Episode 744 | Bluesky, TinySeed is Raising, YC Backs Competitors, and More Hot Take Tuesday Topics
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Welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling. This is Hot Take Tuesday.

In this episode, we talk about the rise of Blue Sky and Anar and Tracy wind up making a four-figure cash bet about where they think Blue Sky is going to be three years from now. Talk a little bit about TinySeed and how we are raising our next fund, how Y Combinator backs competitors, and more Hot Take Tuesday topics. Before we dive into that, the SaaS Launchpad course, this is the most comprehensive and best course I've ever released online.

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for this course to give you an idea of the level and the quality of the content, because the quality of the content is far, far superior than stuff I'm putting out on YouTube. It is far more in-depth, and it is book-level depth in a video course with full transcripts, summaries, and all that. So saslaunchpad.co, click the Start Free button to download the free sample, The DNA of a Great SaaS Idea. And with that, let's dive into Hot Take Tuesday. ♪

This week, I'm joined once again by Tracy Makes on Twitter. Well, I'm there, but... Or TracyOsborne.com on Blue Sky. Ooh, Blue Sky. We're going to get into that in just a moment. And Mr. Einar Volset on Twitter. Absolutely. How you doing? As well as your real name. Are you on Blue Sky? No.

All right. Are you going to get on Blue Sky? No. All right. So let's talk about this. I would bet money you are. First topic of the day, is Blue Sky going to do it? Meaning, do we think Blue Sky is going to survive and thrive? Tracy, I'd like you to take, do I need you to steel man this argument of Blue Sky? Because you, it sounds like you are leaving ex-Twitter in favor of Blue Sky. Talk us through what's going on.

I am a Twitter OG, whenever that year that was, way back in the day. And I freaking love Twitter. Yeah. And it was one of the things that like really catapulted my career in tech. And like, I thought I was all in, but I gotta say, the vibe has changed. And the vibe has changed pretty significantly. And it's been changing for a little bit of time due to certain events, but

with the selling of Twitter and whatnot, but I feel like it's very different in the last few months. And for me personally, it doesn't suit my purpose anymore. And it's not a place that I find very fun. It's not useful for me for my career stuff. And Blue Sky seems to be taking hold. It's like Twitter in 2007, 2008.

And that's really fun. So I'm over on Blue Sky enjoying those early days where people are doing a bunch of little apps and creating analytics and doing little silly things, like all the things you used to be able to do on Twitter with the API stuff. I'm sure it's going to change and evolve over time, but it's just, it's the kind of thing that I want to be a part of rather than what Twitter has turned into now. Got it. So for you, it's a personal preference of the type of social media that you'd like to be part of.

Yeah. And I also, I did, I feel like there's an opportunity, like might as well make an account. I did one for tiny seed to kind of just, I'm going to cross post between tiny seed and, um, Twitter and blue sky for the time being, because I feel like might as well. And you know, if it does take off then that, then it's already there. And it's pretty nice to have that in there because blue sky, you can verify using your domains. So it's really easy for you to find tiny seed cause it's just tiny seed.com. So I feel like there's some business reasons to do it, jumping on a network when it's early. But,

But largely for me, it is personal preference in terms of the way I want to experience a social media network. And also, what's the counterpoint? These are all good points, I think. I just can't bother to join another thing. I'm like, you know...

Why do I care? I mean, honestly, I've been on Twitter since 2007. I think I'm on there all the time. Like, I don't, you know, like you see it's changed radically. It hasn't changed all that much for me. It's always kind of been a show for years now. Like, that's what I'm used to. It is what it is. I mean, you're in good hands with your posting. So it is. That's true. And like, I think like, certainly like it used to be a certain kind of place, I think, before. And it was pretty left wing. It was pretty progressive. It was pretty of a type. Yeah.

And I think it's become more balanced, let's say now, than before. And so, you know, I think you're more likely to see things that maybe you don't agree with than you used to. I feel like it used to be very like, you know, if you were like a San Francisco type liberal, you get a lot of reinforcement on the things that you believe on the old Twitter versus now you definitely get some of the other stuff. And I'm not...

I don't know. Like some of the stuff, you know, there's no doubt that I see full on, you know, I see both communists and extreme right wing white nationalists on Twitter more than I used to. But, you know, I mean, it's just it's always been a show for me. You know, I just don't think it's changed all that much, I think. And how about Blue Sky? Do you think Blue Sky will gain traction and be around in three years and be bigger than it is today? No.

I think it's just a hissy fit to a degree. And I feel like, you know, it's been that, like there's been threads was kind of the same. What was the other one before that? Wasn't there another one? Not this one. Mastodon. Mastodon. There you go. That was the new thing. That was supposed to be a thing. And I'm like, yeah, okay, great.

if it becomes a thing, then it'll be a thing. And like, you know, I'm not saying I'm not going to wander over there, but right now I'm like, look, I only need so much screen addiction. Twitter gives me plenty of that. I, you know. Yeah. And for me, I think we've kind of heard two viewpoints here, like pro and con. And I am genuinely the middle. I do have an account on blue sky. I'm robwalling.com. If folks want to hook up with me there and I'm more doing it to keep an eye on what's going on. I,

I am posting some of my ex-Twitter posts over on Blue Sky. I find that the community is much smaller. I know everyone that I've followed, in essence, which is interesting for now. But the volume over there is just very light. And so if I open Blue Sky a couple times a day tops, I'm kind of like, oh, I'm all caught up. Because I'm just looking at the people you follow tab, and I only follow hundreds of people, right? So it's not just this constant free-flowing...

flow of stuff that I don't necessarily care about. Twitter for me, I don't care about the political stuff. I don't, it just doesn't bother me either way, left or right. I'm just kind of like, whatever. I mean, if something's offensive, obviously it bothers me. I'm not seeing an inordinate amount of left wing or right wing or whatever. I'm just seeing shit I don't care about. I'm seeing stuff from, whether it's Elon Musk or like some celebrity who posts something or blah. And it's just like, I didn't follow this person. I don't give a fuck.

about this topic at all. So that's the thing that I'm like a little fed up with. So I am going that, you know, there's the, what is there, the for you tab and then there's like people you follow tab. But then I go to people you follow. There's a reason there's an algorithm because that is boring. There's a lot of people I follow that's like, man, I really don't care about what's going on with you.

I will say that like one thing I have started doing with the phone that I had to do when you got sort of forced onto the for you tab is like, you're like, when you see things that you're like, it's stupid, like tell it, it does work pretty well. Like, I feel like if you're just like, I don't like seeing what I see on Twitter, I'm like, well, or X, sorry. Then I think like, well, you just, you're just not telling it what you don't like, because it pretty quickly shapes into like, if you

If you spend like a half a day looking through and being like not interested, not interested, not interested, it does update pretty quickly, I would think. So I have one more point before we kind of evolve the conversation. But I just wanted to bring it back for folks who might be thinking about like, should I move over? And I just wanted the vibes of blues...

For folks who are like indie hackers, makers, trying to share what you're doing in public. So if that's something that you look forward to being part of a community of folks sharing what you're working on, how you're building your next indie project and whatnot, then I would say like check out Blue Sky. I think that in particular, that area has been really taking off. And Tracy, your prediction, do you think Blue Sky will be around in three years and bigger and have more traction than it is today?

I would bet so. Like, I could be wrong. But it feels like in terms of the herd instinct of folks and the herd instinct of tech press and whatnot...

There's more now than there was when Macedon and Threads and everything else launched a few years ago, including Blue Sky, which was the two years, I guess, Blue Sky's been around for a few years and nothing was really happening. And then finally this magical moment happened where people all of a sudden moved over and they had that inflection point that I think that now makes the service more useful. Yeah.

And so just because we want to keep things interesting, Tracy, Einar, what are you going to bet? What kind of cash are we going to put on this bet? It's three years out. So someone's going to have to remind us. Reach out, listen to this episode.

I think it should be a hundred bucks. Oh, I was going to say a thousand. Whoa, now we're talking. All right. You heard it here first. Tracy Osborne. Thanks. Three years. Wait, Aynur has agreed a thousand too. What's the definition of being around here? Because I can see like Tracy buying bluesky.com and just spinning up like her own little thing three years from now, just to get like a... Which bluesky.com...

is not the network isn't it that's someone else so I'm sure they're just wait a minute wait a minute why is the name of blue sky if they don't own bluesky.com what is the domain then it's like b sky what

Actually, let's make it $10,000. This is going to last me into the next year. Forget it. No, I'm capping out $1,000 here. So $1,000 and yeah, not that it's around in three years, but that it has significantly more traction. Do you know, what's the like daily active users right now? Anyone? I mean, it's Tracy and you guys. That's two. Okay.

So I just did a quick Google and it says that Blue Sky has 20 million users. That's not daily active. That's not monthly active. It says user. So I'm thinking that's registered accounts. So what is the definition of in three years of this being around and having significantly more traction? No.

I was going to say 50 or 100. It's got to be somewhere in there. Because if it's 30 is not it. Like this is a dying social network if it adds 10 million in three years. So let's say 100. I like that. I would also say if Rob Walling posts more on Blue Sky than Twitter at that point, I would consider it a live network at that point.

Wow. Okay. So all I have to do is convince Rob not to post more on there. Hey, Rob, you want to make 500 bucks? Sure. Gun deal. Do that to your detriment. And where is Threads and all this? Threads, what are you doing, man? Threads.

Threads is engagement bait. Like every time I open Instagram, it's like, hey, let's look at the things that make people pissed off. So they're all responding to this. So it's like for me, it's Threads. I mean, I clicked on it a few times because it is interesting. People are like, oh, I was at the airport and Delta screwed me over. And I talked to this person and I clicked on those a few times because like, oh, I want to know what happens next. And then I realized like, wait, it's just pulling

me in by making me pissed off. Exactly. It's the worst of social media. And so Zuckerberg, he just announced he finally put in because blue side is taking off. They added an option so you can just see the folks you're following on threads. They're feeling some pressure from blue sky and they're changing threads in response. I don't, I think folks are so fed up with the threads that I feel like they've kind of missed the boat, so to speak. I don't get it. Like, so the reason I think I didn't sign up for threads was because

Like I have a private Instagram, just family things. And like, it's like, you have to use this account. And I'm like, no, I'm not doing that. Like that. This is a private. This is why I never signed up for threads. I just didn't want to open that Pandora's box. So, so why are people pissed off with threads?

It's just too algorithmically driven. Everything is engagement bait that all the posts you see is like people being angry or people doing, you know, like when I post like, so like, what are the most underrated guitar solos of all bands from the 70s? And then you want to weigh in, right? You're like, oh my gosh, well, obviously Jimmy Page's solo on Stairway to Heaven is just underrated. You're so old, dude. That's the 70s. Are you nearly 60? No, not even close.

And so that feels just rude. I wonder... Plain rude. Yeah.

AARP, there we go. Perfect. For listeners who don't know, I just held up my AARP card. Someone thought it was funny to sign me up for the American Association of Retired People here in the United States. It wasn't me, no problem. Anyways, it's engagement bait. It's just vapid content. You know, it almost feels like just lyrical type stuff. So I go there. I don't go there anymore because I'm just like, I don't need this in my life. It's not interesting.

So let's move on to our second topic. I hear rumor that TinySeed is raising their third fund. A&R Volset, tinyseed.com slash invest. If you are an accredited investor and you want to invest in US companies or UK entities, you want to talk people through what's going on, we're just kicking this off.

I mean, I guess most people know, you know, TinySeed and what it is and like why we're doing it and all that stuff. We've been doing it now since 2019, you know, so it's been half a decade, unbelievably. First startup accelerator for SaaS bootstrappers. Yeah, I mean, like, and it's worth thinking about, like, you know, 2019, what was going on at the time.

You know, it was right around the time actually with Sam Altman now of OpenAI who wrote an article. I think he was YC president at the time or maybe just left or just started. He wrote this article saying like, you know, how to invest in startups. And his main point was don't invest in anything unless it can be $20 billion. And like really like TinySeed was sort of a response to that. It was like, look, there's got to be a different way to help founders who where success is selling to private equity or strategic for 50 or 100 or a couple hundred million dollars. Like that sounds like success, I think, to most people.

And so really that's what we've been trying to do with TinySeeds. And we've been doing it, like I said, we did our first fund in 2019, deployed that. That was kind of a... At the time, I actually got some advice saying you should call this your fund zero prototype fund. And I kind of wish I had done, but I didn't. So it was our fund one. We raised about $5 million. I'm sure our compliance person is going to shoot me now. But like our sort of mark on there is we're at about, you know, two, two and a half X markup on that fund, which...

You know, it's not quite apples to apples, but certainly like, you know, Carta came out with a venture benchmark report here earlier this year. And like, we're basically in the top 5 to 15% of most metrics of venture funds.

We've started returning capital from that fund. And then we raised our second fund in, well, two funds, really. One US-focused and one sort of European EMEA-focused in 2021 and 2022. And yeah, those are also starting to sort of trend the same way. And really, like, really this fund, the strategy here is like, look, we think,

you know, this seems to be working and we're sort of just looking to keep executing on that strategy. So if this is interesting to people, you know, get in touch with that invest page. You'll eventually end up in my inbox and I'll reach out and I can share some more information. And like I said, you have to be accredited or, you know, a sophisticated investor, depending a little bit on the fund. And there's some minimums and some things there, but certainly get in touch and I can describe what we got going on.

And we've invested in a lot of companies, approaching 200 B2B SaaS companies. And so that we're going to continue investing hopefully at that pace over the next several years. So it's a really nice way to kind of index, index in quotes, you know, into a lot of early stage B2B SaaS companies. I don't know of any other place that you can do it.

it like we do it. Just the ecosystem of MicroConf TinySeed, this podcast and my books and all that, it really has, if you've ever been to a MicroConf event in person or online, it's a unique group of folks and a good chunk of the TinySeed companies come out of folks who are in this community.

I mean, it's the raddest community, the best community out there. Yeah, it is. I think it's one of those things where it's like, look, if you believe that sort of B2B SaaS, the mostly bootstrap, like there's value creation there. It's one of the better ways to access that market. It's hard to do as an individual investor just because it's so early. You really need to be making enough bets that you have the chance of winning.

finding the ones that do really quite well and like getting access to that deal flow. And like it's that's very, very hard to do as an individual investor and probably only a handful of people worldwide could do it in sort of the same way that we do. Our third story of the day is TechCrunch article about Y Combinator. It says Y Combinator often back startups that duplicate other YC companies, their data shows. It's not just AI code editors.

And to give folks background, you know, if you're an accelerator and you're investing in a lot of companies, you inevitably will back competitors over time. And at TinySeed, we have also had to face this because you can't invest in 200 B2B SaaS startups and expect to never invest in two companies that compete, right? So 500 startups has its tech stars, YC, they're all going to have it. But this TechCrunch article where they analyzed startups

The data was interesting. I have kind of mixed feelings about it. I think I'll probably kick it over to Tracy for first thoughts. The thing that really resonated with me, particularly because I'm part of the TinySeed applications process and going through interviews and picking folks and sending over offers, is that they specifically called out that they are backing the founders, not necessarily the idea, which is very similar pretty much what we're doing as well. Because the

change over time, right? People pivot, they find new ideas, they change their positioning and folks can already, you know, even if we try to do it based on the companies themselves and try not to back competitors, then eventually they're going to be competing at some point because people are going to pivot around. Yeah, totally over time. So I thought I really resonated with that part. I was like, okay, good. We're not, I mean, we don't really compete with YC, but it does show how the right person, right driven person who is

is all in just executing super fast and doing really good stuff. It's something we do at TinySeed and YC is doing that as well. But also, YC, what are they doing per batch? I guess they're doing four batches per year now and hundreds per batch.

I think it's 150 to 200. Yeah. You know, with Tiny C, we have like, you know, some competition, but then you step back at YC and then of course, they specifically say in the article that even within batches and even within, I forget what they call it, but a cohort with their one partner, they've had competitors within that. And I'm like, that's a little bit too close for me, for my comfort with Tiny C. I want people to feel comfortable. This is something I did. I had to deal with in 500 Startups because I was with,

another startup doing wedding stuff. And that's a whole podcast on its own how awful that was. So I'm always cognizant of that at TinySeed. I'm surprised at YC doing that. But you know, they're kicking butt. So I can't, they must be doing something right. I think it's I mean, I think it's hard. Like one of the points that we make at TinySeed Founders too is like, look, even if we had a strict, which we don't, a strict policy, we would never back somebody who's competing to anybody, which like not possible. But

You know, companies pivot all the time. I mean, it's almost like a religion just to be like, it's not working. Let's do something completely different. And like, what are you going to do? Like to say people like you can't, sorry, you can't pivot into what you want to pivot to because we already backed someone doing that. Like that's not going to work. You know, particularly as a minority investor, but just in general, like it's just like you can't stop people doing that. I mean, like I said, and the batch sizes are now, I think it's more than 150 now. I think it's probably people 100. It used to be for the longer, I think 21.

2020 or 2021 was the high point. It was like 300 or 400 per batch. But they were doing two batches a year. Now if they're doing four, it's got to be a little smaller. Oh, that's right. Oh, then it might be 100 or 150. I don't know.

So folks have an idea. Like we back across Americas and EMEA, we do two rounds per year every six months and we get about 22 to 30 companies between the both of those. So still a good pace, but it allows us to be a lot more hands-on and ideally not back direct competitors within the same batch. That's kind of something we have been able to avoid to date because that feels like it could be a little bit awkward. Yeah.

And I should mention that if there's anyone who's like TinySeed or YC, do both. We have a few folks that have gone into TinySeed and then gone into YC. There's advantages, I say, obviously, as someone who's running a TinySeed accelerator program and being very biased towards it. But also, my husband went through Y Combinator. We're different programs. YC is what they do, they kick butt at. And what we do, I think we kick butt at it too, but they don't necessarily conflict. So if there's anyone who is like, you know what, I'm looking for an accelerator program, a B2B SaaS accelerator.

We are fans of YC and we do encourage folks who are in Tiny C that feel like that's the place where they want to go to jump into that. But you're going to have a very different experience in terms of that. We have a lot fewer founders, a lot of new companies, whereas in YC you're going to be one of a thousand, but they have other advantages that make up for it.

And we focus on B2B SaaS, like we are some of the best in the world at this. And so if you are B2B SaaS, you're going to get more direct help. But man, if you want to raise buckets of money, there's no better place than YC. Easy to raise. Our next story is an article on Swapnil Chauhan's blog. Sorry about that pronunciation there. We will certainly link this up. Title is Procrastination and the Fear of Not Being, quote, Good Enough.

And it's actually a short article. There's some headings like, am I just not good enough? Do I care too much about what others think? Pushing through to be able to ship stuff. The reason I bring this up is, you know, imposter syndrome is often talked about in startup space. And we see mindset being such a critical element to founders' success that we actually retroactively went back. We have our Tiny C playbook, which is like seven different modules. We added playbook zero.

that is all about mindset. And this is a big part of it is like getting over imposter syndrome. It's not fake it till you make it because faking it, I have such issues with this online of people faking stuff that's not real. So, but it is internally maybe having more confidence than you think you should.

But people get hung up and they get analysis paralysis and they don't take action because they don't know if what they're doing is right and blah, blah, blah. And that is really what I wanted to call out because I know a lot, a lot, a lot of founders feel this. And I know a lot of founders deal with this as they're starting their company, not knowing what to do next, not knowing if they're going to succeed, wondering when everybody's going to find out they don't know what they're doing. So to kick us off, Anar Volsat, have you seen this trait in founders? And what is your take on getting over it?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually one of the biggest mistakes you can do as a founder. That's sort of what I think. And I think it's not like fear of not being good enough. Like, that's hard. Just get over your fear of not being good enough. But I think like what it materializes into a lot of the time is like, like you say, analysis paralysis, needing more and more and more data and like favoring analysis over just action.

And it's one of the things that we tell our founders pretty early on and just try to hammer into them. If I could filter it for this at the interview stage, I would, just because I think it's so important. Just as having a bias for action and being okay with operating under uncertainty. We had the kickoff in Barcelona here a couple of weeks ago, and I told this piece then. I was like, look, a lot of the time, this analysis paralysis or not...

moving fast enough, not moving stuff, tends to be because founders, they really want to reduce uncertainty. They don't want to spend resources or time worrying that it's the wrong thing. It's uncertain whether they're going to get a payback. Particularly if you're a bootstrap, you don't have a lot of resources, you don't want to waste it. But my point that I was making to these guys is like, look, you want to embrace uncertainty. That's what you need. If you didn't have uncertainty, you'd be dead in the water.

Like as a startup, if you don't have uncertainty on something, there's nothing for you to exploit. Like if there was a market opportunity that had zero uncertainty about it, how to do it, or whether it was worth doing, then someone with more better resource than you would have already done it. And so you want, as a startup person, even as a bootstrapper, you kind of want to operate in environments that have reasonably high uncertainty and you don't want to wish it away. And I think like,

sort of your superpower as a startup founder tends to be tolerating operating uncertainty and like making mistakes and like, you know, still being able to move fast and do things under those kind of conditions. And I think like sometimes I look around founders who sort of like wish there was less uncertainty, but I actually think

that would be a mistake. I don't think there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if there is no uncertainty. I just don't think it's a thing. Like you have to embrace the fact that, look, if you want no uncertainty, you should go get a job. And even that's not completely uncertain. But like you shouldn't want to be a startup guy if you can't, or gal, if you can't handle that uncertainty and sort of embrace it.

How about you, Tracy? What are your thoughts? I definitely drink the tiny seed slash Aynar Kool-Aid. There's another place where I see there's like a side to this

I see in myself is I am an information gatherer and I love reading things, everything I can about B2B SaaS and sales and churn and all that kind of stuff. And there's like a paralysis of then knowing what the right way of doing things and being aware of how much work it is to do it the right way. And then I kind of procrastinate because I'm aware of how much work it is. Whereas before when I was just getting into startups, I was just like,

I kind of just flung myself into things. I got it. I got things done because I didn't actually have an awareness of how much work it actually would be. And I was like blissfully unaware about how I've,

what it could be like to be a startup founder. And so I was just like executing fast and doing the 80-20 and all that kind of stuff. And now it's a little bit intimidating when you know the full sales process and all that kind of stuff, rather than just being like getting on the phone with someone. Like it's easy to procrastinate when you have too much information.

I think sometimes it's just a matter of like, I didn't realize that we couldn't do it. So I just did it. There's actually a, it's like General Patton during World War II famously, like he, or maybe if you're just a nerd, he got an order not to take, to bypass this German city because he was going to take four divisions and they didn't think it was worth it. And he radioed back and says, I took it with two. Should I give it back? Kind of thing.

So I think there's a certain amount of that, like the ignorance is bliss thing. But I also think like one thing to internalize also is that like most doors are two-way doors. There's very, very, very few things in the startup world that can't be undone if it turned out not to be the right thing. And it's just, you know, to a degree, just kind of try it and see. It tends to be the best approach.

Our last story of the day is about Australia proposing their quote-unquote world-leading ban on social media for children under 16. It's from Reuters. We will link it up in the show notes.

Tracy Osborne is someone who has been on social media since you were 16. No, I'm just kidding. I mean, kind of. I was 11 years old. Was it Tumblr? No, this is before Tumblr. I had, yes, I would embed a chat into my website. I had a Terry Brooks fanned website and I had a chat on there and Terry Brooks, the author, fans around the world would use my chat and my dad would be like, what are you doing? Are you in a chat room? And I'd be like, no. And I'd go back to talking to all my friends on the internet and

So technically, yes, there was some sort of social network that I was probably not supposed to do at that time. But as an adult, as someone who is in her 40s, I feel like the Internet is...

I'm curious, Rob, you have kids and I'm curious what you think about this because I don't have kids myself. I just have my own experience of. Yeah, it's interesting. And then I'll pass it to Anar as well because Anar has kids under 16. I don't think social media is good for anybody. I especially don't think it's good for kids who are just so much more addictive.

which is not a word, but like it's just easier for them to just get hooked on stuff as you can tell by you give a 10-year-old an iPad and they'll play it for, you know, 24 hours straight and like, you know, not eat and not sleep and all that.

Not saying adults don't do that, but it's definitely the brains are still forming. So I don't think social media is good. I also don't think, you know, kids having cell phones, carrying around all the time is good. And yet I have a 14-year-old with a cell phone and I have an 18-year-old with a cell phone. The question for me is like, do I want the state legislating that? I guess if the state does, then that makes it easy across the board. Because then when my 14-year-old says, but you won't let me on, insert name of, you know, Snapchat.

It's like, oh man, but all the other kids do, right? And if the country bans it, then it's not an issue for me. Now, do I like the country or my government overreaching and telling me what kids can and can't do? Well, I mean, I guess they do it for alcohol, right? And smoking. And is social media as bad for them as that? It could be debatable, right? They've done studies of like the high suicide rates. So I...

Overall, I'm probably just fine with governments limiting children's use of social media. I do think it should be the responsibility of the parents, but I just know so many parents that don't. So it must be like, let's say there was no drinking age minimum and there was no smoking age minimum.

that would be a problem because there would be parents that would not, wouldn't care, wouldn't enforce. And we'd have 13 year olds, you know, not that we already don't, but we'd have 13 year olds smoking a pack a day and, and, and drinking a bunch. And so I do think having the laws and some barriers is not a bad thing for the government to impose. My,

My kids are barely on social media. They're more like in Discord, and they're in messaging apps where they message friends, but they are not in public places where they're posting. They're not doing Twitter, Instagram to public audiences. Einar Volset, you have kids under 16. Are they on social media, and what do you think of policy like this?

Well, it sort of depends how you define social media. But no, they're not on social media that I'm aware of, anyway. That's the thing. They're on Discord with their friends, and YouTube is a constant in my household. So that's the thing. Yeah. Yeah.

I guess I don't... I'm more of the libertarian side when it comes to this. Like, I don't trust the government to tell me what to do with my kids. Like, go f*** yourself kind of thing. This tends to be my standard MO when it comes to, like... I'm like, really? You're going to regulate this? And this is me having been in academia. Anytime there's a newspaper piece about what experts found, I'm like, did they know? Hmm. Okay. I don't believe you. So that tends to be the thing, too. So I'm like, look, good for you, Australia. Like...

you do what you need to do. But like, do I think like, would I be excited if Gavin Newsom decides to dis-supply to California? No, I wouldn't. I would almost be like kids that sign up for social media. But that's probably more my personality, more than anything else. I mean, I look also back at my 11 year old self clicking through all the, are you 13 messages on the internet? And I was like, yep, even though I was 11. So it's not like it's hard to get around. Yeah.

No, I like the thing. So I actually only peripherally paid attention to this thing. And like the Australia thing is like, look, like the more concerning thing. And this is, again, the more libertarian side of my personality is like, how are they going to enforce this? And the answer is apparently that they're going to require all Australians to provide identification to go to access the Internet. And at that point, I'm like, no.

No, you don't get that. That's the problem is these things infringe, right? They start getting real up in your face. Yeah. They have good intentions, but the outcomes are terrible. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's my view. I'm like, I don't I don't think so. My personal view.

Tracy Osborne, if folks want to keep up with you, you are Tracy Makes on Blue Sky. I mean, it is in my title. It says Tracy Osborne, parentheses Tracy Makes, literally for you, Rob. I put it in there. I'm going to say this every day.

is not going to die with me. You know that. TracyOsborne.com on Blue Sky. Anar Volset, while you are Anar Volset on ex-Twitter, if folks want to keep up with you, they should head to tinyseed.com slash invest. That's right. He'll be your best friend if you come with a bucket of money. Bucket of money. I'm only accepting buckets of money these days. No small change. $100 bills only, yo. Thanks for joining me, you two. Thank you.

Thanks to TracyOsborne.com and Einar Volset for joining me this week on the show. And thank you to listening to this episode. And whether you've been listening for five or 500 episodes, I appreciate you being around. If you keep listening, I'll keep recording. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 744.