TWiST News: Bitcoin’s Future, Reddit Answers, SEC Shifts, and more! | E2057

Come January 20th, it's going to be game on Reddit Most Likely to be Acquired I think Reddit, DoorDash, Uber and Lyft are my four most likely to be acquired in the next four years. Those four will be on the acquire slash merger because some of them might merge or whatever. I don't have inside information. Obviously I don't Public Companies this is purely speculation. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit, Lyft, DoorDash and Uber were part of something bigger either. Acquirers Acquiree Conglomerate put together Amazon plus Uber, Waymo plus Uber, Lyft and DoorDash this week in Startups is brought to you by Ramp, the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and money. Get $250 when you join Ramp today at ramp.com/zendesk the best customer experiences are built with Zendesk. Qualifying startups can join their startup program and get Zendesk products free for six months. Visit zendesk.com twisttoday to get started and DigitalOcean Whether you're just getting started with AI or seeing your project take off, DigitalOcean is the cloud platform that lets you focus on what matters building killer apps. Right now get up to $100,000 in free credits at dot co twist terms and conditions apply. All right everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It's Monday, December 9th. My God, we've got plenty of shows for you this month, but we're in that trial between Thanksgiving and Christmas, New Year's when everybody simply bides their time to go f off and go skiing and do whatever. No, we're all working really hard to try to get a bunch done. If you're trying to raise money between Thanksgiving and January 15th, it is a terrible idea. That is the dead zone for founders. And I literally have founders who are pinging me like, hey, I think I'm going to raise a round before the end of the year. I'm like, really? It's November 20th. Like, come on. You know, VCs have families in most cases and they have unlimited time off. They're going to take breaks during this time and then to get three or four VCs in a fund to get consensus on a deal. Unless it's a world class deal that is competitive, it's not happening folks. So just be wary of that.

So basically, if you have tons of inbound and your company starts with the words open AI, you can probably raise before the end of the year if you want to. But if you're not that company. Probably not.

The VCs would have to feel FOMO. They would have to feel like they're going to miss out and the window is closed, the train's leaving the station. The next time you can get it is at 34th Herald Square or you know, Columbus Circle. Like you're on an express train. You're on know if it's an express train startup. Yes. If you're a local startup, which is 95% of startups are not on the express route.

Yeah.

Because they're figuring out product market fit. But you know, I just always want to start the show and remind people greatest thing you can do in your life is start a company. That's it. I'm talking about professionally start a company. Next best thing you can do is join a startup. Third best thing you can do is invest in a startup. Fourth best thing you can do is try a startups product and give the founder feedback directly to that's constructive. Tell them what you love, tell them what you hope they add, tell them what's broken. These are the four things you can do. Everything else you do in your life does not echo in eternity.

Well, speaking of testing products Jason, actually the intro banter that I wanted to get to today was simply that as we were going to live to record the Show, Sora from OpenAI is trickling its way out and sadly I could not log in before we hit record to play with it. I'm hoping that I have access today because you and I both pay for chat GPT so come Wednesday I'm hoping to have a couple of cool clips to show off. Yeah but in terms of shipping, Velocity, talk about that a lot. Building new things and testing things out in the market, I think this is going to be the biggest product release apart from the Reddit news later in the show that we're going to see between now and 2025. So I'm pretty excited.

For people who don't know, Sora is the video creation tool from OpenAI. So they, they give them names. I think eventually this idea that there's different names and different products, maybe it will be like a Microsoft Office suite where you know, you have Excel and Word and PowerPoint and a database of some kind. Or maybe it's all just going to be one because I notice when I use Grok, I tell it to create an image in the same place I ask it a question and I know with chat GPT it's like that too. Did I think they may have even removed from the interface whatever Their image creation tool was called. It's Dolly.

Dolly.

I don't know that there's like Dolly exists anymore. So I wonder if Sora needs more of an interface. But you know, we had a great all in holiday spectacular on Saturday. Thanks to everybody who came. It was chaotic and fun and awesome and I gave my big surprise of the year to Google. I just thought, man, Remember we were sitting here a year ago, everybody saying, oh my God, 10 blue links. Google's toast. Nobody's going to use it anymore. I've been using Gemini. That product is as good or better than Chachi. I cannot believe the parody level. And you can just download Gemini right now, you know, like it's a dedicated app. It's not like hidden in your Google interface or it's like a section of Google Search.

Right.

They've actually committed to making it a dedicated iOS app. And when you talk to it, it's really good, this voice interface. And when we did our best technology of the year, two people said voice interface and two of us said self driving cars and Waymos and I took away my when I was in San Francisco. It's great. It's great. But it's going to take time, clearly. And you know, one of the things with the Waymo and I don't know if this is going to get changed over time, Waymo and self driving cars, they take 10 more minutes to get you where you're going. A great human driver, they know the routes, they zip, zip, zip. It turns out like Waymo takes peculiar routes around the city.

Huh.

So even though it's great, it adds like 10 minutes to a 20 minute journey because it doesn't take the streets in San Francisco that are maybe a little more challenging. Isn't that interesting?

Oh, so it's. It's making easier to drive streets versus quick streets for transit.

Correct.

And got it.

It's a bit of a square when it comes to driving. You know, like you get a good Uber driver, you know, you're going to roll through some stops, impact heights, you know, come to a full rolling stop kind of situation. Uhhuh. And this thing is like, stop, crawl ahead, go. Stay within the lines. It. It doesn't break any of the rules because for obvious reasons, you're working with the transportation departments.

Yeah.

If you break the rules knowingly and you train your AI to break the rules, it's like, did you train your AI to enroll through stop signs? It's one person you can go to and give the ticket to way more.

Yeah, yeah.

Cruise you Know, you can just go give them the ticket for 100% of the time they do that. Whereas with a human, you got to catch them doing it. And then they give you a sob story. You get a little interface back and forth. Maybe, you know, if you got a brother who's on the job, maybe you get a pass. I don't know. I'm just saying sometimes that happens. You get a little beige in here. Wallet. So anyway, it's definitely the future, but there are going to be some interesting issues. It is nice to not have a driver sometimes. Like you're making a private phone call or, you know, you want to talk about something that you don't want somebody here. You know, that happens to me sometimes. And there is. There are some nice aspects to it. So I give them an A plus as well.

Yeah, no, I'm really excited about that. I have lots of thoughts about, about that. But we do have a guest. Isn't that. I do want to get so excited on the pod.

Yeah.

Friend of the podcast, uh, Anthony Pompliano is here. Everyone knows him from his high powered and very caffeinated Twitter account, which is one of my favorite things. Um, also he's an investor at Pomp Capital, which is single family office, and then also founder and CEO over at Professional Capital Management, which I had Pomp explained to me before the show, and I'm going to take a shot at it. It is an investment company that does incubation and uses cash flows from priorly founded businesses to invest in both private and public equities. Anthony, how was that?

That was great.

There we go.

How are you doing?

I'm good.

How you doing, brother? Look at that.

I know this is a very good setup. It's like somewhere between two ferns and your money manager's office. I don't know what you're. What's the aesthetic we're going for here?

Palm, the one that would make you laugh. Jason, you did it.

You did it. You have good depth. You got a great suit on for those people listening. But Palm's been coming to the POD for years. He's got a great podcast, but, you know, he's been in crypto. He's one of the OGs, like my friend Vinnie Lingham or Sundeep. He's been there forever. And so whenever Bit does one of its backflips or there's a lot of crypto news, he's just one of the best guys to have on the program. Top, top three or four I can have on the program. So I wanted to just start with, you know, hey, listen, bitcoin came back, we got Trump in office. My friend David Sachs, I don't know if you met him before, but somebody was actually showing a clip of him talking with you like five or six years ago. It's pretty good. He's now the crypto czar and AI czar for Trump. So people are feeling pretty bullish. Gensler's out. Let me just ask him right off the bat, what are the vibes in the crypto space after what I'll call nuclear winter for the last four years under Gensler? Or maybe it's more.

Actually, yeah, I don't think that regulation really stopped anything in the sense of obviously asset prices are at all time highs. You saw Coinbase go public, you saw the Bitcoin ETF get approved, you saw the ETH ETF get approved. And so there was kind of progress, even though people felt like there was abrasiveness or friction from the regulators. I think the question is how much more progress could be made if you take that abrasiveness away. And so the best description I heard is somebody said it's like holding a beach ball underneath the water in a pool. If you take your hands off, like do, all of a sudden, does the beach ball kind of come up? I thought that was like a pretty good visual for it.

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And so Paul Atkins, the new SEC kind of nominee, very pro bitcoin and crypto. Scott Besant seems to be pro bitcoin as well. And so I think that the question before was like, hey, how much damage could be done by certain positions, certain organizations. Now, even with Trump being the first kind of bitcoin president, I think the question is like, hey, what if everything goes right? What if there is this big tailwind behind the asset? And, you know, frankly, I, I don't know anything more than you guys know. So we're going to find out together over the next four years.

Yes, I wanted to start actually there, ironically. Anthony, sorry to push you on what you just said. You don't know, but I'm curious how quickly things can change with the new administration because it feels like right now everyone's kind of pre buying the good vibes that, you know, the good times are back and we'll have the first bitcoin president, as you said. But does there need to be, like, things that pass through Congress to have the impact in the market that people are expecting us to have now?

I think the vibe shift is all you needed. I mean, you know, Bitcoin's up 50% or so since Trump was elected. And so when you think of, like, market impact, there's nothing that is a clear signal than like, people are buying the assets. It's a finite asset. So the price goes up. And so if you go and you say, like, hey, why are they buying the asset? You know, there's a couple of different things. It's not just Trump, but I do think that Trump being that first pro bitcoin president is a big part of it. But I think that people really are seeing the Federal Reserve cut interest rates. They see M2 money supply expanding. I think they see the regulatory changes that are being made. They see companies like MicroStrategy buying, you know, billions of dollars. There's many copycats now that are popping up. There's rumors that sovereign wealth funds now are starting to buy. I explicitly know that there are, you know, very well known, sophisticated kind of Wall street legends that are actively trying to solicit these sovereign wealth funds in countries to buy bitcoin. And so it's just like, you add all this up and you're like, it's pretty hard to make a bearish argument for bitcoin over the next five or 10 years. And so it's fun to talk about, like, how high could it go? But I actually just think of, like, what's the best, you know, kind of counter argument. It's just really hard to kind of identify one right now.

So that, to me is a great set of arguments for potential increased appreciation of the price of bitcoin, which is great for people who hold it. Huzzah. I'm curious, like, how much do crypto startups benefit from the same tailwinds? Is it one to one, or is it a fraction of the benefits that we've seen in terms of the price of bitcoin from this change in sentiment and tailwinds?

Yeah, it's a great question. So there's a couple of ways that people benefit. One of the things that is, like, least discussed is most of the companies that we have invested in in kind of bitcoin or crypto, you know, world that are private companies, some portion of their balance sheet they're holding, whether it's bitcoin eth, you know, some asset that is not a stable coin. And some of them did it out of necessity. They're in the business, they're, you know, constantly moving assets back and forth or whatever. Some of them did it for the same reason that MicroStrategy did it. They said, hey, look, we don't believe in the dollar. You know, as a store of value, we think bitcoin's better. And so, let's put it, you know, 20% like that. Those companies obviously have a lot more, you know, assets on their balance sheet than they did three years ago. And so I think that's kind of like one very clear, simple reason. Another thing is take a company like Coinbase. As the price goes up, people come into these assets because they want to get rich. And I think one of the, like, maybe lies of bitcoin and crypto is everyone starts with this, like, moral argument. I don't know a single person that came into bitcoin. It's like I'm buying it for humanity at first. I think everyone shows up and like, I want to make money. Like, my friend told me to buy this thing. It's going to go up in price now over time. Do I agree that. Yes. There's a bunch of people who kind of go from speculator and they get converted to like hardcore bitcoiner and they hold it not just for speculation purposes, but they kind of buy into the bigger story and ethos and all that. Absolutely. But when people first come in, they're coming in from a capitalistic, you know, Kind of self interest standpoint. And so that's great for a business like Coinbase. Like, they want trading volume, they want to see a lot of turnover in the market. And so I think that there's, you know, money being made there. And then maybe the third bucket is these assets. And bitcoin maybe in particular, the higher the price goes, the less risky it becomes because it started out so small. And so, you know, we managed a fund a couple years ago that had the very first two public pension funds in the United States who gave us money. And part of the fund's mandate was we were going to go buy bitcoin on their behalf. Now one of the things after they gave us the money is we went talked a bunch of other pension funds and they said this is too small. Like it's still risky because it's only, you know, a couple hundred billion dollars. Now it's $2 trillion. And they're like, oh, okay, like cool. I can put like real money into this thing. It's actually de risk, which is very different than like a stock. You know, Nvidia is like, is it risky? Is it not? Because the price keeps going up. And so I just think that, you know, a number of these different things have kind of lined up where it's like we're kind of in the golden years right now of bitcoin, where the return is still pretty attractive compared to stocks, etc. That probably goes away at some point. You know, 15, 20 years from now. Maybe Bitcoin's going up 10% a year instead of 50%. And people are like, ah, it's, you know, just like stocks, but also those large pools of capital are able to come in because they can come in. They obviously are going to drive the price higher when you got a finite asset.

You know, I think the, there's, there's two different markets here. There's bitcoin and then there's crypto. Right? It's like, and you've said this from the beginning, like this is bitcoin is one thing or everything in crypto. We'll talk about in a minute. But just as we wrap up here on bitcoin before we get to hawk to a rip ripple and everything else going on there, which I'm really interested to get your take on the bitcoin. You have seller who has been like, you know, a convert for the last four or five years and just really, really is going all in. I'm hearing different things from OGs in Bitcoin who are saying like a Lot of them are saying they have concerns with this level of promotion and this level of aggressive promotion. Some might call it pumping, other people might call it a Ponzi. So there's that sort of like optics of what he does every day, just telling other people, like, you gotta mortgage your home and put it all in bitcoin. Then there's the other piece, which is the leverage he's using. Okay. And so I want you to address each of those in whichever order you want. Do you have concerns about either of these? Which I've always considered red flags independent of crypto, Bitcoin or Michael Saylor. When I hear somebody pumping something too much, I get concerned. I get interested too. And then on the other side, you know, using leverage. I'm always super concerned about leverage because I've seen friends and companies get wiped out using leverage and loans. Take it either way you want. Pop.

Maybe let's just start with like, kind of caveat. The whole conversation. Nothing. Nobody that I know In Bitcoin says 100% of things that every other bitcoiner is like, you're right. It's an industry where everyone is constantly critiquing each other, which is, you know, somewhat of a. Like a meritocracy, free market of ideas. And that's what makes bitcoin so great, is like, people show up and, you know, there's two types of people. There's the like, hey, I've been in bitcoin for five minutes. Let me, like, teach you guys how to fix this thing. Those people tend to kind of get washed out. But then there's people who show up and they're like, hey, by the way, I'm trying to learn about this. I have this like, unique idea. Can someone help me? Can. Can you help me, like, think through this? And you know, I can point to a number of different people have shown up over the years and that unique idea. Actually, people are like, you know what? We hadn't thought about that before, but, like, that's a great idea. What if you did this? What if you did that? And like, they kind of extended. The body of understanding grows with these new entrants because they bring fresh perspectives, experiences, et cetera.

That's actually a really interesting point. Yeah.

So, you know, it's. It's open source, right? It's like you can have an open source developer join an open source project and contribute. And you're like, why didn't we think of that before? Well, it's like, because you didn't have.

The experiences and nobody can stop them. It is permissionless. In fact, if I want to get into bitcoin and I say, listen, I think what sailor is doing is crazy, here's what I'm going to do, then I get to test it two ways in the battlefield of ideas, debating it with a gazillion trolls and spam and 4chan and Reddit and true believers and optimistic people, pessimistic people, you get the whole range full on combat. But then you also get to place a bet and then own or not own your bet. And in the case of Michael Saylor, the bet's paying off right now. So he's bitcoin Jesus. Whereas when it, when he, when his nav, I believe there was a moment in time where the value of micro strategies was less than the bitcoins he owned. Is that correct? Do you, do you remember that moment?

I don't remember exactly, but definitely the market cap drew down significantly after having gone up a lot. But here's what, here's what I would say about Sailors. You know, I've gotten to know him.

Well, specifically the strategy. Give me the strategy.

Yeah, but, but here, here I think to understand the strategy, you got to understand the person, right? So, okay, I've gotten to know him probably, you know, more than, than some folks. I think just like anyone, people will agree with some things he says, will disagree with other things that he says. I think that the concern from some of the OG bitcoiners is some of the things that have to occur for mainstream adoption are antithetical to the bitcoin ethos. Wall street pulling bitcoin into the financial products doesn't sound like peer to peer electronic cash.

Right.

And so you get these kind of paradoxes of if you want it to be super successful, you are going to have to understand that it's available to anyone. And so countries are going to buy it. The system is going to buy it.

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The second thing is when people, you know, kind of loudly talk about this, it is probably a net positive. I would argue that, you know, bitcoin is a decentralized organization. There's no executive team, there's no board of directors, there's no marketing team, et cetera. And so I always say that bitcoin's price is the marketing campaign. When the price goes up, everyone talks about it. When everyone talks about it, people are like, oh, I don't own any. Maybe I should learn about this thing. Maybe I should buy. Some word of mouth spreads and it becomes this like reflexive cycle. So the price going up is actually really important because price goes up, people speculate by coming in when the price crashes in the future, some portion of those people stick around. I always say that it's kind of like a mobile app that goes out and they have zero users. They run a marketing campaign, a hundred people come in, then 25 churn, but they're left with 75 people. So what they do, they go run another marketing campaign, right? And some of those churn and like over time they kind of build up.

Build the floor in a way, right? You build this like foundation of people who will never sell. And I think you made a really astute point earlier, which is as the price goes up and the distance between your entry price and the price of bitcoin goes up, then your concern about a drawdown becomes, I don't know, less because you've been through it. It's like, I've been on this roller coaster. You know, we got in at, you know, under 100, right around 100, right above 100, you get in at that price. If it's 10,000 or 100,000, I really don't care because I believe in the story and that you should have some percentage of your net worth in it. So who cares? We all know it goes up and down 80%, but if you bought in at 100, obviously, and then you got scared when it went to 50, yeah, it's kind of a bummer to lose half your money.

So here, here's where I think it becomes pretty interesting is if you look at, you know, again, let's take the critics of MicroStrategy and Saylor on one hand, he said a couple of things that I think make some bitcoiners kind of say, I don't know about that. And so which would be what?

What does he say? That I think the one that people are like, ah, come on, dude.

I think the one that people are probably like, hey, this is the kind of craziest one is if the United States buys, you know, 20% of the supply or whatever, like they'll control bitcoin. And I actually want to give him kind of the benefit of the doubt. He understands how bitcoin works in the sense of just because you own a lot of coins doesn't mean you control the network. But I think that it is the kind of thought process behind that of, like, decentralization is really important. Now, what is interesting to me about micro strategy is it's kind of like, hey, don't hate the player, hate the game, right? And it's like, anyone could have gone and done this. He's just the guy who won, figured it out. And then, you know, what he probably doesn't get enough credit for yet is like, you kind of have to have the balls to be able to go and execute on it. And so there's a lot of people who, you know, if you go and you talk to like a Stanley Druckenmiller, he would tell you the thing that he learned from George Soros and became the best investor, blah, blah, blah, whatever, is it's not how often you're right, it's how much money you make when you're right.

Right? And so big pots will define your night as a poker player. You could win, you could win 20 hands, and I win the right two, and those two were all in hands, etc. And you won these 20, stealing the blinds hands. That's not what matters. It matters when there's a big pot and how much money you got into the pot and you built a pot and you execute.

You take this kind of further out. If you think of the greatest trades that people talk about today, there's Soros and Druck breaking the pound. There's the, you know, maybe you've got the guys who did the housing short and they made, you know, I think John Paulson made like $10 billion or something for his investors. Got Michael Burry. Like, there's.

I.

Maybe we can come up with like 15 or 20 great trades.

Sure.

10 billion is like, probably the biggest number I've heard someone made on one of these big trades.

Yeah.

If Sailor is right, he's going to make hundreds of billions, which would make this the single greatest trade in corporate history. Now, again, caveat or assumption of, like, he's got to be right. So far he is. But I think that that is the part to me that everyone wants to focus on, like, the activity, but it is the, like, I'm not going to take my foot off the gas and I'm fully convicted. I'm going, like, all in. That is really. I mean, we're all investors. Like, it's very, very hard to say. I have an idea and I'm going to go big.

The criticism is he's using other people's money to do this. He's raising, you know, three, four billion dollars. And if he, if he loses, he wins. And if he wins, he wins.

You know, kind of, because I think he's the largest shareholder of Micro, largest individual shareholder of Micro Strategy. So, like, again, you know, it's his company. He's got control. He's got a big percentage. Now, he did also publicly come out when he bought bitcoin with the company and say he personally bought $250 million at the time of Bitcoin. So again, that doesn't mean he's running like a leverage strategy personally, but he at least put his own cash into the same asset that the company did, you know, whatever.

So could blow up here, I guess, is what everybody wants to know. Because when I hear everybody say this is like, I figured out the money machine. I unlocked the safest bet. It can only go up. There's no losing here. And he's kind of tipping into that level of, there's no side here.

I, like, I completely disagree with the whole, like, there's no risk. And I've publicly said, you know, in different conversations, when I hear people saying there's no risk, which I don't think he said, I think there's a lot of people who hold MicroStrategy stock that.

Are saying, it's yes, we've seen them on Oliver X in every single video.

When I hear that I immediately say to myself red flag. Like, like, you know, you don't got to be around that long to know when somebody says there's zero risk. That yes, all that. Now let me walk through maybe to kind of use an extreme to prove the point to start. If Bitcoin gets hacked and becomes worthless, is there a risk to micro shed? Obviously. So I use an extreme, very low probability, you know, thing to just show that there's ob. You can't say there's zero risk because I just gave you a scenario where we all agree like there's some risk. Again, it might be 0.001% but there's some risk. Now let's go back to something that maybe is more realistic. There's key man risk. If Michael Saylor, something happens to him, if he says hey I'm done, I want to retire, whatever, like that introduces risk. And it's no different than name a company that had a really well known founder.

Steve Jobs.

Yeah, I mean we just go through the list, right? And so it's like, okay, like that becomes a risk. The second thing is there's two ways to look at the quote unquote premium. One is that the bitcoin is trading or I'm sorry, the market cap is trading at a premium to the bitcoin, which is some of the premium. But I also think what people are doing is they're looking at it and they're saying hey, if he keeps getting convertible debt that converts at a 50% plus premium and he's able to buy Bitcoin, he's essentially creating like accretive value to the balance sheet which would look very similar to quote unquote revenue. But because of GAAP accounting we can't call it revenue, doesn't count as revenue. But in that we are going to give him a multiple so that if he continues to do this he'll like grow into the valuation. So there's two things that are leading to that, you know, kind of market cap above the, the nap one is a premium of nav and then there's like a, you know, I don't know, like new revenue, multiple, whatever. So immediately what's the risk? Well like the premium to NAV closes and maybe that's only like a 1x even though it's trading at like 3 or 4x, you know, multiple and then z something happens in the market where he can't go buy more bitcoin. People won't lend him money or the stock price crashes or, you know, like there's all these different scenarios. And so now all of a sudden that multiple collapses. And so I just think that, you know, there's a lot of good. But to your point, if I hear no risk, I immediately like there's risk.

And then you didn't go over the most important risk though, which is that the price of bitcoin declines sharply. All the convertible notes have the option for the lenders to request their money paid back a year before they mature in cash. So if he, I mean, he could end up short on money and have to sell lots of bitcoin if the price declines.

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That'S a risk yet. It could become a risk to the scenario you prove. But if I understand correctly and I'm not, I don't spend a ton of time looking at, you know, kind of the up to date numbers because I know they just bought another like $2 billion of Bitcoin. But I believe that Bitcoin would have to crash like more than 80% to be at a level that is equivalent to the debt they'd have to pay back. So bitcoin has done that before.

Yeah, it's done at four times. Yeah.

Right. So maybe it's 75%.

Yeah. Four major drawdowns. He's got 400,000 Bitcoin, 402,000. Last number I have at 100,000. A Bitcoin, that's $40 billion. Companies worth 80, 90 billion. He's. I think it's about 90 billion right now. And then the debt load right now is 7 billion, I think is the last number they keep adding.

So just, just use, just use 40 and 7. Right. Like, basically he'd have to go through a 75 plus percent drawdown for the bitcoin to be worth the debt. And like, he'd have to liquidate it all to pay back the debt. But even if bitcoin drew down 75%, he still would have the cash to pay back the debt now. He would have no other assets.

Right.

I think to your point, Alex, but there's like, well, there's enough of a gap between the money owed and what the bitcoin is worth today where he could weather a 50% drawdown and still 50% drawdown from.

Yeah, so if the asset, the company, if you take the debt out of the 90 billion, let's say it's worth 87 billion right now he's got an 80 billion company. 40 billion in Bitcoin. Yeah, if, if it goes down 50%. So Bitcoin's trading at 45, $50,000 probably. I think that's probable. I don't know if it's the, you know, the majority case, but it's a probable case. Then he would have. His stock price would decline to probably 20 billion because he's, you know, getting two for one right now, double the Navy. He would have to start selling some bitcoin, I think, to pay off that 7 billion. Then the amount he would have to sell, if he had 20 billion in Bitcoin, would be 35% of his Bitcoin to pay them back. So he'd still own two out of three bitcoins, but he'd have to sell a thousand. In that scenario, if we went down 25 billion, you'd have to sell even more. You have to sell maybe two thirds of his bitcoin and then you really start to get what I think would be a spiraling confidence. Now uneducated people are saying on Reddit and social, well, he'll just raise More money. And I'm like, do you not know how debt works? Like people will give you money if it's going up, but if it's going down, they're not going to want that debt. You can't just refinance. Like, yeah, that's like refinancing a home that you overpaid for and the market crashed 30% for homes and you go to a lender and you're like, can I get a loan at that price? And it's like, yeah, no, no, you can get it at this price. If you pay down that debt, there is a risk of ruin here. I don't know if it's 10 or 20%. It's not zero.

I think my point is that we would have to see a crash in bitcoin's price that we have not seen in 10 plus years for the current. Yeah, because here's the thing.

50, right?

No, no, no, no, no, no. Because forget the, forget the market cap of the company because that's basically just a made up number, right? Just like he's got 40 to $45 billion of Bitcoin, whatever that number is, let's say 40, and he's got $7 billion of debt. So right now if he just said, hey, I'm going to pay off the debt, he'd end up with $33 billion of Bitcoin.

Right?

But if Bitcoin's price draws down 75%, so he's got 10 billion of Bitcoin and he's got 7 billion of debt, he could still pay it off and end up with $3 billion of Bitcoin. So what I'm saying is like the price of bitcoin has to draw down so significantly. Could it happen 100%. We saw Bitcoin drop from 69,000 to 16, right? So like these drawdowns happen. But I think that the bigger risk is not that as much as it is because even in that scenario, like he just pays back the debt, he ends up with no bitcoin, but like he's no kind of, no worse off than he was before.

Well, that was my point of like, if we win, I win and if we lose, I'm winning anyway because I own my own personal bitcoin and I'm getting paid every year to do this. I do think the thing that gets.

Like most companies though, that's like most public companies though, right?

Well, to a certain extent, yeah. You just gave up your time as a human being on planet Earth when you could have been doing something Else. But here's the thing. He's asking people to buy his stock. And the people buying his stock, the public, I am like you and I are looking at it from the Michael Saylor perspective, which I think is great that you're pointing that out. Like, how does he lose? But how does the stock when the. How does the shareholder in microstrategies lose? I think that they're on a path to lose in the midterm, short to midterm. Because people are starting to realize I could buy 2 bitcoin, 2 and a half bitcoin, 3 bitcoin depending on the moment in time, for every share of microstrategies I buy with no risk.

Yes, true. And I think that most people should just go buy bitcoin and not worry about kind of all the high finance and multiples and all that kind of stuff. And it's like just that we forget it.

Whatever. Yeah.

Now with that said, this idea of like bitcoin yield, the ability to generate more bitcoin per share, again, this is new. If it ends up being what they're saying, I think there's a lot of people who will start to say like, oh wow, we should figure out how to also tap into this. The question though is that's all predicated on the ability to raise more capital in the future to buy bitcoin.

That is Alex. See this is the problem. Alex, I think is I believe what sailors doing with this bitcoin. He owns the bitcoin yield. I believe that this is a metric. Whenever I see new metrics, adjusted ebitda, community based EBITDA from we were that has been indicative of fraud or Ponzi schemes in the past. When I see a new metric come, that is like 10 red flags for me because why do you need a new metric to understand what the value of a company is? And I feel like that's the one that he's using to manipulate people. And you know, I don't know if he's doing it intentionally or whatever, but trying to get people to think about like how many shares you own of micro strategies and that's better than owning your own bitcoin. If you had a million dollars right now and I said pomp, you have to buy bitcoin or microstrategies, what would you do with the million dollars? If you on a dollar basis, how much would you buy directly on your keys? How much would you buy in microstrategies? And if a friend of yours, a family member said the same thing, I got $1 million. It represents whatever 5% of my net worth, you know, and I just want to put. It's 10% of my net worth. I'm worth 10 million. I believe in Bitcoin. I want to my $1 million worth. I'll dollar cost average it. How would you tell your brother, sister, cousin to allocate it to microstrategies or buying bitcoin directly?

Bitcoin in particular is fascinating to me because if I go talk to people on Wall street, they will say it's the riskiest asset they own. If I go talk to people in the crypto world, they'll tell me that it's boomer coin and it's like the least risky asset that they own. So it sits in coin. Yes, it's. It's boomer coin for the amazing. For the crypto people right now. Here's why that's interesting to me. If you look at what can go up more on a percentage basis, then you're going to end up in meme coin land. Like these things go up thousands of percent and like, it's amazing. But if you look at it as a risk reward, what is the risk I'm taking, What is the confidence level I have that it's going to work and what is the amount of size that I can put into it then Bitcoin is like very attractive. And so what I normally tell people is if you don't own bitcoin, you should probably, in satoshi's words, like get some in case it catches on. And then from there, if you want to go and say, hey, I'm going to take 5% of my portfolio and go speculate on your favorite stock. Microstrategy meme coins. What? Knock yourself out.

But like, okay, so you would family member 950 into Bitcoin, 50k into microstrategies, or hawk to a coin or whatever else you want to, or go play.

The lottery, go to las. Like do whatever you want, right?

Like, yeah, exactly.

And again like that, that isn't a knock against a certain stock or coin or whatever. It's just like.

No, I think it's such an important point though. You. Every single person I know who has been in the bitcoin game for any period of time says they would tell their family member, do not buy microstrategies. Buy bitcoin. Own it. Your keys, your coins, that basic philosophy. I think it's very important for people to know. Anybody who's listening to this. If you own micro strategies 2 to 1 for a bitcoin sell your micro strategies immediately and buy two bitcoin. That's my best advice.

Jason said that. I'm not saying that, but Jason said that.

And I think if we're sitting here in five or 10 years, I will say right now, I believe there's an 80, 90%, 90% chance plus that 2 bitcoins outperforms the 1 bitcoin and microstrategies. If you put a million dollars into microstrategies right now and a million dollars in bitcoin, I believe if you know, and you get two bit and the nav is two to one, man. I think it's like so obvious right now that this thing is overheated. I think you should get maybe 10%, 5, 10, 15% above the value of the bitcoin that, you know, minus the dent that I think is reasonable. You know, like, listen, VCs get paid 20% carry, like, yeah, whatever. Or, you know, if you're a money manager, you get like 1% of like the, you know, which winds up being 20% of the gain, right? You get one point of the five. So it's 20% actually. So it feels like 10, 20, 30% is the amount money managers should get on a device or a capital allocator should get on a device. Not 2x. It's a bit crazy. Anyway, you're awesome. Everybody go into your podcast player since you're there right now and subscribe to Palm's podcast. It's amazing. He's honest, he's always been candid. He's always kept it a buck. He keeps it 100. And just a great follow on Twitter. Your Twitter handle is again, a Pompliano. There it is.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate you. And we'll, we'll continue the discussion.

All right, bye.

I want to make, I want to make a point about bitcoin yield because you said something very interesting there, Jason. You said that when people invent a metric, it's a red flag. Hard.

Agree.

So I want to put a hypothetical to you because I think this would solve the problem for me. So instead of calling it bitcoin yield, if Saylor had said, hey, we're going to start tracking the bitcoin to float ratio to see how good of a job we're doing to make your shares worth more bitcoin, would that bother you?

I mean, it would be like a price to earnings ratio or a price to sales ratio and sure, that would, that would totally be intellectually honest. I believe that Saylor is not being intellectually honest. And when you combine that to his with his relentless promotion, I believe that's the recipe for disaster here. Now, that doesn't mean disaster is going to come. That doesn't mean. I think he's running a Ponzi. It doesn't mean I think he's a fraud. None of that. I believe he's such a believer in this that he. And he has, like, a mania about him. Right. So people who are manic like that, sometimes they change the world. Sometimes they're Elizabeth Holmes. Right. Sometimes they're ftx, sometimes they're Steve Jobs.

Yes.

And so what you have to do when you look at a situation like this, when somebody is that manic, when they're that enthusiastic, when they start making up their own metrics and they're living in their own world, which I believe Michael Saylor is living, you can kind of see it in how he speaks. He is like living in an alternate timeline where he has seen the future. He's like a guy who's come back from the future. And you know what? He's been in the business for a long time. I understand that sometimes when you've been in the business a long time, you think you can see clearly, like, yep, this is a straight shot. He believes it's a straight shot to, you know, a hundred x from here. Therefore, if you do believe it's a straight shot to 100x and I sent you back in time and I said, bitcoin's going to trade at 10 million each and it's a hundred thousand. Now. What would you do?

I sell the house. To sell the cars, to sell the breathing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which he literally said in a video. There's a famous viral video where he says. And they've clipped it to kind of manipulate it a little bit. Okay. I think in fairness to him, that viral video was like, if you believe in bitcoin, the right thing to do is to mortgage everything, sell every asset you have, and just put it into bitcoin. If you believe in it. And it does give that caveat, but there is a much better path here. If you do believe in what he's doing, which I believe is to own the bitcoin directly. If it was 10% more, 20% more, I'd say, fine, put 20%, 1 in 5 bitcoins into Michael Saylor's hands. Maybe he's got some magic leverage machine and he's going to have some tremendous advantage over you just holding it. But at 2 or 3x, I think it would be the height of foolishness to buy a microstrategy share over buying directly. That's what I think. I think he's got so far to go in closing this gap of yield and, you know his leverage. I. I think he. Do you want to be the person closing the gap for him, or do you want to be the person who takes advantage of the gap? So if you bought him when the nav was under, you were smart. If you buy it when it's 2 or 3x, I think you're the sucker at the table.

At the same time.

Yeah.

Would I short it? Hell, no. No. Never bet against people being irrational because you'll get your face ripped off and thrown in the dumpster. I'm just gonna watch. Yeah, I would. One last tiny thing on this. I thought it was very.

By the way, let me just ask you a question here. Just check my logic here, because people are saying, like, I'm a hater or whatever. Is there anything I'm saying here that you can find any breaks in my argument or any bias in it? I mean, listen, I know you work for me, so you're biased, but you are an independent person who could be employed by anybody. You're not going to like, just yes me to death here. As we've seen in previous episodes, you got your own opinions. Is there anything in my argument, Any chink in the armor, Any Achilles heel in what I'm saying? Please tell me if there is Audience and Alex and chat room.

No, actually, if this was, you know, the Alex has opinions our show, and, you know, it was by myself, I think I'd be ruder about this.

Right.

So I think you're probably being a little bit measured because I think what we want to do is leave space, that there's something we're missing. Now, I. I don't see what that could be in this particular case, but I don't think that I'm omniscient and I don't think that you're omnipotent. So I think between the two of us, we're going, hey, why not buy your own Bitcoin? But maybe the leverage machine's a great way to make money in the near term.

Great chance for us to check the chat room. Anybody in the chat room. If you're on YouTube, if you're on X, if you're on LinkedIn, please go ahead and let's discuss if we got something wrong here. Let's discuss if I got something wrong. Is there something I got wrong here? Please Let us know.

I'm reading through the chat right now for a fun.

We'll take a second here. It's okay. And we are coming to you every Monday, Wednesday, Friday in 2025, 12pm Texas time, 1pm Alex, East coast and 10am Left coast, aka the Pacific here in the United States. You can find us at TWI startups on all the major platforms and our YouTube channel. Go subscribe. Hit the bell. If you hit the bell, you get a notification and you become part of the Noti Gang. And if we scroll up, we can read some members of the Noti Gang as well. Who got in here first? I always like to know who got in here first, first Alex, and then if they have any great questions.

Yeah, well, I know. I'm just kind of. I'm, I'm laughing that people are saying that we've beat this horse to death. Sailor's a smart guy who granted is definitely taking a big risk, but we want good vibes. JCAL back. Apparently we're being. We're being too much of a pessimistic. I don't see anything in here that actually underpoints our theory. I will say yes. If you are a capital pool that does not have access to Bitcoin through one of the 8 trillion ways, you can now get access to it directly. Maybe MicroStrategy does have a premium. That's why Jason says maybe 10% to nav. Sure. Last thing on this Jason for me is very simple. He said that there's some people in crypto who are a little bit annoyed that Bitcoin is becoming so institutionalized and brought into Wall street and so forth. I think that's a really good point. I find it very funny that I now buy the future of Money, the revolution against the system in my Fidelity account. That just strikes me as ironic. Like haha, Wall street one. But we should move on, Jason.

And a lot of topics to cover. Yeah. You know, one thing I wanted to. Yeah, one thing I just wanted to bring up. I found this when I was researching Paul Atkins and we didn't get a chance to talk about this, I think, but here is Commissioner Paul Atkins from the SEC in April 20, 2007, Conference Co sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institute. Right. These are famous places that, you know, people go to give talks. And you know, my pet peeve with the SEC is accreditation.

Ah, okay.

So here we go. Can you see my screen? I'm going to make.

I can.

Okay, maybe I'll see if I can make it one Size bigger, maybe that's too big something. It's good to read here, right? I'm at a good size. So in this speech, he talks about accreditation. It Turns out in 2007 this was a major topic. And he says, here, let me highlight it with my mouse. The concepts of economic risk and return also affect a different proposal of the Commission relating to private investment funds. Specifically, part of the Commission's proposal would add an additional requirement for any natural accredited person to have at least 2.5 million in investments before he or she could invest in private. Invest in a private investment fund like a hedge fund or a private equity fund other than a venture capital fund. So a venture capital firm can be accredited. But here they were saying, hey, getting people into hedge funds and private equity in 2007, can you imagine there was such an incredible run up since then that people could, you know, participate in. He says here the underlying premise for the Commission's proposal is that these types of investments are too risky for individuals other than the very rich. Remember, 2.5 million back then would be like saying maybe 5 or 10 million now, you know, money's doubled since then at least. Therefore, we have to presume that the non rich are either unsophisticated or lack access to sophistication and is simply not tolerable to have these types of people at risk of losing their money on a hedge fund. Assuming that these premises are true, however, what evidence does the Commission have to support the conclusion that private investment funds are the most risky? Right. That you would logical basis, you'd have to say, well, this is more risky than buying an index fund or a venture fund or gambling in Vegas, which people were allowed to do.

Yep.

And how does the risk profile of a pooled investment compare to the risk of investing in securities of a single issuer? Right.

And just to be clear, this means you can take your money right now with no accreditation and put all of your capital into the Jason's fly by night. Oh, you can bet on the jets. Yes. I was thinking more like you could buy one single stock. You can bet on Kellogg's. You know, you could buy. That's risky.

Yeah, you could buy, you know, a SPAC that went to zero.

Sure.

And then I'll just end. Many public comment letters express Getting letters back then express indignation at the Commission's proposal. One commenter wrote, stay out of my wallet. Stop trying to protect me from myself. Stop presuming to know more than I do about my own life. Risk tolerance and financial sophistication. End quote. The Commission's proposal may very well prevent the non rich from losing their money in private investment funds, but it will also certainly, but it also certainly will prevent the non rich from participating in any upside profits and gains of these funds. Does this mean the rich get richer while the non rich should be content to just hold their place in the economic ladder? This is not mere, not a mere rhetorical question because the so called smart money investors are allocating increasing amounts of their portfolios to private investment funds as alternative investments. Although this is still a minor part of their allocation. This change in allocation is clearly a market reaction to developments in capital markets. I'll end there. Yes, but it's a long way of saying this is my guy. Yeah, I'm psyched about this. Gary Gendler out for this guy. You know, they've been slow rolling and dragging the accreditation laws. This person clearly gets it if you're an American. He's. And he, he uses the word sophistication, which is what I've been using instead of accreditation, which I like. If there's a path to sophistication, which the SEC has been charged with doing, but they will not do because I think they're slow rolling it. Maybe this guy, maybe my guy will go Paul big. Maybe Big Paulie will go in there and say let's make this fair. I believe that this is the way for people to move from one bracket to another. Why? Why do I believe this? Because I did. My family did. The Calacanis family did. Your family could do this too. I'm not saying bet all your money into it, but I mean if you had a hundred thousand dollar net worth and you told me you wanted to put $5,000 in a private equity fund and 5,000 in a hedge fund, I'd be like, you know what, great, you're going to learn something. Great idea.

Especially compared to what people tend to spend their money on anyways. I mean people often think about what are the risks here for someone who might, you know, put their money into the wrong private investment pool or whatever. But that person might have put it onto, you know, fanduel.

So. Or hawk do hawk to a coin.

It's dollar sign Hawk. I believe if you want to look up that blue chip asset and put all your money onto it.

I mean, is she going to jail? Have these people learned nothing? Did they not see every single celebrity get dinged the last time around? Remember, they all got dinged. It was like a parade of everybody who promoted an ish coin last time what else you got on the docket?

I'm sorry, I just feel bad for. Okay, so you wanted to talk a little bit more about the Brian Thompson murder case. You had a fresh take. I just want to say that there was some breaking news this morning. According to news reports, There was a 26 year old picked up at McDonald's in Pennsylvania, had fake IDs, including one that the NYPD believes was used by the suspect and he had a gun in a similar dispatcher. So I don't want to say that, but it certainly looks like they got it.

They got him, they got 99, they found him where we are. So, you know, now we will go into the, you know, the eventual end game here to find out, you know, if he was hired by a state sponsored actor or he's deranged or his parent died of cancer because they were denied coverage or anything in between these possibilities. Everything is possible here. You know, I was just thinking about how divisive this issue is and I said on the, the all in pod last week. I realize as an individual, you know, as time goes on, you get older, maybe you get a little bit of resources. Your perspective is very different. My perspective on healthcare has changed greatly in 20 years. I used to be scared about my healthcare, like many Americans are today. Can I cover something? It's like a low underlying anxiety, you know what I'm saying? Like a, a pervasive fear that my God forbid somebody in my family, I'm not going to be able to get them chemotherapy, whatever it is, you know, some drug they need because they have got some rare disease. And so when you become more affluent, what happens is your experience with healthcare becomes a different frustration, which is my employees keep complaining about the healthcare and I'm spending 10% more a year. This is infuriating. It's like you have the perspective of the person who's been caught in the middle. That's been my perspective for 20 years, which is cannot believe how much this costs. I can't believe when people on my team tell me what their deductibles are, et cetera. It's nuts, crazy to be an employer and have to deal with this stuff. You're just flabbergasted. But you can always afford to pick the golden plan, right? Yes. Whereas somebody who is coming up, you know, 25 year old J. Cal 30 years ago in 1994, you know, I didn't have healthcare for 10 years. So put that out there right now. I didn't have healthcare for 10 years when I was running my companies as an entrepreneur. I did not have healthcare. Think about how crazy that is. I was flying without a net for a decade maybe, you know, on and off. Sometimes I had it, sometimes I didn't. Eventually we wound up having it. We had a peo at Silicon Valley. Reporter. But for many years, between Sony and that, you know, when I was, you know, entrepreneur and then getting out of it, I had like maybe a year, I paid cobra, if you remember that. You would. You'd have a COBRA payment. Covered myself for a year or two on that. So I. I had. I don't say I memory. Hold it. I just forgotten it. Because you're young, you don't need healthcare. Forgot for, you know, if you're lucky, knock on wood, you don't need it. So I would be like, this is such a waste of money. I'm healthy. I never go to the doctor. Now I'm older. I got sick parents, you know, I got sick grandparents, aunts and uncles. I see it all around me. And I really think, as I've been saying for many years here, the employer being wedged into this is a major part of the problem. And consumers not being consumers of this product, they have no agency. When you have no agency, there's a famous line which is, a man without hope is a man without fear. So it's bl. It's a daredevil and not a bad point. It does not justify anything. Murders, murder, like go to jail forever. We get it. But I do understand that the reaction from people is dark. Yes, it's disgusting. But I understand it comes from somewhere, you know, grand frustration here. And I think this, I don't want to say this is like some rallying cry, whatever. I don't want to inspire people to do this stuff. But do be self aware, you know, as an individual of privilege, where you are in that journey from, you know, having this issue abstracted from you. Right?

Yeah.

And I have been super aware of it, but I haven't had to deal with it. Right. Again, these dark memes don't do the man. This. I just find it so disturbing to watch people making light of this person being murdered, whatever it turns out to be for him. Being murdered is just really dark. I really don't think people should be joking about it, but it is what it is.

Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, one right now, I'm much in your position, Jason. I have incredible health coverage. And no matter what happens to me, my family is going to be just fine. Like literally Anything that comes up, we're good. And that does remove that layer of stress. And to put it into my personal context, because you did too. I recall growing up, we basically never had. We never had vision and dental insurance because my dad had his own company. And so we had basically just high deductible emergency insurance at best. And I remember my mom crying in the car after I would get a cavity or something because she didn't have the money to pay for it. In fact, the first money I made in journalism, Jason, you know what I did? I went home and I got my four front teeth fixed because I never had the ability to have proper dental care that was corrective at that point. So, like, trust me, I've had the crying parents, I've had the fear. I get it. And I think that this moment, if we can use it at all for good, if there's anything we can get out of this that's positive, it's a recognition amongst the. The more well to do.

Yes.

That the people who are less well to do are struggling. They're in pain here. And the American health care system, while we like to beat our chest and say we're the best in the world, it's not working for a lot of people.

Not in health care, we're not. I mean, we spend the most, get the least.

I mean, Congress, we're not.

We're not a frontier market, we're not an emerging market, but we. If you spend the most, you should get the most. Now listen, the solutions and the innovations here, people come from all around the world. So for again, once again, back to, like, capitalism. Capitalism is a rabid competition. And what it has resulted in is we have Prinovo and we have these incredible companies and we have cancer, blood tests. We have incredible stuff in this country, but it's capitalism. So you kind of pay to play in a lot of cases. I think what has to happen is there just has to be a floor. And almost all Republicans and Democrats and everybody in between I speak to are in power and who have affluence, all feel the same way. Just build a floor of like a basic amount of health care that everybody gets all the time, because we kind of have that already with Medicaid, Medicare and.

And emergency rooms.

Emergency rooms, yeah. It's like there needs to be some really great leadership here and some really great competition. And I think maybe the states having something to do with this might also be helpful in creating competition. I'm just spitballing here, but, you know, we have states in Competition with each other to land companies, etc. Yeah, maybe we need to have the states have their own versions of universal health care by a state, by state, instead of having this be a federal mandate. And then there could be efficiencies in each local place, and they could run tests and see who does it better. And if you did it better, then you might draw people to your state because they go, this place has the best health care. I want to move to Texas or I want to move to California, New York or Vermont because they do the best job, just like some people might move to a place because you have the best safety or the best education system or the best tax treatment.

The struggle there that I have is if some states opted out of the strategy that we're describing here, they would have a much lower tax basis. So all the corporations are going to move to Oklahoma, which has no health care, and all the people want to move to California, which does. And you're going up a pretty uneven market. So that's kind of why I think if we're going to do what you say, I hate to say it, probably a federal solution versus one that's done by the states. Otherwise it's going to be super uneven.

But the federal is just so inefficient at doing everything. I just.

It's the only thing we have as a nation that allows for, like, a full collection of action. And I think that the, the, the annoyance you just expressed there, super valid, but I think it's the cost of being a big nation. We could be more efficient if we were just Georgia, because we'd be much smaller.

We'd have my point about, like, the competitive nature of states and like, they iterate and you get in a little.

Competition if the floor is set by the federal government and each state gets to fulfill it in their own way. Oh, hell yes. I love.

Okay, great. Awesome. Maybe that's the compromise there. Yeah. All right, what else we got on the docket? Let's rip through a couple more.

You threw this in, and I had seen the headline about Reddit answers, and I thought to myself, I don't care. I was so wrong. This is like the coolest thing I've ever seen. So pull it up.

Show it.

Yeah. All right, so I'll, I'll go ahead and queue it up. This is how Reddit described its own new feature. So Reddit, everyone knows, has a deal with Google to essentially allow them to ingest Reddit's materials. Now, what Reddit is doing here, Jason, is putting together A Q and A service that curates summaries of relevant conversations and details across Reddit. Essentially it'll pull in what Reddit knows about the query you put in. It's a Q and A service. We all know what that means. What's really interesting to me here is that this is not just Reddit building a new feature. This is a contra Google strategy. Why should Reddit sell off its unique secret sauce to other people for a pittance when it could build its own service that gets people on platform properly, leverages its own brand and I think can make tons of money.

So okay, please, I'll give you the answer. They have to be careful because a large percentage of Google of their traffic comes from Google. If Google perceives them as a competitor, they'll do what they did to me at Mahalo and ehow and other people, which is de index us and move us down. Google has a rule, no indexing of other search like indexes.

Okay.

So if they perceive Reddit as a direct competitor then you know, they, they really put Reddit, move Reddit up in the results and send them a lot of traffic. I think they would be downgraded. And so that is a challenge that they're going to have. I do think Reddit would make a kick ass search engine because a lot of people go to Reddit, like they go to Amazon and do some number of searches there, but the majority of people wind up at Reddit through Google. But Reddit has, I think Reddit and X have the two best data sets in the world for information.

I cannot find this, but I should have pulled it up beforehand. But I think that Reddit was a top five search query on Google in the last couple of years.

They append Quora, they append Amazon, they.

Append Twitter, mostly append Reddit. And I think, I think that shows how this, the center of gravity in finding information online has shifted. You need Reddit's information and Google's search box or do you just need a search box on Reddit? So I agree Google could go nuclear and try to, you know, downrank Reddit. One, antitrust concerns. But also two, I think that would so dramatically harm Google's search quality that it would be a net positive for Reddit over a four to eight quarter time frame. I swear to you Jason, Reddit's too addictive, too popular to be slowed down by Google search alone. And I think this is absolutely brilliant.

I don't think that they could stop them. I just think they could give them a headwind market Cap for Reddit now 29 billion. I'm an idiot because I kept talking about how much I loved Red and how undervalued I think it is when it was like a third of that price. So once again, I'm a dumb dumb because I didn't make the trade. I got to just start making trades. Whenever I'm passionate about something, just tell me, did you make a trade, J Gal so I can keep making trades when you hear me be passionate about.

After the show today, don't forget to go buy about 10 million worth of MicroStrategy.

No, that's the opposite. That's the opposite.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I mean, yeah, no good. Okay.

So on the subject of being a dum dum, when I saw this news, dug into it, my alarm bells went off in my head because I recalled reading through Reddit's Q3 earnings call previously to learn more about its data licensing business. Because I was thinking, here's an enormous revenue stream for Reddit. It's going to be amazing. And you know what? On the earnings call, the cfo Jennifer Wong and the CEO Steve Huffman were incredibly relaxed about data deals. Jen Wong said, we have, quote, limited visibility into the timing of additional partnerships. Steve said, I'd say for us, it's a nice to have business. And then he said this. But if we're thinking about the future of Reddit, it's really our ads business, it's search, it's more of our kind of on platform initiatives. So I really think that during this earnings call, they were trying to be like, just wait like two months for us to drop this new thing. But this explains to me why they haven't landed another seven deals for 60 or 100 million apiece. Why not? Because they're doing it themselves. I love this. One of the coolest things I've seen in the last couple of months. I'm just stoked for Reddit because I'm a longtime Reddit fan, you know.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's the little website that could. They just never stop doing what they do. And it really is. The lesson founders is because there were two companies, Dig and Reddit launched at the same time. Digg kept trying to be something it wasn't. They started competing with like Facebook and they kept changing their interface. Same interface, same focus. Don't change the interface. Evolve the interface on the margins, polish it. But don't go too crazy. This latest update of, you know, the iOS software is showing how much frustration people have when you change the interface too much and you've got hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, or even just millions of people who know your product. You don't want to make them relearn it, et cetera. Reddit has been one thing, a community to discuss stuff and through pseudonyms. The pseudonyms mean you have the same handle forever. Theoretically you can, but you don't have to reveal your identity and so you know your reputation is formed over time from your contributions. They're at 350 million in revenue ish every quarter. They're at 1.4 billion. You know, the sky's the limit for Reddit, I believe. I think that the company gets more and more valuable and I think they're an easy takeout candidate for 100 billion. You know, I think somebody's going to come along at some point and just say, you know, too valuable of an asset. On in the AI space. Microsoft, Google, xai pick any of the major players. I think meta is the obvious one since they understand community. There's somebody's going to come in here and start buying, you know, and ready to.

Yeah, no, I wouldn't say meta because I feel like this is too competing with other meta products. Whereas in Microsoft they have a history of tuck in communities. GitHub.

Why not GitHub? Yeah, yeah. If they. Microsoft is the perfect candidate because Satya Nadella has just great vision in terms of acquisitions and come January 20th it's going to be game on. Reddit most likely to be acquired I think Reddit, DoorDash, Uber and Lyft are my four most likely to be acquired in the next four years. Those four will be on the acquire slash merger because some of them might merge or whatever. I don't have inside information. Obviously I don't public companies. This is purely speculation. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit, Lyft, Doordash and Uber were part of something bigger either. Acquirers acquiree conglomerate put together Amazon plus Uber, Waymo plus Uber, Lyft and DoorDash. Although I think, I think Lyft is kind of like an anchor because it's so small it would slow people down. To be honest, it would be better to build from scratch than buy a broken asset. I don't say that to be cruel at all. Sometimes if the asset doesn't have scale.

Yeah.

And it's up against like giants and it's proven itself to not be able to compete over time. There's a reason why Lyft didn't get bought during all of this and I'VE talked to people, you know, who are kind of, I don't want to say insiders, but who are analysts of the space. They're like it doesn't do anything for another company to buy Lyft. They could recreate the asset because it's not, doesn't have scale. Whereas Doordash and Air and Airbnb and Uber have a scale. And when you have a scale and a network effect and 100 million customers, whatever it is, 50 million customers. 150. That scale is worth a lot of in a competition. So I do think Uber and Doordash and Airbnb will be bought in the next four years. They'll be part of something bigger. I could see Amazon specifically or Google jumping the fence and buying those companies and then spinning them out into other kind of entities. Waymo plus Uber plus DoorDash would be an amazing Amazon competitor. Conversely, Amazon buying DoorDash and Uber would then be a massive competitor to Waymo because Amazon has a lot of bets and self driving. Right. I think they own Zoo or a big portion of Zoox or some of these other companies.

Expand the aperture a little bit here. Let's say you're Shopify and you want to build out your last mile delivery business. You're lots of money, why not tap on Lyft?

I think because you, like I said, you'd be better off just building it from scratch. But if you said Shopify and uber or Shopify, DoorDash, Uber, yeah. Now you got something.

Hold on now.

Competitor, you put those three together. Wow. I never really thought about putting. You put DoorDash, Shopify and Uber together, that's like 80 billion, 150 billion. What's Shopify's market cap?

So I just pulled them all up. So Shopify's 150 flat, Uber's 139 flat and DoorDash is 73 and change.

So you got 3, 7, 400. Well, 400, you put those three together for 400, you've got a trillion dollar company by putting them together, it's a trillion dollar company.

I would not mind consolidation there, frankly, just because what it would do is foment a stronger and better Amazon competitor to the degree I think it would help us.

Which proves my point. At the end of the Wrath of Pawn, I've been saying don't allow the trillion dollar companies to acquire anything or maybe, you know, whatever it is, the top 10 just pick, let them be able to maybe do tuck ins but not like the big big or put them under more scrutiny. Let's say that. Yeah, but then everybody under 500 billion let it rip and take the Mag 7 to the Mag 17. That's my best advice. What else do we got on the docket? We got a last docket or we're. We're good.

Yeah. I want to do one more tiny thing which is a bill that's going through Congress slowly called the, the Kids Online Safety act or cosa. You may have heard about this, Jason. It's been bouncing around for some time, passed the Senate back in July. There's been concerns in the House. There's been work to be done on the bill. And then this weekend, everyone's favorite social media CEO, namely Linda Yakarino, came out in in favor of this. And I was a little bit surprised to see a social media company come out in favor of this bill. She says essentially that AD X protecting our, protecting children is our top priority. Makes a lot of sense. And then she talks about balancing free speech and children's privacy. Kind of the standard debate there. So, Jason, I went ahead and I went through the bill some this morning trying to sort out what are the complaints, what are the positives here. And my, my gist, the thing that I kind of walked away with is that this bill is pretty big in terms of what it wants to do in terms of algorithmic transparency, letting people opt out of algorithms, age verification. And so I'm kind of curious if it's indicative of access support is indicative of a new trend amongst social media companies that maybe some regulation about things that deal with children, defined as 13 and under in this bill is the way forward.

Listen, I can tell you Elon cares deeply about kids. He believes this is like one of his big issues is like population growth. He's, he's a family man. He believes in kids. We're friends. Obviously, I don't speak for him, not back channeling anything here, but it's pretty obvious he does. Yeah, he believes in protecting kids. And who doesn't? I think, you know, X is also in a very unique position. It's kind of like an adult social network, isn't it? Like, I think their position is like, this is for world leaders, etc. Whereas I think like Instagram and TikTok are for kids. Instagram and TikTok are for kids. When I look at young people going into their teens, they all want to be in Instagram and TikTok X is not like on their mind. They don't want to have like a textual, you know, debate about Ukraine or the stock market. Or Bitcoin. Like it's, that's, it's kind of more like it's college, right? I feel like you're in college or on X maybe. I think TikTok and Instagram watching teen girls, watching preteens, you know, even I know some people let their 8, 9, 10 year olds have. And I think 100% we should go do what Australia has done and we'll see how they actually make it work. I don't think anybody should be on social media until they're 16. 100%. It's been proven already. It's damaging. I don't care about the freedom of speech and the, you know, debates around that. I just know what I see with my own eyes is that you're robbing kids of their childhood if they're on social media and phones and parents cannot fight this war individually. We have to do it collectively. My hope is that parents realize it's not that these things in and of themselves are damaging. I believe they are. I believe it's like a kid with developing and social dynamics. It's just a little too intense and addictive. And they've designed it to be addictive because I know the people who work there. I know Dave Morin, he's told me the stories. I know everybody, Sam Lesson, everybody who worked at Facebook, whatever. These guys were obsessed with making it addicting and it obviously is. And TikTok is taking to a level the net, net, net of all this. And if you read what is Jonathan hates book. Gosh, all right. My short term memory anxious generation. And I had him on the all in interview series. You can see it over there. Jonathan Haidt, all in. You'll find it. It's not just that it's damaging, it's that it takes away time with friends, takes away time in nature, takes away time in sports, time from reading books, time from being creative. That's what these phones and devices do to kids. Limit your time for your kids. Encourage your school to let kids grow. There's Let Grow is like this organization that he mentions over and over again, the book. Kids should have phone lockers at school. They bring their. I just got my 15 year old. Her birthday was yesterday. Happy birthday, Lotus. Love you. She got her phone, you know, it's 15. I got her the phone and she loves it. But you know, I think they should have phone lockers at schools. And the schools that get phone lockers, the kids, you know, there's a little bit of like hand wringing complaining in the first week and then by the second week, it's universal. The kids are free from their devices and they look each other in the eyes again and they blossom. That's what it should be. Just like when you go to dinner, we now have a thing at poker games or dinner, we stack the phones. Whoever touches their phone first believe that has to pay dinner. Next time you go to dinner, I want you to try this. This is the JCAL test. You want to have a great dinner party, stack the phones in the table. Whoever touches their phone first has to buy dinner. Just a fun thing to do. And you could also do a thing where you have like a buy like you know, before the entrees, after the appetizers, everybody can check the phone for two minutes to make sure you know there's nothing going on with the nanny. So you have a two minute phone break between appetizers. Dinner. Watch how great that dinner party is. When you go to dinner, stack the phones. Whoever does it has to pay for dinner. And you know what happened at a dinner. Somebody's like this, I'm paying for dinner. And took their phone back.

That's amazing. Free dinner.

Yeah, free dinner. And you know, if somebody else wants to do it. Now the two of you are paying for dinner and the other three couples are not. Oh, try it. It's fun. It's a fun thing to do.

The third person only pays a third, the fourth person only plays a quarter. So at some point. No, but I hear you.

Yeah.

The difference between our dinner parties, Jason, is, is how offline my, my group here is. For example, I, I had to explain to my spouse what Blue sky was the other this week because she'd never.

Heard of Blue Sky. Yeah, I'm on Blue sky now.

But I mean, but why would she be. Right, right. So anyways, I had a, I was going to make a very different point about this. I was going to talk about the duty of care roster and the algorithm transparency. And I was going to say, Jason, this really does feel like a very heavy handed regulatory bill. And I thought you were going to take the government out of tech angle, but you went what, the other way.

I just think kids are different, you know, I don't, I think you have to treat kids differently when you have a mind that's developing. Do we want kids, you know, experimenting with cigarettes, vapes, cannabis, you know, having gender affirming care and stuff like that before their brains are fully developed, all these very considered things, tattoos, you know, when you're a parent and your kids start to get to a certain Age you realize, oh my Lord, you gotta protect the kids. They don't have the ability to make great decisions until they're 25. Really. And we kind of let em loose at 18 and 21. And man, I think another thing, kids should not be on the hook for these student loans and they shouldn't be irreversible because they're making that decision at that 18 to 20 year old window. Your brains are not developed. You should be able to get rid of them in bankruptcy. And then, then we would have some more thoughtfulness about this. You know, you can't get rid of your student loans in bankruptcy which is.

The biggest giveaway possible to the lenders thereof. No, there should be some risk there. So that way they won't lend as much and then the cost of college would come down. This is, this was about as lefty as I think we get on this show. I'm sympathetic to everything that you said about children and as a father I absolutely agree. I just, I struggle to reconcile my general vibes that parents should be allowed to make these decisions versus the federal government. And there is something to be said about if this bill passes because it does not ban social media. It merely requires modifications to social media platforms with more than 10 million monthly actives to be clear. And there's concerns from the EFF and others about the quote duty of care standard and how that could lead to content moderation. That's very aggressive. Rand Paul's against this, a lot of other people, but we'll leave it here.

Well, where do you stand? Which part of it, where do you stand? Because I don't believe, I don't want to seek content moderation. I just want to figure out a way to keep kids off of this stuff.

Well, so that, that's why I said you short circuited my entire complaint because I thought this was going to be way too technical, way too difficult and leave too much open area for companies to get in trouble different ways in different administrations. And so I was going to argue that the way this is set up is kind of a mess. Your endorsement of the Australian approach just precludes all that. It just does away with it. Because then it's not a question.

Yeah, I mean I also think by the way, there's like a whole thing about pornography on the Internet th, this idea that porn should be available 24 hours a day to everybody. And you know, we, we. You would never allow a kid to go buy pornography in a store. But they're this whole generation, they've. It's really messed with their brains having free access to porn. And I know like when I was a kid, you know, like there was like a Playboy magazine, you know, there's a stack of them hidden on a rooftop in Brooklyn. We would go when we were 12 or 13 years old and see these pictures. We're like, whoa, holy cow. What these kids are exposed to. And their verge difference, which is they take out their phones and they show people stuff. It's like, oh my God, it's just dark. And not what life is about, not what sexuality is about. It's a little beyond our mandate here. But I think we knew do need to think about that. And you know, here in Texas there's a big controversy because all the major porno pornography adult sites do not allow you to load from IP addresses this stuff. Because there is a bill and we'll look into it a further episode issue episode. But there's some bill here where you're going to have to verify your age in order to look at a pornography site in Texas or get a VPN.

Which everybody for VPNs. It's a screen door, you can walk around.

Well, it's another level that would I think, protect kids, etc. And you know what, I'm open actually to having that discussion. I don't know, like I'm a freedom of speech guy, but I'm not like unlimited access to porn for kids guy. Maybe I'm becoming like a dad and.

You know, you're starting to sound very much like a California Democrat now. I've got a solution for that problem. That's a joke there. No, no, no. My point is that you sound like someone who's like we can do something about this versus we should not do anything about that. Which is the more libertarian perspective.

Yes, now I'm libertarian except when it comes to kids.

I don't think that that's a bad perspective to take. The only thing that I think technologists would raise is how do you want to age verify and then how do you want to let people maintain that verification across devices? Because it's a non trivial point and I don't think that there's a good answer for it.

Here's a, here's a breaking news. People are making progress with these robots. By the way, these 30, 40K robots check out Optimus now walking up and down hills. We're making fun of Tesla for the Optimus, you know, like being tethered at the first time he showed it in the next year, having people standing next to it at the all in summit, we had or all in holiday party, we had a robot there. But look at this. It like just re got its footing there.

It's better than me when I used to drink. I'm not gonna lie.

Look at, there's Alex leaving the bar.

No, he didn't fall down in the middle of Highway 101 in San Francisco. So it doesn't count.

This is the optimist, you know. And so for people who like mock technology, like just understand the exponential technology, and if you've seen other robotics companies figure out walking up and down hills, like, yeah, AI is going to make these things learn faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. And the hardware is already there. Yeah.

Figure a twist from owner company that we've talked about on the show a lot. Had a tweet out today about how they're like, come work for us. We're going to make millions of these things. That's the temperature amongst people who are currently working on them. And you know, Elon tweets a lot, but he also tweets things that he thinks are the most impactful to his businesses, unsurprisingly, starship launches. And if he's showing off this much optimus, it's probably indicative of. I know I'm talking to Jason, but like, indicative of where his mind's at is my read of it. And that means it's probably doing well. So, yeah, keep in mind.

Awesome. We're back on Wednesday. We're back Wednesday. Wait, are we taping an episode Tuesday though, with Sandeep to do an AI show tomorrow?

Oh, I'm pretty sure we phrased that Live News will return on Wednesday. There should be a Sunny AI special tomorrow.

Awesome. And I hope we go live with that. So for my great producers, let's do that. Thank you to researcher Matty. Thanks to producer Court John and Chris and thank you, of course, to Alex Wilhelm. You can follow him x.com Alex and we're just trying to get 5% better a day here. Tell us what we can do better. I'm jasonalicanis.com for life. DMs open at Jason on all platforms, pretty much. I'm on Blue sky as Jason M. Calicast, but I don't have any followers. I can't find anybody over there. Discovery's terrible.

I'll follow you. So you have at least one kind.

Of like a clunky version of like Twitter from 10 years ago, right? Is it. What is it just like a vote against X and against Threads to go there. Is there some feature that's great that.

You like or just so far it's only the people. I don't. I'm not a big block guy, so I don't block a lot of people. But if you do, apparently it's great for that. Not my jam. I just like to go there because it's like all my friends moved one city over and I had to drive to go see them.

It's so weird. Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. It's like, oh, you moved. I got it. Yeah, you moved to Brooklyn. In Manhattan, if you moved to Brooklyn, it was like, you're excommunicated. I'm never going to see you again. You're dead. I do think. Yeah, I, I like the way the new block system works on X and I'll just announce here how blocking works for me. Okay. If you are obnoxious and funny or insightful, you're going to get a like and I'm going to engage you. If you're obnoxious and insulting but not funny and clever, I'm just going to snap block you and then I'll. We'll still see each other's stuff. You just can't participate in a discussion with me. So if you say like tds, you know, whatever, whatever. If you say like, listen, I don't think you have tds, but I do think you should recognize and this is your blind spots. Yeah, I'm all in. Right? Or make a funny joke about my glasses. Yeah, maybe I'll think it's funny, but that's a high bar for funny for me. So just being. I want to have intelligent discussions online or funny, clever. Intelligent, funny. That's my zone of excellence and that's where I like to be. I don't want to be with like stupid drive by tweets. And by the way, if it's an insightful compliment, like you, you. If you give me. I'm a sucker for the. For the sandwich. Hey, this is. I love this. I've been listening to twists for 10 years. I think you're wrong. Here's your sandwich. And then you say something nice about all in or my investments at the end or my weight loss. That's the way to do it, folks. If you want to get a follow, that's like the really gold standard.

Also a great way to deal with feedback for employees. If you're a manager. I've learned that one the hard way.

Can't go all one way. A little better at that myself. I was telling it was a Little Live about Twist 500. I was like, we got to do better. But then I was like, but I think we've done a great job, but.

I think I need to do better.

So more twist 500 coming on Wednesday.

After we take into account Jason's latest changes. But they will make it better. So everyone get excited. We have a list of companies we are preparing to share with you.

Exactly. I mean, I. The goal is I want people to understand that we suffer over every selection and we really understand their business. So maybe it requires like an act of journalism. Maybe we have to put a researcher on maybe contacting the founder and asking a couple questions over email and maybe, yeah, getting some insights or something about it. Or maybe actually calling the venture capital, asking the question. We could actually do a random act of journalism.

I would love. I would love to do that.

We have resources.

Yeah, well, we'll talk about that offline. Anyways, everybody, we adore you. We'll be back on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Goodbye.

Bye.