SPEAKER_00: We have an amazing show for you today, we cover the following topics, DFINITY, which is one of these crypto nonprofit associations that was backed by Andreessen Horowitz. And they are in the middle of a class action complaint, they're going to get sued because their token has gone from $750 down to 30. Be SPEAKER_01: really careful in crypto folks. It is the Wild West out there. And we talked a little bit about utility tokens, and what's going on with these crazy products and projects. And do they have even have any customers on the other side of their great innovations I'm using air quotes. We also break down a tremendous Q2 for Snapchat and Twitter, both companies firing on all cylinders, SPEAKER_00: printing money, adding new features, delighting their customer base, and they both share something in common. Professor Galloway, Prof G, predicted both would fail, and both were disasters. Of course, he's the disaster. And once again, terrible predictions from Prof G. Then we cover the CCP, considering turning all of their educational public companies into nonprofits. All these EDU companies out of China have had their stocks get absolutely decimated 20, 30, 50% down. Because China wants to ankle their own companies? What is going on with the Chinese Communist Party? We've been talking about it a whole bunch the last two weeks. And finally, we cover San Francisco's insane amount of commercial real estate that is going to take decades to refill. Because San Francisco is a bit of a disaster and everybody's working from home. Finally, we'll look at some old takes of me talking about Disney plus five years ago and years before Disney plus ever existed. Stick with us. It's going to be a great episode. SPEAKER_03: This week in startups is brought to you by calm for business, healthy SPEAKER_06: and happy employees create successful companies. And that's a fact. Calm for business can help your employees be their best selves at work. Get a free well being ebook and one month free of calm for business after you attend a free demo at calm.com slash twist. And brokers startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance at a broker dot com slash twist. And while you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist and snack magic. Snack magic is a stress free way to treat your global team, clients or sales prospects with a build their own snack box. Get 10% off with code twist at snack magic dot com slash twist. SPEAKER_08: Okay, in our first story, we've got another crypto collapse, perhaps fraud, perhaps chaos. These crypto projects are a complete and utter disaster. It's the Wild West out there, folks. This one is Dfinity Dfinity as I think how SPEAKER_01: it's pronounced spelled D F I N I T Y. And they've been hit with a class action SPEAKER_08: complaint, which claims they sold their tokens as an unregistered security. As you know, crypto people do not believe in securities law. Apparently, they think that you can sell tokens to people and because they're called tokens and Chuck E Cheese coins and tokens and like miles from your United miles program that that SPEAKER_01: means it's not a security magically because you deemed it a token, not a SPEAKER_10: security. The SEC feels quite differently. US law feels quite differently. And candidly, I think I've got quite differently because I have to operate in the real world where we have to do certain things when we sell securities, like hire lawyers and, and SPEAKER_08: do things on the up and up and be really careful. Let's put that aside for a second. So SPEAKER_11: this complaint is the first document obviously filed with the court. And this is, you know, before a lawsuit gets filed. I'm no lawyer. But I think that's basically how complaints SPEAKER_01: work. According to this, Dfinity is a nonprofit institution that creates crypto projects. They specialize in blockchain and cloud computing according to their website. And their main project is the internet computer project or ICP. And this is a blockchain based computing system, which they tokenized in 2018 and tokenized means you take a normal business in the world like Amazon SPEAKER_00: web services. And you say instead of it being owned by one person, Amazon, or Microsoft Azure, we're going to make it owned by nobody, it's going to be owned by the collective token holders. So those token holders are distributed, they can trade their tokens. So nobody's basically in charge. So what could go wrong if your cloud computing service was run by nobody but a collective, it could go right, it could go wrong. So their goal for this project apparently is to challenge cloud computing services like Amazon web services, specifically on the reliance of centralized server farms, why anybody would want this product, I'm kind of wondering, like, SPEAKER_01: like, if you're running a big web site, like, I don't know, Amazon or target, would you rather be on a cloud computing service that has employees that's a public company that you can call on the phone and say, Hey, my websites down? Or would you rather do it on, you know, a blockchain with a decentralized server farm? I'm not sure who this product is for or why it should exist in the world. And I always try to think very basically, I'm a pretty simple guy, who wants this product? Why would they pick it over the existing products are in the world? Well, you know, maybe I don't get it. SPEAKER_00: But I guess somebody needs to have a decentralized network to host their WhatsApp or Uber, allowing them to run smoothly while not relying on a centralized server farms, it doesn't sound like it would be smoother, it sounds like maybe it would be cheaper. Are they competing on price? Is that the concept here? Anyway, the ICP token is designed to be used as a governance tool, you know, how this works with SPEAKER_01: Bitcoin, you know, the miners get to be involved in the code and the changes to the code. So this governance tool basically means shareholders have bargaining power over the network, right, the tokens equal votes, kind of like, you know, one person, one vote in the United States in a democracy. The governance tool here would be if you had the tokens, you have some say over how the network operates, I guess. And obviously, those could be used those tokens, I'm guessing here to for transit action fees to use the network, right. So if you have more shares, you have more control. SPEAKER_00: And if you have the tokens, you can deploy your apps, I guess on this Fakaka crazy decentralized computing network, which I'm not sure anybody's actually using this. That's a question I have, if you SPEAKER_01: are involved in this project, you tell me the number one customer, and what app they're running on it, because you would have to be an insane person to put your project that you're putting out into the world on this platform when you have other options that are stable and super cheap. So I'm a fan of innovation, but I'm not sure that this is a risk people want to take with their core infrastructure. Let's get into why people are upset and why they're suing. ICP was launched on Coinbase Pro in May of 2021. The exchange Coinbase. And at the same time, their code became open sourced, like these projects tend to be their open source, people can contribute to them, they can see the code, this builds trust. And that's SPEAKER_19: a tried and true way to build great software in the world. Nothing wrong with that. So the price peaks SPEAKER_00: at $750 a token, according to decrypt.co, a new source, ICP didn't release a coin offering before this because they wanted to limit chances of competition taking on their code. This means the code probably wasn't tested by people outside the company, I'm guessing. But anyway, the token was trading between $100 and $250 token from March to May. And there's the chart if you're watching on SPEAKER_01: YouTube. Since then, ICP's price has tanked. It fell to well over 90% shortly after hitting its peak. It's now sitting at $31 a token. So you know, if you bought him for $750, you know, 10% of $750 is $75. You cut that in half, you know, and you're at $32. And that's kind of where the price is. So you've lost most of your money here, 90, 95%. And, you know, when people lose their money in these crypto projects, they're going to look for recourse, and they might look for recourse in the courts when things go up into the right. Yeah, it's kind of hard to have a lawsuit because everybody made money. And I think we're going to start to see a lot of these lawsuits pile up, especially during times when crypto is down, because people feel well, I lost my money. Is there any way I can get it back? Do I have any recourse? The courts are one of those recourses Twitter users are dunking on them as a coin, which is a term for coins that have no value. It seems like I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. DFINITY seems like they were able to wow, some of the great investors in Silicon Valley. So I SPEAKER_19: don't think that they went into this with bad intentions. I'm not saying that and certainly this could be a drive by, you know, unfair class action suit. But I do wonder like what people are SPEAKER_01: thinking when they buy into this. And I think what they're thinking is speculation. They're just gamblers, you got a bunch of gamblers on the internet who are looking to make 10 times their money 100 times their money 1000 times their money in a year. And that's what crypto has brought. It's just a giant casino where people are placing insane bets on things that may or may not make sense in the world. Despite what the founders of those companies might actually be doing. There's SPEAKER_19: just a big gambling nature here, and a big pumping up nature, which we'll talk about. You know, SPEAKER_01: we've talked about before on the show. So if you look at the complaint, and what's outlined in it, basically, they say on behalf of all investors who purchased internet computer project tokens on or after May 10. And the lawsuit alleges that over 469 million ICP tokens were made available during this ICP Genesis launch, which is I guess what they called it were created out of thin air. Well, of course they were that's what tokens are credits how they're created, but sold in violations of the Security Act. And that is the key here. When you give these tokens, people want to believe they're Chuck E. Cheese tokens, they have no value in the real world, or they're like miles or coins you might have in your backgammon or chess game or your poker online Zynga poker game. But the fact is the people SPEAKER_00: buying it are buying it as a security because they want to see it appreciate I guarantee you nine out of SPEAKER_01: 10 people who bought these tokens have no interest in using this cloud computing platform, I would guess 95 out of 100. And so what the government is going to really start to realize here is people are taking advantage of the gambling nature and the wild west of crypto and these exchanges that, you know, are all offshore doing crazy stuff, and even some of the onshore ones. And that they're really they're buying these tokens not to use them in the network, but to speculate now is that the problem of the person who sells the tokens in good faith, so that people might use them in an innovative way to participate in the network, the core product, I kind of think it is if it's this one sided, perhaps they should sell them to people only to people who are using them on the network and not sell them even to accredited investors, unless they know or have an expectation, a reasonable expectation that they're actually going to use them. In other words, the person could say, I want to use these tokens for this, they can certify I'm buying these tokens for this reason, right, as opposed to I'm just buying these tokens. And we all know why they're buying SPEAKER_29: them. Healthy and happy employees create successful companies. And that's a fact calm for business can help your employees be their best selves at work. And you can partner with the number one mental fitness app to provide support and tools for your employees. Calm can kickstart mental well being initiatives by empowering employees to stress less, rest better and build resilience. Calm has an entire library of content specifically designed for the workplace, which includes lo fi music playlists to get you in flow, quick breathing breaks, guided meditations and hundreds of soothing sleep stories. I know sleep, we don't want you sleeping at work. But we do want you to get a great night's sleep the night before that big meeting or that big pitch, or you're working on that great project. So they even have programs tailored for mental health and productivity, like their mindfulness at work series. Millions of employees at over 600 companies like Lincoln, Iterable and Universal Studios use calm for business. Obviously, you guys know I'm an investor in calm. I've loved the product forever. And I've always wondered what are they going to get into the enterprise? Well, here they are. So right now, calm is offering a free well being ebook for HR and benefit leaders and one month free after you attend a free demo at calm.com slash twist. That's right, a free book at one month free after attending a free demo at calm.com slash twist. Once again, get started today, calm.com slash twist. Thanks again to calm for making such great products. The targets of this complaint are interesting. They include SPEAKER_01: the investors poly chain capital, which is a hedge fund in cryptocurrency injuries and Horowitz, one of the up and coming venture firms here in the valley. And the DFINITY founder Dominique Williams, who I'd love to have on the program. And I'm sure he can't talk about the lawsuit. But I'd love to find out, Dominique, how people are using your service and what the grand vision here is, I don't understand the grand vision. But you know, I'm just reading news stories. And maybe you have great examples of people using your product in the real world. And I think that'd be actually great to hear. SPEAKER_11: So we're just starting to scratch the surface on the story because of the lawsuit. And we'll definitely SPEAKER_01: do a follow up on it. We'd love to have Dominique on the program. They received grants, not investments from VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Village Global, SV Angel and others in 2018. In total, they've raised around $200 million in these grants, quote unquote, according to PitchBook. SPEAKER_00: And according to the Wall Street Journal, I'm quoting here, unlike an initial coin offering, only accredited investors including Sequoia backed Polychain Capital took part in the token sale, which will raise $20 million for DFINITY. And according to the Wall Street Journal, SPEAKER_14: A16Z was part of a $61 million investment, not taking equity, but instead getting ICP tokens. SPEAKER_01: I think this is going to be looked back on as like a crazy moment in time in venture, that venture capitalists stopped investing for equity and started taking these tokens, which are not preferred shares, SPEAKER_11: and then flipping them perhaps or, you know, skirting securities law or going around securities law or reinterpreting them, I guess, we could take any type of framing there, I'm not going to frame it SPEAKER_10: myself. You know, my framing, which is why not just do this on the up and up? Why not just buy securities in a company? And why do they have to have these crazy tokens that investors are buying? Investors are buying money to get a return? Why are they buying tokens instead of equity? It doesn't make sense to me. I think it's a little bit of a shell game. I'll be totally honest. That's my SPEAKER_01: cynical interpretation of it. It's just a way to get around, you know, securities law, which is there for SPEAKER_11: a reason. And I think the SEC shouldn't allow it. I'll be totally honest. I think everybody should play by the rules. And if you want to buy these tokens, because there's a use for them, and you're actually SPEAKER_23: a developer who's actually using them for storage or cloud computing short, but maybe you have to use SPEAKER_31: the tokens and have an active project on the platform in order to buy the tokens, that would SPEAKER_01: make more sense to me, right? Like, should you be allowed to buy the tokens? If you're not actually using the service? Maybe not, right? That would be my approach to maybe stopping this chaos. In the ICO era, we saw so many of these projects go bust and people owned, you know, the term shitcoin comes out of how horrible everybody the results of the ICO movement were. In the report, Arkham identifies around 2 billion in ICP tokens that were transferred to cryptocurrency exchanges by probable insider addresses. After the Genesis launch, these transfers happened around the time of the 90% drop. I guess what they're saying there is maybe insiders were selling the tokens while the suckers and bag holders who were greedy and trying to flip currency and maybe seeing big names like Andreessen Horowitz on this. And that's one of the problems when Andreessen Horowitz and Mark Andreessen with a big name, comes in and invest in a company, a lot of civilians will follow them. And I think Andreessen Horowitz and Mark Andreessen have to take ownership of this. When you invest in a project, the public's going to follow you. This happens to me all the time. I invest in a company, it gets syndicated. In fact, two or three times in the last couple years, people have put my names on projects I'm not involved with, and said I was an investor. And then people invested, or were thinking considering investing, and I wasn't involved. So you know, your name as a legitimate investor can draw other people to invest, including civilians. It's you got to be really careful about what you put your name on. In my mind, I certainly really think about that deeply. Every time I'm making an investment deal. SPEAKER_10: You know, this thing fails and other people and most of them do fail. And other people are investing. Yeah, it's their responsibility. But you know, you do have a brand, you got to be careful with this. SPEAKER_01: So a DFINITY spokesman called the Arkham Report ludicrous, and said it's a very poor source of information. Huh, that's a lot of words. But it's not like a clear rebuttal of any facts. So this is another start of this. We'll see if anybody behaved poorly, or if this case has any merit. But you know, my advice to you is steer clear of this crypto stuff, if you really want to do it, you know, 5%, 10% of your net worth that you can afford to lose, maybe be diversified across a number of projects, but just understand if the project doesn't have customers, if this project or any project can tell you here are my top 10 customers who are using the product to solve this problem in the world, then you're buying into some kind of weird vision with hundreds of millions of dollars sloshing around. Like, why should this company have hundreds of millions of dollars if there's no customers, and the project hasn't launched yet? Like, why not give them $10 million, and then have this SPEAKER_00: milestone based funding? That's one of the things that crypto has short circuited. And it's really dangerous to give the EOS foundation or Tezos or whoever it is, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and say, Yeah, build the future, they should get $5 million, and then hit 18 months of progress, and then get $10 million, and then do another 12 months of progress. And then if they do well over those first 30 months or 36 months, yeah, okay, now we give you $25 million, go for it, you've proven yourself, you got a product in market. The one of the main issues I have with this crypto stuff is it short circuited, and it broke Silicon Valley's and the public markets, milestone based funding, milestone based funding, tranches of capital coming into your company existed for a reason. So there is an incentive system and protection for investors, there's an incentive system for the team to execute, they need to hit milestones in order to get more money. And money is allocated correctly to the people who execute the best if Elon Musk is better at SpaceX than some other space project, or another space project is better than SpaceX, whatever it is, they have to hit the milestones, and then they get more capital. You don't give people a billion dollars or $200 SPEAKER_47: million before the products even in market, come on, I'm not the smartest kid in the class. But this SPEAKER_01: is common sense. Be careful out there, folks. Snap has added $20 billion to their market cap this week after a strong Q2 earnings report. Yesterday, Snapchat reported its Q2 2021 earnings, which exceeded market analyst expectations for revenue growth. Their stock price almost quadrupled in the past year, quadrupled from $21 a share in July of 2020 to $79 a share today. Let that sink in 20 billion in market cap. That's the equivalent of adding a lift or a slack to the market cap of your company. We never see this in Silicon Valley. But let's not forget Professor Cole takes had an all timer on CNBC back in July 2017, just over four years ago today. Check out Professor Galloway's SPEAKER_19: ice cold takes. I'll see you on the other side. The first thing Mark Zuckerberg SPEAKER_51: thinks when he wakes up in the morning is must wipe Snapchat from the face of the planet. And I believe the last thing he thinks when he calls to sleep at night is must wipe Snapchat from the face of the planet. So you have a you have I've said publicly, I think investing in Snapchat is like driving drunk. I think it's something no responsible person should do. You are handing your money over to a 27 year old with no rights in the stock three classes of stock, a company that did 400 million in revenue and lost 500 million. And by the way, has the most agile company in the world spreading Snapchat like features across every property. What could go wrong? This is this company is is in my view, the most overvalued company in the world right now. Okay, they have it folks, misogynist failed SPEAKER_01: entrepreneur and Bloomberg canceled television show Professor Galloway gives you another terrible call, whatever he tells you not to invest in, you probably should make a big bet. And if he says bet on something, you probably want to run for the hills. Snapchat was trading around $15 at the time, and traded relatively flat. Until the pandemic hit in March 2020, in which it took off, you never want SPEAKER_00: to bet against somebody like the founder of Snapchat, who came up with so many original ideas, he came up with ephemeral messaging, he came up with stories, he came up with snap goggles or spectacles. This is an incredible founder and incredible founders who create new ideas. He also did lenses, right? So you look at Snapchat's team, they didn't give up, they stayed really, really SPEAKER_01: focused. If you had faded Prof G on this day, you would have five extra money. That's it. He is the worst picker of stocks. He has no hot takes. It's all cold takes. And on June 17, Twitter user Julie Young broke down the Professor Cold Takes inverse ETF, which outperformed the S&P by 61% from October 4, 2019 until June 17 of 2020. You can find any of these incredibly bad calls. He thought SPEAKER_08: Tesla, Uber, Lyft, we're all going to zero. And his, his portfolio is just a disaster. This chart SPEAKER_01: doesn't even include Amazon. Okay, so now when you look at how terrible Prof G's predictions are, really nothing compares to his coldest take of all, which is his 2015 call, the future of retail looks like Macy's, not Amazon. Let's take a look at that. Macy's and Amazon five year charts, Macy's over five years has lost over 50% of its value. Great take there, Prof G, the future is losing 50% of your money. At the same time, Amazon up almost 400% in the same time span. My goodness, SPEAKER_00: just fade his bets and you will print money. And if you remember, just a few days ago, Bezos got into a SPEAKER_08: little bit of heat for thanking all of Amazon's customers and employees for paying for Blue Origin's SPEAKER_19: flight. And he said, you paid for this, I really think he should be thanking Professor Coltakes for giving them the Midas touch. Okay, back to Snapchat, they had 293 million daily active users SPEAKER_01: for q2 up 5% from the 280 million reported in q1 revenue was up to 982 million, which is 116% year over year, their net loss was cut in half year over year, down to 152 million from 326 million. And their recent growth is faster than it has been since the year it went public in 2017 incredible turnaround with Facebook headwinds coming at you just amazing. Evan Spiegel is absolutely a product genius. He is relentless. He's dogged. He's not part of Silicon Valley's like intelligence here. He doesn't play the game. He just focuses on his vision and his user base. And he's printing money. And he didn't get crushed by Facebook in the face of Facebook throwing every developer they had at him. Pretty amazing. And AR seems to be the perfect rebound after Facebook copied all these killer features. I think the spectacles and the AR development platform snaps working on is going to be a big winner. And they announced their new AR glasses at their June 2021 developer event box CEO Aaron Levy had some words of encouragement for Snapchat Snapchat now worth 100 billion. Sometimes you just have to keep building exactly correct Aaron Levy just build the company was not impacted by the iOS 14.5 privacy changes from Apple. As people initially thought, as you know, the new update from Apple makes it so third party developers have to show a prompt asking users to track them across different apps. And this lack of impact from the new update was due to the fact that the update rolled out later than expected and users have have been slow to update their devices. So Snap is observing higher opt-in rates than other apps in the community, which is kind of interesting, I guess, people who are Snapchat users want to get targeted ads, and they want to support Snapchat. I think that's actually what's happening on CNBC snaps chief business officers, Jeremy Gorman prepared remarks were quoted saying that the higher opt in rates are, and here's the quote, do impart to the trust our community has in our SPEAKER_19: products and our business. That's really nice to hear. Congratulations to the team at Snapchat, and to Prof G for continuing his streak of horrible, horrible calls. If you don't have insurance, SPEAKER_29: you failed one of the first steps of being an entrepreneur, and in brokers technology saves you time and money. 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If you are running a business and you hit any kind of scale, somebody is going to do either do SPEAKER_00: something stupid or somebody is going to feel that they were wrongfully terminated, even if they were terrible and you fired them with cause, they can go find an attorney to sue you. You need to have EPL, SPEAKER_29: and you need to have all four of these types of insurance. If you're going to become venture backable and you're going to build a robust business instantly by custom built insurance for startups, go to in broker.com slash twist E M B R O K E R.com slash twist in broker.com slash twist and use my offer SPEAKER_01: code twist to get 10% off. Twitter stock is up after they posted their fastest revenue growth since 2014. On Thursday, Twitter announced Q2 earnings that came in much stronger than expected. On Friday, the stock was up 4% and is up 10% since the beginning of the week. Their market cap is now 57 billion, nearing its all time high of over 60 billion, which they hit back in February of 2021. Coincidentally, that's another Prof G short. Q2 revenue was 1.19 billion, which was 74% year over year growth, the largest year over year growth since 2014. Twitter's year over year profitability also SPEAKER_19: increased dramatically as they turned at $1.38 billion loss in q2 of 2020 to a $65 million profit SPEAKER_01: in q2 of 2021. That is the playbook in Silicon Valley, which is you invest you invest and people say Oh, your money losing your money losing. And then at a certain point, the business is so strong, the foundation is there. And the growth is there. And then you flip over into profitability. And then everybody is like, Whoa, now we should buy the stock. We've seen this over and over again, Amazon SPEAKER_00: being the canonical example. And let's not forget Prof G, the dog, her Prof G, a grown man on testosterone shots, who calls himself a big dog called for Jack Dorsey firing back in November of 2020. Check out this SPEAKER_63: 50 second clip. Well, let me start with the last part, the change of role should he be he should be fired any board that lets apart. I mean, this is a big company with 1000s of employees that plays an important role in the discourse of society. And about 1pm every day, he pieces out and he goes to another firm. I'm on the board of several I've been on the board of several public companies. And I've never met an individual who can manage a company like this part time. So unless there's some superpowers we're not aware of, I think it's just starting right there. The fact that he's a part time CEO and 89% of his wealth is tied up in his afternoon job renders him totally incapable of providing the attention and leadership to this company needs and distinctive the distinct of the regulatory conversation. I think just think if you look at product innovation, Twitter looks scarily 2015. So I just don't the role for Jack Dorsey is for him to declare victory and leave and be kicked SPEAKER_01: upstairs to chairman. Okay, so there you have it a Prof G call. And since then, Twitter, you guessed it is up 80%. Thanks, Prof G for all the profits. If Prof G gives you a prediction, do yourself a favor, fade that, take the other side of the bet. And you're going to print money. SPEAKER_19: And congratulations to Twitter on their enormous success. And everybody else who Prof G dunks on congratulations on proving him wrong, which it's pretty easy to do. And it's also worth noting SPEAKER_66: that q2 2020 was the hardest hit due to the COVID advertiser panic. Since the start of 2021, SPEAKER_01: Twitter has introduced spaces Twitter blue, it's for subscription service. That's like $3 a month, their tip jar and they're rolling out super follows soon, which will act as like a Patreon OnlyFans like membership where you you know, give content just to that group of people. And obviously, Patreon and OnlyFans were largely built off of people's Twitter and Instagram followings. So now it's as if those businesses are going to basically be built into Twitter. And OnlyFans is for adult content. So if those adult kind of folks or models, whatever you kind of put them into, in terms of descriptors, they don't need to have an OnlyFans or Patreon, they could just do it all on Twitter, it's gonna be pretty interesting. So the big lesson here from both companies is product velocity, gets new users, new users increase revenue. It's really that simple, folks, I talked to the founders I invest in all the time, keep iterating, keep coming up with new SPEAKER_00: ideas, keep making your existing products better. Keep delighting your users, the revenue will come and snap and Twitter were stagnant for years, they were sideways trying to figure it out. Don't give up, go public and keep grinding. This is why I was a little disappointed that slack sold to Salesforce, I would have liked to see them just keep grinding it out, even if they're sideways, just keep fighting. But you know, sometimes people want to catch their chips. And SPEAKER_01: I guess Jack Dorsey, who is, you know, turns out a great leader, both of his companies Square and Twitter, which Prof G derided for years, are absolutely crushing it. So here's Jack's quote, as we enter the second half of 2021, we are shipping more, learning faster and hiring remarkable talent. For example, our increased shipping cadence contributed to reaching 206 million average monetizable DAOs, monthly DAOs, in q2 up 11% year over year and 3% quarter over quarter, there's a tremendous opportunity to get the whole world to use Twitter. And I agree with him. And I think it's possible not counting the after hours move, Twitter shares are up more than 30% since the start of 2021, which is almost double the S&P 500, which is up 16% in the same time period. Twitter's ad business just boomed in q2 was up 87% year over year to 1 billion. And total ad engagement was up 32%. That's people clicking on the ads commenting on them, etc. And here is Twitter CFO, Ned Siegel on CNBC this morning talking about Twitter's bull case, and how they're using machine learning to automate 60% of trending tweets and topics, which is one of the reasons I'm taking a Twitter break is because SPEAKER_74: the product is so damn addicting. We grew our audience by 20 million people year over year 7 million from last quarter. We're delivering better ad formats, more relevance through age based targeting, location based targeting for advertisers, all of this against a really strong macroeconomic backdrop, there are more events happening, people are able to go back to those events in many situations. Advertisers have more products that they're launching where they want to connect with their customers on Twitter. It's all coming together to give us a ton of momentum right now. Well, we're leveraging machine learning and AI across the company to deliver better outcomes. That means making sure we're showing the right ads to people. It means making sure that we're sending the right notifications to you to bring you back to Twitter in a moment when you really care about. That's a really important part of our work. It also means from a health perspective, now 60% of the tweets that we action we're finding through machine learning as opposed to through human needing to be involved at the very outset. I think what we're seeing here is Twitter got its SPEAKER_01: groove back on the product basis. And haters like Prof G, who have produced nothing in the world, but hate and, you know, trying to do soundbites and be clever, they don't matter. They don't matter. They're just haters. What matters is the people who build, and the people who build are more important in the SPEAKER_19: world than the critics, even if the critics get a little too much attention from time to time. SPEAKER_01: Okay, the CCP in the continuing saga of the Chinese Communist Party and their interference with their own companies going public in the West. The CCP is now considering turning publicly traded education companies into nonprofits. And so some stocks are tanking as investors panic sell. Five different Chinese education stocks were down between 20 and 50% on Friday morning, as Bloomberg reported the CCP's was mulling these rule changes. According to sources in the story who were familiar with the matter, the platforms will likely no longer be allowed to raise capital or go public listed firms. And there's another quote from the article listed firms will also probably no longer be allowed to invest in or acquire education firms. Teaching school subjects while foreign capital will be also barred from the sector. Bloomberg reporter Elena Poppina reported that five different Chinese education companies, most of which are public in Hong Kong, lost a ton of value on Friday morning. Dollar sign edu dollar sign tau ticker symbol COE ticker symbol new bedu down 49 54 36 23 and 22% respectively. And as the day progressed, the company share prices have fallen even further. New oriental education is now down 59%. They provide private education services like tutoring. As you SPEAKER_00: know, in Asia, education startups are doing phenomenal because people are so focused on education, something maybe the West could take a tip from. So my worsty Howard Lindzen had a great SPEAKER_01: comment on the CCP's control of their companies. Communism is fabulous. Not sure why US investors should ever buy a Chinese stock again. I mean, it's just crazy. I've been saying it on this program. What is the end SPEAKER_00: game here for China? They're literally burning their relationship with US markets, US investors, hedge funds, anybody who's going to buy these stocks. And aren't they also burning their relationship with their entrepreneurs in their country? Like if you're an entrepreneur, and you spent decades building your company and then took it public and then reap the benefits of that. And then one day the CCP says, SPEAKER_01: you know what, you should all be nonprofits. We've decided education shouldn't be something you profit from. I think we're seeing how communists think. This is a perfect example of the communist mindset. You should not be able to make a profit off of education, it should be no competition in education, you should all be state run, it should all be nonprofits, whatever. This is the chickens coming home to roost. I mean, how do you say it any other way? Communists started to dabble in democracy, and they started to dabble in capitalism, and it's now exploded in their lap. I've said this over and over again, maybe China isn't as stable as we think. They've got the potential of a revolution happening there. You have people protesting, you have Hong Kong being turned over. The tensions seem very high, at least from the outside here. And what are they going to do that their their companies are SPEAKER_00: not going to be able to go public, who's going to build the next wave of companies? Are they going to put guns to people's head and just say, you make the next Uber, DD and oh, now the state's going to run all these things? Maybe that's what they'll do. Maybe they'll just take eminent domain over DD and every other company there, you know, Alibaba, etc, wipe out the shareholder base and say we own all these SPEAKER_01: things, they can do it. And then what does the United States do? Maybe we say, Oh, you know what, your debt? Not worth anything. We're not paying it back. Whatever debt you have from the United States, you don't have it. Oh, if you if the Chinese government or Chinese companies own anything in the United States, you're kicked out, we're kicking out, you know, all your companies, anybody who's in school here is kicked out. I mean, this is a tension level that I don't think we've seen. And I wonder if this has something to do with the Coronavirus coming out of a lab, potentially, and now the West starting to realize, hey, that's a pretty viable scenario. Maybe it's the likely scenario in some people's minds. Maybe it was covered up. But what is the endgame here? Do you have any idea why we try to do this is what I'm kind of wondering. And then why would anybody in the West want to engage, SPEAKER_19: whether you're the NBA, the movie industry? And if you if you're Apple, you have to be wondering, like, what, what what is the next 10 years going to look like for a company like Apple? I mean, Google is not, you know, D and Facebook and Twitter are not integrated or Amazon in the SPEAKER_01: on the ground in China, they don't have customers there. But Apple has a lot of customers there. And Apple builds this up there. This seems like a big risk for Apple, they've got to be thinking, SPEAKER_29: where are we going to make iPhones in the future. In business, it's important to be memorable and sending gifts is a classy way to create a great memory. But gifting stuff, it can take forever, where you get set to the wrong location. And it's never scaled properly until now. Snack magic is a stress free, easy and customizable way to delight employees or customers. Snack magic uses software to help recipients build their own snack box. And we're using it now for our gifting. You click on the link, it says, Hey, Jason, we're this week in startups, you have this $50 $100 $250 credit, what would you like? And then you start going through all these amazing, amazing snacks. And you get this incredible gift box. So here, and I love a bunch of different types of gourmet items. I'll take out a couple of them, you're gonna hear some crinkling right now. You can get these air dried veggies, and I'm trying to eat more vegetables. And this seemed like a reasonable snack for me, SPEAKER_84: we would have these back and forth discussions of what to get our customers and what they like. SPEAKER_00: It's like, Oh, they don't eat chocolate. Oh, they don't like cheese. Oh, this person's keto. SPEAKER_29: This person's that this person's vegan, just send somebody this snack magic link, and you're done. And they get what they want. Whether you want to delight one person or 1000 snack magic makes it easy. Send it to an employer right now. Say thanks for the hard work. Here's a hundy, SPEAKER_19: here's 100 bucks. And you get 10% off if you use my offer code twist by going to snack magic.com slash twist. Very simple snack magic.com slash twist 10% off. Okay, let's get back to this amazing SPEAKER_00: episode. Okay, alphabet has launched intrinsic, another company along the lines of Waymo and deep SPEAKER_01: mind. And they're moving into Amazon territory as intrinsic will focus on software for industrial robots. This is not the first time we've seen Google branch out like this with spin outs and you know, other bets as they call them. Waymo self driving cars and deep minds with the protein folding. These are big projects that Google is able to make these outside bets and they're becoming big. And I think they're going to need to spin out into their own companies. At some point, deep mind probably not because it's so cool to what they do. But Waymo should be a separate company at this point that should be spun out and go public on its own. Some people would argue YouTube as well. But I think the ad networks in Google, Google's search ad network and YouTube's SPEAKER_11: work so well together that I'm not sure that's a good idea because they have the same customer base. We had this debate on episode 41 of the all in podcast from Freeberg explain deep minds latest SPEAKER_01: breakthrough. Is it worth breaking up these companies if they're insane money printing machines give you the ability to lose billions a year on these world changing products? It is an interesting rub that I think you do have to consider. There is a ton of money in the world. I mean, there's an argument that if deep mind didn't sell for 600 million to Google, they might have been the Google killer. And maybe that's why Google bought them, maybe they would have built a better search in better advertising networks. And I do know many people wanted deep mind to stay independent. And maybe they would be worth $100 billion right now. And maybe they would have gotten more accomplished. Freeberg was clearly on the side of big tech making these big bets. Saxon Schmutz were kind of on the side of breaking them up. And Freeberg's point I think is a valid one, which is, the government's not going to get this done, our government's incompetent, they can't manage anything, we're spending more on education and getting less from it every year. And we can't manage homelessness or mental health issues. The private sector is the only one who's going to get this done. And look at space, we now have a race to space where prices are dropping dramatically to send people to space. Do you think the government would have been dropping the prices to go to space, would have been increasing, obviously would have been increasing. So for all the people complaining about the billionaire space race or private companies in a space race. Let's just think big picture in humanity, if we lower the price of going to space 10 fold 100 fold, which it seems like we're on the road to doing. That's good for humanity. We got there. It doesn't matter that a couple people got rich at the time, or that it wasn't our government. Why are we looking to the government to do that? Why not have all private sector companies getting us to space and, you know, we can create some regulations so they don't put too much junk up there and clutter the skies. But clearly, we are living in a really interesting world. So details on this plans for intrinsic, they're still unclear according to the verge. But Google is no stranger to robots. Obviously bought robotic company Boston Dynamics in an effort internally named replicant. Big fans of Blade Runner over there at Google. But they sold Boston Dynamics to SoftBank in 2017. And I think a lot of that had to do with Google's team does not really want to support the military. I think there's like a big anti military thing going on inside of Google, which I find quite hypocritical. Like, if you're a big tech company here, I kind of think you should support our military because geez, like, you can only build great companies like Google and have the amazing security we have here if we have a dynamic military. So yeah, I found that kind of weird. Sam Koros from ARK Investment let Twitter know his thoughts. Google X is launching intrinsic, which is a company focused on industrial robotics software super cool and important problem to solve. Google and X have had a very hard time commercializing techs and they don't have a great robotics track record after 5.5 years. In X, they are now becoming an independent alphabet company looking to validate the technology. That's a lot of time. Having said that, I hope intrinsic crushes it and pushes the deep learning plus robotics frontier. According to CNBC, the division CEO Wendy Tan White, who I'd love to have on the program, this will unlock the creative and economic potential of industrial robotics for millions more businesses, entrepreneurs and developers. They'll do so by making software that enables it easier to use and cheaper and more flexible robots think like a platform for robotics. No news from the project has been released for some times. And these this X which Sergei was running was kind of like a think tank and a way to incubate ideas. And when they become big enough, then I think they become one of SPEAKER_19: the alphabet. And that's why they renamed the company from Google to alphabet because they want it to be a collection of SPEAKER_01: companies Google being the primary one, but Waymo and Nest and other bets being part of that as well. So, in 2019, they announced the project everyday robot within Google x Google self title moonshot factory. The everyday robot project was aimed at creating a general purpose learning robot. But we haven't seen any updates on that. So, who knows if they've made progress, or if they just want to get this off their balance sheet, or if the talented people there were going to leave. And this is one of the things Google always contends with, which is, you know, you're inside of a company, and then somebody has to make a decision to give you more money, and to what your goals are, as opposed to investors, right. So the venture world by shares in a company, and they're aligned with the founders and the employees, if the shares go up, because the value of the company increased because they delighted customers, and made more money, etc. Everybody wins. But when you're inside of a strategic company, then you have to answer to somebody, maybe somebody on the board, or some manager mid level manager, high level manager, the founder doesn't like you doesn't like what you're doing, or thinks you should go in this direction. And you have this like layer of decision making between you and the customers between you and the company's ultimate success. And that becomes untenable for the most talented people in the world, who, when faced with this, and a market of SPEAKER_00: unlimited capital will say eventually, to those people holding them back, you know what, I think it's time for me to leave, I'm going to go SPEAKER_01: pursue something else. And in California, we don't have the ability to do non competes. And that's one of the things in the antitrust executive order that Biden is working on for a reason. We want people to be able to leave their big companies. And you can do that in California, but you can't do it in Texas and some other countries in Florida, where they do enforce non competes, some states in the Northeast also have the ability to enforce non competes. But you can leave Waymo, deep mind, or indicator at any time and start your own company, as long as you don't bring the patents or any documents with you, you're free to do that. And that's what's probably happening here, the management team probably went and gave the ultimatum, or they were pushed and said, you know, you should rise and fall on your own with your own P&L, profit and loss statement. And that's probably what's happening here. All right, San Francisco as but one example of many different cities, but probably the peak has over 17 million square feet of vacant office space, according to the website socket site s o c k e t s i t e.com. This is an amazing site. That's been online for decades. That's, I SPEAKER_00: think, run by real estate insiders. And they do this really interesting visualization. They basically have been visualizing how much office space San Francisco has based on Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in Northern California. And it turns out right now, that 17 million square feet of vacant office space would fill almost 13 Salesforce towers, 12.7 Salesforce towers. This is unprecedented and insane. The office space could accommodate almost 100,000 workers based on pre COVID spacing and density. And we will obviously have a SPEAKER_01: post COVID world at some point, either herd immunity, people getting the vaccine, one way or the other, we're going to get through this. And in other news, because of the Delta variant, Apple, which was telling employees, we're going to come back three days a week, and they were starting petitions and SPEAKER_04: fighting it. Bloomberg has reported that Apple announced they would be pushing back to the return SPEAKER_01: to office from September, just a couple weeks from now, to October at the earliest. And in July, you remember CEO Tim Cook told employees they would be returning to the office for three days per week starting in September. But you know, this Delta variant has pushed back the timeline. And for good reason, it's spreading like wildfire. And you can imagine if you had people back on campus, and you had a Delta variant breakthrough, and somebody died, God forbid, or went to the hospital, you know, there might be liability associated with this, there could be chaos, people could be saying, I told you so the press starts dunking on you. Same with conferences. Everybody remembers the XPRIZE, Peter Diamantes, who I consider I'm friendly with or friends with, he's been on the program a couple times, really great guy. He SPEAKER_04: did a conference, thought he was doing the right thing by having COVID testing, but he kind of broke some laws and I think or broke some regulations about hosting events in Los Angeles during the pandemic, SPEAKER_01: and got, you know, pretty, pretty, a big backlash against him. But what I really think is important to think about with this is the long term and socket site has a common section with a lot of real estate brokers into commenting anonymously. So when they talk about specific homes, or people doing price reductions, you know, three times, and then selling after the third one and taking the listings off each time, and then they sell over asking. But the product has been on the market three different times, got taken off three times, and it sells the fourth time at the reduced price for overmarket, but it's actually a decline of 20% from it last sold. They really, like call out that kind of nonsense and BS in the real estate space. And they're, they're really smart insiders, I basically love socket site for the comments as much as the stories and they do a great job on the stories, Dave Seattle dude said, and this is a really interesting point about this office space in SPEAKER_00: San Francisco. The average annual net absorption for the boom decade just ended was what about 1.5 million feet, it would take 11 years at that absorption pace to fill the space. However, going forward, it's hard to see San Francisco ever averaging that kind of net absorption again, over a prolonged period. So it could take decades to fill the 17 million feet of empty space. This is the key point. Because of the Delta variant now pushing back people going to work, we have a group of individuals who have will not have been in offices for close to two years. Think it through. If people haven't been to the offices, I think it's going to wind up being two years. Are they ever going to go back? Will they want to go back? Will they have moved out of San Francisco or other places? Will they want to commute? I think we've reprogrammed people. If this had been six months work from home or 12 months, maybe you could see the springing back, but two years now. So extended pandemic, fact number one. Number two, San Francisco has devolved into crime and chaos, shoplifting, car break-ins because of this SPEAKER_01: crazy, insane experiment that former defendant, public defender Chesa Budin, as we've talked about SPEAKER_00: many times, you know, he's basically created made San Francisco the worst possible city you could live in, and very dangerous. So people don't want to go back there. And I was already having a hard time convincing families, or senior executives coming to San Francisco. So if you wanted to get a senior executive, you know, think a CFO, CTO, VP level or above to join a public company or a company that's growing office, they didn't want to come to San Francisco, too expensive, too much crime, terrible quality of life, too many taxes. The basically the mirage, the vision that was once San Francisco is over at the same time that we had all this office space at the same time as the pandemic has trained the exact workers that would come back to offices to not come back. In other words, tech is the one group that can work from home, because we work in front of keyboards all day. It's not much different to work at home than it is to go to a campus. And those employees are in great demand. This is not like running a grocery store where, you know, or an arena for a sports team where you can't work at home if you're working at the Staples Center or at the Warriors Chase Center or whatever it is, you have no choice but to go into work. That's how that job function works. So I think San Francisco would take decades. I agree with this person. The last time they had to fill this amount of office space was the greatest boom in the history of all booms the last decade. Man, this is going to be, I think, a crazy situation. So what would you do? What's a possible solution? Very simple. We have a housing crisis in San Francisco because they won't build more units. Start converting half of the space into lofts and let people live in them. You can be sure the landlords would love to do that. However, San Francisco is the worst possible climate of nimbyism in the entire country, a place where liberal individuals who want to virtual signal will block any development of a multi-unit house in their backyards because maybe it brings the wrong element. So they will virtual signal on Twitter and be super virtue SPEAKER_01: signaling and woke, but they won't allow any dense housing in their backyards. It's the most difficult critical place ever. Here is what Dave continues. This does not bode well for the owners of these buildings. Generally, some of the space can be converted to life sciences or residential, but most of it cannot. So he kind of nails exactly what I'm saying is they're not going to be allowed to convert this because the whole area is so nimby. I mean, just even opening a bakery or an ice cream store is a multi year process here, let alone building anything. And anytime you want to build something, it's a five to 10 year process. And you're going to have everything downsized because people are going to complain about the shadow or this or that. It's just a very protectionist, SPEAKER_04: nimby kind of place to beers said in the comments here on socket site, this is why building booms can be such destructive events in the long term, they shoehorn land into niches that may be obsolete for SPEAKER_01: future generations. Smaller buildings are more easily repurposed or demolished to make way for new uses. But there's not a lot of versatility in an office tower. I disagree with that. We've seen SPEAKER_00: office towers in New York converted all the time into residential. This is a completely wrong statement. In New York City, Wall Street went from being packed with office space to being packed with residential. And people love living in the Woolworth building or this building or that building, the former JP Morgan headquarters, former Bear Stearns headquarters, all this stuff is being converted. It's not that big of a deal. You just take the giant office space, you've got it. And now you got high ceilings and a beautiful place. So I disagree with this statement. And you know, SPEAKER_11: we saw Wall Street convert into an incredible, incredible location. I don't know what the heights SPEAKER_04: are on the ceilings in these office buildings. But we'll see one easy and always needed repurposing SPEAKER_01: would be art studios. Most artists just need natural ventilation access to a utility sink. Thousands of our students have been destroyed in this latest wave of uncreative destruction. Maybe it's time to SPEAKER_04: bring them back. This is exactly what I saw in New York. I used to live in the Starratt Lehigh SPEAKER_95: building illegally on 26th Street and the West Side Highway. I don't know if I should say that on SPEAKER_00: the podcast when the statute of limitations is up. And I lived in a giant loft. And we built our own bathrooms and artists lived there and they had sinks and then they would take showers in their sinks. I'm not kidding you, you do whatever you needed to do. And I paid like 1800 a month for that 2500 square foot loft. It was amazing. So this begs the question, if this can't be converted into SPEAKER_01: apartments, what's going to happen? What is the end game here? And I don't see people in San Francisco SPEAKER_04: going back to work in offices, nor do I see people wanting to go to work in San Francisco. In fact, the overarching trend because of the chaos and crime in the city, particularly towards Asian Americans, but it's spread out for everybody. And the homeless problem has gotten just absolutely out of control during the pandemic. And it was out of control before that people are going to leave. And with these crazy taxes, like they've now put a 1% tax on homes above 10 million and Dean Preston doing all these oppressive taxes, the most affluent people are leaving for Austin, Miami and low tax SPEAKER_00: states. So then what happens if the affluent people who start the companies and who pick where the office space are picking Austin in Miami, you've now lost that. So you have to be careful if you overtax the creators of companies, what are they going to do? They're going to go to a place they feel appreciated that has less regulation. I think San Francisco is a 10 year decline. And I'm not sure. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, listen, I don't live in the city anymore. I have some real estate there. I don't know how long I'll keep it. Probably another year or two. But you know, who knows? I don't live in the I live in the greater Bay Area. And the surrounding area of the Bay, the Napa's of the world, the East Bay, Sacramento's, Gilroy, Santa Cruz are exploding, as people still want to stay in the Bay Area, because it's quite beautiful and bucolic and just gorgeous in so many ways and has so much SPEAKER_00: positivity around it in the tech industry. So the homes outside of the city are now booming in the city is turning into Gotham City. It's pretty crazy. I my prediction is a 10 year decline for San SPEAKER_01: Francisco. At least at least because I think a lot of the political maturations are going to take multiple cycles to work their way through where people decide you know what, we we we hired people SPEAKER_00: to run the city who are incompetent or way too far left, like communist far left, like radicals, not even socialists, but more towards the communist bent. And we need to get moderates in here or liberal moderates something along those lines to kind of reverse and maybe manage the city better. It's total incompetent management going on as well. So a complete disaster for San Francisco and a big win SPEAKER_01: for other cities that are high functioning and states that are low tax. So before we wrap, SPEAKER_00: I wanted to touch base on some of my old takes and hold myself accountable. I'll start with one where I just nailed it. Disney streaming potential years before there was a Disney Plus. I was asked on CNBC what I thought of this potential. Now remember, we covered Netflix's slowing growth rate and Disney Plus passing 100 million subscribers in their first 16 months of operation on Wednesday show episode 1250. So I was like, Hey, I think I remember talking about this on CNBC years ago. So I pulled some clips from CNBC from 2016 and 2017, five and four years ago. And in March of 2016, I went on CNBC's Squawk Alley, which is now called Tech Check to talk about ESPN's new direct to consumer video offering, which eventually became ESPN Plus. And this was, you know, Disney's first foray into DTC direct to consumer video streaming. And I was bullish on it from the start, Disney stock was trading around $97 a share SPEAKER_01: at that time with $160 billion market cap. It's almost double that. Today, I probably still undervalued. And I'd have to think that through. But it seems undervalued to me. But anyway, check out SPEAKER_98: this two minute clip from March of 2016. You know, I hate listening to myself from back in the day. But let's have a listen here. And I'll talk to you about why what my thinking was at the time, SPEAKER_101: what is ESPN worth, especially as they are beginning to continue to spend so much on rights, they are losing subscribers. How do you value a business like that hat that has always been number one, but where the ground is shifting pretty dramatically underneath them? Who they have SPEAKER_103: to convince to get money from is the big issue here, right? They were negotiating previously with DirecTV, Cablevision, Time Warner, whoever. Now they've got to actually go to the consumer and convince SPEAKER_105: the consumer to give them money directly. This will be a little bit scary for them. But look at HBO, look at Netflix, look at Amazon. You know, these companies are getting people to pay direct. It will actually be huge for them when they have a database of all these customers, and then they can slice and dice it. Right now, they don't have a database of customers. They don't have all these credit cards on file. They're going to get tens of millions of credit cards on file. And that's going to make them very powerful. This will be huge for ESPN. Consumers are disgusted by the buffet. They want to go and they want to have organic food and pick very specific programming. And once you do that, you're eating healthy, the buffet looks really disgusting. But thinking back to what Iger said SPEAKER_101: on February 9th at the company's earnings call, where he said, we're not going to let the disruptors SPEAKER_103: disrupt us. We will decide. Good luck with that. Yeah, I think Bob Iger is doing a little bit of a show here. He's like, oh my God, we're going to lose control. But actually, I think he's going to SPEAKER_105: love this. He's going to love going to a direct consumer. And yeah, everything is coming together. So if you look at the advertising pie, the internet now is roughly a third and advertising on TV, still half. The internet just went right past outdoor, print, and radio, right? We demolished those three categories. Now what's happening is what happens with video. And those two things are actually merging into one. And when two things merge together and you have the rights, like Bob Iger owns everything in the world, Marvel, Star Wars, ESPN, this guy owns all the assets. He is going to crush it. Disney is a huge buy. They're going to have all the chips. And it doesn't matter what pipe they distribute it to, they're going to get paid. It's just going to be this little, you know, transition that's going to be hard. But he is inside laughing and SPEAKER_16: thrilled with this. All right. I have to give myself credit. I do think Bob Iger was putting SPEAKER_01: on a bit of a show there for the case of like the cable operators who they have a tenuous relationship with, and they're going to go direct. And they don't want to lose the money from them paying them for their content, nor do they want to lose the Netflix money. Remember, Netflix was paying them for content at that time. That was those are big checks coming into Disney. And so this was going to be scary. But this is 3.5 years before Disney plus launch. And it was super clear to me, like, I just look at myself and, and, you know, having a family and having a daughter or, you know, three daughters at this time. Yeah, I did have three daughters at this time. You know, just thinking, well, if I could get the entire Disney library and all the Star Wars library and the Pixar library and the Marvel library in one place, that would be nirvana for me, I don't have to get DVDs or search on Netflix versus cable television, where I'm going to find those movies, you know, here we are, Disney is now at over 100 millions of subs. And Disney is a reformed company. And a company that is now their North Star is Disney plus, literally, that's their North Star as a company, not parks, not movies, not reselling IP. It is the subscriber base of Disney plus that's driving it a year and a half later in August of 2017. I went back on CNBC to talk about Disney streaming potential after they started pulling their content off Netflix, SPEAKER_66: which was a super tell that that was going to happen. Here's the 92nd clip of me describing how SPEAKER_103: Disney is going to get 10s of millions of users quickly. So Disney with ESPN, with Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and that whole collection, including the Disney assets, of course, the original movies, they have an incredible, incredible collection. And when they go direct, it will be very easy for them to get 10s of millions of people to subscribe to that service. David Sacks: Will it be very easy, though? Jason, I'm wondering, you've got ESPN on the one hand, but then you've also got kind of Marvel and Lucasfilm, and then you've got like Disney Junior type stuff. It doesn't seem like all of that fits under a single subscription. So do you have to sell them each separately, and do you end up with subscription fatigue unless there's something like a cable bundle that authenticates for all of them at once? No, I think that Disney is the one SPEAKER_103: company that could produce, you know, a top three offering. So they'll be right up there with Amazon and Netflix, because if they were to just give, as an example, everybody who caught the tens of millions of people who go to a theme park, if they gave each of them a free three-month or six-month subscription with their ticket purchase, they would easily get to tens of millions of users. If they took every Marvel comic book or every Star Wars action figure or every ticket sold for the next couple of Star Wars films and included a three-month or six-month customer acquisition cost would be zero dollars. And so I believe they can create tens of millions of subscribers with a zero acquisition cost and immediately be the number two or three player in going direct to SPEAKER_16: consumers. And that's exactly what happens. Out of the gate, they became number three, I think, behind Netflix and HBO. Now they're number two. And I actually will say right now, it's pretty clear they're going to eclipse Netflix very quickly, very quickly being like in under a decade. They didn't do that exact strategy. Mine was like, SPEAKER_01: hey, bundle it and give people a bunch of coupons. They didn't have to, they just charged $5.99 a month, they underpriced the product. That's another way to get people into a new product is to dramatically lower the price. And that's what they did. $5.99 a month, when Netflix was 12 at the time, I think, uh, or, you know, HBO and your cable bill was probably in the $70 or $80 range. They have the greatest trove of IP ever assembled in the world, Star Wars, SPEAKER_00: Marvel, Disney, Pixar, you get the idea. And, you know, they, they have so much money and they have SPEAKER_01: all this IP that really great people like Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau creating the Mandalorian and SPEAKER_00: the new Clone Wars series coming, the new Obi-Wan series, Boba, Book of Boba Fett. I mean, this stuff is a never ending treasure trove that makes it impossible for you to unsubscribe. Kevin Feige doing WandaVision and Loki. My family went crazy for both of those. And this content, if you win the kids in your household, you win everybody. And, you know, a lot of this content appeals to both, SPEAKER_01: uh, generations. My kids and I both love Clone Wars, The Mandalorian, my wife and I, it's just transcendent. There really is, if you think about all the reasons they're going to win. Number one, the Trevor, this treasure trove of IP. Number two, they have the money to hire the SPEAKER_00: greatest talent and that talent wants to work with that IP. Number three, they dominate kids. And if you win the kids, you win the household. Of course, who's going to say no to their kids for, you know, $10 a month for this incredible library? Plus, Disney plus is only part of the overall product line. And, you know, they have this bundling potential. That's amazing. I now have SPEAKER_01: Hulu and ESPN as part of the Disney bundle. And it's extraordinary. Hulu is amazing. I got rid of DirecTV AT&T now because they screwed up my billing. And that was a godsend because once I got onto Hulu, Hulu is so great on your Apple TV, or on your desktop, or the iPad app, I mean, it's a SPEAKER_19: it's 10 times better than any other app I've ever used for live streaming of content like CNBC or, you know, watching the NBA finals. It's just incredible. And the bundling potential is there, SPEAKER_01: you know, for 20 bucks a month, you can get two or three of these services. And then you start thinking of like the upsell potential in the crossovers, new movies, park tickets, merchandise, they haven't even had that pop up yet. But at some point, you're going to be in that Disney plus account, you're going to watch The Mandalorian. And it's going to say, would you want to buy Grogu? And you're going to say pre order Grogu, and you're going to get that shipped to your house to have your credit card on file, and boom. And we did this as well with some of these premier access movies. I can't remember which one it was, it was a movie about a dragon, some Pixar film was really good. Actually, it had, it had a lot of great actors in it. Anyway, we watched this one film, it was about a dragon. And we loved it, we paid whatever 30 bucks for it. And then it was free, like six weeks later, who cares? It's just like, it's an incredible value. So these incredible premier offerings at home, SPEAKER_00: make it a no brainer. So kudos to me for getting right. I guess it was obvious, wasn't it? All these things are obvious in hindsight. All right, everybody, thanks so much for tuning in. We're doing tons of news. Next week, we got a four show week. Thanks for tuning in. Give me whatever feedback you have. And I'm hiring senior analysts for inside.com. If you are a senior analyst, which means you want to write newsletters and host events around a specific topic, we have openings, you can go to jobs.inside.com. I'm looking for a senior analyst in cybersecurity, SPEAKER_01: podcasting, software and developers, IT, venture capital, transportation, XR, VR, AR, that's one category, and e commerce. So if you are a writer, journalist, analyst, and you've got expertise in a category, plus, you want to host events, imagine your day being writing a newsletter for two or three hours about a topic you care about, and then hosting events and a community in a slack room. At the same SPEAKER_08: time, that's the job pays 75 grand a year, pretty good job, you get to work with me every day. What could be better? So go to jobs.inside.com.