#150 - Jason Calacanis Joins The Brainstorm To Talk Robinhood, Gambling and the Opportunities He's Investing In

yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never look in bag right alright jason how are you great so jason's here on my first million we're gonna talk about ideas and stuff and sean's is gonna pop in in a second but i heard you might be moving here to austin is that true it's definitely being considered i'll just tell you just straight up my thinking on it i spent thirty years in new york and you know was amazing twenty years in brooklyn just over ten years in manhattan and then i moved to la for ten years and spent ten years with my wife there i got married started a family and then that's spent the last six years here in the valley because i wanted to see if i could become the best angel investor of all time which was like sort of a goal or one of the right and so i moved up here for the deal flow and i started the accelerator put twenty companies through the accelerator seven companies at a time so a hundred forty have gone through in the last five years or so and it's been wonderful and then the pandemic hit no founders wanna come here anymore san francisco was getting more and more expensive so probably two out of three startups ups we were investing in weren't here anymore a funny thing happened we didn't wanna stop doing the accelerator in the pandemic so we moved the class online when we moved it online two or three times as many people wanted to come to the accelerator and so that was a very interesting moment of reflection for me then i thought i refused to have anybody on the podcast unless it was in person because i thought my super superpower sam was to be able to look people in the eyes and decide if i should invest in them or to look them in the eyes and be able to figure out what the next question was on the podcast now a hundred percent of people have awesome setups are totally accustomed to zoom and don't want to come to san francisco either to be on the podcast or to come to our accelerator i have been investigating potentially moving to austin well i heard a funny story and i thought it was baller i don't want be embarrassed okay here we go you were talking to someone and it's like yeah i'm looking for a house here and someone's like well you know if i see something i'll i'll it to what's your budget and you said something like oh there is no budget well i mean relatively speaking the houses in san francisco there are not and the independence the water so they're not comparable in price right i mean in san francisco everything's fifteen hundred to twenty five hundred dollars square foot and austin it's six hundred to a thousand right i thought it was a baller move i thought it was a baller about everyone says like this and that and then the person told me story he just said in such a way he goes oh there is no budget anything i want and i was like that's a that's a baller answer that's a great answer and i just thought it was cool there you go yeah i've just been researching you know i've been to the south by a bunch of times since like the ninety late nineties i went to the second southwest by southwest interactive before they even had a before they were even using the convention center i think the convention center was built it was just all that that whatever that weird hotel was on sixth street is where they used to host it and there'd be fifty people you know per talk and maybe there were two hundred people there for south by southwest interactive in ninety nine two thousand time period it was very small and so i love the town and yeah i would be up for the adventure possibly i'm looking at it i'm investigating it and we'll see what happens so jason you started a media company ten fit how long ago was that well most people don't know that i started in the magazine business in the nineties so i started a magazine called cyber surfer which was about online services and cd rom then the internet happened and i started silicon valley reporter which was about tech companies in new york i grew that to a twelve million dollar business a year with a hundred employees or so and then the dot com crash happened lost everything sold that company for a couple of years salary to dow jones which then bought me out of my contract after two weeks which is very weird yeah then i started web blog saying inc can gadget auto blog sold that eighteen months or so after starting it for thirty million bucks that was like considered an amazing feat or accomplishment at the time then started mahal which became inside and start angel investing us as a coy scout and it all started going in that sort of certain direction and really as a journalist and a publisher you ask questions and you try to get to truth or at least you used to now you kind of could talk about late stage journalism but back in the day original journalism you were supposed to be independent and just ask really honest fair questions get the answer double check that your facts were correct and publish a story and not put link bait headline on it so that's where i cut my teeth and after doing that for a while i realized really is the same thing as interviewing somebody and meeting with somebody about an investment you're asked basically the same questions what are you working on who are your customers what's your business model what's the road map like where will this business be in ten years so those are all questions and investor might ask those were all questions journalists used to ask right so journalism you know o male went into investing michael mari from sequoia famously it was a journalist who went and a writer who went into investing and there's a you know mg siegel just alexis is a bunch of people we started in journalism and then went into venture and investing it's just a perfect parallel career path and before we get into talking about i wanna ask you about robinhood i wanna ask you about some startup up ideas and and sean has a question about this list that you used to made but before last question before we get into all that you're a gambler oh yeah do you think over the last ten years have you lost or won gambling probably net even with losses in the beginning and then wins and losses later on over time i went from playing very low stakes and so the first five years of my career probably the total amount bet would be what would be the equivalent of what's on the table now so it's a you know i used to play in one dollar two dollar games and i play in a hundred dollar two hundred dollar game so it's a hundred x right literally in terms of nolan limb hold them in the blind so i think it's sort of like the new golf so instead of having a golf club membership i play poker and i think it's how i became best east with a large number of high profile people and it's worked out well what is the biggest hand you've been part of that's a great question i've been in some six figure hands couple times in my life the worst that ever happened to me was i was playing in los angeles in a game and i lost seven hands in which i was the favorite clear favorite like sixty seventy eighty percent favoring and six of them and then in one i was even i mean almost like fifty one forty nine and to lose seven in a row where you are the you know favorite even if it was just fifty fifty you know you can do the odds of that you know fifty fifty twenty five twelve six three one point five whatever basis points point six basis points it's like one out of three hundred games that would have to happen or something and i lost like seventy grand that item was infuriating and then i came back the next night one a hundred seventy grand so i had this incredible swing so one seventy five it's pretty big i stopped playing in those big games because i didn't like the way it felt to me to either win or lose and i felt like i was getting close to an addiction that was unhealthy and so i kinda pumped the brakes on it i was invited to all those molly games if you remember those and at that time i was playing in one dollar two dollar two dollar five dollar five dollar ten dollar games and molly would text me and call me and say like oh leo here oh you know you know this very famous person's here they wanna see you and i was like they wanna see me lose fifty grand like no banks so i passed on going to all those games and i just played in the smaller five hundred dollar buying games thousand dollar buying games and i i do it for the social it really is not gonna be any comparable amount of money that i would make and start up investing therefore i would rather get the rush of gambling through startups and investing in them then in poker because i feel like better at startups and poker i mean i know i am i'm top five angel investor of all time and in poker i'm not even in the top five million or whatever you know you know all likelihood the alright well sean sean is back here apparently he had some technical difficulties because he had to join on his phone shawn you there yeah i'm here i don't know if you guys can hear me like but jason as soon as you join my internet died but i said no i will not miss the pod that everybody's been waiting for i don't know you've heard this but there's a great tweet that was about our podcast and it said my two favorite podcast this year it goes my first million which is millionaires talking millionaires shit and all in billionaires talking billionaires shit and i was like that the perfect description of of this fine to be clear i'm not a billionaire there yeah but you know nobody's is really working on it exactly there's a great book that me and sam liked to be but it was about how got rich or how to get how to get rich it's so embarrassing to say you know the author jason it's felix dennis you know felix dennis yeah he's a publisher he great maxim magazine it's some other things but he says in there he's like you know if you can count your money you're not rich she's like the richest people have no idea how much money they really have at any given time he's like so if you're counting your money you're not there yet i didn't even know this book existed as a good it's the best i remember this guy he was a mad man it's a horrible title and he named it that time as a joke he's kind of a shit head in a good way like he seems like a wonderful human being but he loves poking fun but his his writing is rhythm mick and beautiful i'm gotta check it out i mean i people said that about the title of my book because i put like exactly you know what i turned into what on the cover of the book he's really good and he was a poet he wrote books and a businessman very ec person no there's no audio version of this correct he wrote in two thousand and nine before the audio revolution i just added the paper he died soon after it adds to the the lower a little bit but i wanna can i ask you about robinhood so robinhood went down last week everyone knows what's going on well i didn't go down the situation went down both the situation went i thought you met the service went i was i didn't hear about that are you an angel investor in robinhood i'm an angel investor i met them before it's pretty funny story and i i met them before they launch the product in a bar paradox enough i was speaking at ad d rec founder institute and he likes this dive bar in palo alto called antonio nut house and he asked me to go there and ado roommate in college was a guy named elon who had a rocket ship company and electric car company and he's like meet me over here elon is gonna come over for a drink so the three of us are having a drink there and vlad and his partner came up and said hey you're jason c and you're elon musk and said yeah and he said i said tell me about your startup and vlad how do you have startup i said you recognize recognized me we're in palo alto like what i mean it's not gonna be a script i mean we're not like we're not at the chat mar you know i'm not steven spielberg so go ahead and give me the pitch and he said oh i what my idea is i'm a quan and i said what's a quan said you don't know wanna quantitative is quantitative analysis i sound to kinda know but explain to me what what you and he's like well you know we try to make algorithms and i was like don't tell me this is another thing where you're making an algorithm and then selling access to the algorithm instead of just printing money he's like no would be stupid if we had the algorithm we just use it he said we're gonna get millennials to trade stocks and i said you know millennials are kind of from what i understand and i've read their commitment pho right and he said yeah so they're living with their parents trying to pay off college debt and you want them to buy stocks and he's like yeah i was like you realize there's been no retail investor since two thousand and eight when the whole collapsed he goes that's the opportunity and i said oh that's a good pitch actually that's a big opportunity if you did succeed in getting this next generation to embrace buying stocks my god what would that look like that be incredible and i said hit me with the business model and he said well we're gonna make it free i said so your idea is to go after a group of people who are on their parents netflix accounts to save money get them to trade stocks and your business model's free he said yep i was like i'm in so i invested and he really you know they really wanted to create this revolution and so that's the great paradox or irony of this situation is that they wanted to enable this revolution that's why they named the company robinhood that's why they made it free to trade that's why they created a mobile app not a big desktop bloomberg app they wanted to make it more accessible and mission accomplished there are some rules to the road and i don't think anybody ever anticipated millions of people deciding on the same day that they would suddenly take up stock trading and all by the same stock you know like this is a black swan of black swan events like it really is an edge case and if you look at the reporting they could have been shut off from trading based on what i've read i don't have inside information about any of this situation but i think they they could've have been shut off and trust me nothing there's nothing they wanna do more than get more users and empower them to trade it that's what they're here for i mean they wanna do invest in them back then i think i put in fifty k or a hundred k which is my typical bat back then it's gonna turn out to be pretty very very very lucrative deal yeah i mean if they we're hit on one of these the uber investment wound up being i mean it's peak maybe four thousand x five thousand x depending on when you know you choose to sell it and nice alone think around half my position so i'm still wrong uber you know i i think in the next five to ten years the company be significantly larger especially since they got this food business dialed in it just for them quick math five thousand x times five thousand is fifty thousand is two hundred fifty million i put twenty five k into uber it'd be more like a hundred twenty five million or something like that at the time i wrote the book the first three or four investments i had made in that twenty five k range were over a hundred million so it worked out pretty well i don't know where what exactly the valuation is or the multiple is right now for calm or robinhood but generally if you hit something as an angel investor and you're investing in a five to twenty five million dollar company and it becomes worth five billion or twenty five billion you can do the math you know with dilution you would basically cut it in half and with dilution you might make a hundred to five hundred x you did uber as a scout right yeah i was a sequoia scout right would you say because i think you know there's no argument investing track record pretty fucking amazing entrepreneurial track record more like singles and doubles do you think that's more like is that just a variance of entrepreneurship startups hard to you know go or do you feel like actually you're a better investor than entrepreneur building media companies is really a fool errand you know they're just really hard to build ad based businesses even the biggest ones you know they get to a billion dollar valuation like v or something like that they're losing money they're challenged you know on their best day right like if you're building media businesses you're you must really love it right they're just hard to scale and unfortunately that's what i'd love to do as an entrepreneur back in the day web blog inc becoming worth thirty million dollars after eighteen months you know if i kept that going would have become a you know three hundred million dollar exit if i worked on it for another whatever ten years there's no doubt i could've done that i i'm sure i could build businesses worth a billion dollars but you know i don't think i'm elon or any of those type of folks so i've definitely done better as an angel investor that's for sure but a lot of this is about timing back when i was an entrepreneur the market for a business would be twenty thirty million homes that had high speed internet that was kind of the market now you look at the market we've got two billion people with high speed smartphones in their pockets so just do the math on that it is a hundred x the desktop market that we used to address and the have built in credit cards the number of credit cards people had on the internet was in low millions and i was an entrepreneur now you've got you know whatever every ios device right has a credit card associated with it in some percentage of the android devices and those are with people all the time so people used to be in probably in front of their desktop for a couple of hours a day now they're on their phone from the moment they wake up they look at their phone and the moment they go to bed they look at their phone right so we've not only a hundred x the market size in my mind we've probably ten x or five x the usage so it might be a five hundred x swing and then the number of people with credit cards you know ready to go and and app store payments and all this kind of stuff or their wallet like already in their browser ready to buy i mean it's a totally different world that's why you see something like com dot com just go or you know club house just go from zero to ten million users or zero to ten million in revenue very very quickly and then also the ad networks are so sophisticated now we didn't have that back in the day you had to wait for things to spread word mouth and maybe you buy go billboards or bus ads traditional ads it wasn't like this infrastructure of i'm gonna go and have my ad by or go on facebook or twitter and and google search and figure out the channels and figure out the c and all these tools to help you do that in creative it just that infrastructure wasn't there so it's it's just a different world but certainly all history will show me as a better investor than entrepreneur for sure you made a comment about you said i'm not an elon i don't know what your relationship is with him but assuming you are were close you host a podcast with cha who's like all the rage right now presumably you hang out with a lot more pretty wild crazy incredibly successful people like that what are those attributes that you're referring to when you said they are something you need to have a singular focus and you have to be willing to give up everything for that and i asked the question a little differently i wanna do it person by person what's their superpower jimmy elon what's his superpower people forget he's a world class engineer and so i think people forget that because he's also so good at twitter but he he is a world class engineer he's a great marketer i think he added the marketing skill later so he he's very good at both of those things now a great communicator obviously but i think singular focus and fearless would be what the superpower is i mean he can really focus on something and he's fearless in his approach if you look at the public record of you know what he's talked about with tesla how many times that company was on the brink and how many times he was all in i'm not saying like all in like he was gonna lose half his money like he had already lost all of his money into those businesses and he was hanging on based upon according to what he said publicly alone in the financial crisis during the tesla dark biz that's a superpower trim off he's really smart this is really smart analyst and strategist also hardworking and you know increasingly becoming a great communicator as you could say about you what's your superpower i think i am incredibly good at figuring out who's gonna be a winner in life and then i'm extremely good at being an advocate friend for people probably on the margins good at media you know hosting a podcast writing etcetera but i'm probably best as a mentor friend supporter of people and helping them work through stuff i mean i think that's why i probably have a lot of really close friends and i think why the all in podcast podcasts actually works is because i have a deep personal relationship with cha off and sachs you know increasingly free but to be honest i was much deeper friends with david's sa and cha off but being close friends is i think what makes that podcast what has made that podcast in nineteen episodes become the number one tech podcast and the number this morning somebody texted me and like you know you're the number eleven pockets i'm like no the number one podcast in tech and said no you're a number eleven overall and i was like what and so yeah and in itunes apparently we we're number eleven today overall which is really mind blowing when you think about it i actually wanna hear the answer to a question sean had about this list so an idea that we've discussed a lot on this podcast is list so there's many examples of this one example is a little bit different but you know the j d power award you know j d power sure yeah another one is ga like these businesses that are based on this idea of create like we are an authority and we're gonna name what's best consumer reports yeah wire cutter thirty under thirty midas touch list all this stuff yeah well you did something similar you wanna take it sean yeah well basically alright so you said the context here a lot of our audio is people who are about to do their first startup or a lot of more college students there of course you know people were more established but for a lot of people they love the ideas we bring up or you needed nothing it's like i call it the cake batter startups where it's just just add hustle you didn't need to be a programmer you didn't need to be a brilliant engineer you didn't need tons of money to get started we talked once about lists as you know one way to getting an influence in any bubble any whether you're in hollywood or new york here in san francisco is you just make the list it can be kind of a fucking arbitrary list to be honest with you but you by becoming the king maker you by being the one who ranks who's who everybody sort of needs to open up access to you in a way and you become a central player and i i used the example now i actually don't know exactly what you did but i heard you say this once because i've listed of your podcast for a long time i had heard you say once about the silicon we can ally one hundred or something like that you went from kind of nobody in that scene to deciding who are the power players by making this list and all of a sudden you kinda became with somebody because you made that list is that care or exaggerating yeah i mean i had started this is exactly fair sorry silicon ally reporter and i said let's do our top one hundred internet people but at the time in nineteen ninety six we could only find sixty people in total who are working in the internet industry so then i asked the sixty do you know anybody else and they my team said let's just make the top ten or top twenty five i said no it's gotta be hundred and so we'd literally for you know number sixty to number a hundred had a teacher an accountant an hr like a head hunter a lawyer we just filled it in but then i specifically was like okay double click is the biggest company but esther dyson been here the longest and she did pc for i mean she's like kind of a legend in new york let's put esther dyson as number one and double click is number two the two cabins kevin ryan kevin o'connor from double click back in the day and they were kind of the google of silicon alley in new york is what they were refer to as we just did that to tweak them and we put people on the list that were wildcard cards we call them wildcard cards specifically just to tweet people and i'm like where do you put the wildcard cards how do you compare them because you know we have the valuations of companies we have number of employees we have how much revenue how high profile they are how well known they are so you could kinda say like well uber is bigger than post made and post meats is bigger than this company and that you could if you were doing it today come up with some really valid metrics and i was just like okay just pick a random number just literally put doug rush off anywhere like put him as number twelve who cares just to tweak people and that's why when people are like oh i where they wanna be in the thirty under thirty or forty under forty i'm like you do realize like it's a bunch of like journalists in a room trying to figure out how to get people to debate it just like on sports radio somebody's like oh you know i don't have lebron on my mount rushmore or i don't have kobe on my mount rushmore oh my god how do you not have kobe on you're mount rushmore you know like people go crazy so you know it worked and then i ranked it which you know most people would just say just you know make the hundred and there was one argument like let's put the top ten and then we'll put everybody else off alphabetical and i was like no we're gonna rank every single one and we're gonna sit here and put people into three buckets and we'll put them into four buckets and i'll put them into five buckets and we just sat there you know the big conference from table and everybody's one pager that would be in the magazine and we gave two pages to the top ten and then one page to everybody else and i did that for five six seven years and it really tweaked people and then everything became my whole life became p people you lobbying me like hey we were twenty seven we should really you know there's an argument for us to be fifteen these seven companies between us and there you know we those companies aren't even business anymore blah blah blah so it was pretty hilarious and it it just forced people to pay attention to us we gotta find the most pride pull sensitive group and then we gotta do it one of the secrets behind like so there's this great book called mate stick which i love dan and chip professors at stanford and they my favorite story is about a news publisher in south carolina who had a local newspaper that everyone else i mean obviously local newspapers were going out of business this guy was thriving it was a smallest ass town and someone says what's your secret he goes i'm gonna tell you free words ready names names names if i'd print the phone book if i could my whole philosophy is to mention as many names as possible because if you see someone you know or you are mentioned in something you are always going to share it and so i've stolen this concept constantly and i've created all types of content and you always wanna name as many people's as possible because that gets the most amount of shares and creates what jason's is describing it's like a secret or not a secret but it's a a very powerful weapon yeah it works it does work people like to read about themselves and i think what you're seeing in journalism today is like a sort of breakdown of like maybe over using that device kind of the what ga did and buzzfeed did at that seminal moment they both really tried to hack seo and social and it was much easier to do what they called process journalism which you know tech ranch dabble in as well which is you get a tip to your tip line you just print it and then you say is this true and it was like that really is what tech crunch was doing and in ga were doing in the early days so much so that in order to get them off the end of what i was doing with mahal hollow i had or i had bought the domain named ko as well which means to help or to guide in the hawaiian language was sort of aloha mahal hollow c couture the three important words i was able to get two of the three and we email them from fake yahoo accounts and said i just interview with jason cal he talked about himself for fifty six minutes of the hour and then he asked me about myself for four minutes he's doing a podcast network in new york la and san francisco he's building studios that are street level and ga printed it verbatim they got it from multiple sources when we sent it to him from one fake yahoo account and then i published that yahoo email we basically proved how easy it was to sort of spoof them and how low their bar was but that's kinda what people do now like don't know if you guys have had this experience where somebody quotes you were mentioned you when your google alert goes off and you're like i never talked to this person and like yeah no we didn't have time to talk to you and it's like really you had time to put me in your story quote me but you didn't have time to email me and my email is my twitter handle and my dms are open really okay fair enough we sold our company last year and somebody ticked off tech crunch or whoever and they published that hey we got bought and they said we got off for twenty five million and it was actually a little less than that and so they reached out to twitch or amazon per comment and they were like they don't comment so they're they didn't say anything and then they asked me and i was like hey if you were lazy enough or you just printed this wrong number that's higher than the real number i'm also not gonna correct i'm not gonna get myself in trouble by like giving you the real number but like man these guy these guys will just print anything that's crazy what's crazy is that which sean's deal and i'm not saying it was greater or lower whatever that's irrelevant but the headline said a rumored this and then when it's linked to a reference it'll say sean's company which sold for it like becomes a rumor and then a fact and i it is pretty wild and that was on tech crunch yeah i mean late stage journalism is a trip like it's really weird it's gotten super weird i mean the amount of stuff that is there's like this really crazy device which is whatever was printed in other blog post is fact therefore i'm going to write in my article cha jamal poly hop the san francisco gate some former go writer is a sports writer over there and then he did a take down piece of cha off and then he like links to twenty other stories like and i know these stories are not true but you know they basically then frame them a certain way and they don't do any fact checking it's just it's weird late say journalism really weird i mean i that's why you see so many people going direct and last night i was tweeting back and forth with the founder of the information and she was lament how mark teresa had blocked everybody who's a journalist therefore when he starts a room on club house to journalist can't get in and they were like lament how bad that is and it's like well you at attacked mark injuries in relentlessly for years he felt it was unfair and now he just goes direct he doesn't need journalists and journalists stopped writing about me once my podcast or my two podcast became you know the number one and number eleven tech podcasts because i have more reach than them they don't wanna write about me because they're competing with me you know v and the virgin whoever tech they're competing with me for audience they don't wanna link to they don't wanna talk about me so i think what we're gonna have happened is and jason har is gonna have their media arm come off myself sa will have our media arm other people have their media arms you know obviously elon has this twitter he goes direct people are just gonna go direct they're gonna rat around the press and the presses is kind fl now like why is everybody routing around us it's like well because you're not doing fact checking and you're writing link bait headlines and people feel they're being treated unfairly so they're gonna ride around you and so it's a really interesting opportunity slash moment in time it's very entertaining what's the ceo of robin vlad yeah you know him you're early there so you definitely want them to win you want them to succeed if you were him how would you have handled this past two weeks or ten days or whatever yeah whatever wednesday i think wednesday monday it seems like whatever two months it's been like less than a week it's literally wednesday to do well i think the blog post they put out on friday was great where they explained what they're required to do with their clearing houses and i think that's where they stumble they should just said like listen we want you to trade we have to have more money in our accounts in order to have more traders on our platform and we have covenants that we have to abide by in order to stay solvent therefore we will not be at we're gonna start a waiting list and we're not gonna allow people to trade until you know maybe a week from now and no new trades and we're gonna raise more money so that we have a bigger war chest here to keep this going and vlad knows you know he the communication was suboptimal optimal on wednesday and it got better on thursday friday and i think it's gotten much better today and it's still not perfect not every founder is like perfect at managing the press and i think robinhood has largely been a hero and hasn't had to face many challenges just like uber didn't for a long time and then uber did right so or facebook didn't have to deal with any of this and then facebook did you'll see this pattern where a startup hits scale and then things are so big that when they bump into something or they trip and fall it can leave a dent it can leave some collateral damage and the stakes get higher obviously airbnb had that when everybody was like somebody's gonna throw a party in some airbnb and trash the place and sure enough i don't know if you remember that seminal moment when you know there was a meth party in somebody's apartment and they went through all her pictures and des her apartment it was horrible it was like you really rented your apartment with all your stuff in it to somebody and like twenty meth came and destroyed the place and they wound up compensating the woman and people now are like oh hotel rooms get trash by rock stars and there's drug parties in you know holiday inn on sunset boulevard if i've rent out this space that's something that could happen to me how do i stop parties from happening i had an airbnb for a while and we had a whole thing where you couldn't do parties in it and then one morning i wake up and i look at my phone there's twenty notifications from twelve to five am and it's the drop cam at the gate and the drop cans is going off and there's all these like uber and lyft showing up in the through a party there after we explicitly told them not to and they did five thousand dollars in damage and you know i got paid for or whatever but you know it's a risky run it's a risky run so long way of saying this happens to every company if they hit scale whether it's autopilot with tesla's twitter fell well club house last night when twitter went down for like six months straight it was like oh i can't tweet when robinhood hood went down it was like oh shit you know i can't you the it ended the pump which was unfortunate you know well i mean people could have gone on other platforms if if people were more were super motivated they could've have just gone down the line of the other platforms and continue to pump the stock but i think you pointed something out there which is this is an artificial behavior going on this isn't people buying and selling stocks this was a war and so people were trying to figure out how to hack the system essentially on both sides of the trade and actually feel bad for games like what happens to games stop their employees and existing shareholders when this thing is getting whipped around like this they paid off like four hundred million dollars of debt and so so did am expenses no they did they converted all their debt when did they do that today no they did it last week when it was all happening but amc did it first and then games stop also did it where they paid if fund that wrong they didn't issue new shares i don't believe but they used what did they do they they did some kind of conversion where they they were able to to because they they both had like five hundred million dollars of debt and really no pathway to pay it off and so this is like santa claus dropped off did what they call like an at market raise or something yeah they acted fast right they had like a basically twenty four to forty eight hour window to do something and and they they did well so so i think i think that was good for them but yeah you know they were getting ragged all for for kinda no here so this podcast is usually not about like what's going on in media and politics and stuff like that what we do is we sit data and we bring some say dude i had to move last week and you know what's a pain in the ass blah blah why does somebody create this or have you seen this this is a cool idea what if you applied into this other space and so we are very much a brainstorm that's why the podcast has gotten somewhat popular because you know most are just kinda interviews and so i don't know if somebody prepped you you know if your handlers have told you what guess i don't know if you brought any ideas the table no okay million ideas i'm good at brainstorming where it literally brainstorming is what i do for a living perfect so hit us with a couple hit us with a couple you don't have to go too in you can go kinda rapid a firing if something's juicy we'll we'll jump on it but tell us some ideas that you see some opportunities that either you would do if you had time or you think other people what should go do okay ideas that i would like to do are other people should do i think the slack communities that are paid are very interesting i know you have one of trends not a slack community facebook community i think slack communities are horrible okay well i think paid communities i thought you had started on slack right no we always did facebook and people shit on us i think if you're gonna say paid communities are great i totally agree i think everyone a lot of people go to slack and i think it's the worst platform for a community why it's too is maybe a ep is that the right word like you people say do you get lost on facebook spoke but there's facebook threads in our community that literally has three hundred rope replies on slack it's like facebook is a podcast and slack is club house it's like it's it's too fast it's too fast yeah so it's i agree with that that's probably true i haven't figured out which platform is the best for this you know we have a slack community for this weekend in startups that's got a couple thousand people each week use it free i mean i'm actually hiring a community manager figure this out we have an investment in coming quotes sole savvy s o l e s a v y dot com yeah i i almost did that too yeah and they are doing phenomenal i think they charge thirty or forty dollars a month to be part of that community so i think the top ten thousand people in every topic want to be part of a community and pay a hundred dollars a year or twenty bucks a month or something like that to be part of it i also think the same about newsletters and teaching and education i'm really taken by isis as well we have a couple of three investments now i think in the income sharing so space i think that that's gonna change education so i'm particularly interested in that and consumer subscriptions are the big one that i think are gonna be phenomenal because we've had calm s for dance brilliant for math musician tone base for music let's talk about communities real quick and then we're gonna go into income share agreements because sean like loves that but let me tell you what i think about communities which is i agree i think they're gonna be huge i think that there's way more room for them the problem it's not a question of which platform is to host these communities as best it's which is the least worse which is the least bad because everyone complains about facebook but i've been hosting communities for ten years it's hands down the best because it has the most liquidity you know people are are there their attention is already there it's way easy to comment every other platform i think the host a community is way of a distant second to facebook and facebook is not even that good it's only good because people are there yeah that's weird i like about slack is that i have all my slack open and i have one for launch one for inside one for launches founders one for my syndicate one for my house i've got all these different slack communities and so when i add one more there you know it's just in the left hand navigation and so i found people really like that and i've got an austin community where i have two austin communities that are slack communities i'm part of now a community manager community that i'm a member of it's definitely interesting like as a concept yeah somebody needs to do the subs for paid communities where you're you give somebody a very quick splash page where you're like you described the community you let them take payments and then it says great here's where the community lives but you guys actually don't try to build the community part let them put it in slack or facebook or discord or wherever they wanna put it but just the pay wall you know you should make that this is a dead simple easy to share and easy to pay wall basically what that's what subs that really did well and i think somebody should do that for paid communities his subs is actually giving you know they had had them on the podcast and they told me they weren't giving advances to writers but then i read they are giving advances so i don't know if they changed their minds or they did on the slide but my understanding is that one of the reasons they got people over was they gave them whatever guaranteed minimums or something which is pretty smart i think actually sean by the way subs i'm actually not terribly bullish on at all why the fees weighed too high i think the fees weigh too a high ten percent twenty percent yeah ten percent i think if you're under a hundred k who cares but if you get to a million giving them a hundred thousand for mailchimp software and stripe makes no sense you could literally hire three full time customer support reps from home you know or two for fifty k each or three for thirty five k or whatever and have a staff working for you and that leads into the next problem with them which is i imagine they would make most of your money off the big shots but if you're a big shot you're gonna wanna bail and do your own thing and if you're not a big shot can you sustain running a newsletter every week or every day or every month for two or three years i think most people are gonna no no having done twelve hundred i can tell you the answer is no most people don't have the stamina for it you have to love it you have to intrinsically love it trust me on inside where we got up to i think thirty newsletters at the peak the burnout issue was real and we got down to i think now we're down to twelve newsletters and trying to really have multiple people on each newsletters so that they get higher quality and it's more sustainable and it just people do burnout out it is a grind i had a personal newsletter for three months that was paid and i i burned out in three months and and it made some substantial money i was making fifty k a month and i was just like fuck this i don't want to do this anymore was i was probably like one of the top five subs earners but you know i just didn't wanna to make keep doing it it was too much yeah we'll see where they take it i mean it's off to a great start so i give them a lot of credit we'll see i mean all those businesses where you take a percentage are really problematic it's sort of like the ad rep business there used to be this concept that you would never hire an add a sales team you would just hire an a rep firm and what would happen is there were all these rep firms in the early days of the internet like in the double click days in the nineties and they like would rep the new york post online for their ads and then if you and you would take thirty percent if you succeeded and major client successful they would look and say okay you made us three million dollars she took nine hundred k we could hire five salespeople people for a hundred k each and give them five hundred k and commissions that plan why are we doing this with you and so your reward for succeeding was losing your best customers the reward for patreon succeeding is they lose that customer to a stripe or ghost or you know there's all these like tools that charge you a flat rate to do subscription so you had someone like sam harris who is the largest person by far on patreon from what i understand and then he just laughed and moved it to his own side and i'm personal friends with sam and actually convinced him to do his podcast we were at dinner and i told them like you're really built for this i mean the problem is if you do it you'll never write another book which both things have turned out to be true and he he just moved it over to his own platform and he gave up all those folks so owning your audience is so critical this is why i think club house is gonna be awesome in one way to get new audience and i've been you know i've done three rooms now that i started and i got to i'm at ten or fifteen thousand followers i think but then i'm just constantly driving them to follow me on another platform subscribe to the podcast and sign up for my email so that i can build a long term relationship with them and then cap dot fm which you know austin i think is got his own version of club house it's slightly different but it's very different but you get to own your email addresses and phone numbers of your followers in your group and that's gonna be the big win is like imagine if you owned all the members of your club house right like you guys own the members of your facebook in a weird way even though facebook doesn't give you access to it you actually have their contact information in order to add them right you can't get into it unless you add them what industries interest you about the income share agreement interest sharing agreements are very powerful because they shift the burden of getting a benefit from the education to the person providing the education as opposed to the student so when you go to college they give you the education they take your money and then there's is this like little tiny office somewhere called like careers where they have a couple of binder of jobs and like somebody like you come in and they point you to the binder like that's pretty much as sophisticated is from my understanding like lambda in a lot of these places spend as much time teaching as much as i'm placing students as they do teaching and so we have a company called on delta which teaches just growth so if you wanna be a growth marketing manager you go there i think it might be ten k for their course you know which would be like half or a third of one year of college and then they only take that money if you get a job over forty or fifty k i think just like lambda and they only take it up to fifteen k or something i'm just making up the numbers here so i really like that idea of people in society being able to not take the risk so i'm thinking about taking founder university which is our two day free course which was a way for us to get deal flow and me founders and making it like a twelve week course i'm trying to hire somebody to run that for me and then charging twelve thousand dollars or six thousand dollars but making it nice so hey if you pay us great if you wanna pay for it up upfront or we don't need to make that money but if you do get a job as a founder sure great pass back because so many people want us to create that product but i don't have the time for it but if you have a budget then you could actually hire a sustainable staff right and you know education has to change don't know what do you like about it john well i miss an lambda school and it was because early on i was like oh shit the incentives are aligned now the school has to get you a high paying job which is the reason people go to school so i think that that was just obvious to me and even though at the time they have like i don't know eighty students total ever lifetime it was pretty clear that the completion rates were super high the placement rate were super high like orders of magnitude above what moo did and even like the success rates of colleges and so that i liked and then i was like okay this is great but it's not winner take all so i just invested in like lambda for brazil and like lambda fur i'm just investing in a whole bunch of that because i'd say model just seems to work like a quarry which is lambda school for brazil and they're crushing it lambda is never gonna go and figure out how to like hit the portuguese speaking market well and do it better than somebody who's there who just took lambda dead said i can do lambda better than you can do brazil and so i just like that model and i think gonna make a bunch of money investing in those and i think that fundamentally it makes more sense to me because i went to duke i paid a shit out of money for that it's exactly what you're talking about you know like nobody there ever even talked about getting touch i was prem med and they didn't even ever say like by way here's what i doctor does or you wanna meet a doctor on you're prem med at duke that's hilarious i did not know that i took the mca and everything i was ready to go i was before i signed up for a ten year like kind of post college commitment i had this crazy idea for this sushi restaurant i was i'm gonna do that instead luckily i was saved by sushi right but the point is like when i went there what was cool was the stamp like oh i just kinda just like the filters like if you're smart enough to get into do i think you're pretty smart everything thereafter the education itself and the way they help you with your career is like gone off and that's why i was like alright i'm gonna make this in my mission i'm gonna start a university someday and so that's like that's been a personal mission of mine sense then so that's why i like i say this because i think it's a tool to create a university that actually makes sense in the modern world there's a bunch of platforms now too that are becoming like the amazon web services of the space like mir and what they're gonna do is just like you don't have to rack servers anymore when you start your startup imagine you start a course and you're like how do i get this infrastructure how how do i do the legal work how do i collect the money how do i enforce these and make sure they're fair or whatever and you you'll just be able to use something like mir and have it work so i think a better i looked at those guys the is sa and the service i think that's cool but there's reality is there's not that many successful schools that you're gonna be able to sell to right so i think it's gonna be all i disagree with sean i think what's gonna happen is people are actually gonna create courses for everything and then they're either gonna fall into like a teachable very affordable five hundred dollars to two thousand dollars or they're gonna be so long and you know intense that they're gonna go with isis and they're gonna need somebody to just do that back for i think lam to actually use mir and on delta i think uses merit toss as well because why bother you know administering all this stuff if somebody is better at like would be like me doing what a short fund management does for our sp like do i really wanna be in the business of like doing the legal paperwork and filings and collecting the wires or would i rather just give every time we do one of these twelve k in fees to a sure fund management and be done with it right it's a much better life i think the better model is the clear bank for so the biggest problem all these guys have is cash flow right you you sell an is but you're not gonna get paid till they have to get educated for a year or two years and then they you get a job we're doing that there are people who are setting up like hundred billion they're people setting up hundred million dollar funds just to give it to whoever right because they're gonna get a decent rate of return and it probably be un correlated with the stock market and you know you're not gonna make a profit off of treasury bills or bonds right so these will be higher seven to eight percent i don't know get be careful with the clear bank kind of stuff because a lot of those places will be like it's an eight ak fee and then i'm like well what's the annual interest and they're like we don't have interest and this like okay if the eight k fee on two hundred k is four percent and it's every sixty days and it's four percent times six but it's compounding so what is that actually equal like thirty five percent or something like it's like double credit card rates when you annual analyze it so you have to be very careful you might be leaving a lot of money on the table so paid communities pay communities is is big one else i think travel is gonna have you know just talking about the pandemic i believe travel is going to be a huge revolution anything specifically it's hard to know which which aspect will be the biggest but there's gonna be like there's the yolo travel kinda of situation but then there's this nomadic lifestyle and i think one of the unlocks people had was from the pause everybody paused and said do i need to be here are my kids doing good in school or is it babysitting sitting right like you basically evaluate everything do i love this job do i love what i do do i love my spouse do i love this life like there's a lot of divorce a lot of people leaving cities divorcing cities a lot of people divorcing schools and saying you know what my kids in the school but they're not actually doing great and i tried something else that it's better and so i think all of that actually so i i would put education in that as well and i think that now that people have seen from remote school that the education portion of the six hours of the day is like two hours and then two hours is probably socialization in two hours is probably elective and jim and we're babysitting sitting i guess is you know one parent told me like i never realized how much of my child day was babysitting versus learning because i sit with them for an hour and a half a day and i get through all the learning and then the learning is typically here's ten minutes of an explanation go work on your own for forty minutes here's ten minutes work for forty minutes here's ten minutes work for thirty minutes because you have twenty people in a classroom and i think that's gonna change micro schools distance learning all this stuff is on the table now you tried to set up a micro school i basically did i knew the teacher's unions would resist going back to work because they're very powerful they're also probably in the high risk group in some cases over fifty over a sixty and so i just assumed we would not be going back to school in the fall in the spring i started the search for a teacher probably i got barbecue online because people were like rich guy wants to steal a teacher because i said hey does anybody know a glue the best fifth grade teacher is elementary teacher i wanna start a micro school because i just did the math like teacher salaries in our country is fifty to forty five to eighty k depending on what city you're in private school is thirty to sixty k depending on what city you're in so two parents in private school equals a teacher because there's so much so if you just do the math you can basically hire a teacher and have two students and you're at breakeven and three you would be basically had a profit so we're a cost savings and you would have a one to two or one to three teacher issue so that's what we did we didn't actually get to the point where we had other students in our microscope just hired a full time teacher for our one daughter who was eleven and you know that's a very privileged thing to do but it probably just slightly more than going to private school and it's been amazing it's the best year our daughter has ever had and i'm thinking about setting up a school for next year maybe we couldn't get it together because most parents wanted to send their kids back to school and i didn't want her to go back to the classroom because i thought it's just too high risk she's gonna get covid and bring home right and so and i didn't think the teachers is be coming back and so yeah i took a a different view of it i think you're totally spot on that the pause made everybody question all the all the things we just did robotic and kinda habit eventually do i need to live here you know i think that was like that spot on and if you're an entrepreneur you're looking for these shift so looking for these cracks you're looking for the new platforms you're looking for the behavior changes there's like when things get shaken up that's where the startup gets to move and create something new where where the incumbent hasn't quite reacted to that ship it's just like college and the ice i think k through twelve school needs to be addressed the amount of money that's actually going into the classroom versus administrators is really weird i'm not an expert on it but there's something very weird going on and the people who are suffering the most from and i think other the people who need the education the most i would much rather see people who are on the lower end of the economic spectrum be able to take vouchers of ten to fifteen thousand dollars each which is what we spend on the average child i guarantee you that five parents in a community could hire a teacher and do a better job than going to a public school of thirty i think overall the parents would be so much more engaged if they have that opportunity but the second you say vouchers you're like that works against poor people and it's like or it works for poor people this whole idea that like poor people are dumb and they can't organize is so just infuriating to me and every time i say like education is free online like there's so much of an opportunity people were like no poor people are dumb and they don't they're not motivated and poor people are not able to get it together enough to learn online and i'm like really are you sure and like poor people don't have internet i'm like are you looking at these statistics like anybody in the economic spectrum who doesn't own a smartphone like they may own smartphone from three years ago but everybody's got a smartphone like who doesn't have a smartphone people are just incredibly biased against poor people that they're dumb and they don't have connectivity and they can't self organize do you think giving six parents twelve thousand dollars each and seventy two k that they would not what do you guys think would they do a better job than going to the worst school in california or the bottom ten percent of schools no way if they hired their own teacher it's a no brainer but i mean you say vouchers and all of a sudden you're like some evil republican whatever you know free market radical it's not radical why not give parents to the opportunity to run their own schools i think there would be a huge unlock for america and we create competition for the public schools if parents could opt out a public school and get ten fifteen k and then start their own schools that'd be amazing so before we like end the show you made a bet with scott gallo right i did can't remember we've got into it but i don't think we could ever construct the bat because well okay you made a fig it was like i would bet you these companies i i forget the ones are gonna be worth more than x yeah i was like uber tesla he he said uber and tesla were going to zero sure remember correctly but jc penn was gonna be the number one company macy's macy's i'm sorry macy's macy's was gonna be bigger than amazon i think he's probably getting paid by macy's i think he probably got like a high speaking gig or something what bets would you are you wanting to make right now beating scott gallo in any kind of business venture is like i'm trying to think of an analogy that's not completely offensive but i mean it literally would be like dr green beating me in a game of one on one is me beating professor gallo in any business endeavor or podcasting endeavor like it would literally be the same as me versus dr on so what bet now i mean that's not like that bet that you made that fig bet it's not that outrageous i mean many many is it's not that unpopular many people would have said the same thing here's the way to say it is there something that other people are really bullish on that you are bearish on the you to take the counter side of it and everybody thinks x and i think why on cryptocurrency i think you know we have not seen a single use case beyond speculation and hope that makes me very nervous you know even about bitcoin and there's a lot to love about bitcoin i was covering bitcoin when it was under a dollar i have exposure bitcoin at two hundred and eight hundred dollars a coin so i've done fabulous and i should say when i say i i mean my wife because she heard me talking about and her siblings were weren't into crypto and she just bought a bunch of bitcoin so we've made large amounts of money off a crypto because my wife is so smart and i actually probably had twenty or so coins i got we're in a one of the i have bought like twenty coins at a dollar each or something back in the day and they got stolen when one of those exchanges went belly up like the whole exchange went away and they took everybody's coins it was pretty funny if it was ten or twenty coins it was probably three hundred to six hundred thousand i mean there are people who have a hundred bit coins or thousand bitcoins on a usb drive and forgot their password so but i think what's gonna happen with bitcoin a distinct possibility is that a better technology comes out that actually does something other than storage of money and other than money transfer other than that and and it's you know bitcoin is not incredible at money transfer it's not it's still kind of expensive and if that happens and that gets you know the sort of reddit man or populous vi romania you could see people just using their bitcoin to buy those other currencies or that other currency that so i i would be very careful if you on bitcoin to at a low price and you don't have other money like take some profit and buy a house if you don't own a house i met people at the height of the crypto the last crypto publish which i think was three christmas ago and it was twenty k and i just sat on stage listen if you bought this shit for a hundred bucks and you're worth five million dollars right now just sell a million dollars buy your condo sell two million and buy a house and then let the other three million ride i i get being a gambler but you know you you have to pair your positions and get some diversification at some point so i think people being bullish on i still think bitcoin zero or bitcoin under a thousand is a distinct possibility now would that happen overnight no i think it would be a slow ride as people realized ethereum or whatever the next one is is the better one right and then people are buying xr in the middle of this sec investigation and that's a total fraud i mean when you read the complaint from the sec it's like oh my god these guys were trying to buy their way onto to exchanges giving like a million dollars in cash and they were trying to create a according to the claim they were trying to create accounts that made it look like people were long so they were trying to find accounts that they owned that were selling xr and then suddenly flip to being buyers and timing that with being on coinbase or whatever exchange they were trying to buy their way onto to i mean it was crazy manipulation going on i think based on reading did you guys read the sec xr claim it's one of the shady things that's still just out there you know still running crazy they sold the two folks in charge old six hundred fifty million dollars in xr to people who are buying it specifically to speculate they've never used it as a utility ever the overwhelming majority of those people they were strictly buying it and so that makes it an equity and so that would be like you and i just selling our stock certificates for you know my podcast or something on the street to people that's why we have the sec that's why we have rules is so that people don't get screwed and these guys were doing according to the complaint complete market manipulation and insider trading basically i had a friend to a couple of years ago was organizing a hostile takeover of the xr peak chain because basically everything in crypto knows xr is just kind of bullshit he was like look there's basically a it was i think we're ten billion dollars at market cap at that's maybe a little bore twenty billion market cap at that time he went to investors who ever everybody agree like xr fees really no value and no utility and it's you know it's kind of a scam he raised like sixty seventy million dollars to take a giant short position and in crypto sixty seventy million dollars just could do a lot of damage and then also had a campaign where any xr holder so he's gonna short it massively which would cause the price to just tank and then as it was tanking it was gonna launch a public campaign that says look here's all the sort of dumb things that xr is done and why it is you know not a not a legitimate of a project i will give you the opportunity now to trade in your xr for ten to one ratio to this other coin and we're not gonna do any of those things and you know you can get to a legitimate project at a multiplier if you go now and if you wait you know two days and we'll go down to five to one then it'll go down to one to one so train in now which would cause what you saw with games it that's what was gonna happen and unfortunately one of the investors that he was talking to leaked to press they found out about it and then they were able to massively collateral and can't a potential cause short attack and they took extra four hundred million dollars and sold so that they would be able to defend which was crazy but it was gonna go down i'm not long crypto but i do think there some interesting underlying technology there it's just really strange that all this money's poured into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and there really are very few use cases for you're saying that but store value is a ten trillion dollar use case right yeah if you look at the internet there's more than one killer app on the internet crypto was positioned as this is the new internet everything is going to change and exactly one thing has changed store of value that is the only thing that has changed speculation and store value there is nothing else crypto has put a dent in i mean during those those white paper days with icos people are telling me like it's over for uber and airbnb it's all gonna be on the blockchain it's gonna be immutable records of each ride and your coins are gonna pay for the ride and but they already have a database that airbnb be like why would a public blockchain be better for that i'm like because it's immutable and i'm like what does that even mean like you can't change it like is that a benefit not changing the database that's not a benefit that's a cost you want a lot of your stuff to be centralized yes decentralized it makes no sense like decent decentralized makes sense if you wanna trade the risk of decent which is massive if you wanna trade that risk you know in exchange for not having a central over overload i get it like for bit torrent or for freedom of speech or something it could make sense but i still remain very skeptical that nothing that no use case really has come out of this aside from speculation and money sort which are valid that's what i'm short in the world i'm long start i'm really long non accredited investors participating in private markets i think that's gonna be the big revolution of the next decade the the sec has been working on accreditation laws and republic seed and vest and while these equity crowd financing sites have shown that there's an appetite and obviously games and robin have shown there's appetite and crypto and the ico craze showed there was an appetite amongst the ninety six percent of americans were not accredited to participate i'm hoping that we can have a test where people can take a test you know twenty thirty forty questions and show they're sophisticated they may not be accredited with money in the bank but they may be sophisticated in fact the people were writing the sophistication laws where the accreditation laws at the sec all likelihood do not make enough money to be accredited the average economics professor or nba professor doesn't make enough money to be accredited every year those are amongst the most sophisticated people in the world when it comes to finance as the user of seed and vest it's not there yet not there yet i don't think so no we raise money on seed and vest i think i'm long crypto you broke up sean but we got you you're long crypto even though there's no use case and you're short investing in companies that have a million use cases and customers got it i raise money in seed vest so you did do right we did seed invest yet yeah worked fine for inside think it's okay i don't like giving updates i don't like sharing private information a lot publicly i guess you shouldn't do it if that's the case i guess that that's not a problem with ce and us is a problem with just the rules that come along with it it's not their rules that's just the sec but i think there's still a long way to go it's gonna take time but i like the idea of people putting a hundred bucks in if you didn't have to do like as much reporting it'd be better like they should basically say if anybody puts in under a thousand dollars you don't have to do reporting or anything and you know you're capped at whatever dollar amount you cap that a million dollars a year in raising so you can raise a thousand dollars for a thousand people one time a year so then if you did do something for ga you know for four years or five year straight the biggest the whole would be would be four or five million as opposed to crypto where you have polls that are billions of dollars right no i'm on board well jason thank you this is awesome we're gonna publish this in a few days two days i think we appreciate you comment we'll have to do it again we're big fans of the all in podcast and how many downloads do you have prep episode do you know i don't know i mean the youtube video you know it's really hard to get information on podcasting and like how many downloads you have this day because all the podcast download the stuff in the background and then a bunch of people are putting cdn in front of your files so like you don't know you know what's being front run and cashed but the youtube video had a hundred forty thousand views in the first forty eight hours so i'm guessing it's gotta be a half million or something like that i mean i think that's what the top podcast get we were number eleven today which is bonkers overall and this we can start up spend perennial top twenty tech you know top ten sometimes on the video side it's always top ten on the audio side it's typically stability top twenty i'm looking at your videos now now we have a target you've got a target on your back and we're gonna we're gonna see what we can do yeah a hundred and seventy seven thousand views in two days it is pretty good it's pretty wild i mean in nineteen episodes we became the eleventh podcast in the world i guess you know i don't know how accurate the itunes i wouldn't look at it that way i was looking at like you've been doing it for ten years it it's a ten year overnight success that's very nice to say yes this weekend in start us was it niche podcast where we only talk about startups and this is a podcast where we talk about trump the stock market censorship and whatever the top five topics in the world are so you know if you have a narrow aperture you know you can get a very distinct endemic audience like you have for your pockets or a half for this weekend start and then if you go general like ben shapiro or joe rogan or all in you can get many many many many many more folks if it clicks this one happens to have clicked and i think when you look at the pandemic we're all gonna look at the pandemic and say what did we get out of the pandemic like what did we try to do and i did maybe five or six different little projects and two of them have really stuck all in you know like i said has become one of the top podcast in the world and then remote demo day we have invested in we we basically have seven companies present for three minutes to our syndicate and it's just led to a whole new level of deal flow and we just did our largest deal lever on our syndicate for three point three or four million dollars which is a million dollars more than the previous record and that's all because a remote demo day because we got companies that were a little bit further in their life into our wheelhouse and our syndicate grew that was the other thing that grew tremendously as our syndicate grew it doubled during the pandemic so a lot of people online looking for things to do so you gotta look at this pandemic and say what did you get at of because the number of shots and arms right now is one point five million a day and a hundred thirty forty million people i think are on the other side of covid in the united states because they've had it or they had the shot now like thirty million people have had the shot so we're going to probably get two million people a day and we only need another seventy million people a day on the other side to hit two hundred million which would be when herd immunity hits so we might be thirty days out from hospitalizations and deaths just plummeting and hospitalizations are plummeting and debts are flat so this could be an amazing turnaround i believe that by the summer everything's back to normal people are saying the fall i think april may there's gonna be so many vaccines available that they're gonna be anybody's gonna be able to walk up seven days a week to any pharmacy in april or may and get a vaccine if they want it that's what i think is gonna happen well that's gonna be a good day when that does happen do you know anybody who's gotten the vaccine yeah few doctor friends okay this is the test how many people do you personally know like you've had lunch with or a conversation with how many people do you personally know not friend of a friend but your friend somebody you've had a conversation with family god forbid that's died from covid i have one one my mom's best friend one okay you have one sean no deaths that my person know and two people who i know have the vaccine my father and a mom mother mom perfect i know fifteen people now have had the vaccine personally and i know one person died how about you saying i've know two people that i've gotten the vaccine at doctor couple and then my family has gotten covid i haven't and i one death a family friend i think that's what we're gonna see is i think over the next thirty sixty days you're gonna know fifty people who who've had the vaccine and you're only gonna know one person's died from it and the first seventy five thousand people who are in the trials none of them have died and i think only one got hospitalized and nobody has been in the hospital for more than thirty days so this vaccine has is a miracle of science and has been under hyped under hype so the that's why i think i'm looking for travel investments if anybody hears this and they've got a travel related investment i think now now's is the perfect time to start ramping up and thinking about that jason at cal dot com jason on twitter jason on instagram at jason jason cal dot com and what was the third one well cal dot com i'm at jason on twitter at jason on instagram jason un tumblr no one uses that okay thanks man we'll talk soon and awesome bro shoot this to you when it's live