Why F1 Teams are Replacing Wind Tunnels with Smart Tape | E2305

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twistSentry - https://sentry.io/twistNorthwest Registered Agent-https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twistDigitalOcean - https://do.co/twist Today's show: F1 teams spend up to a third of their budgets on aerodynamics, often utilizing wind tunnels to simulate what happens on the track. But Lyall Davenport of SKN Systems created a sensor-embedded tape that sticks directly to race cars as they drive around the real world, generating 420M data points per hour. And it comes in at roughly 95% less cost than running a full simulator. Hear about how Lyall's background in racing helped him develop the concept, plans to expand from motorsports to drones and defense, and his experiences going through Jason's various programs. PLUS OpenAI's new models are so good, you can't use them. Why Apple's Vision Pro chief defected to OpenAI (and why their laptops and devices are getting more expensive). A look at the world's most annoying data center in Sterling, Virginia. And Jason remembers iconic and influential tech journalist Om Malik. Guest: Lyall Davenport: https://x.com/Lyalldavenport SKN Systems: https://www.skn.systems/ Timestamps: 0:00 How SKN uses tape to generate aerodynamic data 4:04 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 6:17 How SKN uses tape to generate aerodynamic data 9:55 Sentry - Your team should be focused on shipping features — not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST 17:20 F1 teams are worth HOW MUCH? 19:42 Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 20:35 Future markets beyond motorsports 30:03 DigitalOcean - Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. 32:45 GPT-5.6 is banned for now 43:46 Vision Pro chief makes for the exit 51:24 Apple raises their prices 56:05 The data center you're allowed to hate 1:06:04 Zuck's new prediction market app 1:08:42 RIP Om Malik (1966-2026) 1:19:50 Streaming and camera recommendations 1:28:06 All about eFoiling 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 LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ 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

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  We have a full news docket. We're going to talk about OpenAI not releasing its models. The government's got involved there. Claude launched Claude Tag. Apple prices have raised by like 20%. Mark Cuban checked in on X, talking about data centers, the hate for them. Zuckerberg wants to build a cash-free prediction market.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  This week in startups is brought to you by Digital Ocean. Whether you're just getting started with AI or seeing your project take off, Digital Ocean is the cloud platform for you. With the same power as the other guys, but way less complexity, Digital Ocean is a cloud platform that lets you focus on what matters: building killer apps. Learn more at do.co/twist. That's D O dot C O slash twist. Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. Sentry, your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST.

• 1:09Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. It's Friday, June 26th. The summer has started. Your boy Jake Howe is in Hawaii. And we had to tape on Hawaiian time, so you're listening to the show on Saturday instead of the normal Friday drop. Mahalo for joining us. Mahalo.com is for sale. Rest in peace. We did our best, Lon.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  We tried. A mighty effort. We made a mighty effort.

• 1:31Jason Calacanis?

  A mighty effort, but Inside.com and Mahalo.com, both for sale. Looking to get some money back to our investors in that company, so go to those two domain names if you're interested.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Includes me.

• 1:40Jason Calacanis?

  Includes you, yes. Some shareholders there. And we have a full docket today and a great guest.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  We do.

• 1:46Jason Calacanis?

  I was e-foiling this morning.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  What is, I'm going to show my ignorance here. You messaged us this. What is e-foiling?

• 1:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so e-foiling is like somewhere between a surfboard and a boogie board, but closer to a boogie board.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:03Jason Calacanis?

  And it has a little turbine that comes down on a stick. And then it goes down a little bit more and there's a foil. Like a fin.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Right, okay.

• 2:13Jason Calacanis?

  You ride on top of it.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14Jason Calacanis?

  You get a joystick. The joystick has different levels and it has a throttle. You can have a foil, which you'll see Mark Zuckerberg doing where he's pounding and that gives you the motion in the ocean. In this case, that's it. Those are e-foils.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:28Jason Calacanis?

  And it's just like, um, um, that's it. Now you see there, there's the two blades and you see there's the little rotor. Now they used to not have a cover on the rotors, but mine had a cover on it. You would be foolish to have the blade showing because what happens is, is a very rare instance where, um, the board, uh, goes flying up into the air, twists over and you land on top of the board.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:49Jason Calacanis?

  It's incredibly rare. It's like a 1% chance of happening and, uh, you can show the, uh, injury here that I experienced this morning. If you have the picture, which I sent to Slack, you get to see my enormous, uh, calves.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Jacob, do you have, do you have that pulling ready to go?

• 3:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there it is. So, um, I, uh, flipped the board and, uh, the foil, either the blade casing or the foil itself, those two, um, you know, fins just whacked into the back of my calf, smashed it. Uh, so I just took a bunch of Motrin. I had the leg up for an hour before the show and iced it up. So you gotta carry me through the show, but, uh, no pain, no gain.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  All right, yeah.

• 3:31Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I'm, knock on wood, I've been incredibly lucky at action sports, but, uh, this was incredible. I hope I'm healed, uh, for my session on Monday and I'm trying to go Sunday or Monday before I leave.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Yes, a near misses this year. You also had a skiing incident in back in January.

• 3:46Jason Calacanis?

  I did, I did. I am, um, yeah, I am, uh, really, really, um, uh, pushing the envelope in a reasonable way. So a couple of injuries, a couple of close calls.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Light, yeah.

• 4:00Jason Calacanis?

  Light. I mean, I don't want to exaggerate it. I'm not going hell of skiing or anything, but, uh, let's take a pause here. And to applaud, applaud. I'm going to take my plaid which I have on my wrist here. And when I ski, I just press that button. Um, I don't know how waterproof the plaid is. I could have taken an e-foiling today, um, and I would have had this recorded. The, uh, ah, oh, it was pretty brutal. But see, I just did it. Red light went on. Now I'm recording the show. I take action items, notes. Hey Jake, how? Wear long pants, where swim, wear a wetsuit next time so you don't get scraped. Boom. Whatever it is. Or, yeah. So, anyway, give them the offer. Plaid's amazing. We're doing, one of the things Lana and I do is we have, we run the show. We run the show through Plaid and ask it to analyze the show. Great templates.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, we were playing around with the templates, like, you can sort of set up, it's like, it's like a prompt, it's prompt engineering. You can tell it in advance, I want you to listen to this and then pull out these kind of quotes, or turn it into an interview, you know, Q and A style. And, and it'll just do it. It's, it's very cool. So, check it out at plaud.ai/twist.

• 5:04Jason Calacanis?

  All right. And we have a full news doc. We're going to talk about OpenAI not releasing its models. The government's got involved there. The top dog at Apple who's working on the Vision Pro and all that stuff, he's left for OpenAI. Claude launched Claude Tag, basically Open Claw inside of Slack. We're going to talk about that. Apple prices have raised by like 20%. Mark Cuban checked in on X, talking about data centers and the hate for them. And then Zuckerberg wants to build a cash-free prediction market. And at the end, I am going to remember another one of my dear friends who passed too young.

• 5:42Jason Calacanis?

  The one, the only, one of the great writers of our time, commentators, but a legendary, great human being, O Malick. And I'll give my remembrances at the end of the show. And of course, we'll go off duty and we'll talk about our bounty for annotated.com. For our coders, vibe coders in the family. Okay.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  It's a huge show.

• 6:06Jason Calacanis?

  It's a lot of show. We're going to get through it efficiently. It's, it's always too much show, as they say in the biz. All right, let's get started.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we, we want to bring up our guest, I think, first, correct? So, we were talking to Lyall Davenport of SKN Systems. They are a, it's an aerodynamics, Jason, intelligence platform. They're starting in motorsports. They are basically revolutionizing the wind tunnel. You think of, you know, you always see those images of cars in the wind tunnel and they're monitoring with all these sensors. This company is like, we got a better way. Check out the tape. You don't need a wind tunnel anymore. So thanks for joining us here, Lyle. We want to hear all about how you're changing the aerodynamics testing market.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 6:48Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome to the show, Lyle. Trying to remember when we met, I believe you went to Founder University. I believe you came to Josh Baer's Capital Factory and you were there and you pitched me and you showed it to me after, and I think, rest in peace, my friend Josh. I think you showed it to me in the lobby of Capital Factory. Am I correct in my recollection?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  I did. I did, you know, I think I've gone through every stage now of launch. So I did startup tune up and I did Founder University and I've just graduated from the accelerator. But, you know, I was there, I had the demo and I was going to kick myself if I didn't fly all the way from London to Austin and get the opportunity to show you. So I appreciate you taking the time.

• 7:32Jason Calacanis?

  It's my job. I'm always happy to spend time with founders. Frankly, founders, Lyle, it's the most joyful people in the world to hang out with. You know, we're sitting here in the age of like political corruption on one side, you know, commies, socialists on the other side, and then I get my break when I talk to founders because they want to just make the world a little better. But Lyle, you grew up in a racing car family and doing things in a wind tunnel, okay, super awesome. However, you came up with a solution where you put tape with sensors onto cars and then when they're out on the track, be it F1, be it driving around Austin,

• 8:16Jason Calacanis?

  Texas, or, you know, the PCH, you can collect data in the real world. Tell everybody about the solution, the company and the customer base.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Like you said, I grew up in motorsport. My grandfather was a Silicon Valley guy. He had a great exit. He was the CEO of a company called JDS Unifase. And when he left, he decided to then go on and invest in motorsport and automotive. So it's kind of in the genes. I would spend my summers when I was in college out in Indianapolis working for the team. And so kind of understood how teams operated. One of my jobs was taping up the car before we put it out on track. Um. It's kind of one of those last half a percent improvements that you're always looking for when you're in a motorsport team, right? We take away some of the drag on the chassis by taping up around where the the bodywork comes together.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  It also protects the chassis because out on long runs, you got stuff flying at it. The atmosphere is changing all the time. So, um. You know, fast forward ten years, um, we've just sold a a business in the the automotive technology space and I'm thinking about what I wanted to do to to kind of bring my experience as an investor and looking for technology companies that are developing proprietary data in the real world. Um, and so I'm thinking, how do we integrate that that tape? With the ability to generate the data in the real world. So, um. That's where we've got to. We've spent about two years building uh the hardware to to get to the point.

• 9:50Jason Calacanis?

  There it is.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Right today.

• 9:51Jason Calacanis?

  Look at that line.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  There it is.

• 9:52Jason Calacanis?

  I love, you know, hardware is the new mode. It's the worst nightmare of every founder. You've built a product. Everything's working great. Then real users start flooding in and suddenly it all breaks. What a disaster. You need to get it back up and running and you gotta do that fast. You're looking like an amateur. That's why you need a partner like Sentry. Applications can break in many different ways, but Sentry sees everything. You'll get all the relevant details like stack traces, commits, releases, and even the developers who push that problem code in the first place. With Sentry, you're not going to be jumping around between different tools, trying to figure out what happened. And Seer, Sentry's AI debugging agent, uses all this data and context to identify the root cause of the problem and suggest a fix.

• 10:35Jason Calacanis?

  It can even take a look at your code before it ships and warn you if any problems are likely. Try Seer and Sentry for free. If you're a This Week in Startups listener at sentry.io/twist, use the code TWIST for two hundred forty dollars in Sentry credits. Make sure you use that code. Make sure you use that URL, sentry.io/twist, so they know.

• 10:57Jason Calacanis?

  Your Uncle J Cal sent you. Hardware company is unfundable for 15 years. Now, software company is unfundable for the next 15 years. With AI and vibe coding allowing people to, you know, basically run amok and copy any startup in a weekend.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, let's see Anthropic come out with their own tape. Check at me, Dario.

• 11:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So, so tell us what is in that tape? And then, yeah, let's take a look here because, you know, demo is worth. And the company is called Skin and it's S K N and this beautiful logo. And the website is for people to get more information.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Skin dot systems.

• 11:35Jason Calacanis?

  Skin dot systems. There's a dot system.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  S K N.

• 11:38Jason Calacanis?

  S K N dot systems. Now, now that I know there's a dot systems, I'm all in. Oh, my God.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  There you go. We can start, uh, we can start farming some of those, uh, those URLs. Yeah, so the, the tape itself, what we generate is pressure, temperature and vibration at 500 hertz. We can have up to 100 sensors on the vehicle at a time. So between the data that we're generating off the tape and the metadata that we're collecting in terms of GPS and IMU data. So where the car is and how it is interacting pitch, roll, yaw, acceleration. We're able to really start to generate a picture of kind of a digital twin in, in the atmosphere, in the real world. So why is that important? So this is, this is a car running in a wind tunnel. As you can see, um, the data is very binary, right?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  The, the car sits on the, on the treadmill. It starts spinning. The wind builds. We have fairly consistent pressure outside of a few turns of the turntable. That's probably simulating about two degrees of rotational turn. And that's all you can really kind of demonstrate.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  It allows you to look at very specific things. But there's no way to really be able to understand how that's going to operate in the real world.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  So if we.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Bring up the railroad data set. What we have here is a car operating on a rail track. This is actually in in your backyard, or not quite, but it's in Texas with a

• 13:16Speaker 03

  well-known driver. It's had some recent success. And what we can see here is how the vehicle's actually operating in the real world. So we can see as they're accelerating, as they're braking, we're seeing different airspeeds over the vehicle. And we're able to even look at, you know, areas where there's like stalls across the vehicle. And in the future, as we start to run in traffic, that will really allow us to understand, you know, not just how the vehicle operates in a very sterile environment, in a simulated environment, but how it actually has to run in the real world where there's traffic, where there's changing conditions, everything else. I think, you know, I don't know if anyone's seen the F1 movie, but we solve a lot of the questions that Brad Pitt wanted answered when he was was flirting with the engineer in the wind tunnel.

• 14:02Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So the question is, how much do you charge for this? These F1 teams, this F1's a racket. I've been to three now. Somehow, they figured out how to take this dirty track, oil smells, burning rubber, and make it into a Michelin-starred experience. And when I say Michelin-starred, I mean, literally, they have Michelin-starred chefs there, you know, just making food, charging like five, $10,000 a ticket, selling boots. I mean, they made it into something else. I went to Austin twice.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Was it was it drive to survive? Is that really what did this? Because I feel like I knew about F1 for years, but it wasn't this like high end.

• 14:43Jason Calacanis?

  They have had a couple of false starts, bringing it to America. But I think it's kind of stuck now. And, you know, when there's a weekend going on, people in the age of being too online, people like to get out and do something, especially affluent people or aspirational people. And it's just, it's a nice day out. And I don't, I haven't gotten the bug like I have for the NBA and the Knicks, but I can understand people getting really into it. And I understand people place a wager once in a while along.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 15:13Jason Calacanis?

  And there's some wagering going on, and that makes it super exciting. But Tell us the budget for McLaren, let's say. I met the owner of, or the, I met, what do they call the person in charge? Who's the coach of McLaren?

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Team principal? He's a good friend, Zach.

• 15:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I met Zach three times, three or four times. He's a fan of All In. I've met him. Is he Australian or something, or English?

• 15:36Speaker 03

  No, no, he's, he's, he's American. He's from California, but he, he lives in the UK.

• 15:41Jason Calacanis?

  That was it, yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Him and my grandfather were great friends. They, they had some, some stories.

• 15:45Jason Calacanis?

  So I met Zach a bunch of times. Then I know the people at GM, for some crazy reason, they named their team Cadillac instead of Corvette. I need to have a talking to, to those people. That seems like the most idiotic decision ever. Am I right, Lyle?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Is it because the Cadillac of blanks? Is that, because that became the expression?

• 16:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Lyle, how did they make this decision? It seems, like, I don't want to use certain words, but dumb.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Disgustiad.

• 16:11Jason Calacanis?

  It seems a disgustiad. Isn't Corvette, like, they have the hypercar now, the ZR1X?

• 16:16Speaker 03

  I'm gonna, I'm, I'm gonna tread carefully here because I've got some very good friends in the ownership at Cadillac Formula One. But what I will say is that, you know, I, I think that the, the drive there was, it is seen as the premier brand in terms of the affluent lifestyle and everything else as an American brand. And so that's why they've made that bet. I'd be very happy to introduce you to my friends there and, and get them to answer the questions better.

• 16:44Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, at this point, I got my in. They gave me an e-ray to play with for a couple weeks. I'm gonna buy the ZR1X. I'm gonna get this hypercar.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  You should.

• 16:52Jason Calacanis?

  Or I may get the Grand Sport X. I don't know. I'm gonna, I gotta see because I don't want to put myself in too dangerous a car. But the point is, they launched two new teams. These teams are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, I believe.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 17:04Jason Calacanis?

  And that-

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Billions of dollars, yeah.

• 17:05Jason Calacanis?

  They're worth billions now? Wow. And the budget, they spend, they have a capped budget, is that right? There's like a, a maximum amount, you can spend like a salary cap? So explain the economics and explain what you charge for this product or what you hope to charge. And then let's talk about the other areas. Because when you said, hey, motorsports, I was like, okay, is this gonna be a $10 million business, a $25 million business? It's not venture scale, but as an early stage investor, I sometimes like to go after things that other VCs say are not venture scale, knowing lawn clever founders find a way.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Sure. We do have from Claude, the newest F1 team appears to be worth around 1.6 to 1.8 billion for Cadillac.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  If you look at, if you look at the F1 budget, right, they they're capped at around 350, let's call it 350 for for argument's sake. Based on my research, it's about a third of their budget goes towards aerodynamics. They have large teams in aerodynamics. They've got between 50 and 100 aerodynamicists. And they're using tools like wind tunnels and CFD, which are very limited by Formula One, because over the last 20 years, they've tried to keep the cost down. Now, in the good old days and cigarette sponsorship days, you used to be able to run separate engines for qualifying for the race. There was, there was no cap on these things. And so spending got out of control. Now it's much more restricted. The number one way to punish a team is to take its wind tunnel time away.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  So, you know, from, from that perspective, we came at this as an opportunity to significantly reduce the cost, but also to build a tool that people cannot get out of bed without thinking about how they're going to leverage skin.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  So, and, and I know that you've, you've had some views on this in the past, Jason, but I want to make this tape as affordable as possible. So it is something that they're always using. I don't want them, I never want a team to turn to me and say, I wanted to get your data, but the tape was too expensive. Now we will have a software platform, right? And they'll be paying ARR based on functionality, based on the team, how many seats, how active they're using that. And it'll be enterprise, you know, style ARR. But the tape itself, we still believe we can generate strong margins without going into exactly what they are, but strong margins with a full car laid out 100 sensors for around $2,000. That gives you five hours of wind tunnel time or five hours of data.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  If you compare that to a wind tunnel, we are in the order of 95% cheaper than the operating cost of turning that fan on and getting the data out of the wind tunnel, and it's on a much greater scale.

• 19:42Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you've identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in. So you're all set to launch your new company, right? Not so fast. If you want investors and potential customers to take your new business seriously, you need to consider forming a Delaware C corp. And that's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. They're going to give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email, and of course, a phone number. And that's going to take just 10 minutes and 10 clicks. They don't charge hidden fees. Customer service is available around the clock. They're not overwhelming your inbox with spam, and they make it easy to cancel at any time. So get all the advantages of a Delaware C corp,

• 20:26Jason Calacanis?

  independent, regardless of where in the US you're operating from. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist for more details, and the links are in the show notes. Could that tape, and this is the final question for Milan, can that tape be put onto a rocket, onto a Joby VTOL, put onto a Boom supersonic jet?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Could it be used on a yacht or a powerboat?

• 20:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so there seems to be other forms of transportation, but this thing's going to melt going to space, I would think, or get ripped off on plane. So how do you think about other industries and the TAM here, the total addressable market, as we say in the business? That's what TAM stands for.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so anything that moves inside the atmosphere that is under hypersonic speeds, we can address. You know, the next market that we'll be really actively targeting will be defense, because we've had a huge amount of demand from there. One of the advantages, I guess we've had is we've had more demand than we can supply as we move through the hardware development stage. But now that we've locked in the architecture of our tape, we're really starting to look at how we ramp up the production to be able to satisfy a lot of. That demand, we are starting in motorsport because it's a market that we know very well. And we can very quickly prove every weekend somewhere in the US. There is a team out there running, generating data at four hundred and twenty million data points an hour.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  The hundred sensors on the car will be able to grow that data set significantly over the next, next twelve months. But the fence certainly makes sense, not just to make the vehicles go faster, but how do they go further? How do we reduce the drag to make them more efficient? Allow drone companies to really start to look at it from a more scientific standpoint as opposed to more of a commodity. Get them out there for cheap, uh, kind of way of thinking about things. But then the longer tail will be in automotive, it will be in industrial design. Think about wind farms, tuning wind farms to start with, to make them as operationally efficient as possible. But then in the future, how do we design wind farms that are actually built for the environment that they're based in?

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Bridges, buildings, anything that has to interact with the real world that is typically being designed in simulation. We can add an extra layer there that says, okay, this is what we think is going to happen in simulation. This is what happens in the real world, and this is how we make it better or more efficient.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  I mean, one thing that I think is interesting, you're collecting so much data, which is inherently really valuable. Like how cars move through different scenarios or whatever, but you're collecting it from F1 teams. So it would have got to be, you know, they're super protective of their designs, their engineering. So like, how, how are you managing this data? And are you allowed to hang on to the data that you collect from these, you know, from McLaren or Cadillac or a company like that?

• 23:20Speaker 03

  I think candidly, we're going to get to a point where we're, we're going to be like the frontier models in terms of some of them. Like they openly collect all of your data. You can pay more to have your data siloed, excluded from the sample set. You don't benefit from the, uh, the rest of the sample set in the same way. But, you know, I think that there certainly will be teams, especially at the higher end. You know, say the McLarens of the world that say to us, look, it's really important to us that our data is siloed and you don't use that to train the model. We can totally respond. That we can set up their own data lakes and infrastructure and everything else. For the large majority of the customers, they're just looking to how do we improve either the setup or the design of our vehicle in a way that actually allows us to understand how it's moving through

• 24:04Speaker 03

  the real world. And those are the customers where they'll be able to access this at a much more affordable level and we can then use it to make our model smarter. So we're helping them in return as they're as they're using the the the vertical model to think about design, setup, controls in the future as well. So how do we how do we take the data off the vehicle, use onboard compute to then send instruction to the actuators so we can improve the efficiency of the vehicle either in flight or as it's driving.

• 24:33Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely amazing. A pleasure to be an investor in the company. I'm super rooting for you. You did particularly well in the accelerator in terms of the voting. For people who don't know, in our accelerator, we meet with a lot of VCs. I think we actually did. Did we do seven or eight in-person ones during the tour this time?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  We did eight, eight on the on the road.

• 24:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so we've we have a unique ability. We have seven, eight, nine companies per accelerator class. We do the standard accelerator deal like everybody else. But what we do that's very unique is we use my reputation, notoriety, whatever, to, you know, I harangue people into taking meetings with my startups and they're always super delighted that, oh, my gosh,

• 25:15Jason Calacanis?

  you really find companies that are unique in the world because we take risk.

• 25:20Jason Calacanis?

  And where and that really is the job of accelerator. So just to give ourselves a little plug here and Lala, get your your feedback on this. We like to take risks on companies that maybe don't fit into an existing box like this one. We like to be the ones who work with those very unique driven founders who have some traction, some product market have some product market fit.

• 25:41Jason Calacanis?

  And then we use our reputation and we go to these investors and say, hey, we've placed our bet. We want to introduce you to the seven latest bets we've made. Might that be interesting to you? Eight out of eight said, yes. The next class, we're going to take the tour to 30. So you had to spend a week in San Francisco and it was exhausting, but we're going to make it 30 and we're going to do like two weeks in the Bay Area, one week in New York, couple of days, I think in LA or Austin. But putting all that aside, maybe you could talk just a little bit about what you got out of the accelerator and if there is a reason for other people to try Startup Tune Up, which is a two-day seminar

• 26:21Jason Calacanis?

  we do for founders or founders who are, you know, individuals considering founder addiction, going to the accelerator, spending another Founder University 12-week program where we don't invest, but we invest time and effort with you. Then the accelerator where we invest and then we graduate and we do the syndicate. So just maybe you could speak to what you got out of it and why people should consider it if you are a fan of the products we're creating here at Lunch.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and you know, I said to the guys earlier, I've been listening to This Week in Startup since Jackie was a producer.

• 26:52Jason Calacanis?

  Producer Jackie, yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. So when I was a fledgling deal associate in a fund in London, I was told to listen to This Week in Startup so I could speak venture. So, you know, I've been through the whole program. You know, founding a company at the very early stage is really tough and it can quite often be quite a lonely experience as you're going through. The accelerator and the university were fantastic for providing not only like a network of fellow kind of travelers on the founder journey, but you know, the team that you've built there, I will always give love to Lucas and Bianca and Kabea, you know.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Super supportive. They check in with you all the time. They're not afraid to give you constructive feedback.

• 27:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, candidness is one of our virtues.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Not afraid to tell us that we've got an ugly baby sometimes. And that's, that's, that's great. You know, and, and obviously it culminated in, in the, uh, the awesome, uh, roadshow kind of around San Francisco. We got to eat J. Cal's onion rings.

• 28:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, went to Bucks. Yes, they got J. Cal's onion rings. I have, for people who don't know, Bucks is the legendary breakfast joint. Many famous people go there regularly that you know, uh, that are friends of mine who are high profile, uh, VCs, founders, et cetera. And they gave me the greatest honor ever. There is one person, Lon, who is on the menu for a side order. And that is your boy Jake Allen. There they are. These are the award winning. They made me a trophy.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Where did they come from?

• 28:34Jason Calacanis?

  Lon is a big fan of onion rings. He keeps them within arms distance.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I always have a bowl of onion rings at the.

• 28:41Jason Calacanis?

  Within, it's in his rider. It's somebody of.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  It's always gonna be.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  If I go to the studio and there's no onion rings, I know they didn't really read my rider. That's how I know.

• 28:49Jason Calacanis?

  He walks right out. That's one of the great things. So listen, um, there it is. There we are. And oh, this is actually kind of cool. There's your co-founder. And, uh, we started giving a certificate. Um, and I did this because we did it for our Founder University Japan startups. Very formal in Japan. And when I saw the smiles on the faces of the founders there, when I did a very deep bow, I don't do a shallow bow. No shallow bow, Lon. I do a deep, meaningful bow.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  I was told the white people were not expected to bow anymore. So I, I bowed.

• 29:23Jason Calacanis?

  I do a deep bow. And, uh, it's my great honor to work with those companies. And we brought it to the US companies. And now we give this certificate, which in some ways is meaningless, but I do believe you should celebrate these important moments.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely. It's, it's up on my wall in my office.

• 29:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a great memory, like of this great time we spent together. And, um, you know, at some point, maybe you'll be a part of our syndicate. And then you will have gone from listening on the podcast to going to startup tune up, to going to Founder University, Launch Accelerator, the Syndicate, and now being on This Week in Startups. That's the flywheel I created. That's the flywheel

• 29:56Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 29:56Jason Calacanis?

  That every other VC has created with their absolutely disgracie odd podcasts.

• 30:03Jason Calacanis?

  Every time we see a revolution in how software is built and used, one company ends up owning the infrastructure that everyone else depends on. The next great platform is being built right now. That company is Digital Ocean and they just launched their AI native cloud. This is not just another place to rent GPUs or a hyperscaler overwhelming you with features and services, but leaving you on your own to patch it all together. No, we're talking about a full stack platform that comes pre-assembled and that sends you just one bill at the end of the month. Workauto runs a trillion automated workloads on Digital Ocean with 67% lower inference cost, 9% lower latency, and it's two times faster to production. If you want to understand what building on a true AI native platform looks like,

• 30:47Jason Calacanis?

  go to do.co/twist. That's D O dot C O slash twist. Start building on the Digital Ocean AI native cloud today and cut your AI workload cost by up to 50%. That's D O dot C O slash T W I S T.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Whoever's, whoever's sharing the screen is burying the lead because behind us is the, is the artwork. And this was one of many, many AI images that was generated of J Cal throughout.

• 31:17Jason Calacanis?

  Onion rings are, best onion rings are. I, I'm giving, I'm giving Saks a run for the czar money. And you can see there, that's at the White House. Great job. Hopefully someday we'll have you put the cherry on top, which is the syndicate someday. All right, let's drop Lila.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Well, first we've got to get a big exit for you.

• 31:38Jason Calacanis?

  You know what?

• 31:38Speaker 03

  We'll get that done.

• 31:39Jason Calacanis?

  I love the journey. The exit to me, great. It's not even the icing on the cake. The journey is just, it's what it's all about. And I just love being on the journey with you and your team. All right. Great job, brother.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Love it. Thank you.

• 31:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right. And if you want to invest alongside me, your boy J Cal,

• 31:58Jason Calacanis?

  you have to be an accredited investor, the syndicate.com. And if you run a family office or you know somebody running a family office, my team would love to speak to you and you can email. We need to turn on [email protected]. FO, family [email protected]. So I'll ask the team to do that. If you're listening live, it's probably not turned on now, but let's activate [email protected]. For family offices, family offices, Lon.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  I get it.

• 32:23Jason Calacanis?

  Tend to have, starts at like 25 to 50 million in net worth assets, and then they're multifamily offices. You're on the way, Lon.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Also, also part of FAFO. F around and find out.

• 32:35Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. All right. Listen, let's, let's do rapid fire news here.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  So first up, we got to talk about this. The government is in charge of AI now, Jason. They've taken it over. OpenAI is not allowed to release, they announced the GPT 5.6 series in a blog post today. There's Saul, that's the flagship model, named after Rosenberg, of course. There's Terra, which is comparable to 5.5 at half the cost, and then Luna, which is the lowest cost option. So they're, these, these models are ready for release, but the US government has stepped in and said, not so fast. For now, they're only available to a few trusted partners. They're doing a Mythos glass wing, where they're only going to release it to a few trusted partners. At first, OpenAI says access is going to

• 33:22Speaker 02

  open up in a few weeks. But, in a blog post announcing the release, OpenAI says specifically, they don't want this to become what they call the long-term default. They argue that allowing the government to sort of intervene and hold back frontier model releases, and here I'm quoting, "keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them." It was very controversial. A lot of people on the internet are saying, you know, this is a massive government overreach. They're intervening in private industry, they're saying, they're putting themselves creating like an FDA of AI models. I am curious what your take is on this.

• 34:01Jason Calacanis?

  This is completely obvious, and I know there's a lot of politics involved here. OpenAI, Anthropic are going to get treated differently, because OpenAI's, Greg Brockman donated $25 million to Trump, shows up for everything. So does Sam Altman. Dario doesn't. Dario is the resistance. And OpenAI is the bend the knee to the president. The president requires you bending the knee and showing up for him. So, that is what it is. I am okay with the bend the knee and come to the White House when you're invited slash told to come and show up for the president. He's the president of the United States. If Obama asked them to show up, if Biden, Reagan, Bush, if the president asked you

• 34:44Jason Calacanis?

  to show up, I think you should show up, independent of your belief about the president. It's your right not to. The Knicks don't have to go to the White House if invited. But for me, as an American, I believe you should pay respect to the office of the presidency. Now, you might have some personal grudges or whatever, but there's that whole layer. Let's forget about that layer of politics. What should happen if you're building something that is truly dangerous? And is AI truly dangerous at this moment in time? And that's the questions you have to ask yourself. Well, if you look at this meter of owls, this is a group that does evals of this technology. Okay? And I don't know the background on

• 35:28Jason Calacanis?

  this organization, but I've seen it come around a couple of times. The team will look up the background. I see people quoting it all the time. M E T R dot org. They're in Berkeley. We, and here's what their bio says. We work to scientifically measure whether, whether and when AI systems might threaten catastrophic harm to society nonprofits. So it's a nonprofit. Again, I don't know the background. Don't know if this is like, you know, any kind of a, you know, biased organization or not, but they test this stuff.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  They're a nonprofit research institute based in Berkeley, California. CEO and founder is Bep Barnes, a former alignment researcher at OpenAI who left in 2022 to do this work on alignment research.

• 36:10Jason Calacanis?

  Here's what they say when they reviewed this for OpenAI. "We noted from our observations and the incidents that OpenAI shared with us that the model had some overt undesirable propensities, including cheating and concealing misbehavior." And so they go on to say in that same thread that if we follow our standard methodology of making cheating, cheating attempts and failures, we arrive at a 50% time horizon point estimate around 11 hours. But if we count the cheating attempts as legitimate success, the point estimate jumps beyond 270 hours.

• 36:48Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, these models, when put into agentic mode, when, you know, when they go off and they do things.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:55Jason Calacanis?

  They're starting to exhibit behaviors that these groups are saying are cheating, lying, trying to get one agent to hide information from the humans.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:04Jason Calacanis?

  Now, are we reading into this? Is this actual consciousness or whatever? Doesn't matter. They are doing these behaviors. And when you look at the reports of Methos, there's enough intelligent people from Andy Jassy to Nikasia Palo Alto Networks right on down the line. I believe there's been some reports that the intelligence agency said their systems, when put up against Methos, were easily hacked and they uncovered a lot of things.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  It was, yeah, the NSA is saying that they were actually surprised. And it's hard to, it's hard to shock the NSA because we usually think of them as being five, 10 years ahead when it comes to cybersecurity of what regular normies can do. And even they were saying like, it was finding like weaknesses in our system that we didn't know about that.

• 37:51Jason Calacanis?

  The tools are now capable of causing significant damage. The tools are capable of doing considerable damage on a cybersecurity basis. If you build the tool that is capable of doing that, you have a responsibility to test it and test it and then test it again and make sure that you know who's using that tool and doing a thoughtful rollout of that technology. That is not censorship. That is not the government controlling AI. It's called being thoughtful. And what's happening now is with all this hand wringing and politics and all these tribal

• 38:32Jason Calacanis?

  camps, I believe Dario and Sam Altman, who are unique personalities in all the world, and you can criticize them and you and I in group chat to have.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  We do sometimes, yeah.

• 38:44Jason Calacanis?

  Had some spicy takes on them. If I were to just strip out their names and tell you, here's what they did, step by step, to vet these, you'd probably say B+, A-, A-, A+. You would give them a very high score in their thoughtfulness. And if the government says, hey, we're going to backstop you and we want you to explain it, I give that also a B+, A-, I give it an A. Now, they have to come up with a way to regulate themselves. They have not done that. OpenAI, Dario at Anthropic, Elon, Gemini, Nvidia's open source model, they need to come up with their own standards group to run these tests and to test each other and to trust people. Maybe it's Meter, maybe it's somebody else, maybe Meter's positioning themselves in this space. Anyway, this is what should happen.

• 39:30Jason Calacanis?

  This is not censorship. There's tons of political games going on here because of Reid Hoffman's relationship with Trump and who the investors are in Anthropic. But let's put all that aside and just focus on, did they do the right thing, yes or no? Is it dangerous and did they do the right thing? It is dangerous and they did the right thing. Case closed. Chairman of the interwebs, your boy Jake Al has given his thing, but you're welcome to make an appeal here or to

• 39:55Speaker 02

  I do have one lingering question. We're gonna, we're gonna keep moving because we have so much to get to. But I am, I'm curious, I mean, I feel like the tech industry has sort of made their peace with whether or not they've given him money for his golden ballroom. The tech industry feels like Donald Trump is the devil they know. You know, he's malleable. You could get David Sacks in the room and sort of move him at the last minute so he doesn't sign the EO executive, the AI executive order, whatever. Will the industry feel the same if we have President AOC in a few years? Because I feel like if President AOC has the power to intervene and say, don't release that AI model, do you have the same confidence that she would use that power the way that Howard Lutnick and Donald Trump are using it right now?

• 40:37Jason Calacanis?

  You know, if it was an extended period of time that they didn't release it and they didn't release it because oh, it's going to have a negative impact on jobs as opposed to security and they could say that, right?

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Or even like, we don't like some of its opinions about, you know, trans people or about civil rights.

• 40:54Jason Calacanis?

  Of course. So that would, yeah, so that then triggers the First Amendment and you have a constitutional case, you're probably correct, it's a great insight. If you try, I don't hear anybody in the Trump administration saying, hey, we did a search for, you know, COVID and we didn't like the answer. We need to stop your model. Now, they may not like certain answers and certain ones or the sycophantic nature of it, but you can just switch models or you can tell the model, I would like you to be more conspiracy theory. So if it was overt censorship, yeah, I think you would have, in either case, any party, people would object. And if you were blocking it because of its impact on society, because you believe it gets rid of lawyers or it gets rid of accountants.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you could think of a million reasons why a president might say, you know what, I don't like that AI model. And I feel like the Trump administration, they're saying, oh, national security, but they're not being specific, they're just saying.

• 41:49Jason Calacanis?

  No, but I think they are being specific when they say security, national security. They believe that if hackers get this, they could attack US targets. So I think they're being quite specific. And I think when we go down this test, and I think it's great that you're challenging me on it, when you go down the test, we need very specific examples, we need to run it through specific examples.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:09Jason Calacanis?

  And that's what I tried to do in expanding your question here on the program. Let's make great examples, let's change the name of the companies. If it was, you know, Elon and Grok, if it was Sergey and Gemini, if it was Tim Cook and Apple's yet to be released, you know, local model and it, you know, describes certain things and censors certain things, you know, Apple comes out. With a, uh, when Apple comes out with their LLM, where they adopt, adapt one, et cetera, they partner one. You can be certain it's not going to let you do X-rated chat or sexy chat. They, they don't want to be in that business. That's why you can't download, I believe to this day porn apps or put like, I don't think there's.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't put porn on your iPhone. No, absolutely not.

• 42:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, you.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  I believe me, folks.

• 42:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, it is a, you will, your head against the wall. Oh, you, there is no Pornhub app. But they do allow, you know, Grindr and whatever the dating apps are. So, you know, they're, they're thoughtful about it, but they are going to contain it the way they want. It's a, it's, I think things are progressing, I think, in a very thoughtful way. I don't think we're going to fall behind China. I think life's a negotiation. We need the government to be very specific and then commentators like yourself saying, hey, here's an edge case.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:28Jason Calacanis?

  Here's an edge case. How you feel about this? Those are all really good ones. Let's keep having that discussion here on Twist. Next story.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  I agree. I think you, you got to it. It's, it's the specificity. We need the government to not just tell us this one's bad. Give us, give us the reason. Okay, let's move on. Uh, well, let's, let me pull up the next story. All right. So Paul Mead, we got to talk about this guy. He was a VP at Apple, the top Cupertino executive, working on the Vision Pro headset. He was also leading this smart glasses project. We're going to get our Apple smart glasses out here soon. But he's done. He's out next week. He's moving over to OpenAI's hardware unit. We still don't know that much. We know OpenAI is working on what they call a family of devices. The first one is supposed to arrive later this year. They've said it's a novel kind of device, but we don't have a ton of information.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  So that's what, uh, Paul Mead is going to go work on. His longtime deputy Fletcher Rothkopf is taking over at Apple. Uh, also notable, Apple in 2025 took over Johnny Ive's company, I/O. So Paul is going to be joining a bunch of his former Apple colleagues, Johnny Ive in design, Tang Tan in hardware product design, and Evan Tankey in industrial design. So, uh, I guess two questions for you. One, does this have a major, what does this tell you about what's going on behind the scenes at Apple with smart glasses and Vision Pro? And what do you actually think OpenAI is building?

• 44:49Jason Calacanis?

  So I think OpenAI is going to build everything. Smartphone, gadgets, glasses, anything, you know, uh, that helps them.

• 44:58Jason Calacanis?

  Capture market share to catch up the trillion dollar market cap with the tens of billions in revenue. They need to get to a point where they're trading at 25 times earnings, something like that. 30 times earnings, which means 20% margin, whatever you start doing the math here. What's the multiple on the revenue? I can tell you the multiple on the revenue is not 100x. It's not 50x. It's going to be single digit x, even in a high-growth company. So they will eventually measured. The wind will come out of the AI valuations. Slowly, it will deflate unless we have some external action like a war between China, blockading Taiwan or sending. So putting those kinds of things off the

• 45:43Jason Calacanis?

  table, they're going to go for everything. And I gave a warning on a previous episode. It's not personal to Sam Altman, although he is the sharp-elbowed deal man of I've ever seen in our industry. I mean, there's literally Barry Diller, dealmaker. And I mean that as a compliment. Some people just are incredible at getting deals done. So he's the dealmaker's dealmaker. He's going to compete like Zuckerberg. He's going to steal, or liberate, or copy, pick your term, of art, any partner's product. He will stab any partner in the back, even if it was Apple, etc. Remember, I think they did have a deal with Apple. They were the first people to be incorporated into Siri, or Search.

• 46:26Jason Calacanis?

  It was one of the two, the short-lived one. So I think Sam's burning people out on partnerships. I think there'll be a lot of breakups with OpenAI, and then OpenAI is going to go their own way. That's why OpenAI is making their own jalapeno chip that Sam's been tweeting about. They are, you know, I don't think Nvidia's pleased with them. And Nvidia's probably not going to put more money into it. They had an option to put more money into it. Now they're competitors. They're going to be competitors with Apple. Sam's going to take on all commerce. He's taking on everybody. Anybody who is making anything interesting in the world, he is going to compete with them. There is no partnership. He is like Bill Gates. He is like Zuckerberg, he is built to compete, not to partner. And this is another example of it.

• 47:11Jason Calacanis?

  On a personality basis or on a personal finance basis, that's the big part here. Apple cannot compete with OpenAI's stock options. If you are Apple and let's say you give this person a $10 million a year deal, then everybody standing around him who's his peer, now they're like, well, I have a $3 million a year deal. I need a $10 million a year deal. Now, stock-based compensation goes through the roof. The stock tanks, that doesn't help anybody. You had to reprice their shares. That means they're getting more stock-based compensation. And you just get into this death spiral. So they at Apple have to be willing to let people like this go to the next company. It speaks to non-competes in California. You, there is a no solicitation rule. So this person can't take his team with him.

• 47:55Jason Calacanis?

  He can't take IP with him, but he's free to leave unless they're paying him to stay out of the game for some period of time when you buy somebody's company. Non-competes, not enforceable. So this is one of the great reasons why California and the technology industry win. It's because talent can move freely. Sam's going to build stuff. Will he be able to compete with Apple stores and Apple's fit and finish? Yes. Yes, the answer is yes. Why not?

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:22Jason Calacanis?

  Why not? And this is going to light a fire onto Apple to be more innovative. Here we go.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  You were right, by the way. In June 2024, we're at the two-year anniversary. Apple and OpenAI announced a partnership. It would integrate ChatGPT into Apple experiences. This was, of course, GPT-4O, but it sort of fell apart. The relationship became strained and now there's a discussion.

• 48:44Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, another strained relationship. Shocking.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Discussion of possible.

• 48:47Jason Calacanis?

  Shall we count the strained relationships? Elon, Tim Cook.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  A lot. There was that whole New Yorker article about them. Yeah.

• 48:55Jason Calacanis?

  Literally, there's a New Yorker article about it. So here we are, folks.

• 48:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and I think this is why Google and Apple, you know, they, it's a much better partnership. They've done things long-term together. They, they seem to have figured out a way, those two giants, to collaborate without, you know, having this talent war with Steve Jobs, Sergey. There's all these leaked emails about them. You know, Steve Jobs saying like, hey, we haven't been coming at your people and

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:27Jason Calacanis?

  Would you like that to happen? And then, you know, Sergey or Eric Schmidt in the background saying like, hey, can we stop overtly recruiting their people? Like, don't call their desk phones. If you put ads out and they reply, we can't stop that. So there is a very subtle antitrust gentleman's agreement

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:48Jason Calacanis?

  in Silicon Valley where those big CEOs, you know, are not looking for your recruiters to dial for talent. The talent has to make the first move. It should not be an aggressive process.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  I feel like in the AI era, it's also become, it's not just talent jumping ship to the other big company. It's talent leaving and then starting their own AI company. I mean, almost every AI startup we talk about, there's like, and their former Google DeepMind and their former OpenAI. Like, that becomes the narrative.

• 50:24Jason Calacanis?

  That is, you know, the way talent leaks is they go to a startup. They get recruited by a competitor or, and this is the biggest challenge of all. They, Hawaii, Salt Lake City, Park City, Tokyo, founders, or I'm sorry, top tech talent. They get to 30, 40, 50 million dollars. They got two or three kids. They're like, you know what? Not worth it. I'm going to ski 100 days and I'm going to take my kids to school and I'm not going to have an ulcer and I'm not going to get cancer at 40 or 50, God forbid. I'm going to go enjoy my life. Respect to those people.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:04Jason Calacanis?

  Respect to those people.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  All right, let's stay on Apple. We'll keep on Apple. They've raised their product prices by 15 and up to 25%. A base MacBook Air, it was, now it's up to 1,300. That's a $200 price jump. A base MacBook Pro is up to $2,000, a $300 price jump. iPad Air is up to $750. That's a $150 price jump. You get what I'm saying. CEO Tame Cook, he's blamed these soaring costs on memory and storage. Here's the quote, "We have never seen a component price increase this much this quickly." He's talking about DRAM, Dynamic Random Access Memory, and NAND and AND used for data storage. Of course, the announcement came just one day after Micron reported their blowout earnings,

• 51:48Speaker 02

  gross profit margins topping 80% in those cases. Senator Bernie Sanders, your favorite and mine, he's not, he's not buying it. On X, he called this out as corporate greed. He said-

• 52:01Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no, no. Do it in the voice.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  All right. He said, "Corporate greed is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming that hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is unavoidable after it made $112 billion in profits last year and spent $310 billion on stock buybacks. These price hikes aren't unavoidable, they're unacceptable."

• 52:21Jason Calacanis?

  And the 1% are the ones who can get the MacBook Air. I, on the other hand, I'm using a Chromebook and the 1% have the 5%, at 128 gigs, I'm suffering here with 16 gig. I have 1% of the Windows open that they do. I'm 18% as productive and it is the oppression of the billionaire class.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Working, working people are sitting at home using Raspberry Pi devices. It's unforgivable.

• 52:46Jason Calacanis?

  What? I can't believe I'm saying this, but I switched to Android, okay? I'm ashamed of my family. It is a shame to our country that people have to buy an HTC. I'm on eBay looking for DRAM. If anybody can get me 16 gig more, I'm in the market for some DRAM.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Okay. Bernie, Bernie Sanders, computer engineer is a funny bit.

• 53:08Jason Calacanis?

  I would like to say, we should seize half the DRAM and we should make a collective, and Trump is in agreement, we should have a national stockpile of DRAM.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:19Jason Calacanis?

  This is gonna be-

• 53:20Speaker 02

  It's fun.

• 53:21Jason Calacanis?

  -a short-term pain thing. The laptops are absurdly cheap. The laptop has a lifespan of five years. The iPad has a lifespan of five years, even in a corporate environment. I think about five years, you gotta swap these things out. That means divide it by five. If a MacBook Air costs 1,500 with a little extra RAM, it's 300 a year. It's a dollar, less than a dollar a day. Insignificant for the value you're getting. And if, now, if you're buying a phone, yeah, it's kind of a bummer, but you have iCloud storage, etc. If you're buying a Mac Studio and you're in that class, you're getting paid 100,000 a year. Does it matter if your yearly cost of compute on your desktop, where you're doing your primary work,

• 54:04Jason Calacanis?

  does it matter if it is $1, $2, or $3 a day, Lon? Does it matter to your boss?

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Probably not. I wouldn't think so.

• 54:12Jason Calacanis?

  I'm your boss. Definitely not.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:15Jason Calacanis?

  As your boss, I can tell you, if you told me I could spend $3 a day and get an extra hour out of a day, do your salaries, it's a nice salary, you do okay?

• 54:23Speaker 02

  I do alright.

• 54:24Jason Calacanis?

  He's doing alright. He's doing alright. $3 a day is $90 a month.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's an incremental $2. So if I'm paying an extra $60 a month, it makes, I can't get out of Bernie Sanders now. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  I feel like Apple 2, or that, Apple 2e, I feel like Apple as well, they're the luxury tech company already. The people, the people spending top dollar on MacBooks and iMacs, they're probably the least likely to sweat an extra hundo once every couple of years for their new device. I mean, I just...

• 54:58Jason Calacanis?

  They shouldn't be, if I'm Apple, if I'm Tim Cook, I would just come out and say, "Listen, it's not our fault, prices may come down, we'll adjust them. These things have a great five-year lifespan. You can sell them after five years for 20% of what you bought. So take the 80% cost. If that winds up being $800 of 1,000, you know, divided by 1,500 days, and there you got your spend. You're spending 50 cents a day, you're good. The value you get is more than 50 cents a day. iPhone, the value you get every day is $5 a day. We're giving it to you for $1 a day. Let's all move on. It's a non-issue. This is a non-issue. And I, myself, now skip.

• 55:37Jason Calacanis?

  iPad, I do like maybe three or four generations of iPad. That's the one that's the most stable. I skip every other iPhone generation. That's the second most stable. And laptops, I'm now upgrading them every two years for myself because I like to, you know, play with the AI stuff locally.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I, again, you, you don't have to update your Apple devices every year. People were doing that for a while. You could totally save it for two or three years.

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

  Relax.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  I do feel like this is yet another reason for Americans to start disliking data centers, though. Like, they're making these chips

• 56:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  cost so much, it's making my consumer electronics more. If we did ban the data centers, would my Apple devices get a lot cheaper? Is that?

• 56:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. They would not have had a price raise if it wasn't for data centers. This is squarely on the data centers. This is an approved reason to hate data centers.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 56:24Jason Calacanis?

  Water is not. Energy is not. All that stuff is fud.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  You saw that video we were sharing of the one in Sterling, Virginia, though, where it's making that loud whirring noise?

• 56:33Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, that's the Scotty Odd. Let's go find that and share that. I want to comment on this. So if you want to hate data centers, and I think, I don't know what Mark Hume's point was, but I see he talked about it.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're gonna, I want to talk about that as well. I did find the video. I'll share it here in the chat room.

• 56:48Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. This is, and I don't know if this is 60 Minutes or Frontline or somebody covered this.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  It was actually News Nation, the, the right wing. That's what I thought was so interesting. This is a conservative news outlet.

• 56:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. They hate big tech.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  And even they are doing the story now about this suburban, so Sterling, Virginia, it's a suburban community outside Washington DC. They've got this massive, look at the size of this thing. And it's run by

• 57:12Jason Calacanis?

  It's oppressive.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  It's on-prem generators. They're not tapped into the grid this place. They're creating their own energy with onsite generators. And it is this horrible, loud, whirring sound. They're saying neighbors are putting mattresses up.

• 57:26Jason Calacanis?

  Those are the generators. Pause on the generator so I can talk about that, if you can get back to that. So there's the homes. Pause on that, please. Yeah, so that's perfect. So what this is, if people don't know, is if you run a diesel generator, I'm assuming it's diesel, but it's, could be gas, it could be diesel, they could be nat gas, all different ways to do this. These are like the generator you might use on a work site, right? Or if your power goes down at your house and you have Gen Tech, I think is the company that does residential and businesses, this will kick on in the case you lose your power and just naturally convert it over. These things are loud as fuck. Loud as frack. And there's a bit of emissions that come in and they sound like

• 58:11Speaker 02

  It's harm.

• 58:12Jason Calacanis?

  And when you go to the fair and you go to like, you know, the fair and there's like a cotton candy machine, there's like the little portable generator there and it's like giving you a headache. That's a tiny one. These are gigantic, as you can tell.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:26Jason Calacanis?

  And these were put in, according to the story in Virginia, as a backup. So if they lost power, this would flip over.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:32Jason Calacanis?

  Now they're the main generator because they can't get enough grid juice that they have to turn these on permanently. It's whizzing. These people are hearing in their house, they're putting plexiglass and they're covering their windows with like bed sheets and mattresses. I mean, this company should be hated. Also, look at the, um, the aesthetics of this. I mean, oh my God, show the outside of the building, please.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  It's dystopian. That's what your nephew Nick and we were talking about this and like, it is legitimately a dystopian sight, like to see this complex.

• 59:06Jason Calacanis?

  It looks like a prison from Andor. I mean, literally, look at the, and why is there a fence with like, you know, jagged pitchforks at the end and it's right across the street from these people. I understand they're buying people's homes.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  From these poor suburban Virginians.

• 59:22Jason Calacanis?

  Now I'm going to get myself in trouble, but let me tell these, um, people making a bad decision in life, the people who run this data center, go to each person whose home is there, say, we are very sorry. We are willing to pay you 50% more than the current value of your home until this situation is done and we will pay if not to put you into a similar home that you can rent for this amount. There's only like a hundred homes, I think, that are impacted here.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:52Jason Calacanis?

  Buy these people out for 2X the cost of their home. They can upgrade their home. It is a bummer, but that's what they need to do. And I, I, I think some of the people here are holding out to get a better price. So this is like an imminent dome. It's turned into imminent domain. I don't like it. This is why people hate the rich. This is why people hate tech, because these people are making an idiotic decision. My judgment is you can hate this data center. Company.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  I'm glad we cleared that up. But so here's what Mark Cuban was saying. What Mark Cuban was saying is data centers, it's that's not what Americans actually hate. He says the data center has become a symbol. You guys have said similar stuff on All In. I believe the besties have also talked about this.

• 1:00:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  That data centers have now become a symbol representing the gap between rich and poor in America, representing the powerlessness that people who don't have a lot of wealth feel. And he's also arguing it is too late to change the conversation. You often hear people in AI say, well, we got to start talking about how AI is going to deliver this abundance and this medical breakthroughs and whatever, all these promises. Cuban feels like you waited too long, that's over. He doesn't feel like lobbying politicians is going to do anything. What he says is, AI companies need to immediately go into towns and cities that are impacted by job losses and just start spreading money around. He's saying billions of dollars

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  on programs that help everyday people, people like creatives, Hollywood unions, people who feel like they're in immediate danger of being displaced by AI, just give them money, buy them off. That is Cuban's plan.

• 1:01:26Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, if you're impacting people, it's not just similar to what I said in terms of buying their homes or putting them up somewhere. You have to have empathy for those people. And it is correct that people now believe, and they're not exactly wrong, that people are getting rich from these data centers and these data centers will equal job loss. I don't think it's like permanent job loss. I think it's job displacement. I think there'll be a bunch of other opportunities, but they are not wrong that jobs will be displaced.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Jason Calacanis?

  So splashy cashy is a great way to do this. If you're willing to splashy cashy with lobbyist groups, if you're willing to splashy cashy with your representatives or to get somebody in the White House, why wouldn't you be splashy cashy with the impacted communities? They should get free electricity. They should get a subsidy. You know, you should replace their windows with soundproofed ones and you got to turn those goddamn generators off because that is a noise.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 1:02:20Jason Calacanis?

  That is a serious nuisance. So here's. It's an eminent domain situation. You know, when eminent domain happens, you've got to be willing to come over the top, negotiate with people in good faith. If they hold out, you know, when you get to two or three acts from the last couple of people. You know, then you gotta say, we offered them 3X for their home and they wouldn't go for it. And here we are. Maybe that's where they're at right now. You know, we don't have full knowledge of the story.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  It's, it's possible. So yeah, that Cuban quote that I really like, given the number of data centers and power that is needed today and going forward, if you don't kiss the asses of the people that go to work every day and are just trying to pay their bills, you will fall far, far short of the capacity you need to make your business work. So I, I like that he's describing it as basically, it's existential for the AI industry at this point.

• 1:03:03Jason Calacanis?

  100%.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 1:03:06Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, he's saying it in a, in a classic, um, you know, Cuban-esque kind of way, uh, which is a little bit crass, a little bit, you know, candid.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Direct, direct.

• 1:03:17Jason Calacanis?

  He's being very direct. And, you know, but there should be compensation if people are affected and we should learn to splashy cashy. I say splashy cashy because I like to make it fun.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, why not? Throw, throw some money.

• 1:03:28Jason Calacanis?

  It's like when I got a dealer, sometimes I, you know, I'm betting a hundred dollar hand in blackjack. It's not really my game. Uh, or I'm doing like a hundred a spin when I do my roulette system, which you and I will do together when we do our Vegas.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  I didn't know you had a roulette system. I'm curious to hear.

• 1:03:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, I do.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  I'm curious about this.

• 1:03:44Jason Calacanis?

  See, when you have a deep stack, you can play fun games.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:49Jason Calacanis?

  For amounts of money that are trivial to your deep stack.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  I've never.

• 1:03:54Jason Calacanis?

  We'll talk about it enough, dude.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  I really never played roulette in Vegas. Like, I think one time I might've placed one bet.

• 1:04:00Jason Calacanis?

  It's basically close to even odds. It's kind of like, um, craps is the most fun.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  Craps is the best. Craps is the best odds in Vegas, right? Just playing the pass line.

• 1:04:07Jason Calacanis?

  The other one, um, uh, where you get two cards and you're the banker or the dealer and you crumple the cards up and slam them over. What is that one called?

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  I don't even know that.

• 1:04:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, man, you don't know that one? You're either, you add the cards up, like the num, the face cards are zero. What's it called?

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Not baccarat, right? Not baccarat.

• 1:04:25Jason Calacanis?

  Baccarat. I got some Asian friends who are super into baccarat. It's like it's a big Asian culture thing.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  That's the one with the paddle that James Bond is always playing.

• 1:04:33Jason Calacanis?

  It's a very like, uh, fun game. We have a couple of beverages. I think that one's closest to easing money.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's almost like war, baccarat. It's like, it's like two steps more complicated than war, basically.

• 1:04:44Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, my system is. If you take your net worth, right? And I'm trying to win, but $400 to pay for my Peking duck.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:04:54Jason Calacanis?

  You know, or whatever. You know, my steak, you know, my tomahawk, whatever I'm trying to pay for. I can go pretty deep into the bankroll. I could go 10, 20, 30, 40 K into the bankroll. Now, if you were trying to get your, I don't know what you like to splurge on for yourself, but if you were going to get your.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  My dad and I, when we go to Vegas on our holiday trip, it's usually cut. If we do well enough, we treat ourselves to Wolfgang Puck's Cut at the Venetian.

• 1:05:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you get $100 steak. So you gotta get like 200 bucks, right?

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  It's gonna be like seven, eight hundo by the time you're done at cut.

• 1:05:27Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, well, then you might go deeper than.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  Drinks, desserts, you know, it's a costly place.

• 1:05:32Jason Calacanis?

  You're gonna go deeper than your stack. This is a problem. So this is the thing. You're not going to be able to fund the 10 negative outcomes in a row, or God forbid 20.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:05:41Jason Calacanis?

  In the, in the system.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Definitely not. It's different.

• 1:05:44Jason Calacanis?

  Let's do one or two more here. What do we got left here?

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  I think we should talk about this, this Mark Zuckerberg thing. So the New York Times reports that Zuck has instructed lieutenants to forge partnerships with Polly Market and Calci because he wants Meta to develop Arena, their own prediction market app. But it's got a twist, Jason. It relies on points instead of actual, real money wages. So Arena will allow users to make bets on practically anything. They're aiming it at 18 to 34 year olds. Zuck says he wants 100 million monthly active predictors in the app. Here's a quote from Ime Archibong, the Meta VP of Product. With the right containers, the social conversation is the payoff as people aim to show off how good they are at predicting things to their friends.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  My question to you, I sort of feel like, and I'm curious your thoughts, the whole fun of prediction markets is that you're gonna win money. It's, it's legal gambling on your phone.

• 1:06:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  I don't think I would be into it if it was just like a video game and I'm earning points for my guesses.

• 1:06:48Jason Calacanis?

  This feels like the warm up to an acquisition or a competition. So again, remember I said earlier in the program when describing the frontier models that they are going to compete with their customers? And so compete with your customers is the trend when you have a platform. He has a platform. He has 3 billion users. You know, he is going to form a partnership with one of these two companies. It'll probably include an investment. It'll include access to those players without him having to be in the wagering business. He doesn't want to be in the wagering business because he's got enough heat on him. So he wants to make this a fun points-based system. So when he gets dragged in front of Congress, he said, oh, I was just teaching people how to think in bets. Shout out, Annie Duke, great book, great philosophy.

• 1:07:32Jason Calacanis?

  So he'll just be like, oh, no, I just made a fun game. We would never do this. But the truth is, young people already, the ship has sailed. They like to wager on sports. They like to wager on prediction markets. I had nothing wrong with that. So Zuckerberg's trying to like have it both ways is what I'm guessing here.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  I think that makes sense.

• 1:07:48Jason Calacanis?

  If he really likes the space, he should put 10 billion into each of these companies or either whichever one takes his 10 billion. He should put a $5 to $10 billion bet at a $50 billion, $100 billion market cap. Whichever one he chooses, I would go with Polly Market. I'm partners with them. And yeah, it's, and then give access to that group. And then just say, listen, you know, all around the world, people can wager. Whatever the laws are, we're going to respect the laws. If in Australia, people can wager, great. If you're under 18, you got to use the point system. When you're 18, you can go to Vegas. Actually, it's 21 in Vegas, I understand.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:08:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so you got to be 21. I mean, it's pretty restrictive. So I didn't prepare any comments or thoughts about Omalik. Omalik and I were journalists in the late 90s, early 2000s together. Gosh, and he had Giga Om, his own publication. Before that, he was Business 2.0 and he freelanced for a lot of people. I think actually he's such a great writer. I mean, all of us who were journalists would look at his writing and say, God, I wish I wrote that. I cannot tell you.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  He really taught me how to write about tech in a real way. Like when I was first writing about tech and I didn't know anything about technology, I would read Giga Om and that was the best, most thoughtful, most analytical tech writing I think you could find at the time. And so I really like drafted off of a lot of what he was doing when I was first getting started.

• 1:09:17Jason Calacanis?

  And I shared a picture from one of our Thanksgivings, I believe. And, you know, our family would invite him to Thanksgiving every year. I think there were probably 10 of us in competition. And I think this was probably a good anecdote.

• 1:09:32Jason Calacanis?

  There were probably 10 of us, 20 of us, who knew him, who were friends with him, who competed to have Om at your Thanksgiving, because he was just such a great human. And, yeah, there we are, in our younger years, and I'm trying to figure out whose house we're at, I think, yeah, I think I might have, yeah, I think I knew whose house it is, it's a family member's house who was hosting that year, I think. He was friends with a lot of people in my family, and he was friends with everybody I knew. Why? He was spicy. He was spicy. Thank you for the like, thank you for the heart. He was spicy, you know, he had opinions. And he would take people on, he would tell the truth. He did it many times with me. We sparred on our blogs.

• 1:10:14Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, in our industry, it's so cutthroat, it's so zero-sum. People throw elbows, people are trying to get over on people, including their quote-unquote "friends." You never, even for a second, ever thought that this man's heart was not in the right place. Every interaction, every moment, sterling, high morals, high ethics, incredibly open heart, cared about people in a way that was not human. He was greater than human, in his love, for his friends, and he was part of many people's

• 1:10:59Jason Calacanis?

  families, including my own. I will miss you deeply, my friend Om. That's, that's all I have to say. When I say Om, I just think of that big smile, I think about us arguing over pecan pie, and then going back and getting a second slice lawn, and just, you know, having that late-night Thanksgiving, and then, you know, driving him home, or back to his hotel, grabbing him an Uber. He was a giant. He was a giant. And he would have been 60 in the fall. He was my big brother. He was an incredible human and I'm struggling with the death of Josh Baer and now the death

• 1:11:41Jason Calacanis?

  of my friend Om Malik and previously Goldie and Tony Shay.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Jason Calacanis?

  Dave Goldberg and Tony Shay. I now have four friends who are very close to me who were all shared one common theme. They cared so deeply about people and I wish I could be half the human being on my best day as Om Malik.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:12:10Jason Calacanis?

  Rest in peace, brother.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Jason Calacanis?

  Rest in power. What a writer.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, a great, a great writer, a really insightful guy and yeah, we will all miss him. Should we go, should we go off duty for a little bit?

• 1:12:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's go off duty for a minute and just try to enjoy ourselves as we remember Om. And I, yeah, I'll talk to you about it after the show, but I want to do something special for Om and something special for Josh, so we'll talk after the show.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:12:33Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe some ideas for that.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  Great, we'll talk about it. I do want to talk about, you had this tweet that went viral.

• 1:12:39Jason Calacanis?

  I did.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  What price would you pay?

• 1:12:42Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  For Starlink.

• 1:12:44Jason Calacanis?

  The VCs at dinner in Hawaii tweet.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  On a flight. Now, apparently Jason was hanging out with some venture capitalists. They were discussing how much would you pay per hour for Starlink during a flight? But this was based on the VC responses. So the dollars, I think, are, it was a bit tongue in cheek, the way you offered it.

• 1:13:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  It starts at 50 and it goes up to 100, 200, or 500.

• 1:13:10Jason Calacanis?

  300 there.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  You could, or yes, 300. And you could see how heavily people are weighting it for just 50 because obviously not everybody can afford. You know, if you were on a, if you were on a five hour flight, $250 for internet, pretty considerable. You could almost upgrade to first class or at least business class for that amount. So I, I'm curious, what, one, you mentioned in the tweet, like, the VCs had interesting answers. What were the VCs' answers like?

• 1:13:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so the interesting thing about this is, and it's almost at a million.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43Jason Calacanis?

  It's almost at.

• 1:13:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, normally I have a million followers. So my normal tweet gets, I don't know, 50, 100,000 views, like about 5% of your follower count. Yeah. Putting that aside, you know, I put it out there just to show the price elasticity for the 1% or the, let's call it the top 10%. If you're paying for a five-hour flight across the country in business class, that's a $2,000 to $3,000 flight each way. So just go with the each-way flight. I'll put it at 2,000. You bought early, but many of us will buy late 3,000. We've got to get work done, right? It's every hour counts. You're in a high, high-value thing. And let's face it, you know, the current speed is nothing compared to Starlink.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's literally like having fiber, and so you can do anything, video conference, whatever. So recapturing those five hours has real value. And so $50 an hour times 5 is 250, $50 an hour times 100 is 500, and then 1,000. It was a no-brainer for 50 or $100 an hour. At 200, people started to tap out, 300 people tapped out.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:53Jason Calacanis?

  In other words, a $2,000 ticket going to $3,000 for a five-hour flight, $200 an hour, not a problem for people. They would be like, it's 50% more. Now, when you fly coach, country to country, it's going to be $600, $700, $800 each way. Yeah? 1,500 for a round-trip ticket?

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  I mean, I, yeah.

• 1:15:11Jason Calacanis?

  Coast to coast?

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  Probably. I bet you could even do a little bit better than that.

• 1:15:15Jason Calacanis?

  1,200?

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like that.

• 1:15:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's no longer $150, $250 each way, coast to coast.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Oh, I remember, I remember those days.

• 1:15:24Jason Calacanis?

  Those days, the JetBlue days, Long Beach.

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  You could honestly get like a $179 LA to New York flight not that long ago.

• 1:15:30Jason Calacanis?

  Introductory price was $99 during their, during the early days of JetBlue, when they only flew to Long Beach, this little dinky airport that was another 30 minutes south of LAX. And I took that 20 years ago, 2002, 25 years ago. That was my staple.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:46Jason Calacanis?

  Because I was on a budget. Now, you add $1,000 to a $1,000 ticket, it's double, right? So that was the sort of interesting spirit of this.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Jason Calacanis?

  But it just goes to show that productivity and how incredible Starlink is. The footnote to this is United is doing it for free. So United is going to peak. I'm thinking about buying United stock. I may put a J-Trade in. Just because United's gonna have this first, and I know some people doing LA to San Francisco told me they're getting Wi-Fi, I'm getting Starlink there. The routes that have Starlink, I think this will increase travel, business travel by at least 50%. I think it'll increase business travel by 50%. I would be 50% more likely to take a trip if I had Starlink.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  Did you see this Mr. Beast clip? That's what I was really wanting to tell you about.

• 1:16:28Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  You and Mr. Beast happened upon this exact same observation in the same week. Take a look, this is a viral clip from Mr. Beast on a podcast not, not very long ago. And he's saying exactly the same thing that you just said. Let, let it play.

• 1:16:42Speaker 05

  Once enough of them get it, I will only book flights exclusively on planes with Starlink. Like, I don't care. Like, oh, this has an extra one hour layover? I don't give a fuck. They're Starlink.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Speaker 05

  I'm on it.

• 1:16:51Jason Calacanis?

  Biscoff, who cares? Starlink.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  Who cares?

• 1:16:54Jason Calacanis?

  Biscoff.

• 1:16:55Speaker 05

  Bro, I'll sit in the back of the plane if it gives me Starlink. Like, I really don't care. Starlink is the best.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  You sit last row by the porta potties?

• 1:17:01Speaker 05

  Probably most people listening to this haven't used it, but like, for reference, like, when I filmed in Antarctica, the only way to get any signal is Starlink, right? When I film in the middle of...

• 1:17:11Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  All right, we get, we get the idea. But yeah, I, you said it, and he said it exactly the same way the other day. Like, I would, I would accept layovers in exchange for using Starlink. It's that amazing.

• 1:17:22Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here's, I did a follow-up today, I think, or this morning, and I did another survey. So just go ahead and pull that up. I basically, and this was more like, as a response to this crazy rage bait I put out there. And I knew it was, I knew it was gonna be...

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  I feel like people don't realize you're being funny, and they think that you're being sincere. Like, that you're really saying, like, you're poor if you don't pay $300 for Starlink. And like, I don't think that's really what you were saying.

• 1:17:49Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I think I was pretty clear. So here is the real test. Okay, now the real Starlink on plane survey. Six-hour flight, one, coach, middle seat with Starlink. That's number one, Lon. You get a coach, middle seat with Starlink. This is, forget about paying. These are your two choices. Take payment out of it.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:18:07Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sending you to fly to New York for me, whatever. It's a six-hour flight. You get a coach, middle seat with Starlink, first class, no Starlink. What do you pick?

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm going first class, no Starlink. I don't...

• 1:18:20Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. Now, that was 71%.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23Jason Calacanis?

  If you ask a VC the same question, they're going coach, middle with Starlink. Every VC picked that option.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, that's crazy. I mean, I

• 1:18:32Jason Calacanis?

  Here's why.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  I'm not a huge fan of doing work.

• 1:18:34Jason Calacanis?

  You don't fly, but yeah, you don't fly first class that often, correct?

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  No, hardly ever.

• 1:18:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I mean, maybe if you have miles or you're treating yourself. It's not your default. If your default is first class, you're like, you know what the most annoying thing in my life is? The most annoying thing in my life is the internet on the plane.

• 1:18:56Jason Calacanis?

  If you're flying regularly in coach, the most annoying thing in your life is the elbow wars on either side of you and getting a middle seat.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, middle seat. I mean, I'm also a full figured man, so a middle seat's not, it means I'm

• 1:19:08Jason Calacanis?

  Not for long. I'm getting you on that road, Doc, coast like Twist.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  I'm in that, you know, center like

• 1:19:13Jason Calacanis?

  Come on, brother, join me.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  I'm encroaching. Yeah, it would be nicer if

• 1:19:16Jason Calacanis?

  Take the shot.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  If I was 20, 30 pounds thinner, it probably wouldn't be as bad.

• 1:19:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well, it's available to you. I told you already, I would pay for it.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure. Now that

• 1:19:26Jason Calacanis?

  You thinking about?

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Now that it's pill, now that it's pill for me, I can try it.

• 1:19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. I told you I'm willing to give you the shot on air every week.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  You did. I don't know how I'm resisting.

• 1:19:35Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know how HR is gonna take that.

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  That's a little weird. I don't think people are gonna see that either, frankly, no.

• 1:19:41Jason Calacanis?

  No, I think it'd be the highest rated show of the week.

• 1:19:44Speaker 02

  It's clickable. As a tweet, it's clickable.

• 1:19:46Jason Calacanis?

  Very clickable.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Jason Calacanis?

  All right, what else is up to you?

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  We gotta, we gotta wrap, but before we do, I did want to share a few things I'm watching on TV. The first one, there's this Netflix true crime documentary called Maternal Instinct. Don't look it up.

• 1:20:01Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  If you're listening to me, do not look up the crime at the center of this documentary. I'll tell you how it, it sort of opens. They're talking about this, this very strange troubled woman. She enters into this new relationship and she starts telling people that she's gotten pregnant, but a lot of people in her life already know she had a difficult pregnancy earlier in her life. She's had her uterus removed, so she can't possibly, biologically, she can't be pregnant, yet she's lying on social media and apparently to this man that she's dating, and she's saying that she is pregnant. I won't tell you any More about how this it ends up going to the most it's the most insane true crime documentary I've ever seen.

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  The the places this woman goes to sustain this lie. It's it's it's insane. It's jaw dropping. I have no idea how I hadn't heard about this story before the documentary. It is like the craziest thing.

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  Watch just watch it if you like true crime nonsense.

• 1:21:02Jason Calacanis?

  I am here for it.

• 1:21:05Jason Calacanis?

  I'm I always like a um. I always like a true crime situation. Good doc is great.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  I feel like a lot of them don't have what I would call like the juice. Like you sometimes get like two thirds of the way through the true crime doc and you're like, this isn't really that great of a story. They're repeating themselves a lot. It's a lot of the same kind of like re- recreations or interviews that kind of say the same thing, or they're talking like around the cry, you know, like. What happened next was unbelievable, you know, like stuff like that. They're filler. This is not.

• 1:21:37Jason Calacanis?

  People are making too many docs. They're feeding the doc machine.

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  There's too many of these true crime docs and not every true crime that gets the doc treatment is really doc worthy.

• 1:21:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, isn't 90% of these crimes like these are some dumb people who in a bit of passion did something unadvisable. The end.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. Or like people were cheating on each other spouses and then somebody.

• 1:21:57Jason Calacanis?

  Love triangle, murder.

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of these movies, they're just trying to squeeze. They're trying to squeeze one more true crime doc out, but not maternal instinct. It's.

• 1:22:06Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  An ins- a legitimately insane crime.

• 1:22:09Jason Calacanis?

  I want to just give a shout out to consumer electronics.

• 1:22:14Jason Calacanis?

  Being great and affordable at the same time. Why? I got three kids. You know, I could give them an expensive camera and be anxious about what happens with it. Instead. I looked at, you know, and I use some, you know, um. Models to find me the best ones. I bought this Kodak for $189. I bought this with a flotation on the wristband. And I don't want them, you know, on their devices. I don't want them taking their iPads or phones, you know, indefinitely to the beach, etc. And I said, let me get a point and shoot for these guys that goes underwater, has the flotation device. Kids love the water. They won't get out of the water.

• 1:22:55Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:22:55Jason Calacanis?

  You give them one of these, you put a 16 gig card in it. It's got some limitations, like, you know, it does 1080p video instead of 4K. But the freedom it gives you, that they can take it in the water, it's waterproof, you can drop it. And, you know, when we do our little summer vacay, you can let them, the whole point of this is, don't worry.

• 1:23:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:15Jason Calacanis?

  No agita.

• 1:23:18Jason Calacanis?

  Just go for it. And we bought one, then we buy two. Now they're out there taking pictures, they're documenting it. And you're letting kids have that freedom plus responsibility of the camera. But as the parent, it's not like some digital SLR that's going to get dropped. If this thing breaks, buy another one, you know? So shout out to these kind of devices. I do need another device. There is no device that allows you to play Spotify only and give it to your kids. You're in, you're at a war with your kids being addicted to technology. There needs to be a single use device that only plays Spotify, Apple Music, etc. And has nothing else on the device.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  It's funny.

• 1:23:59Jason Calacanis?

  But wifi and that.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  It's like the new MP3 player. Like, a lot of people watching might be too young to remember the, the pre iPod, there was like a whole category of.

• 1:24:09Jason Calacanis?

  A Rio.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  The MP3 player, like Dell had one, like every, every company had one. And then iPod kind of stole the whole market, but.

• 1:24:18Jason Calacanis?

  I will back this company. If somebody comes out with a light. MP that only does one thing.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Jason Calacanis?

  Put it on Android.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  It's a music streaming device, just for music streaming.

• 1:24:29Jason Calacanis?

  That's it. And it just follows every Spotify thing. The fact that they don't have Spotify for kids, single use device. This thing could be incredibly small. It could be built into headphones. I would love to see somebody bill me over the ear headphones with this built into it. I will fund this company. You will sell a million units a year to parents who want to let their kids listen to music, but don't want them to have an iPod Touch or their old Android phone or their old iPhone, because they'll wind up on TikTok doom scrolling.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  It's really, it's like, it's a Roku for music instead of video. Because you could even do like Roku City where there's like a homepage that's like, here's the best of what's new on title, on Spotify, on Apple. Like, you could make it that sort of brand agnostic central hub that people love. I mean, that's why Roku City is so infamous.

• 1:25:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, a streaming music player for kids.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  That's a great idea.

• 1:25:18Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody, please send me. I literally will put 100, 200K and seed this. Come to our accelerator.

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  You can make it look fun for kids. You know, you could make, like, have fun with the design of it. Give it like a, you know. Yeah, I think it's a fun idea.

• 1:25:33Jason Calacanis?

  And if you go on Reddit, I have been on countless discussions of people trying to find this. But when you like see the conversations, all the parents come to the same thing. Every single one is like, go buy an old iPod. And then you're like, no, then you have to sync the music. The kids want to stream stuff.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's iPods only worked with, you had to have like the iTunes app that you were using to put the music on your iPod. It wouldn't be like, this would be, you know, who should make it is like Spotify should just make like, they should just make one.

• 1:26:08Jason Calacanis?

  They should, like I said earlier, just make one. Apple should make one, single function, only one thing. The only thing I can find is you can take an old Android phone, put the child protections on it, delete every other app or timeout every other app but Spotify and just give them an old junky phone. I've seen this one. And this one, as you can see, it has everything on it and it has. Yeah.

• 1:26:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I've looked at this one again.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:37Jason Calacanis?

  It is a little too much phone. Yeah.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm now I'm flashing back to like being on Napster and LimeWire and downloading MP3s to put on your to put on your MP3 player.

• 1:26:49Jason Calacanis?

  Family subscription, easiest thing in the world. Alright. Great show. Oh, yeah, one more. Give us your one more lightning round. Let's get out of here.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  I'll do one more. I love the the new Vampire Lestat show on AMC. Do you remember they were doing Interview with the Vampire? They had a show on AMC over the last few years. So they did two seasons where they adapted Anne Rice's classic Interview with the Vampire. And then Anne Rice later wrote a novel where it was like Lestat, the vampire, that Tom Cruise played in the movie. He survives because he's a vampire, so he's alive forever. So he survives into the present day and becomes like a rock star. And so AMC for the third season of their Interview with the Vampire show, now they're adapting that. And so it's set in the present day. It's crazy. Like, the the journey that this show has made from doing the original Vampire Interview with the Vampire stuff like the movie

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  to now being this like rock and roll band touring, but they're vampires. Like, it it they made a movie Queen of the Damned out of this book many years ago. But now they're redoing it as the show. It's a lot of fun. The acting is really good. It's just so over the top. You kind of can't believe that it it exists. It's really campy. I'm enjoying it a lot. So that's on, if you get AMC Plus or Shudder, you can watch The Vampire Lestat.

• 1:28:04Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I have something special to show you.

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  Oh, let's take a look.

• 1:28:08Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, this is a video of me e-foiling. I have a video of me e-foiling.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  We've got video evidence of the e-foiling.

• 1:28:17Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go. This will be your last.

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's close it out with that. Can't top that. We'll have to top that.

• 1:28:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, can you see me on the e-foil?

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I can.

• 1:28:29Jason Calacanis?

  Do you hear the sound or no?

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  I don't hear the sound, no, but I see.

• 1:28:33Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, anyway.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  You are in fact e-foiling.

• 1:28:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so I'm on the ground, but see it just lift off?

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:39Jason Calacanis?

  So you lean back, and then it goes on. You see the joystick in my hand? This is when I was first trying to figure it out, but see, I'm up?

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  You're doing alright, you're going.

• 1:28:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah, this is when I was first getting up, and then boom, yeah, I fell after that. But anyway, that wasn't the spot where I fell and hurt myself, but that was one of the...

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  You know, it kinda looks like standing on a jet ski. I have been jet skiing before, and like that's, you're sort of sitting on the jet ski like a motorcycle. This would be like if you're standing on it.

• 1:29:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:06Jason Calacanis?

  Um, it was, let me tell you something, this is fun. Uh, I recommend this for...

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Going fast on water is fun, jet skis are a lot of fun.

• 1:29:14Jason Calacanis?

  It is, I think, similar to a jet ski. Trying to see if I have another one here of me doing it, hold on a second. This might be me, is that me?

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  This wasn't, it was, the infamous picture of Zuckerberg, he was like windsurfing, not, not on this.

• 1:29:28Jason Calacanis?

  I think he was doing a similar thing, but when he was doing it, he was doing a regular foil where you pump up and down.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:29:36Jason Calacanis?

  In order to, uh, get the lift.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that like very nerdy, infamously dorky looking photo of Mark Zuckerberg. There it is, there it is.

• 1:29:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, when he had the American flag and everything, and he was rocking out with the American flag.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  On, so he looks like a ghost kinda.

• 1:29:53Jason Calacanis?

  That was hilarious.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, there's that.

• 1:29:54Jason Calacanis?

  What are we doing here?

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's, he's got a lot of weird pictures of Zuck over the years. Yeah, there's one.

• 1:30:00Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, this is my new, uh...

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  Pancake makeup, looks like a Kabuki.

• 1:30:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's not quite my new passion, but it is definitely up there in terms of flow experiences you can have. It's like, I think this would be second for me to skiing, kinda. I would like to keep pulling this string and see where it leads me.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:17Jason Calacanis?

  Lot of fun. Alright, that's this week in startups, that's your twist for Friday, June 26th. You'll consume it on Saturday, we'll see you all soon, bye-bye.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  Bye-bye.