TWiST News: Reddit Earnings, Apple Intelligence, and more AI money | E2041

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Runway. Looking to up-level your financial planning Runway is the modern and intuitive way to model, plan, and align your business for everyone on your team. Sign up at https://www.runway.com/twist to get your first 3 months free. LinkedIn Ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to https://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups⁠⁠ Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at https://www.vanta.com/twist * Todays show: Alex Wilhelm joins Jason to discuss Apple's on-device AI and its privacy implications, Reddit's earnings, and Amazon's multi-billion dollar investment interest in Anthropic with strategic chip conditions. They also discuss economic indicators like inflation's impact on voter sentiment and what metrics will define success for the next administration. Finally, they explore how product velocity has been key to Toast's SaaS success and share valuable lessons for startup growth. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (3:29) Discussion Apple Intelligence and privacy concerns (10:32) Runway - Sign up at https://www.runway.com/twist to get your first 3 months free. (12:12) Trust in tech companies and privacy (17:20) Trends on AI topics and ChatGPT (17:20) Trends and tech product comparisons (20:59) OpenAI's Chat.com acquisition (22:45) Mac mini unboxing experience wrap-up (24:40) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups⁠⁠ (26:12) Analysis of Toast's business and growth (36:25) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (37:30) Reddit's growth, user engagement, and moderation challenges (47:36) Social media incentives and reputation systems (52:07) Reddit's AI translations and community management strategies (57:25) Reddit's potential for creating a search engine (1:00:38) OpenAI's citation challenges (1:05:30) Amazon's interest in Anthropic and AI regulation (1:07:37) US immigration and AI regulation under Trump administration (1:11:43) TikTok's role in US-China relations (1:15:42) Major IPOs and market potential (1:17:19) Economic topics and inflation's impact on consumer spending * 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 * Mentioned on the show: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ * 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: (10:32) Runway - Sign up at https://www.runway.com/twist to get your first 3 months free. (24:40) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups⁠⁠ (36:25) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/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.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  This is the new, uh, I got the Mac Mini because I've always loved Mac Minis. Isn't it satisfying when you open a Mac product? They make this, I don't know if you know this, but

• 0:12Jason Calacanis?

  they work on that sound that you just heard. So that was the sound of me opening that box that the mini came in and that sound. When you open it is designed to let that puff of air out.

• 0:23Jason Calacanis?

  And then this is supposed to be another, this, um, paper that they put on top of your device or the film they'll put on top of it. That's also designed in the unboxing experience to have a sound associated with it. Do you hear that?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so satisfying.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Runway. Looking to up level your financial planning? Runway is the modern and intuitive way to model, plan and align your business for everyone on your team. Sign up at runway.com/twist to get your first three months free. LinkedIn ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com/thisweekinstarups. And Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist.

• 1:24Jason Calacanis?

  Hey everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm here with my co-host Alex Wilhelm. He is Alex on Twitter or X.com. I am at Jason, X.com/Jason, X.com/Alex. He writes a newsletter. It's called Cautious Optimism. Cautiously optimistic? What? Tell me, uh, this branding is always getting me.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  I'm gonna get a sign behind me that it says it out loud.

• 1:49Jason Calacanis?

  Bad idea. It wouldn't be a bad idea. Well, cautiously optimistic.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Cautious optimism.

• 1:54Jason Calacanis?

  Cautious optimism. Cause I, the problem is I'm, I'm used to saying I'm cautiously optimistic. But it's cautious optimism dot news is your newsletter.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:05Jason Calacanis?

  People can sign up for this and it's great because Alex is researching the industry every day with his daily email. If you get it, you're kind of getting either what we talked about on yesterday's show mentioned, or perhaps a peek at what will be on the next day's show. So it's a nice compliment to the pod. We have a big docket today, this big docket energy. Let's just, I mean, we could sit here and talk about Trump. We could talk about the election or we can just get back to tech news. I say we just get back to it.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  I'm totally, totally here for that. Yeah. But Jason, my question is, where do you want to start? We have a feast in front of us, so pick a course.

• 2:42Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, you give, give me some choices here. Let's tell the audience what's on the docket and then we'll pick. And then, hey, audience, you can tell us always in the YouTube. If you don't subscribe to This Week in Startups on YouTube, go to This Week in Startups, hit subscribe, hit the bell. Monday, Wednesday, Fridays, we're locking it in news at 12:00 PM Texas time, which is 10:00 AM Pacific time, Silicon Valley time, and of course, New York East Coast time. That's 1:00 PM. So you look for us right around that time. Today was 12:30 because I wanted to get a little extra into the docket. Uh, but we're trying to lock into three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And, uh, yeah, at that standard time.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So on the show today, Jason, we have Apple Intelligence, Signal and consumer privacy in the era of AI. Then we have notes on Reddit and Toast earnings from a product perspective.

• 3:29Jason Calacanis?

  I love both of those.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  And, uh, Amazon might put more money into Anthropic. I have the information there and also some notes about the future of AI regulation. And I know you just said no Trump, but if we have time, we can talk about TikTok and what might happen to the social media phenomenon in the new administration.

• 3:44Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, that's a great subject. I think starting with this Signal discussion, uh, obviously a lot of people are using Signal to protect their privacy. Previously, people use things like Telegram or, you know, other messaging platforms, but they generally don't have disappearing messages, point-to-point encryption. So Signal is one of those great, uh, products that I think people trust now. Should you trust anything? I don't trust anything. I assume all my tweets, all my texts will become tweets eventually. And if you go through life like that, you'll be in pretty good shape. Nothing I say in private group chats that's spicier, maybe on the margins 10% spicier than what I say publicly. It's a pretty good way to live. But what I've heard on the back channels is

• 4:29Jason Calacanis?

  on Signal groups and other places, people are saying, hey, Apple Intelligence has been reading me my messages. If you use AirPods, do you have the latest AirPods, Alex?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  I don't have the latest AirPods, but I am now on iOS 18.1.

• 4:45Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. So you have Apple Intelligence. The latest AirPods are amazing. I've gone from Pixelbuds back to the AirPods because of this reason. Uh, for when I'm doing podcasts or listening, otherwise I like to use my fancy focal uh, Batte's, you know, really cool headphones that I have. Putting that aside, I do like listening to my podcasts and doing phone calls with these Apple AirPod 4s. They will read you your messages and it asks you, Alex sent a Slack, would you like to read it? So instead of just reading it, it asks you. And the way you can fire it off is you just nod, or you go like this. So when I'm with my kids, if I'm like, you know, I don't know, I'm kind of chaperoning and they're playing with their friends or something, I might have an AirPod in, well, just one, sometimes two,

• 5:29Jason Calacanis?

  and they're playing and they don't want me around or just, you know, I'm hovering around the periphery and I'll just nod. And then I hear your message to me. It started doing that for Signal messages. And so then people were like, wait a second, Apple is listening on an operating system basis on your local phone to this. And then people are now sharing the train Apple Intelligence screen. So we should show people where this is on the phone. Hopefully we have that in the notes of which screen you go to to show how to turn this off. But it was turned on by default is the claim of many people. I can't remember if this is being turned on or turned off, but let's pull up that screen that everybody's sharing. So if we look at this, Alex, it says, learn from this app.

• 6:14Jason Calacanis?

  And then it says, very tiny, "Allow Siri to learn from how you use Signal to make suggestions across apps." So it's studying your behavior of what you do in there. Okay, you send to your group chat of your fraternity or sorority, or your kids' group, a lot of kids' groups in here, you know, for schools. And then it says, "Suggestions: Show on home screen suggest app, suggest suggestion notifications. Allow suggestions and content from Signal and shortcuts for the app to appear in search and in widgets. These suggestions and shortcuts are based on how you use the app." So, this is a long-winded way of saying, "Apple is now studying your use."

• 6:56Jason Calacanis?

  Apple, I think, anticipated this, but it has not stopped people from thinking this is a leak. So take us through what the media coverage has been of this, Alex, and Apple's response to it, because if I'm hearing about it in group chats over and over multiple times, and I'm seeing it on Reddit threads, in cybersecurity forums, and then Apple has released a security paper on it, there's something here, and it's worth us meditating on.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So, people might recall, we talked about this actually, I think about a month ago, Jason, this idea that Apple Intelligence was going to learn from you as you went through things, and we were concerned about the privacy of it, taught people how to turn it off. I think the concern that people had here is that Apple was turning this on automatically for Signal if you turned on Apple Intelligence, and I think that's a mistake from a design perspective. The other thing that came out when I was prepping for the show is that a lot of people think that Apple has offered a reasonable set of privacy guidelines for their use of AI, which is on-screen learning and so forth, or on-device learning, but people are still very concerned that some AI processing, if you will, some of this learning that Apple Intelligence wants to do, will be done off-device. Now, this kind of boils down to how much do you

• 8:10Speaker 01

  trust Apple, and how much do you trust their private cloud compute setup? Going through privacy-minded forums, talking to people about this, my impression is that Apple's setup is the gold standard for this type of thing. Of technology. And I think that's where the media commentary has come from that you're asking about. And I think the media has been very positive about Apple's work here. But I don't think that general media privacy educational awareness is particularly high. And so I think Apple's getting a lot of credit from the media for saying, hey, we're going to take a look at this. We're going to be serious about it. I don't think that's convinced the actual privacy advocates. And I think that's why it's showing up in your group texts. And also over on, you know, the DEF CON side of Reddit, for example.

• 8:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So, uh, what that means net net is Apple has said, so to translate a little bit of this into plain English. If I'm understanding correctly, there is a private cloud that Apple is using. And then there's your phone. They are contending, Apple, um, that all of this processing is happening primarily on your phone. So if it's learning about how you use Signal and it's reading to you, your messages from Signal, that's occurring on your phone, which is yours, which is encrypted, which even Apple can't get to.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:33Jason Calacanis?

  But, but there might be times when they have to go to the cloud.

• 9:42Jason Calacanis?

  And when they go to the cloud, they are claiming that they have a private cloud to do this. And they've released the paper. We'll put that paper in the show notes. So

• 9:53Jason Calacanis?

  to your point, this comes down to, do you trust Apple and their approach to AI? I would not trust, as but one example, Google. I wouldn't trust because I think they've used data before to kind of market ads. So I would be very concerned with Google because of what happened with incognito mode as well.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 10:16Jason Calacanis?

  Where people at Google used to joke like incognito mode is not incognito.

• 10:22Jason Calacanis?

  And then I wouldn't trust OpenAI as well because I think they're kind of cutthroat reputation wise, but I might actually trust Apple. Hey founders, let me ask you a question. Do you know how much money your startup has at this very moment? Or do you know how next year's hiring is going to impact your burn rate? If not, you're stuck in spreadsheet how? I know it. I've been there and it's super risky. So let me tell you about this amazing software I just discovered called Runway. Runway, like how much runway do you have for your startup? It connects all your data sources, obviously your bank, obviously your accounting, but also your HR software, your CRM, all of it. And then, once you have all that data, it's going to help you model your finances in plain

• 11:04Jason Calacanis?

  English. So you always know where your business stands and you can just crush those board meetings. You never look foolish trying to find information. You're the pilot of this startup and when you go into the cockpit, you want the pilot to be able to tell you the airspeed and want to tell you your altitude, etc. It's complicated, but Runway makes it all super simple. It's not just finance and a bunch of P and Ls. It's actually data you can use and customers like Superhuman, Angel List, 818 Tequila, and Revenue Cat love this product. So just because you're a startup doesn't mean you can run your accounting on the back of a napkin. If you want a personalized demo, I want you to head over to runway.com. What a great domain name, runway.com/twist.

• 11:49Jason Calacanis?

  And they're going to give you three months free right now. It's an awesome product. I wish all of my startups used it honestly, because then we would know exactly how much runway we have. If you know your runway and you know all your data cold, you can just make better decisions. And that's what we all want to do is make the best decisions we can with the best software and the best information we have. Go visit runway.com/twist.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  So I think the delineation between advertising focused companies, i.e. Google Meta, for example, makes a lot of sense. I agree with you on OpenAI. Apple has made such a push, though, about being the privacy-first provider for mobile operating systems and hardware for so long, that they should have pretty good consumer trust here. But I don't think that's enough to make us feel good. So I guess the way that I'm going to approach this, Jason, after going through my settings today and tinkering with it, is that for all my messaging apps, I'm just going to have Apple Intelligence turned off, period. But I don't actually care if Apple Intelligence knows what I use in Google Maps, because it might help me get places faster. So I think that's why I'm willing to give up a little bit of my privacy ethos, if you will, for convenience. But if you're going to use Signal, which is, as you said, Indian encrypted

• 12:56Speaker 01

  and very well known for that, I just don't understand why you would want to give any technology company, even one as high-minded as Apple might be, access to that information. It just doesn't feel right.

• 13:08Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and I think the hacker community is, maybe they're going to fall on the side of turning this off. And there was one interesting comment on Hacker News, Hacker News, [email protected]. Sometimes you'll get, you know, some really thoughtful people who either work at Apple, or have worked there, or worked at these big tech companies, or compete against them. And there were some commentary about it's not transparent, or the person said it's intransparent.

• 13:40Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody knows what Apple is doing in terms of sending stuff up to the cloud or processing at local. So I think that would actually be interesting if it actually told you, hey, we're sending this up to the cloud to actually work on it. We're not. Or if there was a way to say, I don't want to, you know, as great as computing can be, I just don't want to send my stuff up to the cloud. And I think this is going to be the major vector that now people are going to have to contend with. If you have an AI on your phone, built into the operating system, or built into your desktop, as Microsoft and Apple are doing as well, and you can download ChatGPT's Mac app, and it will watch your screen, and we've seen Claude can, you know,

• 14:22Jason Calacanis?

  take over your browser, it's going to know everything you're doing on your computer, and sending some amount of that up to a cloud, which means it could be intercepted. So it's almost like we've all got a keystroke logger. Watching us now. And the idea is the, I mean, I'm starting to sound like conspiracy theorist, but in order for AI to do its job, it's going to have to study you on your computer. And so you should be thinking. Everything I do on my computer is now being watched by AI.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  If you turn it on, you can turn Apple Intelligence off, for example, and you can even turn off Siri. So you can kind of go back to a phone if you want. But I think it's pretty clear from the trajectory of these products that they are going to get built into the browser at every level and your phone and your desktop OS and so forth. What I would like here, Jason, is if Apple would allow me to have my own private cloud compute setup. Like if there was an Alex version of that, that I could pay for, I could approve queries going up and down. I'd feel okay-ish about that, but a nebulous quote-unquote private cloud somewhere else, some of my AI work going off device just doesn't sit well with me. But I wonder how much is of this is just you and I and people that we know in the technology world thinking about this versus the average person.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  I pulled just some fun data and I looked at Google Trends. And if you think about, if you look at searches for Apple Intelligence and perplexity, the smaller AI search engine that's a startup, they're actually about even in terms of total searches right now in the US. And by that, I mean, people aren't searching for Apple Intelligence. They're not really looking for it. So I think the average consumer is going to turn it on and forget about it.

• 16:02Jason Calacanis?

  So interest over time, there was a spike in Apple Intelligence. That must have been the keynote. Everybody must have Googled it and then it came back down. And perplexity, um, yeah, slowly, I guess people are interested in it. But this shows the two consumer products have no, these two consumer products have no traction. I guess putting it up against ChatGPT would be another interesting vector. I bet you ChatGPT is going to spike against this, which means they are the leading consumer brand by far.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  For sure, but what's amazing to me is Apple has the hardware. And Apple has such an enormous megaphone in the press, they have enormous ad budget, they're talking about Apple Intelligence. And it's getting the search volume of perplexity, which is just a startup, one that's growing quickly. Shout out to them, not trying to diss, but there's a difference in scale between perplexity and Apple. And so I was shocked to see how little interest Apple Intelligence is getting. But I do think as well, one last thing, if Apple's gonna be serious about AI, it's gonna have to resolve these tensions because the technologists are the power users. They buy the expensive phones, expensive laptops, and they don't want to give up on privacy or even give a little bit. And so I think this is, you know, gonna be a recurring topic for consumer and enterprise hardware for the next ten years, probably, frankly.

• 17:15Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm, yeah. So what you can see is, uh, let me do, uh, past, sure, yeah, twelve months, let's see, twelve months. Uh, as you can see, ChatGPT has massive interest over time and these two are just a little blip.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's part of that chart, Jason, is you can see summer. You can literally see students leaving school and then you can see them going back to school.

• 17:39Jason Calacanis?

  Fascinating, yeah. If you put it at five years, we'll see like the inception of ChatGPT. Uh, there it is. So, yeah, it's like nobody's interested in it.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Also, all time high. Look at, look at right now. That is not a lower peak. That is a higher peak.

• 17:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  That is, that's impressive. And that's why OpenAI is worth one hundred and fifty-seven billion and Perplexity is worth possibly nine.

• 18:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, uh, interesting. Under, yeah, that is, um, pretty amazing. If, I've never seen a consumer product like grow that violently. Um, if I were to remove these two and then add another product that consumers love, like Bitcoin.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Ooh, okay.

• 18:25Jason Calacanis?

  See, yeah, so this is super interesting. It's just an interesting way for people to understand technology trends is with Google Trends. You see this massive spike, uh, if you remember, maybe, uh, in the twenty twenties, people like forgot about Bitcoin, that had that big rally, uh, in peak ZIRP, came back down. And, uh, you know, it's kind of locked into a small group of people and then you could add to this, uh, something like Airbnb. And it'd be interesting to see like on a consumer product basis, like, yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  That is not bullish for Airbnb. I'm not going to lie. That is not.

• 19:05Jason Calacanis?

  This is people searching for research. So I think what happens with certain trends is like you understand what Airbnb is.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 19:12Jason Calacanis?

  So this is only five years and when Airbnb came out, it probably spikes. So in fairness, Airbnb, I think everything kind of settles in. To most people know about a technology and then it doesn't come up as a trending topic anymore.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Okay, throw in Uber then, because I'm curious if that if that is a similar dynamic to it, because I mean, people use Uber and Airbnb. You know, all the time. So let's see.

• 19:34Jason Calacanis?

  See, it's like super steady.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:35Jason Calacanis?

  Last five years, people know about these products. So when something becomes a standard, because this isn't showing searches. Just raw searches. It's people searching for that term. If you have Uber on your phone, you're not searching for Uber anymore. If you have an Airbnb account, you're not searching for it anymore. What I think people are searching Google for is things that they've heard about from a friend that they want to download and try.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, okay. So this is people that are either downloading the app for the first time or downloading it, say, again, if they got a new device and had to replace their applications.

• 20:09Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's probably what's happening. Like, when's the last time you searched? Google for Uber or Airbnb or Bitcoin, you know, probably you don't do those searches too often because you're already. You know, have those products or services and have made a decision about them. Typically, people are Googling stuff and coming up in Google Trends when they're investigating something. And so.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  So by that logic, then, ChatGPT, given its enormous search share, is still reaching a lot of net new people who are therefore doing early research about it. That's crazy. That's crazy crazy.

• 20:42Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's what that shows. Yeah, if you were to look at it, you know, on its own is people are still looking at it. Also, over time, as people know about it, have it bookmarked, type it directly in. And this relates to another story. Darmesh from HubSpot, the co-founder, had bought Chat.com. And he was pretty public about spending like 10 million on it. And then Sam Altman just tweeted Chat.com and it resolved to.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  ChatGPT.

• 21:09Jason Calacanis?

  And I had said, I think here on All In, Sergey should just buy Chat.com and build a separate brand. For their AI efforts or by genie.com or something, but I just thought like get chat.com and buy it. And I guess Sam Altman heard that news and did it himself. What do you think he paid?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I would bet you a dollar. It was a structured setup in some capacity. I wonder if Darmaj is trying to milk this for like equity down there because he's a smart guy. I've met him. We all know HubSpot. Would he rather have a check or some stock? So that's

• 21:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, he's already made a ton of money. I would think he wants upside. I would take it all. I would take it all in like low cost warrants or margin or something. But what a great purchase. And also I wanted to show you. I just got something.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Unboxing videos now coming to twist.

• 22:00Jason Calacanis?

  This is the new, I got the Mac mini because I've always loved Mac minis and the fastest Mac you can buy is now. Isn't it satisfying when you open a Mac product? They make this. I don't know if you know this, but

• 22:15Jason Calacanis?

  they work on that sound that you just heard. So that was the sound of me opening. You know, the case of the that box that the mini came in and that sound. When you open it is designed to let that puff of air out.

• 22:28Jason Calacanis?

  And then

• 22:30Jason Calacanis?

  this is supposed to be another this um paper that they put on top of your device or the film they'll put on top of it. That's also designed in the unboxing experience to have a sound associated with it. Do you hear that?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so satisfying.

• 22:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but supposedly this five inch. I think it's five inch by five inch by two inch is now the most powerful Mac you can buy.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  That is insane to me and so impressive. Also, it's just a gorgeous. Okay, I love the brushed aluminum look to it. I love the shape of it. I've also I've always been a Mac mini fan and I'm very jealous that you have one and I do not.

• 23:05Jason Calacanis?

  Um, they start at $599, which makes it, I think, the cheapest way to get into macOS now. And you can put it on any monitor. So, you know, that's, I think, one of the magical things about this is Dell makes much better monitors than Apple makes at a much better value. You can buy a 50 inch Dell for the same price as a 27 inch Apple monitor and the Dell one's much better in my experience. So I'm going to put this on the Dell 50 inch and then see how it plays. But I do think this could be um Apple's best product of the last couple of years.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that's, uh, that's pretty mean to the Apple Vision Pro, Jason.

• 23:46Jason Calacanis?

  Um, yeah, I, I think Apple needs to get more entry level computing products in the market. So I think that's a way for them to just sweep up more users and tip over into, um, you know, a significant amount of desktops from Windows. Um, and lower priced entry points for college kids, for families. Uh, it's just such a good idea.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Hard, hard agree there. Also, I just want to say that I recently experienced the Apple unboxing setup because I had to buy a new iPhone because I knew Apple Intelligence was going to come up on the show again. So I went out and got myself a 16 Pro Max.

• 24:26Jason Calacanis?

  You leapfrogged me. Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  So here it is. I'm back on top and I was so thankful because today you were like, Apple Intelligence. I was like, see, I bought a phone because I knew it was going to be back on the show. And I didn't want to tell you twice that I was running an iPhone 11. So, yeah.

• 24:40Jason Calacanis?

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• 25:21Jason Calacanis?

  members of LinkedIn, of which 13%, 130 million of them are decision makers. That means they can pull the trigger on buying your product or service. And 10 million of them, 1% of the LinkedIn audience are those elite C-level executives. You know what I'm talking about? Chief Technology Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, they're all there on LinkedIn. And you're going to get two to five times the return on your ad spend. 9% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn delivers the best paid media results for a reason. So here's your call to action. Start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today. And we're going to give you $100 credit to start your next campaign.

• 26:04Jason Calacanis?

  LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups to claim that credit. That's LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups. Terms and conditions do apply. All right, let's keep going through the docket. I know we have Reddit and Toast. I am very fascinated by the company Toast.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Okay, let's talk about Toast. So Boston-based company, everybody. You may recall from its 2020, kind of like, oh, God, COVID hit restaurant business to 2021 IPO. Jason, what I find great about this company, though, is how multi-part it is. And this is one of my favorite parts of its S1 through to today. So if you don't know, Toast doesn't just offer swipes. It doesn't just offer payment, what are they called? POS is Point of Sale Terminals. It offers a suite of software products. It offers payments, other fintech offerings like loans, and it also makes hardware as well. So it's a really cool, kind of multi-part business, and it's crushing the world right now.

• 26:59Jason Calacanis?

  It's a very cool product, and I always like to think about, you know, what are the product lessons here? Toast has $189 million in services and subscriptions, up from $131 million in Q3 of 2023. So they're cruising into, you know, they'll be at a billion at some point, right? They'll hit $250 million next year, and they'll be at a billion-dollar run rate. And it's a really interesting SaaS product because you have point of sale as a category, pretty well-known category, right?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 27:37Jason Calacanis?

  But once you have a restaurant, then you have to think, well, what do I do next? What do I do next? So people come to the counter, but people also sit at tables. So if you've ever been to a table during COVID, Toast lets you scan the menu, order an individual item, and then open or close your tab. And so there was a great in San Mateo I used to go to when I lived in the valley. I would go to this awesome beer garden. And, you know, I could order a schnitzel, you know, or fries or whatever for my daughters. But if they wanted more, I could just order that one dish without having to talk to the waiter. And I said, wow, it's incredible company. I gotta go invest in it. They wound up going public. I never invested in it.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:17Jason Calacanis?

  But then I started drilling down into it. And they found another use case. One is managing online menus and you start thinking about like all the places your menu signs up now. So they do menu management as a vertical.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:30Jason Calacanis?

  Then you have employees and employees get tips, as we all know. Uh, and Europeans make fun of us like they flip over, you know, the device in their hands when you're paying by tap. And they say, oh, it's gonna ask you a couple of questions.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:44Jason Calacanis?

  You know, that awkward moment where now your tip? The person is standing over you, watching you give the tip. I mean, this is like one of the weirdest. Um, uh, manners and morals and. You know, weird UX decisions ever. I wonder if tipping's gone up or not.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Um, I have a story about that actually. So on the tipping front, um, a well-known venture capitalist, Jason, who you would probably be on a first name basis with, I was talking to them. Uh, I'm just gonna keep them anonymous because they were just talking to me about this. Uh, their daughter works, uh, at, uh, over the summer at an ice cream stand, one of the seasonal things that they pop up. And he told me that they switched from cash to cards and people then switched from paying from cash to cards. And they have the, the same terminals. They turn them around. You can tip. And this guy told me that his daughter has seen her tips fall apart. And I, that blew my mind. I did so much more with my card because I just. Tap and then I hit 20% and I move on with my life.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  But that, that story shocked me. So I would have said, I bet tips are way up, but I'm not sure it's true in every case.

• 29:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what this point of sale system does is it also manages HR. And it manages splitting of tips. And so the reason I bring all this up, and I thought it'd be an interesting discussion for us is. SaaS companies have this major problem, right? Headwinds, et cetera. And then there's a really interesting.

• 30:13Jason Calacanis?

  Um, concept here that founders have to deal with all the time. Do I build the next adjacency or do I make the current product better? And the answer is yes.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:25Jason Calacanis?

  And it's just how often do you add an extra product? And what's your product velocity? And this is why, as investors, I've trained our team at launch to really look at product velocity. How quickly do products get shipped? And then how, what quality do they get shipped at? And if you can ship reasonably good products and features at a really good cadence, you're going to beat everybody around you. And I think this company's doing pretty well. It's got a $21 billion valuation, right?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:54Jason Calacanis?

  Am I ballpark correct?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:57Jason Calacanis?

  Now, they are at ballpark 750 million a year in revenue. So this is a really, really juicy valuation, am I correct?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Oh, you're a little bit low because that's just their subscription revenue. That's the software side of it. On the, um, on the fintech side, Jason, which is payments and so forth. They did over a billion in revenue in Q3 alone.

• 31:18Jason Calacanis?

  So they get a percentage of that?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they take a fee and a cut of, um, of payments that they facilitate through their terminal. Now, it's hard to chase down the exact pricing. I try to for us, but I believe it's set at a custom rate for each, uh, individual company that they work with. So it's hard to tell exactly what that costs, but the, the fintech side of the business is the majority revenue driver.

• 31:39Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  But it's much lower margin than software revenue.

• 31:42Jason Calacanis?

  Right, so I'm guessing that billion is their take. So that makes more sense to me. And then they have 50 million in hardware sales this quarter. So if you were to put those three numbers together, then their valuation is, uh, if they're at 1.25 billion, they're making, what is that, 6 billion a year? Uh, in 5 billion a year run rate, 5 billion a year. Yeah, they're doing four times top line revenue. That makes much more sense to me. And I'm guessing they're profitable or close to it?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, just DPS was a little bit low in their most recent quarter, but the company is profitable enough that no one's worried about it, given its growth rate. I don't think they're enormously profitable on a gap basis, Jason, but I don't think they're being judged on a gap basis, just to be clear. The thing that blows my mind, though, is Toast's business is growing very, very quickly. It added 7,000 restaurants last quarter. They're expanding not just into things like menus and so forth, Jason, but into a capital program. They are having now set up to help you handle your payroll if you're a restaurant. So they are going very, very deep on this vertical and adding adjacent verticals like hotels and so forth. All of that, gross payment volume up 24%, revenue growth was very, very solid, and they're both Forex revenue.

• 32:54Jason Calacanis?

  I'm such an idiot because I was talking about this company when it was at, you know, $15 a share. Now it's 36. I really have to do more public market trading. I don't know if this is a good deal or not right now, but I don't want to give any financial advice. But I think this company is a really good example of relentlessly adding features that delight customers, that lock them in. So there's multiple reasons to add additional features. One of the reasons is if you keep adding features, it's hard to rip a system out. And so, once you use Slack as an example, and Slack costs, I don't know, 15 bucks a month per person, 10 bucks a month per person, depending on which program you got. You got a 30-person company, you're spending 4,000 a year.

• 33:37Jason Calacanis?

  It's like not that much money. There's free versions, or there's a $100 version you could download, or a $999 one you could pay one time for. There's plenty of competitors to it, but if you're getting enough value and it's got enough hooks into it, where you've got enough things feeding into it, and you like to use Huddles, or you like to use their, I don't know, remind-you features, ripping all that stuff out becomes very expensive. So there's two really important piece of advice here. One, you have to nail your core product, which for them is the point-of-sale system. But once you have, you have to get really good at having multiple teams attack other verticals.

• 34:16Jason Calacanis?

  And then you can look at your competitors and whatever they're charging for, you can just abstract and put into your product for free. In Zoom, another perfect example of doing this, they added transcripts. And they added chat rooms like Slack. They edit automatic transcripts and automatic summaries. And so doing that over time makes your product more defensible. And if you have, it all comes down to product velocity. So one of the key, key, key aspects of being a great startup, and we're here on this week in startups. And we're talking about a large public company is can you go fast? Can you go into demon mode as Elon says?

• 34:56Jason Calacanis?

  Can you hit speed and iteration and just release new products that are solid at a regular cadence? And if you do, venture capitalists really like that. And of course you have to turn them off sometimes if they actually don't. But when you look at Toast's offering now, they also allow you to manage into Toast, all of the orders from DoorDash and Uber Eats. So again, one system of record and they just keep adding those features. Squarespace, a product I love, does this as well. They keep adding features. So they added e-commerce and selling subscriptions on their product, SEO metrics. So you don't have to buy the second, third, fourth product. And these platform companies always do better than vertical companies.

• 35:40Jason Calacanis?

  But vertical companies and having a beachhead where you can be awesome and better than anybody is how that process starts.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:48Jason Calacanis?

  So anyway, there's the lessons, I think, from Toast.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  I just wanted to underscore one thing you said about the hooks that they have into companies. They just put out a new feature in the last quarter or two called branded apps that helps individuals, small restaurants or very small chains have their own application, which they said in their earnings call boosts return orders. So essentially not only can having hooks in your customers help keep them with you. If you help them do more business, it'll drive more payment volume, for example, back into Toast. So it works out for everybody and it's very efficient. I'm very impressed with this company, Jason. It's very different than it was when it went public in just a couple of years. And that's product velocity. So yeah, awesome. I think you're dead on there.

• 36:25Jason Calacanis?

  Founders, do you want to sell to bigger customers? I know you do. You gotta get that ACV trending up and you want to push your churn down, right? Sounds good. But to sell to those big buyers, you need to clear all of these compliance checks. You know that. That means you gotta have things like SOC 2 sorted out. What's SOC 2? It's a standard and ensures that companies keep their customer data safe. And if you aren't SOC 2 compliant, you can kiss those big deals goodbye. You're not going to land the lighthouse customers. You're not going to be able to operate at the highest end of the market. But Vanta makes it really easy for you to get and renew your SOC 2 compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks.

• 37:05Jason Calacanis?

  Can take months without Vanta and they automate compliance for GDPR, HIPAA and more. So you can sell to bigger customers in whatever markup your startup is going after. Vanta is going to save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85% on compliance costs. Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/twist. That's vanta.com/twist for $1,000 off your SOC 2.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Do you want to talk about Reddit really quick?

• 37:31Jason Calacanis?

  I do because my understanding is they figured something out. And that's really interesting since this company has been around for 20 years almost.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  It's been around for so long, I forget what it was like to not use Reddit daily. It was so long ago that Reddit took off that its old competitor was Dig.

• 37:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. June 23rd, 2005 was when Reddit launched.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 37:57Jason Calacanis?

  So it will be next June, a 20 years old. Oh, and by the way, Dig launched December 2004. So Dig was six months before.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Long, long time ago. But the story with Reddit is that it has seen insane user growth. And I think the reason why we talk about Reddit so much now is that it has reached real mass scale. In fact, Reddit is, I think now, Jason, just mainstream media. In their most recent quarter, they said that daily active users were up 47%, which is very, very close to half in the last year to just under 100 million, which is 100 million daily people. That's absolutely insane. Also, who would have thought 50% growth this late in the company's history?

• 38:44Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty crazy. Right now, the stock is at $133, market cap of 23 billion. This is another one I was considering putting a J-Trade in and I, you know, I stopped J-Trading because I was too busy and I'm, I'm an idiot because I really do have some insights here. The reason I know Reddit was a good buy, and I don't know that it's a good buy now, that it's tripled in value. It was trading, you know, a year ago at 40, so it's now tripled that price or more, 3.5 times more, is because I was seeing all of my searches wind up directing me back to Reddit. So if I was looking for headphones, or I was looking for music to play on my headphones, or I was, wanted to talk about barbecue in Texas, or I was looking at

• 39:28Jason Calacanis?

  hiring people in Texas and Austin, I just found myself winding up on a subreddit.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:34Jason Calacanis?

  And I think this has something to do with a counter to what's happening in AI.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, to a large degree. So, one thing Reddit pointed out in its most recent earnings was that in 2004, and I'm quoting here, "So far, the word Reddit was the sixth most Googled word in the US." And that's because people have been appending Reddit to their search queries to essentially get around Google trying to offer them up stuff. They just want the human stuff. They want the actual stuff from people. And so ironically, I think Reddit backwards built Mahalo because you wanted to do human-powered search.

• 40:08Jason Calacanis?

  I did, yes.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Reddit built human-powered answers, and then Google is the mechanism by which people reach them. It's kind of the same thing.

• 40:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And I think that's like really the lesson here. Reddit has not changed in 19 years. So, back to startup lessons. We talked about product velocity and adding features. What Reddit did really well is, they focused on that core feature, which was community. Now, I'm not saying they didn't add features, but the UX has stayed remarkably the same. And they learned this because Dig famously released a version 4.0 or something that changed everything and made it feel more like Facebook. And Kevin Rose essentially left the company after that, I believe, and the whole thing just started to come apart.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:48Jason Calacanis?

  If you have something that's working and growing more than, I don't know, in the early days of a startup, 3X year over year, you want to keep doing that. If you're growing double-digit percentages per month, 10 to 20% per month, carry on. Keep doing what you're doing because it's so rare for something to grow 20% month over a month, or even 10%. And that means at 10% every 7.2 months, you will double your size. Very few things double every year. And to double every year for Reddit was just an extraordinary thing. Now, they did add a lot of extra features and there were a lot of things that were going to kill Reddit, obviously.

• 41:28Jason Calacanis?

  It almost got killed by like a lot of the dark stuff that was going on there, misogynist stuff, violent stuff. They kind of got the community under control and that's where 4chan came out. Where they were like, hey, anything really crazy we'll do over at 4chan? We don't want that level of crazy, like trolling, okay. Sure. Violence, not okay. Real world swatting, not okay. You know, telling somebody they're fat or stupid or mocking them, okay, right? They kind of found an okay place for an anonymous message board to operate. And it's pseudo anonymous and I think this really relates to what we're seeing with freedom of speech. You have so many people complaining about X, right? And oh my God, there's misinformation, et cetera.

• 42:13Jason Calacanis?

  But you don't hear people saying that about Reddit. And I think part of that is the expectation was that Twitter was going to be, you know, more real names and super moderated. But Reddit, nobody has that expectation. When I look at a Reddit thread, I assume there's marketers cloaking themselves. I assume there's people with multiple accounts. But that overall, the community sorts through it enough that it's an okay place to start my information journey. I wouldn't do anything blindly on it. But if people were talking about their favorite songs to listen to on high fidelity headphones, I'd be cool with it. So maybe, what do you think about pseudonyms? Cause it's not anonymous in that every post you make is anonymous, they're pseudonyms.

• 42:58Jason Calacanis?

  So you can look at the history and you can build up reputation. So maybe you could unpack what your thoughts are as a long-term community. Member on the internet.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  I've been on Reddit for an incredibly long time, so I've seen its various permutations. And one thing that I think is under discussed is how important moderators are of individual subreddits.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  Big time, yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  So the reason why I think X is more a conversation and a political football to some degree about how it handles moderation is that it's a company versus a collection of individual communities. And so if I'm on the progressive metal subreddit, which I love, there's a couple of diehard fans who moderate it. They set the rules. You don't like it. Make your own forum. But if you're going to be on their collection of of digital spaces, that's the rule set. So I think they kind of federated out the responsibility for moderation in a way that has up and down worked pretty well. They did have the API kerfuffle. Um, sometime in the last year, they were change the rules and people were mad about that and Reddit got into a fight with its moderators, but that is mostly calmed down.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  And I also just think that because it is pseudo anonymous, to your point, people have a simply lower expectation of informational fidelity. Because as people, I think it's it people should post more, Jason, when they're behind a pseudonym versus their real name. And I think you can see that on X. If I see someone whose name is clearly a, you know, an allusion to anime or historical figure or random, whatever. It's never the smallest person that I get mostly.

• 44:26Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and you also have to worry with pseudonyms. Combining pseudonyms, and this is one of the concerns I have about X and Reddit, is if there's a financial incentive and you have pseudonyms, then people can anonymously make money. Okay, why is that a problem for somebody to anonymously make money? Most people would say, Alex, well, it's great, you know, people don't have to worry about losing their job because they have a left wing or a right wing or a particular passion that would get them, you know, I don't know. We're in their privacy, but what it also does is it can create a very cynical approach where I think people on X, a lot of these anonymous accounts and the anonymous accounts on Reddit.

• 45:11Jason Calacanis?

  You can build up reputation and then sell it to the highest bidder. And this happens in all systems, whether it's the Russians paying off podcasters covertly, or just revenue sharing where you get a piece of the advertising or affiliate revenue, where somebody could build up a reputation in your metal forum. Then they go over to another one and say they love these headphones, but they work for that headphone company, right?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:37Jason Calacanis?

  And so I do worry a little bit that the incentives are now perverse. And it's perverse in an Alex Jones kind of way. Alex Jones, his stock in trade was to go after conspiracy theorists. Now, I like a good conspiracy theory like anybody, right? Um, there used to be this great show that Leonard Nimoy was the voiceover for. God, what was the name of that show? Do you remember?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I've never seen the show you're talking about.

• 46:04Jason Calacanis?

  It was a syndicated show where it was like mysteries.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 46:08Jason Calacanis?

  Leonard Nimoy Mystery Show. In search of, thank you, producer Stuart, coming in hot with a great addition. In search of, uh, and it was so awesome. You can, we'll, we'll throw up the in search of screen or something or an episode guide here to show you what it was and like some of the topics. But in search of was such a great conspiracy show where Leonard Nimoy would talk about aliens or Loch Ness monster, you know, all these things. And as a kid, I loved, I thought it was awesome that like, maybe there were these mysteries that were unsolved mysteries. Um, and in search of, you know, kind of did that. Um, I think that's like what Alex Jones did too, right? He was like, let's go in search of these things.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  But it's a 1997 word art style graphics there. You could tell that's not a recent, recent image. You know, just, I'm, I'm curious and I, I'm not trying to prime you to criticize a friend of yours here, so this is not me kicking up dust, but yeah. On Reddit, if you go around making posts that are reposts or stealing something from a different subreddit to put it somewhere else, it's called karma whoring and it's looked down on because karma is the Reddit kind of like onsite currency, if you will.

• 47:20Jason Calacanis?

  That's the reputation that you earn and then people will trust you or not by karma. It'd be a great idea for X or Twitter to have karma or a reputation like that and they could do it actually really easily via community notes and community notes has been awesome. Like I get community noted sometimes, other people get community noted and I find it's pretty accurate and attaching your community notes record to your profile page is a brilliant idea and that's literally what karma does, right?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, people can literally go see what you've posted, how it's done, your overall results, both for comments and posts, but overall on X where you and I have spent the majority of the last 15 years, you can be anonymous and you can post and you can get paid for it and I think that combination leads to people posting, I would say even shriller stuff than they otherwise might have.

• 48:14Jason Calacanis?

  The spicer it is, the more engagement it gets.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  If it bleeds, it leads, yeah.

• 48:18Jason Calacanis?

  Correct and so just like Fox News or MSNBC can go with, you know, a spicy headline that may not be exactly attached to reality or just an opinion and how do you wind up on those shows? It's by having a spicy opinion and so it's a long way of sort of, I know this because I get invited to them.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:38Jason Calacanis?

  And the Republicans like Jesse Waters, they invite me on every week, they're really kind, I love doing it, I just haven't had the time, I'm gonna do it again. I like going on there and being a little adversarial and talking about my criticism of say Trump or, you know, Kamala or the Democratic Party, I kind of like it because I'm independent and, but they love me because they like having somebody on who's not 100% in the bag for Trump and not 100% DNC.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:02Jason Calacanis?

  They kind of love that moderate coming in with a little nuance, but my point about Alex Jones was if you follow this thread, eventually what people do is they just make stuff up. And then you become a fictional author. And that's my fear with what's happening on X with people getting paid or, uh, you know, anonymous accounts on, uh, Reddit pseudonym accounts is that or Wikipedia now is having this where in order to get your Wikipedia page changed and everybody thinks you can trust Wikipedia, trust me, I have a page on Wikipedia. It is run by my haters and people I've beaten in business or people I fired, uh, with, you know, uh, enthusiasm, let's say from a company.

• 49:47Jason Calacanis?

  They're motivated to edit that page and then I have to hire people. If, I mean, if I wanted to make changes, I haven't, but I've had people pitch me on it and they're like, here's our approach to how we would change your page. We have these 50 editors who are on payroll, who are making edits across these four accounts for the past 12 years on VPNs to protect their privacy and we can start a discussion about five issues on your page. And then slip in three or four things you want that have nothing to do with that, but that come from a story that we write on another news source. And you're like, really? And they're like, yeah, we're going to release a press release. Then we're going to pay a blogger to write the story.

• 50:31Jason Calacanis?

  Then we're going to have, you know, a discussion about it on Reddit. Then we're going to put it on your Wikipedia page and we're going to cite like two of those sources or whatever. And I'm like, wow, you can't trust anything. And Alex Jones eventually created the fabrication that the parents at Sandy Hook who lost their children were actors and that they never had kids to begin with. That's kind of where this madness event eventually winds up if you don't put protections in place. So the good news is if you're sharing revenue on X, they know the person's name. They have to send the check to a bank account. They have to, you have to put your driver's license in. So although you're pseudo, they kind of know who you are.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Elon knows your followers might not.

• 51:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, exactly. And so this is where I think if you have, you know, my belief is if you make over a certain amount of money in any of these systems or you have a certain number of followers, I think it's kind of, I prefer. That people use their real names and own their words. I do understand there could be repercussions. And I do understand the founding fathers wrote some papers anonymously.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 51:35Jason Calacanis?

  But I think it's something to be acutely aware of as a consumer of content. Is that there is massive manipulation going on and people taking sides. You have to make your own decisions.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's why I really like having a like a personal blog. Like, I think a lot of people just have like their own, you know, first, firstlast.com. Because here's my thoughts without any filters, without any pseudonyms, without any platforms. I, I, I love that. But looping back to Reddit really quick and talking about product. Uh, Reddit has not changed visually much, but they have made some interesting changes. One thing that really struck me was the impact of their use of AI translations. They said they've been working on essentially translating all of Reddit into other languages, and there's some pretty positive results.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they want to grow their international, uh, user base. You need to get off the English-speaking internet at some point in time and expand out to the broader world. So why not use machine translations across the site to turn the whole dang thing into Pick-a-Langued? Suddenly, your TAM goes up, more people can hit you via search. And I think they can keep the user growth going for some time. They're also doing stuff like AMA changes and so forth, but it was the, the translations that really caught my eye, Jason.

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  So they are going to automatically translate more than thirty-five new locales in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. I'm reading from TechCrunch here.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 52:54Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, wow. So those are not going to be perfect, but they're better than nothing.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:01Jason Calacanis?

  And so here's how it works, folks. Uh, apparently, you pick a post, and if you're in the app, this is brilliant. Uh, so here you can look at the original, or you can hit the, um, sliders, I guess, and click translate and pick a different translation. And read it in your native language. So this occurs on a case-by-case basis. Uh, not, they're not reprinting the entire index in another language. But that would actually be really interesting to do and would previously have been not possible.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yes, or very expensive to do.

• 53:37Jason Calacanis?

  Very expensive to do. Um, this would actually be interesting, um, how this would work in the

• 53:46Jason Calacanis?

  Real world in terms of SEO. If you took the entire corpus, or let's just say you took the top thousand subreddits. Sure, you took their top 1,000 posts in the past year and you just used AI to republish them, put them into the Google search index. I wonder if Google would index translations automatically in those conversations. And then, how would you deal with people in France taking a thread? Like we just had about Toast. Let's say Toast goes to France. Now they want to reply to the Americans who've had their posts translated. Ha ha! Then the Americans would see a French post, but on the English subreddit, you would then translate the French reply into English and then say, "Show Original."

• 54:32Jason Calacanis?

  Then you could have a conversation going on.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:35Jason Calacanis?

  In one thread between Japanese, French and American consumers of whatever rock band you're in. Think about how that would make the world a lot smaller, wouldn't it?

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Well, did you ever read any Douglas Adams, the science fiction author?

• 54:48Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if I've read it. I think I started Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at some point, but I don't know if I ever finished it.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I know what I'm gonna get you for Christmas then. Douglas Adams had a little part in his story called the Babal Fish. It's a little fish you put in your ear and you can understand all languages. It really does feel like we're getting very close to just the internet being understandable in that way. I use a lot of translation to read like, I don't know, Chinese Communist Party meeting notes and so forth. But the thing that you're describing inside of Reddit as a way to auto-translate and allow people to converse across languages, I don't think I've seen yet, but I would frickin' love to use that. That would just be awesome. I would love to talk to more people, why not?

• 55:27Jason Calacanis?

  Why not? I, it feels like we're right there and this is an interesting product discussion. And, you know, when you start getting resources as a founder, I think this is what makes founders really dangerous. And this is why profitability is such a great thing for a company to hit. Because then you can start taking swings at the bat and try different concepts. See if they work as experiments and then use them or lose them. And so as we talked today about, you know, making a really great UX and understanding, hey, this is our beachhead market conversations and tools for the community leaders who are moderating those. You know, then moving on to the next piece, which is can you get the other stuff right of adding new features? They never really.

• 56:13Jason Calacanis?

  Um, they have not, they've seemed to thrive, even though Discord has been like constantly nipping at the heels of Reddit. It's almost like it's two different use cases. And I see so many of the Reddits having a Discord associated with them. And then I see them having their own internal chat. I wonder how that battle is going on, because that's an example of like Discord is been built off the backs of Reddit. And Reddit is kind of, I wonder how worried they are about Discord.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  So I would say not too worried right now. And I, I do track a lot of indie video games, Jason. So I'm on their subreddits and their Discord. So I've actually kind of spent time across this divide. And the Discords tend to be way more moderated, because they're, they're often run by a corporation or a fanatical group of diehard fans of a thing. And I think the reason why they're more heavily moderated is because their chat versus forum postings. And you can much more easily moderate a flow of forum posts than real time conversations. And so I think Reddit ends up being a lot more freewheeling, if more public. So there's a trade off there, but I don't think Reddit's that worried because they're growing faster than Discord is, and they're much larger. The thing that I would be concerned about is what if Reddit decides it

• 57:28Speaker 01

  doesn't want Google's piddly fifty or a hundred million dollars a year, builds an actually good search engine on top of itself, cuts Google off, and then rides away into the sunset with the world's best search product?

• 57:39Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's probably, if you were to look at the valuation of Reddit, twenty billion plus versus the OpenAI or perplexity valuations, nine billion and a hundred and sixty billion for, for OpenAI. You know, you have to think, if I'm Reddit, I would not let anybody use our data. I would build a search engine right at the top, and I would go right at them. And that would be, you know, if Reddit really was ambitious and wanted to go for it, I would cut off all people using it. I would put the entire site, um, behind a paywall at some point, which is going to screw up your Google traffic. And they have a lot of flow through traffic, obviously, with putting them there. So they have to be delicate with Google there. But I think, um, you know,

• 58:24Jason Calacanis?

  figuring out how to not piss off Google. And add AI features. Now, I I'm curious, when you go to Reddit, it never summarizes a thread.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  No, I've never seen do that. No.

• 58:38Jason Calacanis?

  And that is the feature I really want. Like, why doesn't Reddit, when you're at the top of a really good thread,

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 58:45Jason Calacanis?

  write a um write a really good summary. Superhuman does that. Um, I use Speechify. When I go to a webpage, it does that automatically. I I didn't realize Speechify was doing that, but they they whatever page you're on, if I'm logged into an FT or an Economist story, they write me a little summary of it. It's really cool. Um, that would be the TLDR. Uh, thank you, Campbell, uh, in the chat room for mentioning that. What a great feature that would be. Um, let's look at the numbers here. They're they're they broke a billion dollars in ad revenue a year.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  So, uh, Q3 revenue was 348 million, Jason, and I believe 315 of that was advertising. So, yes, they're over the billion dollar run rate. And that's the thing. Their revenue from data partnerships in the quarter was 33 million dollars.

• 59:35Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  I mean, that's not that much.

• 59:37Jason Calacanis?

  Thirty-three million dollars in in data revenue is pretty significant. And if you times that by four, it's 120, and they have 101.2 billion. So it's 1%. No, it's 10% already.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:50Jason Calacanis?

  It's already 10% of their revenue. Okay, so that's an interesting decision that Steve's gonna have to make at Reddit. Does he keep allowing people to use their data with certain conditions like a link back? Or does he, um, you know, uh, go for it and compete against them? What's very interesting about that is, uh, that I have recently started asking interesting questions. Like, if I were to go to ChatGPT, I could ask, uh, give me the top 10, um, headphones for hi-fi music as per discussions on reddit.com.

• 1:00:34Jason Calacanis?

  Let's see if it, because I know they have a deal, right?

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  I don't think ChatGPT has a deal with Reddit. I think it's Google specific. I don't think they have a, I don't think they have the same transaction. But I will double check that while you search.

• 1:00:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so I'm gonna do two things here. Remember I said if Reddit wants to, I'm sorry, if Sam Altman wants to start ending his problems with the use of other people's data without permission, he needs to go all in on citations, right?

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:05Jason Calacanis?

  I've been saying this over and over again, and pull yours up and let's see it. Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:01:10Jason Calacanis?

  See what you got.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Let me screen share here.

• 1:01:13Jason Calacanis?

  So this is like really interesting to see that they're starting to cite Reddit, and they'll put it at the top level, but sometimes they ask you to click it. I think it needs to be at the top level. Burying attribution seems like a bad idea to me, but here, let's see what it shows here. So you asked it, what are the top rated headphones across categories? And it did give you the source.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yes, so I ran your search again for Hi-Fi, because I know that's what you wanted. And to me, like, this is what I was looking for in terms of sources, but I don't see a Reddit.

• 1:01:47Jason Calacanis?

  So put in here a link to related Reddit discussions. And let's see what happens. Because if they are into the API, they, and if they've indexed it, they should be able to do this. So here we have.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 1:02:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and so click it and let's see if it actually takes you to a Reddit thread. Let's see if it opens it and.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  It opened a completely random link.

• 1:02:19Jason Calacanis?

  That's, I had that happen myself where it wouldn't give me the link. So if you say to ChatGPT, show me the URLs of those, it will actually show you the URLs, but it, some reason it gets hyperlinks wrong all the time. It's so strange.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Can you see this, Jason? Can you see my screen?

• 1:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Okay, so if I click on this, it's taking me to, my roommates always come in my room to hang out while I'm trying to write.

• 1:02:42Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so there's work to be done. Send somebody send this clip to Sam Altman and the OpenAI Quality Team. I mean, you found interesting discussions. You got the links wrong, but if you say at the bottom here, show the links, show me the actual URLs of those links, it might actually show you the actual URLs. And if it does it properly, yeah, see, it's not showing you the actual URLs.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  If we click on sources, we get.

• 1:03:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's supposed to show you the sources on the right. They don't get that right. It's so weird. And you did a web search there. So you're using the new search functionality. So lots of work to be here, but you see where they're trying to get to.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:21Jason Calacanis?

  And OpenAI is building in public, so it doesn't work. But Sam Altman learned this a long time ago. I've read it, watching, and Sequoia, you know, scouts, like, watching all these companies just, you know, make progress like this. It's really great.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  I want to make one more point, though, because do you recall the search off that we did, I think it was on Wednesday, comparing perplexity and OpenAI search and Google? One of those four queries, we didn't get to it, but it was an OpenAI query, and it just failed several times. I could not get it to answer a question that perplexity and Google were both willing to. And it wasn't, it wasn't it trying to like mother hen me. It just the back end just couldn't do it. And so I think it's interesting.

• 1:03:58Jason Calacanis?

  Do you remember what topic it was? Was it flights or travel?

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  I can't. One second. I just need to quickly pull back out my notes here.

• 1:04:05Jason Calacanis?

  I know that when I asked it about election, uh, security, ah, yeah, it was like, yeah, you should go to this website.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  So for me, it was how to help a colicky baby was the search that I was trying for. And Google was okay. Perplexity was okay. ChatGPT search said unable to display this message due to an error. And I got that repeatedly trying that search because I didn't want to just cop out and, you know, dress and crap. But there's some weird bugs in there. I wonder who's running QA?

• 1:04:38Jason Calacanis?

  Um, yeah, it's um, it's gonna be a little bit more work, uh, but this is one of the thing that things that's great about OpenAI's philosophy is they put these this stuff out there, they test it. You know, they they're willing to have it break in public. I think we're kind of entering a YOLO kind of environment for these LLMs. And I'm okay with it, actually. I think if you take any of the responses at face value, I mean, you're dumb. It's kind of like listening to politicians or the media, you know, the opinion media. I want to separate like actual journalism from opinion media. But when you like, look at like all the feedback we're getting, you know, you have to go do your own research, you have to come to your

• 1:05:21Jason Calacanis?

  own conclusions, even with these tools. But man, these tools are making things so much faster. So you really have to use them. What else do we have on the docket here?

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  I want to talk really quickly about um, kind of what we just got towards, which is AI regulation and then also anthropics. So just news first, Jason. Amazon might invest more in anthropic. They're an OpenAI competitor. Uh, the news item here is that billions of dollars are potentially on the table, but Amazon wants anthropic to train on its own trainium chips and not Nvidia's chips. And to me, my my read is this, if Amazon is able to set terms for the anthropic investment, that means that it has more leverage, which means that anthropic is not doing as well as it might have hoped to, because you don't get bullied around by your investor unless they have um, something over you.

• 1:06:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Uh, okay. And then on the AI regulation front, there's a lot of commentary right now. And I think a lot of people are kind of curious what the new administration will mean for AI regulation. And I'm curious what you think here, because I'm reading a lot of competing things. On one hand, we know that the technology advisors to Trump um, are pretty pro tech. Uh, for example, Uh, Michael Kratzios is one of the people that are working on Trump's technology transition team and he used to work for Teal Capital. So there you go. But on the other hand, J D Vance has been skeptical of some major tech companies and also Elon Musk, who is in Trump's ear, was in favor of California's controversial AI bill that eventually got vetoed.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  So it's not as simple as you might think to kind of figure out where AI regulation might come down in the current administration. And so I just kind of wanted to get your take on this.

• 1:07:05Jason Calacanis?

  My guess is they're going to be, they're ultimately going to be the party of less regulations and removing regulations. So in almost everything, I think they're going to be, get out of the way of business. It's not the government's job to take care of citizens, you know, um, and which products and services they purchase. Um, and I just think they're going to try to, on the margins, remove existing regulations and certainly not add regulations. That's what they say they're going to do. Once in a while, you know, Trump will say bombastic things. Well, I'm using the term once in a while generously. The entire discussion right now, I did a tweet about it.

• 1:07:48Jason Calacanis?

  Around immigration is a really interesting illustrative example. For the next four years, we're going to be having the same conversation on repeat, which Peter Thiel summarized as, take Trump seriously, don't take him literally. So when we look at immigration, Steve Bannon said very clearly, like, we're going to export 15 million people. Trump said that at his rallies. J D Vance said something different at All In Summit where he said, like, we're going to, you know, do it like a sandwich. We're not going to try to eat it in one bite. We're going to take small bites. The first bite's going to be people who are committing crimes, right? Violent gangs. Great. Nobody wants violent people in the country illegally. Easy. Um, so then the question is, after they get the 500,000, let's say that's the number.

• 1:08:31Jason Calacanis?

  Some people say it's a million. I'll just say 500,000, like, super violent people who never should have been let in. Then you have 15 million supposedly who were let in over the last four years. Um, I don't doubt that number is not. Directionally correct, maybe it's seven million, maybe it's fifteen, who knows? Let's just say it's twelve. So what happens with those ten million people? Are they actually going to drag them out of their homes? Literally on social media, have a family or a kid in public school be dragged out with their mom? Who's working, you know, in an entry level job? Or a dad who's working in construction illegally, you know, laying bricks? Literally going to drag them out of the country? Family of three with a bunch of people on their phones, taking video would be chaotic. It would also be absurdly expensive.

• 1:09:17Jason Calacanis?

  Like, it's going to cost tens of thousands of dollars to arrest each group. Then it's going to cost a hundred thousand per person to, like, house them for a year? As you try to adjudicate where they're going to go? So I think we're going to see a lot of proposals like, we're breaking up Big Tech. And then it's going to actually manifest itself as we saber rattled at Meta? And told them, we don't want you, you know, taking Republican voices or conservative voices off the platform? And then Zuck will bend the knee and say, okay, fine. We're not going to take Proud Boys or Oath Keepers off the platform. You know, if people want to speculate about the election and was it rigged or not? You don't lose your account anymore, right?

• 1:09:59Jason Calacanis?

  So you can now on YouTube, you used to lose your account if you talked about election? If you claimed the election was stolen in 2020? They would say that you were spreading election lies and they would suspend your account. It was against the terms of service. Now it's not. They changed their mind over at YouTube. So that's, I think, the reality of what they're going to do. So in this case, my guess is there will be no AI regulation from the Trump administration. I think zero.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the, the, the only real question then is what happens to the Biden executive order? That was signed? And I was just- Yes, or one particular founder told Forbes, uh, May Habib, um, the CEO and founder over at Rider. They said that it was so weak that they may not even bother to repeal the EO because who cares? Ah, which I thought was a really hysterical, like we tried something in AI regulation. Once and we're done with that entirely. It's going to be interesting, but I do think there, there's competing voices inside the Trump camp and I, I will be curious to see who wins, who wins when and which groups win the most often inside of his.

• 1:11:09Jason Calacanis?

  What has happened historically, I guess, is the question you have to ask yourself. So I always encourage people to just, look at the history of things and then ask yourself, what happened last time? Uh, and last time there was going to be a big deportation. There wasn't, but the border was shut, right? And it was kind of shut in a controversial way. You know, people were separated and all this kind of stuff. Uh, but Americans want that, right? And so, or the majority of Americans seem to want that. So I think, you know, if we look at Tik Tok, that'll be the really interesting example for me. Trump was against Tik Tok, then he got a big donation from Jeffrey Yass, who has a big ownership position.

• 1:11:50Jason Calacanis?

  And, but you know, they've been public about this, you know, anti-China position and China's influence here. So what is Trump going to do?

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I'll tell you that the bill that.

• 1:12:00Jason Calacanis?

  That's the one I'm watching.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  The bill in the House and the Senate was very bipartisan. A lot of his party were vehemently opposed to Tik Tok. And it's already on a timer to get banned. So something will have to happen to, to save it essentially. And I think that the, the best commentary that I read on Tik Tok and the Trump administration 2.0 was that he just might not care now that the election's over and might just do nothing and just let his party's previous, um, decision earlier stand. Which would be bad for Jeffrey Yass, but, uh, it would be too bad if one person can write a large enough check and change American foreign policy.

• 1:12:35Jason Calacanis?

  Right? I think that's always been the case is that big money interests can have massive influence. Uh, the fact that Biden didn't ban it during his term, I think was because there were probably big money influences on the Democrats as well to not ban it. Um, and also banning it on a pragmatic basis. Was um untenable if you're running for office and you think TikTok is going to help you get elected. So if you are gonna ban, they kind of quieted down on the TikTok stuff I noticed and Kamala really embraced using TikTok. She was like really posting many videos a day.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Jason Calacanis?

  Because if you were to ban TikTok, I think they had a fear, a reasonable fear, they would lose young people before the election because it's so popular. Probably, I, I have a conspiracy theory here.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:13:27Jason Calacanis?

  I think Jeff Yass wants secretly for it to have the pressure, and this is a very nuanced position here. But I think he wants the pressure on TikTok to go public. So that he can liquidate his position as any reasonable investor would want to with such a huge hit.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, or liquidate some large portion of it without the valuation being uh crushed. So the very delicate dance, if I was a shareholder, would be, well, we don't want to ban it. But we probably do want to make sure it's secure and you would want to keep that pressure going so that the CCP releases it to go public. And you can cash your shares in and the CCP doesn't say, you know what, this is an asset for us. We cannot give it up. It's too valuable of an asset.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Jason Calacanis?

  The fact that the CCP hasn't left the board, the Chinese Communist Party has not left the board. And they have not let it divest proves to me that it's an intelligence asset. That is the conclusion I would come to because any other reasonable person would take the chips. This company goes public, it becomes a $500 billion company, 250, 500 billion, like out of the gate. And the excitement level would be unbelievable.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Oh, huge.

• 1:14:45Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, we're talking about Reddit right now. I mean, a TikTok scale and the addiction of that platform, when those numbers come out. Man, people are gonna buy that stock up like crazy. It will be the hottest IPO. The only hotter IPL I can think of would be SpaceX. I would say it's like SpaceX. And then TikTok and then, you know, Stripe are the top.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  I was just about to say Stripe, exactly.

• 1:15:10Jason Calacanis?

  But Stripe is like compared to TikTok, like it's TikTok's a consumer brand. It's got global potential. It's super addicting. It's super innovative. All due respect to Stripe. It's a finance backend company that, you know, nobody really uses every day. It's not like you have a billion people using that product every day. As like, I, oh, did you stripe it? Nobody's saying that like on a consumer basis, you know, people are building in. So, um, I, I'm looking at this first example. There, there's going to be like a little scorecard and we should actually keep a scorecard here. Let's actually, let's do a scorecard. We can make a punch list here. We're into scorecards. Let's keep a scorecard. Immigration, a high skilled immigration. We'll do ones that are related to tech.

• 1:15:55Jason Calacanis?

  High skilled immigration is one. Uh, we'll track TikTok. Divestiture, we'll track the, um, Starlink broadband, rural broadband. We'll track that one. We'll track tips and no taxing of tips and no taxing of overtime. Those are all promises made by the Trump, uh, campaign that we should just track and see if they actually happen. How many days after they come in office and we can just track how many days till this happens? If at all. And, you know, that's Kamala was promising $25,000 in startup funding for black Americans and 25,000 for first time homeowners. Like I would in good faith be tracking those as well.

• 1:16:37Jason Calacanis?

  If they were going to give startup financing or they were going to give 25K for home buyers. I would track that in relation to Zillow or Redfin. So this isn't a partisan exercise. This is a holding this new administration accountable to the promises they made. That are related to business and finance. Are there any other ones that you would?

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Well, I just.

• 1:16:56Jason Calacanis?

  Add to that list?

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Yes, but I want to think about it for a minute before I, before I, I, I say it out loud, but I, I will be very curious to see about the taxes on tips because that is a very, very expensive proposition for the, from like the federal budget level. And it's not the constituency of people that donate a lot of money. So I'm curious to see if that one gets jettisoned back to our point about cynicism. But Jason,

• 1:17:19Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know, who would benefit in a major way from no taxes on tips would be the people who use toast and the POS people because they would be like, yeah, I now know that this barista is making, they were making $5 an hour in tips. So when I paid them 20 an hour to be a barista, I know it was 25. And they were netting 75 cents of that. So net, net, they were making, you know, call it $17 an hour after taxes, right? 75% of $20 would be 15. And then, yeah, maybe they get, give, you know, a little bit up in their tips. So you'd be at like $18 and change.

• 1:18:01Jason Calacanis?

  Now, in that same formula, you'll be at 20 because there'd be no tax on that last $5. So the 15 would get taxed at 75% net, 25% to the government or maybe 70, maybe it's 70%, 30% would go to local and depending on what state you're in. So maybe they're getting $14 plus five is 19 versus two, which would be 16. Yeah, that, that's a major difference.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  It's a major difference.

• 1:18:26Jason Calacanis?

  So those are all Republicans or a large percentage of those would be Republicans or Trump voters. Right? When we say Trump voters now, what we're really saying is the majority of the country.

• 1:18:36Jason Calacanis?

  When you say Trump voters, we're saying 55, 60% of the country. Um, so if that's the case, GOP members, uh, they're going to benefit most from it.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Where are you getting the 60% number?

• 1:18:48Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if half the country, um, voted for, if Trump won the, um, I'm taking into account GOP members who didn't vote for Trump, plus the people who did vote for Trump. So what did Trump win in the?

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  51%?

• 1:19:06Jason Calacanis?

  51.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  That was the last time I saw. So, uh, I'll be curious to see what his approval numbers are. Cause your, your point there implies that they're going to be very high.

• 1:19:15Jason Calacanis?

  I, I mean,

• 1:19:17Jason Calacanis?

  His approval number, what will Trump's approval numbers be based on?

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  Because if it's 60% GOP Trump, then it should be 60%.

• 1:19:26Jason Calacanis?

  I, I think probably 60% of the country is either a conservative Republican or a Trump voter. Because I'm taking in the 51% who voted explicitly for Trump.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Jason Calacanis?

  And then giving him a little extra credit on the margins. For having some number of people who didn't vote for him or didn't vote, who are also Republican.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:19:47Jason Calacanis?

  I could be wrong, but I'm on.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  I, I just.

• 1:19:49Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot of moderates and a lot of Democrats voted for Trump this time, right? Non-Republicans voted for him.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  Well, it'll be interesting to see, and we'll get the data starting in January on how popular he is. And that'll help us understand.

• 1:20:02Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think his popularity will be based on? I have the, I have an answer, curious.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  Based on, or where does it start in the, in the, in the opinion polls?

• 1:20:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I don't, not where it starts, but just if we, if you judge the next four years.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think at the end of the four years? The average American will vote, will judge him on.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Oh, what will he be judged on?

• 1:20:26Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, like what would be, which is another way of saying, like, what would the Republican Party?

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Jason Calacanis?

  Tell him to focus on in order for J D Vance to win as president? You know, in 2028, right? Like, so what would be the tie up to a successful term? What would a successful term look like? Closing the border.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Jason Calacanis?

  Would be one, I would think that's something that seems to be on everybody's mind. Inflation going down and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Maybe those would be three things I can think of off the top of my head. Inflation, economy.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Jason Calacanis?

  You know, your, your pocketbook, foreign wars.

• 1:21:07Jason Calacanis?

  Those seem to be two big ones and then the board. Those three, I think, will be how they'll judge him. Am I missing something? What do you think?

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  I think those are the most important ones. I was just gonna say inflation, GDP growth, and the unemployment rate. I was gonna be more narrowed down onto the economic issues.

• 1:21:21Jason Calacanis?

  If you were to look at those economic indicators, rank them. What would be the most?

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say inflation first, job creation second, to GDP third. In terms of importance.

• 1:21:33Jason Calacanis?

  Inflation first.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Jason Calacanis?

  Job data, then GDP.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:38Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to agree with you. I think the most, when I look back on this election, and I was having this discussion on All In yesterday, which will drop this afternoon. We were like, sort of doing the handicapping of everything.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Jason Calacanis?

  And I've come to the conclusion, you know, there seems to be three different buckets you could put into, uh, why one party, one candidate, one over the other. The candidate, the campaign,

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:05Jason Calacanis?

  how the campaign was run,

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:08Jason Calacanis?

  I think are, you know, they kind of, the platform, like what they were running on, what issues, is kind of separate from how they run their campaign, the tactical decisions. So if we were to put those into three buckets, you have the personality of Kamala and Walz versus the, you know, personality of Trump and Vance, that's one, the candidates themselves. Then you have their platforms. And then you have tactically how they ran their, uh, campaign. In one case, you know, uh, doing podcasts, and one case not doing podcasts, right? Or doing a lot of long-form podcasts, et cetera, versus not doing them. In one case, running, you know, these rallies and, you know, maybe on the margins, a little bit of, uh,

• 1:22:53Jason Calacanis?

  hate speech or, you know, xenophobic stuff, uh, just, you know, spark the fires, uh, or flames a little bit. In one case, trying to be maybe above the fray. So if you look at those three, what do you think were the most important? If you were to rank them.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  For, for Trump's victory, you know, it's, it's, the, the real answer is, I, I could spit out a ranking for you and tell you, you know, and answer the question, but I wouldn't have a lot of conviction behind it because one thing that's very interesting about Trump is His, he doesn't seem to fit into normal political physics. Like the, the normals of gravity don't seem to apply to him in the same way that they do to other candidates. Uh, and so I don't know. I really don't know. The thing about Trump is that he's been consistently a surprise to himself, to the market, to voters, to myself, to party officials, to pundits. Um, so I don't, I don't think I fully understand that well enough to give you a good answer.

• 1:23:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, I've come to the conclusion. Please. That candidates matter, right? I think Kamala was the wrong choice. I think they should have done a bake off. If they had done a speed run primary, I don't think she would have come in the top five. I think there's like five better candidates, Shapiro, uh, Dean Phillips, you know, Gavin Newsom. I think there was a bunch of people. So I, I put first that, but I think the second thing is really this tweet I did today. Um, which I'll share here. Um, because I think this is something that we are underestimating.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  No, I'm curious.

• 1:24:28Jason Calacanis?

  The price of a cheeseburger and fries at McDonald's. Ah, if that doubles during your term, how do you think Americans are going to look at their last four years? And here, end of 2019 price of french fries at McDonald's, buck 79. Mm hmm. Mid 2024 price, four 19. Chicken sandwich, buck 29, then 389.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:24:52Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, Big Mac, 399 to 749. Those are increases of 134, 287% respect. Uh, uh, respectively. So if you, and a cheeseburger went from a buck on the, I guess, the dollar menu to 315. And, you know, I don't know exactly how perfect this is. This is from the poverty finance community on Reddit, as you see there. Um, but I looked it up in like 10 different places and it's directionally correct.

• 1:25:21Jason Calacanis?

  I don't think anyone on a gravitational basis can win if the price of McDonald's doubles. The number of people who go to McDonald's, Americans who go to McDonald's, I was asking this question as well. According to ChatGPT, which gave me some sources, eighty-seven percent of American households visited McDonald's at least once between June thirtieth, twenty twenty-three and June thirtieth, twenty twenty-four. In other words, like in the past year, eighty-seven percent of Americans visited McDonald's. Did you go to McDonald's in the last year?

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  Hell, yes.

• 1:25:53Jason Calacanis?

  I did too.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  Dude, sometimes I get sad. I need fries.

• 1:25:56Jason Calacanis?

  Fries are incredible. Filet of fish, outstanding.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  I, I, that is your worst, that is your worst opinion.

• 1:26:02Jason Calacanis?

  I, I have to say, like, I just don't like the burgers at McDonald's. I mean, why would you ever get a McDonald's burger if you could get In-N-Out, Five Guys?

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12Jason Calacanis?

  Or Shake Shack?

• 1:26:14Jason Calacanis?

  I, I think, like, there are just tremendous burgers out there. Now, I understand, one's seven dollars for a Big Mac and the other ones might be twelve. So if you're saying the reason you're doing it is because you can't afford the twelve-dollar burger at Shake Shack or ten-dollar burger, whatever it is, I get it. Um, but the fries is a whole different story. McDonald's fries and the filet, the filet of fish, just unbelievable, unbelievable sandwich.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  We, we, we have to wrap. We'll talk more about these issues coming on, but I'll, I'll say that I don't think it's possible to win an election. Like you said, with inflation, the way it is with prices like that, but this also underscores why I never understood gas prices. Because people will talk about gas prices like they were this existential cost in their family budget and they never were for me. And so I never got it, but then I realized that people are often pretty broke. And so if gas goes up, they have to drive the same distance to work.

• 1:27:04Jason Calacanis?

  Emotions too. It's how you feel. And like, how does it feel to pay five? Have, did you ever pay over five dollars a gallon for gasoline?

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  I never drove in California, so no. Yeah.

• 1:27:18Jason Calacanis?

  I remember filling up at close to six dollars, like, um, before going to Tahoe, I had to get some gas, whatever. I was in the city. Yeah, whatever, like, uh, I'm rich. I don't care. Like, I'm just gonna fill up. I don't, but I saw it and then my credit card. I couldn't fill the tank. And I'm like, why can't I fill the tank? It's like, oh, it went over a hundred. I have a gasoline powered car. I have a Suburban, which is the largest, safest car you can buy, I believe. So I got one of those to have my go car and to like, you know, drive in Tahoe.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:51Jason Calacanis?

  In the snow. Um, because you could fit a lot of people in it. Three rows. Um, the reason was there was a limit at the gas station of a hundred dollars. So I had to then take a different credit card if I wanted to fill up the last third of the tank.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:11Jason Calacanis?

  And do that because six dollars times, I guess, a 20 gallon tank or maybe it's a 25 gallon tank is over a hundred. And that was when I first realized like, oh my lord, like this emotionally had an effect on me. Now imagine you actually are living paycheck to paycheck, which I have in my life.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, same.

• 1:28:31Jason Calacanis?

  And that happens. And now it's like, I can remember going to the gas station and putting in $10 worth of gas because I needed the other $10 or $20 in the eighties or nineties to go do something else.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:28:43Jason Calacanis?

  Um, yeah.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  I did a lot of that with my brother and his Jeep Wrangler. We would get to the gas station with like a dollar thirty seven. They were like, sweet gas, we can get a whole gallon. Ah, to be young again.

• 1:28:54Jason Calacanis?

  What a great episode. Thank you to everybody in the comments. Uh, I didn't see any questions here, but Fusion HD Fusioned HM says Jason wants liquidity. You're damn right, I do. I love liquidity. I named a conference after it. Liquidity is a great thing. I, you know, I do want to see liquidity for a lot of founders and for LPs. So they can invest in the next generation of companies. Uh, and were there, Matty, any other questions we should answer here? Anything interesting come in?

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Not that I saw, but I will just say, everyone, we do have some notes on a couple of startup deals. And I'm trying to get the, um, the CEO of Command Bar, which just sold to Amplitude, uh, to come on the show and talk about how that deal came together, lessons learned, and getting everyone ready for what is supposed to be M and A Palooza in 2025.

• 1:29:40Jason Calacanis?

  That's, I think, a topic we should talk about on Monday is just what we think is going to happen in M and A and the return of the SPAC zombie companies.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:52Jason Calacanis?

  Trends that we should talk about on Monday. M and A and the SPAC attack.

• 1:29:58Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of the SPACs that washed out, some of them turned out to be great companies and are staging massive rallies.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  I have so much to say about that, especially in the case of Root Insurance, but we'll keep it for Monday.

• 1:30:11Jason Calacanis?

  Please.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  I'm Alex over on X, he's Jason, this is Twist. If you're not subscribed to us on YouTube or your podcast app, you're making a mistake. We're back on Monday. We'll see you guys then.