TWiST News: Face Robots, Solar's Growth, The Polymarket Mess, and YC's Latest Call for Startups | E2044

If you walk inside a Starbucks, right, you can have free WI fi and free electricity actually too. I think that over the next 20, 30 years, whether it's smart or renewable penetration, big nukes getting bigger, I think we're going to see energy prices really go very close to zero. And I think electric vehicles and the home, we have a much more sophisticated world.

This week in Startups is brought to you by Fundrise. Fundrise provides access to diversified portfolios of private real estate to all investors with their industry leading, easy to use platform. Sign up today@fundrise.com Twist open phone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com twist and linear. Linear helps product teams focus on what they do best, planning and building great products. Streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps in a tool your team will actually enjoy using. Get 25% off at linear app Twist.

All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host Jason Calacanis. With me, my co host, Alex Wilhelm and we have a full docket. How are you, Alex?

I am good. I was typing up until the very last minute to get all the notes in. We have a surprise guest. Lots to get to, Jason, but first I want to show you my new favorite robotic demo because I think everyone deserves a laugh this week. So generative AI, great at text generation, understanding written words. But what about your face, Jason? Well, it turns out that some folks over at Columbia University have made a robot that can do a couple things. One is it can mimic you very directly and very quickly. Two words here. Uncanny Valley. How does that make you feel at the start?

I think it's great. It's awesome. It looks like the movie iRobot, right, which was Asimov. It's clearly somebody in that lab. Where is this taking place? China or NYU or mit?

This is the Creative Machines lab at Columbia University.

Oh, okay. I was triangulating from MIT all the way up to MIT. We wound up on 125th Street. Congratulations to the team there. That looks awesome. And I do think it's close to hitting the Uncanny Valley. And if I went to a McDonald's and interfaced with this person, or interfaced with this at a Starbucks or at a counter at United Airlines or whatever, Southwest, I would have no problem with that. I think it'd be pretty cool.

Yeah, it has 26 actuators to actually make the face. And here's the coolest part. Jason. As of later this year, Emo. This robot has, quote, learned to predict a forthcoming smile about 840 milliseconds before the person actually smiles. So robots can now anticipate your facial movements, which means that I think our future of using humans for human facing interactions are coming to an end. So everyone please welcome your robot overlords. Welcome to the future.

I mean, I think one of the things we're going to contend with, and I'm not trying to be too humorous here, is we have population declines. Young people maybe are not seeing the value in starting families. Maybe marriage feels a little weird to folks. We might be the last generation that felt that was like what you're supposed to do is kind of like the default. You get married, you make babies, you go to college, make babies, get a career going. So I think if you look at young people today, maybe opting out of careers, they're not as career focused. They're work, life balance focused. Everybody you know, I interview, I would say two out of three young people are like, hey, tell me about life, work balance. I'm like, that doesn't exist at my company, but if you want it at yours, please, by all means, start a company and compete against us. Number two, they don't seem to be on the marriage track. Number three, they do not seem to be on the owning a home or having kids track. And now, of course, there's all kinds of reasons for that. Financial. Owning a home is hard in this country unless you're in Texas. Side note there, we'll get into real estate, another show. But I think it's interesting about this. Alex is. And again, this isn't to make light of the situation in any way, but companionship is complex. You're in a relationship with another human being for an extended period of time. It's dynamic. People evolve. And you have to work at a relationship. You don't have to work at a relationship with a large language model. It'll just do what you want it to do. It'll be what you want it to be. And then you add to it this face. And if this face starts talking to you and you get more warmth and care, empathy from the LLM, which the LLM, if we're going to sit here and say lms, like we said on yesterday's show, can do surgery as good as the best, most perfect surgeon. Waymo wants to make the best driver in the world and Joby wants to make the best pilot in the world. The singular. Well, I think Columbia, with that face and the LLMs and a bunch of other projects we've seen are going to make the perfect companion. And then that'll make all of us highly unpredictable, you know, variable humans. Maybe for young people, they'll just want the comfort of the perfect companion.

Yeah, maybe. The good news for you and I, though, is that no one's going to let robots play poker with us at the table. So if we're going to do our favorite form of gambling, we're going to still need friends. And that is bullish for human interaction.

No droids. We don't like your kind here. Welcome to Moz Eisley. Get the hell out. C3PO.

I mean, quite literally, if C3PO sits down, I'm done because I can't do math better than a computer. All right, let's put that aside on the show. Today, my friends, we have the rise of Global Solar with a very special guest that you may recall from the Liquidity summit earlier this year. Then a media deal we didn't see coming that involves someone named Alex Jones. We'll get into that. The latest on the poly industrial industrious complex.

Startup industrial complex. Jason Galgad is investing in far too many companies. Y Combinator, It's a global industrial complex.

Jason's here to sell you some supplements, by the way, in case you were curious. And to talk about the sexuality of frogs, the massive poly market. And then we're gonna wrap up this week with a note on Y Combinator request for darts.

Venture capital is one of the most lucrative asset classes in the world. Why? Look at today's public companies. Nearly all of them raised capital when they were private. Don't I know it. Uber and Robinhood are the number one and the number two hits. I invested in both of those. As you know, when they were private companies and before they even launched their products. And for venture capitalists and their backers, this is great, right? It's great to be me. Trust me, I love my job. But what if you don't have enough capital to back a venture fund or start one? And I'll tell you something, it's really hard to get into the top quartile funds. You have to know somebody who knows somebody and you have to write a giant check and you know, you might be able to get into it a couple of years from now. How do you get in on some of these deals that institutional investors like endowments or sovereign wealth funds or high net worth individuals are doing? Well, if you don't know a guy who knows a guy who knows a gal. You aren't going to be able to buy shares in say that next hot AI startup until it goes public. But now there's another option. The Fundrise Innovation Fund. This is a $125 million fund that's like a medium sized venture capital that hold shares in some of the most exciting pre IPO tech companies in the world. It's specifically designed for individual investors. So now you can get in early@fundrise.com Twist that's fundrise.com Twist carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. This and other information can be found in the Innovator funds prospectus@fundrise.com innovation. This is a paid advertisement.

Jason, why don't you introduce our guest and then I'll talk about what we're talking about.

All right. My good friend Phil Deutsch has educated me tremendously over the last two decades on how energy works. And when an energy story happens, the first thing I do is just I try to level set and understand the dynamics because when you're just reading the press, you know, you assume what you're reading is pretty straightforward. You read maybe a government press release like we did this morning. And today I wanted to talk about headline that keeps coming up which is one of my favorite countries, Australia. And Australia has been having these moments where the overwhelming majority of their electrical, of their electricity is coming from solar. And then in India, my understanding is a lot of people are hacking together their own solar panels, really crummy batteries and going off grid. And then I'm here in Texas and having a lot of conversations with friends. I just actually was talking to Bill Gurley and we were talking about solar at our ranches and you could actually, if you have enough space, you got an extra couple of acres, you could actually build your own solar farm and then give back to the grid. Anyway, all of this is fascinating to me and I think very world positive. Welcome back to the program. Phil Deutsch.

Thanks Jake. How great to be here.

Alex, why don't you tee up just some facts on what's happening in Australia because we've been trying to get to this story for two or three weeks but there was, there was some other stuff going on in the country. It keeps getting pushed back. But yeah, big, big picture. There's something like 4 million homes in Australia have now have residential solar solar panels on their roof. And on a penetration basis, I think there's 30 or 40 million people there. I'm not sure how many households but it's a large number of households. Walk us through the numbers.

All right, so back in 2011, Australian rooftop solar was kind of expected to eventually reach 4 terawatts of generation in Australia. That was going to be about 2% of total generation. According to the reports that I found a decade later, it was actually 6x that eventual target. So the growth in Australian solar production has been absolutely crazy. And I think last year, rooftop solar panels that are part of the national electricity market were worth 24.6 terawatts. That's an enormous amount of generation, tons of power. And that works out to just about, I think, 12% of homes generating electricity, and that's 3.7 million households. And then most recently, Elon Musk actually highlighted a data point from Western Australia that caught our attention, Jason, and it was that on one day this week at 1:30pm and time does matter for solar stories, distributed solar PV accounted for 2.12 gigawatts of output, which was, I think, about 81% of total generation, far outstripping what was generated from both natural gas and coal. So for a bit of time, Western Australia was essentially one large solar panel chase.

And we've had the same thing, Phil, in Germany, where Germany had renewables as a cluster, tip over to the majority. And then in Texas, I think we have the largest installed base of solar here in Texas. Quite paradoxical, I guess, in some ways. I guess my first question to you, Phil, is what's your take on what's happening in Australia? Is it a monoculture with, you know, a very supportive government, everything aligned in terms of subsidies and they're just going for it? Does it have to do with geography and solar just working really well? Because they have a lot of space. It's a large, large landmass, and they're close to China. Maybe they get cheap solar panels pretty easy. Explain to me what the theory is here. What can we learn about Australia? And is it in any way a roadmap for the rest of the west, or even India and China?

First of all, it absolutely is. And let's break it down, two things. First of all, when you install solar wind, most of your cost is all upfront. It's a fixed capital cost. Sun doesn't cost you anything. The wind doesn't cost you anything. So you produce no matter what. And so the more you install it, you're going to have these things when the wind blows or the sun shines, where you're going to have a lot of production. So the United States both In California and Texas, we've already had moments where electricity prices have gone negative because the turbines get a production tax credit, so they want to sell up until negative $0.01. So just the sheer amount of renewable power in any jurisdiction can cause these weird abnormalities where you get negative prices when they get to be a huge part of the supply that occurs today. And that's going to occur more and more in the world, the more renewable penetration we have. The second thing is this residential solar, where you put the panels on the houses, which is what you're quoting Australia. So if you give me one second here, it's kind of an interesting problem. You decide to put panels on your house and let's say the panel, the electricity cost you, just for argument, say, 20 cents per kilowatt hour in Palo Alto, where you used to live. Where I live, electricity probably cost us 40 cents a kilowatt hour. So you say, great, that's a win for me. I'm going to put my panels up now. The problem is your panels don't provide electricity at night or maybe when you have the cold plunge going and the washing machine and the home theater, but at that point, rely on the grid. Well, your local utility says of the 50 cents I was charging with the 40 cents for your kilowatt hour at home, two thirds of that was for me to have the grid ready for you. So if I let everyone just switch to home solar without picking up any part of the grid, I'm going to destroy my business model. And so there are places in the world where the utilities are going under because people are getting out of the grid and they have to think about that. They're called stranded costs. Like, how do I pay back all these wires and infrastructure? So when you have this residential solar, the ultimate question is, how much does a homeowner have to pay for the grid that is using Lessa? So that's the real question. If you talk to someone who likes residential solar, they say, screw you, it's my house, I could do what I want on it. I should have to pay you a penny. If you talk to utility, they say, you should be paying me a lot of money per kilowatt hour. So in Australia, they have very good rate, they have very good rebates and tariffs that encourage solar. We used to have that in California and the utilities recently amended that in something called NEM 3.0. And when we put down the rebates and the government support, there was a slow in residential solar.

Actually, Phil, I had that chart for us. Let's Pull that up. John, if we could just explain this chart for folks who are watching the YouTube video. The bars that are blue are the old regime in California regarding how much you could get paid for having rooftop solar. And then the yellow bars mark the new regime. NEM 3.0, or what's called NBT in government lingo. But, Jason, what matters here is after this change was announced, there was an explosion in people putting solar out because they could get the earlier rate. And since the rules have changed, we've seen a decline. And if you observe the size of the orange, the yellow bars, I mean, compared to historical blue bars, you can see a decrease in install. So, Phil, it seems that NAM 3.0 really smashed the install rate of rooftop solar in California.

Yeah, exactly. And basically just a question of how much of the savings is the homeowner getting? And then three took away some for the homeowner, really. But what I think is, like, the most interesting thing is when you think about a house that could have an electric vehicle with it, a power wall, and residential solar, that's really the wave of the future. You really love to have all that stuff on site. The question though really is how expensive is that? The EV and the powerwall probably pay for themselves because you're comparing yourself to gasoline. I think the question of residential solar on site, it's a harder question because just think about it this way. If I were to take a couple acres of Jason's Ponderosa, I could lay down fields and fields of solar. Whereas if I did it with my little small trailer park home in Atherton, someone's got to get up, put nails on the roof, and do a whole bunch of fixed costs. So it's much easier to do solar at scale.

That is a very interesting concept. When I started talking about solar recently, and they were, I was immediately started the discussion with the roof of our house, and they were like, Ruth, just find an acre in the quarter of the ranch and you put the batteries there, you put the solar panels. And I was actually talking to Friedberg about it, and he said one of the incredible gains that you get from having space is that power walls and other units that are meant to be inside the house are designed to be incredibly small in terms of footprint, for obvious reasons. You don't want to give up a bunch of square footage to. But doing that doubles the cost of them and makes them much more expensive than if you just put them into, I don't know, a container, a small shed. You just spread them out, and those are much Cheaper. I guess the long and short of this is if you were running the United States and we started looking, you know, 10, 20, 30 years out, we know that we're going to have a massive demand for all these data centers. We know that we are an energy exporter. We have tons of natural gas, we've got tons of oil. We're doing pretty great all of a sudden after all this fear and hand wringing. So it's a two part question. Number one, why did we have so much fear and hand wringing for so long in this country and in the world writ large about peak oil and that the entire world was going to be thrown into chaos at the, you know, 10 years after the millennium and that the United States was going to have to fight all these foreign wars and bring the oil back. And now we're sitting here and everybody got everything wrong. And then we'll go to part two, which is okay, if we got everything wrong over the last 30 or 40 years, our lifetime has been filled with fear, uncertainty and doubt about energy and we solved it all. How do you think about the next 30 or 40 years of our lives?

Yeah, I think in the first part you're absolutely right. We got it wrong and we continue to get wrong. Every estimate for solar is always too low. And you see with EVs, Jason, people just don't understand how fast a J curve works when you're in it. So I think the good news is technology wins. It just wins. It doesn't matter who's in office, what interest rates are, technology wins. And it has in energy, be it fracking or solar panels. And so what do I think of the next 30 years? Let's say if I say 30 years, they won't be around for it whenever a so like these 30 years, I think electricity is basically free. So we don't think of it as a cost any, which is like WI fi. Remember in the beginning of WI fi, how much Just Boingo shout out to Sky Dayton.

We had to 30 bucks a month. And I think a Go Go inflight was probably 30 or 40 bucks and you could get a membership for 50 and share it at your company.

The sky still makes me send him checks for some reason, but he now doesn't be a poker game. But yes. So but now if you walk inside a Starbucks, right, you can have free WI fi and free electricity actually too. I think that over the next 20, 30 years, whether it's smart or renewable penetration, big nukes getting bigger, I think we're going to see Energy prices really go very close to zero after you've amortized the upfront costs and you'll see a lot of carbon free sources. So I'm very, very bullish on that. And I think electric vehicles and the home, we have a much more sophisticated world. I mean you're the expert on this. But I think it's highly unlikely that my grandchildren drive their own car. It'll be autonomous, electric. I think Elon seems very compelling of that to me. Going to Waymo, it's hard to imagine going back in some ways. And so I see a world with a lot of energy choice and technology just continues to surprise us. On the upside, I'm very bullish.

It's interesting you bring that up. I had a dream the other night that I was in my self driving car on the way to a dinner in Texas and I was watching because I had just fallen asleep watching the Knicks game and shout out jungle cat. And I had this dream and in the car the entire Knicks game was on the windshield with all the statistics and everything was on the display panel. So instead of speed and everything, I was just looking at the player stats and the shooting percentage and everything. And I woke up in the morning and I was just super delighted to think, God, we going to recapture a lot of all that productivity and time and distance is going to shrink in many ways. Yeah, yeah. I mean if you think about a.

Two hour car ride, you'd be able to see a movie as if, as you say, as though you're at the game. Maybe they'll be in a workout in a car. I don't know, maybe like the Flintstones. We've had a while we're going.

When you look at the. I call it the Skiff. It's kind of like the job of the hut skiff that he takes to the Sarlacc that Elon made the, the, the sort of bus, I don't know what he called it. Cyber van. What was the name?

Skiff, as you may know is a secured facility in the intelligence world.

But there's that there's a different kind of skiff.

Yeah, you're gonna have to tell a lot of the people who've been nominated for that. I think that word later but.

Well, and we also have cyber van. The cyber van could be a skiff, it could be a skiff of a skiff. Yeah, this could be a skiff skip. But those have like a great potential to be a living room, poker room, workout room and distance could be covered. Founders know that every missed call is a missed opportunity. Customers don't want to wait. They will call someone else if you don't pick up. But if you use Open Phone you're never going to miss another customer call. And guess what? It's super affordable and easy to use. People used to spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars putting in a corporate phone system. And now for just $15 a month, OpenPhone will give you a business phone line and complete control of your destiny. Want to know who's answering customer calls and how they were handled? OpenPhone can do incredible things like sync with HubSpot and give you AI powered call summaries automated responses to ensure you don't miss a single ring. Well, that's all built into OpenPhone and if you've got an existing phone number, they will let you port it over at no extra charge. Get 20% off your first six months. What an amazing offer@openphone.com Twist that's O P E N P H O N E.com Twist for 20% off for six months. As we wrap here with you, what's going on with nuclear in the United States? We are seeing customers show up in terms of big tech with big iron saying we'll pay. And they're becoming customers of these small modular reactors and maybe asking them to turn things on or put data centers next to existing nuclear power plants. Did you think we'd see in our lifetime? From the 197879 no Nukes concert, shout out to Jackson Brown and Bob Dylan with the greatest performances of Tangled up in Blue ever was at the no Nukes concert. And I was very inspired by that concert as an 8 or 9 year old when it happened. And my whole life I was like yeah, no nukes, thumbs up. And now we realize, well that was a huge mistake that celebrities got behind and now people are starting to say, hey maybe I'll, I'll buy a small modular reactor. I'll put a deposit down, Google, Microsoft. Everybody seems to be getting in on this. Is it going to happen? We'll be sitting here 10, 20 years from now and there'll be many more nuclear reactors in the United States. You heard Sachs probably on all in say not in my backyard. I don't want to be anywhere near that.

Well, I actually heard yeah, I think Sachs also said he's afraid to fly. That's why I really took away from that. Those planes in the air are scary. Scary.

Actually it's a true story. I've been on flights with cit. He's not a. He's never been a calm flyer.

Let me say the following. When I was in high school, I worked on the Senate Energy committee on what we could do with nuclear waste. We've done nothing in 40 years. And I would have said three or four years ago, nuke power, it's insanity. It just doesn't. We're not going back down that wormhole. But this really begins with data centers. The amount of energy that's being demanded by the hyperscalers, carbon free, is unfathomable. It is going to be the biggest thing I think to hit energy since fracking. It really is unbelievable. And the hyperscalers have said we need baseload carbon free power that is reliable and that's brought them back to nukes for reasons that you've discussed, bill growers discussed. And so but you want it modular is better than large because it fits the data center sites. Now in full disclosure, we have an investment in X Energy which Amazon and Dow are involved. So I don't want to be accused of talking my book without disclosing it. But I think what you're really seeing is it's data center driven. They can, they want power, they want it reliably and they're willing to pay for it and they're innovative and that's really the change chase and that's a whole other show. But the data center stuff is what's really spurred on the new discussion.

So we will be sitting here in 10 to 20 years in all likelihood with new nuclear plants in the United States. And to your point about waste, it's just leave the word.

That's not the best answer probably, but it's certainly one that works. And the amount of waste required, it's not that big and it can be controlled. But yes, to answer your question, 20, 30 years from now, I believe we'll see material increase in electricity from nuclear power as we demand more electricity. The whole world is electrifying. There's just no doubt about it.

Alex, anything left for you before we dismiss Phil and let him get back to work?

I'm going to just point out that, you know, Elon Musk recently did a chat and this was a chat in October 29 and he said yes, we are going to need a lot of energy. But he argues, Phil, that quote, long term, almost all the energy that we're going to get will come from the sun. And his argument is that if we're ever going to go up the Kardashev scale from, you know, zero to a type one, type two civilization, it's going to be essentially all solar based. And so I'm also a small nuclear energy bull. And I'll just say yinby to this, not nimby. My backyard's good to go. Put a reactor here, I'm fine with it. But is this a temporary fix until we sort out solar generation and storage on a mass scale? Essentially are some more as a band A to get to our solar future?

Well, I mean I don't know what time frame Elon's talking about. He could be talking about a century. So I mean I don't think of band AIDS over a 20 or 30 year period. I think we're talking about 20 or 30 years more. So he's a visionary. I'm not a visionary. I don't think that we're going to be an all solar world over the next 50 or 60 years. That's, I mean I'd have to. That seems a bridge too far for me. But look, the man is not to be trifled with when it comes to seeing the future.

All right, so a couple of generations more nuclear power and then perhaps a solar future. Jason, either way you slice that, it's green energy that's low carbon. So I think either way I'm happy.

I'll give you one prediction. I don't believe that there's ever been a data center built of scale United States that's not connected to the grid. They all connect to the grid. I think Musk will do what it's done. That's my prediction.

You believe he can build a hyperscaler, a massive data center for AI that is not plugged into the grid? Wow, that's.

I don't know if he can. But I'll tell you, if anyone can, he will. And I suspect he must be thinking given everything he cares about carbon free anti government scale speed, try and control as much as he can on the private side. If anyone's going to do it, it's going to be him. And I suspect it's a bit will be of interest.

Well, if you think about it, let's think out loud about this incredibly bold prediction. If you had a battery factor, a battery factory and let's say, and you had solar and let's say your battery factory happened to be in a very sunny state like I don't know, Nevada. And let's say you had a couple of companies that had a big need for electricity for AI Xai, Twitter, slash X and of course Tesla. Well if you have the batteries coming out the back of the factory and you Just sell one and keep one and then you're making the solar panels here. Is he making the solar panels here, I wonder or I don't.

But the problem he's going to need, I think he's going to need natural gas, Jason, which he might not, but he's used natural gas in his plants in California. I mean, he can't get away from. He can't.

So, you know, he gets some natural gas going. But I mean if literally the factories there and the, and the right batteries are coming out the back, the batteries would never see the sun. They would literally just go to their eventual resting point at the end of the conveyor belt. That's brilliant.

So, so if you think about NAT gas, NAT gas is priced by location and in some places it's very, very cheap because no one uses it there. So if you were to build a data center where there was abundant NAT gas and if you were someone like Musk who was willing to take some technology risk and wrap it, it could be pretty interesting. Now that's really cookie talk, but it's pretty interesting.

Well, and if you look at NAT gas, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's some burn off from when you're like flare off or something is what you think of. Yeah, and I don't know how much of that there is, but some amount of that could go into batteries. And he's doing some really incredible stuff, battery storage in Australia. So this becomes like really interesting if people are buying the natural gas grade, but if they're not buying it, it can keep flowing and then flow into the batteries and then you smooth out the curve. Really interesting. The world's going to be amazing if energy gets close to free. I mean this will change geopolitics forever.

Yeah, but look, it's already negative in certain things and as you know, that's where a lot of people think about bitcoin mining and how to think about that. Just the one way to think about it. We said this at the summit. Everyone in the world thinks that data center size is not by square footage or how much they cost. It's purely done by how much power they use. And so the world of tech and energy are now really fully integrated and every hyperscaler is focused on energy.

Yeah, amazing. And you know, the, what could happen also with desalinization of water and then, you know, that's an energy problem for my, what I understand and some countries, Israel, other, you know, islands, they're, they're all desal and they have to burn Oil to do it. Now you'd be able to do that with batteries, solar, renewables, nuclear. And if water becomes free, or solar.

By the way, or solar, I think Israel is nat gas by the way. But yeah, but that's why the fusion. Obviously the next step is fusion. Right. That would be even another bridge.

So I mean, Phil, do we, do we need fusion? I mean, the thing is, I was very optimistic that we're going to get to more commercially viable net positive fusion reactions in the next 10, 15 years. But after just looking at the growth of solar power generation both here and abroad, improvements in battery technology and Even though in SMRs, I wonder if we need fusion to complete a green energy revolution at all.

For me that's too hard. You know, I'm very confident tech wins. But for me to say which tech shouldn't win and that I know more than like the guys at Commonwealth fusion versus, you know, so and so new thing, that's not something that I thought as much about. I think right now there are a lot of really smart people running at really interesting problems and there's going to be a lot of success. It's going to make us happy.

Yeah, extraordinary. So I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge here. Where can people learn more about your firm? I gotta give you a plug. I don't know that you need a plug.

No, no, no plug. Your next summit, that's good enough for me.

All right, thank you to my guy. Take care. Well, that was amazing, huh, Alex? It's just really great to have an expert on and, you know, kind of fill in our gaps. Right, and which there are many.

Well, I mean, I just want to point out that Phil dialed in from a, a fancy airport lounge and so if his audio quality, if you're on audio, wasn't as up to our usual par, that's because we had them on like an iPad in an airport because that's how dedicated Phil is to come in on the show. Jason, one last thing about this solar energy generation, we found some data from Statista that shows that a in 2023 the share of global generation from solar was over five and a half percent. And you know, ten years ago it was 0.8%. Now a lot of work to do, but I'm just very encouraged by this. And my point about the fusion thing wasn't to dismiss or dis fusion startups, I think they're awesome. But I just like that we don't have to solve commercially viable fusion generation in the near term to help the planet and get more Power. Because we need more power and greener power.

So, yeah, I mean, one of the things I always like to focus on, you know, I really don't like politics. Pretty icky, right? And I don't like to spend time with politicians. There's been some reports that I'm vying for a position in the administration. I can assure you those are false. Just like I wasn't.

I asked you that on the show, like two days ago. And I was like, I'm just.

I didn't realize that multiple newspapers have said that I'm vying for a position in the, in the administration. I'm not. I'm supportive and I. And I hope for the best. And if they did ask for help, I would help on the margins and an advisory capacity. I guess as an American, if I was called to help in some way, I would. But I like to hang out with technologists, I'll be honest. And the reason I like to hang out with technologists is every time I see a big problem and, you know, I get to play my small part by talking about it here with you and maybe highlighting some of the innovations and maybe placing a bet on some of them. That feels like a very. A high use of my time, a really good use of my time. And I am just astounded that a lot of the things we have been told are intractable, I guess is a good word.

Yes.

Are not at all intractable. And so if we are sitting here and we were told our entire adult lives, and as long as I can remember from the oil crisis, which I remember in 1976 or 1977, remember my dad having to go get or get gasoline. And it was based on if your license plate ended in an even or odd number, I believe. And I was like, oh, my God, this is like dystopian. We're not going to be able to travel in the car. And it wasn't that bad. You just couldn't get gas, you know, three days a week, and you get the gas the other four days or whatever it have to be. Long story short, during the gas shortage and the things, you know, and there's no nuke stuff, technology reigns supreme and entrepreneurship and capitalism. I gave my little speech yesterday, just gonna give it again. Any problem that you think is intractable, get off your ass, get a team together and take a swing at the bat, and we'll give you the first hundred K. And there's a bunch of people out there who'll give you the next 500k. And then there's people who are designed to give you 1 to 3 million and then there's people who are designed to give you 5, 50, so on and so forth. Capitalism and entrepreneurship and democracy are the messiest, most effective operating system and stack in the world.

Oh, hard to agree.

Appreciated.

Yeah and I just want to give a shout out to a company we talked to a couple weeks back which is Exowatt. They're doing storage of solar power using solar lenses, not solar panels and storing this in the form of industrial heat which they can then use a Stirling engine to power industrial facilities. Just one example of founders that are building domestically awesome ways to collect and then disperse energy. So I, I'm actually very optimistic about power generation in the next 10 years like, because smarts are awesome, fusion is making progress, this is blowing up and there's so many cool ways people are approaching storing energy. Not just batteries, there's compressed air storage, there's all sorts of awesome things. So frankly, I really do think that we're going to see, as Phil said, essentially free electricity. I think by the time my kids.

Go to college we're going into the golden age. I've always said it's going to be the roaring twenties and it's, it's, we're soaking in it. Put aside all the strife around, you know, woke ideology, identity politics, Magda, you know, all these other culture wars, all of that pals into comparison to the power of a small team to build a technology product or service and change the world. All of this is like for me, wasted, wasted energy. If all the people complaining about this stuff incessantly and arguing and fighting just built a couple of startups, we would solve the issues we have around education, incarceration, housing. All this stuff is so solvable. And almost all wars are fought over resources on the margins. You get some religious ones here or there, those are a little kooky and hopefully they're in there, you know, the end as religions move from reading 2000 year old books literally to maybe interpreting them. And here we are.

There's so many American Christianity comments that I'm not going to make given the church that I was raised in.

Founders, if you want to build beautiful software products, you need a beautiful development platform. But the problem is most issue trackers, they just aren't helpful and they feel like a chore to use. Linear is different. It's developer first, incredibly fast, beautifully designed, and it's purpose built for how modern product teams work. With Linear, you can streamline bug reporting and task tracking, plan inspect new features and manage your long term product roadmap. That's why Linear is the tool of choice for tech companies of all sizes. Half of YC companies build with Linear. That should tell you something. And it powers Cash, App, Scale, AI and Vercella. So here's a call to action. See for yourself why product teams love Linear. Visit Linear App Twist L I N E A R dot App Twist to try Linear for free with your team and get 25% off your first year, that's linear App Twist.

Jason, before we move on from the green energy thing, there was some late breaking news before we jumped on, which is that the latest reporting indicates that the Trump administration intends to kill off the 75 was a blue dollar story.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think also Reuters wrote about it and I am, I'm a little bit disappointed by this because it felt to me like a pretty effective place to put some of our national capital to encourage a shift towards EVs. So I think just personally, philosophically this doesn't track with my view of where we should be going. But there was an interesting tweet from Spencer Hacker Kimian from Tulum Capital Management, and he thinks that you can't repeal this because it won't pass the House, given how many companies that have EV factories in the South. And so I think we're going to see a very interesting political test of a Trump administration objective and something that might be a little bit harder to pass through the House than you might have expected. I'm just kind of curious where this goes and who wins in the near term.

Okay, this is a multifaceted story, I believe. I don't have any inside information, less anybody think I talked to the administration or to any particular friends of mine. Very simple. You can buy a used EV right now for 10 to 25k. My Model X I've had forever with which has relatively low miles on it, like maybe 50 or 60,000 miles is worth like 15,000 to $20,000 for a model X. It's crazy how many of these EVs are available at such low prices. And the battery packs, everybody was like oh, battery pack after 10 years is done. It's like quite the opposite. They seem to be like maybe 10% degradation, which with soup, which means they're perfect for a city car or even like a suburban car. No problem. That's a suburban car. Maybe if you had to drive, I would say three, four hours a day. Yeah, you're gonna probably want to get a newer one with a 300 mile battery pack as opposed to the older ones, which had typically 150 to 250 mile battery packs. So I do think maybe these are unnecessary now. I don't like you. I don't mind spending a little bit of money, of taxpayer money to do this because it will take, literally it'll, it'll give back, I think years of life to people in certain cities where we used to have smog problems. And it sounds crazy, but there was a study done out of Berkeley. I don't have it in front of me here, but this study showed that in Shanghai and cities in China where there were smog problems, it was literally taking, it was the equivalent of people smoking a pack of cigarettes a day or two packs of cigarettes a day, depending on which city you in. This is a 10 year old study was bad. I talked about it here on the show. As those cities have gotten cleaner and they are really pushing EVs there. That means everybody gets back like years of their life. And you know, these are cities with 20, 30 million people in it. So if everybody, if 30 million people get back, five years is 150 years, you know, 150 million years of human existence, which is beautiful to survive that so. But if you look at what he said with the cyber taxi that they can make those for 30k, maybe it gets to 20. If there was a $20,000, $30,000 EV right now, they would not be able to keep them in stock. I believe the reason Tesla stock is, you know, so high is because they will and I have no information. Always give that disclaimer. I'm just guessing that that cyber taxi there's going to be a hatchback, like a two door version of that with the steering wheel. Just a guess because if that existed, I would have ordered two on the first day. I literally would have ordered two and had those for, you know, me to drive and the bigger cars for when I'm with the kids and just take a smaller car that zippy with two seats in it. Why not? I would love to have like a two seat, $30,000 car to just zip around in. Long way of saying when the free market solves a problem, I think it's a good idea that we step back. There are lots of dynamics that we're going to see over and over again. You pointed it out this, and so this dovetails with Doge. So both of these impact Elon and his role. I think this is brilliant because it gives Elon the high ground in terms of, well, if I helped, you know, Trump with his administration And I'm helping cut costs. And I was the first one who said, you know what, I wouldn't be surprised if Elon tweets like, yeah, I'm in favor of it. Take, take the subsidies away from everybody. The government doesn't need to pay for them anymore. If he said that, that might take a big, it might give a hit to Tesla stock. I'm unsure how much of what they do, you know, the subsidies drive at this point, but it would be the high ground. And the same thing with rural Internet. I mean, I said this publicly. Why are we paying for rural Internet when Starlink exists? And there's five competitors to Starlink that are in some process of getting their satellites out. In fact, SpaceX is putting them up for them. So why on earth would we get involved in rural broadband and run fiber lines when those same people are ordering Starlings today while they wait for the government to run a $20,000 fiber line. This is why Doge is so brilliant. If they get it done, these are the kind of low hanging fruit, just cancel these. And you pointed it out perfectly. Will politicians, under the direction of Trump, Vivek, Elon, start giving back money and not taking the money that they fought really hard for, for their constituents to, you know, bring jobs to their region, to bring economic value? Will they give that money back and let the taxpayers not have to pay as much tax? That's really fundamentally what we're going to be talking about here. And it is a tragedy of the commons because everybody has to agree, smaller government, less spending. And you can't have like Alabama say to Colorado, yeah, you give up X, Y and Z. We're not giving it up. We need it more than you. And that's the standoff that we're going to have over the next couple of years. It's going to be messy as hell.

It's going to be very, very messy as hell. But I just do think though that there are sometimes we use money in a way that does help accelerate change. That can be very positive. And I'm worried of the following possible chain reaction. Tax credit goes away. Every non Tesla major American car company pulls back from electric and then the electrification of the American car fleet gets set back 10 or 15 years and we have more pollution and more dependence on the variability of oil prices, which we are the biggest producer in the world now. Hell yeah. But is that the future we want to be leaning into or more into electric and solar and green and so forth? And I think you and I share perspective on the fate of the question on that. Yeah.

Do you believe it should be a state's issue or a federal issue, the tax credits for EVs tax and the standards for them? Because we do have in California, like I wonder sometimes if the federal government, you know, is too big, too involved and that states could mitigate this. And if in Texas they don't have a tax, an additional tax and additional rules on how clean gasoline is, people can live in Texas and make their decision. If you want to pay 4 or 5, an extra dollar per gallon of tax in California and have cleaner air and have different standards for how many miles per gallon it has to be, would that not be better? And then car companies could say, you know what? Screw, we're not going to make this model of car. If you want to have a suburban, it's not available in California, but it's available in these other states. California gave us some standards we didn't want to hit. But you can buy to these other states. And then people like, you know, it's too frustrating to live in California. California's got to react to it. And we keep the 50 states. Dare I say this parallels the abortion debate and then it parallels the gambling, online gambling debate and it parallels the debate around cannabis. And it seems like the way to make progress sometimes is to let the states fight it out and let them come to their own conclusions on a very local basis. I don't know your thoughts.

Well, I think letting the states lead is, is often a good way to go about things. I mean, why has Texas always had outsized influence on American education via textbooks? Well, they have a unified system, they buy a lot of textbooks. And so Texas educational standards have long had outsized influence on the rest of of the nation. Yeah, it's. If you're into keeping religion out of schools, it's one of your things you keep tabs on. But California has even more population than Texas does. I think California's 39 million. Texas is roughly 30 million. These are the two largest states by population, by the way. Florida's number three, then New York. But we're always going to have large states wanting to push their own perspectives and agendas. So ERCOT in Texas, Texas independence, you know, we can do it our own. And then California, the sixth largest economy in the world, has its own standards. I think it would be a mistake for the federal government to say to individual states, you can't have stricter standards. But I think it would be difficult if we could say there's a federal standard and you could have A looser one at the state level because then you have a tension between who's in charge. So I think California should be allowed to have its own rules and should be allowed to throw its weight around because that is one of the laboratories of democracy, it's one of the states. So I'm hoping, and getting back into politics, I'm hoping that the Trump administration doesn't preclude California's ability to set regulations about cars like we're hearing. They might because that would set us back even further. So I don't know. I want self driving electric cars and big batteries. That's what I want here is to get there faster.

By the way. Good job. Producer John Berkeley Earth 2015 article Air pollution location equivalent in cigarettes per day in US the average person because of pollution in this 2020, 2015 article was smoking.4 cigarettes a day in Shen Yang, the worst ever recorded. Who is the equivalent of smoking? You want to guess or are you looking at it?

I saw it.

63 cigarettes a day. That's three packs of cigarettes, Beijing average four on a bad day, 25. So you just think about that. You know, you're, and, and the tragedy of this is, you know, to tell your kids not to smoke cigarettes and then you live in Shanghai or Beijing or wherever and, or one of these other, you know, industrial cities and they're your kids. Babies are smoking 60 packs of cigarettes a day. That's not good.

So Jason, you've smoked cigarettes before, I.

Presume, and yeah, I like a cigar. Okay. You know, to this day I'll still smoke a little cigar once in a while.

Yeah, I used to smoke cigarettes before I, I gave that up. Yeah. For. Well, I used to drink a lot. And they too kind of go hand in hand.

Yes, they do.

Let me tell you, if you smoke a pack of cigarettes, which is 20, you feel it the next day. You don't feel really. I always did like a pack a day is a lot of cigarettes. That's, that's.

How many cigarettes is not discernible. You smoke to a day, you wouldn't feel it the next day.

Because for me it was always paired with alcohol. I can't see the two. But my point is a pack a day is a lot. Two packs a day is a lot. 60 cigarettes a day. I mean that's, that's like you're punished.

By your dad and he puts you in the closet because he caught you and he says, okay, you smoke these three packs and they do a feel so nauseous. You never go near him again. That happened to me with, when I, I did three shots of gin when I was like 13 or 14 years old and man, maybe it was like five shots and I just never, I see, I see that Tanqueray bottle, that green bottle, I literally will feel like I'm about to pass out. There's some other things on the docket I wanted to get to. I think this Poly Market story is super important because. Well, yeah, I hate to everything seems to go back to politics this day but you know, these days. But Poly Market has captured people's imagination. You know where I stand. Adults should be able to do what they want with their money and we should allow accredited, non accredited people to become accredited through a simple test. And yeah, there's so many ways to skin the cats. I don't know why you can go to Vegas or you can do online poker in I don't know, three out of five states but you can't place a bet on the election. Seems kind of stupid to me but there seems to have been an FBI raid on the CEO. This is all confirmed now I think maybe take us to the story. The FBI raided the CEO of Polymarkets home, kicked down the door at 6am and took his devices. I heard. I don't know this is all true but this seems pretty dramatic and it happened five days after the election and Polymarket was the number one of the top searches on the Internet and they obviously predicted absolutely correctly, you know, in those final couple of weeks, months, the election results, I mean down to the state it seems they got right in some cases. So yeah, the story.

Okay, so the FBI carried out a search of Shane Copeland's house. He lives in New York City. Now keep in mind he is the CEO of Polymarket. Polymarket is putatively not open to US residents and there's been quite a lot of back and forth between governmenting, sorry regulatory bodies in the American government and so called prediction market. So Jason, that's Polymarket and also Kalshi which critically has been open to people in the United States. So there's a lot of back history here Jason. And I don't know how much of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission or CFTC we want to get in here. But the gist as far as I can tell is that looking broadly at prediction markets and the US government, the CFTC felt that these types of wagers on what are called, I think event based binary options, essentially you make a bet, doesn't mean happen, doesn't mean not happen, should not be allowed to target elections because there's concern that if you introduce gambling on or investing if you wish, on elections, it can increase the chance of meddling. And this is also, by the way, something that comes up in sports a lot. It's why athletes aren't allowed to bet on their own games, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Google Shohei Ohtani baseball, gambling, if you want more on that. But the CFTC got its butt kicked repeatedly in federal, in different courts. And so by the end you could, on Kalshi, I believe, bet on the election. Now, polymarket different. And I think this is going to hinge probably, Jason, on if polymarket did enough to prevent US citizens from using its service. Now, I know you're a poker player and I know you've played online. I'm sure you remember Block Friday and how we all had to go use VPNs for a while. Do you think that's the same issue here with polymarket?

I suspect that's what's happening. The regulatory bodies should not get to determine how Americans spend their money, except maybe on the margins on, you know, extremely dangerous things. But I don't see the harm in placing a bet on political candidates. You can do it in Vegas, you could do it outside the country. So it's going to happen no matter what you do. And maybe a little transparency, maybe upper bounds or limits on them. So if you bet over $100,000, you have to have your name associated with it. Or there could be other rules because, yeah, perhaps at the edge of the margin, I don't know, some incredibly wealthy person could manipulate the market if it didn't have enough liquidity to give a perception that a certain candidate was running. Let's take it out of the presidential politics. Let's pick a smaller one like the mayor race or something. And so a rich person runs for mayor. They get 10 rich friends to place bets on these markets in a very coordinated way. They paint the tape. You can look that up. It's a way of making or wash trades, trades that make it look like there's more volume than there is. This is something that happened in crypto. A whole bunch people thought, oh my God, I'm going to buy this NFT. It's traded 50 times in, in the last two months. So I'll just be the 51st trade and then I'll flip it. And it turns out the other 50 trades were the same two or three people with 10 fake accounts each trading it. And then you're the, what's called the bag holder wash, trading, painting, the tape. These things exist. There's regulations around them for a reason. The same regulations could apply to prediction markets. And just like you're not allowed as an NBA player or an owner, I believe, or a referee to gamble because we saw what happened with the Tim Donaghy NBA scandal. I think he was telling mobsters, I believe, or gamblers who was going to be the umpires, who are going to be the officials at a basketball game. And based on who is officiating a game, you could get a bet in early because you knew their patterns. This is like really, really, you know, interesting. Sharp, because if you get a 2, 3, 4% advantage and you're placing a lot of bets over time, it could be a tremendous advantage. Putting all this aside, I suspect what happened here because it's now conspiracy theory corner time. Everybody's paralleling this to the Hunter Biden laptop case in which the FBI was able to get that story banned or, you know, the link to the story in the New York Post ban. And they were able to do that because they said, hey, this is Russian interference. That seems pretty logical because Trump himself did ask Russia to hack Hillary's thing. And the Russians were doing all kinds of shenanigans. They always do shenanigans. They're like, it's kind of what they do, right? It's the place is run by a KGB agent. Doesn't mean that Trump is a Manchurian Candidate, but you could, you could believe Trump is not a Manchurian Candidate and there's no pee tape. And then on the other side, believe the Russians do interfere. And of course they do. So the FBI has got egg on its face, as do all the people who signed off on saying, hey, this thing is not real. Turned out to be real. They shouldn't have banned it. Public should have been able to figure it out. But that was a really difficult decision to make, I think, a couple of weeks before an election, in fairness. But it does seem like there was some conspiracy or cover up there. Now everybody's saying this is a conspiracy or cover up. So what do we. How do we process that? Because I'm starting to think about it in game theory, and I'll give you my position on it after you queue it up. But there's a lot of conspiracy corner going on here. I don't have my tinfoil hat. Got to keep one here. But if I put my Alex Jones tinfoil hat on. Oh, the globalist conspiracy Holly market. I put the sharp money on Peter Thiel. I Mean, like, where are we supposed to even go with this? Right? Like they did, did they? Is this Benj? Is this revenge because Trump won? I don't understand. I don't think that they've got the cause and the correlation. I think they may know the correlation, but not the causation here. Anyway, tell me what's going on.

Well, I think the reason why politics is inescapable in this case is that polymarket is backed by Founders Fund. Founders Fund, of course, is associated with Peter Thiel, and there's a lot of money from the Peter Thiel world that went into backing a Trump victory. So if you are Shane Copeland and you just got raided by the FBI and they just took your devices and you want to rally people to your side, what do you do? You get on X and you make a tweet that says, and I quote here. It's discouraging that the current administration would seek a last ditch effort to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents. To me, this is the epitome of what is usually dismissively called virtue signaling. And I don't think it's what's going on. So people talk a lot about government and how they use the law. My favorite example of this recently is that when Hunter Biden was in trouble with law, Joe Biden was like, well, it'll play itself out and we'll see what happens and let that process go. Letting his son get essentially pilloried in the press and in court and look terrible. And he kept telling him, I love you, but we'll see this through. That's the guy we're talking about. Not the type of guy who waits until after an election to go after a thing. The timing just doesn't make sense to me here. So, Shane, 10 points for rallying, you know, your team to your side. Good job grabbing the news cycle. I just don't think that it's true.

You know, I believe that many conspiracy theories come true, but the majority don't. Okay, so let me just put out my general concept on conspiracy theories. Sometimes yesterday's conspiracy theory is tomorrow's Pulitzer. We saw that with the Catholic Church. I talk about that example all the time. You know, people thought it was a conspiracy theory, that that was the world's largest pedophilia ring. Turned out to be true. So let's put it aside and congratulations to the team at the Boston Globe. Incredible research and investigative journalism for decades to uncover this incredibly just abhorrent cover up that occurred in the Catholic Church. Put all that aside, in this case, I'm trying to figure out if you were going to do this. Mm. And you're the FBI and it's a conspiracy theory. Okay. What are you trying to accomplish? If you went after them six months before the election and you did it, that would mean you believed that they had an impact on the election. And that election impact, if they were Democrats in the FBI who are doing this, would hurt their team, and they would stop it before it could hurt their team. But there would also. People have to also recognize that the overwhelming majority of law enforcement is conservative. Like 60 or 70% are conservatives.

Jason, just to add to that, the divide, the classic divide, is that the FBI is more conservative and the CIA is more liberal. Just to give everyone some background.

Yeah, I wasn't aware of that, but I just know from being in a family of law enforcement and being around it my whole life. Pretty conservative.

Like, very conservative.

Very conservative. Like, the only time it wasn't conservative, where maybe in, like, the Northeast, you would have, like, a union, and the Democrats would fight harder for getting a union, you know, pay increases. And the Republicans want smaller government. This is historical. This no longer applies. It seems the government, you know, would be, you know, save the government money. Was the classical, you know, not give in to the unions and their demands. Putting all that aside on a game theory. Okay, you want to do what now? Punish them, Stop them because the election results are done? Or is there. Is there some greater conspiracy here? Where? We don't know, but maybe they have evidence that there was a coordinated effort to manipulate the market, and they want that to be on record between now and the new year when Trump takes over the Justice Department. So let's say there was some coordinated attack, and, I don't know, Shane became aware of it or something, or there was market manipulation, but I don't think the market manipulation would have any impact on the election. So I don't think the prediction markets influence people's voting. I don't. I mean, it's such a niche thing that, like, am I going to not vote for Kamala? Because I see the prediction market is $0.60 to $0.40. I don't think so. If I'm a Democrat, I'm going to vote for her. If I'm a Republican, I'm going to vote for Trump. Like, it's already baked in. And then the moderates in the middle who are, like, quirky people like me. I don't know where you stand on that. But, you know, the people who are double haters, is polymarket's having no impact on me. All my best friends were lobbying me to come out for Trump publicly and I didn't do it. That would have a much bigger influence on me. Is my high profile friends asking me to support Trump and me taking all these arrows because I refuse to. So I just can't figure out the logic of this case which is another way of saying it's probably true that people cheated and pretended they were outside the country and placed bets. I don't think that's polymarket's responsibility. I'll be totally honest. If people cheat and they get fake ID and they go to a bar and the bar checked your ID or they check ID on a regular basis and you order a drink, that's on you, that's on the person who came through. And so I don't know, I think that this, to me it smells fishy. But we don't have complete information. Let's wait for complete information. I bet you this is like a ticky tacky. I think this is most likely a ticky tacky. There were some cases of people using a VPN and somebody said hey Shane, we caught some people. And he probably said okay, yeah, ban their accounts or yeah, let's you know, refer it to the compliance department, which is what I would do as CEO. So this seems very strange to me and I like the idea of waiting over speculating. Even though I just speculated for 10 minutes with you.

I know, I know you and I can't help ourselves. Two things to add to that really quick. One is main character syndrome. The prediction markets inside of, I would say right leaning venture circles have been anointed with the mantle of Oracle and they are now treated as essentially reality writ chart. Cool. I think they're neat. I check them, I use them as one data point in a mix. But hey, a lot of people really do think that they are the future. So if you are that person, especially if you're the center of the storm, the CEO of the company itself, probably you feel like you're a nail and everything else is a hammer.

I get that.

The other thing that I'm going to say is the CFTC had a settlement with Polymarket. I think this was back in 2022. J. I think it was like a. I'm sorry, it was like a $1.4 million settlement. But the point is they've already been on the CFTC's radar. So I asked Kalshi.

Right. And the other one predict it. Yeah, I mean there's been like oh wait, did you say poly market or predict it?

Poly market.

Polymarker, yeah. Predicted. Also had a judgment against it, I think. And Kalshi obviously had a legal battle to do all this.

So I want to say one more thing though, which is that I don't think the regulators here are the devil. I know that's not a popular sentiment in technology right now, but I think they're trying to enforce the rules as they're currently written. So maybe instead of constantly just, you know, whacking regulators with sticks, we should go to Congress and shake up the actual underlying rules that we're using and then allow for transparency in the prediction markets to allow adults to do whatever they want without the concerns that we have about transparency and wash trading and manipulation and so forth. But no, I don't think most people pay attention to this at all. I don't think it changes votes. And I think this is, this is peak nerdery and I bet you it comes down to kyc, which, which is pretty frequent in the world of fintech.

That is probably correct. I and by the way, I, I know Shane. I've met him. He was on the, the live stream. If you're running a big enterprise like this and it's going really well, you don't need to break the rules. Like there's no upside in him breaking the rules. So I don'. I mean, I would be incredibly, incredibly shocked and disappointed frankly if there was anything that he did was that was not by the books when you run a prediction market. I knew this because, you know, I was an investor in Uber, which was known to, you know, have some disputes with regulators from time to time.

Oh really?

Yeah. And you know what you do, you have a lot of lawyers, you're buttoned up, you're very thoughtful about these things, even though from the outside it may look chaotic. You're very strategic. Like you have a lot of people discussing every one of these issues and doing the right thing. And yes, maybe saying we disagree with how ride sharing works in San Francisco or how you interpret it or how the taxi lobby interprets it in New York and how our attorneys and we interpret it and we are willing to fight that fight. Long story short, let's wait for the facts to come out, folks. Let's not jump to some crazy conclusions here. Either way, I think it's going to be a ticky, tacky, minor thing that's going on here and sometimes the FBI, you know, goes on little adventures because they get some tips or something like that and it all Turns out to be like either, like a ticky, tacky fine, you know, here's your $100,001 million fine. You could have done a better job here and here. And that's just part of business. So I'm guessing that's what this is going to be, some ticky, tacky little thing where somebody signed up. Now there should be some thoughtfulness around the whales in the system. When we started this, any wells in the system, the percentage of wells, the protocols you're using, I know they use a specific protocol, the UMA protocol here, the transparency, all that stuff should be above board and people should know what's going on in these marketplaces because I do think any system that could be abused will be abused and market manipulation would probably be not foreign actors, more likely foreign actors looking to make money. So a lot of times when foreign actors get involved in this, what people forget is sometimes they're from regions where the foreign actors are like the mafia in that country. And they like money.

Yes.

And a lot of the hacking that occurs is more about money than the nation state. And the nation state allows these hacking groups to, to use hacking to make money and then they get to use them also for other nefarious things like hacking into a political candidates, you know, Gmail, which they did, I think for J.D. vance and Trump this time around. And none of the press would print those hacks, am I correct? And that's, that's how that one wound up.

Ken. Ken. I can't pronounce his last name, can I? Something like that did post it and then ironically got in some trouble with social media bosses. But I think we now have kind of decided that nation state based hacking materials probably shouldn't be used. I have various conflicting views about that because on one hand, you know, availability of information, on the other hand, rewarding foreign actors, it's, it's dicey. But I, I do think we're going to learn a lot more here. And just to wrap this up, the U.S. attorney's office and the FBI as of the time we compiled our notes, but now we go had not commented. So more to come here. We will be tracking the story, we will talk about it more and if this is political meddling into polymarket, we'll call it out as such. But I agree with Jason. I think this is going to be something much more ticky, tacky and regular.

We're going to talk about it on all in tomorrow. I saw it's on the doc tomorrow. So if you want to hear the besties as well. I'm going to have this conversation all over again tomorrow.

All right, Jason, just to wrap up this week, I want to end with kind of a good old fashioned startup topic because this is this week in startups. And you and I both read through the latest Y Combinator request for startups. They put this out under the banner of it's the golden age for building. And just quoting from them, it seems like we're entering a golden age of building and we can use it to build things and make the country better. So to me, very much wrapped up in that mantle of American dynamism. And I think it's a medium good list, but a little bit less out there than I expected. How do you want to do this? Do you want me to tell you what I'm thinking or do you want to take the first stab at this?

Okay, so YC requested startups. And this means, hey, if you don't have an idea, here's some places you might go look around to, you know, markets basically. And so just to give people some context, Y Combinator is an accelerator. We have an accelerator as well. It's called Launch Accelerator. And sometimes founders come and they have skills and you have a team, but they're not sure exactly where to look for an opportunity. So sometimes this can just creatively get the juices flowing. And so here we are. I think maybe tell me, why don't we do this? You tell me which one you think has got the most potential to build a unicorn startup and then I'll give you which one I think has the most potential.

Okay, that's really tough because I have, I have several favorites, but I shall pick amongst my children and I will put stable coins in the number two spot and I'll put space companies on top of.

Okay, so you got space companies and stablecoins. So let's start with space companies. Some of the bullet points here say capitalize on 10x launch cost reduction. Okay? We know that that's what Spacecrack has enabled. You can get things into space. This is a continuing discussion. There's tons of companies already build businesses around satellite applications, okay? Satellites are already up there. You build the business around the existing infrastructure. Create infrastructure for routine space access. Okay? So I think this is an interesting idea. It's kind of in the review mirror already. I think founders already know about it. On stablecoins, you have build business focused stablecoin management platforms, okay? Platforms that allow you to use stable coins within a business. In other words, stripe for stable coins. Interesting. I Think if there's going to be a stripe for Stable Coins, Stripe's going to launch it. I think we're going to see Coinbase Stripe, Robinhood. I don't have inside information on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if every fintech company has their own built in stablecoin. I know FTX was working on one. Develop easy integration tools for developers, focus on cross border payments and remnants. Yeah, these are all interesting.

I, I take it though, you don't walk stoked about my choices.

I, I, I'm, I, I think maybe I'm a little jaded because I'm in this business that I think these are obvious space and stable coins. But I, I think Stable coins is actually probably more interesting than space because I think space aware of I haven't really thought about stablecoins 2.0. It's the first time I've ever heard somebody say stablecoins 2.0. Tell me what your thoughts are on Stable Coins since I find that a fascinating place for startups to be built.

Okay, so if you aren't familiar, stablecoins are digital currencies that are pegged to a specific fiat currency. Mostly Jason, this is the dollar. It's by far the most popular stablecoin peg and so that means you can buy a token that is worth a dollar and then you can exchange it back for a dollar. So these companies essentially take in actual hand out digital tokens and then sit on the reserves, make a lot of money circle. We've had Jeremy Allaire on the program, I think several times. They can build big businesses. Very cool. That's all stablecoins1.o I think what happens with stablecoins2.o is we begin to see other countries that have their own currencies lose their local primacy. And by that I mean once you let people around the world anywhere execute their financial life in dollars, they're going to, it's more stable, it's more accepted. And So I think stablecoins 2.0 are the startups that are out in developing markets that bring broad access to the dollar or perhaps the euro, pick your currency to the local market and disrupt entire economies that are currently priced in the local currency. So to me that's the, the possibility here. It's getting people a better currency digitally across the Internet and there's going to be a lot of business applications for that both locally and in terms of connecting them to the broader U.S. economy. So I think it's bullish for us, bullish for smaller consumers and there's going to be a lot of cool tech there. So I don't know, it just, it feels very democratizing.

Yeah, I mean it does feel like it will lower fees when you transfer money around. And for places in frontier or emerging markets where you have destabilized currencies, some might argue that's happening to the United States. It seems like an interesting place to look for ideas. So I, I do like that one as an idea. I think the reason why, you know, the Reddit discussion, the hacker news discussions were a little bit negative. I noticed some negativity when we looked at some of the threads and people talking about it just broadly is because some of this is obvious. I think a lot of these are obvious. Let's go through some of the other ones. I do think stablecoin is an interesting one. Government software, AI software to automate government administrative tasks, target large scale operations like form processing, application reviews. I mean all this stuff has been going along so. And build solutions for citizen facing services, DMV permits and licensing. I think all these are interesting ideas. When I was in the Middle east, government software was a very top down, high order bit in Saudi and uae. In other words, the honorable rulers of those countries had said just, they had basically said to anybody working in government, make this more efficient or you're out and you lose your job. I want to see massive efficiency. So it's an obvious one. And maybe with Doge and people saying there you go, you know, that is actually some really good advice is that maybe selling into these will be less about corruption and more about efficiency and saving dollars. And when you say I have a way for making renewing licenses 10 times cheaper and twice as secure, maybe Vivek will tweet that and maybe Elon will say, good idea. And then all of a sudden you've got the public saying, yeah, I would rather use that system where I take out my phone, I make a video of myself saying, this is Jason Calacanis, I live at this address, I want my driver's license, here's a picture of my license plate. And you know, I'm okay with you stamping the location of where I am right now and you putting this into a database. And that would be a more secure way of getting a driver's license as opposed to putting a form in. And then you've got a video of me asking for my drive. I'm just spitballing here folks, but that would be harder to fake, right? And me actually making a video of my license plate and having AI process that video where it made thumbnails of my license plate, my VIN number, all that stuff could be in a video. I submit the video, AI process it frame by frame. It knows who I am and it makes me a driver's license and does my registration from a video. Pretty interesting. Pretty interesting. So I like that one a lot. You were going to add?

Well, no, I just, I think it's a great idea, especially because I look, government is what we do together, but no one's gone to the DMV and left enthusiastic about how it works. So I think if we can apply software and startups to that, that's great. I'm a little skeptical at the pace of federal procurement and how that will impact startup growth curves. But perhaps we are moving on to a new, a new era. But that's a cool one. Boring, but possibly useful. But again, Jason, to your point a.

Little bit, obviously, yeah. Public safety technology. I like this one. Advanced computer vision. Develop privacy preserving surveillance. I've talked on this show about density IO One of the things that I got wrong about density when I made that investment was I constantly talking about like, can we do this with a camera? And they're like, privacy. People don't want to have a camera over them, you know, at their office. And I'm like, fair enough. But I go to offices and there's cameras in the hallway. So can't you count the people there? They're like, you can. It's creepy. Nobody wants it. And then certainly in an Airbnb, nobody wants it. As we've seen, you can get arrested for putting hidden cameras in and people do the waffle that little people counter, you know, having that. There's a, there's a version of that for sound. I got pitched on a company that has a thing that plugs into the wall and it just records the sound level. Now it's not recording what you're doing, it's just recording decibels. And when you make a product like that and it's has on it what it does and what it doesn't do and it's from a company, you know, you could be like, okay, that's a better way to do it because I can take a picture of that. Airbnb has said, hey, this is, this doesn't record you, but it does do sound levels. If the sound in a space and if you put it outside, even better. And people know it's there. If you knew the sound level was too high for the neighborhood and you hit 100 decibels and it just sends a text. The decibel reader outside on the porch doesn't record you. It's from this company. The text message is. And the email is from that company. And that company's emailing the host and the guest through the API. You just hit 110 decibels. Can you turn it down? That's going to save a lot of agit or whatever. So I like that privacy enabled stuff. Very, very good.

I'm just imagining now like a, like a teenager, you know, their parents go away for the weekend and they have a couple of friends over, you know, on the DL and then they turn the up a little bit and then it texts their parents and then you. There's, there's. I think it's cool.

Yeah, I have it in my Tesla's. Now if the Tesla goes above 90 miles an hour, I have it set to speed limit at like 85 or whatever, plus 10, whatever the speed limit is. And it sends an alert. So only two people driving these cars. If I go too fast, my wife knows, if she goes too fast, I get an alert. It's just a way of like putting some, you know, if you measure it, you can manage it. I don't want anybody dying. I want to keep my family around. So that's like a great way where you can put some rules on yourself to maintain some, you know, lack of speeding in your family. And certainly if, when my kids start driving, if they ever do, I don't want them going above the speed limit more than 5, 10 miles an hour. So great.

How do you, how do you square the, the Texas ethos, you know, the yeehaw, Lone Star. And you and I wanted to keep our kids alive because I feel like there's. You and I at times have this libertarian ethos. Adults should be able to do what they want. You know, it's their money, it's their time. And then we talk about like, you know, limits on cars and sound and such. And so does this all hinge on the age of majority essentially? Because I don't think once my kids.

Are 18, there's opting into it. Right. So if you, in both examples I'm giving, this is me opting into it, right? I put, I have an Airbnb. I decide to stay in an Airbnb that has rules around sound and I decided my cars to do that. Now on the public roads, I think you could have a reasonable discussion as to what the speed limit is on public roads, because that's shared. And I'm fine with 85 miles an hour as the upper speed limit. I would like to see cars if we're going to. If I'm going to live, if I was going to live in a state with, you know, a really high upper limit, I think a way to do that, and we have the technology to do that, is if you want to go 100 miles per hour, you know, like really fast, it has to be on certain highways, straightaways, etc. And it has to be the left lane and there has to be some left lane rules. And you have to be in a car that hits certain standards. ABS brakes, you know, certain tires, certain maintenance, and maybe certain insurance. So that would be a way, you know, to take libertarian values and, you know, a shared interest in each other. Maybe you have to pay more in insurance to have to go that fast. Maybe you have to have an easy pass that you pay a certain amount to go that fast. There could be some creative solutions there that technology enables. So kind of.

I hope so. I would love, I'd love to go faster, but let's just run through one or two more of these. Jason, I want to flip it back on you. You asked me which of these do I think are the most interesting, the most compelling? So, I mean, putting it to you, which one of these really, you know, bakes your casserole?

Okay, the one that I was perplexed by. And which then when you're confused by what the person actually means, that means there might be something there. So whoever put 1 million jobs 2.0, create sustainable human centric job platforms, focus on jobs that I can't replace. Build tools for independent business owners. I kind of like this one. Buildtools for independent business owners. By the way, that's Stripe, that's HubSpot, Small Business Owners, that's FreshBooks. You know, anything that helps somebody be a company of one or two or three, I think is a really smart idea. So Freelance Nation, something we talked about 20 years ago would happen because of the Internet. It's happening today. And then maybe aggregating in the way Uber has. Uber is now as much a platform for transporting stuff as it is a platform for work and on demand work. So they have now started doing kind of like an assistant in Uber. This is a Uber product. So anyway, there was like Uber for retail workers. So there was an experiment, I believe in Florida. Dara talked about it on a recent, recent earnings call. The concept is very simply, you need somebody for 30, 40 bucks an hour to help you with household tasks or business tasks. So You're a retail outlet. You need a cashier, you need somebody to agree to. You could go into Uber and order one for 40 bucks an hour. Uber takes 25%. They take 10 bucks an hour. You get somebody for 30 bucks an hour. So if you needed somebody for a week at your restaurant to be the maitre d, the greeter, you could just order that from Uber for a shift or two. And those like on demand work platforms, there's a couple of different ones out there that sort people into buckets and there's many of them doing retail right now. There's many of them helping with the stuff. We have one, hey hire, which helps hire people for jobs in retail. And they're doing very well. They're actually based here in Austin, Texas. So there's a bunch of different platforms there. So I do like that one the best, I think.

Okay, well I, I think that's kind of a contrarian. I thought you were going to go for the LLMs for chip design. Because what they're discussing in that particular bullet point is it's exciting to me, lower energy, higher performance, but that's optimistic. I just looked up Fiverr, Jason F I V E R R public and they're worth 1 billion. You should just get darrowed by them and then just meld that into Uber and then ta da, huge demand. And therefore Uber is much more a platform for work than just having people bring me burritos and donuts in the morning.

Well, you know, Fiverr is an interesting company because it was worth the market cap. It's worth $28 a share. But during Zurb, if you look at it, man, it had just boomed. So right now its market cap is 1 billion, but I think its market cap was like 10 billion at one point. There's been a lot of fear that AI and generative AI specifically would kill that company. And if you look their peak valuation was in 2021, if you look at the five year chart. And what date was Chat GPT 3.5 launch? Chat GPT 3.5 was launched on November of 2022. And so I think that's where it kind of went into the public consciousness. So I, you know, I think they got hit pretty hard since 2022, but November 2022 it was trading. Yeah, that was trading at 35, so it's actually the same. But I do think, you know, maybe that's the peak Zerb era. But I do think the LLM started to make people think that freelancers on a marketplace like that would get less work. I think it's going to be the opposite. I don't know what the revenue is. I think what's happening is a place like Fiverr is going to become more valuable because it's going to be your. You're going to hire somebody using AI and the prices will go down and what they build for you go up. And I think the quality level, I think the number one thing of any gig platform, whether it's Fiverr or there's a couple of other competitors to it for coding and for other things.

Sure.

The issue has always been quality level. Is it going to be really good quality? And I think those people using LLMs generative AI co pilots is going to make the quality go up to the level that more people will use it. That's the only complaint I ever heard about a Fiver was variable quality.

Yeah.

And now I think we're going to have something completely different. We're going to get high quality.

I'm excited about that. Well, I mean, talk to Uber. I mean, maybe they could bring us all together. The thing that I want if I'm doing like Uber feature requests is I want to be able to hire a driver for like a five hour period.

You can do it whatever. By hour exists in a lot of markets. I use it all the time. I don't want to give this hat. Yeah, Uber hourly is two hours for a driver and it is called.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, Uber Hourly. It exists.

This has changed my life.

Okay. Yeah. So the reason I do this is I don't. God, I hate to give this tip, but you know how at some airports you have to walk a mile to get to the ride sharing area?

Yes.

It turns out Austin is one of those. What I do is I order an Uber for two hours and when I get off my flight, I have the Uber for two hours. I'm not that. I'm under an hour from the airport, like, like maybe a half hour. So I have it for two hours. I text the person, I say, hey, listen, I'm coming in, I'm landing at this time. I'd like you to pick me up at departures, not arrivals, pick me up at departures. I'll sit in the front seat, we can pretend we're friends and I'm going to stop and pick up dinner on the way home or whatever. And I will stop and I'll do a little shopping at the grocery store. I'll stop by Central Market by the airport. Really beautiful, like nice Whole Foods plus kind of store I pick up some stuff for dinner, whatever. I do a little shopping or I have dinner with the family, but I have the driver waiting for me and then I take it home for the rest of the way. But it turns out it's only $20 more for a 2 hour uber black than it is for the Uber Black to my house. So I just tell the driver, like, I'm doing this because I want to get picked up at the gate or at the curb and I might do a stop on the way home to pick something up. But I'm probably going to use your for an hour, not two. So consider the extra hour I paid for the tip. Really? I'm like, yes, I'm not going to use you for the full two hours, but it's a great service.

No, I'm going to, I'm going to use the heck out of this because I often want to go to concerts up in Massachusetts and I hate driving and my wife does not appreciate heavy metal and we have children at home. So I would love someone just to take me up there, draw me off, let me go to my concert, and then when I'm done, they're already there. Be home. I will pay for all of it. Okay.

I don't know if it exists in your market, but it exists and they're testing it in other markets. And this was one of the discussions I had with Dara at one point, which was adjacent markets do really well for them and like things that are pretty far away, you know, maybe it's a little bit more difficult. So adding hourly is like a really easy ad to build the product and it aligns with the core product and those things get massive adoption. And so I think that's the journey they're on is adding like quick adjacencies and getting massive adoption. So convenience stores, which I think was, what was the startup? GoPuff.

GoPuff, yeah.

Like adding the GoPuff features, I think, which they did for convenience stores. And they have like, I think they've tested like Uber's own version of GoPuff, which is like an Uber outlet store where they have their own stuff and they can get it to you real quick. But they also did a deal, I think with 7 11, CVS and Walgreens and those things are everywhere. So this is why I think Uber's undervalued in some ways, is they? Because of their lightweight model. And you have someone like Walgreens, McDonald's and Starbucks embracing Uber, which people said they never would, and now they have. Yeah. And I believe some of the services like GoPuff. Well, I think when I was in New York, GoPuff was an option on UberEats. So that's kind of interesting. Strange bedfellows, right? Remember we talked about competition the other day?

Yeah, competition.

If you're a GoPuff and Uber has many UberEats and DoorDash have many, many more customers than you, and you already have a storefront in Manhattan, why not let them place their order and give, you know, Uber or DoorDash a little bit of percentage and get more customers from your GoPuff store. And for Uber, it's like, okay, we're marketing GoPuff, but who cares? We have CVS in here, we have Walgreens. Why look at GoPuff any differently than we look at our own convenience stores or CVS and 7 11? So, yeah.

And also if you're doing it on the Uber app, Uber owns the customer. GoPuff doesn't. So I. I think that makes a lot of sense.

I think on the YC list, what I wanted to say about the YC list, it's awesome. They put it out. It's awesome to inspire people, but you got to come up with an idea that you personally really want to work on for 10 years. So keep that in mind. I don't advise founders take my list of requests or any VCs or any accelerators list and start there. Start with something that matters personally to you. If you can't find something that personally matters to you and your team, I think these lists are great for brainstorming. Yeah. So the way we just debated it, maybe you can get your juices flowing by going through this list. So I think these lists do serve that purpose. But it's got to be something like, you don't want to create like a space company because you. To get into Y Combinator, create a space company because you really are going to wake up on day 2000 more excited than you are on day two or 200. And if you do something because a VC is interested in it, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be building a product that you're going to wake up one day and not want to go to work to build. So just. There's an important caveat there. No, no, dig to yc. It's a great thing about this list. I've made these kind of lists before, too.

Absolutely. I think that they even say, you know, you don't have to be doing anything on this list. But here's some stuff that we're excited about I want to talk about, and I think it's good to have more conversations about it. All right, Jason, we're going to leave it there for today. We've done a lot of live news shows this week. We have more coming next week. He's at Jason over on X. My name is at Alex. I'm over on X as well. And we'll see y' all next week.

Bye. Bye.