Communist coffee hits NYC, RIP Hulu, GPT-5 arrives and more | E2161

Today's show: It's a brand-new PACKED episode of TWiST. Jason and Alex welcome guest Zach Dive of Adam.new, to tell us why he made a deepfake AI ad starring Jason and the All-In besties. PLUS a rundown of the biggest tech and startup news of the day, including Disney's decision to sunset Hulu, OpenAI's new open-weight models, the Cloudflare vs. Perplexity feud, Uber's newly-announced stock buyback, China's Luckin Coffee coming to Manhattan, and much much more! Timestamps: (0:00) Luckin Coffee hits NYC… along with COMMUNISM?! (09:15) Is China taking on major American brands on PURPOSE? (10:16) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (11:29) Show Continues… (20:17) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech (21:30) Show Continues… (26:02) RIP HULU: Why Disney is sunsetting the iconic app. (28:37) Nostracanis Returns: Jason's 2017 Disney vs. Netflix predictions came true (30:24) . TECH - Say it without saying it. Head to www.get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today. (31:28) Show Continues… (35:39) Zach Dive of Adam.new joins to tell us about making a viral deepfake ad starring JCal and the Besties (44:10) Zach shares thoughts on AI and copyright, and why it's a problem for the "big dogs," not him… yet (48:12) Jason wants to wet his beak… but is there room in the Adam.new seed round? (53:07)OpenAI's new models are open-WEIGHT; how that's different from open-source. (58:36) Do Nvidia and Apple devices NEED kill switches and backdoors? Why it's such a tough question. (01:02:10) GPT-5 arrives TOMORROW?! (01:03:31) Cloudflare vs. Perplexity… let them fight? Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (10:16) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (20:17) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech (30:24) . TECH - Say it without saying it. Head to www.get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today. Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  It's been done, so maybe, I mean, I listen, I don't, I don't ascribe any bad intent here, but you, you thought people wouldn't be confused? I would, I would say the majority were not confused, but hey, you're confused a few people. But you explicitly did it with the TechCrunch one to confuse people. So let's call it what it is. You're hacking media to confuse people to get attention, correct?

• 0:20Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers and get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io/twist. CLA: Innovation takes balance. Our CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at claconnect.com/tech. And .tech: say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today.

• 1:02Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis, back home in Austin, Texas. Had a great dinner last night with my team, my growing team. I don't know how many people we're up to, but man, launch is growing. With me again today, Alex Wilhelm, you know, from TechCrunch, cautiousoptimism.news. Is that right?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Nailed it. First try, Jason. I'm so proud.

• 1:27Jason Calacanis?

  Cautiousoptimism.news. I got it posted up. Go ahead. I think you should go to your, your daily right now, right?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, five days a week.

• 1:35Jason Calacanis?

  Not the right move. I need deeper insights from you. I'm going to just give, I'm going to be your editor in chief. I think you should go to two or three days a week. Let the news build up.

• 1:49Jason Calacanis?

  Cause the news is a commodity now, all the bullet points, Alex. And I think what people would rather have is your insight, your take. So I am going to give you permission.

• 2:01Jason Calacanis?

  To run an experiment, it's your choice, obviously, it's your business. To try that for August. Alex's analysis. Because when I see you cover the bullet points, I'm finding I know 80% of what you're saying. You're just taking the time to type it. But I don't care about that. I know the headline. Your readers are so in the know that I think you should just do the headline. Alex's analysis.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I will, I will, I will play with this and I'll let you know how it goes. Thank you for the idea.

• 2:31Jason Calacanis?

  It's just an experiment.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  I love experiments.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Is there a shorter version? Alex analysis? I feel like we're almost at something. We've almost got to there.

• 2:38Jason Calacanis?

  Alex's analysis. Two idiots, Lon and I do all day is brain games and make memes and do jokes.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Trying to come up with puns.

• 2:49Jason Calacanis?

  All day long, all day long. That's our life, the life we've chosen. All right. And with me, of course, Lon Harris.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody.

• 2:55Jason Calacanis?

  Our editorial director. You know, we had a great meeting last night with our team.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01Jason Calacanis?

  One thing I realized is we need to, you know, I have the pilot, co-pilot concept.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  What do you mean by the pilot, co-pilot concept?

• 3:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's something I learned in management. I used to have very few resources. So I would staff, we used to say man, but I would staff. Now I staff, I don't man. You understand why, Alex?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Yes, because your team is majority women.

• 3:25Jason Calacanis?

  That's absolutely true. And I have three daughters. So I say staff, we staff it.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I'm with you. I appreciate that.

• 3:33Jason Calacanis?

  I'm teaching people. I'm teaching them. There was a period in time where at the, we had a woman who would come, an investor who would come to our accelerator. And every time somebody used the wrong gender pronouns or whatever, when she would give them a review of their business, she would start with like a five-minute lecture. You said, sales guys, I would like you to know that there are women who work in. It was just like, it was like clockwork. It was just like, oh my God, these poor founders. So I had to like do a thing, like when she would come and say, I just want you all to know that there are firefighters, not firemen. They're firefighters. Like you gotta, you gotta understand the non-gender words.

• 4:17Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, all right, there's a lot in the news. I like coffee.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Got a big coffee story.

• 4:24Jason Calacanis?

  We got a big coffee story today because. I remember a great fraud that had occurred with something called Luckin Coffee. And Alex remembers it as well, but this incredible baked books, which, you know, baking the books in China is, I don't want to be derogatory here, but it's not uncommon. Let's just say that. It wouldn't be like a shocker that somebody had put their thumb on the scale. So they had some sort of accounting scandal.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 4:53Jason Calacanis?

  But the news now is that they're launching in New York.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 4:57Jason Calacanis?

  And that this meme has merged with the socialism meme, which means I'm interested. Coffee and socialism, let's go.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  You and every undergraduate poetry student loves coffee and socialism. So yes, you summarize Luckin, they're a Chinese coffee house chain founded in Beijing in 2017. They have been rapidly expanding over the last few years. Luckin stores in mainland China now outnumber Starbucks, which is an incredible stat to think about. They are opening two locations in Manhattan, Greenwich Village, and Chelsea. Now, as you mentioned, Luckin was accused of accounting fraud in early 2020. They denied it, but then later, after investigations, the company did admit to falsifying around $310 million worth of 2019.

• 5:50Jason Calacanis?

  Say it again.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  310.

• 5:52Jason Calacanis?

  How many million?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Million. $310 million worth of 2019.

• 5:56Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of coffee.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  That is a lot of coffee. How do you even fake that much? You gotta fake buying all those beans, brewing all of those cups of coffee. Like, that's a lot.

• 6:05Jason Calacanis?

  I can tell you a million ways to run a scam like this. It's pretty simple. I mean, you just say, you count the number of cups and then somebody at the manager at the end of the shift who refreshes them just takes 50 cups, puts 50 extra. Sales in the register and you can count it out.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  I guess so. The company got hit in China. They wound up going through bankruptcy procedures in 2021. They emerged from bankruptcy.

• 6:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Emerged from bankruptcy in early 2022, and that was when they started this new international push. So they've expanded to Singapore and Malaysia already. And now here they are. They have landed in the US of A. Their 2025 Q2 earnings showed 47% year-over-year growth. 1.72 billion in total revenue and GAAP operating income of 237 million, 26,206 locations around the world. That's a lot. That's a lot of coffee.

• 7:06Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of coffee. Now, this has become quite successful for a number of reasons. One is price.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:16Jason Calacanis?

  They've realized that sugar, milk, ice, and coffee, none of those ingredients in and of themselves are particularly expensive.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:26Jason Calacanis?

  So they have run the price down.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  They also have another leg up, a variety of drinks. Like, they have a lot. It's some of the TikToks we saw compared it, it's almost more like a boba shop with their variety of different kinds of drinks than just a coffee house. So a lot of those drinks probably have less expensive ingredients than coffee in them. So you can also cut the price there.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yes. And I just want to add here that there's a difference between the way we think of coffee shops here in the States, or probably Europe as well, and the way Lucken operates in China. It's mostly a mobile ordering experience, and then you arrive, pick up your drink, and leave. So you can have higher efficiency stores, and therefore, Jason, lower prices. So it's not a place where you have newspapers laying around, Starbucks chairs.

• 8:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's not a third space. It's not a European experience where you drink out of a ceramic cup. And that's super interesting. When you think about it culturally, in Europe, to ask for a to-go cup is like, they're like, why? Just drink your coffee and enjoy the moment.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Relax. Smoke three cigarettes. Enjoy your coffee.

• 8:31Jason Calacanis?

  Why not? Sure. Just pop it out. Why not pop it out? So, Rachel Impact, boys.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 8:38Jason Calacanis?

  I'm overdecking now.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Now, it's a show. For those of you watching at home. Three-hour show. Now, it's a show.

• 8:44Jason Calacanis?

  So, and then America, we got used to, yeah, like having a third space, place to work.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  On Starbucks was always very explicit about it's like an Italian coffee shop. The drinks have Italian names. It's that leisurely European vibe. Sit down, grab a comfy chair. And yeah, we've, we've talked about how that is a little bit out of step with the times that we're in when people want to like go into Starbucks, get their drink and go. And now you're in line behind eight kids who want unicorn frappuccinos. And now it's your whole afternoon. So lucking is a different experience.

• 9:17Jason Calacanis?

  What's been the reaction to this in my hometown? I wonder.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  I mean, on one level, they're embracing it. They were doing pop ups. They got those long lines, just like you always do when you have Instagram friendly pop up social media experiences. People don't want to miss out. What is this new matcha thing people are drinking? But there has also been a little bit of a pushback about the Communist China origins of the company. And people are making connections to the candidacy of Zoran Mamdani, the democratic socialist candidate who has taken over New York.

• 9:52Jason Calacanis?

  And where are they expressing these opinions? I'm just gonna, I'm wondering, where would a young socialist in New York comment on the Communist Coffee Company?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, it's all happening on TikTok. As, as we say so often on the show.

• 10:08Jason Calacanis?

  Who owns TikTok?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  A Chinese company called ByteDance with connections to the Chinese.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  And Jeff Yass.

• 10:18Jason Calacanis?

  When you're a busy founder, finding a new developer, my God, that can become a full time job and you've got enough on your plate. I mean, you're running a startup, but lemon.io has done the hard part for you already. They've got a crop of pre-vetted developers that they've ensured are experienced, results oriented and prepared to make an impact at your startup. And they can work right now at competitive rates. These are skilled, handpicked devs with a minimum of three years of on the job experience. And just 1% of applicants are accepted into their program. Lemon.io. Isn't just recruiting you the top talent that's out there. They're helping you integrate them into your team.

• 11:00Jason Calacanis?

  If anything goes wrong, Lemon will find you a replacement developer ASAP. And many of our launch founders and founder university companies have staffed up with lemon.io and we always get the best feedback. So go to lemon.io/twist and find the perfect developer or even a tech team in less than 48 hours. And Twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. Stop burning money, hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io/twist.

• 11:31Jason Calacanis?

  So the CCP, the Chinese Communist Coffee Producers own.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  The Chinese Coffee Party.

• 11:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, they own the TikTok.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  The caffeinated Chinese Coffee Party.

• 11:44Jason Calacanis?

  Coffee company. And now they're going to own New York City.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  They're coming. I mean, they're.

• 11:49Jason Calacanis?

  They're coming for New York, folks.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  It's a little bit aggressive. Do you want to see? We've got some of these TikToks we can take a look.

• 11:54Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, we do have TikToks. Okay.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  We can look at a few luck in TikToks.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  All right. So we have some options here, Lon. We have the official announcement one. We have the local news coverage and then we have the woman in the Hammer and Sickled jersey.

• 12:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm going with three.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Hammer and Sickled jersey. Do it.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  We got options. We got options.

• 12:13Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody get their daughter.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  All right, here we go. Let's do it, boys.

• 12:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here we go.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Hey, guys. Come with me to get a $2 cup of Communist Coffee.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  This specific coffee shop.

• 12:27Jason Calacanis?

  This is great.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Has more locations in China than Starbucks does. Um, okay, I'm going to come back to make a video there later. But no, this company went through a $300 million accounting scandal where they faked their profits because capitalism sucks. And then they started paying their workers and putting the money back into the coffee and what actually matters. And now they're more successful than Starbucks. European family that doesn't know how to walk on the sidewalk.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  She's so New York.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Of course this location is right by NYU campus.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Should've paid your workers.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  If you're from New York, you know how close the strip to Starbucks is. So the fact that the first Chinese communist coffee shop is on this strip is crazy.

• 13:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's right up Broadway.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  This is the very first store in the US.

• 13:14Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, they numbered it.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  And I got the iced coconut latte.

• 13:17Jason Calacanis?

  Iced coconut latte?

• 13:18Speaker 02

  That sounds good. They also have a pineapple?

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Time for a little review.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  That sounds disgusting.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  She's beautiful, and it is full of finance bros in here, but the barista complimented my shirt, so... We see each other. Recycling with no waste.

• 13:35Jason Calacanis?

  Alright. No, wait, no, no, you missed the bagger. There's a total bagger in here.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, we gotta keep going, Alex.

• 13:41Jason Calacanis?

  You gotta keep going, because this is like... Amazing. Now, is she... is that like a European accent?

• 13:48Speaker 03

  The beginning of Chinese companies coming to the US.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  No, I think she's a New Yorker, this girl.

• 13:52Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sensing like, uh...

• 13:55Speaker 03

  They're better at capitalism than you are.

• 13:57Jason Calacanis?

  Oh! Did you hear that one? Rewind that little bit. This is her best line. This girl's all banger. This young lady is all bangers all the time. Wait, I'm sorry. I spoke over it. Go ahead, one more time.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  This be the beginning of Chinese companies coming to the US and disrupting the market and being better than American companies even though it's literally a communist country. They're better at capitalism than you are.

• 14:19Jason Calacanis?

  Ooh, that stung. That stung. She got me on that one. She's right.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Jangita. This is Jangita on TikTok, by the way. D-J-A-N-G-I-T-A.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Now, this isn't like any other coffee... I think I have. And this is also just in time for the Dunkin' boycott because not every company needs to be talking about eugenics in their advertisements.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  Ooh, she's taking out Starbucks Dunkin'. Capitalism.

• 14:46Jason Calacanis?

  Go on, girl. You go.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Making lots of enemies today.

• 14:50Jason Calacanis?

  Smooth, okay. Smooth you can.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  It goes down like super smooth, like it's just.

• 14:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, socialism usually does go down smoothly at first.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:58Jason Calacanis?

  The other side that you gotta worry about.

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot to take away from this, I think. I'm sending this to my guy JD Vance. I'm gonna send this to JD Vance. Because this feels like this is the beginning of a MAGA angle that we could go after here, which is that the Chinese companies undercutting American brands. Let's just let this sink in for a second.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  What we saw.

• 15:24Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Oh, I was just gonna say, fast fashion. We did see this.

• 15:28Jason Calacanis?

  We saw it with fast fashion.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Your American companies got beat by Shein and those.

• 15:33Jason Calacanis?

  You cut me off at the, you cut me off at the pass.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

• 15:36Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's okay. I'm gonna give my rant because my, this is a mini rant. America is so dumb that we're gonna allow Luckin to come in. Sponsored by the CCCCCP.

• 15:50Jason Calacanis?

  The Chinese Communist Caffeine Coffee.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Collective party.

• 15:54Jason Calacanis?

  Collective comrades. We're so dumb that we've let TikTok come in and take over social media and program our children. Now, we're gonna allow them to come in and destroy one of our iconic brands by undercutting them. Keep in mind that this, if China really wanted to damage one of the great strengths of America, it's our brands. Why are we allowing them to come in and do this? I know that they're allowing Starbucks, but Starbucks has been struggling. They're gonna sell off the business in China.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  I guess my question.

• 16:26Jason Calacanis?

  Hold on, let me finish my rant. Keep your questions, gentlemen. I need to finish my rant here, please. This is the start of a communist tsunami. That's, this is a brilliant technique by the comrades in China.

• 16:42Jason Calacanis?

  Pick a company, our automotive companies, and then send BYD in with the ships we talked about just on Monday. Send Luckin in, undercut every American brand, get all those jobs onshored to China, have all that money and all that profits come back to China, which by the way is exactly what we did to them. We said, hey, make our iPhones, designed in Cupertino, made in China, the people in China made a buck an hour, they were jumping off the buildings, had to put safety nets around the Foxconn buildings to keep all the suicides because they were working six days a week, putting in tiny screws and just

• 17:23Jason Calacanis?

  the most arduous labor you can imagine, or amongst the most arduous labor. And now they know our playbook, which is build a great brand and win the hearts and minds of consumers. This is something that is being done deliberately, strategically, and thoughtfully and deftly by the Chinese Communist Caffeine Coffee Company Party. They're doing this on purpose. They see, okay, Instagram is number one, we bring in TikTok. Tesla is number one, we bring in BYD. Starbucks is number one, we're gonna bring in Luckin. And what's the next thing to fall? What's an American iconic brand that they will want to take from us

• 18:07Jason Calacanis?

  next? Disney parks?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  The NFL.

• 18:10Jason Calacanis?

  The NFL?

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, seriously. It's already happening. The number one most profitable animated film box office-wise around the globe of all time came out last year, earlier this year. It's called Nisha 2. It's Chinese.

• 18:27Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know it.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  They already are making...

• 18:29Jason Calacanis?

  Pull it up on screen.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they are. N-E-Z-H-A-2 is how you spell it. They're already making blockbusters that exceed Hollywood films in China. There was also, I think 2024's top film was called Detective Chinatown, and it was a Chinese movie. And so, yeah, they're already taking us out in the entertainment field.

• 18:50Jason Calacanis?

  I'm taking action here. I'm putting a hundred percent tariff on Luckin Coffee.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  I wanna try it. It sounds good.

• 18:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's okay, you could try it, but not for $1.99.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  All right.

• 19:01Jason Calacanis?

  You're paying $3.99, and that $2... Is going to re-education camps here in the United States to re-educate

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Here's my question.

• 19:12Jason Calacanis?

  Communist sympathizers.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Okay. Are we so threatened? My question is, are we so threatened by China because they are our largest rival? Is it because they are communist? Or is it something else? Because I feel like if this was a Brazilian coffee chain, if this was a Thai coffee chain, I don't think anybody would care. Everybody would be like, oh, cool, a Thai coffee chain. I want to try that. But for some reason, we've elevated China the same way we did, I feel like the USSR in the 70s and 80s.

• 19:41Jason Calacanis?

  For good reason.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  I mean, maybe.

• 19:43Jason Calacanis?

  For good reason.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 19:44Jason Calacanis?

  They're, they've got a billion four people. They are extremely ambitious. They're hardworking and they are cutthroat. This is a cutthroat rival.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  But I mean, is that not all true of India? And then if India opened a coffee place?

• 20:00Jason Calacanis?

  Tell me the Indian brand that's taking over our social media. Tell me the Indian brand taking over our cars. Tata's not dumping cars around the world for a cheap.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  But if this was an Indian coffee chain, I don't think anybody'd be like, oh, there's so many Indian people, they're coming for our coffee.

• 20:19Jason Calacanis?

  One of the themes we talk about over and over again on this week in startups is making sure you do your chores. I'm no expert on these things. I have some experience. Stephen Estes from CLA is an expert. Let's talk about being cash efficient. Tell us about efficiency and what you see in the, in the top tier startups in your practice.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  We're seeing kind of an interesting trend out there where companies aren't needing to raise quite as much as they had in the past. You really have to be careful as a founder to only take on as much money as you really need. You've got to do the forecast and you've got to do the modeling and you've got to dial it in and get it right. Otherwise, you're going to end up either not raising enough capital to get to where you're going and you're going to have to go get venture debt or go back, have an extender to the round, or you're going to give up too much of the company because you just didn't recognize how much money you actually needed.

• 21:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, very important to get this stuff right, folks. And that's really a bummer when startups don't do things in a button up way. Always have a great partner, a good partner to have on this adventure while things change. My friend Stephen over at CLA. Visit CLAconnect.com/tech and don't forget to mention that your boy J. Cal sent you. That's CLAconnect.com/tech. Start today. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I'm putting a $2 tariff on it. And if you want to launch your company here, you have to have a local partner. So you need to give 49% of the company like we do when we're over in China. You gotta give, you have a local partner and some Americans gotta wet their beak on this.

• 21:49Jason Calacanis?

  And we gotta have, uh, we gotta have somebody from the administration on the board with a golden vote. A golden vote. I'm putting my guy, Howard Lutnick, on the board of Luckin Coffee, USA. We're taking 49%. It's going in the sovereign wealth fund.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  What's going on?

• 22:09Jason Calacanis?

  USA.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  No, Jason.

• 22:12Jason Calacanis?

  No free trade.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 22:14Jason Calacanis?

  It's over.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  All of this is so, oh, God. Okay.

• 22:17Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  So a couple of things, a couple of things. The reason why Chinese companies are coming after American brands is that the free market gave room for American entrepreneurs to build iconic global brands. Now, in the case of BYD, we are seeing the impacts of basically an industrial policy at the national level in China, subsidies and so forth. So that, I think, is a market distortive area. In the realm of coffee, while we joke about the, you know, Chinese communist caffeine collective, whatever, it's not actually part of the government system. So in my view, by telling American consumers, you can't have lower priced coffee because Starbucks can't compete with this company, we're just reducing consumer welfare. And by approaching them and demanding golden shares, Jason, all we're doing is aping the CCP.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  So when you and I see that, that young lady wearing her, I presume tongue in cheek, hammer and sickle jersey, I didn't think your response to that was going to be excellent. Let's put that stamp on the US by forcing the same practices here.

• 23:14Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, if you want to be anti... Okay, I'm looking for reciprocity here. You are correct about free markets. You're also making up a very good point. BYD is subsidized, which is called price dumping in America.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 23:29Jason Calacanis?

  So we say no bueno to price dumping. What is a $1.99 cup of coffee for a ginormous thing? It's price dumping. I believe Luckin Coffee is engaged in price dumping. I'm bringing back Lina Khan on special assignment. I call on Lina Khan to run a new division, which will stop communism and socialism spreading into our country. Lina Khan, you are now part of the 47th administration. I'm calling my connects, you guys know I'm very connected. I'm calling my guy Lutnik, calling JD Vance, and I am going to bring this to the top of the agenda. No price dumping, you need a local partner. We get our bets, we wet our beaks if you want our market.

• 24:14Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, no, in all seriousness, I do think it's like the price dumping is the issue. I don't mind the competition, but I do wonder, if they get to bring their brands here, how's, there's a Disneyland in, is it in Hong Kong?

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Shanghai, I believe.

• 24:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's in Shanghai. I want to know, if, we could ask producer Claude, who's incredible, by the way, and I have my comment browser set up to use producer Claude.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Oh, it is.

• 24:39Jason Calacanis?

  You can set it for default.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Look at this, I can try out Opus 4.1 now, it's for complex challenges.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Don't get ahead of the docket lawn, that's coming up later.

• 24:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, well, it's a little dramatic foreshadowing.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's ask it this question, what do you want to ask?

• 24:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, what I really would like to know from producer Claude, is...

• 24:58Speaker 02

  He's listening.

• 24:59Jason Calacanis?

  What's the deal? What's the deal with Disney Shanghai? What is the deal?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Who are these people?

• 25:07Jason Calacanis?

  Who are these people getting 49% of Disney Shanghai? I want to know who owns the 49% of Disney Shanghai. Is it Xi Jinping personally? Who owns it? Because we have to have a partner there. Bobby Iger and Donnie and Eisner, they had to cut a deal.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  The Shanghai Shendi Group, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, owns 57% of the Shanghai Disney Resort.

• 25:32Jason Calacanis?

  Whoa, whoa, what?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  The Walt Disney Company owns 43%.

• 25:36Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 25:38Jason Calacanis?

  It I want I'm upping my 49% we need 58% if you take 47% of Disney I want at least 62% of luck Case closed I have given my verdict

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you to producer Claude so did you see how how speedy Opus 4 was with that answer

• 25:55Jason Calacanis?

  I mean if we put Oliver on that it would have been seven minutes instead it was seven seconds

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Producer Oliver is doing a great job

• 26:01Jason Calacanis?

  He's great but he's a human yeah give me number two you have a number two culture story here

• 26:06Speaker 02

  I do I do it's a big it's a big it's a historical milestone we've all seen this coming but it's nonetheless an end of an era now that Disney owns Hulu outright they purchased all the remaining shares that Comcast still held They are going to sunset Hulu as a standalone app and platform and integrate it entirely within Disney Plus by 2026 everybody will have a unified Disney Plus Now you'll still be able to if if you want to just subscribe to Hulu content you'll be able to do that you can access just your Hulu or just your Disney Plus but it will all be under the Disney Plus umbrella

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Bob Iger told investors he thinks this is going to be not only a better cleaner less confusing user experience but he thinks it's going to cut down on churn Fewer people are going to unsubscribe because they're already have Disney Plus and Hulu ready to go and because these two they already have the same ad team So this is going to unify a lot and allow them to bundle and do a lot more with ads now that it's just one platform and they don't have to worry about supporting Hulu and Disney Plus In addition, this is also an interesting footnote they're going to sunset the Star brand internationally when Disney first entered the Indian market it bought Star India which was the big native Indian streaming platform and so in India all this time it's been Disney Plus Star

• 27:28Speaker 02

  That's going away Star is also going to just become Hulu in terms of

• 27:33Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic this is a great thing we predicted it and what this will do is If we could get producer Claude on this, I'm curious where Disney Plus and Hulu are in their subscriber bases and where Netflix is, you know, in relation to this because consolidating these two, I don't know the overlap in subs, but this has got to be pushing, I would think, Disney over 200 million.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Well, we'll find out in a second. Yeah.

• 27:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And where is Netflix at, Alex, in terms of their subscriber base? And what was the first year Netflix offered the streaming service? Because what we have, anybody who's got it.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Netflix is just over 300 million global subscribers.

• 28:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  I'm going to look up when they introduced streaming. It was like, oh, January 16th, 2007 was when they first started.

• 28:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so they're at 18 years. Disney Plus was five years ago, I believe, when they did that introductory $6.95 a month.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  I think it's more like six year, 2019 before it was pre pandemic.

• 28:37Jason Calacanis?

  Now, I made a prediction on CNBC and I'd like producer Claude to find it. I made two really spicy predictions when I was doing my CNBC rounds. One was they got to get rid of Tim Cook because Apple cannot come out with innovative products under Tim Cook. I want to get that call and we'll talk about that on Friday. And I want maybe a little mini victory for me. He's done great in getting an extra $3 out of every iPhone, every iteration.

• 29:04Jason Calacanis?

  But I think I predicted that there's a possibility within the first 10 years that Disney would eclipse Netflix and that it would certainly be Netflix, then Disney, then whoever else.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  So core Disney Plus subscribers are at about 128 million. As of the end of last year, the last time we got an accurate Hulu count, they had an additional 52 million. So put them both together, you're close to 180 million, well behind of Netflix's 301.6 million as of August 2025.

• 29:38Jason Calacanis?

  Also owned, and big news out of ESPN today that they sold 10% of ESPN to NFL.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  To NFL. ESPN Plus has 24.1 million subscribers.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  That sounds about right. Yeah.

• 29:49Jason Calacanis?

  So now we're at 200 million plus.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:53Jason Calacanis?

  In six years. Disney has achieved 66% of Netflix's 20

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I got it.

• 29:59Jason Calacanis?

  Almost 20 year run.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  In 2017, when Disney first announced plans to launch a streaming service, Cal LeCannes told CNBC, quote, "It will be very easy for them to get tens of millions of people to subscribe." And he said Disney is the one company that could compete with Netflix and streaming content from Amazon Prime. He predicted the top streaming platforms will be Disney, Netflix, and Amazon.

• 30:26Jason Calacanis?

  We all understand the importance of a crisp, memorable, easy to spell domain name. One of those names you can say over the phone and people know how to type it in without asking you the spelling. But let's get real. The good ones are either taken or there's some poacher who's holding it and waiting for some huge payday and they don't reply to you, even if you want to pay for a premium domain. You don't want to use up all your runway on a domain name. That's just the truth for a startup. You want to put that valuable cash back into your startup's operations. So you should consider this, a .tech domain. You can get a clean, crisp, super memorable name for your website and company and signal out loud to your customers and investors, we're a

• 31:07Jason Calacanis?

  tech company. That's instant branding for you. That's why over 500,000 founders have collectively raised over $5 billion in investment, building their companies on .tech. So skip the hassle. Head to www.get.tech/twist or go to your favorite registrar and grab your .tech domain today.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  That's what Claude gave me. 2017, when Disney

• 31:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so that was eight years ago.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  That was when they first announced Disney Plus. It didn't even launch for two more years.

• 31:39Jason Calacanis?

  So I need a victory lap. I need a victory lap. I'm going to go back on CNBC to take this lap. But this is, this is big news. And I also said, I think on that, that Disney Plus was missing the hugest opportunities ever, which is to make Disney Plus the singular place for all Disney services. The fact that they have not listened, I need somebody to get me a Bob Iger interview. And if I ever had another job, it would be a studio head. I would love to run Disney. I'm putting my name in the ring. If this happens, I'm folding up shop. You're all coming with me to be on my Disney CEO jaunt. So I would like the Disney, I'm throwing, put me in the, as I said, put me in the, put me in the game, coach.

• 32:21Jason Calacanis?

  I would love to be, a little internal reference for the Twitter. I would love to be CEO of Disney.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Heck, yeah.

• 32:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, here's what I do.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:31Jason Calacanis?

  Day one.

• 32:34Jason Calacanis?

  Disney merch is a tab in the app. When you're watching a show, when you get to the end of the show, it shows you all the Disney merch and says, since you just finished Lilo and Stitch, or, you know, since you just finished watching whatever TV show, here's the Fargo merchandise page. And since you completed season one, you get 20% off. If you complete season two, you'll get 30% off. And if you complete season three, you complete the whole series, you're gonna get a free t-shirt, or whatever it is, I don't know.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:07Jason Calacanis?

  Something. Then, for Disney Parks, Disney Parks, if you subscribe to Disney Plus, you get first shot at the premiere dates at Disney Parks, the holidays. The holidays are for Disney Plus subscribers. You can't walk up and buy a ticket for those days. You must have a Disney Plus subscription. And we give first shot at those to the top, the top longest tenured Disney Plus subscribers. So if you have a Disney Plus account for five years, you get to buy tickets first on the holidays, then second. So you get a pre-sale, a pre-sale at the beginning of the year, and we collect the money ahead of time.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  It seems, it's almost like Amazon Prime, but it's like Disney Prime. You're joining their like heavy users.

• 33:58Jason Calacanis?

  Correct, correct.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  The Disney adults list, yeah.

• 34:02Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. And everything is in, so there's a Disney World app, right?

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 34:07Jason Calacanis?

  I'm taking this.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  You have to have the Disney app now to, if you go to a Disney park, it's all through the app. You basically don't have a choice. You have to download.

• 34:15Jason Calacanis?

  And we're starting a Disney miles program and a gamification.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Well, they have cruise ships, too.

• 34:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So as you go and do these different. Things, your Disney Plus account and your karma in the Disney Plus account grows and your badges grow. So when children go to Disney Plus, you put your kids' names in, they get to have credit for which rides they want on. They have the percentage complete they are for California Adventure, percentage complete for Disney World, percentage complete for Disney Shanghai, et cetera. As you move it up, you learn more and more. Here we go. All right. Thank you. Let's drop off our friend, producer, I'm sorry, editorial director Long. Thank you for coming on. And that was a, that was a brutal call I made back in the day, Alex, when I said Tim Cook should, because you know, the stock went on a rip.

• 35:03Jason Calacanis?

  My point was, the stock can go on a rip because he's a bean counter. And sure, it's gonna make, it's gonna be a good bet on the stock, but it's not gonna be a good, long-term bet technologically if the person running the show is a bean counter. And sure enough, here we are. And Apple cannot build a car. They cannot build a VR, AR headset. And they cannot build a goddamn AI assistant. So like, every major new category, since I make these comments, which we'll talk about Friday, seems to have been a whiff. Okay. Should we go to our guest?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Defenestration, Russian accident. Now, earlier this week, Jason, you saw a video of what appeared to be yourself doing the All In Podcast, talking about a company, and you had this amazing moment when you said, I, I had, did we talk about this show? Is that actually something that happened? So Zach, we'll talk to you in just a second. But Jason, do you want to show, do you want me to show?

• 36:04Jason Calacanis?

  I think we should just show like the first, up until my part of this, and then we can pause it. But this was so crazy, because people were like, oh, what episode was that? And I was like, I don't know. I think, did I say that? Because I do seem to remember people doing, you know, sending AI jobs to Manila, wherever, and they were actually using, pretending it was AI, and they were brute forcing it with humans. So I was like, did we talk about this or not?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  So here, here's the clip.

• 36:38Jason Calacanis?

  We have a confession to make.

• 36:41Jason Calacanis?

  Brilliant. Y'all, we got a situation.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  Sources are calling the biggest tech scandal since Soham Perak. A YC startup called Adam that creates 3D models from prompts for game developers has been exposed for allegedly using a human employee named Adam instead of artificial intelligence to manually edit those models. Wait, so game developers thought they were using cutting-edge AI? But it was just some dude pulling all-nighters?

• 37:06Speaker 05

  Bro, if that's true.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  And it goes on from there.

• 37:09Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, these guys hacked the system. And people thought that this was real. And so I'm like, wait a second. And I, and I, I start asking like, did we? Do I know that? Cause there was another company. Ask Peter's Claw, what was the other company that was doing this exact thing?

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Builder AI.

• 37:28Jason Calacanis?

  It was Builder AI. Okay. So this is, as I thought maybe we're talking about Builder AI, but then I see this Adam. So I see this, this young gentleman, Zach Dive. Zach, welcome to the program. Thank you, thank you.

• 37:42Jason Calacanis?

  And so take us behind your idea here. Take us behind the idea here, because this is sinister and brilliant and all those great things. Go.

• 37:52Jason Calacanis?

  How'd you come up with this idea? We, we actually did it first for April Fools, where we made an April Fools prank, where we put up like a fake TechCrunch article and said that like, the AI behind Adam was actually a guy called Adam. And it went fairly viral on X. In fact, we even had some of our investors call us and like freak out, but I was like, it's fine. And then, yeah, then we, we decided to do it again. And with the new AI video, as you can tell, it's getting pretty, pretty close to real. But, but yeah. Okay. Which tool did you use to make these fake AIs? I mean, right now you can use a mix of tools. So you can use like, you can use 11 Labs to clone someone's voice. You can use Lipstick Models and then VO.

• 38:36Jason Calacanis?

  We actually use a company, shout out to them, Yuzu Labs, who are really good at doing AI. Okay. And you're a YC founder? Yes, went to 25. Congratulations. Not, not easy to get into the program. And YC does look for pirates. They look for punk rock people who will break the rules. I've been there. This is a minor infraction. I was an investor in Uber, Robin, and countless other companies that bent rules, you know, and were even more punk rock than you, Zach. But I saw this and I was like, hey, Zach, what's the story here? So I DM with him like, hey, listen. People are confused and you can't do this kind of stuff to the point at which you're confusing people.

• 39:17Jason Calacanis?

  Now, I've had people do, there was a all-in AI that a kid named Edward did from a company called Podcast AI that I wound up investing in. And he did this digital all-in one, but it was so bad back then, we all knew it was fake. The problem with yours, Zach, is you did it too good. The tools are too good. People were actually confused. So I said, Zach, you can't do this. You can't take me out of this. I will say, most people would think probably a joke that a guy called Adam is doing.

• 39:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, except it's been done. So maybe, I mean, I don't ascribe any bad intent here, but you thought people wouldn't be confused? I would say the majority were not confused, but hey, you're confused. But you explicitly did it with the TechCrunch one to confuse people. So let's call it what it is. You're hacking media to confuse people to get attention, correct? Sure. Sure, okay. So I told Zach, I was like, Zach, you can't do this kind of stuff. Take me out of it because I don't want to be a spoilsport here, but this is causing confusion. And also I do endorsements and I have an endorsement with Athena. So like, if you can use me as an endorser, that messes up my business.

• 40:31Jason Calacanis?

  So I gotta nip this in the bud because literally in the last, this year, I've had no less than 10 startups use me in their ads. Including my friend David Freeburg's team cut me, talking about Super Gut, and then put me in a paid ad campaign. You didn't put any money behind this, did you, Zach? You didn't do a paid ad campaign, did you? Be honest. I know if you did. We didn't do a paid ad campaign. The ad was free. Even making you a muppet was free. Exactly. So then Zach's like, okay, fine. And I was like, and please take me out of the previous one. So I was like a little hardcore with Zach. But Zach was a gentleman. He knew he was in the wrong, I think. And he fixed it, but then he decided he would dunk on me. Well played.

• 41:16Jason Calacanis?

  Here you go. Let's play the next one.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  I have cut, my dear friends, to the place where Jason arrives in his new getup. I think this is a really good fashion for you, Jason. Let's take a look.

• 41:27Jason Calacanis?

  I like it. I like it.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  Has been exposed for allegedly using a human employee named Adam instead of Artificial intelligence can really edit those models.

• 41:35Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, so game developers thought they were using cutting edge AI, but it was just some dude pulling all-nighters?

• 41:41Jason Calacanis?

  Even better. So the Muppet thing's been done a bunch, but yeah, so that was your way of like giving me a little counterpunch, Zach? You wanted to be a little spicy with J Cal? Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, you got me on the podcast, so I can blame you for it. So what's the status of the company? I mean, explain. So, well done. You hacked media. I give you credit for that. But in all sincerity, please don't use me heads. And there's like a bigger issue. Now there's crypto ads. I don't know if you've seen this, Zach. Have you ever seen me or Sacks or Elon or Chamath doing crypto ads on like YouTube and TikTok on live streams? No, no, I haven't. The only thing I will make you into, Jason, is a 3D model. That's the only thing.

• 42:19Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, okay. I mean, there's some, there's some amount of fair use. Just, there's a thing called right to publicity. I sent you this link because I also, there was a teaching moment because I was like, hey, Zach, if this is going to become like a regular thing, just know right to publicity is even if you parody a person, you still need to get permission and can't confuse you. You gotta put all kinds of disclaimers. That's why when there was like a group of advertising, I don't know if you remember this, Alex, on radio where they would use celebrities' voices? And they would use like Arnold's voice or whoever, some iconic voice. And they'd be like, celebrity impersonator, not the actual Arnold Schwarzenegger. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they would be like, I love to eat the superhuman bars. They're incredible. So I just was like, Zach, just know, like, you can't like do this as like a, you know, 100% of the time thing, you know, one time's okay.

• 43:05Jason Calacanis?

  But tell me about the business and what you guys are doing. Since you, since you, since you got yourself here, you could create a little bit of a ruckus. And now everybody's dunking, oh, J Cal has no sense of humor. Okay, fine. I have a sense of humor. I mean, it's punk rock, but just don't do it as a programmatic thing. Which one did you think was funnier, the first or the second video? Well, obviously the second is better, but these deep fake crypto ones are the ones I'm really concerned about. I had somebody tell me in my DMs that they had bought $10,000 worth of like J coin or something in a crypto scam and they wanted their money back. And then they sent me pictures of the DM. So somebody created fake ads using AI. Then they DM from fake accounts on like Instagram. These Instagram accounts I'm not aware of because they download my whole Instagram account.

• 43:50Jason Calacanis?

  They create a copy and they block me.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  And they block you.

• 43:53Jason Calacanis?

  So you don't know that they're doing this stuff. So there is like, just so you know, Zach, why their sensitivity here is like, I don't want my, you know, people who listen to the show and the listeners to get scammed. And this is like part of that whole genre of using AI to do this. So there's like a real thing here. It's not like I'm just singling you out, but tell us about the company. Yep. So we're Adam. We're an AI powered CAD etcher and 3D modeling tool. So basically like the model of the company is that you can just speak anything into existence. Right. So I could say, make a snap fit enclosure for a Raspberry Pi and it'll generate the CAD model with a subset of parameters. Or I can even say like, make a figurine of Jason holding a cup of CCP coffee. I could 3D print that and put it on my desk and show it off. Absolutely. Yes. Make me into a camera.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Jason, can I, can I show you what it looks like and you want me to use it? We have a, I have a demo for you.

• 44:42Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, great. Awesome. Yeah. Go run the demo for Zach. Let's get him some customers. Who's it for, Zach? Who's this for? Is it people making video games? Is it for people who are like traditional CAD people? Or you're trying to do what Canva did and make CAD something that everybody can do? And kind of induce an audience to exist. Yeah, I think where, where AI is right now, we're bringing the floor down. So what we're allowing people to do is people who really want a 3D model, who don't necessarily have the, the modeling skills, a bit like Canva, is they can just go in, describe exactly what they want. And then, you know, 3D print it or put into their video games. And then we also have professionals. So we have some double A game studios, um, using it to sort of make assets for their games. Oh, they are making assets. Yeah, I did hear that, um, a lot of folks are now making assets in real time using AI too.

• 45:25Jason Calacanis?

  Is that part of the vision where you could like actually have the tool built into the backend and world create and like insert things in real time? Yeah, exactly. User feedback or? I think the big thing, I mean, a lot of the asset generators out there, you just like put an image in or put a prompt in and you can't edit it. Ours is the only tool that is like, like chat GPT, right? You can keep conversing with it, right? So I could have you holding the CCP coffee and then we could, you know, have the same thing and have you, you know, having a communist flag as well. So we can, we could keep editing it. Where are you guys based? We're in SF in the marina.

• 46:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, congratulations. You raised money? Were you able to raise money on this idea? Where you at? Who's the who's the lead investor here? Yeah, yeah. So we, I mean, we're lucky enough that we had, you know, we had a launch during YC that was pretty much one of the most viral YC launches of all time. So we raised like a very healthy seed round. We'll probably announce it in a few weeks or so. Oh, great. Awesome. And then, yeah, so we basically during YC, we made the very first like sort of web-based text-to-CAD editor. So some people call it like VSLV0 for CAD. Even Guillermo called it C0. Then we built this 3D asset generator tool in the last like two, three months. Best asset generator tool in the market. And now we're going full-fledged on sort of AI CAD research, but Alice can show you a little bit.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Here's an example, Jason, that I made. So my prompt was a model of an elf wearing a Lorna Shore t-shirt. And I picked that because heavy metal bands have very, very complicated logos, ready to jump out of a tree. And here it is. One shot of this thing. Isn't that crazy? Cool? I would actually play a game with this guy in it. I think it's fantastic.

• 47:02Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. Hey, since we have you on, Zach, how do you, we're talking about IP. How do you think about IP in these kind of tools? It's been a big issue with output, right? Obviously, training data is one thing, but output, like if you ask it to make a Jedi or a Disney character, will it do that? Or do you have to like start thinking about those kind of issues now?

• 47:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I feel like that's a problem for the big dogs out there. If anything, like, you know, initially, we were content moderating it, but we found that users wanted to generate different IP. And I guess like since the models are slightly different and adjusted, we kind of allow you to generate any single character you can think of. So your favorite movie character, you can generate a figurine, print it or like put it in your game. So, so, yeah. Awesome. All right. So in the tradition, in your interpretation of IP, no problem using other people's IP for the output? Not yet.

• 47:54Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so there's a lot of lessons here for you about IP usage. I would not let people output other IP things. We could make a video game where you're in a JSON, wouldn't that be sick? What's that? We could make a video game where you're like walking around and stuff. We could have you like slash down the CCP coffee, so. I love it, I love it. Uh, so, uh, is there any room in the seed round now? I feel like I need to get my beak wet here. What's going on with the seed round? What's going on? Is there room for JCal in the seed round? We could let JCal in if we get exclusive publicity rights. We can like deep fake you whenever we want. Uh, I can make giant 3D printed models of you. I'll put it on top of the palace, why not?

• 48:35Jason Calacanis?

  All right, well, send the, uh, send the 50 bips as an advisor agreement over and, uh, we'll get that signed straight away and then let me know about the term sheet. Maybe we'll pop in a quick Hyundai and, uh, we'll be along for the ride. But I wish you great success with it and, uh, yeah, um, it was great to meet you and have a little back and forth with you. All in good fun, folks. All in good fun. All right, peace. Check us out at adam.new. Oh, yeah. Adam dot N E W? Dot new. Adam dot new. And if you want to generate JSON in 3D and post on Twitter, you can do it. Subdomain? N E W? N E W, yeah. It's like bolt dot new. Holy cow, that's a neat domain. I like that. Yeah. Zach, continued success, uh, and, uh, great to get to know you and I will see you on X, sir.

• 49:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right, well done. Uh, I thought it'd be fun to just cut this off before it becomes like a Palmer Lucky situation because enemies accumulate. And this kid Zach is just, I know a punk rock founder, like I kind of, this is my speciality is finding the punk rock founders because I was kind of one of those back in the day.

• 49:42Jason Calacanis?

  Because the second I was like, hey, you know, maybe you can't do this kind of thing. He's like, oh yeah, let me escalate this because I can get more views. And I'm like, yep, that's what I would have done when I was your age. Yep, that's exactly what I would have done as a 25 or 30 year founder.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  You told me to stop. I do it twice. You told me to stop again. I do it four times. You tell me a third time, then I'm probably going to tone it down slightly.

• 50:02Jason Calacanis?

  But in all seriousness, uh, this will become an issue over time. I don't recommend.

• 50:08Jason Calacanis?

  Doing this as for people listening, don't ever take a known person's talking about your product and put it in an ad. Because this recently happened, actually. I think it was Huberman. Look up, ask producer Claude about Andrew Huberman doing a lawsuit based on people. I think it was Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman, and Peter Attia. And one of those three, or multiple of them, had to write a bunch of cease and desist letters. And I think it was Huberman. Because people were taking Huberman, who might talk about a compound on like Joe Rogan. And, you know, he might talk about, I don't know, like vitamin D or something.

• 50:52Jason Calacanis?

  And then they cut him talking about vitamin D and then put their supplement ad on it. But this was like, not just, you know, a startup, you know, in their seed round, doing it on Twitter precociously. This was programmatically. They were buying millions of dollars of ads and using his likeness in it. And then somebody did it to Joe Rogan as well. Now, if you do it to those two people, they're in the business of their image. Like, I think, you know, you would have Joe Rogan reading ads for these people. So now you're circumventing his ability to run his business. And that's when you lose in court for a big dollar number. And you would have to go back and pay for that violation of major. Now, in this one, you could argue a little bit of parody, no harm, no foul, there was no damages.

• 51:34Jason Calacanis?

  But with Huberman's case, Andrew Huberman's case against a nutraceuticals company or something, he can actually claim significant damages because he had his, he has advertisers as well.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  So we're here from May of 2024. Jason, is an Andrew Huberman post from Facebook in which he says, unfortunately, many ads are currently running on social media, they use my face, or a drawing of it to sell it. He sent cease and desist letters. And then he lists here are our actual sponsors down below. So yes, this was Huberman. You were dead on.

• 52:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And I don't know if it actually went to a lawsuit or not, but this is going to become...

• 52:10Jason Calacanis?

  You know, young people have a different view and technologists have always had a different view of IP copyright and the kind of fairness of this stuff. And so in one instance where somebody did this programmatically and paid for it, they were like, we're just fans. And I was like, that's fine, but you understand this is our business. And then unbeknownst to me, they went and bought some ads on this week in startups. I was like, wait a second, isn't this the same company that was stealing? They're like, yeah, they felt bad about they bought these ads. Now, this was a company doing tens of millions in revenue. So I was like, okay, that's a nice question. Sure. I didn't ask them to do it. But I did think, gosh, I always think when a founder is doing something close to the line, I should just give them a little bit of like, hey, be careful. Which is actually what I did in the Palmer Lucky situation. I was like, you know, don't buy covert trolling

• 52:55Jason Calacanis?

  ads because it could blow up in your face. Anyway, I may have said it in a spicy way. So I'm sorry if I said it too spicy, which I probably did. I was a little spicier back in the day. But we've got more news in the docket. Let's get to the docket. Is there anything more news for us? Because there's a lot of major news today. I saw that, I think the biggest one is OpenAI dropped two open source models? Wait, I thought they were out of the open source business.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Pause. Not open source, open weights.

• 53:22Jason Calacanis?

  Open weights, not open source. Okay, that's totally different.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  But still much more open and as

• 53:29Jason Calacanis?

  So you can't see the source code, but you can change the weight. So maybe you could explain to the audience what's going on here.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. So I knew this question was coming. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to best respond to what the hell is an open weight?

• 53:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, sure.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  First thing at the top level, you can download these models and you can run them locally. You don't have to interact with them via an API or an inference provider. You can run them on your computer at home, or if you have a Series GPU from Nvidia, you can run the larger model there. Open weights is not the code. So you cannot download the code and actually extract the individual lines. But what you can think of is that weights are a bit like memory or the knowledge of the app once it was trained. And because they're open, you can see what OpenAI did. This is dramatically more transparent than the most recent generations of OpenAI models, and it is, I think, driving some change. So for example, AI Jason in the wake of this announced Elon said this, I think it was today that they're going to open source, maybe open weight.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Grok two, after having open source Grok one back in the day. So a good move by open AI, you love to call them closed AI. Here they're making a good step in that direction, but it's not open source. And so people are mixing those two a little bit. And I think it's important to make the distinction.

• 54:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so in a way, when you train these things, you might weight certain information over others. I think is another way to say it. And so, you know, like, maybe this is not correct. I would like to have somebody really figure out how to explain this. We understand that there's parameters and all this stuff. But how do you weight different things as being truer or more important, I guess, is how you could think about this. So if you were going to do something specifically with this model and make a cursor AI competitor. You would maybe tweak the weights. Maybe you think, oh, the stuff we scraped off stack overflow is more important.

• 55:22Jason Calacanis?

  Or this GitHub stuff is more important, or this GitHub ranking makes this thing more important and slide the weights around. It's always been known that Microsoft owned the source code and the weights in the open AI relationship where they bought like half the company or whatever it is. So this feels really interesting to me because you can also run it on your local computer. And we knew this was coming. And what this means is when you start thinking about IP or privacy. This is going to have a big impact on it. If you're doing something like, I don't know. I'm taking, you know, pictures of my grandparents or whatever, and I'm making them into videos like people are doing.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 56:04Jason Calacanis?

  Do I want to upload those photos to open AI and give them those? And then the next person who makes pictures of a grandpa, it's my grandpa. You know, you get the idea. So and then on a privacy basis, if you were doing deep analysis of your documents, do you really want that in the cloud with somebody else? And then somebody else, you happen to index, I don't know, salaries, bonuses, legal documents. You know, this stuff can get pretty gnarly and then it's training their model.

• 56:34Jason Calacanis?

  You will have a large language model in the operating system on your phone, on your computer. This is where Apple, which has been just totally disgaziad when it comes to LLMs, could actually maybe come from behind. If they were to take one of these open models or work on one and then incorporate it into their operating systems, of which they have billions of users, oh lordy, that would sync with, and I predict they'll do this, I predict Apple will use one of these models encrypted on your devices, so you never have to use

• 57:15Jason Calacanis?

  a cloud-based service and be subpoenaed for what you do. And when you choose to subpoena Apple, because there was a terrorist attack at, was it San Bernardino, and they wouldn't unlock the iPhones? Oh, yes. It was San Bernardino, I believe, right? And they were like, "Oh, there was a terrorist attack? Love to help you CIA, FBI, everybody, but we don't have access to it." That's a bold thing to do as Apple, right? Like terrorism, you know, explicit images of minors, like there's a, there's a small cohort of things that any reasonable person would say, "Turn it over." But Apple has taken the stance, quite bravely, I will say, of saying, "We don't have access to that," and then giving you that information of the terrorists would

• 57:58Jason Calacanis?

  compromise billions of people on our platform. Therefore, we're going to make this higher level decision that anchoring, slowing down the next terrorist attack and finding out where the terror cell is, is more important to Apple. It's more, it's, it's, it's a, they're willing to pay the price of another terrorist attack occurring from a sleeper cell, then compromising billions of people's privacy by having a backdoor. That's a hard, hard...

• 58:32Jason Calacanis?

  Hard decision to make. I'm glad I don't have to make it.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, this just came up. Nvidia put out a blog post yesterday or today, Jason, I forget exactly which. And they said, there are no kill switches and no backdoors in Nvidia hardware. Nvidia is currently trying to get back into selling its H20 chips in China, working with the Trump administration on getting permission to do that. And I think China is a little bit worried that what they're going to get is backdoored chips, just like, you know, the US would worry about a Chinese company sending compromised chips to the US. And so they're making a pretty clear stand about that. And then also, we've seen the UK work recently to try to get companies, again, to break encryption and provide backdoors. And Nvidia said in its post, don't forget the, was it the Clipper chip that had the compromised backdoor that led to all the security flaws?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  And so in the case of Apple, I feel like what they're doing is they're just saying encryption is or is not. And there's no middle ground to offer up to law enforcement. I'm sure that if Apple could find a way to have encryption be compromised in a way that was safe, which I know sounds oxymoronic, they'd go for it. But I just think they're being technologically honest. So that's my, that's my take. Of course, we care about children. Of course, we care about stopping terrorism, but I mean.

• 59:44Jason Calacanis?

  We also care about everybody's privacy, a right to privacy is the term I just used. That's for public figures having the right to publicity, actually, is what it's called. But a right to privacy is even more core than, you know, what celebrities have to deal with. And oh, I was correct. I see here, producer Claude lets us know that Tim Ferriss successfully got an injunction.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 1:00:08Jason Calacanis?

  Tim Ferriss and a company he owns, Creesa Performance, obtained a default judgment against defendants alleged to have improperly used his name and likeness in connection with a fraudulent scheme. According to the case, Alliance Publishing and Pegg and Twitty perpetrated a fraudulently get rich scheme in which they published a flyer asking targets to mail $97 and $100 to a dealer and whatever, blah, blah, blah. So anyway.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  People are scammers.

• 1:00:35Jason Calacanis?

  Just, I mean, scammers are out there. It's like, that's part of becoming a known entity in the world is that people will try to leverage. Your followers into some dark place. Okay.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  On the OpenAI point, though, just a couple more small things I want to make sure we share with founders because I think this this matters for what they're building. So there's two models from OpenAI you can play with. There's the 220 billion parameter model and then a 20 billion parameter model. One's more tuned for data centers, one's more tuned for home use. They're lots of fun. The metrics seem to be by benchmarks pretty good. I've heard some people say there's a lot of hallucinations, but it's certainly, I think, having more open models in the market is good. And Jason, on the show, we've talked about how when we think about open source AI, it's really a Chinese product now as American companies mostly go closed source. So here is a rejoinder from the West, if you will. I think that's very important. And then there's two other, there's a couple more things about AI models. And I'm going to just run through these, but I think for all the founders out there who are building

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  and are curious what they can build with, here's the latest. So the other thing is DeepMind, which is part of Google, released a thing called Genie 3, which is a world model that has much better context maintenance. So essentially, if you're playing inside this world model, Jason, and you turn around, it doesn't forget what you've seen, which means that it's now much more useful, much more high fidelity. It's just great. I'm not going to go through a demo today, but Genie 3, if you want to take a look at that. Anthropic dropped a very incremental improvement to Claude 4, called Claude 4.1. Again, the benchmarks say it's better, but it's going to be more a matter of taste. So I'll be curious to see what people think about that in the coming days. Then the big news is that tomorrow, OpenAI is going to release GPT-5.

• 1:02:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, well, this is the big one. Wow, that's the shebang. Maybe we should do a live release of that. That's incredible. What do people expect in the chat GPT-5? I heard a rumor, no hallucinations, more reasoning. What is the expectation here? Have they tipped their cards and said, here's what's happening? And when was the, when was ChatGPT-4 launched? I wonder how many months between those?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Producer Claude, can we get the gap from GPT-3 to GPT-4 and then GPT- GPT-4 to tomorrow, please, so we can compare those. That'd be lovely. Um, the most important reporting that I saw to answer your question, though, Reuters spoke to several people who have had access to GPT-5. Didn't share their name because they're under NDA, but they specifically said it's better at coding, it's better at reasoning. But critically, of course, it's going to be better. The question is how much, right?

• 1:03:07Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  They said it's not going to be as big of a jump as we saw from GPT-3 to GPT-4 from four to five.

• 1:03:13Jason Calacanis?

  So they're downplaying it. That's interesting, trying to manage expectations.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  So GPT-4 came out in March of 2023. GPT-3 came out in June of 2020. So that was just under three years. This is just over three years, just over two years. So actually, it's a little bit faster from four to five than three to four. Huh. Who'd have thought?

• 1:03:32Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting. There's been a big kerfluffle between CloudFlare.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Jason Calacanis?

  And Comet. And you emailed the founder, you emailed the press department there.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Jason Calacanis?

  And I CC'd the founder and we got kind of the backstory here. On the perplexity versus CloudFlare. I don't know if it's on the docket.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Did I not add Arvind to that email?

• 1:03:55Jason Calacanis?

  I did. You probably didn't, but I did because I was like, Arvind should know about this.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  I meant to. My bad on that one. Okay. So anyways, no apologizing on Twist. Uh, the backstory here is.

• 1:04:06Jason Calacanis?

  Getting there, getting there.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  A while ago, maybe a month, CloudFlare announced PaperCrawl. This was a big deal. We talked about it on the show. The idea was if an AI model, um, going out to the internet to collect information on behalf of a user query, wanted to come to jasoncalacanis.tumblr.gif, you could say, no, you have to pay us a cent or whatever to come, take our information and bring it back to your user. I think we said this was pretty reasonable and an interesting experiment in economics for the internet. Time passes. PaperCrawl has been in closed beta now. They're working with publishers. We'll see what it looks like when it comes out. They have not responded to my notes, asking how that's going, but we'll see. So perplexity, sorry, uh, CloudFlare comes out this week with a post essentially accusing perplexity of very bad behavior online.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  They said that, look, you know, we set up a, a test website that had, you know, a big stop sign for AI. And then we used perplexity's models to take a look at this and we found they found the information and accused them essentially of being bad online citizens. And perplexity fired back with, you guys don't know how technology works. Which was an interesting moment because here we have two very different perspectives that don't. Seem to be talking in the same language, Jason. So maybe you can explain what you mean by they're acting in good faith? Because I think that's an interesting, important point here.

• 1:05:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you never let a good argument get in the way of reality? Because both companies now are being talked about, which I think is part of the point.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:33Jason Calacanis?

  You can send a crawler out. There's many third-party services that you can fire up as a developer to go crawl websites. It will fire up a web browser, a virtual machine, and it looks like a user agent, right? So it looks like a human being is browsing, say, something that doesn't let you scrape it, like Reddit or Quora. Like, you ever go to Quora and you try to click on an answer and it gives you like, maybe the first 500 words that says, hey, you gotta log in to see this?

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  I hate that.

• 1:06:00Jason Calacanis?

  Well, but it's the perfect example of somebody trying to protect their IP from these crawlers.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:06:04Jason Calacanis?

  So what CloudFlare is basically saying is perplexity is trying to circumvent that. And I can tell you, all the LLMs have tried to circumvent this. But now we're starting to get to the point where lawsuits are flying and something's at stake. And that's why these language models now need to behave because Disney, New York Times, are suing and we've got actual court cases. So people are being more thoughtful about this.

• 1:06:33Jason Calacanis?

  It's amazing what CloudFlare is doing by saying, hey, if you want to crawl our websites, that's okay. Here's the rules. Here's where you send the money. And if CloudFlare, what does CloudFlare take? 10%? I don't know what their vig is. I would really love to know that.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  I don't think they've released that. But if it's more than 10%, we're gonna take them out back and whack them with sticks.

• 1:06:50Jason Calacanis?

  I think 10% feels like a reasonable vig. I would pay them that. I don't think 30% would be. But 10% seems reasonable for them to manage the buy and sell side. And, you know, 10% plus your Stripe fee. So they get a full 10%. I think that would be reasonable, actually, maybe.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  You're literally describing the Substack model, and I think that's fine.

• 1:07:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's like enough for them to maintain the service and pay for their team. It's not predatory in any way. It's kind of genius, I have to say. It's a really unique way to do it. It empowers the content creators and it gives a programmatic way for LLMs to ask for permission. Now... In comes the rub. We've been talking about the browser's role in this. You could, and we talked today about OpenAI having a language model you can run locally. You're allowed to do whatever you want on your desktop with other people's IP. So if you paid, as long as you paid for it. So if you bought my book and you decided to take screenshots and you decided to run analysis on it and you bookmarked it, more power to you as an individual. You paid for it, you can remix it. Just like you take the physical book, you could cut it up,

• 1:07:50Jason Calacanis?

  put it on your wall, make a copy of it for a backup, but as long as you don't distribute it, right? So if you want to photocopy my book, so you have a backup and you have it in one house and the other in case the house burns down, God forbid, I mean, it's nonsensical because you could get the bound book for the same price as a photocopy, you get the point.

• 1:08:09Jason Calacanis?

  Browsers are not detectable.

• 1:08:13Jason Calacanis?

  These third parties are, and I think what's happening is there might be some confusion that Comet users using the browser are doing queries. So when I showed, hey, I'm doing a United Airlines, you know, task and it goes and it fires off on my local desktop, the browser to go do things. What I suspect is happening here is when I just told you I had Slack summarize the channel using the Comet browser powered by Claude.

• 1:08:42Jason Calacanis?

  How does Slack look at that? It looks at it as my user agent. It looks at it as my desktop. It doesn't look at it as a backend scraper. Now, if you took back content and you trained your LLM on it, you would be using me as a proxy to backdoor into stealing content. Yeah. So let's use the Cora example. Cora says, hey, you can't use this in your language model. But you and I go on there and we say, oh, give us all the questions about Corvettes. And we start reading them. We say, oh, get us the best answers on these Corvettes and teach us about the whole corpus of Corvette history or whatever. And we build this whole document and deep research on it. And we've queried, you know, over a number of days, 1,000 pages of Corvette information and history and lore that Cora owns. Cora owns that.

• 1:09:27Jason Calacanis?

  Even though the users made it, they made it with the understanding it goes into the Cora corpus. And Cora said, you can't have this. Well, what if that then fed? The perplexity language model. Well, the founder of perplexity said they're not doing that. So whatever you're doing is not happening. So there might just be like they're talking through each other, perhaps some misunderstanding of the user agents. But this is where the details matter. Details really matter. And that's what a show like this week in startups is about. We get into the very nuanced, granular details of these kerfluffles. And this Donnybrook is valid. It's an important one.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  It's very important. And I think the way where I come down on this, putting aside the technical differences of whether or not CloudFlare quote, misunderstood 20 to 25 million user agent requests that are not scrapers, according to perplexity's blog post.

• 1:10:17Jason Calacanis?

  How many? 25 million?

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, 20 to 25 million user agent requests are not scrapers. Anyways, that's from the long perplexity post about this. We will sort this out. But what I what I'm worried about is this, the idea that if I go to, let's say, chat GPT and ask it a question and it pings 47 websites, collects the information and brings it back to me and gives me a summarized paragraph. And then opening, I says, well, we're not doing that. Alex says, not really. There's a there's a automation and scale differential here. And I tried to talk about this for something that I wrote. And I was trying to think of the analogy as food. So Jason, if you came over to my house, you can eat anything you want. Open the pantry, the refrigerator, the freezers, steal from the kids. I don't

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  care. There's lots of food. Come over, eat. But if you sent a like a robotic courier to my house to collect food for other people.

• 1:11:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, it's the scale of which you're doing it.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  And the automation, because it's not one to one. And so I'm concerned that people are saying, as long as a user requests it in some tenuous capacity, anything downstream from there counts as Alex requested, or Jason wants it. And therefore, it's okay.

• 1:11:28Jason Calacanis?

  Not true. Yeah. And the other thing is, these websites will also block you if you do unnatural behaviors. So people for many for all time have been creating local index like Google does. And so they'll just have their browser open 100 LinkedIn pages and start scraping. And there's infinite number of tools online you can get to do a user agent in your browser to spam people with in mails. And you're paying for in-mails, there's a throttle on it, you can only send so many. But there were tools in the early days to just automatically like posts on Twitter, automatically retweet stuff and, you know, create all this garbage on the internet. And so it's up to the website owner as well that if somebody does more than 100 clicks

• 1:12:12Jason Calacanis?

  in an hour, to pause them and say, hey, we noticed you did 100 page loads in an hour. A normal human being can't really do that. So what's going on here and pause your account or freeze your account? And sophisticated people like say Crunchbase or the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, anybody who's got a subscription product or Quora, Stack Overflow, they build these things in to know a user or what appears to be a user is doing something with malfeasance. This is incredibly niche, but an important topic. Okay. This has been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups.

• 1:12:51Jason Calacanis?

  My amazing co-host Alex Long, x.com/Alex, x.com/Jason, x.com/Lon, x.com/TWI. Startups, we'll see you all on Friday. Bye-bye.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Bye-bye.