Amazon's RTO Impact, Lina Khan’s 60 Minutes, and Microsoft's Big Nuclear Deals | E2013

The key here is for us not to have foreign dependency and to win AI and win superintelligence. You cannot win superintelligence without a ton of power and a lot of chips. This is going to be awesome for America. Independence and reaching super intelligence. And the super intelligence is going to train us how to make better decisions about technology to get more efficiency and energy. This, this could spiral in a really good way.

The first thing superintelligence is gonna say, it's gonna print out. Leena Khan was right. And you're gonna go, no. Why have we made this?

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All right, everybody, welcome back to this Week in startup. It's Monday, September 23rd, 2024, and the news doesn't stop. We're going to talk about a lot of big picture stuff here and how it relates to your startup. With me again, Alex Wilhelm. He is formerly with Crunchbase, TechCrunch, Matter Bar, a bunch of great companies. He's been studying the technology industry as a journalist and writer for two decades. So welcome back. We're in a second decade, I should say. Yeah. I don't want to make you seem.

Too old, but in your show today, our housekeeper. I was going in to shave my head in anticipation of our recording today and she said, you're gonna shave your hair? What hair? And I was like, oh, getting burned.

Wow. Getting roasted.

Yeah. In my own.

In your own home. I love it. Fantastic.

So, yeah, I'm old is what I'm saying. Yes. Anyways, before we get into the rundown, Jason, I wanted to bring up this, this, this viral tweet from Harry Ste. So anyway, shout out Harry stings 20 Harry Steven VC. I've met him, it seems. Nice. This blew my mind. So Harry says the biggest problem in venture capital right now is that we've made entrepreneurship too safe a career path. Starting a company should be for the crazy, for the obsessed Instead, today it's for the rational. Leave a top tier vc, AKA Stanford, raise vc, own your time, work on something cool, pay yourself well. We need to go back to the ones who only do this because they cannot buy bear to not see their creation in the world. Okay, I have thoughts about this, but let's start with you first impressions of that tweet.

Easy to say as a venture capitalist with very large salaries, huge compensation if things do work out, and very low risk because you're in a mutual fund of startup companies. So whenever you're a venture capitalist, you do have to be careful to understand that your job is incredibly low risk and diversified, whereas founders jobs are incredibly concentrated. And if it does go back to what he describes where you, you know, make a pittance of a salary and it's incredibly hard, then you will leave out people who might pursue the path, who have, I don't know, a baby, a mortgage, you know, a payment for college. So there are a very small number of people who can do what he describes, which is live off of ramen and suffer, et cetera. So I don't disagree that in the old days it was harder and it drew more grit, but the truth is it might have been actually too hard back then and a little bit too unreasonable. And listen, I am a eat rocks, chew glass, spit blood entrepreneurial guy. I had to do what he's describing there. If you were a founder, it was because you were a misfit who couldn't work at a big company and you had to suffer, you know, and, and essentially live like a monk and put every penny you had into it and it created a certain pain and suffering. Much of that pain and suffering is unnecessary and a distraction and probably doesn't actually accrete to a better product or service. In other words, like if you have a studio apartment or a one bedroom or a two bedroom, it probably doesn't make a difference to the ultimate success of your startup. That being said, we did create the luxury version of entrepreneurship, which is I could take down a 250k salary and my salary should be similar to the salaries of, let's say, you know, the equivalent of me working as a vice president at Verizon, aol, you know, Cisco, Uber, you know, or Apple. And so between the two is kind of the truth. You don't want people to suffer so much that they don't become entrepreneurs and they have no choice but to take that Amazon job. We'll talk about that in a minute. And you don't want them to be So I don't know, coddled that it's like, you know, the Google hooley send up where you're just picking between which cut of steak you want before you get your massage and play volleyball and do a meditation mindfulness session like you see in a TikTok video in the Day of a Life of a Googler, which by the way, I think pissed off a lot of people from Google. Like those millennials doing those specific, you know, soy matcha honey, manuka honey latte. You know, it's like in my day we had bad coffee and we drank it.

Cheap and easy to make and you can make it in big vats, like.

Yeah, I mean, you want your matcha latte latte with manuka honey and your tweak that they have soy instead of whatever nut milk you like. Like that's I think what he's reacting to. But, you know, having been there when it was pure suffering, it was probably a little too much suffering.

Yeah, no, actually, I think that's very reasonable. I mean, my first job at a startup, I was sleeping on a couch and my desk was a series of cardboard boxes in front of me where I put a laptop. And that was fine because I was 20, you know, like, I mean that I could literally sleep on my. Also my office chair because it was the same couch. That's fine, but not for everybody. The thing that I think that I. That's not brought up enough. Enough is secondaries became so common in the larger rounds in the 20, 21 era.

Peak Serp.

Yeah, peaks are. But I think a lot of founders got accustomed to the idea that they should be able to start a company, raise money and then also be a part time VC on the side and make lots of money and be. And so I think like the founder universe got much larger and that takes money and I think that's changed things. But the nice thing is a little austerity solves successes. And I feel like now things are getting a bit back to that middle ground you detailed, which is why this Harry tweet's interesting to me. I'm curious if this is not like a 18 months late tweet.

I have a feeling, you know, when you see a VC tweet like this, and Harry's a nice guy, you know, I think it's probably just some frustration with an acute situation that happened that week to a vc. We're all human and you know, there probably was some founder who was like, yeah, I know the company's dying. I know we got product Market fit problems. And when I get back from my silent retreat and I spend, you know, this money I spent in secondary at peak zurb that I sold on my, you know, new, you know, beach house, I'll. I'll try to solve that problem. It's probably something like that. He probably got tweaked. And we're all human. It happens on both sides of the equation. People get frustrated with their VCs, they get frustrated with their founder, they get frustrated with their cto, they get frustrated with the VP of sales. But the truth is, you know, as the market gets hot, exactly as you outline, you can let people who just don't have the metal, the proper, you know, grit to be founders will get anointed as founders. And I'll be totally honest, people who don't have. Do not have the stomach to be venture capitalists have become venture capitalists. So this is overall in our industry, it got too easy. Now you get an inside look at my life as a venture capitalist. When the market comes down, there's no dpi. Lina Khan's reign of terror on the industry continues unabated for another six months. You know, we have to figure out, hey, how do we sell a $50 million company without the 10 buyers who would love to buy it being too scared to buy, you know, a little acquisition that might make your venture capital. It might be the difference between a seed fund existing next year or not existing. Might be that little $50 million acquisition because they own 20% of the company, and they would have got $10 million to distribute to their LPs in their $20 million fund. And it gets them to break even. Right? So we are in a very difficult time for the industry. A lot of, like, things have been a lot of the excess we've got to clean up after. They're like a bender. You know, you have a bender and, like, the house gets trashed, and then everybody leaves. And everybody who's at the bender who broke the windows and the railings broke on the staircase and the. The mirrors cracked in the bathroom, like, those are the people who broke it, Aren't the people who clean it up?

No, no.

It's the people who got to live in the house who clean it up.

Puked in the sink, is never there with the plunger the next day fixing.

Nope, nope. Definitely not. Thank you for that graphic reminder of college days.

College days.

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Now, speaking about major cleanups, well, there is Amazon's big RTO move. We're going to talk about that and what it means for stealth layoffs and startups. Then we do have some notes from Lena Conch, who's on 60 Minutes. We have clips to bring you all the latest there. Jason, you brought up Apple intelligence, AKA AI on Apple devices. We have Microsoft and some big nuclear deals, a couple of new 2500 companies, and a little bit more on OpenAI to wrap things up. So let's start with Amazon. Jason, the big story here is that Amazon's going back to the office five days a week. They tooled around with coming back three days, and now they're going to five. Just to break this down for everybody, CEO of Amazon Jassy asked two questions. One, do we have the right org structure to drive the level of ownership and speed we desire? And two, is the company set up in the way that it's going to be the most effective? And in both cases, he said no. So two things are going to happen. One, they're going to try to reduce the ratio of ICs or individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of next year. And then also, like I said, returning to office five days a week in order. Jason, first of all, a Mandate to reduce the number of managers compared to IC's genius top down. I can't decide.

Yeah. So you know, Andy Jassy is not a founder but he's going into founder mode. The stock has been up and down. They obviously got a huge Covid bump. But if you and dependent on when you look at the stock versus the S& P and contemporaries, what you'll find is, you know, you take out that huge spike they had in Covid stock hasn't kept up with the performance of contemporaries. And if you are a hired gun CEO, I. E. You know, Bezos left in 21, I believe 2021, you know, you have to perform and your performance is exhibited through the stock price. And Amazon has an incredible business. It's growing. But I don't think the stock has done particularly well and I don't think the work from home Experiment Experiment is working at Amazon. Now if it's not working and you feel people are not as committed and you know you have to reduce workforce, what's a good strategy? You want to test everybody. And so I'll just. This isn't necessarily an endorsement from me. This isn't necessarily the strategy I would pursue. But reading the tea leaves here, stock price not great. Business growing. But maybe you see more innovation and people are talking about Microsoft AI's effort. Apple Intelligence, Zuck releasing his own LLM. Tesla being on the verge of releasing their, you know, Robo taxis and FSD coming out quite nicely. Waymo doing quite nicely at Google. Google, it's got Sergey back in the office and they're making progress. And then you go to Amazon and you're like, what have they done?

Put more ads in our search results.

Okay, Precisely.

Also they put ads in my prime videos. Jerks.

I mean it's like, okay, Lord of the Rings series that nobody's talking about for a billion dollars, it does not feel qualitatively or in the stock price like Amazon's a leader. If you're not a leader, you're falling behind and everybody else is thriving. In AI, you gotta shake things up. So how do you rattle everybody's cage? You want to scare the entire team and make them feel unsafe. Now I know this is sounding triggering, so I'll put yet another disclaimer. Alex, I'm not saying that this is what I would do. I'm not endorsing this, saying it's right. I'm just telling you reality. You want to scare the out every employee there that their jobs aren't safe unless performance changes. That's what's happening right now. And if you don't get your ass into a seat by January, go. Your resignation is accepted, and then whoever's left is going to get compensated, they're going to get your rsu, and we're going to get this company back on track, full stop. That's what he's trying to do. Will it work? Let's talk about it.

Yeah. So I want to go back and just clarify that when you say you want people to feel unsafe, we're not trying to say like unsafe in your person, just unsafe in your current existing employment. Deal with Amazon. So a very narrow.

Not that you're going to be beat up. He's not going to come with a bat and do an Al Capone situation from the Untouchables.

I know, I know. With the round table, right?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

Baseball is a team sport, but when you're at bat, it's for an individual.

Oh boy. That's a, that's a memory I haven't come back up with in a while. No, but I agree with you. I went and read a bunch of forums about this. I read the aws, Reddit, and read a bunch of other different areas, just trying to find any developer on one of those groups that thought this was a good idea and would lead to retention of the best talent. I couldn't find a single example of that. In fact, everyone was saying things like, oh, well, I just, I just took a job at Amazon because it was three days a week in the office and my commute's long and now what am I going to do? And a lot of people expressing annoyance that this was being put into effect the way it was. Some even saying that the new RTO policy is actually going to be more strict than Amazon was pre Covid. So this is a tightening down. My concern is that from a C suite perspective, this looks great because you want some people to quit. Anyways, Amazon's been doing small layoffs throughout the year. Why not do this? We'll get better return on our office space we've already bought or leased. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. When I just think you lose a lot of the best people who know stuff. And I, I, I, I don't know how to put that in EPS terms, you know, but it, it is going to be institutional knowledge walking out the door. And if I was the CEO of a company as complex as Amazon, that would give me pause. You know, I, I don't mean to throw my hat in here. I just, it makes me worry about who they're going to lose.

That would be a calculus that they discussed internally for sure. You're highlighting something that they had a discussion about before they did this. They said, you know, there's these, this team over here at Twitch, there's another team over here. They've been like, Twitch, I think has been remote since before they were bought. So Twitch got a carve out. So there'll be little carve outs that occur to address what you're saying. They just won't talk about those publicly. They'll do them very quietly, you know, and you know that that has always been the case. There could be some incredibly high performer in sales or development. And you just, they've got a set of rules. And everybody goes, why does that guy or that gal get a different set of rules? And it's like, here's her sales and here's your sales. And then everybody, you know, STF use, like there's nothing really to discuss. This person's the high performer. They want to work from Japan for six weeks. They're working from Japan for six weeks. The end, we're done.

Every corporate policy is, is a thing the corporation wants. It's not something that they're going to hold themselves to. It's designed to limit your behavior, not theirs. Just keep that in mind. Everybody, unless you're in charge, then it is your policy.

So if you wanted to get rid of 20% of people, not pay six months or a year of severance, not have to deal, deal with, you know, all the legal filings that go through plant shutdown rules. These are antiquated rules that existed. So like a factory couldn't just leave a town and the whole town collapses. They got to give some warning, right? Those warning acts exist. So this, you know, a lot of moving parts there. And I think they looked at all options. Getting people to come in two or three days a week wasn't working. People wouldn't do it. They would do coffee badging. They would, you know, basically ignore it. And you know, in the details here, Devil's in the details. One of the details I saw that people were particularly tweaked with was assigned seating. So you have to say to yourself, well, why is that so controversial? Why would they include in. You will be in your seat, not a seat. So what they're saying is when they say that, and again, you just gotta like kind of read into your. Just imagine you're in that management meeting and they say, what? How do we get people to take this seriously? We say, yeah, they Have a desk. What they're saying is you have a desk. 15% of people are going, and if you're not in that desk, we assume you're one of the 15%. You're one of six or seven people that will no longer be working here. Worst case scenario, they lose some institutional knowledge, they'll survive. It's not going to affect my buying stuff on Amazon. I will probably not notice the loss of those that institutional knowledge. That burden will be carried by the employees who remain, who have to clean up that mess. Sorry, it sucks, but so, so be it. And worst case, their earnings go up and the stock recovers. Best case, maybe the company becomes more competitive and actually releases some products or services that are disruptive in the way that Amazon web services were. So he's, he's trying to. Andy, Josh is trying to keep his job and he's trying to do a 15% riff and he's trying to make the stock go up. There's your explanation, folks.

Well, if you were curious about if Amazon is now in its balmer era, I think the answer is yeah. Actually the best comment I read online was isn't this some day two? We can bleep that out? But I was kind of laughing about that.

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This fits neatly into something that we've been talking about on the show, which is static team size. Amazon actually a couple weeks or months ago dropped this big note about how they saved all this time and money using, what's it called? Amazon Q. I think, yeah, Amazon Q, their gen AI software assistant to save them like, you know, hundreds and thousands of hours and hundreds of millions of dollars. And so I think Amazon's also looking at this stuff they're building internally and going, we're going to limit our need for developers. So if we lose some in this process and get what we want out of it, maybe that's fine. So I, I wonder if RTO is actually somehow being made more possible by advances in gen AI and therefore if developers aren't taking away some of their own perks by building better AI tech.

Thousand percent static team size, AI arriving, you know, AI job loss and then offshoring are all part of what's going on here. You will see some of these jobs go to India or you know, Ukraine, South America, where they don't require RSU and their cost is 50% or 30% on the dollar, not even counting RSU's. People in those jurisdictions are not expecting to get big, huge stock grants. It doesn't exist culturally as a concept that you would take the risk of working at a startup and get some big payday. They haven't seen it, therefore they don't expect it, they don't demand it. So you get all of this massive air cover and you know, a lot of times management decisions are made based on never waste a crisis. Covid was a crisis was not wasted on executives at companies who decided working from home is dope. Now we've got a reason to, let's hold on to it. Coming back to office, the stock's in crisis or the stock's not as robust as it could be in comparison to competitors. And other competitors are doing things that are making Amazon look like a laggard. It's a bad look to be a laggard if you're part of the, you know, fang, you want to look like a leader. So this I think dovetails nicely into what's happening with M and A which has been a part of Amazon's and Facebook's growth. And then also, you know, looking at Apple intelligence as a consumer company.

We're going to get into the M and A thing in just a second, but I want to grab one more chart. This is the number of job postings on Indeed that are for software development gigs in the US And I think we actually may have had this on the show before, but I pulled it back up for today. Thinking about this Amazon thing, what blows my mind is we're essentially back down to the lowest point of COVID Like that early three, four months of COVID Everyone thought the economy was going to be dead forever. That's how low today job listings are for software development gigs in the US which is kind of shocking to me. It's worse than I thought it was going to be based on what I just saw.

The finite resource in our industry was developer talent. It is no longer the finite resource. And so that shows you exactly what happens during, you know, this kind of, you know, economic and boom bust cycle we've seen combined with the efficiency of AI. This is a multi factor experience going on here. People are people over hired, therefore they reduced AI makes it so you don't need to hire as many people because people are getting 30 or 40% more effective a year. So you don't have to hire people. That's two really considerable factors there. It's almost like you built too many apartments and then we came up with this new technology that made construction workers 30% more efficient at a year every year. Imagine if that happened in housing, we'd be like, whoa, housing prices are going to plummet and there's going to be construction people everywhere and we're not going to need as many. And we don't have that because there's regulatory capture and there's, you know, NIMBYism and all kinds of other stuff that are factors there that distort that market. But you don't have that distortion here. And then add to it globalization, multiple factors working in conjunction to reduce the need for developers in the United States.

I agree with all of that, but there's, there's a tension that I, that I can't quite unspool for myself, which is how does a company that wants to go RTO to get back in the office the most IRL they could possibly get five days a week hanging out, bumping shoulders and then also do offshore? So are we going to see like companies that, that pursue rto be the outliers when it comes to hiring people in Ukraine, Latin America and so forth. Or can companies kind of like walk and talk at the same time?

I suppose those employees are in offices in India. So the Bangalore office is in office and there's some manager there. And you know it's, it's always been my belief that the top 20% of performers over perform at home by removing their commute, increasing their happiness. Then I think there's another swap, probably equal size. Who do you know just as good, plus or minus a couple of percentage points. And then I think it's the bottom half which when you have an at scale company becomes the real challenge. There's no mentorship, there's no discipline, they don't have self discipline, they don't have the ability to learn on their own. They need resources, they might need people next to them to motivate them. You know, when you're in part of a sales culture as an example or you're part of a running club as an example, if the people who are around you, when you run, as a young runner coming into the world, if you run with people who run an eight or nine minute mile, you're going to trend towards that. If you run with people who run a 12, 13 minute mile, you're going to jog and you're going to, going to jog instead of run and everything in between. And so that is human nature. And I think when you look at finance companies, they were the first to say every, you know, get back in the office. We need that dogged competition, that energy. We want people to be part of this culture. Now in information work, writers, designers, salespeople, maybe in startup land, we are slow to get back. But I think for you, for that bottom half of people, that vibrant competition and learning and collisions equal some culture that does increase performance. I know if you put these companies side by side, an in person culture would be a remote culture with the same people. I mean, and I'm sorry to people who that hurts their feelings or it's a bummer me, you know what? If you weren't you, I wouldn't give you the gig because you're an extremely talented person. There's only, I would say maybe 30 of us. 40 of us who in tech can draw an audience and have a good conversation on a podcast. You're one of 30, you're not one of 30,000, you know, and so that's, if you want to work from home, be one of 30, not one of 30,000. The people who are Being forced to come back to offer it are mids.

Yeah, yeah. The thing I love, they're not elites. We. We gotta. We gotta move on to Lena Khan. But I'll just say this. Spoken like a true extrovert. Said with nothing but hearts. I just like, I just want to be like. I'm like, oh, yeah, I can see that from. But also, I'm like, I also want to hide in the corner a little bit and. Yeah.

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Halloween is coming up, ladies and gentlemen, which means that everyone's dressing up as things that scare them most. Which is why I'm very glad to report that Jason is going to go as Lina Khan for Halloween.

Yeah.

Nothing makes him more like. It's funny to talk to you. I talk to you a lot. And you're. You're actually pleasant and nice. And then Lena Congress up and you're like, she is destroying the industry. Terrible. She's Godzilla kicking over my tower. Yes, but she was also recently on 60 Minutes and we have a couple of clips. We're going to play them for everybody here, and then we're going to talk about what she says and what we've learned. So decades of M and A and what happened with that court hit it.

In the technology markets. We went through a couple of decades where we saw over 800 acquisitions by the five big players, not a single one of which was blocked. And some of those, we realized, ended up leading to significant harm. Just to give you a concrete example, there were companies that were offering Americans greater privacy and they were promising that we're not going to use your data, we're not going to sell it, we're not going to spy on you everywhere all the time. After some of those firms were bought up by one of the big guys, all of those data privacy policies changed overnight. And so Americans lost those privacy protections.

You're talking about Facebook and WhatsApp.

Yes, that's one example of that.

So, Jason, first of all, thoughts about that argument that agglomeration of technology companies has led to a deterioration of consumer privacy.

Hogwash. I mean, we take 800 acquisitions. You mentioned 800 acquisitions. Can you name the three or four that were the most harmful? And they came up with one. And I would say the harm of Facebook tracking WhatsApp users is all within the law. If it falls outside of the law, they get very significant penalties. And in fact, Facebook had the largest judgment against any American company in history for privacy violations. And they are audited because of that. If you remember that case, I had a. This was over 10 years ago.

And very recently there was the Attorney General Ken Paxton Texas case that cost Meta. I think it was $1.4 billion. So this is still happening.

So there are laws around privacy. So she's taking a fear tactic. And she is very smart and very evil in my mind. I think she's sinister. I think she is political. I think she is a political tool to be anti capitalist and to be. And you can see in that weak argument exactly how blatantly political what she's doing is. They don't like Facebook. They want to go after Facebook. They're going and taking an acquisition that was not fought at the time of a messenger app, which is a commodity that anybody can build. It's not like it's some incredibly proprietary technologies, technologies that exist inside of now. Twitter has encrypted messaging signal, Telegram. I mean, there, there are more messaging apps than you could ever use available to you. And they're all free. So the, the concept of consumer harm here that they're going to is privacy. Consumers don't have to use those apps. They can easily use one of the alternatives if they really care about privacy and they don't like the feature set or the deal presented by WhatsApp, which is a free product. That is a free product. People can use globally, communicate for free and run it for their businesses and get massive value out of. And so I think they're in that quote. You can see how insincere this effort is now because it's scary to consumers. Oh, they're collecting our data. You opted into that. You don't need to opt into it. You could use another service if you really cared. Consumers do not care about getting targeted ads. If we've learned anything, consumers do not care about that type of privacy. They might care about having their phones hacked. They do not care about getting targeted ads. It's a total red herring.

You and I do, though. I mean, we rerun adblock and all sorts of stuff. And I suppose, I guess to me, the argument that unsophisticated people are unsophisticated and therefore they shouldn't have protections is. I know what you're getting at. The thing that I'll say, though, is, and I just, I just say this as an enormous please take the counter argument.

I mean, it's just, this is my worldview. I mean, I would love to hear the counter, if you have it. Yeah.

Which is that I don't think she's being insincere at all. I think she really cares about this.

Okay.

I, I think that you disagree with her entirely. I just don't think that she's as malicious as you make it out to be. I think you guys just have a very deep seated policy disagreement and she's been, I would say, effective at changing the conversation from where she sits inside the government. And I'll also throw in that I don't think that many people think that Lina Khan, no matter who wins the upcoming election, is going to have her gig next year. So to me, this is definitely not kind of like, it's almost like a. Not a victory laugh, but like a farewell tour. Thank you, Jason. It's kind of a farewell tour. I was surprised that she was on 60 Minutes. I'm like, why would you do this now? It's almost like she's probably been told that someone else is going to get the job if Kamala wins. And of course, if Trump wins, she's out of her job. Either way. I just don't think she's evil. I think she's just applying the best take that she can of the regulations that are in the same way that I don't think Gary Gensler is the evil mastermind that everyone wants to make him out to be. In the crypto world, do people have legitimate policy beef with them? Hell yes.

So yeah, my counter to that is I think Gary Gensler is a square, a nerd who just wants to apply the law and he doesn't want to deal with the chaos of adding new technology because it's a lot more work and it's a lot more headache and it's all downside for him. And so that is a fundamental architecture of that organization, an enforcement organization. They're rewarded for stopping crime. They're not rewarded for allowing innovation. So you know, that just the nature of. It's not like a police officer, you know, or a police precinct gets like bonus points if everybody in the community is happy and they, they're thriving and they go to, you know, great colleges and their scores go up. They only get graded on if there's less crime. Did less people get murdered? Did less stores get robbed? You did your job. And, and that's the SEC right there. There's no upside, there's no reward for them allowing new types of financial services. So that's like a very unique situation. And with her watchdog organization, I think she was selected because she had extremist views and there was an anti technology bent to the current administration which wanted to stop what they perceived was the power of the social network specifically and information, because it felt like, hey man, maybe this is competing with politicians and their ability. So I mean, I'm starting to sound a little conspiracy theory here, but they picked a 32 year old with very radical ideas to run this. Her ideas are to, you know, break up big tech and to stop future harm through competition. What we've learned is there's a very simple way to deal with monopolies. It's to allow technologists to start companies and compete. Now it might take 20 years to displace somebody, might take 30 years. But we're seeing it right now between ChatGPT and Google. We saw it between AOL and Google and Facebook and Twitter. It's just always some renewal that occurs. Android iOS versus, you know, displacing Microsoft in mobile. Like everybody thought Microsoft would win mobile, right? They won desktop, so how do they not win mobile? And they play no role in it. So, you know, I'm just, I'M glad she's going. I think what we're seeing here is, you know, what she did was just basically freeze the market for a couple of years. Hopefully we allow the small acquisitions to occur and we actually look at the behavior of the companies and address the behavior. Not a theoretical future competition. Because I would rather not have government officials determining through a crystal ball what's going to happen with future competition. I'd rather leave it to the market, if I'm being honest. I'm not saying the market's perfect. You can get monopolistic behaviors, but I want to see them give speeding tickets and revoke licenses in this metaphor of unsafe driving for people who actually break the rules. I don't think, I don't think Facebook broke the rules by buying Instagram and WhatsApp.

Well, I think if. Well, Facebook was a smaller company at the time, and that's the thing that we should bring into this conversation. I am slightly more skeptical of how to knock off certain incumbents because there does seem to be quite a lot of inertia in the market. But it just feels like sometimes people point to Lina Khan's regime and reign as more impactful than it is because I can't recall that many examples of deals that are these tuck in acquisitions that are so important to early stage funds, the seed funds from earlier getting blocked, to me, it's the major deal.

They're just not happening. It's the chilling effect. So you're correct. You're not seeing them get blocked because people don't even try. That's how bad it is.

Would they get blocked? I guess is my question.

Probably would get. Probably would get a legal letter saying, you know, and you probably would get vetted. And so they've just given up on it. And the paradox of it is then they just build their own. So instead of buying things, they say, you know what? We'll just build. And so if you actually wanted to make Apple and Facebook and Microsoft less powerful, having them buy the companies and having those companies be valuable and being able to raise more money would be a better way to do it than having those companies fail and just have Facebook incorporate the idea into their next version of their product.

So the argument there is if we allow big tech companies to go into the pool of startups that are competing with them in some ways and pull out a couple of the names, it enriches the, the, the pool so much that the overall package of startups become stronger. I'm very sympathetic to that. I mean, I am a guy Who? I mean, I. I've been interested in startups since I was going to the public library in my hometown because I think they're cool. I think it's cool to go up against the big players. Like that has been the key thing that's gonna be interested in this sector for so long. And that's why I've always thought that some antitrust work has to be pro startup. Because if we do have some limits on companies that are monopoly trending, let's say avoiding some arguments, then it creates more room for startups to be able to compete and then take them on. So I can see this from both sides. I will say that I thought this interview was interesting in its framing. So, Court, why don't we play one more clip from this from Lina Khan to get more of a taste of what they put out.

Of all the thousands of deals that are proposed every year, the FTC and DOJ collectively investigate maybe 2 or 3%.

That might not sound like a lot, but startup founders complain that she's spooking investors so much, she's actually stifling innovation. Others fear that her chasing the tech giants will cause a domino effect. Earlier this month, after it was reported that her counterpart at the Justice Department subpoenaed the chip maker Nvidia.

Nvidia shares getting slammed in the regular.

Session, the stock market plunged. Do you ever worry.

Okay, Court, let's pause it there. So did you see what just. So back to your point about weak examples. I think that is, that is the definition of a weak example. They just said that when someone who is not Lina Khan announced an investigation of a different company, their share price quote plunged. Played a clip from CNBC when the share price was off 2%.

Yeah.

After going up by like 8,000% in the last, like, I mean, this shows.

You, like even 60 minutes is, you know, as a journalistic enterprise, very lauded, does incredible work at times. You know, they also, at times they also are an entertainment program that's, you know, fighting for audience and they can make things a lot more dramatic than they actually are. The DOJ investigating, like, you know, some activity at Nvidia doesn't necessarily has to do with her. That is just an example of the government investigating companies. And then sometimes that affects the stock price in a minor way or a major way, but in this case, a minor way. So it's not exactly evidence. The statement before that, which is that startup founders are feeling the chilling effect is the actual story. And I think what she's on right now is an Apology, farewell job interview. I'm going to restate that. It's just a farewell tour because she's 30 something years old. I think she is doing these tours because she's going to be doing one of two careers after that. Well, one of three careers. She's either going to be working for a very large tech company on the other side of the table, a venture capital firm on the other side of the table and advising them on how to get deals through, etc. Work for one of the giant law firms. I'm not sure if she's an attorney or not. I assume she is, somebody should look that up. But if she is an attorney, maybe she goes and works for one of those firms to help deals get through. So when Figma's getting bought by Adobe, maybe Adobe hires her and I think the other possibilities to run for political office. She's well spoken, she's highly intelligent and she's anti corporate, which plays, you know, in a lot of America. So she would be a great senator, congresswoman, you know, who knows what position she would go for next. But you know, this is a great resume builder that you try to fight against the evils of Amazon, et cetera. I love the consumer harm framework and I like the idea of looking at specific anti competitive behaviors. I do believe Apple giving all of their search results to Google in a multi year, tens of billions of dollars a deal, I do believe that feels anti competitive. I do believe not allowing app stores on the iPhone or Android or I guess Android allows it now, but iOS previously or iOS taking a 30% tax, not letting people click to pay directly and have a direct relationship with their newspaper or their, you know, you know, app of choice. I believe that's anti competitive and that's where you could really make really good progress. You know, if, if I want to use Apple News or I want, I'm Apple's, you know, I'm the Wall Street Journal app. Why am I giving money to Apple to, you know, go through the app store? I mean if it was, if it felt like the 3% you pay to stripe, slash Visa, that's one thing, but 30% is 10 times that number. And so I think, you know, forcing them to allow other app stores on iOS, which I think the EU is doing now, they're going to force them to do that and allowing them have links on the webpage to say go direct. There's a podcasting 2.0 standard that Adam Curry is working on that has two buttons that Apple and Spotify don't put into their apps. To the best of my knowledge, one of them is the donate button. One of them is this podcast is going live that is like now standard in the HTML code, like the RSS code, the standard for podcasts. So when we go live, we have to tell you like log into YouTube, subscribe, etc. But it should be in any podcast player. If you have notifications on Spotify or Apple, you get that alert, but they don't follow the standard. And there should be a button that says donate that goes to our Stripe page and let you donate with or whatever. We choose to use Patreon Stripe. And we, we program that we don't have to go through Apple subscriptions, through Spotify subscriptions, through, you know, YouTube subscriptions and let them take 20, 30%. Absurd. So I think that would be a better use of whoever comes in next, a better path. And then we've talked about it here before. Let's let the small companies go crazy so that we have more big companies. Instead of a Mag 7, we've got a Mag 17 or a Mag 170. And that would happen if you allowed Uber and DoorDash to merge or Waymo to spin out and merge with Uber, you know, or Tesla to buy Uber or DoorDash, you know, that's where you start getting really interesting ways of competing against big tech. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

No, no, I'm here for it. Also, just going back. She has a law degree from Yale, unsurprising given that she runs a department and she is 35. So it turns out, according to my research I just did, Lena Khan and I are one month apart in age and we are four months older than Taylor Swift. So there you go.

I mean, three of the most important people in my life.

Yes. Also nightmare. Blunt rotation. I think that would be the worst way to hang out. Okay, let's move on.

Taylor Swift is just bogeys that doobie every time. I'm like, swift T. Swift, pass it. Puff, puff, pass.

And she's like, absolutely not. I have to date a football player. All right, Jason, so today before the show, you were all hot and bothered about Apple Intelligence because you have the new version of iOS. My iPhone is too old. Sorry. I'll buy a new one. Tell me what's up.

So it's just interesting to see a lot of the features that were in products like superhuman Gmail Grammarly notion around writing all of a sudden appear on the operating system level of your phone. So the first thing I'll show Here today is the writing tools. I sent a couple screenshots. I'm sure we could find other screenshots online. But in the new iOS and anybody can join the beta, by the way, if you go to your software section, you can join the beta. There's Sonoma and then there's another one. Right now, I can't remember the two names of the betas, and they have different things in each one. And some of them you need Apple, silicon and higher levels. But the writing assistant tool, very good. And so here I was, I think, in our docket. We write a nice little docket here. And when I say we, I mean Alex. And so I could highlight the section here, and Writing tools comes up as one of your choices. So I highlighted the section we did on Amazon's Riff that you wrote, and then it could proofread it, rewrite it, make it friendly, make it professional. In other words, like, you know, maybe 20% of what Grammarly already does, Right? Here's another one. This is a very simple feature that you can use with ChatGPT4 Claude, all of them, but it's built into Safari. So when you're in Safari, you'll see on the top left, you have that reader view. Now it pops up a menu and you can enable highlights, highlights. So you have writing tools, and now you have Highlights Highlights. Safari intelligently displays summaries, previews and suggestions from the web, nearby locations and more. You turn it on, and then when you're reading. Let me show you that. So when you're. And this is just another feature I found, which is to hide sections. If you click that, hide sections. And I don't know if this is part of Rapple Intelligence or they had this previously. You could do something like, here I opened up the New York Times top story about RFK having a. A really spicy relationship with a journalist. You could click on something like the carousel and say, hide this. And then it no longer shows you that when you go to the New York Post.

So you can actually, like, Huge.

Yeah, it's kind of cute, right? And so it's not an ad blocker. It just empowers the user to remove clutter. Now, of course, you can click it again. Another screenshot I send is when you click on that, you can get the reader view. So everybody knows Reader view. If you don't know reader view, it takes everything out and just gives you text. I love Read Review. Now, when you do Read Review in Safari, you have Summarize. You click summarize and you'll get essentially a three sentence summary of the story here. Robert Kennedy is considering suing Olivia Newsy. Her name is Newsy and she's in the news.

I think it's Nuzzy.

Okay. Nuzzy. For allegedly sending him spicy images and videos after tricking him into unblocking her number. Okay, like this, I guess. Summary here. Sorry that I picked a salacious story with the top story.

No, I just, I find it really funny that everyone's like on this, we find RFK Jr entirely believable.

I mean, it's kind of hilarious. Like this guy's like 70 years old and he's a Kennedy and like these are the stories. I mean, this guy's got some. I mean, I don't know what it is. Is it the Kennedy last name? Is it the delivery? What is it that sends people into a tizzy?

I don't know. But people still have Kennedy rose tinted glasses in a way that, you know, given my age and being born in Oregon never reached me. I miss, I missed the mythos of this much like I missed all of Princess Di being a big, you know, global phenomena.

So those are just a couple of the ones that are interesting. Another kind of interesting aspect of this is when you talk to Siri, it puts a glowing bar around your whole iPhone which makes it feel alive. You know, it's almost like a little bit of a synthesizer where it kind of glows as you talk. And then knowing that you don't always want to talk to it. There's a spot on the bottom of your keyboard if you double click will pull up your keyboard glowing with Siri and you can have a text exchange with Siri. Essentially it turns itself into chat GPT. So it's going to. And it's also kind of got a very different. It has a very efficient way of listening to you. So if you said to it, hey, blank, I'm not going to say because I don't want to turn everybody's on. If you have a similar voice to mine, you know, I want to set a timer for six minutes. No, make it four actually, make it three and a half. It would actually follow that thread and very quickly respond. If you ask it, how do I set up a calendar item on my phone? It would do it very quickly. So it's got that snappiness that it needs to actually be utilized. And they're doing what Apple always does. Take the simplest, SimpleTest features of AI and make them work for everybody, you know, including laggards, including the vanguard and, you know, the, the massive middle of technology adoption. I'm giving them like an absolute A plus, not for what's been delivered, but for the approach. I can see this approach is going to work. I think Siri, that sucked for a decade is going to become essential in the next decade. I think they're going to nail it is is what I'm saying. I'm a buyer of Apple stock. I'm not selling any shares.

I'm very optimistic to hear all that because my iPhone 11 has finally, I think, reached the end of its life. So I'm about to go get a Apple intelligence ready iPhone very, very soon. Are you a pro Max guy or just a pro?

I'm a Max. I like the large screen size. You know, I'm older, I wear glasses. So, you know, when I have this giant one, it's got better battery life and I can read it a little bit easier. I put my anchor battery pack on it with my little stand. I got my kickstand here and I put it on the side when we're talking. I can leave it open during a show, et cetera. When I'm on an airplane, I can put the kickstand on and I'm in great shape.

So yeah, okay.

This is going to be pretty big. They've also got recording of phone calls. They're adding and transcribing them. In other words, what's already in Zoom. So that'll be huge. I don't know if it alerts the person. I haven't tried it yet. I'll try it and let you know on a future episode. But I think you can call somebody, click the record button. I hope it tells them you're recording or ask them for permission. You know, Zoom I think tells people the calls being recorded. Right. Like that's a standard procedure. And then obviously there's different states that have different rules around recording or two party consent of recording. So, you know, it wouldn't be so difficult for it to know what geo you're in and say, hey, you're in California, you need consent. Hey, you're in New York, you don't need consent. Would you like to request consent, yes or no? As opposed to just telling people like Jason's recording you like, whoa. Would you like to ask Alex if you could record this call and make a transcript and send it to both of you? So there's going to be a new. We're going to have some new. What's the word that I talked about? Norm. Norm's manners. I have a character, Miss Manners that I call on the phone for my daughters. I don't, I don't know if you know about Miss Manners, but I don't.

But I'm gonna need to know because.

Well, I'll give you her phone number. Her phone number is very easy for you to remember. So when my daughters were young, they'd say, listen, that's it. I'm calling Miss Manners. No, no, no, don't call Miss Manners. I pick up my phone and I go, beep, beep, boop. That's Miss Manners. Phone numbers. Did you get it? It's beep, beep, boop.

I got it. No, no. I'll never forget that. That's written in my head.

And then it goes. And then I do my Miss Sapphire. Oh, hello, it's Miss Manners. What's going on? It's good to hear from you, Jason. I say, oh, you know my daughters, they're misbehaving. Somebody just said, this pasta is gross. Oh, we don't use the word gross. We say, I don't care for it. I'm wondering if there's another option if it's not too much trouble for dinner. And so I taught my daughters to stop saying yuck or gross because at another person's house or a restaurant, that's untruth.

Sure.

And now they say, when asked if something is not to their liking, we'll say, I don't care for it. Thank you very much.

How did you manage to hire the late Queen to hide in your phone to scold your children? And what did that cost?

No, no, it's a new. It's a new startup I'm incubating. It's called the Miss Manners. It's a. It's an AI that teaches manners. It follows you all around.

The startup point is what I, what I wanted to get to. Because you said at the start of this rant that, you know, some stuff from Superhuman is making its way in, some stuff from Grammarly is making its way in. And to me, there's a. There's a thing called Getting Sherlock in which Apple takes a product that was built by the community, brings it into its OS and politely kills off another company. So I'm curious, do you see Apple intelligence coming to all of our phones very soon, hurting a class of startups out there?

No, because I think there'll always be a place for luxury power user software if you can't. The pace at which Apple likes to release stuff is when it is bulletproof for 99.99% of the, you know, people, you know, the Picture your friend who literally doesn't know how to turn on the flashlight or you know, doesn't know where the Bluetooth settings on their phone is like that person, they want it to work for that person if they stumble upon the feature. So you're, there's, they're, they're never going to be part of the vanguard, the avant garde, you know, and it would mean you are a very lazy developer making a really terrible product with an untalented team if you can beat Apples, you know, product velocity. So I don't worry about that too much. What I, what I do think it's going to do is educate a large number of people to trust AI in certain circumstances. And I think the person who loses the Most here is OpenAI. I think that Apple does not need OpenAI to do any of this. They could use llama, they could use any of the hugging face models. None of this is dependent on ChatGPT. And I think what will happen is ChatGPT is massively that I'm seeing. And by massive I mean six to 12 months. Some people might argue it's 18 months. I don't think anybody in our industry is arguing that ChatGPT is like 24 months, five years.

Yeah.

Nobody would say that. Yeah. I don't know if you would. I doubt it. Yeah. It's like it feels like a six month. So this O1 preview is so good. I was talking to people in the industry the last couple days about it and everybody admits 01 is is wild in what it does in terms of thinking. You and I talked about it, I believe last week.

Yep.

The distance between Apple having that grok inside of Twitter, slash X Claude it being in every Facebook, I think it's all commoditized. I don't think OpenAI will be able to charge 20 or $50 for this to that class of consumers. I don't think that class of consumers is going to need another app. I think a lot of that, I think a lot of the base functionality like rewrite this or proof it for me is going to be enough for a large group of people. So doesn't mean ChatGPT doesn't have a great business. But if you were to ask me who loses most, I think they lose because Apple is intent on making this a system level feature. It's not an app, it's in the os, it is the interface. And when I saw what they're doing with Apple intelligence and I used it and you have to use it in order to understand it's Like a key premise I have as a technologist and an investor in technology companies and a commentator is use it. So I made everybody in our organization try it as hard as I can. When you open up a new tab, have ChatGPT4 or Claude open up in that new window. And when you start doing that or you install the beta of this Apple intelligence, what you realize is it's going to be the new interface. You're not going to scroll and click apps. You are going to talk to Siri. And Siri is studying your behavior in apps. There is a bunch of stuff in the terms of service. You and I talked about it offline, where they're asking you to watch yourself in an app. The reason they're doing that is they want Siri commands to go two clicks into each app. An example of that would be when you ask Siri to play a specific artist in Spotify. It works. So you want to play music, you want to play this genre of music and you want to do it in this app. So three things. Music, genre, app. Now it's going to be like, I'm looking for a sushi restaurant within this many miles and I want it to be open tonight and I want it to be good for groups. And they have to take Apple pay, right? Can't be cash only. So now you got like five, you know, variables. Oh, and please, I need them to have Peking duck. So I'm going to go to a Chinese place with Peking duck that takes Apple pay and is good for groups. Now it gives you the three dim sum restaurants and it's like that one's not open on Monday nights and it's a Monday night. So here are the two. Those queries will be done through Siri, not by opening up Yelp and clicking a bunch of buttons, if that makes sense.

No, it absolutely does. But I mean, it does limit the number of companies that have, that have that opportunity in front of them because it comes down to Microsoft Windows, Google Android, Apple iOS, which are three of the Mag 7. It disappoints me a little bit that we're kind of trending towards a future, by the way, that I agree we're going towards. I'm completely on board with where you see this going. It just makes me worry a little bit.

Sure, it's a lot of power. It's gonna be a lot of power. It's a lot of power. You know, he who owns the interface, like, really can exert a lot. Now, once you're inside of that app, it's now up to Yelp to earn their keep and have a discussion with Yelp's data set. Be more robust than what Apple can simply look in Apple Local or Apple Maps and give you. And so it just means you have to be that much better, you know.

Or, or it means that Yelp et al simply become data providers for AI models essentially and they become less and less a consumer facing entity and instead they're mediated through the Jason Calacanis Siri instance that you have across your iOS devices. I wonder if a lot of companies just won't have a GUI in the end and they'll just be essentially API data streams that are fed into either real time answers or model creation and training.

I mean there are probably many companies already that exist that would fit that model. You know, there are databases of airline flights and hotels and you know, Kayak queries them to give their results and then gives them a. They pay a license for data. So it is possible Yelp's future is not in having a front end interface for the majority of users, but allowing ChatGPT, Gemini from Google and Apple's new whatever to pay them per query. And maybe it's a better business model for them. Maybe they just perfect the data set and it's a better business model and it's better for consumers to have that interface. The right now they're already being mitigated through a desktop or an app that has to go through the store. So it's, it is troubling in some ways and it is an opportunity in other ways. And again as a technologist you must look at the trajectory of what they're doing. They want to control the conversation. You're going to have to have a better tool, a better mousetrap that provides more value than they can.

Yeah, absolutely. And I bet the argument you made earlier about Apple's app store being a bit to controlling of other companies trying to reach consumers. We're going to have a complete reprise of that with Siri and other similar services at the OS level. I think with other people wanting in. Looking forward to that when it happens. Now Jason, give me a direction here. We can talk about Microsoft and the renaissance in nuclear power or we can tie this right into OpenAI. What do you want to do?

Well, I think the more important story is obviously, yeah, the most important story is obviously what's going on with nuclear power and Microsoft and Three Mile Island. So why don't we just do a quick hit on that and take one question from our LinkedIn Twitter X audience.

Awesome. So this is one of the coolest stories that has hit the world technology in a long time. Everyone knows Three Mile island here in the U.S. the site of the worst nuclear accident in our history. It was a partial meltdown that was back in the 70s. Things have changed. And now Microsoft is working with Constellation to turn back on one of the producing units at Three Mile island so that it can essentially buy all the power for its data centers. Low carbon, Jason. We love to see a clean energy source, but, you know, Microsoft is now essentially in the leasing its own power plant business because of the demands that it has for power and so forth. And this strikes me as an absolute story of the times.

I mean, we were sitting here a couple of years ago, and if you brought up nuclear power, people would reference Fukushima, and they were scared to death and don't put it in my backyard. And then, you know, now we have AI demanding more power. We have utilities and many people in the country putting generators on their homes because they keep losing power. So. And then, you know, we have global warming, which some people don't believe in, but statistically it's clearly happening. And we have energy prices out of control. So I, I have found this very strange phenomenon where what people tell you they care about is very specifically impacted on what they have to pay for that product or services or its availability. So when electricity is not available and it's really expensive, people are like, can I get another solution? And nuclear is obviously the cleanest, along with solar. And so solar takes a while to deploy some of these nuclear power plants, apparently. I didn't know this, but most nuclear power plants have multiple reactors. Okay, I did know that Fukushima had a couple three mile and a couple. But three mile island was still operating in 2019, and they shut it down for financial reasons. We need to restart nuclear here in the United States. We need to have the will to put up new, these new gen 3 gen fours and turn on the old ones. If you look at what happened with Germany, not to make this a political show, but Germany, Germany turning off all their nuclear power because you've got some green group of individuals who are obviously misguided and don't understand that, like, they're now burning coal and oil instead of having nuclear. Like, we really need to educate people. And Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl really warped people's minds into how dangerous this technology is. It is the safest technologies ever. We have more people dying from coal, from breathing it in and getting lung cancer. And we were talking about Tens of millions of people or millions of years of lifespan. I would say probably billions of years of lifespan have been shortened by coal. But we remember like three dozen people who died acutely in fires at nuclear power plants. Like, come on, let's try to have some thoughtfulness about this. And if AI is the reason that we'll have the willpower to do it, this is the huge win for society.

Absolutely. Also keep in mind that Three Mile island was back in 1979. That's before Metallica had released their first album. That's how long ago that was. I mean it's, it's back in the day. Technology has improved. And what had to happen for there to be a crisis at Fukushima? Well, there was massive earthquake and tsunami. So you know, we are never going to have zero risk energy. But nuclear is so safe that I would live on top of a nuclear reactor today, let alone nearby to it. Bring it on.

Bring it on is I think a great way to phrase it.

Yeah, thing it generates very little waste you can just throw into a hole in the ground. Huzzah. It's, it's fantastic. So Microsoft, 100 points for this. I absolutely love it. We also found some stuff that's been bouncing around the Internet, including that Amazon is hiring a principal nuclear engineer, Data engineering power generation solutions. So we are moving towards a world in which data centers not only are getting larger and more power intensive, but the power that goes into them will also be owned and operated by the company that runs the data center. So that means that Microsoft is going to be eventually a nuclear power operator, a data center provider, a laptop maker, a failed phone company. And I mean like these, these tech.

Companies are getting kind of weird business productivity. Yeah, I mean fantastic if you know, sometimes, you know, some need will drive changing people's opinions on these items. And here we are, we, we don't get our power situation straightened out in this country. You know, there's other countries that maybe you have top down control and they can just ordain a company or force through eminent domain that, you know, one of these nuclear reactors gets thrown up every X number of miles and then they never have to drill for oil again or be dependent on another country. So the key here is for us not to have foreign dependency and to win AI and win superintelligence. You cannot win super intelligence without a ton of power and a lot of chips. Interestingly, most nuclear power plants in the United States are on the east coast. And you might ask yourself why is that? And it's pretty simple. That's where industry form formed in our country. A lot of it was on the east coast. That's where water is and that's where population density was. And industrial. The people in industry who needed power were all in the east coast, not the west coast. You know, so that we're, we do have a lot of people who moved west since the 50s, 60s and 70s. I think 60s and 70s, early 70s is when this ended. So during that time period they all cluster on the east coast. We need to actually bring them to the west coast as well. And you know, more power is a good thing for our country, which is now a next, a net exporter of fossil fuels. So we're going to be, this is going to be awesome for America. Independence and reaching super intelligence. And the super intelligence is going to train us how to make better decisions about technology to get more efficiency and energy. So we've got this like this. This could spiral in a really good way.

The first thing superintelligence is going to say, it's going to print out. Lina Khan was right and you're going to go, no. Why have we made this?

She's totally right about like the speeding tickets she's given. I give her a lot of credit for, you know, investigating people for app stores. It's just the M and A piece that it really gets under my skin and I cannot wait for her to join Andreessen Horowitz.

That's where I thought you would use that VC from. I'm like, it's going to be Andreessen Horowitz.

I mean I. Sure, why not?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I know we got to go. But before we leave a couple of notes about companies that are building next gen nuclear reactors. Actually a few are public which blew my mind. So new Scale Power, Nano, Nuclear and OCLO are all public and they have a combined market cap of $4.2 billion. So not the biggest companies. Well, I am not going to tell you which one's my favorite because I don't know yet. But I will add that there's two startups that I'm going to put onto the twist 500 Last Energy and X Energy. Last Energy last raised a $40 million series B and X Energy's last round was a 235 and million dollar Series C. But these are companies that are working on more modular, easy to install nuclear power that you can place where you need it. And I think that's fricking great because we need it everywhere because data centers aren't always located near power generation. So I'm stoked at the money flowing into this, the need for it, how it's going to change our society. I love nuclear power. And now we get to watch Chernobyl again, because that's a great miniseries.

You know, I didn't get to it. I wanted to watch it with the wife. People seem to be over the moon of it. I will just say, if you haven't tuned into industry, it's the HBO show about young people doing trading in London. It is awesome. It's like, okay, it's kind of like Secession or Sopranos, but taking place at, like, a Goldman Sachs trading firm with a bunch of young people doing crazy things that young finance people do. But, you know, like a lot of HBO shows, they kind of innovate in storytelling. And the innovation here is you don't know any of the actors, but they're all really good and it moves fast. It's kind of like that movie that Adam Sandler was in, Uncut Gems, if you remember. Did you see Uncut Gems by chance?

I did not see Uncut Gems. I know. It's Adam Sandler's latest masterpiece.

It's incredible. I mean, it's basically about a degenerate gambler doing degenerate gambler stuff. But this has that vibe of, like, these people are taking risk. It moves too fast. The screen moves quickly. They're talking fast. They're doing crazy things. And it's got, like, a pace to it that's so frenetic that each episode is like a starter's pistol goes off and it's a sprint.

Oh.

And then it's. It's really compelling in. I haven't seen this in storytelling except in, like, very manic portions of movies. Like in Goodfellas, when they do that scene where, like, the helicopter's flying and it's like an intense 10 minutes of, like.

Oh, man, that's.

Yeah, it's kind of like that for the entire series. It never lets up. It's just chaos and the lack of sleep and stimulants and coffee and trades and anger and double crossing. Highly recommend. The TV show industry. It's on its third season. It's gotten better every. Every single season.

All right, well, Jason, I'm going to watch that this weekend with the spouse once I get all the children into bed. But couple of comments and questions from our dear friends who are with us live. And so from Andrew Storm, why is it with the obsession in technology to return to Office? I think he's asking kind of as Compared to other industries.

I think competition is driving it and that's the beginning and end of it. I think there's some obscure situations where people feel like they want to do a riff. So it's a gentleman's riff. We've talked about that before. But I think the obsession is really, can you compete against an in person team and do they have a distinct advantage? If everybody was working from home and you didn't have competition, I think people were like, okay, yeah, but people believe that in startups there's more intensity, creativity when everybody's in an office. As but one example, I hired three. Well, first three team members for our company in Austin will be in office in October and I'm going back to the office. So of our team we'll have four of 21 or 22 will be in office. But I'll grandfather everybody who's not in office if, if they are ultra high performers. So you have to be a u h p to be remote in my mind. Does it mean like tomorrow everybody's got a. I'm not taking this like in, you know, hardcore. Everybody comes back to office on this date, it's be an ultra high performer who I don't have to manage or if you choose to be creative and come to an office and that's fine. I think there's room for both and that's my personal philosophy. But when you run a large organization, it's just easier to tell everybody to get their asses back and see it. So it's a little bit of lazy management. There's a little bit of control and there's a lot of competition worries.

Yeah, no, I think that's true. I also think there's no good way to build an incredibly large company. I don't think any corporation has managed to build an internal structure at like a hundred thousand person scale that that works. I think they're always trying to make.

It kind of fit.

And so I think Amazon got so much bigger during the pandemic and now they're trying to make that work. Okay, let's just do one, one more. Giacomo Bali says, why is it not okay to make rules for your own proprietary hardware anymore? Essentially arguing against your app store comment.

So, you know, when you have a large percentage of market share and you try to extract more value than you're giving, I think that's when people get a little bit tweaked. If you are giving a tip to a creator, you know, let's imagine you were walking by somebody on the street. They play a song, they took a request and you wanted to give them 10 bucks. It was very special for you. If somebody dipped in there and took $3 and walked away, you'd be like, but I gave them 10. Now if you did it with Venmo and you gave the 10 bucks and they got $9.25 or 9:50, you'd be like, okay, fine, I got to use Venmo. So it just doesn't feel fair. It's the percentage if, if the app stores were 5 to 10%, I don't perceive anybody would bring this up. It's because they're over 20%. Even if it was 15%, I don't think people would bring it up. But 20, 30% is a big rate. It's a big rake. There's not a lot of poker chips left. If the dealer's taking 30% of all the chips every hour, every transaction, it's just too much.

That would kill the poker game. In fact, that might be a good way to think about this. If your cut is so high that if it was a rake, it would kill a poker game. You're. You're, you're taking too much.

You're taking too much.

Thing that I would just throw in there is that, you know, right now, I don't think Apple's breaking the law, but we have regulations to shape the market because not everything fits exactly in an activity promise. But anyways, everyone who's live, you're the best. Otherwise, we'll see you all on the podcast things. And we are back on Wednesday with more live news. We'll see you then.