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Unknown A
But most people don't have your skin. And that's the thing. That's why I'm glad you're being empathetic. Because, yeah, the last show we were talking about how you won't close your DMs and I'm like, Close your DMs and you're like, no, I want to know.
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Unknown B
I want to know who the anonymous accounts are who are saying this stuff. I have security protocols like anybody in my profile here. I'll just tell a little story here. I had somebody dox me, person is upset because of something I said on the show, they decide to dox me. They decide to put my primary residence is worth $10 million. What do I know? Blah, blah, blah. You know how they got my photo? They went back two years to when took a picture of the tree line in my backyard. They reverse image searched it and they tweeted it. This is on July 4th weekend. I looked the guy up, I Google search him because I have security protocols. So now I gotta get the security company involved to find out if this person's gonna jump my fence. Right, Right. Okay. I finally got on LinkedIn.
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Unknown B
I look at the company. Hey, that company looks very familiar to me. I click the company. I know the CEO who he works for.
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Unknown A
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Unknown B
Hey everybody, welcome back to this week in Startups. We taped on Sunday because I'm going to be traveling. I'm going to be in Japan doing a little skiing. Last minute trip for a couple days but I will be recording the show. We might have to change the times a little bit because I'm, I don't know, 10, 12, 14 hours ahead of when we normally do it. But fear not, we will keep you updated. And with me again, my amazing co host, partner in crime, Alex Wilhelm. How are you doing sir? Happy Sunday.
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Unknown A
Doing fantastically. I love working on a Sunday because I feel ahead for the week and the good news for you and I is there's actually lots to talk about. I was a little worried. Start of the year, Sunday show, Is it going to be a lot of us telling jokes, but no, lots of news.
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Unknown B
I just want to say buckle up because it's going to be nuts this year. I'm just letting everybody know right now. The inside track is it's going to be chaotic in 2025, which means we've got a lot to talk about. A lot of change is going to happen. And one of the changes I asked Alex do some of the last minute was to start sharing our docket publicly with you, our amazing audience, and then to just really show you behind the curtains what we're going to talk about. About six or 12 hours in front of the show, which is when Alex gets working on this. This week in startups.com docket this week in startups.com docket will redirect you to a Notion page, shout out to our sponsor and partner, Notion, which is where we keep the show notes. And you'll see him building the docket in real time.
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Unknown B
And what that'll do is you'll get to follow along as we talk about these topics. If you're an insider, you'll get smarter. And what my big hope, Alex, is, is that you all will be engaged as producers. We did a really interesting thing in the first couple of years of the show. I was figuring out what the business model would be to pay for the team.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And we had this concept of anybody could be a producer of this week in startups. And I had cribbed that from Adam Curry, who was doing that on his no Agenda podcast at the time. And I wound up panning that because we had so much advertising, I didn't need the money. And I thought, I'll just go with ads. But the one thing that I think Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak. John Dvorak, now, what they got right was they have such an engaged audience. I forgot about no Agenda for a couple of years and then I started listening to it again, and it's actually quite good. And what I love about what John Dvorak, who I grew up on, he used to write for PC Magazine, which was a print magazine about PCs. And I always idolized John Dvorak, Jim Seymour, all the guys who wrote these columns, because I was obsessed with PCs in the 80s and my dream was to someday be a columnist in PC magazine.
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Unknown B
And of course, Adam Curry was, hey, it's Adam Curry. He watched the va. He was vj and I was like, well, that's a pretty cool gig too. So I love both of those guys, you know, they're like probably a decade or two ahead of me in careers, and I just thought they were great broadcasters and writers. Putting all that aside, that's such an activated audience and they do something called value for value. So you can provide value to them by writing show notes or suggesting stories or making album art, and then. Or you can make a donation, then they shout you out on the air. I'm not planning on doing that, but what I think is really interesting is that they just take the top 100 people who love the show, like the 0.01% or the 0.1%, whatever it is, and they've really engaged them.
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Unknown B
So that's what I'm hoping to do is take the Noti gang who have notifications turned on and just activate you in helping us build the docket. Because, hey, you might see us make a mistake or you might, you know, in the notes, or you might ask ChatGPT something and have a great question for us. So instead of waiting for on air to do that or your letters to the editor after the show is published, well, why not show you the docket ahead of time? And so anyway, that's the goal and we'll see how this experiment goes.
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Unknown A
I think it's really fun and what it's going to make me do, Jason, is use less shorthand because sometimes I might write something in an abbreviated form for you and I like, I might say trad infra and mean server tech from the 90s in context. But I'm going to have to be a little bit more explicit and I just want to share with everybody. We went through the permissions that are available for non staff members on the page and we're currently set to comments, so you should be able to drop a comment. If you're listening to this, please send me an email. Alex Wlaunch co. Um, if you can or can't leave a comment, I want to see how it's testing. It's a little hard for me to test with my own account, um, but would love your feedback there and I will see those live as we're going through work.
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Unknown A
But Jason, there is a story that is bubbling up on rich person Twitter and I need you to explain to me what's going on with Vail and why does everyone hate the cmo. I've pulled their earnings. I have looked into this, but it seems very strange. So give people a taste of ski Twitter. Sure.
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Unknown B
There was this Very innovative thing that happened a couple decades ago, which was the season pass for skiing. Now, if you were skiing in Wyndham, like Scott Adams, he lived in Windham, New York, and I used to ski there, you could get a season pass. But then Epic and Vale Resorts put together a consortium of mountains, and they bought a bunch of mountains, and you could buy the Epic Pass. And there's a competing one, the Icon Pass, and then there's another one called, like the Indy Pass, I think is all cost 300 to $1,000, and it means unlimited skiing.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
But what it meant for the mountains were they got to take the money in advance. This is a very important note that anybody who's an entrepreneur understands why this is important. Cash flow and secondly, subscriptions. So at the beginning of the season, now, Vail Resorts or any of these ski seasons, ski companies get all the money in advance. I have to buy my ticket, my season pass, I think by November, or else they stop selling them. So you can't go skiing in January and say, I'm going to go for a week. I'll buy the $600 pass. No, if you snooze, you lose. If you wait till the mountains open, you then have to pay per day. Lift tickets today in America are 150 to $300 per day. You're only on the mountain from nine to four. You might get like four hours of skiing in, you know, based on parking and everything.
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Unknown B
So you're talking about it's costing 50 to $100 an hour. You have a family go out, it' hundred dollars a day to rent skis. It's absurdly expensive. This is a elite, rich person sport. But you buy the season pass, a local one, for three or four hundred dollars, and you own your skis. You buy a season rental. Season rental for my kids, 150 bucks. There's lift tickets, 300. So I'm in for 450. Yeah, yeah. They've ski, I don't know, eight days so far. We'll do a spring season for another five days. They do 12. Let's say they do 15 days. Hey, for 500 bucks. Pretty good deal, right? Such a good deal that now too many people buy these passes. And there's no incentive for Vail Resorts, which owns the Epic Pass, to sell less of them because they get all this money in advance.
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Unknown B
It's all guaranteed. So if it's a bad season, let's say it's warm and they don't get as many ski dates, it doesn't matter. All the money comes in advance. They get to sit on your money, make interest on it, and they don't have to take loans out to run it. Anyway, cash flows the business brilliantly. But there's two problems. Number one, Vail is a cheap ass organization. In my estimation, they made a couple hundred million dollars and they're fighting in Park City, which is their premier location, really? Or one of the premier locations with the ski patrol. When I found out what ski patrol gets paid, it's less than a nanny gets paid. It's less than a housekeeper gets paid. It's not that there's any. I'm not saying anything derogatory about that, but these are, you know, serious professionals who go ski and rescue you if you get hurt.
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Unknown B
23 bucks an hour, they get paid, they're asking for 25. This cheap vail resort, which has hired, according to what I've read online, the chief marketing officer from Comcast, which is one of the most hated organizations for trying to unsubscribe, you know, and just known for terrible customer support. So Vail has the worst. Vale resorts, which run Epic Pass, has the worst customer support. And then they're at war with the people who run the mountain. The lines were extremely long. To get up the lift, the line should move person. And why were the lines long? They oversold Epic Passes like they always do. It's a holiday and they had to shut down multiple lifts because they didn't have their ski patrol. Not having ski patrols, like, I don't know, like not having your ambulance corp. So look at this chaos. People are furious. I think there's going to be many lawsuits anyway, none of this matters.
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Unknown B
Well, it's all a 1 percenter problem. But there's a lot of startup lessons in this insanity, good ones and bad. The Epic Pass was like unlimited skiing. So I've skied 17 days now. I go out for an hour and a half, but I couldn't do what I do, which is skiing for an hour and a half a day, if I had to pay two or three hundred dollars a day because it just wouldn't make economic Sense to do six runs for 300. But if I can buy a pass and if I go out for an hour or two and it starts raining or it's too windy, I can just come home.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
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Unknown B
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Unknown B
Incredibly cheap. This is a terrible organization that has run horribly. Yeah, they are cheapskates. They have horrible food on the mountains, horrible parking, they treat their staff terrible. And it's kind of like Comcast was for cable modems for some period of time where everybody hated them.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Or Verizon or the Wall Street Journal trying to cancel your subscription. Just a very non customer centric organization. But that has an incredible value prop so I'll leave it at that.
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Unknown A
I'll throw this thing because I this before. I saw your tweet about it and I was like okay, this is, this is, this is funny to me. I grew up snowboarding. I grew up in Oregon near my bachelor. I've been to Beaver Creek. I love the mountains. Hell yeah. And then I looked up their earnings and I was kind of curious. I'm like, are these companies struggling financially? Is this actually a burden on them? And the answer is no. They paid a 2.22 per share cash dividend, bought 20 million of their shares back last quarter and they're expecting to have total reported EBITDA in the current fiscal year, Jason, of about $900 million. So I think they can afford $2 per hour to their ski staff to avoid a PR catastrophe. That's the thing. They didn't just shoot themselves in the foot. They shot their brain in the foot. What a mess.
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Unknown B
Well, now people are saying we should boycott Epic next year and go Icon and use the Icon mountains and teach fellow a lesson. I don't think that'll work because they made these passes so cheap and then people might live near, you know, one of the other mountains. So they kind of have in some ways a lock on these things. But I do think if there are ambulance chasing class action lawyers out there. May I point you to an incredibly juicy target, which is Vale Resorts, the company, the stock ticker.
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Unknown A
Oh, MTA.
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Unknown B
I looked that up before MTN, and let's see, five years. I'm looking at the five year stock. Yeah. If you bought the stock in 2021 for $272, you've lost half your money. You've lost half your money. So this organization, their stock price tells you that they're mismanaged and not run. Well, I think yes, and they probably should. There should be some stock shareholder lawsuits here just based on the just utter incompetence of this. There should be a no vote. And listen, I, I have an Epic pass for, I don't know, six, seven years and I love it. But this is a terrible organization. It's a disgrace description as we say in Brooklyn. Descartiad.com I own the domain Descrizade and I am going to redirect it.
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Unknown A
I don't even know how to spell that word. But you should redirect it to Vail's IR page.
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Unknown B
Well, it used to be that disgraziad d I s G-R-A z I a d.com redirected it to Jake Paul after the Jake Paul Tyson match, which I thought was a fraud, a literal fraud. I don't know if I'm correct or not, but I'm take descartes.com disgrace and I am Jake Paul, you're off the hook. Val Resorts, you're on the clock.
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Unknown A
All right, so I want to start with something very optimistic. We have a lot of actual hard news to get to. But just before we jumped on air today, a really interesting interview with Sam Altman dropped Businessweek. Jason got him for a very Deep on the record interview. We're going to talk more about it later on in the week. Couple things about AI, but I want to drop some sunshine in your lap by pulling out this quote about fusion. So Bloomberg is talking to Sam Alban. Hey, you know, what are we going to do about chips? What are we going to do about energy? And Sam just shoots back and if you're watching the video, there's the text, but I'm going to read it for everybody. So energy Sam says fusion's going to work. And then Businessweek says, on what timeframe? And here's Sam Altman.
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Unknown A
Soon. Well, soon there will be a demonstration of net gain fusion. You then have to build the system that doesn't break. You have to scale it up, you have to figure out how to build a factory, build a lot of them, you know, regulatory approval. And that will take, you know, years altogether. But I expect Helion and other companies will show you that fusion works soon. That Jason would change the world as much as Chad GPT, if not more. Yeah.
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Unknown B
And Sam Altman made a bet on a fusion company, a very large one on Helion Energy. Yeah. And it was disclosed it was a personal one. So I don't know. But my understanding is he went all in on this. He might have made like a nine figure bet, like $100 million bet. Yeah. So, and you know, you can talk to a bunch of folks. Some people think the fusion timeline is a decade, some people think it's five decades. The truth is China is approving a massive number of not only nuclear power plants, but coal power plants and solar and they're forcing EVs. So you got to go after everything.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Hopefully the United States can get past the grifting, the virtue signaling and just all energy matters, all energy sources matter. Just go after everything. Because what's happening is even if you don't like fossil fuels, the United States is leading along with some European countries in terms of the reduction of them, clean air, etc. We're going to solve all these problems. So a little bit of fracking, a little bit of oil, offshore drilling, I'm not worried about because you have the natural counterbalance of technological innovation. So I do think we want clean air and clean water and we don't want to pollute. But you don't have to sweat some amount of fossil fuels because solar is so cheap.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And nuclear is getting approved, maybe not by our country as fast as we like it, by emerging markets. And there's a belt and road concept that China is doing. And what it basically means is spreading influence by giving people resources. And that belt and road goes through Asia to Africa and back. And I think they have 150 nuclear power plants outside of China they're building.
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Unknown A
Oh, wow.
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Unknown B
So that's where you could really spread influence. If you want to spread influence, the United States should be the leader in nuclear and then obviously fusion like we are for EVs and batteries along with China. And we should be trying to sell these things and get unlimited energy for everybody. I'll get off.
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Unknown A
Oh yeah.
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Unknown B
Of my speech here and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
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Unknown A
I just want to throw in that people often underestimate how much oil the US produces when we discuss this, this topic. So I just pull up some data from the government in 2023, this is about a year old. We produced 22% of the world's oil, which is double the number two country, which was Saudi Arabia and then Russia is number three also.
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Unknown B
How is that possible? Because we were sitting here 20 years ago in the early 2000. Everybody's talking about peak oil, we're going to run out of oil. And there is going to. Remember the peak oil discussions or those documentaries. It's going to throw society into this cataclysmic thing. Then what happens? You find more oil, you figure out ways to clean oil, you get solar going, you get batteries going and everything works out eventually.
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Unknown A
So here's the chart. Look at that. So this is A chart showing U.S. oil production from 2011 through 2022, when it doubled going back to the 1900s. We produced very little oil. It peaked originally in the early 70s and then declined through 2010 roughly and then shot up to all time record highs in the last couple years. Shale oil fracking, offshore drilling, better technologies, deeper wells, pick your poison. But the point is the US is on top of a thing that we didn't really want to be on top of, but lights need to turn on. As Jason's Christmas tree once again points out to us.
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Unknown B
Today we are going to move into a golden era of abundance. We're kind of soaking in it right now. It's just very hard to appreciate. The human mind is designed to look for bad news. We have a bias towards negativity. Why do we have that? Said it a million times on this program. The people who are conservative and scared and anxious didn't cross the river and get eaten by the crocodile. So in our DNA is to be conservative, to be scared. But one of the things that Elon said to me 20 years ago, we were on a flight together, we were going to do something and he said, it's really interesting to me how much people overestimate the downside risk. And he was about to go bankrupt with Tesla and he said, the downside is I go bankrupt, but I can only start another company.
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Unknown B
And so it's not life or death. He was worth a couple hundred million, maybe 100, 200 million at that time from PayPal and whatever. But he had poured it all into these companies and that always stuck with me. Take more risk, take more risk, take more. Now you look at his personality, he takes a lot of risk, right? As a society, we are programmed in our DNA to not take risk. We should be taking more risk. So to Sam Altman's credit, putting 100 million of his own money if he's worth a couple of billion, and now he's worth maybe 10, 20 billion with, you know, depending on what you think ChatGPT goes. I mean it's a, it's a worthy bet if it's a 1% chance it works out and we have unlimited power. Well, that was like, that's a one in a thousand chance. You make that bet.
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Unknown B
Yes. People's minds are not designed to do this. We are in the age of abundance right now as we speak. The fact that we as a society can complain and hand wring about the topics that we are obsessed about in this country is part of our privilege and the abundance we are living in. That doesn't mean they're not real problems. That doesn't mean people aren't suffering. It doesn't mean horrible things don't happen in the world. But let me tell you, there's a reason why everybody in the world wants to come here.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
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Unknown B
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Unknown A
The abundance mindset thing has become actually an oddly recurring meme in my mind because I'm playing Factorio at night after I get the kids in bed.
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Unknown B
I love it. What's fact? Explain what Factorio is.
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Unknown A
Factorio is a factory building game. It is essentially the factory building game. Yeah, I'm still obsessed. I'm playing a 25x science game, if you know what I'm talking about. But the thing is, whenever I run into a problem, I try to finagle with what I've built and every time I do that, it's wrong. No abundance mindset. If you're short on something, go build 10 times as much as you need. And I keep having to reteach myself this lesson and in fact Torio is oddly abundance pilling me. So shout out to the team over at WU Mate. All right Jason, so lots to talk about today. We have AI taking on the healthcare task world. We have startup shutdowns, UPS and how to handle rural deliveries. The ups and downs of online engagement via a chef in San Francisco. Where do you want to start?
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Unknown B
You know what? I think the Ro Khanna one dovetails with what we were just talking about. So maybe this lady will make you picnic.
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Unknown A
All right, so Jason got into a conversation with one of California's congressional group, the well known Ro Khanna. He is the representative of California's 17th district, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Santa Clara, parts of San Jose. If you don't know why that matters. Well, Sunnyvale is where Yahoo was based. Cupertino of course is where Apple is. Santa Clara is another big tech city. So row Jason is probably the most visible congressperson from Silicon Valley. Is that fair?
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Unknown B
I would say so. And he is a friend of the all in pod where we talk about politics a whole a whole lot. And he spoke at one of our events I think was two years ago. He did the all in summit and I think incredibly highly of him. He's on the left, but he's kind of a centrist and he's very common sense. And he's focused on what matters. And so he started talking about UPS closing facilities. And this caught my attention because we're $36 trillion in debt as a country. And he says in this tweet, UPS plans to close around 200 US facilities, including in places like somewhere in Ohio, Iowa. This will hurt rural businesses. We need federal incentives and regulations to keep shipping centers open in rural America. We need a rural New Deal. And I just thought to myself, do we?
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Unknown B
And I wrote a little bit of a response to it, which is, you know, I'll just summarize it in my own words.
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Unknown A
Yeah, please.
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Unknown B
I chose to live in a rural area for the first time in my life. I've always been a city dweller or, you know, infill areas. You know, San Mateo, outside of San Francisco, which is still a city really, but it's kind of like a Bukala kind of city. Brooklyn, New York City, Manhattan, etc. Los Angeles, Brentwood. But now I live on a ranch in Austin, which is about 30 minutes outside of the city center. And the trade off you make when you move outside the city center is you get less services, but you get more land. You lower your cost of. Cost of living massively, but you give up the fact. And the thing I miss most is san Mateo has 200 Asian food restaurants. My favorite cuisine. And I can't order ramen. Korean sushi rolls. Sushi, you know, Korean barbecue soba from restaurants that are dedicated to those specific dishes.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
And I can't get them to my house in 20 to 40 minutes. In fact, all I can get on Ubereats to my house right now is, I kid you not, Carl's Jr. McDonald's and Starbucks.
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Unknown A
All right? That's the American trifecta right there. You can clog your arteries and get the jitters at the same time.
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Unknown B
So, you know, I. I have to come up with a solution for this. I might get, like, a chef to come twice a week and prepare some meals. I don't know what I'm gonna do. It's a little bit of. It's the only downside. But I have a couple of dozen acres all to myself that I can hike on, right? And so I think this idea that all taxpayers should subsidize me out in the hill country, you know, in the. In. In the. In the ranch land of Texas by putting up a couple of ramen and sushi places that I love would be ridiculous. And so he sent me to a substack. I looked at it. I Was like, you know what? Honestly, this poor, you know, entrepreneur living on the sticks who has to pay very little money to live out there, cost of living is dirt cheap, land, et cetera.
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Unknown B
I feel bad for her that she's got to ship her items and she's got to drive one hour to go to a depot center that doesn't take the exact size box that she wants and doesn't have the. It's an inconvenience for her. And I just thought to myself, you know what, raise your prices if your product's good enough. It takes an extra day to get there. But we can't have every person whose business takes a hit or has to drive an hour. We, I'm sorry, we don't have the ability as a country anymore to subsidize everybody. The federal government should not be solving these kind of problems. So I just respectfully, and I use the word respectful times disagreed with ro.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown B
What are your thoughts on all this?
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Unknown A
All right, so I did, I had to do some research because I had not looked into UPS's business in a long time, it turns out. And this was, to my surprise, Rose, actual post was about an article from March of last year. So first of all, we're going back in time nine months to when UPS announced this. UPS as a company is doing quite well. It is changing up its business, Jason. It's selling off parts of itself. It sold off Coyote Logistics to a company called rxo. So it's currently in a mode of curtailing unnecessary activities, working on profitability and trying to invest in automation. We've talked about this on the show before, back when there was the port strike or the threatened port strike. So this is something that we are familiar with now when it comes to subsidizing companies. So they keep open facilities in rural areas I think we can afford.
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Unknown A
So I tried to figure out where rural money comes from in the US and it turns out that the USDA Department of Agriculture has a rural development group that does a whole bunch of different things. And the usda, the last time I checked, the federal spending data, spend about 4% of our money. So it's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. So I would say directionally, I agree we spend too much money, we need to spend less. But I think that when it comes to rail and, and delivery infra, we probably unlock more inside of the heartland than we lose by subsidizing them. Now, of course, it could be a boondoggle. UPS is a private company. I don't want to just give them tons of money for no reason. Jason and I are both capitalists, but in this case I was sympathetic. The problem is, and I know this is the flaw in my argument, everything probably has a reasonable argument for it.
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Unknown A
And so it's hard to cut money without stubbing some toes.
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Unknown B
If this was a profitable endeavor for ups, they would not be retreating to a smaller number of centers. So if they thought there was a business opportunity, they would do that. And this area is serviced by usps, the United States Postal Service, which is already subsidized. I think we lose a lot of money on that already. But that's not as good for, you know, maybe they don't, they don't do fast enough shipping. The free market will sort all this out. It is not the government's role to be in there picking winners and losers and subsidizing. It's the free markets. And Amazon is doing drone delivery, which means they can eventually do drone pickup.
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Unknown A
True.
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Unknown B
There are self driving cars coming and there are self driving trucks coming. So Amazon and Zoox will be picking up all this rural stuff in a truck that has no humans in it. And they'll be doing it for half the cost of UPS is right now. And UPS is not the leading shipping company, is it?
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Unknown A
FedEx is larger.
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Unknown B
Yeah. And then I think Amazon has their own delivery now. They don't just rely on ups, they have their own drivers. So we have the most amazing, vibrant, competitive logistics industry I think in the world. In the United States, Nailing product market fit is every founder's top priority. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on selling it, especially to big customers. You know, we call them lighthouse customers, some people call them whales. To land those deals, your security compliance has to be rock solid. Certificates like SoC2 or ISO 27001 are the keys to building trust and unlocking these opportunities. But they take time and energy pulling you away from building and shipping a beautiful, great product. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're your partner. Vanta is the all in one compliance solution, helping startups like yours and mine get audit ready and build a strong security foundation quickly and painlessly.
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Unknown B
How do they do it? Well, Vanta automates the manual security tasks that slow you down, helping you streamline your audit. And the platform connects you with trusted VCSOs to build your program, auditors to get you through your audits quickly, and a marketplace for essentials like pen testing. So here's your call to action. Whether you're closing your first deal or gearing up for growth. Vanta makes compliance Easy. Join over 8,000 companies, including many Y Combinator Techstars and launch startups who trust Vanta. Simplify compliance and get $1,000 off@vanta.com twist. That's V A N T A.com/twist. If you choose to live rurally, that is a choice you're making. You will get slower service, but you will have acreage that cost, I don't know, 1,000 to $50,000 an acre.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And you get to live in the most beautiful, unbelievably vast landscapes of America. You make that choice, you have to give up something. And what you're giving up is convenience and speed. But fear not. Technology is going to save the day eventually for this. I just think we got to make hard choices in this country. Stop trying to subsidize it. I say cancel the entire broadband subsidy thing and let people buy Starlink or the other five competitors to Starlink if they want broadband. Enough of this.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
And I don't think we should be subsidizing people in the cities either.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
No subsidies. Let's. Let's slow down on the subsidy. Everybody's got to tighten the belt.
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Unknown A
All right? So I will. I will trade you. What's this woman's name? Meredith Nunnock Hovens. Barn swallow Flowers. If you want to look it up. In Oskaloosa. That's a town I've never been to. I'll trade you or her business and let it die off by not subsidizing ups and chances. That's going to die.
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Unknown B
No, it's not going to die off, by the way. She just said it would be one day extra. But. Okay, go ahead.
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Unknown A
Let's just take the worst case scenario.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
I'll trade you her. I will sacrifice her upon the altar of my love for capitalism. But if we're going to stop subsidizing her or not subsidize her, then we need to not subsidize you and your friends via the carried interest tax loophole.
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Unknown B
Okay. I'm fine with it.
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Unknown A
Done.
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Unknown B
Because then, I mean, honestly, I think we should go to a flat tax. I think capital gains income should just become one tax. Now, I know that's controversial for a lot of people. Carrot interest. Controversial. It just, I think, simplifying it, we get so many gains that it would be worth it.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
All that being said, you know, I do think capital gains and investing in companies is why we have the most vibrant and the most unicorns in the max. Seven are here, but I don't think it would be existential if we change those. So I'm fine with it. Right. Everybody's got a belt tightening if we want to get 36 trillion in debt down to 25.
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Unknown A
Can I, can I gently push you on. I have a question for you. Okay, so going through this story, just prepping for our show today, one of the parts, one of the reasons why I love this job, Jason, is whenever we broach a new topic, I have to go out and learn things. So I get to kind of go out and just poke around. So I found a Cato Institute website all about cutting government spending. And this is actually data from 2016, but they were in favor of cutting rural subsidies, which would be encompass things like this. And they said that that was worth about six and a half billion back in 2016. But the same Cato Institute page said that they want to cut agricultural subsidies as well, which are about $30 billion a year. That's cutting agricultural. Oh, okay. That's political suicide because of the way we handle primaries in this country.
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Unknown B
It's all political suicide to talk about any austerity measures. That's true. If you notice, this whole discussion of Doge, I think, traces back to maybe three years ago. We were doing our, like, concerns or whatever on all in and Freeberg started talking about the debt a whole bunch. And I was like chirping on about it as well. I think Chamath took the other side of it a little bit, like, hey, we can have a little more debt. But then we all realized, hey, wait a sec, with COVID and like, adding 8 trillion per administration and there's no slowdown, like, so we thought, oh, you know, there'll be a little extra Covid spending. Makes sense. We'll pay it down because we're America, we kick ass. And people are just like, you know what, yolo, let's keep spending. I think what you have to do is get in office and then interact and then engage it.
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Unknown B
And if you notice who's leading the charge on this, Elon Vivek and a lot of people in my, you know, extended circle and a lot of people who are capitalists. And so I think it's going to take business people who realize the danger of this debt and then people who are in office who are a lame duck. Trump is in his second term. He doesn't have to run a third time. Yes. So he can actually take this on. I don't think in his first term. You can take this on. If you want to win a second one.
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Unknown A
If you want to win a second.
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Unknown B
Yeah, if you want to win a second one. And you know what? I heard from an insider that cannabis legalization was something that Obama wanted to do from somebody who was one of his mega donors, like one of his, whatever they call those super pat donors, whatever. The people who are the super syndicates, you know, who get all these 250k checks together, the bundlers. I heard from a, you know, a very high profile bundler who was trying to bundle me. I don't like to do that, sorry.
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Unknown A
That's a really fucking startup.
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Unknown B
So I don't want to be bundled anyway, the bundler said it was one of my issues. I said, you know, I kind of feel bad. Like I think all these kids who are in jail and it happens to be black kids and brown kids more than white kids who are selling dime bags on the corner. And then I see all these white entrepreneurs, I don't mean to make it a race issue, but it is. Were getting funded at that time to do cannabis companies. And I'm like, wait, this seems profoundly unfair. Just anybody who's in a non violent cannabis thing should be released from jail, obviously. And I'm not going to happen. But they said to me, Obama can't do it in the first time, he's definitely going to do it in the second. He didn't wind up doing it, I don't think. No federal cannabis legislation.
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Unknown B
But now all these Republicans are smoking weed and taking gummies and tinctures and everything and they realize it's not, you know, as harmful as alcohol. And all studies basically, you know, listen, all things have downsides, but it's, it's. I would say it's probably. Well, agreed. No worse or better than say alcohol. Most people would say alcohol is worse.
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Unknown A
I think if anyone thinks that cannabis is worse than alcohol, come talk to me. I'll give you a lot about this. Actually, the Doge point is very interesting. The founder of I think it was Loom had a viral blog post the other day about how he's trying to sort out his life post acquisition because he suddenly had all this money and I just pulled it up. Jason.
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Unknown B
Because he has a problem.
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Unknown A
Great quote about working with Doge. And he was just trying to find himself after the acquisition and he went to go work for Doge for a couple of weeks and after he gets associated with Doge for a minute. The next four weeks of my life consisted of hundreds of calls recruiting the smartest people I'VE ever talked to. Working on various projects I'm definitely not able to talk about and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was, it was a blast. Now, whatever you think about the federal government, its current efficiency, whatever, it's very interesting to get that glimmer of information from Doge because I don't think we know much about it. It's been kind of under wraps for a little bit. I'm very curious, but that gave me a lot of hope that there's a good level of recruitment going on. Jason, you might have more visibility into the back channels and your group text than I do.
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Unknown A
But it did feel like Dogebook went a little quiet for a bit. And so I'm glad that that tells me there's still a lot going on.
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Unknown B
I think everything's gone quiet because they have to get these nominations done. And there was a public, I guess they called her the ice Queen or something. The woman who stuff. Yeah, she was like, no more tweeting because we got to get these nominees through. Just everybody pause on the tweeting. It was the public statement. I saw there was a memo or something. And so I think everybody's kind of like, well, we're not even in office yet. We can wait the five, six weeks and then we'll start putting our stamp on things so we don't just have non stop chaos on the interweb. So I think that's what's happening. But I got a lot of people asking me, hey, I want to do this. I want to sell my software into it. I have two software, I have two portfolio companies that want to help where that I assume want to help.
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Unknown B
Yeah. One of them has been public about it density IO, which does, you know, people counting in spaces. And I'm like, wow, this could be incredible. Like let's donate or at cost or whatever, or, or on the come, you know, we could do it on, you know, like on contingency measure, all the usage of all this office space and then start getting rid of the unused office space, which is billions and billions of dollars, I believe. Right. And then Deep Sentinel, you know, you got all these crazy security needs at these buildings that nobody's going to, but they need to have security. Well, you know what? You don't need to have dozens of security guards. You could have one and then you could have monitored AI based camera systems where you make those security guards super efficient and we could start lowering costs there. Now I know that means some people might lose their jobs or like, you know, facilities might become Available.
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Unknown B
But then they could be available to do other more important work than playing Candy Crush at three in the morning, watching a bunch of cameras that don't change, that AI can watch for the changes and surface those. So that's deep Sentinels, you know, their company that we're investing.
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Unknown A
Every time I've watched a spy heist movie, the Candy Crush plane security guard misses the critical moment of theft when the Mona Lisa makes it out the back door. So not a big fan of that. As a general point, I want to actually grab the conversation by the. By the head here and pull it in a different direction. Jason, did you see the recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal about the depth and scale of Chinese hacking into American infrastructure?
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Unknown B
I did not. I mean, I saw it going by on my feed, but I didn't read any stories on it. So educate the audience here what's going on.
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Unknown A
So we've all heard about Salt Typhoon, which was the recent Chinese incursion into American telecom networks that went very, very deep. And that led to the government saying, hey, everybody, make sure you're using encrypted chat, which people found ironic because the government has often been opposed to encrypted chat that they can't crack. But, hey, you know, potato, potato. What's interesting is it seems that there is a consensus rising, that Chinese penetration, and I would say meddling in US Infrastructure has reached a new cadence, a much faster pace, and it's very, very dangerous. And, Jason, to put this into geopolitical context, the expectation is that if China was to invade Taiwan to try to take it over, they not only want to block US Communications and activity, but also cause mayhem domestically to throw the US People off, off their game. So disrupting cell phone networks, water, that sort of thing.
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Unknown A
It's all actually incredibly scary. And reading through this piece, I was just kind of angry because it seems that given US technology primacy in the world, that we should be better off. And so I just was kind of sitting here going, what can we do? And then I remembered, ironically, the launch of healthcare.gov, which was a flop. So when Obamacare came out, they had a website where you could go on and get a plan, and they launched it and it didn't. It failed. And then they did bring in a bunch of nerds, our friends, to fix it. I think we need something akin to a cybersecurity Doge project. Like, what if we got all of the Smart cyber kids, 6 months, pay them nothing, give them a gold star, because I think Doge has Made going to the government. If you're a technology person, politically okay or like socially acceptable and maybe even encouraged.
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Unknown A
I think we need a cybersecurity doge movement because we are not ready for Jack right now.
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Unknown B
Seems like a great idea to me. It seems like something we need to focus on. I mean, it's pretty obvious that we're getting hacked pretty heavily. And yeah, we should totally do a Manhattan Project on that. And you got to make systems that are redundant. I think one of the great things about the United States is when you have 50 different states. We talked about this over and over again.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Unknown B
You know, we're kind of like South America or the EU in some ways the United States more than we are, you know, or Germany or Canada, where we do have like a pretty disparate operating system going on here and experiment. We really, you know, if. If you want to take down the entire grid in America, you're going to need to attack a lot of different pieces of it.
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Unknown A
True.
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Unknown B
So in some ways that's a feature. Right. It's. It's just there's not a lot of surface area to take down the entire grid. So single points of failure, there aren't many. But where they are, we should be more and more vigilant. And this is where technology comes in. I was mentioning deep sentinel and density IO. Both of these rely on AI and sensors. Yeah, cameras, you know, more advanced types of sensors. Plus we have drones and all kinds of other things. This is going to be unbelievably effective to put sensors around reservoirs and fly drones automatically 24 hours a day. Or those, you know, robots. Remember we had the dog like robot that I was. Sixteen hundred dollars. We take that, that dog company, which I want to have them on the pod, you know, and you release 10 of those dogs into the robotics.
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Unknown B
You know, you release 10 of those around, you know, some water basin or reservoir to just run around. And then you fly a drone every hour and you put up some sensors. Somebody hops the fence with some terrible chemical to pour into our water stream, the dogs are going to catch him.
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Unknown A
I hadn't even thought of that.
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Unknown B
Yeah, because that was always the quintessential thriller. Like there's a great thriller. Black Sunday by Frankenheimer. And the idea is like a blimp goes over. I'll leave it at that. Like the Super Bowl.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
To do a terrorist attack, you know, since we have these terror attacks going. The large body of water, critical infrastructure, electricity, bridges, etc. Skyscrapers, football stadiums, water, these Things could affect a lot of people as opposed to as terrible as it is. Driving into a Christmas fair, you know, or down a busy street, you can kill dozens but not thousands. Right? Thank God. And so, yeah, we could use technology. I mean, Those dogs cost $1,600, you know, if you, if you put 10 of them around a reservoir, I think it's enough. And you know, five of them are out, five of them are charged. It'd be just beautiful, beautiful ways.
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Unknown A
And the thing I want to say here is that's not just a non human solution, it's a better solution. And the dogs don't get tired. But I'll just read the paragraph that made me just kind of get chill. So this is from the Journal. Chinese hackers had gained the ability to shut down dozens of US ports, power grids and other infra targets at will. And that was according to Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden's national security advisor. And then, then salt typhoon happened, which was the Telecommunications Act. We are getting creamed here. And honestly, I love our federated systems, Jason. I love that we're 50 states. I love that different states have their own policies and so forth. But we're going to have to have unified action, I think, to build up a, a digital wall of sufficient strength that we are safe.
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Unknown B
And, and don't forget soft power. China's in decline right now. Why are they in decline? Nobody's investing in that country. Nobody wants to be an entrepreneur. I heard somebody talking some nonsense like, oh, they're going to just fire up entrepreneurship again. And I'm like, really? If you're an entrepreneur in China and you had your company taken away or you worked for a company and you're part of the diaspora of Alibaba or Aunt Pei, you saw Jack Ma get whacked, essentially just disappear for a couple of years and he goes to do philosophy and paint oil paintings. Like, you know what's up? You know, he could have been tortured, he could have had all kinds of threats.
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Unknown A
I don't mean to laugh about that.
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Unknown B
You were laughing, but yeah, you were not laughing at what I was saying, but in real time, like, and there's that dog. Jesus Christ. I mean, every time I see that, I think, every time I see that goddamn thing, I think it's cgi. That looks like the Black Mirror episode.
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Unknown A
I, I shout out to Black Mirror dude, it looks like. It looks like a chicken that has no head and has been de feathered in a way.
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Unknown B
Love it.
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Unknown A
And it's incredible. I'm obsessed with this, but that, to me, is like the promise of where this technology we've been talking about, robotics, AI and connectivity all come together. It isn't just to take away jobs. It takes away the worst stupid jobs that we have that we don't need people to do. It's going to emancipate us. Yes, I'm on my technology soapbox today, apparently.
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Unknown B
But here's the thing. Soft power would really help here if China's got problems with, you know, potentially a civil war happening because people don't have jobs, if manufacturing is moving to other locations, because people don't want to have a single point of failure, which is their right as a country, you know, and they're becoming isolationist. Well, if we come in and say, you know what, Listen, Trump's a pretty, you know, you don't have to like Trump, but he's pretty good at negotiating. I've come to the conclusion he goes in there, he says, hey, listen, you know, maybe you want a little more investment. Remember, China came to San Francisco and they were like, at 0% investment or negative? Negative investment, in fact. Because people are pulling stuff out of the country like Russia has experienced. You know what kind of sucks to be Russia and China and have people pulling their investment from your country and then less jobs.
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Unknown B
Right. So, yes, we, you know, a little bit of soft power here. Hey, Trump invited Xi Jinping to the inauguration. A little bit weird, but okay. You know, I don't think our president is going to his, you know, coronation.
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Unknown A
But I don't think he's invited.
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Unknown B
An invite. An invite, whatever. You know, if I don't go, look.
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Unknown A
You know, I'm not.
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Unknown B
It was big Trump.
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Unknown A
It was big Trump. I am not a Trump fan, but that. That's hilarious. 60%. When he tries to close this, we're going to shut you down. By the way, do you want to come over for lunch, too?
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Unknown B
Like, hey, come on over. 51st state, Trudeau. It's the 51st day. Come genuflect in Mar? A Lago. Buy a membership. Half a million dollars. Did you know that bar lago memberships are half a million dollars? That's what I heard.
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Unknown A
Look, do you know. Do you know who always gets paid?
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Unknown B
Donald the Don gets paid. Yeah. So anyway, it would be kind of great to go do that soft power thing again with China, and then you can say, hey, listen, we're going to get investment going here, a little private equity, a little bit of IPOs. Hey, we'll work with you on the TikTok divestiture, whatever. It is, yeah. How about you stop sending the federal precursors? They're in Wuhan. Can you just whack those that syndicate, which, by the way, if they can whack people for practicing a religion.
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Unknown A
Oh, they know.
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Unknown B
They know where they are.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
They know what they're doing. Hey, so let's horse trade. No more fentanyl to Mexico coming to the border. And we want you to stop with the shenanigans in the hacking. And here's what we'll give you.
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Unknown A
You know, can I tell you, though, because you brought up the thing I wasn't going to bring up implicitly. So the idea of the dialogue back and forth, offering something demanding, something standard, give and take between nations. Here's a quote from Liu Peng Yu, a spokesperson for China. Quote, some in the US Seem to be enthusiastic about creating various types of typhoons. The spokesman said, referring to the names assigned to the hacking groups. Quote, the US Needs to stop its own cyber attacks against other countries and refrain from using cybersecurity to smear and slander China. I just. Can you imagine what it takes to. To lie like that? Like, just so. So clearly just lie?
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Unknown B
I mean, we have to, you know, we do our own escapades around the world. I mean, we were tracking. I think there was a little tension when it came out that Angela Merkel's phone was being tabbed.
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Unknown A
We had to do some oopsies. Yes, there they was a little bit.
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Unknown B
Of like, hey, sorry, we looked at your. We looked at your text. Sorry. I mean, she knows we're looking. Come on, she's looking at it. I mean, if she has access to Trump, she's looking. So anyway, it is an issue. I think soft power wins the day in a lot of this. And the great lesson of globalization is you can take it too far and you cannot take it far enough. There is a very fine balance here where, you know, you send too many jobs over, you get rid of too many factories, you build a dependency, and then that gets out of whack. So we still want to make cars in our country. We still need to make medicine here, but we still want to import some cars, and we still want to be able to import some medicine. We want to have some jobs done in India, China, you know, Portugal, Canada, and we want some in the United States.
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Unknown B
So it's a balance. And these geopolitical issues, whether, you know, it's Russia, Ukraine. Yeah, if you are having some business relationships, the upside of capitalism is the entanglements. No conflict, no interest. If there's conflicts, then there's interest. If we get rid of all the conflicts with China, well, then, yeah, they can roll into Taiwan and we can roll into another place. And, you know, there's no business person saying, hey, we're Apple. If we get into a fight, you're going to lose all the jobs building iPhones, and, you know, Americans are going to have to pay $3,000 an iPhone or not be able to upgrade them as fast. It's going to suck for everybody. There's a lot to lose here. I think the iPhone could be the number one reason. No, we don't go to war with Taiwan. I know it Sounds silly, but TSMC, Apple, those CEOs are going to call BYD and say, can we work this out?
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Unknown B
Because we're going to have to lay people off if we don't.
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Unknown A
There was a metric back in the day that said, like, no two countries that both had McDonald's had ever gone to war. The point being that if you're part of the global economy, you don't. That didn't end up lasting forever. But it's a good.
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Unknown B
It was a Thomas Friedman coat quote. It was a great, memorable quote. Yeah, I believe that's Thomas Friedman.
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Unknown A
Yeah, well, I used to read Thomas Friedman back in the day. I read Hot, Flat and Crowded back in the day. I'm very hopeful that you're right. I really do. But I'm going to be curious to see, going back to our discussion about what we can afford and what we cannot, where we are willing to subsidize, to maintain domestic production, and where we are willing to not subsidize, to not have domestic production because we ended up so dependent on China because it was the cheapest, most free market way to get stuff built. And if we don't want that to be 100%, then we're going to need to make a decision about where to spend. But let's put all that aside, Jason, and let's talk about something that was on your mind, which was apparently a dust dump in the San francisco Foodie. Instagram, TikTok World.
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Unknown A
This. This was a very interesting story, and I have all the clips and quotes. But I'm curious, first of all, why did this catch your eye?
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Unknown B
I think there's something very interesting going on right now, which is the power of influencers is so great that you can destroy a local business or you can make a local business. And TikTok is kind of the new nerve center for this.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Y'all. Sure. People had complaints, you know, with the Reviews and everything. But there's something about TikTok and its virality that there is too much influence from influencers in some cases. And then sometimes chefs want to stand up for themselves. It can get messy. And I just think it's a sign of what's to come, which is the human brain is not meant to take on a million people, a thousand people at once. The first time I really saw this happen was my friend Josh Harris from We Live in Public when he started producing himself with cameras everywhere, 24 hours a day. You can go look at this award winning documentary. I'm in a. If you want to see a younger chubby or J Cal We Live in Public by Andre Timon or at one Sundance I'm in the film. I was like kind of the narrator because I was Josh Harris's best friend at the time or one of his best friends.
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Unknown B
The human brain can only take so much negativity directed at it. There was this also thing with Gawker in the aughts has Jessica Landon. This seemingly.
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Unknown A
I was on Twitter that day.
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah. There's this good person. She wrote a joke that was inappropriate, got on a plane. It was an off color joke. It went viral while she was on the plane. When she lands, there's people from the press on her 12 hour flight waiting for her to land. And this whole thing. Has Jessica landed?
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Became a meme now. Gawker was abhorrent at that time. They were just really cruel to people. There's a whole litany of that. They also broke a lot of stories early. They outed Anderson Cooper and Tim Cook. There was a lot of weird stuff that went over there. This was one of the horrific things where like this poor person was kind of destroyed. I think they made a documentary out of it actually, or some other kind of thing between the writer and the and the woman. Jessica. This kerfuffle that we're seeing here is indicative of the lack of empathy that happens in social media. But it has gotten extremely, extremely from those days. You know, it might be tens of thousands of people. Now it's hundreds of thousands, millions. The stakes are much higher now.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
And it happens much faster. Let's just talk about the story.
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Unknown A
Okay? So to give a little context, there's a guy named Jeffrey Lee and written up by local media as, quote, the creative force behind a restaurant called Juni in the Western edition. I've never been there. I am not a makasse guy. I'm not a sushi guy. I don't eat fish. So I've never been, but it's fantastic.
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Unknown B
I've been.
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Unknown A
Thanks, Jason. I actually very much trust your opinion on this. So if he says it's good, it probably is really freaking good.
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Unknown B
Spectacular.
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Unknown A
There were two spin off restaurants that were kind of casual. One was called the Hand Roll Project and then there was the Hamburger Project which opened in late 2024. And that is what we were talking about. So what follows is a 543 second clip from a woman named Catwalk SF over on TikTok describing her experience at this new restaurant.
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Unknown C
The SF Chronicle just reported that this spot sold a thousand burgers their first two days of business. So I followed the hype and I got in line. The menu is simple with three smash burgers starting at 6.89 for a classic single. And you can upgrade your meal for 35 with little Tsar Nikolai caviar. I started with the loaded fries with cheese, sauteed onion and HP sauce. I think they forgot the sauce on mine and I just forget the fries. If you're thinking about giving this spot a shot, here's a look at some very sexy, crispy, lacy edges on the Smashburger. I started with a single Wisconsin with sauteed onions, HP sauce and whipped butter. This was good, not great. These are thin burgers. They're giving ozempic burgers. I'd order a double Wisconsin if I.
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Unknown B
Were to do it again.
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Unknown C
And I give it a 7.2. Here I am getting after the classic. This one has diced white onion and pickles on it. This was really not for me. It was all bread and not hot enough for me at all. I give the classic a five point.
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Unknown B
Looks like a good review so far.
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Unknown C
What I not a slam for me. I saw a friend from the Infatuation as I was walking out and I.
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Unknown A
Decided that is the original clip. And Jason, I thought that the starting point here was me much spicier.
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Unknown B
But that clip, simple, easy. Her personal opinion, she went fast. Now I don't know if she's paid to do these reviews or what, but, you know, I think this has become incredibly popular, especially with, you know, Dave Portnoy doing his pizza reviews and the impact that has on businesses. He can make or break a business, right? So this has become something that chefs are aware of. Dave Portnoy had a couple of flare ups because he gave people low ratings or high ratings is very polarizing criticism, as we know from Antonio in Ratatouille is a dicey business. But that one did not seem spicy or not spicy. Just Seemed like a just a person's impression of the burger.
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Unknown A
Yeah, she gave a 7.2 to the first one. And by the way, shout out to her for eating two burgers back to back. Bang, bang. I mean, that is, you know, you're a food person when you can not. I would have passed out immediately.
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Unknown B
Yeah. Not on Oceanic.
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Unknown A
Then the chef in question started to comment on her social send dms and that led us to our second clip when she showed a number of these. Jason and I think this shows a bit of the response to the response.
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Unknown C
To her original review for leaving an honest review for the viral San Francisco Smashburger spot hamburger project. I tried it and it just wasn't for me. I was there shortly after the grand opening and they need some time to work out the cake. This is what the owner wrote to me today. Because someone needs to tell you to grow up. It's pathetic being damn near 50 and trying to have influence over 20 year old somethings to try to remain some kind of sense of relativity. All the chefs look down on it and one of us has to tell you. Then he said, I said, instead, you're attacking my agent weight. He said, that's just an honest review of what you put out there.
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Unknown B
Wow.
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Unknown A
And then apparently one of his kids left like a voicemail for her. And there's other people that have chimed in with other notes about this, this guy in question. And it does seem that he's fired off at critics a number of times. And I'm curious where you think blame lands here. I think you've tipped your hand from the intro here, but after seeing that, what's your opinion?
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Unknown B
You know, I think there's a lack of empathy online when you're face to face. You would never say the things you'll say online.
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Unknown A
Absolutely.
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Unknown B
Everybody's going through their own personal journey, their own story. Somebody might have a sick parent. They could have a child, you know, having a tough time at school. They could be behind on their rent or their mortgage. It's hard to be a small business owner and to be under constant criticism. Also not hard. On the other side, it is just criticism. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words should never hurt you. So you should be able to if you're putting yourself out there and you want to be viral and get a thousand burgers in two days, which if they're 15 bucks each, which is kind of what a burger costs these days in San Francisco. Or a $15 ticket size. Or a $25 ticket size, sure. Hey, they made $25,000 in two days from a hole in the wall. Pretty good business. Live by the talk, die by the top.
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Unknown B
You got to be able to control yourself. And I do think, you know, saying things when you're criticizing something like she did, where she kind of frames it as, hey, not for me, or maybe they made a mistake or they're getting the kinks out. I think those are all good caveats to put in there. So the person could be under a lot of pressure. And, you know, I have great sympathy. I saw my dad go have a lot of pressure when the financial Crisis happened in 1987 and he lost his second business just hard. And so, you know, I have empathy for everybody all around. My understanding is the chef now has left all these because he's been getting so much hate for trying to counter the criticisms he's gotten. Gosh. I mean, I'm starting to sound like a softie, but a little bit of grace for everybody here, maybe a little bit of reconciliation.
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Unknown B
Maybe a beer summit like Obama did, where, hey, why doesn't she come work there and make some burgers and run work the front line? And why doesn't he make her a three star and invite her to go have omakasa? That's how I would have handled it. I would have invited. Hey, listen, thank you for the review. We appreciate the attention. Sorry, we only got a 7.2. Here's what we're trying to accomplish. Would love to invite you to come as my guest if you're into omakase, because I do appreciate you giving us a little attention. If you can give us a second shot in 30 days when we've got everything up and running. Hey, you can pay for it or it's on me. Here's a coupon code. Just, you know, show this here and there's a way to handle it with grace.
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Unknown A
I guess that's like jiu jitsu. That's like taking the incoming and turning it into something that, like, works out in your favor. I do think, though, that you have touched on something that's super important, which is that it is so easy, I think, to be someone who has never received a lot of online hate.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
And presume that that actually has no impact on you because it's all digital now. In this case, I think Jeffrey Lee, based on everything that I saw, went too far and was a bit of a jerk and should have had his wrist slapped. Firing him, maybe a bit excessive.
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Unknown B
I thought the review certainly excessive. I wonder if he. I think he might be doing A little seppuku there where in order to keep the restaurants going and not have them have a problem, he said, you know what? I'll just resign. Got it. Is he actually resigned? I don't know. He's got ownership in these things.
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Unknown A
Relieved, but.
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Unknown B
Yeah, but. So maybe. Maybe he needs a month off to just take a breather. It's a hard gig, right? But I think you know that.
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Unknown A
But most people don't have your skin. And that's the thing. That's why I'm glad you're being empathetic, because, yeah, the last show we were talking about how you won't close your DMs, and I'm like, Close your DMs. And you're like, no, I want to know.
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Unknown B
I want to know who the anonymous accounts are who are saying this stuff. I have security protocols, like, anybody in my profile here. If somebody. I had somebody. I'll just tell a little story here. I had somebody dox me based on a picture of, like, my backyard. This person. I'll just tell a story, okay? Person is upset because of something I said on the show. They decide to dox me. They decide to put my primary residence is worth $10 million. What do I know? Blah, blah, blah. And you know how they got my photo? They went back two years when I took a picture of the tree line in my backyard. They reverse image searched it and they tweeted it. This is on July 4th weekend. I say to the guy, I look the guy up, I Google search him, because I have security protocols.
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Unknown B
So now I gotta get the security company involved to find out if this person's gonna jump my fence. Right, Right. Okay. You know, and I have security. I have guns, I got cameras, I got alarms. I have a security detail. I mean, I got it all. I don't talk about it, but I'll talk about here for a brief sec. I finally got on LinkedIn. I look at the companies. Hey, that company looks very familiar to me. I click the company. I know the CEO who we work for. I screenshot it, check me. I send it to him, and I say, hey, dipshit, first of all, happy Independence Day. Number two. Your boss and I had drinks at this conference, played cards, yada, yada. And I'm about to email them what you just did. What do you think their response is going to be to you doxxing me?
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Unknown B
He says, are you gonna do that? I said, well, why don't you call me? So I get off the treadmill July 4th. I say, hey, dum dum. Do you realize how dangerous this is for me? I have kids now. I know you don't have kids, and I know you're probably 24 year old. And he goes, no, I'm actually married. I just had my first kid. I said, oh, that's great, what a blessing. How old's your kid? Says, four weeks. I said, you got a four week old kid? It's July 4th and you're doxxing me, knowing that I could have my kids get attacked. This is serious shit here, kid. And I said, so you're married. I said, I tell you what, go talk to your wife, tell her what you did, and ask her what she thinks is the best thing for you to do.
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Unknown B
I get an apology letter from him with his wife, Cece.
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Unknown A
Yeah, they're. You think?
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Unknown B
And I said, consider it lesson learned, water under the bridge. I wish you great success with your 4 year old. I encourage you to have more kids. They're a blessing. And next time I see your boss, I'll tell them what an amazing individual you are. And I won't ever mention this again. Wife replies back, thank you, Jake. By the way, he's one of your biggest fans. And I just think. And I'm like, what?
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Unknown A
Yeah, okay, so I was with you until that last sentence.
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Unknown B
Now I'm perplexed. I'm bringing it back to grace. All right, hit me. I think sometimes people will lose their logic, et cetera, when they're online too much. And this goes back to we live in Public. You watch the We Live in Public show and you see people lose their minds when they're online too much. They say things that are over the line. And the empathy, it's the. I wrote a blog post at the end, you know, two decades ago called the End of Empathy. I think Mike, syndicated on TechCrunch at some point, and I said, listen, you know, the end of empathy is here. You gotta really remember there are humans on the other side of this and they all got their own stories. Now, this sounds crazy for me because I'm a full contact guy, but the reason I tell you this is as full contact as I am, you know, I always think about the humanity of individuals.
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Unknown B
What are they going through? I just think, what's my worst day? And then I double it and say, what if that person's going through that? And I just put myself in their shoes, right? And it's a. It's a Christian thing. I grew up a Catholic. Yeah, it was drilled into me. Turn the other cheek, you know, do on to Others, all these great principles that Christ. And I'm not a religious person. Spiritual, not religious. But Christ had some pretty darn good concepts and ideas, whether he's a historical figure or he is the Son of God, wherever you want to put him on the spectrum. If he was a fictional character like Batman, that's some good ideas. So you don't have to be religious to take some of those ideas to heart. As we go into the new year in a contentious time, I brought this story up because I just want everybody to think about the humanity on the other end.
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Unknown B
And that's why I tweet the DMs. I get that sometimes say horrible things about people because I always want people to remember there's a human being on the other side. And every time I tweet those, I get a hundred other DMs with people saying the nicest, kindest things to me. I saw you got those eight dms. Yeah. You tweeted them for let you know. You know, hey, here's a story of how you had a positive impact on my life, etc. And be kind to each other.
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Unknown A
Be kind to each other.
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Unknown B
Before we could end the show, I want to get your take on everything.
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Unknown A
I said one tiny little thing about this because I do not have to have security. I do not have to do a lot of things that you do, and I honestly don't think that I aspire to what it would require to have the need for that, because you and I are a little bit different in a couple of ways. But I do have a very private spouse who works in healthcare, and that means she has a lot of patient contact, which means she has very different privacy rules than I do. And she's always giving me a hard time. Like, don't post that. Don't post that. I almost can't post pictures at all because she's so worried about what's in the background and what people. And I've always been kind of like, oh, it's not that big of a deal. Yeah, but your story just scared me straight again.
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Unknown A
So I'm gonna go ahead and go inside after this and give her a big hug and tell her that I'm gonna post no pictures ever again. Because that is really. Because I have kids, too, man. And there's nothing I think I wouldn't do for them.
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Unknown B
I think people are overall great human beings.
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Unknown A
True.
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Unknown B
And even when they have a bad day, I still think they're great human beings. Like this kid who was in this finance company. I think actually is a good kid who had a bad day. Yeah. And if we're all going to get judged on our worst 10 moments in our life, we're all going to fail. And we're all going to fail pretty equally, I think. Yeah. On average. So when somebody screws up, like the chef or the kid in private finance, or maybe I did, I said something spicy about a CEO, and maybe it was a little too personal and it upset them. You know, like, whenever this stuff happens, I always think, just dial it back. And I always try to be judicious when I say stuff.
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Unknown A
Now forget to beer summit between the woman and the chef. We need to beer summit. You and Palmer lucky to quash that beef because I feel like. I feel like it's living over your shoulder.
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Unknown B
Well, no, it's just only because people keep riling it up. They keep riling it up. Would I have said the things as spicy as I said them 10 years ago? No.
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Unknown A
No.
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Unknown B
Could the press have been wrong in that instance? And I was commenting on stuff that's wrong? It is quite possible. You know, I totally apologize for it. You know.
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Unknown A
All right, so let's. Let's leave on this beautiful positive note, and I'll just say this. Don't forget, everybody, Jason will be on a different country for a bit. So the next show will be on Wednesday. It's going to be in the morning if you're here in the US So you will get to see me before I've had my seventh cup of coffee. So you welcome. You've never seen that before, everybody. We found the only time that was kind of okay for both of our schedules and y'all. So we're doing our best to make sure that we're bringing you the Twist love. So shoot us some notes. We will be on YouTube then. But, Jason, fly safe in the meantime and have fun skiing.
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Unknown B
All right, my brother, I just want to say, going into the new year, what an amazing job you've done.
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Unknown A
Oh, thanks, man. All right, everybody. This has been twist. He's X.com Jason. I'm X.com Alex. We're back on Wednesday morning. Fly safe. We'll see you then. Toodles.
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Unknown B
Bye.