SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody. Happy Monday, big show today, a little bit of backed up news, but we spend most

SPEAKER_01: of our time actually on this huge email, a total level set from Uber CEO Dara Khazarsahi. This

SPEAKER_04: is a big one. Yeah, I mean, he basically looks at what happened last week when they put out tremendous revenue numbers, just great numbers, a great beat for them and their stock went down lifts got crushed, all tech stocks getting crushed. And he's saying, Listen, we got to tighten up here. The public market wants something different than what we're giving them. They want free cash flow, they want to see the profits. So we're going to show them the money. And he's basically outlining what that means practically for the company. And then Molly and I will talk about some of my predictions

SPEAKER_06: about layoffs and work from home colliding together and what the next six months is going to look like

SPEAKER_08: for tech workers and for companies. Yes. Spoiler alert, Jason calls a bottom, or at least a bump,

SPEAKER_12: at least a bump, a bumping along the bottom, which I'm not sure I totally disagree with. I think I think we're pretty close. But I also don't think it's going to be as bad as we all think it's going

SPEAKER_00: to be like this is not necessarily going to be a disaster. Anyway, we're going to talk about what it means in the short term, let's say the summer for the tech industry and the employees who may be laid off and the employees who may be thinking I'm quitting over this work from home policy like a high level Apple employee and what it's all going to look like for the next couple of months. And

SPEAKER_15: then some good news, the government did something right, maybe 20 years too late. Sounds like right

SPEAKER_12: about government time. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is

SPEAKER_18: brought to you by Embroker. Embroker's 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 today at Embroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. Dell for startups. Visit Dell.com slash twist to apply for Dell for startups and save up to 45% off on select items. And OurCrowd. OurCrowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join OurCrowd for free at O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D.com slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome to Monday.

SPEAKER_21: Monday, Monday. How was your weekend, Molly? How was your weekend, Molly?

SPEAKER_24: Good. You know, I wisely, Warriors 1, I wisely gave myself a little stomach bug for Mother's Day, which meant that I spent the whole day. Thank you. I spent the whole day on the couch watching sci-fi.

SPEAKER_12: I've subjected my son to all the Halo episodes on Paramount Plus.

SPEAKER_29: Oh, you know, I had watched the first one and I enjoyed it. Does it get better? Or is it sort of like,

SPEAKER_32: you know, just serviceable sci-fi? I would go ahead and just start at episode five, because episode five is the video game. And I was like, losing it, texting my brother. I'm like, dude, they're fighting banshees and warthogs right now. Like, that's the energy sword. It was super exciting and thrilling. And then episode six is amazing. And episode seven, I'm up to,

SPEAKER_28: they're not all out yet. You really binged, huh? Wow, you went for it. Well, I had watched the first three already. So I went from four to seven. I watched the first 10, 15 minutes of the new

SPEAKER_29: Star Trek. That's great. And that's goosebumps. Yeah. And then quickly fell asleep like an old man. Yeah, that's fair. We had a whole day out with the girls on Saturday. We went to see

SPEAKER_40: Doctor Strange. Well, not to spoil Thursday, but... Oh, you did? See, I, my plan for Mother's Day was to see everything everywhere all at once. I've seen a lot of people tweeting. I want to see that so badly. So badly. Me too. But is it for kids or not? Yeah, I think it is actually like older,

SPEAKER_45: maybe a little older. 15 or something, maybe not 12. Yeah. Well, no, I mean, I think you could take your oldest. I just wouldn't take the twins. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I heard.

SPEAKER_04: But I hear it's metaverse. Yes. And people are freaking out and crying and having existential moments. I saw somebody crying on TikTok talking about it, but... Oh God, really? It didn't seem like

SPEAKER_49: a mentally stable person to begin with. You know, the people who... Yeah, I do. I'm not saying people who cry

SPEAKER_52: easily. Hello. I'm saying people who seem deranged, who kind of lose it on social media. And they need to make it into content. Yeah. Yeah. You know, these people on social media who just like lose it and attack everybody for no reason randomly. Really? I've heard of that.

David Friedberg: I've heard of those people. Sometimes that happens. Maybe they have delusions that they're being

SPEAKER_62: persecuted or... Persecuted or... And delusions of grandeur and that the world's against them

SPEAKER_63: and there's a grand conspiracy. Grand conspiracy. Definitely. I don't know if there's any...

SPEAKER_64: I don't know if there's anybody in our orbit who is experiencing a grand conspiracy. I don't think

SPEAKER_65: so. And trying to stop the abuse of the angel investor class. So much abuse. So much abuse.

SPEAKER_12: I mean, that's what we need to do in this society is get the abuse under control. Absolutely. And

SPEAKER_69: speaking of abuse, we did our 250th syndicate deal. So we abused our 250th founder by dropping

SPEAKER_04: a bag of money on their heads. All right, let's get to it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. By the way, Dr. Strange is amazing. Okay, good. And I am here for the, I think it's the fourth or fifth part of the MCU, phase four or five. This phase four is going to be

Jason Calacanis: sick. The multiverse stuff is exciting. Okay, don't spoil it, but I'm excited. I'm not going to spoil anything about it. I really want there to be a double header. I want a double header of everything everywhere and then Dr. Strange, like the two multiverse options. I just love that we're talking

SPEAKER_77: about the space time continuum. And, you know, this really, as much as this is, uh,

SPEAKER_04: Dr. Strange, which one of my favorite characters, it's really Scarlet Witch. I mean, this is the goodness. It basically the TV show is the, you know, whatever they call that, not the epilogue, but the prologue, the setup, right? Yeah, it's kind of the setup to all this. And so it's kind cool that they have Disney plus, like, if you don't own Disney plus, and you see this, you're kind of going to be delighted going back and watching, you know, WandaVision, WandaVision,

SPEAKER_24: right? I'm like, I just want to call it this garlic show was so good. And Loki too, was also a good setup. These are almost like the prereqs.

SPEAKER_69: They're just doing like really interesting stuff and mining that stuff. And then of course, we have made the fourth be with you. But the Obi Wan, they're calling it a special six part series now,

SPEAKER_86: like a six part event, which I kind of like that they're saying like, Hey, this isn't just Mandalorian.

SPEAKER_04: This is like big effing deal, but there's some big effing news. I think maybe starting with this Uber email, full disclosure, I was the third or fourth investor at Uber. If you haven't been watching

SPEAKER_88: this podcast, if you haven't watched the last 900 episodes. If you just arrived,

SPEAKER_00: which could be the case. And if so, welcome, you are in for a treat. Where you been? Somebody's always new somewhere. That's true. Fair enough.

Jason Calacanis: So after meeting, this is a very interesting kind of level set email from Uber CEO Dara Kozarsahi. After meeting with large investors in New York and Boston, Uber CEO Dara wrote in an email to all employees on Sunday night. So Sunday night, couldn't even wait till Monday. No, that's a big, that's a big statement. Yeah, it is a big statement on like Mother's Day and Sunday night wrote in and said, All right, here's the deal. We need to actually turn a profit. We need to make money and show free cash flow in order to win faith from investors, which is such a is so interesting, given all that we've been talking about lately about the Twitter board and, you know, Barry at Peloton and how to move forward. Let's do a quick catch up though, before we get into the substance of the email. The stock Uber stock is currently trading at a 47 and a half billion dollar market cap. Last week, we covered their earnings, which were great, right? Revenue was up 136% year over year annualized revenue is something like $27.4 billion, meaning Uber is only trading at 1.7 times wild. They're 20, 22, right? Like the faith definitely is not there from the public market investors. And evidently, maybe even from the private market investors, Uber is down 60% from the mid pandemic high, even as people get back in cards again. Yep. And it's down 45% year to date from

SPEAKER_30: $44 a share to $24 a share. Yeah. So it's it's gotten whacked. And all tech stocks have I mean,

SPEAKER_04: the SAS companies, Peloton zoom, I mean, just even Snowflake. I mean, a lot of these have compressed, we talked about it over and over again. That's fine. But what we're starting to see is valuations that are making you go wait a second, does that make any sense? So what's happening here, we know, there's been a market correction. And money is coming out of the system, inflation is happening at the same time, this quantitative easing has turned into the government actually selling their positions in the debt markets. And so and we're in a recession, in all likelihood, we had one, you know, like the first quarter was negative growth, just like 1% and change. And so we'll see if we have 2% or 1% or 0.5% or 3%, who knows what negative could be in the second quarter. The economy constricting. And some of that has to do with the war. Some of it has to do with supply

SPEAKER_29: chain, the war is exacerbated slash in any we have all these headwinds and crazy events going on. But the reality is, you have companies putting up a phenomenal numbers. And when they release their phenomenal numbers, their stocks are going down. So this is a combination of retail,

SPEAKER_04: quantitative easing, etc, etc. But Dara is just not going to take it lying down, he basically wrote this email to employees. And he said, after earnings, which remember, we talked about last week, they moved up because lifts were so terrible. He moved the earnings up. And he said, basically, he spent several days with investors in New York and Boston, this shows you, you know, how tuned in Dara is as an executive, because he's done this before, what was he at Expedia before he was running. Yeah, I believe. So he really understands the highly operational businesses in Wall Street and how to, you know, manage customers, partners, you know, investors, employees, all that stuff. But you know, this, I would say is probably the Fidelity's and the Morgan Stanley's of the world people who own big positions in Uber. And now they're gonna want to see something different. They are in a flight to quality, everybody is going to buy companies or not sell companies, depending on the situation, like Apple, or Microsoft companies that just print money. And in some of those cases, they buy back shares. And so he says, Hey, you know what, we are just going to have to prove it to the markets. And I remember this from the dot com era, all the companies went down together. And then some of the companies then recovered, some didn't, right? Some of them just permanently stayed down. They were not viable businesses. And so what he's basically saying in this email, and I'll let you read it, is hey, listen, we just need to be in the bucket where people understand this can be profitable. And everybody knows, Uber can be profitable, you've seen the prices go up, you've seen the wages go up, all the stuff they said would happen has basically happened. It doesn't mean it's going to be software level margins, but clearly,

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SPEAKER_24: offer code TWIST. I'll read some of the kind of like key nuggets from this email. And I think this

Jason Calacanis: is a good point to remind people that Uber, still, I think as a public company has never been

SPEAKER_49: profitable. So the moments right where they sort of like, Well, it was based on external investments

SPEAKER_04: and selling shares of other external investments. So if you net those out, they've always been right at break even since Dara sort of took over like a year after that, he just got it to this like

SPEAKER_32: sort of break even point, right? And right before COVID, they were like pretty close. And so now it's like, Alright, look, our investors are saying, show us if a business like this can be profitable,

Jason Calacanis: what are we going to do? So Dara writes, the average employee at Uber is barely over 30, which means you've spent your career in a long and unprecedented bull run and the next period will

SPEAKER_00: be different and will require a different approach. Rest assured, we are not going to put our heads in

Jason Calacanis: the sand, we will meet the moment. He said, among other things, investors are happy with deliveries growth. Coming out of the pandemic, he really sort of differentiated between these two businesses and talked about the importance of them both is that they like this delivery thing. But now they want to know, quote, is delivery a good business? And why? What happens if we enter a recession, we need Rodara to answer both of those questions with undeniably strong results. Right? He also said,

SPEAKER_00: meeting the moment means making trade offs, the hurdle rate for our investments has gotten higher.

SPEAKER_12: And that means that some initiatives that require substantial capital will be slowed.

SPEAKER_122: Got it. So he's, this is,

SPEAKER_04: here's the market conditions is great leadership. Here's reality, he's painted reality. And not just the reality of the situation for the company, but the reality for the people who work at the company, you may have never seen this before. You've only lived in an upmarket. Something I actually said recently on this, I've said a couple times in these podcasts, like, either here or all in or both, that, hey, we've got a generation of founders who've never done a downturn. So we'll see which ones can adjust at this time. So he's defining reality. And he's actually even saying, and your perspective, as a 30 year old, might need to change because you haven't experienced this before. But hey, I can tell you what the reality is like after this. And then he's, then starting to prepare them for what the plan will be. This is great leadership to find reality, and then start explaining the plan. And the plan here is, when he says hurdle rate for investments has gotten higher, hey, if we want to start a new business, if we want to start a new initiative, and we want to invest in that, invest is a fancy way of saying lose money in the short term to make money in the long term, we're gonna have to pick our shots, we can't just decide willy nilly, we're going to start an Airbnb competitor, or we're going to, you know, do micro mobility, and we're gonna, we're gonna do scooters again, or, you know, jump bikes or whatever, you know, we're gonna have to pick our battles, we can't, we can't have seven wars that we're losing money in, we're gonna, you have to

Jason Calacanis: show me a plan for how this investment is going to make money, right? Like, not just a like, let's try this and see if it works, which, which is fine, when you have happy investors and lots of money coming in the door. But when you don't, you have to be able to say, this is how this plan is going to is going to have ROI. Yeah. Another interesting thing about delivery is that he was like, they love delivery, which surprised me, because I actually think delivery should be growing even faster. Yeah, that was pretty cool. That was kind of cool. He's like, sure, it's fine, but it should be better. He said, the least efficient marketing and incentive spend will be pulled back, we will treat hiring as a privilege. And big on marketing at Uber since the beginning.

SPEAKER_119: Yeah, I think that was because they were in a very competitive race, you had the door dashes of the

SPEAKER_04: world, you had the lifts of the world. You had a lot of competitors. And so they did spend money, they had money in the bank. Why not do a Super Bowl commercial? Why not do these ad campaigns? Everybody has seen Uber ad campaigns, lift ad campaigns, door dash ad campaigns, Uber Eats

SPEAKER_49: campaigns, you know, maybe those will be consolidated into things that are more effective. So that means maybe radio ad stay, maybe television goes, maybe outdoor goes, maybe, you know, influencer ads go up.

SPEAKER_04: There's different strategies here that could be more effective. And you could track the ROI. So instead of just saying, put 10% of our revenue towards marketing, which is sometimes what businesses do, they just pick a percentage of the revenue, and just say, Yeah, that's a reasonable number to spend. Yeah. And then the marketing department isn't really looking at ROI, maybe as much as they need to. So they could move to that. This is, I think, one of the reasons why people give Elon a lot of credit, he's used his personal charisma, and the product to kind of sell itself. And listen, Tesla has no natural competitors, or hasn't really had a natural competitor up until now, really. Yeah. And actually, some of those competitors I noticed

SPEAKER_29: are doing ads online, ads on TV. Yeah, I did see actually, I mean, it might be the car that you got. What's the name of the car you got? The Polestar. They did a Super Bowl ad. Yeah, I saw them on I saw a TV ad for them. So that was interesting. And Ford has an ad for the

SPEAKER_32: lightning that I think is actually like, well, it's funny, because the Polestar ad took a little bit of a swipe at Tesla by saying, like, we're not trying to go to Mars, we're just trying to make

SPEAKER_00: cars. And it was funny. But then Ford has now Zuckerberg to that idea, and made this really snotty ad for the lightning. And I'm just like, you know what, that's, that's such a mistake, just

SPEAKER_12: Polestar, because they're like, they've got that European DNA, right? They did it with subtlety and

SPEAKER_140: class. Yes. And then Ford stopped in there with the big American truck version. That's basically

SPEAKER_04: like, not on what you want to do is talk about the value of your product. So I think

SPEAKER_142: one of the cars has this trip. I don't know if it's a Rivian or something, somebody just went over the top and made a 600 right mile range car. It's actually like a really bad idea to do that for the environment and just completely necessary. The car has to be it's 404. Yes, exactly. So the weights working against you for most rides, like most journeys in an electric car are, you know, 10 miles,

SPEAKER_119: 20 miles, 30 miles. So now you're dragging a 600 mile battery pack, that's working against you, right? Yeah. 400 is the sweet spot, I think. I think that probably is a sweet spot, because you

SPEAKER_35: can say, man, five hour drive, five hour drive. And nobody wants to be in a car for more than five

SPEAKER_147: hours and knock it out. You have to take a bio break and get a cup of coffee. It's true.

SPEAKER_00: So anyway, Dara goes on, we will be even more hardcore about costs across the board. He is warning everybody, we will treat hiring as a privilege, he said. And then he said that they would be deliberate about when and where we add headcount. So the hiring so is not necessarily

SPEAKER_72: signaling layoffs. But he is saying, you're not getting all the help you want. He's basically saying hiring freeze. That's what I read without saying the word hiring freeze and

SPEAKER_04: Facebook and Meta is doing a hiring freeze. So we'll talk about this in a moment after we do his

SPEAKER_147: thing, but layoffs and the contagion that can occur. But keep going. Yeah, definitely. But here's

SPEAKER_72: his super pumped energy at the end, which is I've never been more certain we will win.

SPEAKER_04: But he was going to demand the best of our DNA, hustle, grit, and category defining innovation. Some places will have to pull back to sprint ahead. That's basically tipping cards about layoffs or shutting down units or maybe offices in certain places. And we will absolutely have to do more with less. Again, we might shut an office down, we might get rid of a department. Uh, we might do layoffs. This will not be easy, but it will be epic. I like that easy epic. You got two E's in there. That's a just a great way to get that. Uh, not rhyming, but a little bit of that alliteration going.

SPEAKER_69: Remember who we are, period. Remember who we are. Good short sentence, tight punchy. We are Uber, a once in a generation company that became a verb and changed the world forever. This is a true statement. Let's write the next chapter of our story working together as pound hashtag one Uber,

SPEAKER_119: and let's make it legendary. Go get it. Haps. Go get it. He wrote this after the warrior game. I think it was like a warrior game. I bet he did. He's writing it during the war. He's a warrior's fan.

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SPEAKER_162: off. So that's great. I like it. I like him being charged. I like him being out there. Um,

SPEAKER_69: and, and, uh, and he also really Bosa, by the way, got this. So congratulations, Deirdre Bosa, who leaked this. Yeah. I like that he also signals full contact Deirdre,

SPEAKER_162: she, she, no, she's like, I don't know what she really is, but they told her to go full contact at some point and I was on and she was always like very jovial at me. And she was just like, but what about this? What about this? And I was like, well, if you let me finish, I don't usually do that. I

SPEAKER_38: usually just talk over people, but I didn't want to just talk over her. So I was like, well, you, if you ask me the question, you gotta let me finish. And she was like, fair enough.

SPEAKER_166: But it was like one of those contentious. You're like, huh? Yeah. I like CNBC,

SPEAKER_08: but I don't like the, like, I don't like when I'm just like, I'm watching a screaming match. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Um, but he seems to be, if you read sort of between the lines here, I think Dara seems to be

Jason Calacanis: saying that they are all in on, uh, potentially hailables and taxi, which is interesting. Like

SPEAKER_00: we're going to keep taxis on our platforms. I have no clue what that is. And even as I said it

SPEAKER_169: out loud, I was sort of embarrassed. I think it means like flagging down a taxi, like old school,

SPEAKER_140: like flags, like you see an Uber and you can be like, pick me up. Okay. So I guess the taxi in some

SPEAKER_142: markets, that's a term halibals and someone to look it up for us. Um, but they did add taxis in San

SPEAKER_04: Francisco. They're adding taxis in New York and San Francisco. We know that. So maybe halibals just as a general category on a global basis for raise your hand, get a ride. Got it.

SPEAKER_35: I think so. Yeah. Or it could be a code word for something.

SPEAKER_00: Halibals and taxi delivery and mobility, which I think is the overarching term for get a ride in a car. And he's like, our strategy is really simple. Bring in consumers on either

Jason Calacanis: mobility or delivery, encourage them to try the other and tie everything together with a compelling

SPEAKER_173: membership program. Hmm. Uh, well, I just found a link over subscription. Maybe. Oh,

SPEAKER_04: Uber one is a subscription. Yes. I think they call it Uber one. That's Amazon prime. I'm a member of it. They, they have not done a great job marketing it yet. Um, you get discounts for rides and upgrades. So you order an Uber X, they might send an Uber black. Um, you please. Yeah, no. And, and, uh, I think you pay like five bucks a month and you know, 60 bucks a year. So it's their Amazon prime. And then you get, uh, priority delivery for free. You know how sometimes they deliver two or three things and you're like the last in the daisy chain of pad Thai being delivered and it comes like cold.

SPEAKER_69: Yeah. Um, they give you like straight shot delivery, which I think they call priority delivery. And then

SPEAKER_06: I think you don't have to pay certain fees, uh, for delivery. You get a discounted thing. Got it. Uh, but I just found a software engineer level two driver halibals in, um, when I did my search for halibals, the street hail industry, taxis, auto rickshaws and motorcycle sharing is a multi-billion dollar industry largely untapped by Uber. The halibals team is responsible for building technology that caters to this industry building from zero to one, our product offering in the space. We want the top of the mind choice of any rider who wants to hop on the back of a taxi, auto rickshaw or motorcycle. You will have the opportunity to work from the ground up building

SPEAKER_00: and scaling systems. I like it. Um, so they really are saying we're coming for the we're coming for every version of a ride that you would get, whether that's flagging down a rickshot or a taxi in the

Jason Calacanis: street, calling a car in advance, calling every level of car, a big car, a small car, a crappy car, a fancy car and the taxi. This is something I think Uber could do a great job of. Um, I think Uber

SPEAKER_04: should launch because I did this when I was in France one time. I think I did it twice. When I, when I would go to France and I'd be alone, I would take a motorcycle from Charles de Gaulle to Paris. Um, motorcycle picks you up. You don't have to wrap your hands around the dude. It's like those, it's a second seat. That's a little bit higher. Oh yeah. It has its own like grip bar or whatever. Yeah. You hop on the back of this motorcycle. It's got room for your bags in the back.

SPEAKER_69: And boom, you're in Paris in 20 minutes, as opposed to an hour and a half or an hour or whatever, you know, with the traffic and they zip you through traffic, you can split traffic. And, uh, there are like incredible drivers who are just, I always thought there should be a service. I've been pitched on it many times in LA and other places of this. I think they should do it with Vespas, um, that have the second Vespa seat and just design it. So you don't have to wrap your arms around the person. That's always the thing. That's a little weird. It could be very weird for women as well. It's very weird for everybody. It's like, it's already weird enough to be in a car with somebody you don't know safely. Exactly. Full no, thank you. But if you were in a, there are people who are in places where it's a little bit, uh, there's a lot of traffic and this is a faster way to go around. You, you might actually consider it. I think it could actually work in some, I could see hipster kids in New York and stuff like that. Loving getting a Vespa to pick them up

SPEAKER_142: and zip them home. Yeah. And record time for a dollar or less or whatever.

Jason Calacanis: Well, honestly like much get all those cars off the road and replace a lot of them with electric scooters. Be great. Boom. You're talking about a massive traffic and environmental impact done.

SPEAKER_49: Well, and you think about it as an investment. It's like people, it would be like a new product for Americans, you know? And so that means you have to educate them. It's risky that it up, but it could

SPEAKER_04: also be exhilarating and fun and you could get behind a new trend where people say, I, I don't want a giant car taking me home. I want to save money. I want to save gasoline. I want to have less of an environmental impact. I don't want, I want to get there quicker. Yeah. Cause these things just can go right to the front of the line. They're allowed to split traffic. So, um, the revel scooters, uh, and some of those electric scoot, I guess with the other

SPEAKER_184: company, those became a little bit of a phenomenon in New York, whatever.

Jason Calacanis: They're cool. I just think you actually ideally need a driver. Like I think what you're describing is actually the way to make this take off because not everybody knows how to drive them, not everybody is good at driving them. It's like a little unsafe.

SPEAKER_04: This is what the hell of us should do. They should just take these, the people who drive these for Uber should park in front of chase center and just have 20 of them waiting for the game to come out. They should park in front of whatever the hottest bar in Manhattan is or Williamsburg. And just, if you're driving one of these, you drive there. And then instead of calling an Uber, you take the Uber driver takes theirs out. You take their app out, you tap NFC, or you scan their, um, QR, QR code. You put a QR code on the side of it and somebody scans the QR code and it joins the car. So for the team, this is obvious, but for the hail abilities team at Uber, put a QR code on the back of the person's phone or a sticker on the scooter. And if you want to take the ride, you

SPEAKER_38: say, Hey, you're available. The person's like, yes, obviously I'm available. And you maybe have like an available sign, you know, take out your Uber app. Yeah. And you just put a light on it that says

SPEAKER_187: available and boom, you scan their code. Oh my God. Just drink. Think about all these drum producers

SPEAKER_192: we have working for us. Think about all of the, think about the three New York City area producers.

SPEAKER_04: And they are doing their, you know, cause they are producers. They don't drink during the week.

SPEAKER_142: They just, they just day drink on the weekends. They're brunching it out. I caught my nephew with three drinks in front of him at brunch this week on a mother's day. That's mother's day. It's mother's day. I don't even want to know what producer Nick's doing on not mother's day, but I saw two sangrias and another beverage and I don't, I can't verify what the other beverage was.

SPEAKER_196: Nick, you deserve it. It was a red, a white and a coffee, which is the Nicky, that's the Nicky special. You deserve it. She had a red sangria, a white sangria,

SPEAKER_199: couldn't decide why decide, just have one of each. And then you had a coffee,

SPEAKER_200: anything in the coffee? I was trying both. They were small cups. Karafs. Oh, I see. Oh, I love this. I called it.

SPEAKER_202: I don't know. That's what they called it. I called them pitchers, but they called it crafts. So, okay. All right. Well, you have,

SPEAKER_35: I'm glad you didn't fall into a crevice when you had your craft, uh, crevasse, crevasse, a car off,

SPEAKER_205: curvasse. It's kind of a say, am I saying it wrong? Correct. Correct. Graff. I mean, I like, I like it. It's classy. I like it. It's pretty great.

SPEAKER_210: I was at mother's day brunch and I had a carafe. What did you put in the coffee? You have bellies in that coffee? You'd be honest.

SPEAKER_215: No, no, no, no. I love a Kahlua in my coffee. Um, maybe we'll do that for Friday. Everybody get a little Kahlua special. No, I do espresso martinis.

SPEAKER_196: You're not going to be here. It makes amazing espresso, obviously, as you know, and espresso martinis. You have a Tara cafe? Espresso martinis are a thing. Why? Yeah.

SPEAKER_173: Of course. Did I buy that for you? You bought it yourself? No. You have that. So you make yourself a little tight espresso with that.

SPEAKER_03: And then you shake it, ice it up, and you put a little vodka with it?

SPEAKER_220: Yeah. Uh, Stoli vanilla. Ooh. Yup. Two tablespoons of Stoli. Well, if you're making two, two tablespoons of Stoli vanilla,

SPEAKER_196: a tiny bit of Kahlua, and I have something called Boovery, which is a chocolate liqueur. Just a little tiny bit of that. You don't want it too creamy. You want it like nice and black. And then yeah, you shake that up with some ice. It's bomb. And you drop three espresso. You drop three coffee beans in it for- Of course. Look at your fancy. Good luck. The Father's done in the Holy Spirit. Yeah, of course. Good luck. Look at you. It's got to stay in the show. That's what I was going to say.

SPEAKER_200: This is amazing. Three beans. Three beans.

SPEAKER_228: Oh, what's going on over here? Get three beans.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. Let me get a Bucca. I mean, I was, I was, uh, if you serve a guy in Brooklyn, like a Sambuca with two or one, I mean, you literally could start a fight. Dude.

SPEAKER_234: Like it would be like the biggest insult ever. It's so funny you say this. We were at, uh, we went to dinner with, um, Savino took the whole New York team out a couple of months ago.

SPEAKER_182: I heard about this. I didn't get the bill for this. They hid the bill in accounting.

SPEAKER_234: Savino, um, ordered a like Sambuca or something. And it was, they brought, and it was a really Italian place that we were at. Shout out to Nino's, um, McDougal street. What's up? Um, and they brought him out a little Sambuca shot with three B coffee beans in it. And he was like, I've never seen coffee beans in a Sambuca before. And that waiter, who's like complete Staten Island, like Highland Boulevard, like, he was like, yeah, the Holy Trinity guy.

SPEAKER_239: Yeah, Jesus Christ. Come on. The Holy mother. All right. So sorry.

SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry. Let me someday go out to dinner with Savino. That's all I care about.

SPEAKER_245: Oh, it's all I care about. Someday as in next week, Someday as in next week, I want Savino ordering the wine.

SPEAKER_229: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Uh, I'm doing my seven day tone up.

SPEAKER_162: I told Savino when we went to Hong Kong, I was like, come to Hong Kong with me. I don't have time, but I want to hit, like, I want to hit at least three Michelin stars. We did six.

SPEAKER_04: Uh, so we just. That guy knows how to demolish Hong Kong. He knows how to live. I was like, here's your job. Find the hotel and book reservations everywhere. Boom. And he,

SPEAKER_119: he nailed it. Uh, and now I got precious my chief of staff. So the next trip is going to be even more

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SPEAKER_252: I love it here. So let's wrap up the Uber. Let's wrap up the Uber thing. Yeah. So yeah, I mean,

Jason Calacanis: Uber clearly signaling, I think a couple of really interesting things. One is that they see the opportunity to take like seize this moment in time, which is like, look, there's a pullback. Nobody's in a

SPEAKER_118: question, any hard choices that you make. And also clearly institutional investors are like, look,

Jason Calacanis: we've been patient long enough, but we're not at a point where we can just continue to funnel money at this thing until you show us that you're willing to make the hard choices. I feel like if you consider the long, super pumped journey, we're now at the point we kind of knew we'd always be at

SPEAKER_00: where it's like, Dara, show us the money. Show us the money. Show us the money. It's Jerry

SPEAKER_162: McGuire moment. And here's the thing. Great. Um, it's going to be easy enough for them to do.

SPEAKER_69: You just cut costs. You cut expenses. 10%. It's not the end of the world. Yeah. Uh, you may have to raise prices a little bit here. You may cut some marketing there, uh, but they'll easily do it. And then if you look at what's happening in the public markets, um, this will be great for employees because their stock options will accelerate and rise. And I think, um, when you're, I'm looking at the market right now and not the overall market, but specifically tech stocks, I think, and I'm going to call it right now. We're here on, um, Monday, Monday, May 9th. I believe we are, uh, doing what I call bouncing along the bottom. So I don't think there's going to be, uh, precipitous drops, um, in the tech stocks from here,

SPEAKER_04: because listen, I mean, it's easy call to make if they're down 70, 80%, you know, they could go to 80, 90%, but we're, we're bouncing along the bottom to where the cash in the bank at some companies and the revenue of these companies is so great. And the cash in the bank is so great that they can flip the switch, make the hard decision. And the company becomes like if a company is valued at two times revenue, one times revenue, or they have 5 billion in cash and they're worth 7 billion. Now you're saying the enterprise value is worth 2 billion. If they

SPEAKER_69: bought that stock back from the public market for the 5 billion they had, then they'd have a $2 billion market cap. And I think certain companies like Peloton, Robinhood are going to start to fall into this category. A lift might even if they, um, you know, tighten up their business because they're only worth 7 billion, right? Uh, then they become potential buyout, uh, candidates. Now, if they're going to get bought out, they have to be bought out for a premium. The premium typically is 50%. So what you're going to see here is this is I think the bargain hunting summer, the summer of bargain hunt. I think this is a unique opportunity between now may 9th and call it when we get back in September, uh, sell in May and go away is what people typically say. Um, you know, it's gonna be a really tough market for the next couple of months, but I think I am calling a bottom. Now that doesn't mean it's not going to go down a little bit more. I'm calling the bouncing along the bottom of the bottom. And now's the time to bargain hunt in my mind for the companies you think that can pull off this change. Um, and I think stock buybacks is something we might see if a company is sitting on a ton of cash, like, you know, Robinhood is, or Uber is, and they get to profitability. If you see them start saying, you know what, we're going to, we're going to do a buyback of, you know, a hundred million dollars or 250 million. Right. Um, and so, you know, this is the case because what you'll also see is the CEOs of these companies that may have sold shares earlier, and they may have sold them at a premium now start buying their own shares.

SPEAKER_271: Mm hmm. Because if a CEO, we did, right? Yeah. Uh, who was Spotify? Ah, yes, that's it.

SPEAKER_29: Nick read my mind on that one and put it right there in the chat. Okay. Oh, there it is. Okay. So, um,

SPEAKER_69: this is a classic move. When you believe your stock is undervalued. If the CEO goes and buys 10 million, uh, or something like that, you know, five, 10 million, something that feels like case, 50 is how much I put in Spotify. Wow. I'm guessing Daniel, um, you know, probably had a chance to sell some shares at some point, you know, before the IPO, whatever, maybe cashed out a couple hundred

SPEAKER_04: million. Um, because I don't think you can buy your own share back on a margin loan. You might be able to actually, if his margin alone was for a couple of billion dollars, I don't see why he couldn't buy 50 million. So he may have a huge margin loan that he can take if he owns 2 billion worth of Spotify or three. I don't know what his position in Spotify is worth, but let's just pick a number

SPEAKER_29: 3 billion. Certainly he could, you know, take 10% of that and buy 300 million dollars with shares. That's the ultimate insider move to do. And like, you're not doing that if in all likelihood to

SPEAKER_119: manipulate the stock, you're doing it to show the stock is undervalued and you believe the best.

Jason Calacanis: And that you're not going anywhere that you're not gonna, I mean, you're certainly not going anywhere at that level investment. And then Nick makes the point, I think, and this is true. If Uber

SPEAKER_00: ends up breakeven on a net basis before the end of 2022 and shows a net profit early in 2023 and is

Jason Calacanis: trading at less than two times revenue. Yeah. This is not buying advice, but yeah, it could be,

SPEAKER_164: it could be the setup. And so I think this is where, you know, the market and all this, you know,

SPEAKER_04: headwinds that we talked about. Now you have to make changes. And this is where layoffs can become

SPEAKER_69: a contagion. And I mentioned this over the weekend. Right, right, right. You started to see people like fast.co go out of business, right? There was no time to do the layoffs. They waited too long. They should have cut the company in half or by two thirds and still stayed in the game. They didn't. And then you see cameo laid off on deck laid off. Who else laid off a number of other companies have

SPEAKER_04: started the layoffs. Oh, I did a little thing here. Well, we know better had their own problems. Robinhood laid off. So you're starting to see when you see layoffs in the 10% or greater, they're significant. 5% of reorg 5% means nothing. But 10% unless it's a huge number, like, you know, Googling or 5% might be a very real number, but would be a company with 1000 people laying off 50.

SPEAKER_69: That's a reorg. You're supposed to cut the bottom 50 performance, according to Jack. Well, when you see 10%, when you see 25%, that means we want to extend our runway by X number of months,

SPEAKER_04: we want to show profitability, etc. And so we're going to start seeing those signs. Now,

SPEAKER_69: this gives every CEO and every board cover to do the layoffs. Now you got cover to do layoffs. You consider them like reorgs, in some cases, because you know, you're not getting rid of the top performers, you're obviously going to start with the least least performance, there's 5%, 10% you cut from any company, you don't do it for cultural reasons, typically. But if you have the opportunity

SPEAKER_29: to cut 10%, you're going to do it as a CEO. Yeah. And so now everybody's doing it. Now the next phase happens, Molly, which is, if you don't do it, and it's a recession, then people start wondering,

SPEAKER_69: why aren't you doing? And then that puts a unique, interesting pressure on the CEO, the CEO and the management team have to go to their board. They have to then think even to their own teams and to their shareholders. Hey, the reason we're not laying off is because we are throwing off this amount of cash flow, free cash flow every month, we're profitable, and we want to hire more people, which is what Google did. Through the recession, they were hiring people during the Great Recession, because they were massively profitable. So anyway, it's, this is the this is what the summer is going to be, every company is going to do a layoff, or a reorg, cut 5%, unless they have a

SPEAKER_29: really strong thesis of why they wouldn't, right, you know, well, unless they've been, you know,

Jason Calacanis: super disciplined and super lean. I mean, not, yeah, I know, I'm like, you're bleeding heart

SPEAKER_00: mom over here. But it's frustrating. It's, it's, the bummer part of this is that there are going to be these layoffs, and some of them are going to be about content. I mean, there, there could be lemming layoffs that aren't entirely necessary. And then you're releasing a bunch of your workforce

Jason Calacanis: into an environment where it's right, where doors are closed, where there are hiring freezes. Yeah. And so, you know, it's hard not to, it's hard not to acknowledge that up until now, when there

SPEAKER_118: were a bunch of layoffs, it was like, look, your tech employees there, you know, you've said this, there were the tech employees, there are lots of openings, like, they're, you know, you can't fill

Jason Calacanis: these jobs, blah, blah, blah. But at some point, soon, probably, these little ducklings who have only ever known a bullrun are about to get sent into a world where every door is closed. And that

SPEAKER_49: is, it's a, it's a distinct possibility. It could be a little ugly briefly. Yes, the distinct possibility that that Google sheet, with the list of the impacted employees who opt into being in the sheet, like, hey, call me if you have a job, here's my title, here's my LinkedIn URL,

SPEAKER_29: here's my email. Those, those may not be wanted by the, you know, those sheets may not be poured over by an HR department somewhere, because there's a hiring freeze that meta, there's a hiring freeze that Uber, there's a hiring freeze that

SPEAKER_69: Airbnb, whatever it is, or they're being super selective. So that's going to be the next thing. And so when that happens, then we're going to start seeing this is going to clash into and crash into, sorry, the work from home issue. You may have seen Apple. Yeah, this is like, this is my two parter year of predictions. Mm hmm. A three part one, we're bouncing along the bottom in a recession.

SPEAKER_04: Now's the time to be looking at these stocks and figure out which ones you think will be here 10 years from now. And if you were going to buy them, I think this is going to be the choice opportunity to get into them. And this may this could last like a six months bounce bouncing along the bottom, it could be 16 months, you know, usually these recession things are six to 18 months. So just be

SPEAKER_69: prepared for that. If you're buying them, you're not flipping them in the fourth quarter of this year, it might be the fourth quarter of next year or two years from now. The next piece is, okay, these stocks are hitting the floor, and then the layoff contagion. And now the third piece, Apple said, we're going to go back to three days a week, one day a week now. Well, that was two weeks

SPEAKER_06: ago, and two days a week in two weeks, and then three days a week, I think three or four weeks from

SPEAKER_69: now by the end of this month. Yeah. There's like, you know, um, some very high level AI person, machine learning person in Goodfellow is not he the director of machine learning, like basically,

SPEAKER_68: the guy ran the division. So how do you read this Molly? How do you read this person quitting?

SPEAKER_71: How do you know to staff? He said, I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been

Jason Calacanis: the best policy for my team. Mm hmm. There were some I this is where like, I roll my own birdwatch, and I like to read the comments. And there were several supplies, several replies watching. Thank

SPEAKER_118: you. Several replies that suggested that he had been there just about four years, meaning he's vested. Yeah, so that that could be a part of this. And clearly, he had gotten used to a lifestyle that he believed was very effective. Mm hmm. I think that they he probably still thinks he has choice. And he may, right? Like if you're, he might, although I will say the higher you get up, the more expensive you get as an employee headed into a recession, the harder it can be

SPEAKER_01: for you to find a job. But I don't know. I mean, he may just literally be like, I don't want to work

SPEAKER_314: like that. Right. So invested. So I don't have to. Here's my read. Yeah. Apple, um, obviously believes

SPEAKER_152: in work from the office. They believe that's how the magic happens. They want to, they want to win this battle with employees. The secrecy. Don't forget the secrecy part. That apparently is a huge

SPEAKER_117: part of why Apple wants people in the office because it doesn't want to leave in the office. Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_83: Like, uh, you know, maybe some, uh, work from Supreme, uh, court documents to work from home, right? Like now that place is going to be locked down and you're not going to be able to leave

SPEAKER_04: the building with anything. Uh, so, and it's hardware and design is a big part of it, but putting aside any of it, I think a lot of people believe that people are not working as hard when they're at

SPEAKER_69: home and we can debate it. I'm sure there are people who are goofing off at home and I'm sure there are people who are crushing it. And then there's these other factors, security, hardware, design philosophies. I think what's actually happening here is Apple is challenging the employees. And

SPEAKER_252: it's a, a loyalty test and B, uh, a way to avoid having layoffs. So they want to like,

SPEAKER_319: I want to volunteer. People will volunteer. If you say everybody's coming back to work,

SPEAKER_04: there's a certain number of people who left. You know, if I said, everybody has to be in San

SPEAKER_69: Francisco, I lose you, uh, lose Ashley. She moved up to Napa, you know, like people moved all to different places that, and if I said, we have to be in once or twice a week, I'd probably lose nobody, but people might be like, ah, you pay for my Airbnb. If I have to stay overnight, are you paying for my Uber? Like it'd be a whole thing. Like, do I get paid for my commute time? All these conversations

SPEAKER_83: will start to come up. Um, which I, I saw some Apple employees kind of lobbying, like,

SPEAKER_323: are we being compensated? It's like for your commute? No, that's not how the world works.

Jason Calacanis: I mean, the world didn't, but now there is this question of like, wait, this is a lot of time that I'm essentially donating to my company. Okay. You chose where you, you chose, right?

SPEAKER_325: Yeah. Right. But I mean, it's on the table, like, but if they moved, right, like stuff is on the table

Jason Calacanis: now that didn't used to be on the table. And I do think the idea of like, forcing the question makes a lot of sense in that regard, because Apple's probably like, we don't want all that

SPEAKER_69: stuff on the table. Right? This is it's a power move. And I think they would love to cut 10% of the

SPEAKER_04: staff and be more efficient and not have to do a layoff. And like, if people push out buying an iPhone because of the economy, because they're behind in their payments or whatever, they say,

SPEAKER_27: yeah, just keep an iPhone for one extra year now, because I want to save a little money. I don't want to spend the $1,400. So now, yeah, yeah. And you're like, they don't have to, it's like, well, if they want to keep showing the earnings, they have getting rid of some high priced employees.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that actually does. Yeah. And if those employees are not the ones who are going to be, you know, shoved out the door into a brutal job market, if it's like, look, you're the guy who's

SPEAKER_118: vested, you made a crap ton of money, because the machine learning is really like, and you don't want to come back to the office, fine. I don't, I do think it's very interesting

SPEAKER_00: that that guy tweeted about it. I think, you know, the sort of because he actually tweeted, or did his report, actually, he didn't tweet about it. You're right. That was the reporter getting the internal note that said, this would have been a better decision for my team. Fair.

SPEAKER_340: Good point. Good point. Because I think leaving loudly in that regard is not in your best interest.

SPEAKER_341: Well, he did leak it to her or somebody leaked it to her. So obviously,

SPEAKER_00: yeah, he wanted it out there if he did. And he said it. And you know, so it's, it's, it's gonna, I just think it's a fascinating moment in time, because we're gonna find out what businesses can work remotely. And what can't like, it is so true that a hardware business,

SPEAKER_118: I mean, at least some people have to be, you gotta like, see it. Then there's a question, even about a software business, how collaborative do you want to be? Whiteboarding and whiteboarding, all of that stuff. But then there's the other question of like, my god, is real estate expensive? And so if that's a cost that you can cut, are you going to be better? Like, I'm just so interested to see what this all what all this data looks like in five years.

SPEAKER_04: That's actually gonna be very interesting. You know, both models clearly can work. We have not seen an at home model or work from home model, create a Google or Apple. There's WordPress, there's envision, you know, work from home companies that have been and work from home

SPEAKER_69: forever. But they they're not trillion dollar companies. They're not $100 billion companies,

SPEAKER_04: you know, they're unicorns. So we know a unicorn can be made. Okay, checkbox. But could you make Facebook? Could you make Tesla? Could you make Apple? Could you make Google? Most people believe it can't be done. Now, could you operate them in an emergency remotely? Of course you can, right? They're already built, they're already at scale. And obviously, a factory and an Apple store are different. So put that on the side. But

SPEAKER_69: we're talking the creation of, you know, the iPhone, the creation of the Model S, the creation of

SPEAKER_04: Google, you know, search or Gmail, could they be done remote? Well, obviously, the hardware stuff that exists in the real world, the answer is no, you have to be in a room if you're building it.

SPEAKER_69: Portions could be suffer could be. And then the question is only could like a Google or Amazon level

SPEAKER_06: business, the virtual parts of it not that it's so it is just fundamental culture question. Because

Jason Calacanis: if you look at those companies, they all have a lot in common with a cult. Yes. And it's really hard to create. I mean, don't get me wrong, I have a cult like devotion to lunch. But it is really hard

SPEAKER_00: to create that sense of connection when people are at home. It's like, there are good things and bad things. You know, people are finding that they're a lot it's easier for them to to say things to

Jason Calacanis: their like meetings are more equitable, because you don't have that sort of in the room power balance thing. So people love lower level feel more comfortable, like sharing their opinion in a meeting. And previously, they maybe wouldn't have because they were physically intimidated.

Chamath Palihapitiya: This is why I think the zoom boxes should be based on the size of the zoom box should be based

SPEAKER_30: on your you just whatever your salary is, that's the size of your box. That's the size of your box.

SPEAKER_29: It would be like one of those heat maps, you know, when they have stocks and the you know, they show the market caps of them. Your opinion is based on that. Your purple aura says what you

SPEAKER_00: say matters more. But so like some parts of that are good. But in terms of creating like that sense of

Jason Calacanis: I mean, in order to program somebody, you need to get them in your space and feed them your drinks and

SPEAKER_00: have the party and you know, like have the club. And so can you recreate that four times a year? I think is a real question. Can you get that like, you know, devotion that that esprit de corps, you know,

SPEAKER_49: that esprit de corps? Yeah, can you build it virtually? And you know, like, I, I feel we have a

SPEAKER_69: different type of enthusiasm at launch and inside as virtual companies than we do in person. It's much

SPEAKER_04: less the relationship between us, and more the work and the output that we're doing. And then people have, I think happier home lives. And I find it's easier. I feel like people are more content in their life outside. They're out, they're outies as opposed to their innies going back to severance. So I feel like the innies aren't as like sacrificing their outside life. Therefore, they don't resent the company as much, right? Whereas I felt people who had to come to an office, there was a sense of resentment. Uh, in some people, my family's at home, I'm missing dinner with my kids, I didn't get to

SPEAKER_69: drop my kid off at school, because I had to get to the office for an early morning meeting, some of my

SPEAKER_29: nanny had to drop them off, or, you know, my neighbor had to pick them up, and I'm missing that. So I kind

SPEAKER_06: of feel like for me, I like the remote thing, in that I like having happy, intent people working for me. And we're not making a car or phone. We're investing slightly different.

SPEAKER_00: Also, we work so much more. Like, I think you get an extra remote work you get, depending on what the

Jason Calacanis: commute used to be, you get and that was a bit that actually is how I ended up working from I was working from home for three years before the pandemic started. And a big part of that reason was because

SPEAKER_00: we were sort of trying this experiment where I would go to San Francisco. And for me, that was a 45 hour 45 minute minimum drive each way. And the argument that I made is that that's just a you pay me too much to be offline for an hour and a half a day during, you know, rush hour of news and output, right? Like, that's just and that's not a good use of your money. Whereas if I'm at home,

Jason Calacanis: I'm going to be working those hours. And we have data that shows that like most Americans were ended up working, like 30% more hours. I mean, that might not even be ideal. But people are working up to like

SPEAKER_370: 11 hours a day, because you're just you just can. Yeah. So if you enjoy your job. It's like, well, I'm awake. And I don't want to stream something I already worked out. You know, basically that two

SPEAKER_04: hour commute, which is probably average, if the two hour commute, I think probably, I think it becomes work or gets split 50 50. Right. And I'm okay with that 50 50. And honestly, so then depending on

Jason Calacanis: again, like this is why I wonder what that five year ROI is going to be? What how do you measure productivity?

SPEAKER_00: Did it go up? Mine certainly did when I went full time remote? Way up. I don't know that I could

SPEAKER_69: do as much as I'm doing right now if I had to commute. Yeah. And my commute is 25 minutes, 30 minutes wasn't that bad. I mean, in the pandemic, I was doing in 22. It was pretty crazy, easy, easy job. Actually, I kind of liked it. Because it would I would be listening to the news or a podcast or audio book on the way to work and on the way home, it kind of gave me like a little decompression moment. I kind of like that piece to it. But I realized not everybody is privileged

SPEAKER_119: enough to have a 20 minute commute. Some people have two hour, you know, whatever 45 total minute a day. I kind of enjoyed actually gave me like a little me time. I think that's not the worst I

SPEAKER_32: do miss that time. I like the I like the car time. I like to enjoy that time. Yeah, it was like,

SPEAKER_27: but then you know, if you missed your kids thing, it kind of sucks. All right. Yeah. So anyway,

SPEAKER_04: this is a I think my predictions bouncing along the bottom, the winners are going to emerge,

SPEAKER_69: you'll be able to identify winners by profitability, and the change in unprofitability to profitability stock buybacks either by executives or you know, the company doing them, and the layoffs and then

SPEAKER_04: layoffs are going to be contagion like over the summer. Everybody's going to rebalance everything, the job market is going to be very different. At the second half of this year. So people who felt they had three or four different job offers might only have one or two. I'm talking about a sought out sought after person who easily had a competitive market for their services.

SPEAKER_29: Lock it in now people are two. Yeah. And yeah, maybe I don't think salaries are going to go down, but I don't think you're going to be able to extract, you know, that extra, you know, I got three offers. So hey, you know, this is what I need, kind of moment and then somebody be like, Okay, fine, we'll pay it. I think that's going to go away because we're like, you know what, we'll get by.

SPEAKER_04: Yep, we'll get by. We don't need to be in a dogfight for your services. And so that'll be good for startups too. Because I do think that there'll be some number of employees who are like, I don't want to, if, if this startup allows me to work from home. So this machine learning guy, uh, and his team, the members of his team are going to be like, you know what, we can go work at this company, you know, WordPress, Matt Mullenweg is going to let us work from home. Great, we'll work from home. Right. I'll go there. Oh, he doesn't pay as much as Apple or the options aren't worth as much,

SPEAKER_27: you know, whatever the RSUs. Apple can be more generous. Okay. I don't care. It's working from

SPEAKER_382: home. You know, I want to ski 40 days in Tahoe. I want to set my own schedule, you know, different

Jason Calacanis: people have different points in life. Yeah. And it will just, it will become part of a workplace culture question. Some cultures, some places have this, others have this. You may have the choice for a little while, but I, I will, the only thing I will add to your prediction is if you're thinking about switching

SPEAKER_331: jobs, lock it in now. I think it's probably, probably good advice. All right. Lock it in.

SPEAKER_00: Good news as a result of bipartisan legislation. Here we go. True story. Uh, you know how we,

Jason Calacanis: we forget this all the time. What's that? Yeah. Yeah. Good news related to bipartisan legislation, which was only barely bipartisan, let's be honest. But you remember how President Biden actually managed to get an infrastructure bill passed and it was a lot of money as a result of that infrastructure package. There is going to be much more availability of high speed internet for low income Americans. Okay. Explain. How do they do this? Amazing. 20 internet services have agreed

SPEAKER_12: to cut prices or increase speeds to provide eligible households with affordable high speed internet. They include, uh, providers that cover more than 80% of the U S population, AT&T, Comcast,

Jason Calacanis: Verizon. It means they'll offer plans with speeds of at least a hundred megabits per second for $30 a month to households that qualify for this affordable connectivity program. This is, uh, of course, as I mentioned, part of this trillion dollar bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed, and this will be eligible or available to almost 50 million households, 48 million households that have an income at or below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines.

SPEAKER_27: How do they know that you have to apply to Verizon and tell them your household income?

Jason Calacanis: I think that probably, and somewhat unfortunately, the federal government will operate this affordable connectivity program. And then it'll just be based on your, your tax returns.

SPEAKER_378: No, actually, wait a second. I'm reading here. Um, oh, so you can get accredited through a

SPEAKER_04: government site. That's good. And it says it based on income level or participation in government programs like Medicaid, right? So if Medicaid, so that's a smart idea. If you, if you, if you're

SPEAKER_396: low income enough for Medicaid, do they call them food stamps anymore? I think they call them snap

SPEAKER_35: SNAP benefits. SNAP. Got it. I know that food stamps was considered a, like, um, I don't know, like,

SPEAKER_07: uh, now they call it snap or food stamps because people are very used to food stamps, but they gave

Jason Calacanis: it a sort of less like loaded name, I guess. Yeah, I guess that it was like shaming people that they

SPEAKER_04: were on food stamps. I remember when I was a kid, people on food stamps were shamed by it. Um, so if you have Medicaid or snap benefits, I guess, so 11.5 million house hosts have signed up to receive the

SPEAKER_00: ACP benefit. Wow. That's amazing. It's, I mean, this is a huge deal for people who do want to work remotely, have some, you know, or have like a childcare or just like you can't, I mean, imagine if you're low income in America and you want to start a business and the thing that is literally

Jason Calacanis: holding you back is access to broadband internet. We pay like the highest, I think the United States still pays more per megabyte than any other developed nation. Like our cost, you know, it's to our cost to speed situation is terrible. And it's because we just don't have enough

SPEAKER_29: competition. You know, this would have been great 20 years ago. I have to say, this is the fact that it took the government 20 years to do this is like, just shows how dysfunctional and gridlocked our government typically is. I know, um, the, the great paradox

SPEAKER_69: here or irony is that because of Starlink and it's, there's two other competitors that are coming. Uh, there's an independent one and I think Amazon's doing it. So there's gonna be three,

SPEAKER_04: uh, satellite based low earth orbit satellites, which means they're really fast as opposed to the old slow stuff. They're gonna have three of those. Those are all gonna be a hundred dollars and dropping a month and they're gonna be really fast and you can use them anywhere. Then, uh, Verizon and

SPEAKER_29: other 5g folks are doing 5g to the home, which, and then cities are banning like single, uh, access points to buildings. So there's that legislation that I think just San Francisco, the Bay area now

SPEAKER_69: did where you, you know, if you put the fiber into the home, you can't like block other people, right? So what's gonna happen here is this is gonna be, uh, great for that group of people. And at the same

SPEAKER_04: time is gonna be a dogfight in pricing, I predict. And I think most homeless will, most, these things are gonna become so cheap that most homes are gonna buy two different services because it's not a middle class homes and above. I think you're gonna buy two services. So they're never down. That's how much our cup will run this over. People are gonna have a satellite

SPEAKER_69: and a fiber line or DSL. They're gonna have 5g to the home and the satellite or 5g plus the landline. So people are gonna have two of these things. I think it's gonna be the, and if you think about

Chamath Palihapitiya: it as a home, we have five people in a home, having like 230 to $50 services makes sense.

SPEAKER_00: You know, like, yeah, because you want to be able to avoid congestion or have like, you know, have the streaming on this side and the work stuff on this side. Yeah, no, I agree. I have, I have had up until five months ago, two high speed internet services running for public radio.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, well, I just, and the one and then the home one for redundancy. So they were both plugged into the back of the box in case someone, you know, if Comcast goes down, AT&T kicks in, it would automatically fail over.

SPEAKER_164: Yeah, that automatic failover routers are dope. I think everybody's gonna have those. It's Pam. It is. P. I. Yes, you're absolutely right. Like, we're on the cusp of the competition

Jason Calacanis: that would have made this irrelevant. But we took so long to either enable competition or give people this benefit that now it's coming. Not too late for people, but it is irritating that didn't happen.

SPEAKER_72: It's like they're gonna solve the problem. Right before the problem is solved. Right before,

SPEAKER_319: you know, capitalism solves the problem. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, listen, we love to it. And I think there's a time for both, you know, I, I think these we're not there yet. So well, you know,

SPEAKER_69: it feels like there should be a little bit of government government intervention here.

SPEAKER_29: If the prices aren't come naturally coming down naturally because of competition as a competition. Exactly. Yeah. So you have to at least double click and find out why they're not going down. And what's being blocked and why. And I think other folks, because the whole, I'll tell you why I'm

SPEAKER_69: not 100% free market on this one. Because there are edge cases where people who work in rural areas, people who are low income. Well, and just how hard it's been to get fiber to the middle of the

Jason Calacanis: country. There is no infrastructure. Like you can't really big country, you can't run fiber,

SPEAKER_68: you can't run fiber to farms. I mean, it's not possible. The farms would have to pay 100,000 each to

SPEAKER_86: lay, you know, at least $100,000 each to lay the distance between these things. So just

SPEAKER_29: strictly not possible. Yeah, agreed. Um, totally agree. But also the, the importance in society

SPEAKER_04: for this. So I would say, you know, deprecating the post office and moving some of the post office

SPEAKER_69: budget towards this would be another great use of funds. Because who wants like, why are we going there? Well, I've I believe that the the the the post office should be a one day a week service, two day a week service, not a 567 day a week service. It should be like a backstop against the

SPEAKER_04: free market services. And the fact that it's a five or 60 day a week service is why everybody gets a free ride and you get so many of these free flyers, and real estate agents sending you stuff that gets thrown away. It's terrible for the environment. It's um, and you know, there's, I'm not saying

SPEAKER_69: those people should be fired, they should be reassigned, and they can be given pensions and, you know, a soft landing. So I'm not cold hearted about the employees there. But just think about it from first principles, would we create the post office today as it is currently with the United States create the post office today? The answer is no, there's Amazon doesn't use the post office. Most times they're using their own services, other ones, we don't need it. So once a week,

SPEAKER_04: you get your post. And if you want something faster, well, then sign up, I just went through the

SPEAKER_252: exercise of taking every bill and making it e an e bill, right?

Jason Calacanis: Well, that relies on broadband everywhere and affordable access to the internet. But yes,

SPEAKER_118: there's a lot of infrastructure that would have to well, it also applies on digital or, you know,

SPEAKER_72: relies on digital literacy, like a lot of things that would have to be in place before you could do

SPEAKER_29: that. That's why I said one or two days a week, you know, and maybe in rural America, it's three days a week. And in cities, it's one day a week. Yeah, like there's somebody living in New York City

SPEAKER_86: needs seven days, any postal service, six days, I'm of the opinion that we can afford both.

SPEAKER_331: If we make hard choices and get disciplined, but Well, well, what could we do with that money? That would be better served?

Jason Calacanis: Well, I think we could use the post office for more things, right? We have a globe, we have an internet, we have a national infrastructure of post office, so that people have been talking about, for example, using the post office to provide basic banking services. So that for the unbanked, you could do some banking at the post office, which used to exist, you could use that infrastructure for potentially more things.

SPEAKER_32: It's the government's and we're using it for now. That is that is very true. All right. So that's,

Jason Calacanis: uh, that's our Monday news wrap up slash government redesign session. There you go.