Welcome back to another video. Since we have had some time now to get used to the fact that Vortex is leaving Kings Island after this season, I want to discuss a few options for what I think could potentially replace Vortex in the future. Before I jump into this, I just want to mention that I am in no way expecting a huge roller coaster to come to Kings Island for 2021 or even 2022. I think the absolute earliest we could say new roller coaster for the park is 2023, seeing as they are receiving Orion for the 2020 season and that will be about a $30 million investment. Even still, we might not actually see a new coaster here until 2024, but I would say 2023 at the earliest. Kings Island has been adding a new coaster every three years starting with Banshee in 2014, but since Orion is such a large investment, I won't be surprised if it's another four years until the next one following Orion. Getting into the good stuff, what do I think Kings Island will receive to replace Vortex? Vortex takes up quite a large plot of land right next to the beast. It is very picturesque and built onto a sort of valley. It is absolutely gorgeous. This is a prime location and the park isn't going to just leave this area abandoned. It would be a huge eyesore to leave it vacant. I believe something will definitely be placed in Vortex's spot. Will it be a coaster though? In my opinion, I believe that Kings Island will eventually put a coaster in the spot. They could maybe do something temporarily with the land until a new coaster would come, but I think the coaster will happen by 2025. I'm going to discuss a few different coaster models that I think could come to Kings Island in place of Vortex, and I will talk about them in order from what I think is least likely to most likely. The first coaster model I want to talk about that I think could potentially fill Vortex's plot of land is a Bolliger and Mabillard flying coaster. Now, I don't think this is extremely likely, as Cedar Fair has not built a single BNM flyer to date, and of course Kings Island just got rid of a flying coaster in the form of Firehawk, the Vekoma Flying Dutchman. It just doesn't seem like that something Cedar Fair would want to do, as you replace a type of coaster with a very similar type of model. Of course, as enthusiasts, we realize that the Vekomas and BNM flyers are pretty different, but that doesn't really matter to the general public. I think a BNM flying coaster would fit into Kings Island's lineup great, but I don't think it is the big coaster that Kings Island will want to draw in the crowds. One type of coaster that Kings Island is missing in their lineup is a Rocky Mountain construction coaster of some sort. The reason I am talking about RMC in an umbrella and not just one specific model of RMC is I don't have any idea what Kings Island would end up going with. I believe their classic Woody's Racer and Beast are safe from getting the iBox conversion, but I could not see the park getting yet another wooden coaster, so Topper Track is out as well. That leaves a ground up hybrid, a Raptor, or a T-Rex. I don't think Cedar Fair would bring a Raptor to Kings Island as the capacity would be too low for a park like Kings Island that gets over 3.5 million visitors annually. We have not seen a T-Rex built yet, and Kings Island has never been a park known for being a testing ground for new types of coasters under Cedar Fair management. And honestly, it is hard for me to think about Cedar Fair actually investing in a ground up hybrid too. Add to this that I believe Cedar Fair has had a somewhat rocky start with RMC, no pun intended, with the three coasters they bought from the company for the 2018 season. I don't know how likely it is that Cedar Fair will work with RMC again in the next couple years, and I struggle to find a good model from RMC that Kings Island would realistically add to their lineup as much as I would love to see one at Kings Island. One thing going for RMC is that this would be the cheapest option by far out of all the models I am discussing here. For the third model, I will talk about a B&M wind coaster. It seems like there is always a rumor of a Cedar Fair part getting a wind coaster, but I think one would work great in this plot of land. They are very beautiful looking rides, which would be great for this area, and of course would also feature many large inversions. There is also the time that Kings Island made fake leaks for a wind coaster before the announcement of Banshee, which they were teasing as the Bat, which they of course ended up using the name for Flight Deck, and the Bat-Pace tribute to the original Arrow suspended at the park, which sat right where Vortex does. Funny how it all ties together. But anyways, I personally love wind coasters and wouldn't mind seeing one here. I imagine this one would be much more compact than Gatekeeper, but they could easily fit a very good-sized wind coaster in this piece of land. This is just a similar thing to the B&M Flyer though in regards to drawing in guests. I don't think this model would really give Kings Island the desired results they are looking for in terms of return on investment, although I do see a wind coaster as being much more likely than a Flyer or RMC. The next model I will discuss is a Mock Rides multi-launch coaster. Kerowins opened Copperhead Strike this year and it has done great for them. I personally got to experience Copperhead Strike several times for myself and I absolutely loved it. Kerowins and Mock Rides really knocked it out of the park with that ride. I would not be surprised to see Cedar Fair add at least a couple more of these in the coming years. I would love to see one of these come to Kings Island, but I'm not so sure it would be the most likely candidate for Kings Island's next coaster. However, they really could use a modern, thrilling launch coaster. Backlot Stunt Coaster is 14 years old and is a very family-oriented ride with no inversions. While Flight of Fear is a pretty intense launch coaster, but opened 20 years ago, I think a Copperhead Strike-esque multi-launch could bring something new to Kings Island's lineup that they could really use. In Vortex and Firehawk, they have also lost two inversion-focused coasters as well, and this could help to fill that void a bit. Based on the history and recent years of Kings Island's new coasters not bringing very big attendance increases though, I don't know if Cedar Fair would be willing to invest $26 million, which was the cost of Copperhead Strike into Kings Island after they invested $30 million into Orion. I suppose it could depend on how well Orion does for the park and if it brings in the crowds that they want. Next up on our itinerary is the model that I personally would be the least excited for, but I think could also make a lot of sense from a business perspective, a BNM dive coaster. In the last few years, Cedar Fair has invested in both Valraven and Yukon Striker, and both of these massive dive coasters have done very well for their respective parks, Cedar Point and Canada's Wonderland. Though these dive coasters are also very expensive, and this would probably cost almost as much as Orion, these dive coasters are general public magnets and have proven to be very popular, increasing attendance at both parks and boasting great ridership, as well as being very reliable in terms of maintenance and having great capacity. I have also thought for quite some time that the plot of land where Vortex sits would be a perfect spot for a dive coaster. I could just see a menacing dive drop towering over the midway where you walk up to where Vortex's Batwing currently is. It seems like a perfect location to me, and dive coasters are also very picturesque as well. This model really would make a lot of sense for Kings Island in my opinion from a business standpoint, but at the same time, I just feel like a dive coaster would feel out of place in Kings Island's lineup for some reason that I honestly just can't explain. I thought almost a year ago that they were possibly going to get a dive coaster rather than a giga because of the same reasons actually. In any case, I think that a B&M dive is in Kings Island's future at some point, even if it is not the next coaster, but for right now, I'm going to say that a dive coaster is the most likely candidate for the next coaster that would replace Vortex. What do you guys think about Vortex being replaced in the next few years? Do you think a new coaster will be put in its spot? Do you think the next coaster after Orion will be one of these models I discussed, or am I missing something that you could really see coming to the park over all of these models? Maybe they won't replace Vortex with a coaster at all, but expand that area and add new flat rides or something along those lines. Of course, everything I discussed here is complete speculation, and obviously we will not know what is next for Kings Island for quite some time. Be sure to leave your comments about what you think about all of this, and if you enjoyed this video, liking it and subscribing to my channel would really help me out a lot. Be sure to like my page Coaster Daddy on Facebook, and follow me at Coaster Daddy Official on Instagram where I post pictures for my trips, and post updates on new videos and interact with all of you as well. Thank you all so much for watching. This is Coaster Daddy. Bye.


In May of 1856, William Webster tried to set up a business in Granada as a migration agent, hoping that he would be able to carry favor with William Walker. Webster had a history as something of a con man, but it's unclear if anybody in Granada knew this. But William Walker did not take a liking to Webster, and without the benefit of government patronage, Webster's business venture failed. But in Granada, he met another man named Sylvanna Spencer, who had previously been employed by the transit company but found himself out of a job during the years in which the company was not controlled by Cornelius Vanderbilt. So Webster and Spencer teamed up in Granada, both of them in dire need of money, and both holding a grudge against William Walker, who they blamed for their circumstances. So by the end of May, while Walker was busy fending off allied attacks from the other Latin American countries, Spencer and Webster traveled to the United States to speak with Cornelius Vanderbilt. The pair met with Vanderbilt in his Manhattan office in October of 1856. Keep in mind that this is all taking place at the same time as the events I talked about in the last couple of episodes. Spencer did most of the talking. He had inherited some transit company stock from his father, and he spoke as a stockholder with a moneyed interest in the company. He hated William Walker, he told Vanderbilt, and he wanted to help get him out of Nicaragua. Spencer and Webster had a plan. Vanderbilt was depended on the transit route for the waves of new recruits that kept his small army replenished. If they could cut off his access to this route, he would be crippled, and his forces would be starved out of the country. Vanderbilt knew all this already, of course, and he told the men that he'd already tried to take the transit route through the Latin American allies he was funding. But Spencer had a new approach in mind. The allies had tried to take control of the transit road, which connected Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific Ocean between the towns of Lavier-Hinn and San Juan del Sur. The road could be taken if the attack on the connecting towns coincided with attacks from the southwestern part of the country, where the San Juan River connected the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Nicaragua and San Carlos. This was the connection between Walker and Eastern ports, which meant, among other connections, the port in New Orleans, where Walker received a large number of new recruits and supplies. The Costa Ricans had already tried to take control of San Carlos, which I detailed in one of the previous episodes, but it was a disaster. It was a clumsy attempt and their forces were driven off by a much smaller band of filibusters. But Spencer had spent five years running ships up and down this river, and he knew the geography well. He proposed to Vanderbilt that he lead the expedition for a surprise attack to seize all of the steamers on the river. Webster piped in to add that he had military experience, which was probably not true. He was a professional fraudster, but it's unlikely that even Spencer knew any of this when he teamed up with him. Vanderbilt was intrigued by their proposition, but being the business man that he was, he made a no-risk offer. They would carry out their proposed plan. If they failed, they would be out of luck. But if they succeeded, Vanderbilt said, he would write each of them a check for $50,000, nearly $1.5 million in modern terms. So only 10 days after Walker led his failed attack in the first battle of Messiah and nearly lost control of Granada, Vanderbilt, Spencer, and Webster shook hands on a plan to defeat him. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In the last five episodes, we have been covering the story of William Walker and his attempt to establish a new Republic of Nicaragua and pave the way for the Americanization of Latin America, bringing in planters and wid-them slaves, thus attracting the attention of many Southerners hoping to make more secure the institution of slavery and possibly extend the political power that was associated with it. In today's episode, we will conclude the William Walker story, and I apologize that this detour was longer than I originally anticipated, but I just found this to be a remarkably fascinating story and I wanted to do it justice. But in the next episode, we will return to the United States to wrap up the antebellum period leading to the Civil War. We last left off when William Walker reclaimed the all-important transit road after suffering a second defeat in the city of Messiah, which was just north of Granada, the city Walker had established as the capital of his Republic. He was receiving new recruits, but the five Latin American countries that had allied against him were making his life difficult, especially since they had modern weaponry — rifles — supplied secretly by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who Walker didn't even know was part of the story. So we are picking up, near the end of November 1856, the same month that Spencer and Webster arrived back in Nicaragua. I've mentioned the geography before, but I want to remind everybody of the geographical importance of some of the cities since I can't use visual aids in this podcast. The maps would be very helpful here, but unfortunately they're not an option. So I already reminded you that San Juan del Sur and La Virgen connected the transit road to Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean. North of La Virgen was the strategically important city of Rivas, where Walker had already waged two battles, each of which ended in defeat, and North of Rivas was Granada, Walker's capital. On November 20th, Walker took 650 men with him from Granada to attack Rivas. The city was an important connection between La Virgen and Granada, so he needed control of it to ensure that he didn't lose access to California. Rivas was defended by both Costa Rican and Nicaraguan troops under the command of Costa Rican General Jose Canas and Nicaraguan General Maxim Oyeras. Walker left Granada defended by 440 troops under the command of General Charles Henningson, who had recently proved himself to be Walker's most capable military leader. So keep in mind that Granada had enemy troops, the Latin American allies, in the city just north of it in Messiah, and troops south of it in Rivas. So Walker was fighting on multiple fronts just around his capital, not even considering the country as a whole, but he had so far been able to maintain control of his conquered territories through American volunteers armed with superior weaponry. Some of them now had sharps breach loading rifles, and he wasn't aware that so many Latin American soldiers also had rifles at this point, so he was probably overestimating the superiority of his firepower against the larger forces. But on November 24th, Granada was attacked at three different points, all while Walker and the bulk of his army were away. The idea formulated by General Raymond Bioso, the chief general of the Allied Force, was to attack Granada from the north and west so that Henningson would try to escape east, where a mile-long street connected the plaza to the eastern ports of Lake Nicaragua.  General Thomas Martinez led a company of Nicaraguans from the east. As they invaded the city, they came face to face with Major Schwartz's artillery. The Nicaraguan troops were no match for the large weaponry, and those who weren't hit, scattered. General Mariano Paredes led 500 Guatemalans from the north side of the city, where they ran into a band of filibusters at the San Francisco convent led by Major Cal O'Neill. Among his men was his younger brother, who was among the first killed in the attack. Witnessing the death of his brother caused Cal O'Neill to go berserk. He was hardly dressed for battle. He was in an undershirt and he had no shoes on, but after his brother fell, he hopped on a horse and led a charge of 32 men straight at the Guatemalans as they tried to regroup after their first assault. This was unexpected, so the Guatemalan soldiers were caught off guard and the small force of Americans cut them to pieces. So the Americans successfully fended off the Allied attacks from both the west and the north, but the eastern attack would be a different story. Bioso's troops overran the defending Americans under the command of Captain Hesse, killing him and 22 of his men. They took the Guadalupe Church and secured the street that connected the plaza to Lake Nicaragua. Henningson was trapped inside Granada and the Salvadorans were able to close in on the plaza, securing the Escapulis Church around the edge of the plaza, also cutting off Henningson from the 27 Granada police at the old fort on the city's coast. So General Henningson was trapped inside the city plaza with a force of more than 300 filibusters. They also had about 20 Guatemalan POWs, some civilian Jamaicans who'd been stranded in the city, and about 70 wounded Americans and another 70 women or children all surrounded by Allied troops and cut off from escape. Henningson was able to slowly fight back over two days. He attacked the Salvadoran troops and drove them out of the Escapulis Church and slowly made his way toward the lake, setting fire to buildings behind him as he moved. Basically the Salted Earth Strategy of Warfare. He was hoping to fight his way to the lake and escape, but unfortunately, since Walker wasn't in the city and James Jameson had abandoned Walker, we don't have the juicy details they provided in their personal accounts of other battles. But on the night of November 25th, Walker was in a steamer a mile off the coast of Lake Nicaragua. He had been able to successfully deliver orders to Henningson to destroy the city and escape. Up to this point, Granada was one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful city in all of Nicaragua and Walker had concluded that the Nicaraguans would remain determined to take it at any cost. So even though he was fond of the city as well, he decided that it would be better to destroy it than to try to keep it. If William Walker couldn't have Granada, nobody could. So as Walker squinted through the darkness to try to get an idea of what was going on in the city, he couldn't see anything more than that his Lone Star flag was still flying above the parochial church, which means that whatever was going on, the Allied troops still hadn't taken the city. What Walker couldn't see was that while Henningson was doing everything he could to fend off attacks from two sides, his men were losing heart. After two days of fighting a battle, they knew they couldn't win. They were drinking heavily and Henningson had to spend all his energy driving them forward. He had taken the 20 POWs and the stranded Jamaicans he had and used them as laborers. Slowly but surely Henningson had been able to get the women, children, and wounded as well as some of the supplies he'd been able to salvage from the plaza to the buildings that he took as he moved toward the lake. He did this by taking one building at a time, moving the people in supplies, and defending his rear with artillery, which was basically what kept him from defeat during these two days. So when Walker sent a man to order Henningson to destroy Granada, Henningson was able to receive the courier as he landed his small boat on the coast. Walker had also sent an officer to take the lake's side fort where a couple dozen Granada policemen were serving under the command of Captain Greer, though one of the policemen of Venezuelan had deserted and they knew that if he was captured he would inform the enemy of how bleak the situation was at the fort. It's almost certain that the Venezuelan spilled the beans shortly after deserting, because before Walker's officer could even finish informing Walker of Greer's situation, the fort was assaulted by two allied forces, attacking simultaneously from the front and rear. The fighting only lasted for a few minutes, but the allies killed Greer and 25 of his men, including the Venezuelan deserter, this meant that only one person in Greer's company survived, diving into the water, risking getting finished off by the fresh rodder sharks that inhabit Lake Nicaragua, but he made it to the steamer where he could give the news to Walker personally. Walker ordered the steamer to return to Laveer Hin, but he continued to travel back to Granada to sit off the coast helplessly, hoping to be able to rescue Henningson and his men. Three days later, after a full five days of fending off allied attacks, Henningson had retaken the Guadalupe Church, which put him halfway between the city plaza and the lake. To be clear, that's five days to make it a half mile away from the plaza. When he took the building, they levied volleys of artillery at the building before having 60 men charge into it to find out that it had already been emptied out. The day before the allies took control of the abandoned plaza, but as they celebrated, they were unaware that Henningson had left a supply of gunpowder under one of the towers of the parochial church, and when the victorious troops ran into the building to take down Walker's flag, Henningson set off the gunpowder, blowing up the tower and causing it to crumble on top of several allied troops killing them. Now with Henningson and his men and civilians secure in the Guadalupe Church, two enemy soldiers approached waving a flag of truce. One of the men was an American deserter from Henningson's forces who'd been brought in to urge his former commander to surrender as they were surrounded by 3,000 enemy soldiers. Henningson refused. Had the American deserter arrested and sent Zavala back with word that there would be no surrender. By the time this took place, Henningson's men were sober again since they'd had to abandon their liquor when they fled the plaza, so they were actually more orderly than they'd been a few days ago. Later the same day after Zavala delivered word of Henningson's refusal to surrender, the allies sent two waves of attack against the church, one at 3 p.m. and another at 8 p.m. Both waves were torn to pieces by Henningson's artillery. Shortly after the second wave was fought off, it started to rain and the Americans inside the church started to get sick. The group was stuck in the church for days, living off of horse meat and drinking rainwater. Disease was spreading, so even though the allies couldn't seem to get at Henningson's troops, cholera and typhus were doing the job for them, and people were dropping like flies inside the church. Some of them dying only hours after the symptoms first appeared. But while Henningson was barely holding out in Guadalupe church, Walker was receiving waves of new recruits from newly arrived steamers. Three steamers arrived between December 3rd and 5th, bringing more than 300 new volunteers to join William Walker at La Verhin. Keep in mind that he had no knowledge of Henningson's situation in Granada, but he continued to travel to the city to sit off the coast and watch for anything that might give him news, good or bad. On December 11th after Henningson had been holed up in the church for about two weeks, General Bayoso ordered a new large-scale attack on the church. Like Walker, he had also received several hundred new troops. The first wave of 200 fresh soldiers was sent in the morning under the command of General Florencio Zetruc. What the Allies didn't know is that the night before the attack, Henningson had been quietly moving his people closer to the lake, covering them in trenches. Only 31 men remained in the church to defend it, the commander of his force being Lieutenant Sumter Williamson. They each had sharps rifles, which had a range of about 200 yards. Even with Vanderbilt's aides, the Allied troops had far inferior weaponry. They had rifles at this point, but they were not the breach-loading rifles that Walker's men had been recently bringing with them. So as the 200 Honduran soldiers charged to the church, Williams's men opened fire as soon as the soldiers were in range, taking out several of them. Now it's worth talking about the psychology of these Honduran soldiers in the attack. Most of them, if not all, were conscripts. They didn't want to be there. The sharps rifle was a new technology of the much wealthier United States. So it's unlikely any of these Honduran kids even knew they existed. So when there's still 20 football fields away from the church, they start taking hits that in their minds shouldn't have even been possible. The technology the Americans were using probably seemed like sorcery from their perspective. Not only were they hit from a distance that they couldn't conceive of, the breach-loading rifle made reload so fast that for people who were used to ramming musketballs down a gun barrel, this would be almost like if we were handing AK-47s to Civil War soldiers because they had this incredible range and they were able to reload so quickly that it inflated the perception of the numbers of troops that the Hondurans were actually facing. So if the allies could close in on them, their superior numbers would make quick work of the 31 defending filibusters. But to get to them, they'd have to run the length of 20 football fields while facing gunfire that was able to come rapidly enough that 30 breach-loaders would seem like a force of many times its actual size. These 30 men with their sharps rifles took out about 100 Honduran conscripts before the commanding officer finally distorted the retreat. The same day as the attack, one of Walker's officers, General Sanders, arrived back from Granada after being sent to attempt a rescue of Hennison. Sanders told Walker that a rescue would be impossible, but Walker didn't believe him. He figured that Sanders was jealous of how quickly Hennison had been promoted above him and that he had no real desire to rescue him. So the next day, December 12th, Walker arrived off the coast of Granada himself with 160 hand-picked filibusters to stage a rescue. That night after sunset, Walker had all the lights on the ship put out and he quietly steered the steamer three miles up the coast, docking it at the very same spot he landed for his first invasion of the city in 1855. His men debarked while Walker stayed on the steamer to sail it back off the coast of Granada so that when the sun came up on the 13th, any enemy scouts would think that it had never moved. Back off the coast of the city, he could see a man swimming toward him. The man was Kanaka John, one of the few remaining men who'd been with Walker since the very beginning and he was also one of the soldiers defending Granada with Hennison. He'd been sent to tell Walker that Hennison and the rest were on their last legs and that if he was able to attempt a rescue, he should send a specified signal by lighting some of the lights on the steamer. Walker did this but the signal was poorly thought out as the lights were blocked out by the smoke from the fires that Hennison had been setting all over Granada. So Hennison was under the impression that Walker was not going to stage the rescue. But the 160 men that Walker had unloaded three miles north of the city were on their way to it anyway led by Major John Waters. The men came upon an enemy barricade, waged a battle that was mostly hand-to-hand combat and a handful of filibusters were killed but they were victorious. They continued onward and entered Granada at around dawn on the 14th. So now keep in mind that Hennison had been trapped in the city for about three weeks at this point. Waters and his men took another enemy barricade suffering another 43 casualties, 13 of whom were killed. But again, they won the skirmish and took a prisoner who was able to give them the location of Hennison who was camped out in a trench not far from the Guadalupe Church. Waters sent a man to inform Hennison that rescues were on their way and not to fire on them. The messenger successfully gave the word to Hennison, returned to Waters, and led the rescue party to the trench where Hennison and the remaining Americans were camped out. What none of them knew at this point was that General Bioso was under the impression that Walker had sent his entire force rather than just the 160 men and he had ordered a full retreat of the troops back to Messiah which was taking place at roughly the same time as the filibuster escaped. But everybody was under the impression that they still had thousands of enemy soldiers occupying the plaza. And three weeks after the invasion began, I'm sure they were all just happy to finally be able to make an escape. So at this point, Hennison had already lost 110 men to enemy soldiers and 120 more to disease, not to mention 40 deserters and two men who'd been captured. Among those remaining in his group were 200 who couldn't fight and some of them were women and children and other soldiers who were sick or injured. But as Walter's men joined Hennison's small group of survivors, Captain Sam Leslie, a Cherokee known as Cherokee Sam, who was part of Waters' rescue party, fell dead from a bullet to the head. Somewhere, enemies were sniping at them even as they were retreating themselves. So those who were able tried to stay covered as best they could as they carried the sick and wounded toward the coast. Hennison even made his men drag their six pieces of artillery with them, which the men were not happy about, but it was probably a wise decision as the artillery was the only reason any of them were even still alive. During the retreat, they could hear explosions and see smoke as the allies were igniting gunpowder destroy buildings as they retreated. Like Hennison, they wanted to make sure their enemies couldn't reclaim the buildings they were abandoning. By two o'clock in the afternoon, they were loaded up into the steamer with Walker. Before he got on board, Charles Hennison picked up an enemy lance that he found lying abandoned on the ground and stabbed it into the earth. He then fixed a piece of leather on the other end of it and used a piece of charcoal to write the words, Akifue Granada. Here was Granada. Walker's capital was no more. Granada had been destroyed. Walker was now headquartered in Rivas. While Walker and Hennison were occupied with Granada, Savannah Spencer was leading 200 Costa Ricans through the jungles toward the head of the San Carlos River. Once they reached it, they built rafts and took the San Carlos River to where it joined the San Juan River, which connected to the southern coast of Lake Nicaragua. On December 22nd, roughly a week after Walker rescued Hennison, Spencer was watching 40 American filibusters going about their business inside the small fort they were garrisoning, unaware that the enemy was close by. As they sat down to eat lunch, leaving their rifles nearby, Spencer ordered the attack, taking them completely by surprise. Spencer had left 80 men behind to build a fort where the San Juan joined the San Carlos, but even with only 120 men, he outnumbered the Americans 3-1. The battle was a quick and easy victory. Most of the Americans were killed, and the rest were taken prisoner. Spencer then led his men to the next closest fort, defeating another 45 filibusters. By December 23rd, Spencer reached Punta de Castilla just south of San Carlos, the city on the southern coast of Nicaragua that served as a transfer point for travelers passing through Nicaragua. As they moved in, they passed four river steamers sitting idly, including the one that Spencer himself ran for five years while he was a transit company employee. They also found Joseph Scott, the steamer captain who kept being pulled into Walker's war every time one side or the other wanted to use his ship. Spencer told him that he was confiscating the four river steamers. Walker's connection to the eastern ports of the United States was now completely cut off. Spencer was ecstatic when he took back his old vessel, the Machuca, and he sailed it to San Carlos where he expected to join forces with General Mora and his army. They'd taken rafts into San Carlos themselves and the rafts were set out on the San Juan River with allied soldiers, stationed on them to fire on filibusters.  He pulled the rest on board the Machuca and then finished the trip to San Carlos. Over the coming days, lake steamers continued to bring passengers to San Carlos, unaware that the allies controlled the city and the transfer points on the river. Several lake steamers fell into Spencer's hands this way before Walker found out that he'd lost this connection. He knew that he was due to receive several hundred new recruits from New Orleans and he didn't have the force to retake San Carlos from the allies, so the only thing he could hope for was that some of the new recruits would take a steamer and make it to Walker. Walker's situation was as bleak as it had ever been, but on the San Juan River he had one small bit of luck remaining. A decommissioned river steamer named the Ores had been sitting unused at the Punta de Castilla transit depot. This is where Joseph Scott was being held, along with many other Americans, including several of Walker's officers who'd been captured by Spencer as they sailed into San Carlos on their way back to the United States. Joseph Scott informed Walker's captured men that the Ores could be repaired so that it could carry them in the new recruits back to Walker. With this antiquated paddle-wheel river steamer, Walker had one remaining connection to New Orleans that was not on Spencer's radar. The men renamed the ship the Rescue. As the men who knew how worked to repair the old steamer, new recruits arrived, a total of 240, most from New Orleans. Among these new troops were two returning officers that you may have forgotten about at this point. One was Frank Anderson, who was injured in the first battle of Rivas and sent back to California to help recruit as he recovered. The other was Charles Doubleday, who was Walker's right-hand man for a time before returning home just before Walker took Granada. Doubleday couldn't catch a break. He left Nicaragua right before Walker claimed his glory, and he would rejoin Walker just in time to participate in the defeat. He also left some valuable memoirs of his time in Nicaragua, which is part of the source of the information in this series. Another new recruit, as somebody you might remember from the episodes I did on the Cuba filibuster attempts, Chatham Roberto Wheat. He joined Walker on the promise of being made a brigadier general. So with the new recruits and factoring in the recruits that had deserted, 220 men piled onto the rescue and they started moving down the river to make an attempt to recapture it. At this point, there were several fortifications garrisoned by Allied troops along the river. The first fortification they encountered was at Cody's Point. When they started being fired at, they realized that the Latin American soldiers were armed with rifles that shot mini-balls provided by Vanderbilt. The filibusters quickly moved out of range and disembarked a ways north. There, they started cutting down trees to build a log stockade and prepared to attack Cody's Point. When they attacked, they greatly outnumbered the small garrison at Cody's Point and took it with only a few small injuries. They also gained possession of two brass cannons in their victory. The men moved back to the rescue and sailed a little ways further downriver and landed not far from another fortification at Hips Point, which was more well defended. This fortification was much older than Cody's Point and Spencer had left 200 Allied troops there, though they'd been reduced to only about 100 at this point due to disease, so the filibusters still had the advantage from numbers. With the newly acquired cannons, the filibusters fired their artillery at the fortification. This accomplished little other than keeping the Costa Rican troops from returning fire. The artillery attack came from the north, with wheat serving as artillery commander, but the bulk of the American forces were on the other side of the river, where they fired their rifles from the east. The Costa Ricans returned fire, and the shootout raged for more than an hour, with several Americans taking hits. After enemy fire died down, Doubleday led the Americans to charge the fort, and when they did, they found it completely undefended. Dead coast is littered the ground, but the survivors had already fled. The Americans tossed the enemy carcasses into the San Juan River, knowing that the water-blooded bodies would be carried with the current as a signal of the American victory to whoever found them. The Americans took the rescue further down the river, where they met another transport carrying an additional 180 new recruits, all equipped with rifles, ammo, and artillery. Their leader was Henry Titus, who was infamous as a border ruffian, who had been participating in bleeding Kansas, fighting John Brown and other northern guerrillas. The men with him had all been seasoned by the border war of Kansas and Missouri, and they refused to serve under the command of anybody other than Titus. So you might remember from one of the episodes I did on Kansas, Henry Titus was taken prisoner by New Englanders after they captured Titus Fort, which was named after him. That had taken place back in August of 1856, and it was now early February of 1857 to give you the timeline context. So again, we get a reminder of the connection between Nicaragua and the dispute over the extension of slavery in the United States. Titus was pretty arrogant after leaving Kansas, especially considering he'd surrendered his fort pretty quickly. Before leaving New Orleans, he bragged about how he and his men would secure Nicaragua in only a few days. Now, as the officers talked about attacking the fort at El Castillo, just outside of San Carlos, Titus said that he and his men would take it themselves. Double Day wrote in his memoirs that Titus was, quote, bone full of pride by the cheap reputation he had acquired in burning defenseless houses on the Missouri Kansas frontier, end quote. But the other officers relented and let Titus take his men on the rescue to attack El Castillo. As they sailed the old steamer up the river to El Castillo, the officer in charge of the garrison there, Colonel George Cotty, an Englishman, was able to watch an approach on February 16th, flying William Walker's lone star flag proudly. Up to this point, Cotty was completely unaware that the filibusters had repaired a steamer and taken some of the allied fortifications. When he saw the steamer flying Walker's flag, he ordered his drummer to signal the alarm of an impending attack. Cotty only had a handful of men at his disposal. He stationed 14 men in trenches that were dug at the base of the fort, and he led his remaining 16 Costa Rican soldiers from the ramparts above. He sent orders to the men in the trenches to destroy the two steamers that were docked in the river so that the Americans could recapture them. Titus had 140 of his men on the rescue, and they took to the shore firing as they charged the fort. As they charged, the men destroying the two steamers abandoned their work, though they'd successfully destroyed the ship machinery, and one of them was now in flames. One of the Americans cut loose the steamer that was not on fire, setting it adrift, letting the current carry it toward the other Americans downriver. The men defending the trenches fled up the hill to the fort, though one soldier and the commanding officer were killed first. Nearby, the city of El Castillo, not far from the fort, was in flames. In addition to ordering his men to destroy the steamers, he'd sent some Costa Rican soldiers into the town with torches to set fire to every building they could, causing the panicking citizens there to flee, not knowing why the town was even being destroyed. So Henry Titus surveyed the scene, watching the remaining steamer burn and slowly sink into the river, flames rising up from the nearby city, and the fort above him garrisoned by a small band of remaining soldiers, though Titus had no idea how many soldiers were actually in the fort. By the way, I'm calling it a fort, which is what it was used as at this point, but it was actually an old castle that the Spanish had built in the 17th century, called the Castle of Immaculate Conception, but sometimes it's referred to as a castle, and other times it's referred to as a fort. In any case, this is why the nearby town was called El Castillo. Titus sent a message up to the castle demanding that Cotty surrender. In response, Cotty came down to speak to the Americans themselves. Titus and Cotty drank some brandy together, and Titus offered to accept to the garrisons unconditional surrender, making a veiled threat if Cotty refused. According to the report Cotty gave later, Titus claimed to have had, quote, a large battery of cannon of great caliber mounted for the attack, and that his force consisted of 1000 men, end quote. Titus essentially was a wannabe military leader. His only experience had been leading border ruffians in Kansas, and he hadn't even actually been successful at that. Cotty, by contrast, had a very significant military experience in the British military, so it's fair to say that Cotty was able to size Titus up pretty accurately. Cotty countered Titus' bluff with one of his own. He said that he wanted to surrender, but he had to get permission from his superior at San Carlos. General Moro was a superior there. He asked Titus if he could have 24 hours to seek permission from Moro, and Titus, demonstrating that he was only an arrogant amateur, actually agreed to let Cotty send a man to San Carlos. Titus and his men made camp on the other side of the river to wait for Cotty's surrender, but of course Cotty had really sent his man with a note asking for reinforcements. Moro responded by sending 60 of the men he had at Fort San Carlos, and at 10 in the morning they ambushed Titus and his 140 filibusters, having snuck up on them from the rear. Caught by surprise, Titus' men threw down their weapons and took off, lucky enough to have a steamboat coming up river just in time to help them escape, but only after about 70 of them had been killed or wounded. On the same day that Titus originally joined up with Double Day and the others, Walker was waging his own attack. He'd gotten word that enemy soldiers had taken San Jorge, which was three miles from Rivas. Walker was worried they would take the all-important transit road, so he wanted to attack them before they could have the chance. So on February 4th, they attacked from the east at four in the morning. Catching the enemy while they were sleeping, the allied troops were jolted out of sleep, only to run into the middle of the attack in the town plaza. But even with the element of surprise on his side, Walker was too heavily outnumbered, and once the allied soldiers were able to start fighting back, Walker couldn't win. So he ordered the retreat, but it unfortunately wasn't soon enough as Cal O'Neill, the guy who went berserk in Granada after his brother had been killed, took one of the last bullets of the attack and died in Rivas two days later. O'Neill was one of Walker's originals, who'd been with him during both battles of Rivas, so this was a loss that hit closer to home than most for Walker. Shortly after this loss, he learned that 19 mounted rangers, and one of his officers had deserted, with morale at an all-time low. Walker was afraid that he would soon be losing more men to desertion than anything else, and this made it all that much more important for him to take back the San Juan River, so he could replenish his forces, though he was unaware that he already had men, such as Henry Titus, attempting to do just that on the other side of Lake Nicaragua. But after Titus had been driven off from El Castillo, Colonel Cody had another brilliant idea. He sent some volunteers on a mission to take a canoe down the river. Along the banks, they would periodically find piles of firewood that had been cut down to the size necessary to fuel the fireboxes of river steamers. His men didn't destroy the firewood, though. Instead, they had with them their own pieces of firewood taken from the supply at the fort. They then hollowed out the wood and packed the cavity they created with gunpowder, and then hammered wood plugs into the holes. They then placed these pieces of gunpowder-filled firewood in with the piles of firewood along the river. Back at the rescue, Titus and his men had abandoned Nicaragua after their embarrassing defeat, but the other Americans received yet another supply of 140 more volunteers. This brought the filibuster count on the San Juan River to about 400 fighting men. By this time, it was nearing the end of March, so the filibusters had been biding their time for more than a month after they rescued Titus. The one positive outcome of Titus' attack was that the steamer they'd cut free had drifted into the hands of the filibusters. But by this time, Samuel Lockridge, one of the officers, informed the men that he'd received word that no more recruits were expected from New Orleans. Some of the men voted to take the steamers down to Panama to try to take a longer route to Rivas to join Walker. Roughly a fourth of the troops voted to do this, including Doubleday. The other 300, staying with Lockridge, decided to take the rescue to go back to the United States. So Doubleday and the 100 men who volunteered to stay took off down the San Juan River. On the way, they stopped to replenish their firewood from the piles on the banks, included, in some of their supplies now, were some of the gunpowder-filled logs that had been planted among them. On April 2nd, at around 9 in the morning, Charles Doubleday was steering the ship on the upper deck when an explosion below sent him flying. He wasn't killed, but he found himself lying in the wreckage of the destroyed ship, his skin being scalded by the boiling water around him. He could see other men in the scalding rotter around him as well, and some men had been blown so far that they landed on the shore. Many of the bodies around him were black from gunpowder burns. One survivor gave his account of the New York Herald later, saying that he could see men running around what remained of the boat, quote, with the skin of their arms and hands hanging in strips, shrieking and groaning and begging to be put out of their misery, end quote. Then someone yelled out, the powder on the lower deck, which had not been destroyed, were two tons of gunpowder covered by tarpaulins to protect it from the rain. The tarpaulins were on fire, quickly burning its way through the fabric to the supply of gunpowder underneath. As Doubleday watched, waiting for the second explosion to finish him off, he saw Frank Anderson and Bob Wheat climb up the side of the part of the ship that wasn't destroyed and then drag the burning cover away from the gunpowder, tossing it into the river. They stopped the gunpowder from going off in an explosion that certainly would have finished off the rest of the survivors. When the total count was done, 60 men had been killed in the blast, and another 25 were severely injured from the flames and boiling water. The rescue came up behind them a little while after the explosion, picked up the few survivors, and everybody lucky enough to survive this incident made it back to the United States, never again to return to Nicaragua. The news of this explosion made it back to Walker and Rivas, and they could only speculate as to the cause of it. It's only because of our access to records from Colonel Cody that historians have been able to understand the cause of the explosion, but for the filibusters, it would forever remain a mystery. With this, Walker had once again lost complete access to the eastern United States. His men were deserting in large numbers, and he could expect no reinforcements. Some of the deserters were picked up by Allied troops and gave General Mora details about Rivas. On the southern side of the town was a house occupied by two American women. It was undefended. On April 11th, 250 Costa Ricans broke into this house. The women screamed, alerting one of Walker's officers who controlled the Hoitzer in the city plaza. The filibusters quickly surrounded the house, aiming their weapons as the coast is piled out. Walker had several men secure the rear exit of the house, blocking any retreat. The coast is surrendered, and the records give us no information as to what happened to the two women inside. Two other companies, one of 500 and the other 250 Allied troops, stormed into the plaza only to be mowed down by the filibusters. 700 were killed, and nearly all of the rest were taken prisoner. This would be Walker's final victory. It was three days after this attack on Rivas that Walker received word of the explosion on the San Juan River. With this information, he knew the war was lost. The filibusters were now effectively trapped in Rivas, surviving on subsistence rations of mule meat. Charles Henningson said, quote, a little more of this, and we'll have to start eating the prisoners, end quote. It's hard to tell how serious he was being when he said it, but he likely suspected that this would be what they would have to resort to if nothing soon changed. Luckily for everybody in Rivas, the US Navy sent a ship, the St. Mary, to Rivas on April 23rd, and the women and children were escorted by US Marines safely along the transit road to San Juan del Sur, where they were able to board a ship to California. A week later, a naval officer named Charles Davis met with Walker in Henningson, with the permission from General Zavala to peacefully secure Walker's surrender. Davis had negotiated with General Mora for permission to take the filibusters safely back to the United States, but Walker was to be left behind to be tried and executed. Davis pushed back, pointing out that the Allied Army was in poor shape itself and couldn't continue the siege on Rivas much longer, and Mora reluctantly agreed that if Walker surrendered, he could be taken back to the US alive. On May 1st, 1857, the defeated William Walker, having given his surrender, boarded the St. Mary to travel back to the United States. Now I'm not going to cover any of the rest of this story, but the spark note's conclusion is that after his defeat, Walker led two more invasions of Nicaragua, one in 1858 and the other in 1860. After the 1860 expedition, Walker was captured and executed by firing squad in Honduras. Between these last two expeditions, he wrote his memoirs, which you can still purchase on Amazon pretty cheaply. The memoirs titled The War in Nicaragua were largely written for propaganda purposes, and Walker presented himself in them as a great champion of slavery. He wanted to appeal to Southern interests by making himself seem extremely pro-slavery, though his personal history has made some historians question his sincerity on this. But the fact that he did this is important in the context of this series because it helps us to underscore the importance of the slavery controversy in understanding the 1850s. But William Walker had successfully made himself the most famous filibuster in United States history, far outshining Narciso López. Inspired by both exploits, many Southerners like John Quitman continued to push for US acquisition of Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, and other areas of Latin and Upper South America that they referred to as the Golden Circle. Quitman even lobbied for the repeal of the US neutrality law that made filibustering technically illegal. From these ambitions, the semi-secret group, known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, was formed largely in outgrowth of the earlier Order of the Lone Star. Their hope was to annex territories all over Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean, ultimately creating a new country that was safe for slavery and ran from the slave states of the United States through the Caribbean Islands and down to Venezuela. This idea, of course, would never come to see any real attempts to make their dream a reality as they really started to organize in 1858. The records claim that the group was first founded in 1854. So instead of leading filibusters, the group ended up serving as lobbyists for secession, and many of them waged guerrilla warfare against Union soldiers during the Civil War. I apologize that this detour on filibustering ran so long. I was never planning to even include this history, but I've ended up spending two months on it. So I hope you found it as interesting as I do. We will return back to the United States in the next episode, where we will learn about John Brown and his hope to take his war into Africa, as he liked to say, starting with his plan to attack Harper's Ferry, Virginia.


Hello everyone, thanks for sticking with us. My name is Arjun Kapoor and I'm pleased to be joined by Shriram Krishnan, general partner at A16Z. Shriram, great to catch up with you today. It's been a very busy time for you, A16Z. First office outside of the US has been open in London. A lot of what you're focusing on is Web 3. It is crypto, it's blockchain. Just lay out your thesis for us around these technologies. What's getting you excited? First of all, thank you so much for being here. Question for the audience, how many of you work in Web 3 crypto in any capacity? Sure, fans. Great.  Now, I just want to know, right before we came out, Arjun promised everyone here this is going to be 25 minutes of bangers and spicy content. Absolutely. So thank you. So I think the core of this is this, which is we think the internet had several errors.  That's all you could do. In the 2000s, you had user-generated content with sites like Facebook and Flickr and YouTube, where you could now write to the internet. And I think we believe this new era is about how do you actually own what you produce on the internet in many different ways? And we think blockchain technology is at the heart of making this happen. Now, obviously, a lot to unpack over there, but that is our thesis in a nutshell. Now, Sridhar, I've been covering this sector for a while. Just give us a sense of where we are in this path. Because even three, four years ago, everyone was telling me blockchain is going to revolutionize the world. It's going to change industry. It's going to hit everything. Much like the discussion around AI is right now. That hasn't really happened. So where are we on this journey? So my firm has been involved in crypto for a very, very long time. Chris Dixon, who basically runs the crypto fund, led our firm's investment in Coinbase almost a decade ago. So we've been doing this for a while. And when you do this for a while, you start to notice some patterns. And maybe the most key pattern that we notice is that this industry tends to be cyclical, where you have these waves of prices go up. And this brings a lot of application developers. It brings in usage. The prices go down. There are crypto winters, and people, the tourists leave the market, people with infrastructure, and then it repeats all over again. And we believe we are seeing a version of a crypto winter. So, and the way I would like to think about is kind of the few spaces. First of all, if you just look at the headlines, this has been a year of some negative headlines in the space. And I think if you look at, say, what happened with Binance and FTX, I think the way I think about it is, one, it's finally we have basically the rule of law prevail after a period of time. Two, we've been long-term partners of people like Coinbase, which has always been so focused on being the most compliant organization out there, really dotting the I's, crossing the T's. And also it shows that a world where founders know how to, what the rules of the road are in regulations is really the way to go. Now, that's in sort of the press headlines and the piece. And also, obviously, we really really happy at the heart of it, you want to make sure consumer funds are protected. But on the technology side, one of the interesting patterns that I see, and I suspect the people who are builders here maybe notice this, is these down markets are actually the best time to build. Because there's a lot less noise. There is a lot less things happening around you. So what if you look at some of the past down markets and down cycles, you see some of the most key piece of infrastructure come out of that. And we're actually starting to, you know, we see people, a lot of interesting infrastructure. I'm sure some people here are doing that. So, and our belief is this is going to lead to fantastic applications being built. And in terms of, you know, that's what everyone tells me. This is the best time to build. And in particular, you mentioned FTX, Binance as well. A lot of people are saying, well, this is it. We've drawn a line under the bad actors. We think, you know, they're gone now. Is that true? Has the industry learned its lesson? Do you think the majority of the bad actors have been swept out? Well, I think the two biggest question marks of the last year have been these two. And I think they've been dealt with. And you sort of saw, you know, the legal process play out. I think the core here is you need rules of the road on regulation, right? And I think we're sort of on a path to get there. And yeah, I actually think, like, you know, these are kind of like two overhanging questions, which, you know, I'm actually happy that it's kind of the end of the year. So we kind of start off 2024 with a clean state and we're excited about that. And regulation, big topic, of course, in the industry. There have been those I've spoken to. You mentioned Coinbase, Brian Armstrong over there who's told me, well, look, the U.S. is getting it all wrong. The SEC litigating against firms, being too aggressive. This is going to put the U.S. industry behind so far. There's others who say, well, look, you look at other places in the world. You look at what's happening in the UAE. You look at what's happening in Singapore, perhaps in the U.K. as well. These are forward-thinking regulators. So when it comes to regulation, what do you think is the best path forward? Do you think the U.S. is getting it wrong here? Well, I think the first question to answer is wide-regulate, right? And I think for us, we deal with builders and founders. These are usually small teams. They are technologists. They are not used to, you know, dealing with, you know, lawyers and regulations and politics. They're not used to any of that. What they really want to do is spend time building fantastic technology and fantastic applications. But to do that, you need to know what the rules of the road are, right? And these rules are important. You want to make sure consumers are protected. You want to make sure, like, the bad actors, some of the bad actors that we've seen in the last couple of years are not enabled. You need those rules, but you need clarity in those rules. And, you know, I think that's a place where the U.S. has not done the best job, where I think a lot of the regulation enforced, it has been more regulation by enforcement than being prescriptive. And this is also, you know, one of the reasons why we've been excited by it's very, very early stages, by the environment in the U.K. and some other places. But at the heart of it, you know, if you kind of remember nothing else, we are really about how do we get builders to just focus on building amazing technology and giving them the exact rules of the road and with clarity on how to do that. Okay. So just with that in mind, I mean, why now for the U.K. expansion? So first, as a firm, we have been involved in the U.K. for a very, very long time. We have invested in multiple companies over there. We invested in companies like TransferWise and there are several others. And that means that we've got a chance to study the U.K. over the long period of time. And we now know a few things. But how many people here are from the U.K.? Okay, several. Okay, awesome, right? Like, make sure you all contact me afterwards. I want to hear from all of you. So, well, I think what hopefully the folks here, you know, are examples of is the U.K. has fantastic academic institutions, fantastic talent, and we've been fortunate to partner with a lot of them as founders, as people who kind of work in the companies that we work with. So we know that. You know, second is we find that the U.K. is a place that is very livable. A lot of people want to come live there, build businesses. We also knew that. And I think the third piece is we think there is an opportunity with Web 3 where the U.K. has kind of shown some very, very positive steps to actually have this regularity clarity. So if you get that, what happens is with the first two pieces, I think the U.K. has a real opportunity to build amazing companies and to really plant the flag for innovation as a startup hub. So all of these came together. So it's why we, a couple of months ago, we announced, actually four months ago, we announced that we're opening our very first office outside of the United States in London, which I'm heading up. And not only that, we announced a few other things. The first is we are announced that we are going to run our crypto startup school program. This is our incubator where we put out a call for applications. We did this in Santa Monica earlier this year. We're doing it in London next year. We get thousands and thousands of applications. We pick a couple of dozen of the best ones. We give them a few hundred K each. And then for a couple of months, they come in, they get mentorship, resources, and, you know, really kind of like things which is really hard to get. So we're doing that in London, which is kind of a sign of our testament, kind of like a sign of like our confidence in the UK. Outside of that, we've been lucky, kind of like unknowns over the last year. We've made investments in a couple of UK-based companies as well. So yeah, we're very, very, very bullish on the UK. And now I'm in the one of London's newest residents. I want to ask you more about how you view UK startups, their innovation, etc. But first, I want to have to get your response to this. And there was an article written in the FT by Sineado Sullivan, a former senior researcher at Harvard Business School's Institute for Strategy and Competence. I don't know if you saw this, but the headline was about your expansion to the UK. And it was a question, is this a marriage of crypto-venience? Sineado argued, right? She argued that you've got $7 billion fund or more than $7 billion fund raised during a lot of it during a low interest rate environment where things were going good. Then you had the downturn. The US is now getting tougher on crypto. So, you know, this diversification was almost forced. You've come back to, you know, one of the only non-regulated place of crypto, i.e., the UK. How do you respond to that? Is that fair? I think one of the things people often don't understand about what we do is that we are in the long-term relationship business. So, if you look at something like, say, Coinbase, we have a 10-year history, right? Roughly a decade. And that's not the crypto with all of our firm. So, when we do something like this, this is meant to be a long-term relationship. The companies that, you know, we wind up partnering with, looking at, grabbing a coffee with, this might be yours in the making. So, I think sometimes when I, you know, when I read pieces like that, I think they fundamentally misunderstand what we do. We are not traders. We're not looking at prices going up and down. We are technologists trying to partner with companies that may often take four, five, six, seven, eight years to become something. So, this is for us a long-term sort of commitment to the UK. And look, it's very, very early days. Lots of things would happen. But, you know, as sort of, we're just talking backstage, one of London's newest residents, I've been enjoying meeting the fantastic startup community over there. Probably some people, folks over here, too. And how do you find the startups there out of London in terms of their level of innovation versus, say, you know, what you are seeing in the US and other parts of Europe as well? Well, I think one of the things about venture capital is, you know, ultimately, in some ways, you offer a commodity product, like you have capital. And so what do you need is to draw talent. Like, without talent, you really can't do anything, right? Like, I'm not building products. I'm not building companies. It is the founders that we partner with the building companies. And I've been so heartened by the founders I've met here, you know, and we've been meeting everybody early because you casually just meet people working on Web3, working on AR, working all these other spaces. And the best part for me has been, everyone has been so welcoming and warm. You know, to me personally, to my family, to the firm, they just, they've been very helpful and supportive. And the local startup community is really supportive.  Like, you know, I think they hopefully sense that we are in this for a long term for many, many, many years. And yeah, it's been very, very, it's only been a few months, but you know, I've been very excited. Yeah, there's probably a few people in the audience who put their hands up at the start, founders, people in these crypto companies wondering, well, what kind of companies are you funding? What's the profile? You know, we're in an environment, you mentioned it, crypto winter, maybe a crypto spring now, but are you being more discerning? Are you looking for companies that have a bit more profitability? Are you looking for companies that are being a little bit more careful in the way they're spending? Give us a profile of the type of, and is it certain parts of the stack when it comes to blockchain and Web3 you're looking at? Well, I think our approach in the UK is going to be probably our approach where what it is everywhere else, which is we are a very broad multi-stage capital firm. We are essentially technologists. You know, what we really look at is what is the technology underpinning one of these? But once you get that question, we go up and down the stack. Like, we have investments starting with layer ones to layer twos to when you go up to the app layer, we look at everything from gaming to decentralized media to I'm a big fan of decentralized social media. So we look at it all. But I think the core of what we do is technology. So if you're building interesting technology, I want to talk to you. That's interesting. Decentralized social media. Someone remarked to me earlier, they were from the crypto industry saying, you know, I'm not really at this kind of conference. It's very Web2. Web3, the promise is that we get decentralized social media. I've heard theories that actually what happens in Web3 because of this decentralization is the power that the Facebooks and the Googles of the world hold begins to be disintegrated. Is that a view you hold or is there more to it? Is there a bit more nuance? Look, I spent the majority of the last decade personally working in some of these companies and so I respect a lot of what they've done. But the truth is the internet is really sort of controlled by a few large social media platforms and a lot of us as users don't have a lot of say. For example, how many of you use Instagram? Pretty much everybody. Now, if someday if Instagram decides to delete your account, you probably have no recourse against it. About six, seven months ago, we had the TikTok CEO testify about the usage of algorithms. But is there a way to look inside the box? Is there a way to build an alternative client to TikTok or Instagram or YouTube? I'm not picking on anyone here, true for every one of these players. You can't build an alternative. You can't appear inside the box. When it comes to decently social media, it really is throwback to an earlier era of the internet. In the 90s, when I grew up, I used to write code which built my own email client and which could talk to any email provider I wanted to. You can't do that with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, any one of these. And decently social gives you a right of alternatives, which is you can build your own client.  I'll give you an example. And this is obviously, I'm very biased, but one of the companies I work with is a company called Forecaster, which we're investors in, is a decently social network. Now, I highly encourage everyone here to go check it out, download it, use it. But one of the things you will find is that there is absolutely nothing the forecaster team can do to take away your account, right? And there's nothing they can do to stop you from building an alternative. That is not true with any of the other platforms that I just mentioned. And that is real power in that. What it brings is any developer here today can build an alternative experience without needing an API key, without needing to talk to a VP of BD or partnerships, and it really just explodes innovation. Imagine if somebody had to build email in the 90s and you get an API key and there was throttle limit, throttle. We wouldn't have had a lot of the technology we take for, I don't know. And I think, and I use Spark as an example, but I think a lot of Web 3 is about bringing back that promise of permissionless innovation, right? We promise fireworks. We promise some spice in this session. We've got 10 minutes left. Oh, dear. So we've got Twitter, OpenAI, Bitcoin, and you're meeting with the king left in 10 minutes. I'm suddenly having technical difficulties here again. So because you're talking about social media, let's get to the current landscape of social media, X, or formerly known as Twitter, under Elon Musk. Last night, he went on an expletive ridden tirade telling advertisers to effectively go to F themselves was his words. What's happening with Elon Musk? What's happening with X? What do you make of his running of the company? I've done a few of these where somebody always asks me what does Elon Musk mean? And my standard response is if you want to know what Elon means, there's one guy, he's at Elon Musk on ask, you should go ask him, right? Because he speaks for himself. Here's what I'll broadly say. We're obviously super fortunate, thrilled as a firm to work with him. And I was personally involved with Elon as well. He brings up about change. And if you look at the last year of X, look at community notes, look at the fact that you can now upload videos full-time.  Last couple of months, they have been very serious hefty world events. X is maybe one of the best places to go consume content on it. Like, how much time do you spend on X every day? Less now. It's becoming difficult to use at times. And what else do you spend more time on? Well, started dabbling with some of the other things, right? Threads and Instagram, whatever else is out there. Well, when I ask people this question, what I find is that when something important happens, like open AI or something, they always come back to X because that's where the action is. And look, Elon is a person who's built multiple world-changing companies. This is early innings and he's not shy. He's not boring. And I'll leave it at that. Look, at the end of the day, as a business, it's an ad business at the end of the day still as much as he wants to turn it into the everything app, etc. It's an ad business, advertisers have run away. The valuation he paid for is halved. Revenues are getting difficult at the moment. From a business perspective, this doesn't look like good business. Yesterday's tirade felt like a person under pressure. Well, I think, look, these are, again, and you should probably ask Elon or Linda these. I will say one of the things, when I was at Twitter, one of the things we struggled with was we used to have this sort of joke in there that with Twitter, you can influence world governments, but sometimes you can't sell ads. In the sense that the value of Twitter wasn't really captured by the business model. And one of the things I've loved about what Elon has done is diversified the products that Twitter now has. You now have subscriptions where I don't have a subscription where people, you know, it's like a dollar a month, so it's meant to be sort of the lowest price point where others are making money from it, where people can actually subscribe to what I have. And I see a lot of podcasters now use X full-time to be like, I'm now going to have a legitimate business, right? And you're now seeing all these other things that he's building on top. For example, I just started to play with Grok the other day, which is obviously built on top of X as well. So what I think I like about Elon is he stands, and look, if you listen to him, he says anything, he stands for rapid change.  Some of them will work. Some of them won't work. Some of them people here will like. Some of them you won't like, but there's always going to be change, right? And I think that's how that's been at the key of how I've seen succeed at Tesla, at space, other companies. And yeah, so we'll see. But you know, I'm still on X as much, if not more than I was last year. Okay, let's get back to the crypto markets and I want your macro view going into sort of next year as well. What part of the cycle?  What part of the cycle are we at at the moment? We've got, you know, the FTX and Binance issues drawn a line under, you've got people excited about potentially less aggressive central banks next year, the halving for Bitcoin next year, maybe an ETF. Where are we in the latest cycle, would you say? Well, the first thing I'll say is like, I don't have a crystal ball and I can't make predictions. And these things are very, very hard to predict with any accuracy. But what we can do is look at how these patterns have played out previously and see what lessons are there from us. So one, as you said, you know, sort of the two big sort of shoes that were overhanging crypto, which was FTX and Binance, it feels like they've been resolved in some capacity. And obviously there's going to be like a process that plays out these, but you know, there's a liberal underlining that has happened underneath them. For me, as a technologist, I look at technology, right? Like if you look at, for example, what happened at NFTs in the last cycle, that is because people built the standard of ERC 271 and that enabled all this amazing innovation, which wound up happening. So I look at all the things that people are doing to make crypto faster, cheaper, easier to use. Like for example, just use one example, account obstruction, which for those of you in crypto, you might have been following, like that's super exciting because that means you now have projects which can say, hey, I will pay for users gas fees when they use this. And I would make the word experience a lot easier in ways that wasn't possible before. So I'm a consumer app person. I think crypto's adoption lies in things which are easy, fast, cheap to use. And for me, I'm seeing a lot of these infrastructure being built out, which hopefully you then see amazing consumer applications that you can download on your phone and use. So I think we've been seeing some very good infrastructure being built out. So you're sort of less interested in the price at the moment of these crypto? I think prices come and go and obviously they play a part in people's psychology, but the technology is what motivates me and it's that technology is why I'm in the space. But as you look at the space, you know, when things are going well, funding's easier and people are very excited about when you look at sort of some of the developments next year and particularly this ETF, does that change the game at all for where you're investing or not? Not for us because again, you know, we are not traders. We are long-term technologist investors.  So when you have the view, you have to really nicely take the long-term view as opposed to react to what is happening in the moment. So I don't think that really influences that. Every meeting we have with the founder is very similar. We're like, who is this person? What have they built in the past? What have they been able to do? What is the technology? What is the use case? That's what we've always been focused on. We're still going to be focused on. Great. Shriram, we've got about three minutes or so left. So we'll just bring this discussion to a close with a couple of other very interesting topics. Open AI. This is the gossip section of the chat. What do you think happened there with Sam, all of them, and the whole board? I know no more or no less than any of you folks. Like everyone, I was on X watching. By the way, did your usage of X go up during that week? Yeah. I mean, there's been so much happen when we're using it. Yeah. Yeah. I just like to point out that all the principle players were tweeting or exposing all the time. So even some people who said they don't like Elon had to come back and get back on X. So I'll just leave it there. But I will say, look, I don't know anything more than anybody here. I do think it's sort of a good... One of the things I'm a big fan of is decentralization and open source. Without open source decentralization, I wouldn't have had my career. I wouldn't have been the skin in India who could build things. I think more options, more open source is good. And I think what this shows is that you need more alternatives, right? You need more open source alternatives where if you disagree with the governance, maybe you can download from GitHub and go make it your own. So look, I don't know anything more than what has been said on X. But I do think this kind of leads people to understand why open source decentralization is important, not just in AI, but probably for like every space. That's fascinating, because earlier this year there was a leaked memo from a Google researcher who basically said, look, Google, open AI, we have no moat because... Or almost no moat because at the end of the day, open source is a real challenger, potentially, to what we're doing with large language models and these foundational models as well. That's a big debate playing out here in Europe as well. Do you think right now a lot of the US tech companies are getting the sort of big limelight around AI technology? Do you think Europe has a shot? Absolutely. And by the way, I have a lot of tweets on this topic if folks are interested. I think, look, if I was in sort of a European regulator or a UK-based regulator, I look at like, what do we have? We have amazing founders, amazing talent, a lot of people in AI, and I would say what helps them. And I think open source fundamentally helps them because all the large AI companies happen to be in the US. So what I would do is one, I'm very bullish on all the AI talent that I'm seeing. I don't spend much time on AI. I have other partners who do. I spend all my time crypto, but the people I've seen or heard of I think are fantastic. And if I were in Europe or the UK, I would be doing as much as I can to really sort of encourage more open source AI and make sure there's not regulatory capture where a few large companies can dominate how we all use AI. Shriram, in your short time in the UK, you've already met Royalty just in the last week or so. You met His Majesty King Charles in the UK. What's his view on Bitcoin? Well, you'd be surprised to hear it's zero, zero is proof. No, I'm kidding. It was a real honor to meet His Majesty. It was part of an event where several of us who are investors in the UK got to talk about our sort of outlook on what we see and why we're bullish on the UK in general. And look, it was a life highlight. He was so kind and generous to ask about my family. He was very thrilled that we are here in the UK, but it's a pure life highlight. But I'll say this, and maybe the Indians in the audience can understand this. Nothing has made me more popular in my in-laws WhatsApp group. Because my in-laws do not know venture capital. They do not know crypto or Web 3, but the king, they understand. And it was a true highlight, a true honor, and it was absolutely everything I could have hoped for. Well, Shriram, it's been an honor to sit with you and speak this past 25 minutes. Thank you for your insights, taking all the questions from OpenAI to Elon Musk to crypto and what's beyond a round of applause for our wonderful speaker, Shriram Krishnan from A16Z. See you back on next.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's CaseBreaks.com coming out to you with a Salo Pack of 21-22 Prison Basketball. This will sell out 21-22 Prison Choice Basketball. So a similar theme here. This is break number 27. Let's do the break first. Big thanks to this group for making it happen. All teams are in. Let's roll it. Flames and teams 6-6, 12 times each, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. I mean I think if you're an employee of a sports team and you unfollow your own team, that might actually mean something, right? I mean that's a conscious thing that you're doing. For whatever reason that is. T-Wolves down to Raptors. Alright so here's the first half of the list right here, second half of the list right over there. Now if Joe Jaspy unfollowed Justin Fields, no one cares about that. If Joe Jaspy unfollows at Jaspy's breaks on Twitter and or Instagram, there might be some eyebrow raised emojis happening here. Alright, here's the final printout, hot off the presses. Now whether that means Fields get traded or not, I mean that's obviously a completely different thing, but there's some sort of passive aggressiveness about it. Well the Bears have given him a chance, Rex. They just haven't given him good coaching, good players, good support, good offensive line. They haven't given him any of that. Danny Avizia Green, alright nothing too crazy here, what about in here? And a rookie red, white, and blue Aaron Wiggins, alright nothing too crazy there, but let's see who's going to win those two teams for a fraction of the price and put themselves in the running for break credit. Let's gather everybody's names here, new dice, new list, just the top two. Top name gets the Laker, second name gets the Cavs. Let's roll it and randomize it six and a four, ten times, top two after ten, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Now from three through 30, sad times, but I appreciate all of you getting in on it. Thankfully it was only 5.99 a spot. Top two, you're in the next break, prism choice, Allen you're in, Brandon you're in. So Brandon you got the Lakers, Allen you have the Cavs in the next break, boom there you go, and a shot at some break credit. I'm Joe, I'll see you in the next video.


In Excel of what you know a paycheck might look like just do it a quick register Just so you can kind of imagine the accounts that would be impacted from an accounting standpoint So I'm just gonna format this Excel worksheet. Just do this fairly quickly and I'm just gonna say this is gonna be What am I doing here numbers? currency boom boom, let's say This no decimals for now and so I'm just gonna say all right let's say we've got Employee one and employee number two and I'm gonna say the earnings earnings for so employee one generic employee one and employee two Generic employee two. Let's say that the earnings are Hold on. I put this way down here. What happened? Let's delete that. Let's make it bold So let's say employee one earns one thousand $200 for whatever pay period a week or whatever we're doing and then we're gonna say that the withholdings will at least be The withholdings for for taxes the federal taxes So that's FIT federal income tax, which is based on the tables you get from the W4 information and so on Quickbooks, hopefully will help you to deliver the W4 and the employee can kind of do that So I'm just gonna make up another a number here. Let's say it's like 180 or something and then we're gonna say that we have the social Security, which is right now. I believe it's something like this times point oh six two That's the employee portion and then we're gonna have the Medicare Which I might misspell that's gonna be something like this times the point oh 145 and then you might have state taxes you might have other withholdings that you have to put in there As well for like 401k voluntary withholdings and so on but just as a simple scenario. Let's do this and say this is the net check So the net check is going to be the sum of these So that's how much the check is going to be for let's say employee to earn 2,500 and let's say the withholdings for FIT are are 230 and then this is negative this times 0.062 this is negative this times negative times 10145 and then I'll sum this up and Then we have the total for all of our employees. I'll sum this up this way and So boom there we have our total that I can add down like this sum up like that and We can also double check it adding this way. So so there's our numbers. I'm gonna make this like centered Let's make it black and white on the headers. Let's put a bracket around this Just so we can see it a little better. Let's put an underline here so So we can kind of visualize this if I did this internally within QuickBooks Then I would have to have the detail for each individual Employee in terms of their earnings on a pay cheque check by paycheck And on a year-to-date basis so I can provide it to them But if I'm having an external payroll provider do it then I really only need the total That's gonna be going into my into my system so that I can get my financial statements correct And the payroll provider can kind of do everything else now if I was to record this into the system then in Total you would say okay the net cheque is going down by 3,007 so if I go back on over here cat cash would go down, of course by 3,007 you got to be a little bit careful of that because when it's coming through the bank feeds We can see that it's gonna actually be two checks that are gonna be for this amount in this amount But total cash is going down by 307 You've got to be careful of that so that when you do the bank Reconciliations you can reconcile them and that's where the bank feeds can come in and then we're gonna have a liability Which will be these three? Which adds up to six ninety three? So that's gonna be the six ninety three in the liabilities area of six ninety three and And then you're gonna have the difference That's gonna be the net check and then the three thousand seven hundred that's gonna be what's on the income statement as Earnings so you've got payroll or wages so wages. Let's see this way Wages will be three thousand seven hundred Expense and then the cash will be going down in total by the three oh seven and then the liabilities should go up by this six six ninety three if I did a journal entry for it for example payroll Expense if I just do debits and credits would be going up by this and then Payroll, it's not pay roll Liabilities Would be going up in the credit direction for the sum of these and then we've got Check-in account would be going down by that right and then We also have the employer portion of taxes so in employer Taxes which we have to match social security medicare and we might have futa to but just We have at the minimum social security Medicare for our two employees and You can then sum it up this way for the total and Sum it up this way and Then you can sum it up this way if you wanted and Sum it up across like this Boom and you can double-check it by adding these two. So there's our total Liabilities, so then you would also have payroll Payroll tax expense, which is our portion of The taxes debit and then once again payroll liabilities I know those misspellings and whatnot all over the place, but that's the general Payroll transaction that would happen and you can record it on an employee by Influentee basis which you would have to do if you were doing it internally or you can record it as a total Which you might do if the payroll was done by an external Payroll provider and you're just trying to enter the system into your system in such a way that your financial statements will be Correct. However, you got a note that as they clear the bank They're gonna be two checks here So when you do the bank Reconciliations possibly with the help of the bank feeds that's gonna be something that you got to kind of be aware of so that you can Properly reconcile, but that's the general idea now note that it it might be possible I it is possible if you're if you're working with a third-party provider to even say hey look I want to be on a cash-based system as much as possible So instead of me taking your reports that might look something like this and Recording the transactions looking something like this periodically I'm just gonna wait till everything clears the bank and I'm just gonna record it to one account called like payroll expense Which is misspelled up here, but like payroll expense. So that would mean When the checks clear the bank I see that check clearing the bank I'm just gonna record it to payroll expense decrease the cash the other side's payroll expense I'm just gonna record this to payroll expense and then when we pay off the liabilities I'm gonna wait and just record these to payroll expense as well so that you can automate the system on The bookkeeping side. So if you're a bookkeeper and you're saying I'm trying to automate everything I just want to record everything the payroll expense and then at the end of the year you or Your CPA or tax preparer as well as your payroll provider can then say okay I'm gonna get the payroll reports from my payroll provider Breaking out the unit date information that looks something like this And I need to get that to the CPA or tax preparer So they can make my financial statements correct at least for tax preparation and possibly for external reporting possibly just on a yearly basis and they can then make the adjustment necessary based on these reports to account for to account for the Liabilities as of the cutoff date 1231 the end of the year to account for the breakout between payroll taxes and payroll expense If necessary for tax preparation purposes, you know at the end of the year So these are just some ideas that you can you can go through if you're a bookkeeper or or you're thinking about adding the payroll