Chime's IPO, Databricks' $1B Acquisition & Dave Rubin's Media Empire | E2126

Today's show: Chime is finally going public with strong financials and a shot at matching its $25B 2021 valuation, signaling real momentum in the IPO market. Databricks just made a $1B bet on agentic AI by acquiring Neon, a Postgres-as-a-service startup riding the new database wave. Then, Dave Rubin joins to share how he built and sold Locals, his uncancellable creator platform, all while navigating the intense media landscape. Timestamps: (0:00) Episode Teaser(1:14) Jason and Alex open the show(1:42) Why Chime's IPO is such a promising sign(7:22) Chime's financials and valuation(10:12) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST(12:17) So why did Databricks buy Neon?(13:22) Where is the AI Integration Desktop App?(17:29) Jason's plan to bring Americans back to the movies(20:10) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(21:58) Make movies All-you-can-eat!(26:26) Special Guest: Dave Rubin(30:39) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(31:41) Why Dave Rubin goes phone free for weeks at a time(45:24) Why Identity politics is killing business and sports(49:23) Can Locals reinvent subscription models? Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Links from episode: Rubin Report on Locals: https://rubinreport.locals.com/ Follow Dave: X: https://x.com/RubinReport YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJdKr0Bgd_5saZYqLCa9mng Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (10:12) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (20:10) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! (30:39) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When I closed my Patreon that night, the way I did it was I was on a live stream and I said for, I can't remember the exact numbers, but I was like, for every thousand subscribers we get, something like that, live while I'm on air, I'll do a shot of Patron because I'm leaving Patreon. Anyway, about 12 shots later.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

  12,000 subs. Wow, you must have been.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  So I was, and I was really doing it. So not only was I wasted, but I doxed myself live on air.

• 0:22Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Because when I went finally at the end of the night, when I went to delete the account, which we were showing.

• 0:27Jason Calacanis?

  It had your address. Oh, no.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  It, you, you pressed delete and then it popped, your email pops up.

• 0:32Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, your email. Great.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  It was not my address.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com/twist today. And Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at Lemon.io/twist.

• 1:13Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startup. Dave Rubin's going to be with us in the second half of the show. You know him from The Dave Rubin Show and Locals, a voice of the right. Lots to talk about with him about the media business, but we have a full docket. I gave Lon some time off here so we can just ping pong and volley back and forth through this docket a little bit faster than we normally do because there's a lot going on, Alex, and we need to get through this for our audience. I know Chime is going public. Explain what Chime is. Explain the deal.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  All right. Chime is an American neo-bank, which means that it's a digital software service that is banking-like things. It is an incredibly well-funded fintech startup here in the United States, and its valuation went to, I think, about $20 billion back in 2021. And Jason, we've been waiting for this IPO for a very long time, given its scale of value, how much money was put into it, the number of investors, and finally, it's going to go public. So you want a quick rundown of the numbers?

• 2:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think it's always a good idea, and this is, you know, absolutely fantastic. We're tracking M&A and we're tracking IPOs. So on the IPO train.

• 2:21Jason Calacanis?

  Etoro is filed, yeah? They were gonna go out.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  Etoro priced last night, Jason, and it's

• 2:26Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it did.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  currently trading and it's doing well.

• 2:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, so Etoro is out. That's the Canadian version of Robinhood.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:36Jason Calacanis?

  Then there's Chime going public. And did we have any other IPOs this year so far that we've been tracking?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Well, we're taking a look at Klarna, of course.

• 2:43Jason Calacanis?

  Klarna, right, okay.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  And StubHub is in the wings. Puro pulled back. And of course, CoreWeave went out earlier this year. So that's our current kind of list of things. But there are, people keep telling me, Jason, there are so many companies in the pipeline. So I'm expecting, given that Etoro priced above range, sold more shares and is trading well, and we're seeing Chime list, I think we could see quite a few more offerings unlocked shortly.

• 3:05Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So here's what I want, just as we get going here in 2025, IPOs by month, we record them, we put it in the docket so that we can kind of track this and the velocity of it. And M and A above, you know, some minor amount, let's say 50 million or more. Just so we're kind of tracking this on a monthly, quarterly basis for our audience. All right, so Chime is like Mercury Bank, it's like Ramp, it's like that category of NeoBank. New Bank is the other one, and New Bank for South America. These are extremely popular because Bank of America and other online banks are terrible.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Garbage.

• 3:48Jason Calacanis?

  Right, and this is a really important lesson, I think, for startups. Banking seems like the most difficult group to go after, right? Like, how could you possibly take on big banks?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:02Jason Calacanis?

  It turns out, they are amongst the most hated. So one of the great ways to make a startup is to look at the index of which companies are least trusted, Alex, and most hated. When you find companies that people feel abused by, it's really easy to construct a better product. Now, they might try and stop you, there's regulation, etc. But if you were to look at the drug companies, they're hated. And what do people love? Compounding pharmacies and cost plus drugs. People hate the cable companies and cable modems. What do people love? Starling or...

• 4:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so this is a tried and true model. People hate when there are monopolies that are captured. And my Lord, if I'm Bank of America, I've got to be a little bit nervous because I was talking to a group last night, or I should say, yesterday, we had our first Founder Tuesday here in Austin. I'm trying to get this whole in-person thing going. So we had a dozen founders here. We spent the day with them from 10 to 4. We got some barbecue at Stubbs in the middle. And I was amazed, they all use, you know, Mercury Chime, Ramp Cards. They are rabid consumers of this vertical.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I am a Chase customer in my personal life, and I used to have a Citibank account back in the day, but I moved out the, you know, Northeast, not out here. Citibank decided, Jason, to start charging me a monthly fee and then won't let me close my account unless I send them a canonized letter. That is the level of customer service that you get from existing banks. They're terrible. Now, Chime is riding the way that you outlined. So in 2024, revenue 1.64 billion, up 31%. And that's a faster pace of growth than they saw the year before, 27. So Jason, a little bit of revenue acceleration over at Chime. And also, in the first quarter of this year, revenue is, I think, about 550. So we're on a plus, you know, over $2 billion revenue for this company against a 2021 air valuation of about 25.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Now, I can see a lot of arguments why this company could get very close to that 2021 price. I don't know if it'll surpass it, per se, but then again, eToro did much better than I expected on a slower revenue growth pace. So the market does seem to have a lot of appetite for fintech products, which I think is going to throw a halo on your Brex's, on your ramps, on your alpaca markets. There's a lot of companies out there right now that are in the fintech space who are probably cheering these two companies on as champions, really, for some gosh darn DPI. And that's what I want to bring up next, Jason. So who owns Chime? Well, 5% and greater shareholders include DST Global, Postlink Capital, Access Industries, General Atlantic, Minlo, Cathay Innovation, and our Jirphins, of course, over at Iconic.

• 6:49Jason Calacanis?

  What's the share price going to be? Did they, did we see that, nor it's not?

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Not yet. This is the first S1. That'll be in the first S1A.

• 6:57Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  So we're, we're dying for that. But the company seems super healthy. Really quick account creation growth, improving ARPU, you know, improving gross margins. They had a period in 2023 when they actually managed to reduce some of their costs as they grew, Jason, which is how they managed to go from losing hundreds of millions a year to something like 25 million on a net basis last year. So essentially break even, lots of cash, growing just EBITDA. It's a winner.

• 7:21Jason Calacanis?

  They make their money from the transaction fees, I guess, like other credit card companies or interchange fees, like banks make money from. Yeah. And they get a percentage of the money flowing through the system.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Yes, but what's really interesting is that's going down as a percentage of their total revenue.

• 7:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  The revenue mix is improving because there is a legitimate risk, and they talk about this in filing, that local laws at the state or perhaps even federal level could undercut the interchange revenue streams that they enjoy. They give a couple of examples of that. So they're also doing other things like, you know, you can pay a fee and get your salary earlier. They get fees from out of network ATMs and all of that added up to about 28% of their revenue in the first quarter of this year. So slowly diversifying the revenue way, but they still make a lot of money off transactions.

• 8:04Jason Calacanis?

  10 times revenue. They're at 2 billion in revenue. They're going to go out for 10 times. Revenue would be 20.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:10Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe it's 12 times revenue, 24 billion, and that matches their last private company. So this issue you've heard about here and on All In constantly and the hand wringing of the private valuations got ahead of the eventual public ones. Well, I don't know when that last round was. Did you say it was last year or two years ago?

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Uh, August of 2021. So literally peak.

• 8:32Jason Calacanis?

  Four, four years ago. So think about that. Four years, they were at 25 billion. Four years later, they're going out at 25 billion. So the catch up to the extraordinary valuations we saw on peak Zerp, the overhang for a fast growing company was four fricking years. So that's a lot of hand wringing. Congratulations to the board of that company and to the management team and all the rank and file employees because four years of going sideways and hard work to get to the exit. It's not fun. You know, you're used to the scoreboard going up and they had the scoreboard go sideways, but now comes the new, this is the new starting line for them. They're going to have a public currency. They can buy other companies. They can put this money to use

• 9:17Jason Calacanis?

  and it's going to raise their profile. When a company goes public, more people know about it, more people engage with it. People didn't know Airbnb and Uber in, you know, there's probably like a third of the country that didn't know about those companies. They hear them going public. Google, when it went public, it just, it just fills in like the last third of the laggards who don't know about it because they hear, oh, this went public and they become more aware of it. They engage with it more. So maybe somebody sees Airbnb go public. They've heard about it, but they never used it. Maybe they go from being, you know, in that messy middle of, you know, adopters of technology and they say, oh, you know, maybe I'll give it a shot because it's public. It legitimizes the company. So if somebody didn't want to use Chime, maybe they would. eToro, they went public, priced at $52 a

• 10:02Jason Calacanis?

  share, $5 billion valuation ballpark. So that's another great one that got out the door. Any, any notes on eToro?

• 10:14Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:59Jason Calacanis?

  website on planet Earth.

• 11:02Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, just really briefly, everybody. So they dropped a $46 to $50 IPO price range. They priced above that, always a bullish sign. They also sold more total shares than they're offering than expected. So the scale of the fundraise, Jason, was larger. Now, I think it was about half secondary. So it's not like all the money went to the balance sheet, but certainly unlocks a lot there. And as of right now, as we record this show, is trading for 6650, up 28%. That is enough of a gain that people will complain that it was mispriced. But I would say also provides enough of a cushion that it probably won't fall underneath its IPO price. So frankly, straight up, not gonna lie, this is a win. Shout out to them. I just, it feels so lovely to be talking about companies that are now trading versus companies that might in the future.

• 11:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And it's a $5 billion company. This isn't a 50 billion, 25 billion. This is the kind of IPOs we want to see. We want to see one, two, three, four, five, 10 billion dollar companies getting out because that gives, you know, the public the chance to maybe ride up from 5 billion to 100. Maybe they can get a 20x or a 10x off their investment. And Neon is selling to Databricks. Obviously, Databricks is a public company that's done very well. Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  No, it's still, still private.

• 12:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's still private. Okay. Snowflake's public. Databricks is remaining private. Wow.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. They spent a billion dollars roughly on a startup called Neon. And I'm gonna tell people what it does and a little bit about it and not go too much deeper because we don't have that much time. It offers Postgres as a service. Postgres is an open source relational database. Jason, they took database tech, put it up in the cloud as a managed service and are doing quite well with it. The reason why Databricks wants them is not strictly because they have cool technology, a growing customer base and so forth. It's because in 2024, they discovered that Agentic AI and what they offered had a really lovely marriage. And so they saw a lot of demand from the Agentic AI space. As a result, you know, Databricks wants people to build agents on top of their stored data inside of Databricks. Kind of a match made in heaven. The only thing I couldn't find for us today is what its last valuation was.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Though I'm gonna go ahead and say at a billion dollars of Databricks stock, presumably not cash. Investors that backed this company are gonna be very happy, given that it only raised like 120, 130.

• 13:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you know, in the announcement, I saw the announcement on the Databricks page and. There was a really interesting fact I didn't think of. You know, AI agents are, they don't care about resources, right? They, they just want to solve the task you're doing. So they're not thinking, oh, you know, what is this going to cost you? AI agents, it says here, we're creating four times as many databases versus humans. In other words, agents are going to be like, I have some other ideas of databases we could create, I'm gonna just rip. And so if you look at this chart here, it shows humans versus AI agents in October of 2024. This means people are going to spend more. And if they're spending more and they're doing more work, they're probably going to

• 14:06Jason Calacanis?

  have a stickier product. Yes. That's a reason to buy a company like this. If people get more value from your product and you're creating all these databases, getting all these results, that means it's stickier. I was lamenting how like terrible AI is in Slack. And then people were like, oh, do you not have the upgrade? I'm like, oh my God, it's going to cost me $5,000 a year or something like that for a team of 20, 25, 25 people maybe in our Slack instance. And now I gotta make a decision. It's like all this cognitive dissonance. I just hate when they make AI an upsell. But then somebody's like, oh, why don't you use, is it glue? David Sacks's AI first version of Slack? Yeah. And I'm like, oh, I forgot about that. You know, like I literally forgot about it because when I went to try it last time,

• 14:50Jason Calacanis?

  I was like, okay, it's a little early. Let me give them six months to kind of get these features we would need to move over. But now I'm seriously considering moving us out of Slack because of this AI issue. It's not AI first. And I'm trying to just simply summarize what happened. So then the Notion founder reached out to me and he turned on AI in our account. I'm going to meet with him later this week. Turns out Notion will ingest your Slack or has a Slack API. And people are saying that Notion does a better job of summarizing Slack than Slack does. So that's super interesting. Then I was like, wait a second, why don't I have a desktop client? I should have a desktop item like, isn't this the promise of Copilot with Windows?

• 15:35Jason Calacanis?

  And obviously, Apple's never going to get this done, but I downloaded a ChatGPT desktop app. I need a desktop app. Somebody, please let us know at TWI Startups, at mention us on Twitter X. Is there not a desktop app that will read my Slack client for me and just end run the application level and run the backend and just read all my new messages and summarize them for me? And then just, you know, on the side, say, hey, by the way, you know, while you were away, here's what's going on in the Slack production room, the investment team room, et cetera. Where is that? Where is that desktop app?

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Also, can that desktop app do my email to read my email for me and like summarize them? So I can quickly respond to people and just chew through it while I'm like taking a walk?

• 16:24Jason Calacanis?

  If you use Superhuman, I literally turned all this on in Superhuman just yesterday in the settings because, you know, they they've been rolling it out. And I'm like, I gotta be thoughtful about this. But there I now have Superhuman auto labeling all my inbound email. So when I look at it, it says, marketing pitch, marketing pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch in my inbox. It doesn't do it, but it's doing it in my other box right now. And then it is reminding me if I don't get back to an important email. So that is built into Superhuman. Full disclosure, we're the first investors in the company. Founder of HubSpot will claim he is. And Darmaesh is going to claim he is because we were both investors

• 17:06Jason Calacanis?

  in Reportive. And then Raul worked us both to be the first investors in Superhuman and then told us each we were the first investors. So I will take claim that, even though maybe he got his check in first. I don't know whose wire came in first.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  I'm not going to get in between the two of you on that. But I do think if you're the first or second money into a company doing that, well, you're both going to get your credit in due time.

• 17:27Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  In the form of a check.

• 17:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, fair enough. Okay, what else do we got? I guess I did a tweet about AMC or just about the movie industry and how clueless they are. You know, before we run out of time, I think that's a really interesting story. Maybe you could tee it up for us.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  All right. So Jason has a view here about how the movie industry should work on bringing more people in and AMC, big theater chain, if you don't know, also a meme stock out there. They're going to have a discount Wednesday promotion, Jason. Essentially, if you're a part of the AMC loyalty program, you get half off tickets for Wednesdays. I presume Wednesday is the slowest day of the week for movie theaters. So why not offer tickets at a discount, get more bodies in, sell more popcorn, et cetera. I thought it was kind of a winning idea. You had a very divergent view and you thought it was kind of stupid. And so I'm going to go ahead and bring up your tweet here because I think it somewhat speaks for itself.

• 18:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think the movie industry is clueless. I might have said something, you know, a little more colorful there. But everybody has seen the example of the epic pass in skiing. Skiing was this dying industry and this company Epic and another one iconic and some others bought a bunch of mountains, put together consortium and said, all you can eat, ski as much as you like. You want to ski five days a year, 500 bucks. You want to ski 50 days a year, 500 bucks. And then they boiled the frog to the point at which my Epic pass is 1,000 a year, my Icon pass might be 1,200. And buying a ski ticket in

• 18:58Jason Calacanis?

  order to incentivize people buying these season passes, what they did was it's now $200 or $300 to ski for a single day, which anybody can say, you know, by the fourth day, you're now in the all you can eat mode. So what do you do? You book a second trip, you book a second weekend, and then you enjoy it more and then you become addicted to it. I mean, this is like all you can eat fentanyl. Like if you could come up with a system for like an epic pass for drugs, like, I mean, you'd kill everybody, but that's what they did with skiing. They made skiing into a drug for a certain cohort of people where you just get that high, you want to keep doing it. Movies have done the opposite. Movies

• 19:39Jason Calacanis?

  have said, every time you want to come here, we're going to make it more painful for you. You want to buy a ticket and you bring your family of five? Great. You know, it's 10 bucks a ticket on average, 50 bucks. And you want to buy stuff at the concession stand, it's going to be 10 bucks per person, minimum, probably more like 15. So a family of five, you know, if mom and dad sit it out and the kids get $15 each, now you're at 95 bucks. 95 bucks for two hours of entertainment. That's not cheap, right? And so people were, and then maybe you got the Epic pass, maybe you go skiing for the entire day for free.

• 20:12Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:58Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:44Jason Calacanis?

  and get your business investor ready today. For just $39 plus state fees, you can set up your company the right way, fast, private, and compliant. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. So people are making these trade-offs in their mind. Then they were like, oh yeah, we need more money. So how do we get more money? We're going to add $2 to everything for 3D. And we're going to make you watch a movie in 3D that you didn't ever ask for 3D. Oh, and we're going to put it on IMAX, we charge another $3. So now you're getting to $16. Oh yeah, we're going to make it a luxury theater. You're going to be able to order food to your seat. Now the $10 in popcorn and drinks went to $25 to chicken fingers, et cetera. I literally spend $250 when I go to the movies now. Let that sink in. Five people, $250, about $50 a person.

• 22:29Jason Calacanis?

  I go to an IMAX, I like the IMAX theater, that's $18 a ticket. And everybody orders dessert, and so it's basically combining dinner. Anyway. If they just went with an all you can eat model of 20 bucks per person, and then maybe if it's a family of five, you discount a little bit, you get to $50 per month for a family of five, we would go to the movies two or three times a week. They could do, I believe, what the ski industry did, which is make people addicted again to the experience of going out and seeing movies. But because there are different people in the ecosystem trying to optimize different things, the movie theater is trying to optimize the food. The movie industry is trying to optimize the ticket price.

• 23:12Jason Calacanis?

  The cable TV providers are trying to optimize getting these things out of theater into their streaming services to get your 15 bucks a month. So now you've got three different constituents, and then you've got poor mom and dads, which you're not in this phase yet, but you will be in another couple of years, where you're just trying to do something with the kids on a Saturday or Sunday and laugh and have joy with them and keep them entertained and, you know, maybe have some shared experiences. You've got four different people going in four different directions. There is only one direction. Enjoy yourself and give people a good deal. They should let the movie studios buy the theaters and then all you can eat. And Netflix should have a theater chain. Disney should have a theater chain. And they should have reciprocity where you can see unlimited Disney, unlimited Netflix,

• 23:57Jason Calacanis?

  if you have either of those subscriptions. Or they could balkanize it and be like Epic and Icon Pass where some people might pick both. People want all you can eat. So two really good ideas for founders to think about today. Can you create all you can eat? There was a movie pass that tried to do it. Didn't work because they had to deal with these different folks. But Spotify did figure out an all you can eat model. Netflix did, Disney did, et cetera. So try to look at a space and create an all you can eat model and see what happens. Second, how interesting would it be to find something that's hated and make it all you can eat? Sometimes people hate certain hotel chains. They charge too much. I wonder if I paid, let's think of a number, for unlimited stays in a hotel.

• 24:45Jason Calacanis?

  Married hotels, unlimited stays. A married hotel on average is 300 a night, I'm thinking.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  Something in there, depends on the city, yeah.

• 24:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so 1,000 hotel room nights would be 300,000. So anyway, 300, well, 300 times 300 is roughly, you know, 100,000.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:04Jason Calacanis?

  So $100,000 paid in advance, you have unlimited stays in envoy hotels. And if there's availability, you could stay in another one. I would pay that every year.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:15Jason Calacanis?

  If I was a single guy, I would certainly pay that and just travel the world. I bet you they could sell that for 150,000 a year, 10,000 a month, 15,000 a month, and make it all you could eat. Or if you said you could buy 1,000 hotel rooms for $150,000 in advance and then just use them over three years, people would do these kind of deals. So it's something to think about when you're approaching entrepreneurship is to think about making people a dictatorship product and giving them some extraordinary deal, which would create a lot of press around it. So maybe what the movie theater chain should do is say, we're going to sell 1,000 of these passes for unlimited for $1,000.

• 25:57Jason Calacanis?

  And you can bring 1,000 for 1,000 and you can bring up to four people with you. I would buy it immediately. Immediately, I would buy it.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  And then charge the next 1,200 and see where demand goes, make a bunch of money, and it's free publicity. And Jason, you made a really good important point. It's going to get people back into the theaters. Right now, they're too big, they're too empty, they're too expensive, and they have fixed labor costs. So like, you need to have more bodies in there. And wouldn't it be great if for once we had a good headline about the media business?

• 26:26Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm, absolutely. All right, everybody, special guest today, Dave Rubin, is with us. You know him because he's an entrepreneur, he's a podcaster, former lib, now MAGA. I don't know how you like to describe yourself. You and I spoke, everybody knows the Rubin Report, I don't have to like, you know, like drag this out here because you're YouTube famous.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Let's see how long you can go with this intro. Come on, give me three more minutes off the top of your head, let's roll.

• 26:52Jason Calacanis?

  Last night, we spoke at Joe Lonsdale Mutual's University of Austin. And 80 or so students in the first class.

• 27:03Jason Calacanis?

  They're all picked because they're brainiacs. They got high SAT scores. We found out. And I was like, wow, you're in town. We should, we should talk because I wanted to talk to you just about the business and how your business, specifically right wing media has, it became huge.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:20Jason Calacanis?

  And now maybe it's in a transition, but people also maybe don't know that you created locals and then you sold that to Rumble. So you're like me, a podcaster and an entrepreneur.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Right. We just have reverse entry points because I was a political guy that became a tech guy, I suppose. And you're a tech guy that became a political guy. So it's a nice, it's a nice meeting there.

• 27:40Jason Calacanis?

  I got dragged into politics. You were started as a comedian. I mean, I really don't, I'm not as obsessed about politics, but is it exhausting to you? Cause you're due five days a week.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Five days a week live, plus however, however many interviews I do on top of that.

• 27:54Jason Calacanis?

  It's exhausting.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Is it exhausting?

• 27:56Jason Calacanis?

  Talking about politics and the pace that Trump goes at.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:01Jason Calacanis?

  And the vitriol now, like you have to be on one side. You are complex. You have many, I think, characteristics of people on the left, moderates and the right, but you live in a world like I do where you're forced to pick sides.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:17Jason Calacanis?

  So what's it like to be, I guess, in some ways, loved by the right as somebody who moved from the left?

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:26Jason Calacanis?

  And then also under this crazy scrutiny where just like I was on the left, they want you to pass a purity test on the right. And there are some parts of the purity test that maybe you pass or you don't. So what's it like and how do you manage the psychology of being under constant scrutiny, assault, and just dealing with a pace of news, like the pace of news in tech is, I mean, that's fast.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:54Jason Calacanis?

  But in Trump politics, it's absurd.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Right. Well, basically it's like life has become endless doom scrolling on this thing, right? That's sort of the pace of everything is just can I scroll and scroll and scroll, almost to the point where you see good things or positive things and you just don't even look at them and you're just waiting for some disaster.

• 29:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  And you know, back in the day, and people don't remember this, but guys of our age remember it. Websites used to have an ending. You'd go to CNN.com for the news. And there was an end to the page and it would say, go back to the top. But then, you know, the endless scroll came in.

• 29:25Jason Calacanis?

  Daily Mail. Those are some long stories.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  And it just goes and it goes and they just pump more to you. And, you know, our brains are not quite wired to that. So first, just quick on the exhaustion part. It is exhausting and politics is infuriating. And we talked about this a bit last night. Once you kind of know the people on both sides of it, you know, public, how they are publicly and you know how they're privately and you see how the sausage is made. There's a lot of stuff that is not.

• 29:50Jason Calacanis?

  Theatrics, performative.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  All of that. And then you kind of see the disconnect between how people behave in their private life and how they are publicly. All that stuff's kind of exhausting, I would say. But like you, I've built a great life doing this. So I am able, I've made it a very high priority for me to put this thing down. I do every August, I go off the grid for a month. I've done it eight years in a row. No phone, no TV, no news.

• 30:15Jason Calacanis?

  Where you go, what do you do?

• 30:17Speaker 00

  I've done Bora Bora a couple of times. We've done tree houses in Mexico, literally just disappear, disappear. And I read a little bit.

• 30:24Jason Calacanis?

  Is the world there when you come back?

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Well, that's the thing. You think the world won't be and you do miss things. One year I missed the Afghanistan withdrawal. I missed John McCain dying. I missed when Biden chose Kamala as VP. You miss things.

• 30:39Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, founders, let's keep it a buck. Finding the right developers is tough. It's hard, especially when you're trying to run and scale up your startup. You've got a lot to do and lemon.io is gonna save you time. They're gonna save you money and a ton of headaches and they're great at what they do. They've done work to find and vet developers who are experienced, result oriented, and they charge competitive rates. And you also know that great developers can be hard to find and integrate into your team. So lemon.io handles all that for you. Startups choose lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with at least three years of experience and who are the best of the best, the creme de la creme.

• 31:21Jason Calacanis?

  A bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they had great experiences. Here's your call to action. Go to lemon.io/twist and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And Twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. Stop burning money. Hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io slash twist.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  But you come back and you know, for the first like five days of it, every year, the same thing happens. I'm kind of freaking out, you know, my hands going to my pocket like, where's it, where's the thing, where's the, you know?

• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  It's like a shadow arm, right?

• 31:52Speaker 00

  No, it really is.

• 31:53Jason Calacanis?

  Like those people who lose an arm.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  And you feel it.

• 31:55Jason Calacanis?

  And they reach for something with no arm.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Well, it's like, you know, I'm sure you get it to the phantom buzzing.

• 31:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  You get the phantom buzzing. I don't really get it anymore, but it used to be a real thing with phantom buzzing that people were getting when we first had these things in our pockets. But I think by doing the disconnect that I do, this will be my ninth year doing it, that has been one of the things that's allowed me to stay sane because we know a lot of the same people and we're a lot of same world. So many people go into the political thing with good, you know, most people do things for good intentions and they just, the clicks, the fame, the money, whatever it is.

• 32:25Jason Calacanis?

  And lose their minds.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  It just starts making you crazy.

• 32:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Where do you fail currently and where do they love you?

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 32:32Jason Calacanis?

  Like, so that is psychologically, I think, part of the strategy is to, in your replies, attack, you, you get brigaded.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:45Jason Calacanis?

  And I have had coordinated brigading, you know, Sacks has sort of made fun of it on the pod where, you know, he called off like the MAGA people, but I know how the brigading works because there's group chats that you and I.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Is he able to control the people? That's good to know.

• 32:59Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, he, I mean, that was the kind of the joke.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Nobody can control.

• 33:02Jason Calacanis?

  But there are group chats where they will share a Dave Rubin tweet, a Jason Calacanis tweet, a Sacks tweet and say, okay.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Go.

• 33:09Jason Calacanis?

  Go.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:10Jason Calacanis?

  And you'd know it when you're a super rattle, you have a following because, okay, this tweet just went from, you know, I think my average tweet gets 50,000 views or so. And okay, this one's getting 400,000. This one has 1,800 applies, the average one has 100.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:26Jason Calacanis?

  What's going on here?

• 33:26Speaker 00

  And it turns out that suddenly none of these people follow you and they're like, how did he get my mentions the second I tweeted it out? You have 50 people telling you to go kill yourself.

• 33:36Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  You know, some version of that.

• 33:37Jason Calacanis?

  It's psyops.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, it really, well, they coordinate and telegram and they're doing it. And I don't know if it's 4chan or just whatever these underbelly things are, but that, that is what they're doing. There's no doubt about it.

• 33:46Jason Calacanis?

  And it does affect you psychologically if you're unaware of it.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:50Jason Calacanis?

  And I noticed it when it came to Ukraine because I had like dictator bad. As we follow this, like, hey, dictators are bad and democracies flawed as they can be are a better system. So just, you know, my basic operating system as a Gen Xer is like, yeah, more democracy, good, less democracy, bad. But man, the, because of Sacks and his position on it, which people couldn't understand, like, why is he so pro Putin? That just kept coming up in my replies. And I was like, oh, this is either like, uh, you know, some Putin people trying to promote this or anti Ukraine people, whatever, or it could just be his followers. Like, it's, there's some coordinated effort here. And I was like, yeah, this actually reinforces my belief.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's one of the-

• 34:36Jason Calacanis?

  It actually makes me dig in.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Well, that also is one of the reasons that you really better know what you think and why you think it. Otherwise, you will be pushed. You will suddenly tweet something that you think is fairly innocuous or not particularly dangerous politically, and you'll get owned by these people and it will be unrelenting and it will go on for days. And suddenly you'll be like, wait a minute, did I, did I really miss the mark on that one? And then little did you know that it was a bot farm in Russia, or it was out of South Korea, or, or, or it was just coordinated by the frog people on Telegram, or whatever it might be. And, and that's why it's really important. Well, it's also why it's important that once you have a certain following, you really shouldn't pay that much attention to the-

• 35:16Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  To the responses, which kind of sucks in a way, because I want feedback, right? Like, of course you want feedback. That's why it's nice last night to sit in a room with, you know, 80 young people and really like, you could see, they were really listening to us. Like, they were real, the questions were great, by the way, and, and some were kind of combative, which was really nice, actually.

• 35:33Jason Calacanis?

  Totally fine, yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  But, you know, the anonymity of this thing, the distance of this thing, it has changed us so far. How, how old are you?

• 35:40Jason Calacanis?

  I am 54.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  54. So I'm, I'll be 49 next month. So we're basically Gen X, we're basically the same age. We're the last generation that fully grew up without this thing. We're the last generation that grew up, where, where did you grow up?

• 35:51Jason Calacanis?

  I grew up in Brooklyn, yeah.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  In Brooklyn, okay. So I'm from Brooklyn originally. I grew up in Long Island, lived in New York City most of my life. But, you know, I would come home from school, get on my bike-

• 36:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  And disappear with my friends for eight hours. And then I showed up for dinner and my mom, where, what, did you-

• 36:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we were latchkey kids. We were free range.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  And, but we were the last generation that fully, fully had that. And that is why I think Elon being involved with Trump has been so formative, because we needed, the boomers for some reason would not hand this thing over.

• 36:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  And Elon, I think, just did an unbelievable job of finally being like, hey, There's another generation here. We're still, we have some, you know, experience. We're still young enough that our bodies work.

• 36:33Jason Calacanis?

  We have some energy.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Stop with you geriatric people.

• 36:36Jason Calacanis?

  I mean Mitch McConnell glitching on TV and then Biden. It's just, I don't know, this gerocracy or whatever they call it. Jury, geritocracy. I'm like, how, how are these, let them retire.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  It's, it's a function. It's, well, it's, I think we would all gladly send them into retirement. So it's not about letting, it's that they for some reason have decided not to let go. I, I don't know if there's another example of this literally in world history of a generation that refused to let go. Now you might blame us in a weird way. You might blame the Gen Xers for not grabbing it more. You know, like that there's something there that why didn't the Gen Xers be like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You guys can't do this anymore. You're 87 and you're running for reelection for the 40th year in a row and all of this shit. So whether it's our fault or their fault or whatever it is, part of what's going on here that feels so crazy in the world. It's a technological revolution, right? Which we're about to have another one because of AI.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  But it's also just this weird generational tension. I mean, even now, as you know, I'm a big Trump supporter. But the guy is basically 80 years old.

• 37:39Jason Calacanis?

  81. He's double the age. And I said this in one of our mutuals, very public person got really upset at me and was like, please don't say that. And I'm like, he's twice the age of the VP.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, literally. Right. JD's younger than me.

• 37:56Jason Calacanis?

  JD's, JD's 39, I think. So he's, if you doubled his age, he'd be three years younger than Trump.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Right. And look, I don't want to.

• 38:03Jason Calacanis?

  Let that sink in.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  And the weird thing is I don't want to be ageist. So I don't hold that against him as long as he's cognitively there. The difference, I mean, I don't want to get into the whole Biden thing, which is now, you know, but it's like, that was, that, I was doing videos in 2019 talking about his obvious cognitive problems. I'm not a wizard. I'm not from the future. It was just pretty damn obvious. Oddly though, I didn't write a book about it like Jake Tapper, which is now number one on Amazon.

• 38:26Jason Calacanis?

  Great. I mean, I think that might be, I know it's a controversial, but I haven't read the book yet. I will, I will give it a listen. Might be self-aware or it could be CYA. You could, you could take the cynical, hey, it's CYA. You know, he's part of the media, whatever. Or he could feel like, I'm really kind of pissed off that you abused my trust. And there was this grand conspiracy and I want to get to the end of it because I was a sucker at the poker table.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Which, which do you think? Because it seems fairly obvious to me.

• 38:58Jason Calacanis?

  Could be a little bit of both. It could be, he gave them the benefit of the doubt because of pre-existing relationships and because maybe he's on that team and he's as a journalist, you know, they said like, no, no, he's fine. You know, obviously he's older and he stutters and he's got a speech impediment and he's had that for a long time. But yeah, he's sharp. Because when I talk to my friends, Mark Pincus, Reid Hoffman, people I've known for a long time, and even Chamath, like, when's the last time you saw him? How was he? And it was always the same thing. Like, yeah, I had lunch with him, had breakfast with him. And he was great. I mean, it wasn't like, it's still like talking to your grandpa. It's not as quick and he doesn't understand AI, but.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  That in and of itself is a problem. On top of what you referenced last night related to the sundown and that they were obviously hiding him at certain parts of the day and all sorts of things.

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, grandpa had a bad day.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:43Jason Calacanis?

  You know, and Dean Phillips, I give him so much credit. I don't know if you got to spend any time with Dean Phillips.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 39:47Jason Calacanis?

  He's worth having on your pod.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  By the time I wanted to have him on, he had already gotten out and then.

• 39:50Jason Calacanis?

  Have him on your pod and talk to him. You'll be so impressed because he's a Clinton-like.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:55Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, he probably has more in common with you than Trump, you know, and you probably in a non-partisan world would vote for him. Uh, because he believes in, you know, whatever you're doing in your personal life is your personal life, which is, I think, a Republican position historically.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:12Jason Calacanis?

  You know, it's your ranch.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Limited government leaves it to you to live your life as you see fit.

• 40:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, like, it's literally when I moved to Texas, you know, maybe we'll talk about it when I'm on your show and I'm the guest. But, you know, like, that was an American value I really cherished was like, and when I came here and I bought my horse ranch and I was talking to the guy with the ranch, I was like, hey, can I do this on my ranch? He's like, it's your ranch? You mean the one you just bought? I'm like, yeah. He's like, yeah, you can do that on your ranch. I'm like, hey, can I do this on my ranch? You know, like shoot guns or whatever, have a shooting range? And he's like, yeah, yeah, no, it's your ranch, son. It's your ranch now. You can do that. I was like, can I? And he's like, son, I'm gonna stop you right there. It's your ranch. Do what you want. Don't bother your neighbors. And when the fence goes down, that's when you and your neighbor split the bill and that's when you interact.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:59Jason Calacanis?

  It's the fence.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:01Jason Calacanis?

  And it is like a really ingrained here, that's the fence. And when I grew up in Brooklyn and you grew up in New York.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:06Jason Calacanis?

  We all took the subway. You had your seat, I had my seat, you have your space, I have my space, we deal with each other. You're gay, I'm straight, I'm Irish, or Greek, or black, Hispanic, whatever, we just all deal with each other, nobody cares.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:18Jason Calacanis?

  We all gotta get to work, we're all suffering through the same, you know, delay on the subway, the same bullshit we gotta deal with, rats on the subway platform, whatever it is.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 41:27Jason Calacanis?

  And we all just got along, but you kinda just respected each other for who you are, and it was just so beautiful. I don't know, what happened to this goddamn country where everybody has to be at each other's throat over your political affiliation? Who cares? The least interesting thing about anybody is which party they're in.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I'm completely uninterested in which party you're in, I like assessing people on their beliefs and all of those things. You're completely right, I use the subway a lot as an example, because as someone that lived in New York City most of my adult life, and I had grandparents that were in the city that I was always going to when I was a kid, you're right, like, you'd get on the subway, and it was everybody from everywhere, of every age and color and background and religion or whatever. And it's not even that you respected them per se, but you just didn't get in their way, and they didn't get in your way. I mean, you'd all put cram in together, and you'd elbow everybody, but you didn't elbow them like, oh, I'll elbow the gay guy and not the Greek guy or something, it was just like, we're all in it together.

• 42:26Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta get to work.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  And that's what the danger, I would say, of what the woke thing did to the country over the last decade plus. It started whittling us down to these very, very unimportant things, right? Like, okay, so you're Irish, fine, that means you have a heritage, and, you know, okay, great, that's great, and hopefully there's probably some foods you like and traditions you have.

• 42:46Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  And we just went to an awesome St. Patty's Day thing in Miami, and I drank my, I'm not a beer guy, but I had a margarita that had some green stuff in, it was fantastic, everybody was wasted by 2:00 PM, it was amazing.

• 42:57Jason Calacanis?

  No judgments.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  But you don't look at somebody and be like, yeah, well, how are you gonna judge? But you don't look at people and be like, alright, you're Irish, I must think this about you, you're a Jew, I must think about this, you're black, I must think this about you. And once that thing crept into the system, it basically started shredding us apart. And I lay most of the blame on this, on the good liberals, I'm not talking about the crazy progressives that did this, or the Marxists, or whatever. The good liberal who just said, I am so damn tolerant that I will let anyone say or do anything at all times, I will be tolerant of intolerance. And once they ushered that in, the progressive movement, the radical part, basically was like, look at these suckers.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  What I always liken it to, what I wrote about in my first book, that it's basically, I'm sure you've seen it, the original Alien movie from 1977. If you remember, which is the best of all the movies, maybe the second one might be better, but.

• 43:52Jason Calacanis?

  Ridley Scott, James Cameron did the second.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  It's just perfection. But if you remember at the end of the first movie, the, after the alien has now, you know, ransacked the ship, killed everybody, basically, except Ripley and the robot, who's the doctor. And you find out that he's a robot, you know, halfway through the movie. Yeah. He basically is saying how he admires the alien. Because the alien is, has no morals. It just accomplishes what it wants to accomplish. And this is what I've tried to explain to people about the left, like, what the modern left or the progressive movement, you don't have to like what they're doing, but you have to respect that they have basically taken over the host. They took over the country. And they destroyed so much, and you could say, oh, they're all idiots and they're purple haired morons and, okay, well, it happened on your watch.

• 44:39Jason Calacanis?

  It was effective for a time, yeah. I mean, I remember talking to, I think, our mutual Sam Harris about this. And he was on to identity politics and like radical terrorism and fundamentalism.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  He was very, very early. Very early, which is why he got so much fame at an early point of the internet.

• 44:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and he and I both lived in LA. We had the same book agent. And so we met through our book agent, and I actually introduced him to Elon, and we used to have dinner together, the three of us, all the time in LA.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  That didn't end well, but.

• 45:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it didn't end well, but I'm gonna try to, I'm gonna try to bridge it and bring it back, but they're at each other's throats right now, but.

• 45:16Jason Calacanis?

  You know, he described identity politics to me, you know, as a cul-de-sac. It's like, you know, you get into this thing and you just start spinning. It's never enough.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  So they've infected. I mean, they just, the amount of stuff that they have destroyed. I love basketball, like basketball outside of my family. Basketball is my thing.

• 45:33Jason Calacanis?

  Who's your team?

• 45:33Speaker 00

  So I don't even have a team anymore. And I'll tell you, I used to have a team. I'll tell you that in a sec. But the reason I don't have a team anymore is because politics destroyed the NBA. Once they put that VLM logo on the, on the court, and then every time I turned on Inside the NBA with Chuck and Kenny and Ernie Johnson, I was like, I'm listening to people lecture me about racism.

• 45:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  That's just fine, but it's not what I'm coming to basketball for. So if you look at my YouTube search thing, when I'm doing cardio every day, I watch the same games that I watched from late 80s Lakers to the Bulls run in the 90s, up to about the end of Kobe. And then, and then it became political. My favorite player of all time is, is a Texas guy, actually Clyde the Glide.

• 46:15Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  Played for Houston, with Blazers originally in Houston. And one of the greatest moments of my entire life was for my birthday about seven years ago, my agent just send me, I open up my texts, he says, happy birthday. And it's Clyde's phone number. And then we become text buddies since then. And I was like, that's like of all the little things that you get.

• 46:34Jason Calacanis?

  You guys, you guys beat my Knicks and Patrick Ewing and John Starks back in the day.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  So Clyde, that was the 94 team. Clyde was traded to them in 95. But yes, that was game six.

• 46:45Jason Calacanis?

  Great series.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  You remember the Olajuwon just nipping that John Stark shot in game six. And that's what turned the whole thing around.

• 46:52Jason Calacanis?

  That would have been our favorite. And now it's this year, it might be my Knicks year.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  You love that team, that 94?

• 46:56Jason Calacanis?

  Knicks, I mean, I started going to Knicks games in the early 90s. And that's been my passion ever since. And I literally went to the Pistons games in Detroit.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:07Jason Calacanis?

  Wonderful city, by the way. If you haven't been to Detroit, I know.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  I've been, not in, not in some years.

• 47:11Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible how they've turned that city around. The people are great. And it's awesome to go to road games, because I'm a New Yorker, or I lived in the valley, like getting good seats was, you know, a five figure affair.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:23Jason Calacanis?

  In the first two or three rows, 10, 20,000 dollars to see, which is. Disconnected from reality.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:29Jason Calacanis?

  So then I was like, wait a second. I live in Austin now. I'm just going to go to Philly. And second row or first row in Philly is like a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars or three thousand dollars. I got courtside in Detroit for three thousand dollars a seat.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 47:43Jason Calacanis?

  Which would have been four rows back, five rows back at the Warriors, et cetera. So I was like, oh, my God, it's free and I get to see a new city. It's incredible. So if the Knicks clear Boston and go to Indiana, which will be an incredible series, I'm going to literally just go to the Indiana games.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  What do they charge in first row?

• 47:58Jason Calacanis?

  Probably 12 bucks. I think it's like 12 bucks for two. You and I can go.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  And you get Reggie to bring you your.

• 48:04Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, literally, you could stay. I stayed in the best hotel in Detroit, the Shinola Hotel, based on the Watch Comedy. Gorgeous. I was in a suite that was like the presidential suite, like 2,000 square feet. It was 400 bucks a night. I was like, God damn it. Like, this is incredible.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  I sat courtside for the first time about two months ago. Now, I'm going to name drop for a second.

• 48:24Jason Calacanis?

  Do it.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  But Bill Maher called me, said, you want to come to the Laker game?

• 48:27Jason Calacanis?

  Nice.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Sat courtside with Bill and it was just, as someone that loves basketball, I've never, I've been to a million basketball games.

• 48:34Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's totally different when you're on the wood.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  We probably went to the same games.

• 48:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  Because I used to go to the Knicks games all the time, especially when the Blazers or Houston was in town. And, but to sit courtside when you're right.

• 48:44Jason Calacanis?

  It's a whole different thing.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  You hear the squeaking and you hear all the trash talk. And you. You can literally hear the sweat fly off them and land on them. It's so awesome. If you, if you love basketball, there is nothing better.

• 48:54Jason Calacanis?

  I, it's literally the greatest thing ever. And I said to myself, like, if I ever make any money, like, you know, I, I made a bunch of money and I was like, I don't spend it. And I talked to my wife about it and, you know, and she's like, well, what do you love? And I was like, I love skiing and I, I love the Knicks. And she's like, well, you know, we, we have to spend like this amount of money per year if we're going to end with this amount of money for our daughters. Like, just a little, like, here's how it trails off for a 54 year old. And I'm like, can't possibly spend that amount of money a year. Like, I'd have to start flying private or something. And I was like, but I could go to Japan and ski every year. And treat myself to catskying, which is a thousand dollars a day, which is pretty, you know, rich compared to just using your app. And I bought a ski house and then I started

• 49:39Jason Calacanis?

  sitting courtside at Knicks games during the playoffs. And I said, you know, during the playoffs, I'll just go and I, I won't worry that I spent $10,000 on tickets.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:46Jason Calacanis?

  I'll just go and enjoy it.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  I've been, what's the point of having it if you can't enjoy it?

• 49:50Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  People feel all this guilt about success and it's like, I used, it's funny, before I was successful, I had a weird thing about success in some sense. Like, I don't know, I was like, as I started, because you know, there's a weird thing about fame also. Sometimes you can kind of become famous and then people think you're automatically rich. So when I, when I first started gaining notoriety on YouTube, I was still broke. I was making maybe 50 grand a year, maybe the first few years of doing it. And I was putting all that money back in. So I, I barely had a dime actually, but yet I was famous. So I'd go places and people would know me.

• 50:23Jason Calacanis?

  Now you did locals.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:24Jason Calacanis?

  I know this because I, I, um, during COVID discovered Scott Adams.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:28Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, who started doing this local things. I paid and subscribed to it for a while because I was like, I really want to see what's going on over here. And I remember Sam Harris was talking to me. I helped him set up his podcast and he was originally on Patreon.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:41Jason Calacanis?

  But he started doing Casper ads and whatever.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:43Jason Calacanis?

  And he's like, oh, this advertising is not good because when I talk about, I don't know, radical Islam or whatever, you know, priests and Catholic church issues, they're going to drop me where I can't have the advertisers. Oh my God, I'm going to have to like have my business development. People go talk to the advertisers every episode and give them credit. So he goes to Patreon. Then he's like, oh my God, Patreon starts kicking people off.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:05Jason Calacanis?

  And he's like, okay, I'm going to roll my own. And he kind of rolls his own subscription service. And he's like, this is the way I'm going to do it. And you did locals.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:13Jason Calacanis?

  Um, great domain name. That's like a $500,000 domain name. How much did you pay for that?

• 51:18Speaker 00

  About $500,000 actually, but it, but it turned out that one of our investors, a guy by the name of Andrew Condru, who's an old tech guy from, well, he's not that old, but I mean, he was like one of the original tech guys from like the nineties. Uh, he had it. He had it just sitting there. So originally he licensed it to us.

• 51:34Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  He was an investor, but licenses to us. And then eventually when we sold the company, we had to buy it back.

• 51:38Jason Calacanis?

  Why did you decide to do a startup and then?

• 51:40Speaker 00

  So it's, it's very Connected to what you just described right there. I was on Patreon, just like Sam, Sam, uh, uh, Jordan Peterson, a couple of other people. And then they started banning people for crazy reasons. Uh, one of the reasons was there was a guy by the name of Carl Benjamin, who's big British YouTuber, and he went on, not on his Patreon account, not on his YouTube show that was being funded by Patreon. He went on someone else's show and he said the N word, but he didn't say it to be racist. He was mocking the alt-right at the time. So he was basically playing out a character and he said the word. Without any warning, Patreon blew up his channel. That was it. They didn't send him a, you have to retract this, you have to delete this.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Blew up his channel. That day I was on tour with Jordan Peterson. We were both making a night. I was making most of my money.

• 52:26Jason Calacanis?

  On tour.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  At that point. No, I, no, Jordan was already had been selling books and on tour and whatever. I was on tour with him, making a nice amount, but most of my, I was making about 30 grand a month on there. That was basically the budget for my show. And Jordan and I sat down and we were like, this is intolerable. We gotta figure out something. Jordan and I then tried to do something together, but that was right when Jordan was getting sick.

• 52:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right. Yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Year where he really got quite ill. And, and then I was like, all right, I'm gonna try to do this on my own. My brother-in-law is an Israeli startup guy, as all the Israelis are. I was like, can you build me something?

• 52:59Jason Calacanis?

  Six, five million.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  I'm going to need the five minutes, but I think I can do it. And basically.

• 53:04Jason Calacanis?

  Five million people, they got like seven million startups. I'm like, how, you got 1.2 each?

• 53:09Speaker 00

  You know, they're under a lot of pressure. It's a small piece of land. They're under a lot of pressure. Um, but basically I said, can you build me? I'm gonna leave Patreon. Could you build me a subscription thing? That's it. And I want direct connection with my audience. I don't want any algorithmic nonsense. I wanna own the data. I wanna own the emails. All, all of, I wanna do it the right way because it was for me. Anyway, we did that. When I closed my Patreon that night, the way I did it was I was on a live stream and I said for, I can't remember the exact numbers, but I was like, for every thousand subscribers we get, something like that, live while I'm on air, I'll do a shot of Patron because I'm leaving Patreon. Anyway, about 12 shots later.

• 53:43Jason Calacanis?

  12,000 subs. Wow. You must have been.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  So I was, and I was really doing it. So not only was I wasted, but I doxed myself live on air.

• 53:51Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Because when I went finally at the end of the night, when I went to delete the account, which we were showing.

• 53:56Jason Calacanis?

  Your address. Oh, no.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  It, you, you pressed delete and then it popped, your email pops up.

• 54:00Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no. Oh, your email. Great. I thought your address.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Wasn't my address, but it put my personal email popped up, which then of course was problem, blah, blah, blah. Long story short, we delete that. And the next day, I was like, wow, I have a success here. And then I was like, I want to spawn this off to other people. So Scott Adams was one of the first two or three people we brought on board. We built it for him originally, the way we were going to do it. And I think this is how you and I got in touch. Originally, what we were going to do was white label it to people. So you would have your own app. Because I remember you

• 54:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I was thinking about it, too. I was like, watching that area. And I was like, this is a super interesting area. I want to invest in it or start something. But then, you know, one of the things that happens is, as you know, if you if you if you figure out advertising, and it takes off, like this podcast, I've had 14 years. I was one of the first five podcasters. It's been sold out for 13 of the 14 years.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  That's incredible.

• 54:48Jason Calacanis?

  And it was only only year it wasn't sold out was during COVID, where we had maybe five advertisers. Two or three went out of business. And we let two push their ads to the next year because they were like, we can't do business. So please let us push our ads back. But yeah, I just think it's such a great idea to do the subscription.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Well, so right. So subscription. Look, if you have a base of people that like you, like, it's a great business. Now, of course, you're eventually going to hit a ceiling on that. But basically, we thought so originally, Locals was white labeled. So I had a Rubin Report app. Then, once we brought on Scott, I think we had a prototype for his white label. But then suddenly, like 10 other people reached out to me in a week that were fairly well known. Michael Malice, who's here in Austin, a bunch of other people. And then

• 55:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Michael Malice is here?

• 55:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, but he's part of Daily Wire now.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Is he part of Daily Wire now?

• 55:33Jason Calacanis?

  Michael Malice. Oh, no, Michael Malice.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Oh, you're thinking of Michael Knowles.

• 55:36Jason Calacanis?

  Michael Knowles.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Who's in Nashville.

• 55:37Jason Calacanis?

  Michael Malice is the guy who's kind of

• 55:40Speaker 00

  He's the ANCAP. He I call him the

• 55:42Jason Calacanis?

  He's an anarchist.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's an anarchist.

• 55:44Jason Calacanis?

  But he's not a white supremacist.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  No, not at all. He's the most one of the you should have him on. He is one of the most wonderful people you will ever meet.

• 55:51Jason Calacanis?

  But an anarchist.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  He's he's a complete anarchist. He doesn't believe in government at all.

• 55:55Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  He's been to North Korea. Like, the guy has a, you know, his parents came from Soviet Russia. He's got a really

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

  I kind of probably would like to hang with a guy like that. Sounds like a good hang.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  He's here in Austin. We should get drinks. Like, he's a great, great human being. Anyway, he I brought him on and a few other people. And then quickly, we realized, all right, the white label thing isn't going to make sense there. So let's just put it all into

• 56:13Jason Calacanis?

  It doesn't scale, yeah.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  We do all that. And then and then it's really successful. I was like, holy, you know, oh, and then Sacks came on as an investor. And really, once

• 56:21Jason Calacanis?

  Joe Lonsdale was an investor.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Joe Lonsdale was an investor. But once we got Sacks, Then everything else opened up because once we got sacked, suddenly Naval was like, I'll put in money and Joe put in money.

• 56:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah, that's a preference stack start, yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  It just opened up all the doors for us. And the beauty of the of the Saks thing is that we were at Peter Thiel's New Year's party in Miami. I don't know, this is like five years ago or so.

• 56:42Jason Calacanis?

  And my invite got lost. It's a very gay New Year's.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess, you know.

• 56:48Jason Calacanis?

  I wanted to go to that.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  For me, it was just the average New Year's, but you know.

• 56:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I want to go to Peter Thiel's very gay New Year's party. Can I be your plus two?

• 56:54Speaker 00

  That can be arranged. So we go and this very pretty woman comes up to me and she says she's a big fan and we're chatting for a while. And then she says, I want me, I want you to meet my husband, David. And I chat with this guy, David, for like 15 minutes. And I was like, ah, he's a nice guy. She was very nice, whatever. I took a picture with her. And then I walk away and some guy's like, oh, how do you know David Sacks? I didn't even know who David was.

• 57:14Jason Calacanis?

  Jackie Sacks.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was Jackie. I didn't know who David was. I wasn't really that, even though I was in tech at that point, it's not my world. I come from politics and comedy, whatever. The best thing that I could say about David is literally two days later, I called him up. I was like, hey, listen, I know we just had a quick chat. Your wife seems to like me. We had a 15 minute conversation. I showed him some numbers. He called me the next day. He's like, let's do it. And then, and then it just opened every door for us. And

• 57:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's one of the nice things.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  And next thing you know, we got acquired by Rumble and Rumble went public. So.

• 57:42Jason Calacanis?

  So nice. And you owned a nice piece of Rumble, yeah?

• 57:45Speaker 00

  We sold all for stock. I did not take one down.

• 57:48Jason Calacanis?

  Smart. So you're good.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  I'm good.

• 57:50Jason Calacanis?

  I like it.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  I'm good.

• 57:51Jason Calacanis?

  And you're gonna do another startup?

• 57:52Speaker 00

  But I still got this jacket that you complimented me on. It's like a Chinese drop ship.

• 57:55Jason Calacanis?

  It's okay.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  30 bucks. Pretty good.

• 57:57Jason Calacanis?

  27 dollars of that was the Trump tariff. So enjoy it. You don't think the Trump tariff stuff was crazy? You had to look at that and think?

• 58:07Speaker 00

  No, I didn't. You can watch my videos from those days, even when the market crashed. I just thought it was a negotiation tactic and I thought everything would be fine.

• 58:13Jason Calacanis?

  So 4D, you're in the 4D chess camp?

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I was just like, well, wait a minute. Is he really trying to, you know, crash the economy and is no country going to come back and be like, I'd like access to the American markets? That just seemed crazy to me. So I was like, let's just give it a couple of days. I did learn something about myself. Hopefully you learn the reverse thing, which is that when it comes to investing, I'm not that, I'm not that aggressive. Like when my guys were like, it's dropping, you should probably start buying. I was just like, you know what? Let's just kind of let it be.

• 58:41Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no, you always buy when it's crashing.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  I know. I didn't, though. I just let it be. And look, it's all come back, right? I mean, it's a, is it even more now than?

• 58:48Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's exactly even since, so Trump's flat, yeah, for the year.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  But as I think, uh, maybe it was you or it was Sacks that said on All In a week or two ago, we'll, we'll only find out the results of this when the landing happens. And we're gonna learn about that in the next couple of weeks. And if we get, look, if we get 40 countries that come back with better deals, and maybe we get 10 countries that, let's say it's a wash, and we get a few that it's not good. It still was a net good. The, the little pain point, as you just said, the market's back. So I just...

• 59:17Jason Calacanis?

  You know, my take on it is, I, I want to get your opinion on this, about the nature of Trump.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:22Jason Calacanis?

  You know the guy.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:24Jason Calacanis?

  He, I studied him before he came on All In. I never really told this story, but I'll tell it on your podcast later when I'm on your pod. But I studied him major.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  We're doing the rare back-to-back pod.

• 59:36Jason Calacanis?

  We're doing the back-to-back pods. It's a double, double, a double feature.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:39Jason Calacanis?

  Um, but I studied him, and my perception of him is, a key piece to his psychology is being respected.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:50Jason Calacanis?

  You agree?

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:51Jason Calacanis?

  Like, it is a major part of it.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:52Jason Calacanis?

  And even beyond respect, being loved. Like, actually, people loving him for who he is. And he's not like the perfect character. He's obviously flawed in some ways and, you know, bombastic, and people don't like his style. Maybe they love his style, whatever it is. But I just knew he would reverse all of this stuff with the tariffs if things went the wrong way. Because his overriding principle is to be loved by the American people.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  So do you think this wasn't the plan?

• 1:00:23Jason Calacanis?

  No. I think he was doing a ton of trial balloons and floating things. And it wasn't well thought out, because if it was well thought out, I think what you would have said is... We have 150 trading partners. We can put them into these three buckets. These ones are inconsequential because we don't do a lot of trade with them. These five are 90% of it. It's a Pareto principle. It's the power law. These five are the ones that matter, and then these are the ones in between. So I've told Besen to do this group of people who are important. And then I'm putting, you know, Sacks and Elon, or this person, that person, Lutnik on these ones. And here's the strategy we're going to pursue. It's going to be pretty aggressive. There's going to be some pain. Here's what you can expect. Instead, it was like, oh, you put it at 50? I'm making it 150.

• 1:01:06Jason Calacanis?

  And it was this attention-seeking, crazy shake the globe. And now shake the globe as a concept is fine. I get the reality TV, the attention getting. You know, there's, you know, these concepts in negotiations to anchor, you know, in a crazy part. It's all like very well established. But I think when you're dealing with something that has second and third order downstream effects, you can't shake it too violently. And when it comes to the economy, you talk to anybody who does macroeconomics, like they're alchemists. They have a little bit of science, a little bit of magic, and they're trying to like read the tea leaves. But they actually don't understand these systems. It's like weather systems, right? You can understand some pieces of them.

• 1:01:51Jason Calacanis?

  It's quite possible we could break things in the economy. And the thing that was going to break was if he didn't relent, I was talking to all these startups who are in e-commerce specifically.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Yep. No, I heard a lot from e-commerce. My brother-in-law's in e-commerce. Yes.

• 1:02:02Jason Calacanis?

  And they were like, we're going to have to do layoffs. We're going to not put our Christmas summer orders in. We are going to not do this new product line, and we're not investing in this new thing. It takes a decade, five years, you know, minimum two or three years to set up these supply chains and get a business cranking. So I was talking to Cutts Clothing, and I had him on the pod here in This Week in Startups. And he was like, ah, I'm going to have, everybody in my group chat is laying people off. And I think they didn't fully realize exactly how this would go to mainstream. Like when Besen was saying, this is a Mag 7 problem, not a mainstream problem. Yes. First stroke of the pen, it's a mag 7 problem. It's a market problem.

• 1:02:46Jason Calacanis?

  And then week six, it would have been massive layoffs and the Trump layoffs would have made him so hated that his operating system is to be loved. So, winning the deal, going and getting all these wins in the Middle East, which is kind of a superpower, I think, and then, oh, the stock market comes roaring back. I knew he would reverse his entire position if it didn't go well.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  Right. So, look, I don't think either one of us can speak to exactly what was in his mind at that moment. Like, was his plan to throw out the bomb, have it be crazy for three days and then have what happened, happen? That seems right to me. But I'll grant you, maybe it was, he was gonna throw out the bomb, had no idea what was gonna happen. I would say either way, since we can't speak to what's in his brain, what we can speak to is what has happened. And what has happened, I think, you would agree, has been pretty good, right?

• 1:03:36Jason Calacanis?

  I mean-

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  We're gonna, assuming we get the landings that we think we're gonna get.

• 1:03:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's possible he will, yeah, have more fair trade deals over time. Yeah.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  I think the way I would put this is, when I was first coming around to Trump, so this is now gotta be six or seven years ago. Do you know Eric Weinstein?

• 1:03:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  So I had Eric on the show, and he really, I was trying to get him to come along too. So sort of what I've been doing with Bill Maher for years. I've tried to bring these people along, right? And Eric just couldn't get there. He kept, he's a bull in a china shop. He's a bull in a china shop. And I said, Eric, well, the thing is, what you seem to want is a panther in a china shop. You want a panther to walk in and be real sly and knock one thing off with its tail, and then just close the door softly on the way out. But that's not the phrase. And there's a reason it's not the phrase. It doesn't really exist. Would we all like, in like, our heart of hearts, or in like, if everything was as highly functional as we'd like it to be, would we like him perhaps to be more, you know, now he's changed, where I do think-

• 1:04:35Jason Calacanis?

  Presidential.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  He's more statesman-like. But could we have gone without some of that stuff? Sure. Could we have gone without some of that stuff? Sure. But that's just not exactly how the world works. So we finally got one guy that was willing to do all of the things that none of us were willing to do. And to me, the results of that have been a net positive. So that's why, when you asked me last night and you asked me here, like, what's my criticism of him? I don't really have much.

• 1:05:01Jason Calacanis?

  You just look at the output.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  At the end, I really do just look at the output. Like, could, could he have not tweeted this or that, or- Some of those things like maybe, but he was also now we see how calcified the mainstream media was, how he was working against big tech. I mean, in retrospect, the fact that the old regime of Twitter took him out and what they did to Parler. And when you think of just all of these things.

• 1:05:24Jason Calacanis?

  I would have given him a 30 day pause after January 6th. Just because the chances of him, January 6th could have been hundreds of Americans killed if those police officers had done what most police officers would have done, which is when you're getting beaten, you know, take the guns out and start shooting people. They showed incredible restraint. That could have been a much different outcome for America. Dave Rubin, I appreciate the hour.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  It has been a pleasure. Now I have to figure out how to get you for the next hour. We have a two, I'm going to talk to Lonsdale now. I gotta think.

• 1:05:55Jason Calacanis?

  And then I'll see you in the studio.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  How can I get Jason?

• 1:05:57Jason Calacanis?

  No. I mean, you, you and I are probably the closest to center of everybody in our circles. We probably are the two people who are criticized most by our constituents of like, oh, wow, they, they won't like fully take one side or they're thoughtful about this stuff. Like I, I do, I'm kind of disappointed in some of my friends that just are, have that Trump dedication syndrome.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Who had that great joke, I would never be part of a club that would have me. Who's joke was that?

• 1:06:25Jason Calacanis?

  That would be Mark's Brothers.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Is that Mark's Brothers? Oh, that's Groucho Marx.

• 1:06:28Jason Calacanis?

  Groucho Marx. Yeah. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time on This Week in Startups. Bye bye.