The Startup Building the First Hotel on the Moon…

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Every.io - visit every.io Sentry.io - sentry.io/twist Vanta - vanta.com/twist Today's show: The next SpaceX won't be building rockets; it'll build the first hotel on the Moon. Today on TWiST, GRU Space founder Skyler Chan brings a brick made from lunar soil into the studio and lays out a plan to manufacture on the Moon as early as next year. We get into the science, the business model, and the regulatory land-grab ahead! Then, the US government forces Anthropic to pull Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Jason and Lon unpack what it means when a single AI model can vanish overnight, and the US government's emergency order. Stick around for the winner (or winners?!) of the $5,000 AI podcast-companion bounty! Timestamps: 0:00 Knicks playoff run, San Antonio & Texas BBQ (Black's vs. Terry Black's) 8:23 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! 9:52 Guest intro: Skyler Chan, GRU Space — and the lunar-soil brick 10:29 Every.io - For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io 12:14 Why the next SpaceX builds habitats, not rockets 15:18 NASA's $20B moon-base signal & the TRL contracting path 16:13 Business model: from construction contractor to owning lunar land 18:06 Building the hotel robotically + $1M refundable deposits 20:00 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 31:09 Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist 39:28 News: US government blocks Anthropic's Fable 5 & Mythos 5 41:34 The politics: Hegseth, Sacks, Jassy & the "conspiracy" angle 1:09:39 Why no single model dependency is safe (multi-model harnesses) 1:18:47 Bounty results: MySidecast wins $3,000 1:19:07 Honorable mentions: Couchverse (Lemon Slice) & Convalenz 1:29:44 Next bounty: the Annotated app 🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned: Guest & company Skyler Chan: Founder, GRU Space → https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/galactic-resource-utilization-space-inc-gru-space GRU Space (Galactic Resource Utilization): YC startup building lunar-regolith bricks and a robotic Moon hotel → https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/galactic-resource-utilization-space-inc-gru-space GRU Space lunar hotel bookings → https://payloadspace.com/gru-space-opens-bookings-for-planned-lunar-hotel/ 🎙️ About the Guest: Skyler Chan is the founder of GRU Space (Galactic Resource Utilization), a Y Combinator–backed startup developing a payload factory that manufactures bricks from lunar regolith to build the first robotic hotel on the Moon. Follow GRU Space → https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/galactic-resource-utilization-space-inc-gru-space Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  He's building the first lunar hotel using an on-site factory that turns the moon's soil into bricks.

• 0:08Jason Calacanis?

  You're kidding me. It's not a put-on. You sure this isn't a put-on?

• 0:12Speaker 02

  We basically got like manifest destiny going on on the moon.

• 0:14Jason Calacanis?

  This is sci-fi becoming reality.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  We would build the entire hotel end to end without actually needing to send humans because we would have robots to assist us.

• 0:23Jason Calacanis?

  You're asking people to put down a million dollar deposit to visit the moon, to own a moon condo? What do you get for a million bucks here?

• 0:30Speaker 02

  They've experienced everything that can be done on Earth, that they want to do something greater. The moon hotel is simply just the first wedge towards enabling us to build products on the moon.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist. 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 sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST. And every.io for all your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io.

• 1:18Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back. It's Twist. It's Monday, June 15th. The New York Knickerbockers have won the world championship. I was there a long. I was there with my brother Josh.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  And in beautiful San Antonio, the Frost Bank Center.

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  Very simple ride from, you know, Austin, 70 minutes or so.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not so bad.

• 1:41Jason Calacanis?

  Stopped at the original Blacks Barbecue.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Hmm, yes. For people who don't know, the Black family of Texas, they're having a war right now over who controls the barbecue. So there's, there's one young black who runs the, the original Blacks Barbecue that's on the road from here to San Antonio. And then there's Terry Blacks here in Austin, which is a different child of the Black family. It's a whole thing.

• 2:06Jason Calacanis?

  We had a very similar thing in Brooklyn and Harlem. There's a place, Patsy Gromaldi's Pizza, Patsy's, Gromaldi's.

• 2:14Jason Calacanis?

  Brick oven pizza, fantastic. Frank Sinatra used to go to the one under the Brooklyn Bridge, and then there's the one up in Harlem. Anyway, long story short, same situation. You know, the kids, the cousin, the uncle, whatever. Everybody's got the same last name.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  And they all want to be the inheritor of the tradition because Blacks, one of the oldest barbecue places in Central Texas.

• 2:31Jason Calacanis?

  And it was fantastic. Really great beef rib, really great brisket. If I were to swap those two items with Terry Blacks, I probably wouldn't know the difference if I'm being honest. But I just want to say, you know, my brother had an observation, being from Brooklyn. He's like, wow, Texas is amazing. Everybody's so polite. Everybody's so cordial.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:52Jason Calacanis?

  And it's like it used to be in Brooklyn when we were growing up. You just assume everybody's of good faith. And we walk into Blacks BBQ, what is that, Laredo? I don't know. Kyle, Buddha, somewhere down there.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:04Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, there's like two or three down there.

• 3:08Jason Calacanis?

  And everybody's like, oh, hey, you going to the game? I said, yeah. They said, oh, man, good luck, man. I said, oh, thanks. You Nick fan? They said, no, I'm a Spurs fan. I said, oh, I really appreciate that. You have a great team and just really cordial. And I was six rows behind the Knicks bench. Cost me a fortune. But, you know, I polymarteted, Yolo'd 6K into it in 115, so I paid for the ticket.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:29Jason Calacanis?

  Gambling. I love these prediction markets. It's so much fun. Shout out to my guys at Polymarket. I think I saw Shane with courtside seats.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Probably.

• 3:38Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody was there. It was fantastic and just a great relief after, you know, I was there for two of the Feld attempts versus Houston and versus Spurs. I was there when the Spurs won on our court. Spurs got a bright future, a lot of great young players. But man, this Knicks team has transcended. Thank you to Leon. Thank you to Coach Brown. Thank you to Jalen Brunson, OG Ananobe, Mitchell Robinson, Josh Hart. I mean, just...

• 4:04Jason Calacanis?

  Bridges, F them picks, just so many great players and had a great time calling in this season to Knicks Fan TV, shout out to my guys over there, Alex, CK2K, and of course, CP of the franchise, great YouTube channel to follow. They do this Fan TV, which is like a thing in soccer, where they have all these fan shows, the fans just get on and, you know, they're drunk and blah, blah, blah, and they're yelling, but they're obsessed with the game. KF TV, Knicks Fan TV has got a hundred thousand followers and he's been following the team for nine years. What a great story. He was following the team when they had seventeen wins a season. There's eighty-two games a season, huh? When we were the worst team in the league, he was following this team and had literally thirty people watching

• 4:48Jason Calacanis?

  his live stream. You know, then when they win games, he has three, four, five thousand people watching live, and then another, you know, a hundred thousand watching after that. So, just great all around. Amazing for the city of New York. Couple of notes. Couple of notes. Number one, during the National Anthem, put your hand over your heart, take your goddamn hat off, and no screaming. I want you to wait till the end.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  People are screaming? Well, I mean, a little bit of, well, I think, I think the one moment you're allowed to get excited during the anthem is, "And the rock is red glare", when they hit that note, you're allowed to give a little, you're allowed to give a little woo, a little cheer, yeah.

• 5:25Jason Calacanis?

  Under, not for me, but okay. I'm okay with it. It's a kind of a tradition.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  That's a tradition. Yeah, like, oh, they hit that, they hit that. No, well done.

• 5:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fine. Yeah, it's kind of like a roar in the end. It's like a pre-aplaus.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:38Jason Calacanis?

  But there's guys who are yelling, "Go Knicks!", like every time, and the person's trying to sing the National Anthem. It's not, it's uncouth. Second thing that's uncouth, you know, if you lose, which I've spent fifty years doing with this team, you, you can't take it out on the other fans. There was like a little random violence here. I'm also not down with the vulgarity and the burning of other people's journeys. It's not cool. Be classy in victory and be honorable in defeat.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:05Jason Calacanis?

  This is just a PSA for young fans. I, you know, I don't mind if you climb a... A lamppost or whatever, but I'm not down with you burning, you know, a fire engine or a police car, none of that shenanigans. Keep it classy, folks.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  People get excited. It seemed like I saw a lot of footage of the celebrations in New York and it seemed like the rowdiness was was an outlier. Most people, it felt like it was a real community, all in good fun sort of vibe.

• 6:31Jason Calacanis?

  Now, I've been on the road. I think this was my ninth game in this postseason and then one time, yeah, a couple of times last year, but just for this postseason, this jacket.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Oh, the lucky jacket. Yeah.

• 6:42Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to say thank you. Shout out to Kith. I had to pay for this. It's not a freebie or anything, but this is an Averit's, which is like the classic jacket. And they did this. This is incredible designer. K I T H. Kith is an incredible designer. This jacket costs a free pen. I don't want to say how much, but you know, a couple of G's. It's now become like a classic. You can, like, people are selling these in the aftermarket. I think they only made like 100 of them. Guys like, hey, you know, I hear a Kith. We're huge fans of yours. I was like, okay, great. Can I get this jacket? And they're like, oh, yeah. Well, here's how it works. You go to Williamsburg, you line up at 5 a.m. and then you got a pretty good shot. They give you a ticket. I said, let me stop you right there. I'm all, and I go.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Not going to Williamsburg.

• 7:21Jason Calacanis?

  If it was a 25-year-old J Cal, 30-year-old J Cal, I'm all in. You're fans. I'm fans. How about this? You send me an invoice for five dimes. I send you five dimes. You sit on my five dimes. Put it in your interest-bearing account. Make 500 a year off me, whatever it is, you know? And then when you drop the Knicks heat, I'll just tell you which ones I want. You maybe send it to me, whatever. Make a little VIP promo. I said, oh, that's very interesting. And sure enough, I get an invoice. I get the jacket. Boom.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  Boom.

• 7:50Jason Calacanis?

  Jacket. Nine for nine in playoff games. I went, the heat does, the air conditioning doesn't work in the dump of an arena the Spurs are still in. They're getting a new arena.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  The Frost Bank Arena is where the Spurs play.

• 8:01Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, just literally tear it down. It's, it's, I mean, this thing is, it's rough. Anyway, they, they're gonna build a new arena.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're working.

• 8:11Jason Calacanis?

  But they don't have air conditioning working in this building.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 8:14Jason Calacanis?

  And so it's hot down there and they just, it gets hot in there. I wouldn't take the jacket off. I took it off a couple of times just to hold it up, but.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Well, it's lucky or the team's counting on you, you know?

• 8:23Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sweating and anyway, uh, you know, we got a lot on the docket today. I'm really excited about today's guest because space is so big with the SpaceX IPO. I just don't want to miss a moment. So I'm going to just get this Plod pin on here.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, get your Plod pin on.

• 8:35Jason Calacanis?

  I pressed the button. I now have the haptik going. Now everything's recorded. You know me, I'm on a tear right now. I'm on a tear right now, uh, working at the company. You'd see behind the scenes, all the stuff I'm doing, I'm vibe coding this new.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  A lot going on.

• 8:46Jason Calacanis?

  Claude, the perplexity. I'm like, I'm doing a lot perplexity and Claude to automate all this stuff and level everybody up. We've got five associates in training starting. So I'm really excited about our business and running it and, you know, all the, all the great stuff we're doing, but I don't want to miss a minute. So I use Plod. I went on a hike the other day around the ranch. Had a lot of, uh, action items that come to my mind when I'm hiking in nature with my 25 pound kettlebell, doing my old man rucking. I never miss anything because I just turn the Plod on. I might not talk for 15 minutes and then I talk for 10. Then I'm quiet for 15, I talk for another 10. Get back, put it in the cradle, cats in the cradle, boom. Summarizes it. I get the bullet points. I pull it up on my desktop.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:27Jason Calacanis?

  I've never touched my phone, by the way. And then I have all my notes waiting for me there, organized. And then I can share you the raw feed with all those notes or, and I just look at it. I remember a couple of things, cut and paste, bing, right into Slack and I'm ready to go.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, the app.

• 9:42Jason Calacanis?

  Don't miss a moment.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Pulls the whole thing together. You can put the app wherever you want and then all your conversations just live, uh, uh, across all your devices. So if you want to make your work more efficient like J Cal, you need to get your own Plod Note Pin S. If you check it out at plaud.ai/twist and use the code TWIST, they're going to give you 10% off your purchase.

• 10:03Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's get started. We have a great guest today. I think we're going to get right to it. Or you want to do news and then guest?

• 10:07Speaker 00

  No, no, I think we should get, I think we should get right to our guest. He's building the first lunar hotel in a, using an on-site factory that turns the moon's soil into bricks, just like this one I'm holding up in front of you. Please welcome Skylar Chan of Gru Space. Now they think he sent us bricks.

• 10:26Jason Calacanis?

  It's not a put on. You sure this isn't a put on?

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Lunar soil.

• 10:30Jason Calacanis?

  One of the most important things you can do as a busy founder is stay focused. You need to prioritize the decisions and workflows that are going to move your company forward, not get lost in extraneous details and minutia. That's why the best decision you can make for your business is signing up with Everi. Everi is the all in one platform for incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, taxes, basically your entire back office. They're going to keep up with all the bookkeeping and paperwork so you can stay laser focused on your next big product or hiring, features, customers, all that important stuff. If you're just getting started, they're going to handle your Delaware C corp and getting yourself a registered agent, all with no legal fees and no delays.

• 11:10Jason Calacanis?

  And every has worked with over 1,000 startups already. That's the kind of know how and experience you can rely on. So head over to every.io and stop wasting time on stuff that isn't growing your company. That's E V E R Y dot I O. It's not a put on. This is like for real. It's a real startup planning on building a lunar base. Explain how you came up with the idea and where you're at in this journey because this is sci fi becoming reality.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Thanks. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. So yeah, I'm a scholar. I started this because I always wanted to become an astronaut when I was a kid. So so obsessed with becoming an astronaut as a kid that I decided that why don't we all go to space? And so we have this end state future of exciting like first cities being built on the moon and Mars, like the next San Francisco, the next New York on the moon and Mars. The question is working backwards from that. What are the series of civilizational scale technologies that we need to develop to make this happen? It's not just rockets anymore. Clearly with the IPO, we saw that ship has sailed. The next SpaceX is going to be building the first habitation modules, the enablement of using resources off Earth,

• 12:19Speaker 02

  but using resources on Moon to create structures. So we don't have to pay for all the shipping from Earth to the Moon. And so that's kind of where we're at. We just went for Y C last batch and opposite misses the center shit to the moon. So it's pretty exciting.

• 12:33Jason Calacanis?

  So maybe we can get into technically what you're actually doing. We understand moon base. Great. Yeah, we also understand, hey, shipping bricks and materials from Home Depot to the moon is quite wasteful. So you're going to build some sort of a factory. You got to ship something up there. But then I'm seeing here in this video, very evocative. You have designed and tested building these bricks out of moon soil? Is it soil? Is it? But what is the moon constructed of when we would compare it to soil on Earth? And then take us through this process. And how do you test something like that? Do you actually have some moon rocks that you bought for a billion dollars to test it? Yeah, tell me everything.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's not into the details. So basically what we're doing with is lunar regolith. And lunar regolith is topsoil on the lunar surface. So think of it just like dirt all over the moon. The idea here is that, like you said, it doesn't make sense for us to just keep shipping shit to the moon because it's very expensive. And we should just be using resources on the moon. Like we built the US, we bring everything from Europe. No use the timber available in the US. And so what we're doing is we're building a factory. Think of it like a payload, like a mini spacecraft that we're sending to the lunar surface. And what it's going to do is it's going to have an excavation stage, a couple of stages. Excavation stage on the moon where we mine lunar regolith with a robotic arm. Then when we filter out lunar regolith, you want the fine particulate because then there's more surface area to bind it with a geopolmer, which we bring from Earth.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Now, if you just chat GPT, like, how do you make stuff on the moon? Right, you're going to find sintering and melting among other proposed approaches to do this. The reason why we then choose these approaches is because of energy. And when we think about the sort of timeline that we're dealing with, right? NASA wants to build a moon base like ASAP, immediately. We basically got like manifest destiny going on on the moon. And so in terms of a timeline, like we can do things like laser the ground with like thousands of degrees of Celsius. It's too costly and we don't have the equipment. So the decision we made at Gru is like, let's use a geopolmer based approach with a robotic arm, with some other stuff in our payload that we're going to reveal soon, to use the resources on the moon intelligently so that we can break down the cost of construction on the surface.

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Now, your hope, I'm guessing, is that NASA gives you a contract to be the contractor to make the bricks that make the lunar base? Or do you want to be the owner of the lunar base? Are there going to be multiple lunar bases? Because it sounds like building a lunar base is a multi-billion dollar product. And it sounds like you solve. One of the acute problems, but I don't know if they're going to just let some random Y C founder have a base on the moon. I know this like not regulated, but there's going to be some regulation going on at some point of this. So talk a little bit about what your aspiration here is and who your customer is. Obviously, your customer right now is venture capitalists who are crazy and want to, you know, do this hail Mary amazing idea.

• 15:26Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. But you got to get a customer at some point and the customer's got to pay for something. So talk about how you, what the business model here is.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the exciting thing is like pre, literally on our demo day for Y C was when NASA had the ignition event where they basically announced that they would spend $20 billion to build a moon base, which is a great demand signal for us. So now we're talking like the timeline post that timeframe. Yeah. The short answer is like, we want to be NASA's go to moon base construction contractor. And the pathway to getting there is to prove something called T R L, right? So technology radius level NASA ranks you on a scale of one to nine. The higher you are, the more likely are to get contracts. And the best way to do that is to demonstrate that the tech actually works on the moon, which is why we're doing this mission to make the first ever product, the brick. But the second half of your question is like the business plan, which is very exciting. To preface this all, it's a very blue ocean market.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  As we've seen with SpaceX in the early days, it wasn't obvious that like reusable rockets is the play. It wasn't obvious that Starlink was going to evolve. Just like with the moon, there's a lot of things that are not obvious yet for why construction. More specifically, the ability to use resources off earth, decoupling us from earth is going to lead to like this massive explosion in terms of value. And so for us, it looks like, of course, the moon hotel is simply just the first wedge towards enabling us to build products on the moon, do a demo on the moon, then earn the moon base construction contracts and then scale, right? And to your point as well, regulations, very interesting. There's actually not much set hard, clear cut regulation for who does what on the moon.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  So our prediction is it's going to look like, if you look at the Hudson's Bay Company, right? In Canada, they owned a huge chunk of land for 200 years before they sold it back to Canada. And so it looks like companies owning pieces of land on the moon. Which frankly, we've stated this in our white paper, is on a roadmap, is our aspiration is to eventually own a lot of the resources and the land on the moon. And we do this because we're the ones who figure out how to even do stuff with it, right? Because we're the reason for utilization company. So that's the end state vision. After that, eventually it's really to hit the final form of our company, which is galactic resource utilization, galactic scale ISRU. Elevating humanity to type three on the partnership scale. So that's really the end state of our company.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, wow, that's, it's, it's, it's, I'm, I'm curious, how far down the road do you need, can you get without humans going to the moon? Like, obviously, sending the factory, getting started, that's all going to be sort of automated. How, how far along can you get in terms of building structures on the moon before we have no choice, like, we got to send a few astronauts up there?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  You mean a few astronauts to help construct?

• 18:08Speaker 00

  You know, that, like, even if it's the final stage of the process before guest starter arriving or whatever, like, at, at some point, you're going to have to have humans going to the moon.

• 18:17Jason Calacanis?

  This is pre concierge, pre concierge at your lunar hotel.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's the thing is like, everything that we can do with robots is a lot cheaper than having to send humans, right? Having to send a human up to the moon, there's a lot of other associated costs, like life support systems, ECLSS, like, et cetera, et cetera, power comms, et cetera. Um, so the idea is like, we would build the entire hotel end to end without actually needing to send humans because we would have robots to assist us. This is important because if you think about the tech tree, though, in terms of like, how do you sequence this? We've done robotics on the moon and Mars. We have something, humans have something called flight heritage. What humans don't have flight heritage on is how do you use resources on the moon to make a product? Which is why we decided in our roadmap for our company is like, okay, let's laser focus ourselves on proving that we can make a brick on the moon.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Right? That is going to unlock all these other things. So what's the next stage? Similarly to other companies that, for example, like Star Cloud, they send AGV to space. What's next? Let's send like thousands of these bad boys up.

• 19:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  For us, okay, we can prove that we can make a brick on the moon. Let's send thousands of these bad boy factories up to the moon to just crank out more bricks, just accelerate the construction. This is a very exciting future at the end of the day because for the first time in human history, you look up at the moon like it's no longer just a place to look at and people visit. It's going to be a place like this space station where we're going to have constant human presence on the moon, uh, which is a very exciting time to be alive.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and all this has enabled Elon because Elon has taken the cost of getting to space, I think, down 90% plus now.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  If you see those charts, it's exponential. The one, as soon as you, as soon as you can reuse the rockets, the costs just plummet.

• 20:00Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:39Jason Calacanis?

  Plus who use Sentry to move faster. Check them out at S E N T R Y dot I O slash twist and use the code TWIST for $240 in Sentry credits. We'll get that famous chart and pull it up in a second. And so, but then we, we have like lunar rovers and those kinds of things which have robotic arms on them, but you're going to need some providers for your company, Skylar. You're not going to be able to make Optimus robots or you're not going to be able to make the robotic arms. So is there a company making robots that work in space? Or is that been limited to governments now? And who, and who are they? Because that's the exciting part about this for me, Skylar,

• 21:21Jason Calacanis?

  is so many entrepreneurs now, because you can get to space for 10 times less, are now going. So really interesting if we can get there for 10 times less. Now we're going to be, need a thousand different.

• 21:37Jason Calacanis?

  Problems to be solved, 10,000 different problems to be solved, 100,000 problems. And one of them is, you know, will this GPU work in space? So Nvidia is working on a specific GPU for space because it, and we had Star Cloud on this week in AI, the other week. They have to make it so their GPU, like if you just send up an H100, it might come apart. It's not made to, for the G-force going to space. It might not have the heat profiles and be designed to dissipate heat the way it does in our atmosphere. So man, there's so many different things that have to occur. Who's the company making the robots that actually work in zero Gs in space, radiation, et cetera?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a couple of companies out there. I mean, if you look at the LTV providers, so LTV is like the lunar terrain vehicle. You've got like Lunar Outpost, Astro Lab, there's a whole other set of companies. Um, you know, we're obviously in the mix of all these different folks and we have different things coming up. Um, which we'll save that for later, but there's a whole some group of companies there. There's a lot of like robotic arm companies as well that do construction or welding and have done demos on Earth. Um, there's a lot of comms companies, there's a lot of power companies. So some, some bit of background, this is important, I guess, is, um, when you look at the lunar economy, you've got a lot of different services, right? Services for like providing power, providing comms, like power as in like nuclear, crazy stuff on nuclear to like solar, to like laser beaming on the moon, like it's some really cool shit.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  And you got this whole like bucket of people here, you've got the comms guys. So like, how do you like FaceTime your friends when the moon holds up at home? The nice thing here, and rather I think the bigger takeaway is this, if you think about the space industry as a whole, um, it's really got two pillars underpinning it, right? You've got governments and billionaire back companies. What we're doing at Gru is we're taking the unconventional approach. We're saying, hey, let's use a third pillar, space tourism, extend to literal moon and build the first hotel on the moon. The hotel is actually nice because if we win, it's like an index on everyone else because comms guys will, will, will be using them.

• 23:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  The LTV rovers, well, they won't have to be just depending on NASA to stay alive. Like we can use the rovers for ATVing on the moon for tourists, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so it's really this whole ecosystem, right? The moon hotel, interestingly enough, again, key distinction is the branding is distinct, hotel and base, but the key technology is really the same. It's the enablement of using resources on the moon for building all kinds of products.

• 23:59Jason Calacanis?

  So, so tell me about this hotel in space. Is that like actually part of the vision right now? And, you know, obviously you have customers. NASA might just say, hey, yeah, well, we'll give you a contract to make us 10,000 bricks. And here's the funding and here's your milestones. Oh, that's all great. But talk to me about this, like, really far out there concept that, hey, if you go to space, you might need a bed. You might need a hotel room.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's inevitable. I think one nice thing call that we got was, you saw on the Elon JP Morgan summit, like, they're talking about moon hotels too. And so, yeah, it's on the roadmap. Like, if you think about critical path. So, moon hotel, like technically, like on a technical level, what does that look like? You've got, let's say, a habitat on the moon. Okay, let's break that down further. Let's work backwards. Let's say all of us, you know, Jason, Lon, etc., we just teleport to the moon. Right now, we take off our spacesuits. What's the first thing that's going to kill us? The lack of pressure on the moon. Okay, next thing. Float off into temperature swings. Yeah, we're just gonna explode. Like, it'll be not pretty, right? Temperature swings, radiation, and then the potential for micrometeor impacts.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  So then what we did, our group was like, okay, there's, there's a lot of other problems, obviously, like, okay, how do you recycle the water? How do you recycle this and this? But these things have been solved, again, on the space station. Let's focus on what's critical about, like, at its core. So if you got pressure and temperature, like, working backwards from that, what do you need to create as a product to solve for that? Well, we need to have an inflatable, like, expandable habitat. Okay. The last two problems of radiation and micrometeor, it's like, again, how do you think about that problem? Well, it turns out, if you can use the resources on the moon and make not just bricks, but all kinds of material using the resources on the moon, bricks are just the first step to shield the habitat. So that you have an igloo, like, structure where you have the inflatable in the middle,

• 25:50Speaker 02

  and you got the bricks placed around it, like an igloo, that will protect you from the radiation from outer space. And also the potential for micrometeorites on the moon. And so what we're like is, okay, we want to open up this hotel. Like, we have to actually prove that this stuff works on the moon. And also on Earth along the way, but more importantly, it's very visceral. We have proof that this functions on the moon. It's like, it's legit. And so that's actually why, how we ended up doing this milestone path. That's later on our white paper of let's, let's build a brick on the moon. And let's prove out way to what can expand.

• 26:24Jason Calacanis?

  I'm showing on the screen here for those of you who, uh, yeah, uh, are not watching and you're listening. You can go to GRU space or GRU.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  GRU dot space.

• 26:35Jason Calacanis?

  GRU dot space is the domain. And you've got this really nice timeline here. You know, it starts with, hey, you, you get your first lunar systems there and you test making the bricks. Then you have this cave base, very basic dome. Then you have the first lunar hotel and you're seeing the bricks go around it. And then, uh, you have picked an architecture style that is, I would say, uh, Neo Greek Lucas Star Wars aesthetic.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's got a Death Star. It's got a Death Star vibe.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Death Star.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:07Jason Calacanis?

  No, I think this is New Republic style, actually. Death Star would be a little more military.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  The cave one looks like a Death Star.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Cave one.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:16Jason Calacanis?

  The cave one definitely has Death Star.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  This one, you're right, is more like Naboo. Yeah.

• 27:20Jason Calacanis?

  This is Naboo. This is Prince Amidala. This is Renaissance, which by the way, Lucas, there is a building you pass by in Marin. That's like a civic center or something. And you see it when you're, when you're going north, it's on the right. When you're going south to the Golden Gate Bridge, it's to your left. You can barely see, but that's where he got that Naboo architecture style from. Lam, we'll pull it up in a second here, uh, one of the producers will. But talk to me about picking the style of what this would look like. Cause that does not seem the most utilitarian, the most, uh, basic, efficient. You're doing some flourishes there. You're making it look elegant and interesting and sci-fi and dare I say, inspiring. By the way, here's that building. What is that building called?

• 28:05Speaker 00

  Uh, I believe this is the Marin County Civic Center.

• 28:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:10Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's stunning.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  San Rafael, San Rafael.

• 28:14Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty amazing.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Is this the one that was Frank Lloyd Wright or am I crazy?

• 28:19Speaker 00

  I believe it was. Yes, I am. I am correct. This was designed by the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

• 28:24Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Let me pat Lon on the back here. Very good. So talk to me about the aesthetics here because you're asking people to put down a million dollar deposit to visit the moon to own a moon condo. What do you get for a million bucks here?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, okay, two things. First of all, the style, right? And so you basically got to bang on. It's when we thought about the style, like we got to think about zoom out from our own like little sliver of 80 years or maybe longer of life in this universe. All right. When thousands of years later, we look back at the first structure, manmade structure on the moon, like it has to be pretty, that's pretty sick, you know, like

• 28:59Jason Calacanis?

  It has to be sick. That would be a good benchmark.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  It is like the first bastion of like humans mark on the moon. I mean, that is, that's really exciting. And so the thought process is like, you know, obviously looking at the wonders of the world that have already existed. But also like, what would something that looking back, right? Our great, great, great, great grandkids would be like, whoa, like, yeah, like my ancestors worked on this shit.

• 29:21Jason Calacanis?

  Like the Acropolis, the Parthenon.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. So it was a bit of Grecofuturism and, and actually it was a trip I did when I was still at Berkeley as a student there. I went to Palace of Fine Arts with my parents. And I was like, I was just like, whoa, like imagine this on the moon. This is before Bruce started, but that was what ironically, my mom is an architect and she thought the design was shit. I still think it's good. But we got featured in architecture magazines. I was like,

• 29:45Jason Calacanis?

  Love it. I love it. Now, what psychedelic were you on? You were on psilocybin or DMT when you came up with this idea?

• 29:53Jason Calacanis?

  I kid, I kid. But talk to us about the million dollar deposit.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, about that, it's so basically the thought process behind this as well was with, okay, in order to ensure that people have a spot here, right? How should we, you know, work this out? We studied Virgin Galactic. We studied Blue Origin. We also studied ones that didn't work so well. One important thing is that we design, A, they have to be fully refundable, right? It's only fair that way. But more importantly, this is a way so that people can reserve their spot in advance prior to the hotel being opening. Frankly, a big piece of this of like, why do people do space tours? All right, let's think about that. Why do people even want to do something as crazy as this? And it's not for everyone. Like, let's be clear, it's not for everyone. One of the biggest things is because they've experienced everything that can be done on earth

• 30:39Speaker 02

  that they want to do something greater. They want to feel like they're a part of something even bigger than themselves. It's about legacy built. And so it's an opportunity for people to be a part of that. Um, one of the nice things that we've actually um are going to start to offer is that our payload that's going to the lunar surface. We're obviously making a brick on the moon, but there are opportunities for people to etch their name of a company. On the payload that goes to the moon, they'll be there forever. Hmm. So a little marketing. A little, little, little burger there.

• 31:09Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  That's why some of our favorite companies like Ramp and Writer are spending eighty-two percent less time on their audits by working with Vanta. Whether you're a fast growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta is here to help you automate. Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance and earn and prove trust. So get started today at vanta.com slash twist. That's V A N T A dot com slash twist.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  I don't know if you can see Jason, your name is etched into this. Oh, is it really? It's a little too small. I'm gonna have Sal zoom in here for a second so you can see, but they have etched Jason Calacanis into this.

• 32:25Jason Calacanis?

  I love this. Leo Laporte, when he did the uh Twit Brickhouse. His concept was you for, I don't know if it was a hundred bucks or five hundred bucks, you could support independent media like this week in tech, Twit. And you could buy a brick in the Brickhouse and then when you came to visit the Brickhouse, you could uh see your brick. It was a really genius idea.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:45Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, look at G R U.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:47Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. Uh, all right. And so you're gonna keep these deposits. You get the interest on, you put them in a nice five, six percent interest-bearing account. You sweep the interest. That's great. Uh, fair enough. And then I get, what am I getting for my million dollars? Uh, is it like, uh, I get to stay in a hotel for one night, 10 nights? Do I own a piece of it?

• 33:07Speaker 00

  What do you want to be on the moon for 10 days? What are you gonna do up there?

• 33:10Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if I took the time to go and took the risk, yeah, I wanna get a full, no, I mean, I don't think.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  I should, that's a good question. Like for Jason, would you want to go to the moon?

• 33:18Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going. I'm go, I'm gonna go, uh, well, a friend of mine's got a rocket ship company and we talked about it. So I think when he goes up, uh, you know, if he wants to have a couple of his mates with him, I might get a, I may get a shot at that. Uh, so when he, when he thinks it's okay to go up, that's maybe when I would decide it's okay to go up. Uh, but I don't wanna, you know, I got three daughters. So I think the power move is to wait until, yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  It's established.

• 33:43Jason Calacanis?

  They've done, yeah, I think maybe if there's been like a hundred trips to the moon or something.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't wanna do the Titan submersible first trip.

• 33:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  You wanna wait for like a hundred trips, then it's like, okay.

• 33:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's interesting you bring that up, Lon. It's, there are people who want adventures who have enough money to kill themselves. We call it toxic wealth in Silicon Valley where people, you know, go buy some hyper sports car and, cause they made a little bit of money and then they do crazy stuff. Like the billionaire who his son didn't want to tragically go on this thing. He was nervous for a good reason, like trust your gut folks. Uh, and he went anyway and they were thrill seeking because they had the money to do thrill seeking stuff. This has to be safe and it will be safe. Nobody's gonna take crazy risks doing this, but there will be some implied risk. You can just do the statistics of the number of astronauts that have died in space. It's, it's, um, it's,

• 34:36Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's low single digits. Uh, so, you know, if you were playing poker hand, it would be like having, I don't know, you flop a set of aces and somebody run or runs you and.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Well, we, we.

• 34:47Jason Calacanis?

  Hits quads or something.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  We remember. I mean, there have been, there have been few enough that like you, everybody knows the Challenger exactly, or like Apollo. 13 they we rescued those guys but with it's infamous the times when things have gone famously wrong I mean I guess I guess

• 35:02Speaker 02

  that's why it's important to test well right

• 35:04Speaker 00

  right I guess my question is for for grew and even for you Jason I mean we're really talking about are we talking about the moon itself as a destination or we're really thinking about the moon is like the gateway to the cosmos right like the goal here is we've got to be permanently on the moon so that we can go to mars and beyond is that my am I correct here

• 35:26Speaker 02

  yeah so the vision is like again the moon is just a stepping stone

• 35:29Speaker 00

  right

• 35:30Speaker 02

  right but again the moon hotel and I love it when people are like wait so the moon hotel is just the first step like that's fucking crazy like

• 35:37Speaker 00

  right

• 35:37Speaker 02

  but no

• 35:37Jason Calacanis?

  family show scholar family show scholar

• 35:41Speaker 02

  it really is the first step we have to go to mars right that is humans have never left system or space is in our destiny it's to have humans living on mars right and we cannot have reasonably speaking have people living on mars if we are dependent on resources from earth the entire time yet vocal core at some point has to be separate right and so the only way to do that is can we develop the technology and understanding of systems so that we can use the resources on not just the moon but on mars for this future to happen so that's the end state

• 36:13Jason Calacanis?

  yeah we got I think we have yeah 20 or 30 years of moon work to do lon before I know it's a lot well I mean it all of all we have right now is the space station as an equivalent but the space station you know has taught us over you know 50 years how human bodies and food and you know medicine and you know all kinds of things work using the loo these things all had to be figured out over the last 50 years congratulations we're able to do it but to be able to build stuff in space man that is a lot of work and I'm really excited Skylar we

• 36:50Jason Calacanis?

  wish you unlimited success in this incredibly positive awesome endeavor chances are slim but we need crazy entrepreneurs to do all of these little stepping stones and so brick by brick we wish you great success

• 37:07Speaker 02

  thank you Jason thank you lon

• 37:09Speaker 00

  there's gonna be startups on the moon one day

• 37:12Jason Calacanis?

  Which is nuts when you think about it. All this science, all this technology is really changing everything. And one of the things that I was able to change with technology over the last five years was dropping 40 pounds.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 37:25Jason Calacanis?

  That's my own moon. That was my moon landing. That was my moon shot. Could I get back in shape?

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Hey Jacob, could you find that, that at image Jason posted over the, over the weekend of, of his new, of his new, his new body? Yeah. The, the Jason, the J Cal thirst trap. Can you find that for me while I'm, while I'm co-hosting here? Yeah. Showing off, showing off the, the impact.

• 37:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that was at Cinco, Cinco Tare, Cinco Tare, CT, uh, the five towns or whatever it is along the ocean.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  I don't know. I'm not well-traveled enough for this.

• 37:54Jason Calacanis?

  I took this a couple of, I took this a couple of years ago and I was probably down 30 pounds and that went sucking my gut in.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Look at that. Look at that.

• 38:00Jason Calacanis?

  But, uh, man, you compare that to the pictures my enemies, uh, posted me online. And, uh, I mean, I, this is the definition of a dad bod, you know? I'm old, I'm creaky. There's things that break once in a while, but I tell you what, you lose 40 pounds and all of a sudden my sciatica in my leg, my lower back pain, my shoulder pain, all this stuff, my snoring, my asthma, it went away, all the downstream things. So this summer I'll be posting a couple more thirst traps, x.com slash Jason. But in the meantime, if you want to join me on your journey, I highly recommend at least considering if you're more than I'd say 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, which is like 60% of the country. Uh, the

• 38:43Jason Calacanis?

  food system is conspiring against us. Work is conspiring against us, sitting at computers all day. You might need help. I needed help. I'm not ashamed to say it. Ro.co slash twist, ro.co slash twist. And you'll, uh, get to take their insure, you'll get to use their insurance checker. And that's the first step. Now, if you don't have insurance, your insurance doesn't cover it. Uh, don't worry. There's a, like, all kinds of affordable versions now. I'm not sure where exactly it starts, but like low hundreds of dollars, I think is the actual price now.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, the word, the word, the immediate word when these GLP ones were first available was, "Oh, it's so expensive. You're spending thousands of dollars." The price has really come down considerably now. So if you want to check if your insurance covers it, go to roe.co and try out their insurance checker. They'll let you know if your GLP ones are covered for you for free. You just submit your insurance card and they do the rest. Go to roe.co/twist for your free insurance check. roe.co/twist.

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and I mean, I'm looking at it right now. I mean, you're going to be able to get into this for like 150 bucks, 200 bucks. Uh, just roe.co understands what the mission is. They're trying to get everybody, everybody who wants access to this incredible technology, access to it.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Big story we got to talk about. Uh, the US government is blocking access to Fable and Mythos, the advanced frontier Claude models. They're citing national security concerns. The US Commerce Department has ordered Anthropic to suspend access to the advanced models to all foreign nationals. Now, the government just told Anthropic they're instituting export controls over these models. So no foreign nationals can use them because of concerns that you could theoretically jailbreak Mythos 5 out of Fable 5 and use it as a cyber weapon. Anthropic, however, responded by just shutting everyone out of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 entirely. They said to ensure compliance.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Um, so a lot, a lot of back and forth over the weekend on, on this, whose fault it is, what the implications are, Jason. So Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he's been making a direct connection between this policy and the Pentagon's previous fight against Anthropic. His tweet, "Three months ago, the Department of War kicked Anthropic AI out of the building forever. Every passing day proves that why that was the right move." Axios also today, uh, has reported on friction between the White House and the Anthropic team saying this is a Contributing factor. Here's Axios. Anthropic failed to honor a recent cyber executive order, administration officials claim,

• 41:20Speaker 00

  and the company's purported failure to take the matter seriously led to its most powerful products being scrubbed from the internet. And then here's an unnamed administration official. Everyone said Anthropic was a bad actor. Some of us said it was time to give them a chance. Now those people are questioning that. They screwed us. So I'm interested in your take here, Jason. Do you agree with David Sacks that this doesn't really have anything to do with the previous fight against Anthropic? And it's a isolated situation where Anthropic just needs to do something to make Fable Five un-jailbreakable? Or do you think this is continued bad blood between the administration and Anthropic? And it's just coming out in another way? Or something else?

• 42:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there's, there's multiple things occurring at once here. So let's just call it what it is. Let's just be radically honest here.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 42:10Jason Calacanis?

  There is a beef between this company and their politics and the administration and their politics.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 42:17Jason Calacanis?

  If you look at all of the parades of CEOs coming to Washington, Steve, you know, Tim Cook, Michael Dell, you know, everybody.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Sundar, Satya.

• 42:28Jason Calacanis?

  Sundar, everybody's down.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Over there, yeah.

• 42:31Jason Calacanis?

  Jensen, whatever. There's one that's always been missing, and that's Dario and Anthropic. The reason Anthropic has run the table on a lot of the talent in Silicon Valley is because they're liberals and Democrats. And they are highly offended by the Trump administration. Right? They're diametrically opposed to it. You don't hear them too vocally saying it anymore, for whatever reason. Maybe they don't want to dabble in politics. Maybe they don't want to draw any more heat. But if you were to look at, and you were to talk to privately, 10 different people who work at Anthropic, nine out of 10 would, you know, have concerns about the Trump administration.

• 43:14Jason Calacanis?

  Last term, this term, everything in between. So it's easy enough to say, they hate Trump. They hate Trump. They hate everything about this administration. Okay, put that aside in your brain. They have a right to their political views. Now, go to the Trump administration. You've gotten every single company to support Trump on various endeavors. And that's good. It's good for private sector, public sector to work together, independent of that. Some people have said, you know what? I'm just going to put aside my concerns about Trump. We disagree with immigration policy, whether it's the border or H1Bs. I'm going to put all that aside.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  UFC fights in the back lawn of the White House, whatever your issues may be.

• 43:58Jason Calacanis?

  Whatever your issue is, you're allowed to have it. This is America, everybody gets their opinion. But this administration takes things personally and they're full contact. So we're seeing some full contact here. Pete is attacking Anthropic, they have it in for Anthropic. Now, put that aside. They got a beef going on and it's a political beef. You look at OpenAI, by contrast, Greg Brockman and his wife are the number one supporters of all these companies in terms of donations with, I think, maybe the exception of Elon. I think they've put $25 million into Trump's account. By the way, not popular inside of OpenAI either.

• 44:40Jason Calacanis?

  So the people who disagree with that decision, and people will pick where they work based on the political beliefs of the leaders. If you worked at OpenAI, you were there because, hey, it was this open thing. But then when Sam transformed it and the team over there to this profit-making thing, a lot of those people went to Anthropic, in fact, right? Like the leadership, etc. And Andre Ipanovski, any tech company would pay him a king's ransom to come work for them. He gets to choose, he chose Anthropic. So keep that in mind. The talent in Silicon Valley is by and large, 80, 90% in my, maybe 80%.

• 45:13Jason Calacanis?

  You know, appalled by Trump and his administration to this day.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  You don't feel like that's shifted over the, I feel like it used to be.

• 45:19Jason Calacanis?

  It shifted in leadership and I think people are burned out by it.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, in the Obama era for sure. But I, today I feel like tech is sliding to the right.

• 45:27Jason Calacanis?

  There's tech leadership, making pragmatic decisions, and then there's the rank and file, who are developers, etc. They might also have issues with the left as well, but just if you looked at their voting records and you look at like Democrat registration versus Republican, it's still 80, 20, 90, 10.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  See, you, you feel like this is overtly political, that the Trump administration is giving.

• 45:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it is. Pete Heg says it's overtly political, right? So, there's, there's a political level to this and obviously, Dario not showing up for any of these events is his political statement, right? So, there's beef here. That's not my belief, that's just what the facts tell you. Now, let's go to the reality of this model. The reality of this model, it's groundbreaking. People have voted with their dollars. Consumers are even switching to Claude. I'm starting to hear people who are in my circle, who are not in the industry, say they love Claude.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 46:19Jason Calacanis?

  And also hear them say they love perplexity and, you know, Grok and Gemini, but it's not OpenAI's only game now for consumers. Claude made, has the best product, currently. People could flip flop. And, they're thoughtful about this. Now, you might say they're hyperbolic and their comms are terrible, and that's, that's all true as well. But the truth is, at the end of the day, they made the post-powerful model. If I told you, and we'll just swap the names out here. Let's just take the names out. Gemini has created this model, and when they put it through their testing, their developers and their security team and the red team, the blue team, everybody went through it and, holy cow. We found so many exploits in open source software, in our own software, that we're

• 47:04Jason Calacanis?

  just gonna hold it for a couple of months and we're gonna give it to like 25 of our trusted partners, 50 of our trusted partners for a month, and let them use it. And by the way, we're gonna give them their tokens free, or at a disk, at our cost. When you have Mac cost tokens, use as many as you want, to just make sure that the low hanging fruit is cleaned up here.

• 47:24Jason Calacanis?

  Just, you know, you'd be like, okay, it's a pretty, pretty smart move, right?

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:28Jason Calacanis?

  That's a great move by Google. Yeah, that's thoughtful. They, they know this thing is powerful. And by the way, on the margins, we might be concerned with not just cyber warfare, which is software-based. We also think, okay, maybe somebody could use this to make a dirty bomb, or maybe they could use it to...

• 47:43Speaker 00

  Sure. Well, biological was the, for one of the first...

• 47:45Jason Calacanis?

  Make biologics.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Right. Biological weapons, or do, you know, unpleasant genomic stuff, or whatever.

• 47:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So, we're also gonna test that, and we're gonna bring in some, you know, award-winning, you know, notable biologists, and people who've worked in the Wuhan lab, or whatever these labs refunded globally.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  And, and I mean, Sacks did point this out in his, in his tweet on it, which maybe we could bring up into the docket. Uh, like, the messaging from Anthropic does seem off here. It is confusing, from even the public's perspective.

• 48:17Jason Calacanis?

  So, let, let's hold on comms for a second. We'll, we'll get to comms in a moment. Let me just finish my little analogy here. So, you swap out a name. It's, it's the same thing when you go to, when you talk about race, you know, oh, this person did this, and it was a black person, a white person, an Asian person, Indian person, a man, a woman, a trans person, whatever. Sometimes it's helpful for people logically to just swap those races, names, genders out, to kind of get clarity on what happened. And just think intellectually, honestly. So intellectually, honestly here, if Apple did this, if Microsoft did it, you'd say, okay, Microsoft, yeah, you've got an important product, you've got a lot of surface area in Windows, or Google, you've got a surface area in Android. Yeah, you should be really thoughtful about this. And then they said,

• 48:59Jason Calacanis?

  you know, uh, a couple of months later, hey, as the next phase of our rollout of Gemini, we're going to allow people who are logged in to use it, people who we have their credit card number, and their IP address. But as part of that 30 days, we're going to look for keywords and use AI to watch what you do. We're gonna watch what you do and how you use it. It's a preliminary open, more open, beta test. So, we had the closed beta, now we're gonna open up the beta a little more, but just know... We're going to read this, so don't put your personal health stuff in there, whatever. We're going to just look at every search. That's not a privacy issue. That's part of the rollout.

• 49:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's being framed by people in the administration and other people who are Trump adjacent as, oh, my God, they're taking everybody's privacy. No, completely normal to say, hey, if you're going to use this tool, this is the monitoring phase. We're going to know how many bullets you fired. We're going to give you the gun, but you know, you got to use it in the range, right? It's constrained. We're going to constrain it for another 30 days. And by the way, if you do something that triggers, you know, you're doing biological stuff, which I did on air. I asked it, how do, what are the

• 50:11Speaker 00

  I remember this, yes.

• 50:11Jason Calacanis?

  Components, what are the components of?

• 50:14Speaker 00

  A nuclear weapon. You said, not how to build one, but what are the components I would need to get together in order to build one? And it automatically took you down from Fable to Opus.

• 50:25Jason Calacanis?

  Then I asked it, well, what are the regulations and rules we have in place for fertilizer bombs to avoid people getting in the wrong hands? And it was like, when you watch it thinking, it's like, okay, this person wants to know the regulations, they're not trying to build a fertilizer bomb, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it gave me the answer, but also again, it dropped me down.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:43Jason Calacanis?

  Now, if I said, hey, Google said if you try to use it for something it thinks might be adjacent, it's just going to let you use version 4.8, not version 5.0.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  Right. And it did, it notified you. Like a lot of people were concerned about is, oh, it's going to downgrade you a model and then not tell you. It told you, hey, you're not using Fable for this. We're going to send this query to Opus instead.

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  I think if you look at Anthropic's actions, we're going to get to their comms in a minute. We've handled politics, we're going to get to comms. But just in terms of their actions, I would say these actions are of a good actor being thoughtful. Let me say that again for you. If Grok, XAI, Google, Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI, any of them did the same exact rollout, we would say thumbs up, thank you for being considerate. We don't need to regulate you because you're regulating yourself. And I have said over and over and over again. Regulate yourself, or the government will regulate you. Now, all the biased people who are in one camp or the other want to make this about something it's not.

• 51:47Jason Calacanis?

  Safety regulation is job one for these language model creators. And they are creating it, therefore, therefore, they should come up with what they think is the most safe way to roll it out. They don't need to have the government come in and tell them that because the government doesn't even understand the nuances of these products.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:07Jason Calacanis?

  So, regulate thyself, or thy product will get banned.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  There, there is one more thing that's action as opposed to comms. Now, there, there is disagreement about what specifically has happened or the, the, the narrative of it. But what, what Sacks is saying in his tweet is that this, this jailbreak was discovered, and we'll, we should talk more about where the, that information came from as well. This, this jailbreak was uncovered, this way to get Fable 5 to turn into basically Mythos, take away the guardrails that kept Fable 5 safe.

• 52:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  And so, the government then apparently, according to David Sacks, went to Anthropic and said, "Hey, we're very worried about this jailbreak. We don't want bad actors, rogue actors overseas to be able to, you know, it's a threat to our national security if they can use Mythos 5. What are we going to do about this?" And they said Anthropic came back to them and said, "It's not really a big deal. We've looked into it. We don't..." They, they sort of waved, waved these concerns.

• 53:09Jason Calacanis?

  According to Sacks.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  According to David Sacks. I'm, I'm putting all this, this is according to David Sacks. That's his argument. And what other people have said is that the notification to the government about this potential jailbreak came from Anthropic's competitors. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is named by name. He was one of the people that flagged this jailbreak to the Trump administration.

• 53:31Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, doesn't he own 10% of Anthropic?

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Yes, but, uh, like, there, there's a, it's conspiratorial now.

• 53:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so they're not, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  There's a conspiracy theory forming that this is other AI companies sandbagging their main competition, getting this model taken down so that other people can't use it. I just want to get your thoughts on that before we move on.

• 53:52Jason Calacanis?

  So, let's take the politics out of it and the communications out of it, again, just to look at what occurred.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:58Jason Calacanis?

  If one of your partners, this is their top partner, Amazon hosts these models. Sure. Amazon provides compute, Amazon owns this company, they're not trying to sandbag, I don't believe, Anthropic. I am certain they told Dario about this before they told the government. Probably. So when this all comes out, and this is where like these narratives and all this spin, and listen, some people are extraordinary communicators out there who can spin things and the nuances of them, but what are the chances the CEO of Amazon, who owns double-digit percentages, I don't know where it is now with dilution or whatever, and is one of

• 54:38Jason Calacanis?

  the original backers of Anthropic, didn't tell them that they found this? They probably are under an ethical and moral duty to let the government know if these kind of things get happened. So they probably think, we have liability here if we don't tell the government. Because there were probably internal comms from the security team at AWS, who probably has to provide compute and/or provides the model to people via their services, they probably had an internal discussion, and somebody said in Slack, oh my God, I jailbroke it. You can do whatever you want with it. You can ask it about dirty web bombs, you can ask it about bioweapons. And once that happens, ding ding ding, you cannot un-ring the bell. Right.

• 55:23Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody has alerted the entire team there. That has to get escalated. Who does it get escalated to? Now, if you don't escalate that up to the CEO, up to the CTO, CIO, the chief, the general counsel, if you don't escalate something of that importance, if you don't escalate something of that importance, now you're liable. Now you've got, you know, potentially, literally, blood on your hands. What if they know it's jailbroken, it comes out a week later that some terrorist organization jailbreaks and does create a bioweapon, God forbid. Now, this is all fantasy, so that's what happened, I'm guessing, inside of it. That's why, but now somebody on the other side of the aisle could say, oh, you know how we spin this? They got ratted out by their competitor who doesn't trust them.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  Well, but I'm

• 56:08Jason Calacanis?

  When in fact, it was just the bell got rung.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  And, and, and, yeah. I think now it's time to switch to comms because I, I feel like the one thing I don't understand and, and, and I, I don't often agree with David Sacks, but we, we aligned on this point. Is that, wouldn't you think Anthropic would be the first ones upon hearing that it was possible to jailbreak Fable and unleash this terrifying, dangerous model? Which they themselves were the ones who started this narrative about mythos is so dangerous. Wouldn't you think they would be the most proactive ones like, well, we gotta pull it until we can be sure we're the AI safety company?

• 56:45Jason Calacanis?

  They might have.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  It seems weird that their position is this isn't a big deal. We should be allowed to use the model. And even I would, one last thing before I let you jump back in, it's in the docket. I pulled a screenshot. Anthropic is sort of advertising this situation. They're not trying to hide this at all. If you go log in right now and try to use the model, I took a screenshot. It has Fable there grayed out. It's purposefully letting you know the government's not letting you use this right now.

• 57:13Jason Calacanis?

  Where does it say the government's not letting you use it?

• 57:14Speaker 00

  The government, but it just says like currently unavailable. Like they're, they're advertising to you that you can't use this model.

• 57:20Jason Calacanis?

  Is that an information button that you can click on there or hover over? There's an I next to currently unavailable?

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Yes, they, they, they have.

• 57:26Jason Calacanis?

  And what is it? What, what does it show when you click it?

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Oh, here, let me, I'll, I'll load up my screen.

• 57:31Jason Calacanis?

  Whoever's driving, if you look where it's grayed out, there was an I there.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  Oh, that's just a screenshot, but Jacob.

• 57:36Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's a screenshot.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  You can open your own Claude and show us what happens when you click that button. It's for everybody's got it. No, just the info box above the, the search bar, Jake.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  See, see that? There you go.

• 57:50Jason Calacanis?

  Here it is. Okay. So it links to a statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable five minutes. So they are not hiding it. They're, this is

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Quite the opposite.

• 57:58Jason Calacanis?

  This is the cleanest thing you could do is to just let people know. Okay. So your question is to comms. Okay.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  I'm just saying, why wouldn't they, why wouldn't they be the most proactive one to pull the model until they could be sure it's safe? Why are they sort of playing?

• 58:11Jason Calacanis?

  Remember the last time, there's a game being played here by the administration, similar game that the press uses. Hey, we need your comment in the next hour. Or we're going with the story.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:23Jason Calacanis?

  They keep bringing up that it took an hour and five minutes, or these guys didn't get back to me the same day. I think Emile Michael actually talked about like how they were concerned that it was taking an hour for a company to return the White House's call. Well, you might need to talk to your general counsel first. You might need to talk to your team and make sure you have your facts straight before you start talking to the government. So that's completely reasonable. So I think there's gamesmanship happening there. They obviously would have turned it off if it was jailbroken. They turned it off and they limited it for those first two steps anyway. They love turning it off. That's their thing. They love limiting access. Right. So to the answer to your question is, if they did know it was jailbreak, they absolutely would have turned it off, which leads me to believe in this crazy conspiracy thing that there's no grand conspiracy here.

• 59:08Jason Calacanis?

  There is no grand conspiracy here. What happened was, Amazon's team found the vulnerability. They told Dario. Dario starts looking into it. Amazon says, you know, we got to tell the White House about this and that we need to tell national security because we've made that arrangement that we tell them when we find major vulnerabilities that could cause national security issues. So they do that in parallel. Now, while this is all happening in the same day, all in the same day, they're looking into it. The White House says, oh, we didn't get a call back in an hour and five minutes or something, I think was the quote. Like, it was very specific, like, we, you know, they waited an hour and seven minutes to call the White House back. Yeah, well, what if, what if they just said to the White House, give us an hour, we're investigating.

• 59:51Jason Calacanis?

  And then they said, maybe they thought, hey, we tried to jailbreak it. We don't have evidence of this. And they might have said, but give us an hour. We're going to go talk to Amazon and figure out what they did. So the White House has it in for Dario. Dario and Anthropic have it in for the White House. And so they're all spinning this. If you just look from first principles, what Anthropic has done, I think, if you put XAI, Gemini, Microsoft in the same series of behaviors, you would say, great job, thumbs up. The White House would say thumbs up to Elon, Sergey, Tim Cook, Satya, everybody. They would say thumbs up, great way to do it.

• 1:00:31Jason Calacanis?

  But when it's Anthropic, they're trying to figure out ways to, you know, hit them with it now. They're trying to do damage, I think. I actually do think that, because they never bent the knee. I think that they are a vindictive administration. You see this in other things they do. Now, Dario has done no favors for himself with the comms. The comms are terrible. If you keep telling people that you're going to destroy half the jobs in the world, don't be surprised when people take up arms and get violent. Don't be surprised when regulators show up. Don't be surprised when Bernie Sanders says, "I'm going to seize 50% of the company."

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  I mean, this one seems directly...

• 1:01:09Jason Calacanis?

  Their comms trigger this.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  This one seems directly, like, I'm looking at the Politico. It was an hour and 15 minutes, by the way. And then a rumor circulated that Dario didn't get back to them because he was at some sort of wellness retreat. But now Anthropic is denying that that was true. They're just saying it took a little time. But here's the interesting paragraph. So Dario Amade, he, in these calls with the White House...

• 1:01:30Jason Calacanis?

  And this is from who?

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  This is from Politico. This is from Politico over the weekend.

• 1:01:34Jason Calacanis?

  And Politico's, is that a biased publication on one side or the other, or straight shooters?

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  If you ask people on the left, they would say Politico is hardcore right wing. If you ask people on the right, they would say Politico is a bunch of commie socialists. So I think they're pretty...

• 1:01:49Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay, hated equally by both, so maybe that means they're independent.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  No one would say Politico is on their side, I don't think. Anyway, so they're claiming that Dario, behind the scenes, is saying that there is no universal jailbreak. And that they don't...

• 1:02:04Jason Calacanis?

  Universal jailbreak was the term?

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Anthropic in a blog post said, "No testers have been able to find a universal jailbreak, a jailbreak method that can broadly bypass the model safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities." So in these meetings with the White House, the Anthropic team is basically saying, "You've been misinformed. There is no dangerous jailbreak. We don't need to change the models. The guardrails are safe and in place, and the White House just doesn't believe them. They believe this tipster instead."

• 1:02:32Jason Calacanis?

  All right, well, the truth will come out very shortly.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  We can't know who's right and who's wrong at this point.

• 1:02:37Jason Calacanis?

  I think my assessment, you know, is... The most logical. They're an incredibly thoughtful, if not dramatic, group at Anthropic.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:51Jason Calacanis?

  They literally are the people who created the OpenAI mission. And when the OpenAI mission was corrupted in their minds, they started Anthropic to be the thoughtful frontier model. And they're winning. They have the best model. So the most thoughtful, concerned, and you can interpret that as drama queens, are also producing the best model. Running the table is what people say. And then suddenly, everybody's saying that they're bad actors and they don't want to limit access and you need to do a national security thing. I guarantee you, if, you know, Pete Hegseth, what's his last name?

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Hegseth.

• 1:03:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, if Pete Hegseth called them and said, hey, we think this model is a national security risk. Would you pause it for 72 hours while we collaborate? They would do it. They would love to do it. Instead, they did this to damage the company and/or as retribution. As Pete's quotes.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  I mean, the broader implication of this, we had a question from one of our viewers. I believe it's Daniel Demissey. Please acknowledge, Jason, we're on a dangerous path to a dystopian society if we start gating model access based on demographics. So do you?

• 1:04:10Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, hold on.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Do you think this is a first step to some sort of more dangerous situation where the government now is reserving the right to decide which AI models we can use? Or do you think this is more of a one-off situation?

• 1:04:23Jason Calacanis?

  I think it is a one-off situation. They hit the panic button. And they hit the panic button against the one tech CEO who will not bend the knee.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:33Jason Calacanis?

  So just put that in your mind. Just say it over and over again. If this was Gemini, if this was Microsoft, same series of actions, they would have just said, hey, can you turn the model off? And let's work for a week together to make sure it's not vulnerable? And would that be okay with you? They'd say, sure.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  But in a broader sense.

• 1:04:49Jason Calacanis?

  And I guarantee you, Dario would have said, sure. They came over the top with this.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:53Jason Calacanis?

  Now, there's the other part of this. Oh, they get to decide. No, the government decided in this case. Dario decided to not release it early. As a private company is allowed to do. We live. In a society where the private company gets to define what they release, the government also, as a backstop, can stop that if they believe there's some imminent danger. That's what occurred here. That means the system is working.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:05:18Jason Calacanis?

  Now, if you limit access to the models, which they're not doing, they just, the model's been turned off for everybody. It's not like somebody has an advantage here.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  Well, the government said,

• 1:05:27Jason Calacanis?

  Off for everybody.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  The government said you have to turn it off for any foreign national. And Anthropic's like, we can't, we don't have a way to do that where we can be sure nobody is, so we just have to shut it off entirely.

• 1:05:37Jason Calacanis?

  The reason they did that is because they don't want to get caught making a mistake.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:05:42Jason Calacanis?

  If it is, these products are porous. Somebody can get an IP address in the US, they can get a fake identity, just like they do identities that have in the US. So if they don't turn it off for everybody, and then the Russians, or the Chinese, or the North Koreans, use one of their American spies, or American stolen identities, which they have an infinite number of, to then go do something, now Claude and Anthropic have broken the law in some major way.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I, I think people are concerned less about that and more about the precedent. Like, are we, is this now saying we think the president has the right to shut off an AI model?

• 1:06:25Jason Calacanis?

  The president, or the president, which president?

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  Well, right. That, I mean, this is what's important. Even if you're okay with Donald Trump and his team making this decision, would people be okay with a future Democratic? Like, what if Joe Biden had been president, or Kamala Harris was president, and she decided to shut off access? Are we okay with the executive branch making these kinds of calls? I think it's the broader concern, like a first amendment sort of concern that people have.

• 1:06:51Jason Calacanis?

  We have no choice but to trust the executive branch, that's been duly elected, to push the panic button, and to take a product off the market that they believe is a national security risk.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:07:05Jason Calacanis?

  We have no choice. The executive has to have that power. What if this was, you know, somebody doing bio bio research and they created, you know, COVID times 100?

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  I think some people see these AI models as it's like, almost like a freedom of speech issue. Like, the government shouldn't have a role in saying which AI model you can use for which task.

• 1:07:26Jason Calacanis?

  They're temporarily, they're temporarily, the difference here is, they didn't shut off access to all AI models. They're saying, this one model has been jailbroken and the company has told us it's too dangerous to release. We are gonna

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:07:40Jason Calacanis?

  ask them to turn it off for now, or not let foreign nationals have it.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  In the interest of changing the names or the concept slightly, what if it was, this model is too woke and we don't think it's appropriate, so we're gonna shut it off? That would be objectionable, right?

• 1:07:54Jason Calacanis?

  You wouldn't be able to stop a model for that. This power resides in national security, right?

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  Okay. I mean, I don't, I think this is the larger, I don't have any of these answers. I just think this is the larger concern people have.

• 1:08:04Jason Calacanis?

  Well, we're in uncharted territory here. We are straining to find the analogy of a time a private company created something so powerful, the government had to intercede out of fear that it could be misused.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  And we do have, I mean, you know, weapons.

• 1:08:20Jason Calacanis?

  But do you have an example of a bioweapon company where this happened?

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  Not a bioweapon company, but like, there was an assault weapons ban for many years until it got reversed and like, that's

• 1:08:28Jason Calacanis?

  Wasn't done.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  That's the government's how private companies can't make certain kinds of dangerous products.

• 1:08:32Jason Calacanis?

  That wasn't an emergency order like this.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:08:35Jason Calacanis?

  This was an emergency temporary order. This is not like, oh, we're gonna have a whole democratic process over the number of bullets in a magazine. This is like pushing the emergency button. So, in that context, the only other time I can think of this happening was in Iron Man. A fictional story where they're like, hey, wait, can you have that suit, Tony Stark?

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  The Tony Stark's not allowed to have his Iron Man suit, correct?

• 1:08:59Jason Calacanis?

  Right. And like, that's literally, that's how fantastical this is being set up as. So, you know, we'll be sitting here.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  It's an unprecedented situation. I think that's why people are so interested.

• 1:09:09Jason Calacanis?

  And then people are going like, off the reservation about this. They're just like, I'm gonna just jump the fence and go crazy. And just leave reality. Okay, so now they're spying on us. They're picking and choosing the winners and losers. None of that's occurring. None of that's occurring. The government said this is really dangerous.

• 1:09:29Jason Calacanis?

  Will you turn it off for this number of people? They say, you know what? We're going to be even more secure. We're going to turn it off for everybody. We'll get back to work on it. We'll release it. By the way, this is going to happen to Gemini. It's going to happen to Grok. It's going to happen to OpenAI. It's going to happen over and over and over again. I do think this is going to drive people to realize you cannot have a single point of failure.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  I'm glad you

• 1:09:51Jason Calacanis?

  That's the key here.

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  I'm glad you got there. That's, there's been a bunch of international outcry about this too, that I didn't get into yet, but now I will. Thank you for the beautiful segue. So Labor MP in the UK, Labor MP Alastair Carnes posted, "This week, the most advanced AI model on the planet got switched off by a foreign government." He argues that Britain has some of the best AI talent in the world. "The country must jumpstart a homegrown AI industry to avoid this situation in the future." Echoed by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, he flagged the risk of, quote, "over-reliance on certain models and has encouraged Canadian tech companies "to diversify the models that they're relying on." So you're, you're spot on. That's what this is encouraging internationally is people are realizing

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  "we can't rely on just one company or just one model because it can go away."

• 1:10:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and the Chinese realize this, and that's why they are supporting open source to catch up. And then, you know, there's Mistral in France, there's other models, Manus, which started in China and then went to Singapore, I believe.

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  Correct, yes.

• 1:10:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  And now they're being killed. They're not allowed to leave China anymore because the Chinese government's afraid of losing them.

• 1:11:01Jason Calacanis?

  What we're seeing is this is, this is a very powerful technology as predicted. Okay, check. And one company does not have a monopoly on it yet. Anthropics is better, but it's like 20% better. So we're sitting here like, you know, getting all excited about the future here and oh my God, what does this mean downstream? Here's what it means downstream. You can't have a single dependency on any technology, whether it would be an Oracle database, and then that created MySQL and other alternatives that were open source. Nobody should have a single point of failure. When you write this stuff, it should be in a harness like OpenClaw, or we had the founder of the new competitor.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  Hermes agent, Jeremy Quinnell from New Research.

• 1:11:44Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you. My short-term memory is fried. Jeremy came on the program.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  Jeffrey Quizell.

• 1:11:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Jeffrey came on with Hermes. Hermes can use any backend language model. That's what you have to do. You have to take the harness, you have to take control of the front end, you know, your data, your skills, your memory, and then you have to just be able to route. And that's what this is going to create, dynamic routing. The dynamic routing of your AI harness, which includes memory, which includes skills, and your prompts, and your data, and the context window, all that, you have to own on your servers in your proprietary way.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Jason Calacanis?

  And then just be able to boop, boop, boop. And we did this internally. It's not hard, folks. We did it. We're a bunch of podcasters. And we set it up so it would use Kimi 2.5 or Claude. And we started with Kimi, and Kimi was like, okay, it's not as good, it's slow. But, you know, for simple things, it did work. I'd say open source is like nine months, 12 months behind, I think, this latest ethos model. And so that distance is, you can feel that distance now, but that distance closes. It's kind of like you're a freshman in high school and there's a senior in high school. It feels like you're incredibly different. Then you go to college. A freshman in college and a senior in college doesn't feel very different. Then you go into the workforce, and a 27-year-old and

• 1:13:06Jason Calacanis?

  a 31-year-old feel the exact same. No difference. Right? You're all just adults.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Jason Calacanis?

  This stuff, as it matures, it'll be the same kind of situation. Right now, it seems like, oh, my God, Anthropic is so far ahead. If Anthropic's servers went down today, everybody would just be on Codex.

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  Right. And it's also, all of the open source models are using the frontier models to like, they're distilling them, and that's how they're training. So every new generation builds on the generation that came before, anyway.

• 1:13:33Jason Calacanis?

  Tempest in a teapot.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  All right, fair enough.

• 1:13:35Jason Calacanis?

  Tempest in a teapot, being used for political.

• 1:13:40Jason Calacanis?

  Machinations and anybody who's in one political party absolutely hates Anthropic. I know all these people. They hate Dario. I think Reid Hoffman is the investor in Anthropic. Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, just so they hate Reid, right? So if you want to go one level deeper, who hates Reid Hoffman? Most.

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Well, Republicans don't like him because he.

• 1:14:05Jason Calacanis?

  He funded all the lawsuits against Trump.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, I believe Reid Hoffman's also, uh, also an OpenAI investor, but he, he's, he's behind Anthropic too. He calls Anthropic one of the good guys in a, in a back and forth with David Sacks.

• 1:14:19Jason Calacanis?

  I am really interested in what his ownership position is right now.

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  Let me take a look.

• 1:14:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. If he owns but 1% of that company.

• 1:14:30Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, his stake in Anthropic.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  He owns, holds an indirect stake in Anthropic through his position at a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners.

• 1:14:40Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. So he, if he's 25% of Greylock and great, cause I think he co-founded it. So if he's 25% of Greylock and Greylock owns, uh, 10%, he owns 2.5. If it owns 1%, he owns 25 basis points. In other words, he's worth billions to tens of billions of dollars based on his ownership there. So that's the tribalism. Most people don't know the tribal history here. If you go a little bit lower, take the PayPal mafia. Reid over here or the other members of the PayPal mafia on the other side.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Jason Calacanis?

  And it is, um, there's some longstanding grudges here.

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  There's some beef.

• 1:15:16Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot of grudges, a lot of beef, and there's beef like two layers down.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Jason Calacanis?

  And you know what Silicon Valley people really get beefed about is like another person getting richer than them or having, you know, a stake in one of these companies. So it is absolutely tweaking for Republicans and the Trump camp. That Anthropic is kicking everybody else's ass.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  Ah, okay.

• 1:15:38Jason Calacanis?

  That is ultimately tweaking for them and that Reid Hoffman's going to become worth tens of billions of dollars, not just a billionaire, but tens of billions because it's, that's ultimately tweaking. They have the pitchforks out for this company in a major way. The company's not doing itself any favors either. So here we are.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel like if you are selling yourself as you're the AI safety company, you're the people that are so like, as soon as there's the whiff of this model might be dangerous, you got it. You get to be like, ah, it's not that big of a deal. Like, that feels contradictory.

• 1:16:09Jason Calacanis?

  I don't believe that part of the story. I don't believe that part of the story where he dismissed it because he doesn't dismiss anything.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  I mean, that's what.

• 1:16:16Jason Calacanis?

  And he overreacted.

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:16:19Jason Calacanis?

  He overreacted to their request. Their request was turn it off for non-nationals. He said, I turn it off for everybody. He's over-delivering on his conservative nature. And so there's nobody in the AI space more conservative and thoughtful about security than Anthropic. They're the most, just based on, this is not my opinion, this is just based on the behavior. He wouldn't release the model, but to 50 partners who were testing it for security. Then he released it in a very thoughtful way. We had limited access. It was monitoring every use. Then when they told him, turn it off for non-nationals, he said, okay, I'll turn it off for everybody.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  Right. Well, I mean, the counterargument would be that that's, it's more marketing. It's that I'm gonna ban it for.

• 1:17:00Jason Calacanis?

  Now you're playing 4D chess.

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  It's gonna, gonna ban it for everybody. It's so powerful. It's so dangerous. Like, no one can.

• 1:17:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, now, now we're back at 4D chess, but.

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I don't know the answer.

• 1:17:12Jason Calacanis?

  If the government shut it down because Amazon told them it was too powerful, then the government and Amazon agree it's too powerful.

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18Jason Calacanis?

  So are they both making it up now? This is what I'm saying is like, there's so much hand wringing here.

• 1:17:23Speaker 00

  Right. It's impossible to know. It's impossible to know who's being motivated by what at this point. We, we, we can, we can only guess.

• 1:17:30Jason Calacanis?

  But there are some basic facts, and the basic facts are, it is very powerful. Okay, now is, um, uh, Nikesh, the head of Palo Alto Networks, who said at the liquidity summit that they found a ton of.

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I don't think it's not.

• 1:17:45Jason Calacanis?

  Security flaws. Is he in this grand conspiracy?

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  It's not in doubt that it's a very powerful and advanced frontier model. I think the thing that is mostly in doubt is, has it legitimately been jailbroken to where you can use Mythos 5 powers through Fable 5? That we don't really. Anthropic is saying, no, the government and Amazon are saying, yes, we don't have.

• 1:18:05Jason Calacanis?

  If Amazon says yes, then they did succeed. They did succeed. There's no, why would Amazon do this to their, a company they own a hundred billion dollar position in? It has to be true.

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  I don't have a good answer for that.

• 1:18:18Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, unless we're living in some three days of the Condor.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  I mean, we might be.

• 1:18:23Jason Calacanis?

  It's just like three billion days of the Condor.

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, three billion parameters of the Condor.

• 1:18:29Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's keep moving.

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  All right. Do you want to do the 5K bounty announcement now?

• 1:18:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, we have to do this. People are starting to think I'm not going to pay it.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  Yes, no, we're getting, we're getting questions in the DMs about it.

• 1:18:37Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to get skewered, man. I want to ship this money out.

• 1:18:39Speaker 00

  All right, so I have pre-recorded demos, so we're, we can't fail this time. Just a quick reminder for the audience, we asked for a real-time podcast companion that listens live to Twist Recordings or other podcasts, but we'd like it for our show, and reacts in real-time as the show plays. Specifically, originally, we asked for all kinds of different producer voices, then we sort of honed it down. We mostly want to focus on fact-checking. So here, I'm going to bring up the first finalist. We've got three finalists competing today for the grand prize 5K. The first one, this comes from a company called Lemon Slice AI. This is an app called Couchverse. Now, what I like about this one, and I'll have Jacob start playing it in just a moment.

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  What I like about this one is it's not just a, sort of a box that comes up with text. They actually came up with animated avatar characters. You'll see there is an alien who's their fact-checker, and then there is a cat-themed goth girl who is sort of the snarky troll. And this one, the other cool thing about Couchverse, it's just a Chrome plugin. So you could just go, set it up as a Chrome extension, and then use it directly in your browser on any video that you're watching. Very easy to use. Jacob, hit the play button. Let's watch the demo. So here, yeah, you can see, I showed you, this is me installing the plugin. And then here, I'm about to click it on our previous episode.

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  Runs companies autonomously. Pulsia is an AI that builds and runs your company as you sleep, building the products, fixing the bugs, running support. It's alien, whatever they're about to commit to on tape. Yeah, I'm taking notes.

• 1:20:15Speaker 05

  It's Catgirl. I had better things to do, but apparently this is happening now.

• 1:20:23Jason Calacanis?

  The true milestone was the number of times-

• 1:20:25Speaker 06

  Long thing, like the 1998 Daimler Chrysler merger, perhaps.

• 1:20:28Jason Calacanis?

  Beaten down and got back up. I have never seen an entrepreneur more resilient than Elon Musk. He, when he gets kicked, you know, he, he's got grit. He's got a work ethic. He's got a stamina that-

• 1:20:41Speaker 05

  Entrepreneurial grit, code for depth.

• 1:20:44Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, I got it.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:20:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, um, I've got a couple of observations about this one.

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:20:49Jason Calacanis?

  Creativity, great. It's obviously listening in real time.

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:20:52Jason Calacanis?

  I don't like voice over voice. That's like, that is problem. I'd rather just have it be giving me the bullets, but well executed, simplicity, ease of use. Ease of use is like a 10.

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  Ease of use is a 10 out of 10. This was the easiest one to set up by far and it just works right in your browser. You don't have to do any thoughtfulness or setup at all, uh, and it'll, it'll comment on anything.

• 1:21:13Jason Calacanis?

  I give it 10 out of 10 for easiness. We both do.

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:21:15Jason Calacanis?

  Now, in terms of, um, the actual value, I give it like a four out of 10 because-

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's not giving me the value I want. I just want to see it bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. But for creativity, I also give it like an eight or nine. I could see this working if the characters were like small in the corner and it paused, uh, to give its commentary.

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  Interesting. Alright.

• 1:21:35Jason Calacanis?

  So that could be more like, uh, Mystery Science Theater. So overall, I'm going to give this one a 7.5.

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think the one big thing that I was, that I felt like on this is the, the, the commentary is just never really that useful. It, it is like, it's too tossed off. It's, it's repetitive a little bit. I feel like it's maybe the AI model that this is running on is just not as sharp as it should be. So in terms of the experience, I really liked this one. In terms of the actual practicality of would this be useful to have on during your live stream? I don't, I don't know. It's sort of in the middle.

• 1:22:10Jason Calacanis?

  Not yet, not yet. But I just, I think a couple of tweaks, this thing could be like really amazing. So great job.

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, uh, our next contender, this is Convalesse by Bo Bratton. Uh, this is an app that you actually have to download and set up on your computer. Uh, it is, I have to admit, it's a little bit cumbersome to set up. It's a little bit confusing. Of all three, this was the one that took me- The most time to set up, but we'll, we'll let you take a look at how it works. Once it's actually working. Uh, so Jacob hit, hit play on this demo. Um, and you can see the first thing you do here after you've got the app installed is you actually talk to the AI and you give it a little bit of context about the show. Oh, the other thing I should mention here, this one only works for live broadcasts.

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  You're sort of making a podcast along with it as opposed to having it listen in on a podcast that your other is making. So to start off, I tell the AI, in this case, I told it, I'm just going to read you a news story. Please comment along. My name is Lon. And then it goes, okay, it's got all of the. Has hit an IPO. The rocket and AI company now known as SPCX will sell more than 555 million shares starting on Friday. So it's just me reading a news story from Friday. $75 a share. The total raise they're looking for is 75 billion at a valuation of over 1.77 trillion. Elon. Another downside here, it takes a little while. This one, this one, it's not instant real time like we were hoping.

• 1:23:37Speaker 00

  It's a little bit slow, but you're going to see it's got a very interesting take.

• 1:23:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Cause you've been talking for a minute now. We've had no feedback yet. It's still listening.

• 1:23:44Speaker 00

  In terms of the feedback, what's interesting that Convalence does is it's really not so much fact checking. It's turning what I say into presentation slides.

• 1:23:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God.

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  But it's doing it in a pretty interesting and thoughtful way. I mean.

• 1:23:58Jason Calacanis?

  I didn't ask for that and it's stunning. Look at that. It just built a slide. The largest tech IPO in history, $75 billion total cap raised.

• 1:24:05Speaker 00

  It's totally.

• 1:24:06Jason Calacanis?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  It's completely accurate. I fact checked the slides that it makes. Uh, so here you can see I'm done reading. You can keep the video playing. I wanted to see, it keeps going. So it's, it's playing catch up right now because I'm done reading the news story, but it's going to make a second slide here. So you can imagine not exactly what we asked for, but you can obviously see the value of this product. It's making a live presentation out of your show as you're doing your show.

• 1:24:36Jason Calacanis?

  This is a different product. I love this product. I might back this startup. This is, I'm giving a talk at, at Stanford. And it may, instead of me preparing slides, I just read from my notes and it makes dynamic slides.

• 1:24:50Speaker 00

  It makes dynamic slides as you're talking.

• 1:24:52Jason Calacanis?

  So if we did Q and A, I want to try this when I'm at Founder University in Japan. I do a Q and A session.

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:57Jason Calacanis?

  When we do a Q and A session, if I said, you know, there was a startup Uber and I invested in it and then it did this and then there was this company and then I missed this investment in Twitter. It made a slide like Jason's Biggest Misses, Jason's Biggest Hits, and da, da, da, da, what I saw in each one of them. And it did that in real time. That provides massive value. Nobody has to do notes. It's beautiful on the screen.

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  And think about that session I had with the AI before I started. You could tell it anything. You could give it design, custom design features. I want the slides to focus on this kind of information.

• 1:25:27Jason Calacanis?

  Make it look like Steve Jobs keynote slides.

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  Or, you know, put a chart on this one. If I ever mention comparative numbers, make a chart. You could give it any of those kinds of directions. So a very interesting program there. I was.

• 1:25:39Jason Calacanis?

  Love it. I mean, I'm going to say, both of these would be startups that I would be willing to back. I think. Now, there's a lot that goes into backing a startup. Like, you have to have founders who are capable of not quitting.

• 1:25:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:54Jason Calacanis?

  Building a team and other things. But if a founding team came to me with either of these ideas and said, hey, can we get 25K, you know, to just incorporating it going? Or can I get 125K and come to the accelerator? I'd be like, yeah, this is pretty compelling. Let me have you pitch the team. Great job.

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  My immediate thought on ConvoLance was like, Gamma should just buy this, right? Like Gamma, this should be a feature in Gamma that I can just do my presentation live and Gamma builds the slides for me while I go.

• 1:26:22Jason Calacanis?

  Or maybe Plaid buys these guys and when I get one of my templates in Plaid, because I always like to applaud Plaid. Maybe one of my templates is build a slide deck or build info, or actually I would say build infographics.

• 1:26:35Speaker 00

  Real time infographics, yeah.

• 1:26:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, real time infographics. There was this other interesting thing where an artist, you could hire an artist to come to a show and they would. Draw on a giant panel, each speaker, it was a live artistic interpretation of what you learned that day.

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:26:51Jason Calacanis?

  And it was really cool. Somebody go find that and we'll pull it up later. Hit me with number three.

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  All right. Third and final, uh, these are in no particular order, folks. Our third and final finalist, Ricky Rivas in My AI Sidecast. So another cool one, does not have a lot of complicated setup. It's a very minimalist sort of interface. Less is more. The transcriptions are accurate and we found, Jacob and I both found the fact checks on this one, pretty, pretty darn insightful. So Jacob, hit play, let us take a look. This is My AI Sidecast. And this one, it works anything, it's just listening to a tab in your Chrome. So it could be a live show, pre-recorded, anything. A blog post on Thursday, they said they want to slow down global AI development. An odd

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  thing for Anthropic to say.

• 1:27:42Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, their heads of internal research and policy wrote that slowing down the pace of global AI development would, and I'm quoting, likely be a good thing.

• 1:27:52Jason Calacanis?

  Crazy.

• 1:27:52Speaker 00

  Your photos from Bouchon, I'm very jealous.

• 1:27:54Jason Calacanis?

  I'll take it. It's incredible. Anyway, I'm a bit exhausted. I saw this go by my Twitter feed.

• 1:28:00Speaker 00

  So here, you can see, if you look in the upper right on your screen there, I'm, I'm actually turning on, he's got more personalities. He's got a fact checker in there. He's got a roaster.

• 1:28:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Okay. Where are the facts?

• 1:28:15Speaker 00

  So, yeah, so the biggest thing we're going to point out here is there have not been any fact checks yet out of everything that I've said. If you keep the, the video playing, you can see I added the roaster.

• 1:28:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here we go.

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  They're more active.

• 1:28:26Jason Calacanis?

  We have one.

• 1:28:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:27Jason Calacanis?

  Here, we have one here. Bernie Sanders wants to seize 50% of the equity in Anthropic. That's right. Sanders proposed the AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, a one-time 50% equity tax on major AI firms, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and XAI, Payable, and Stockton Cash. One source found. Amazing. That's it. This is what I wanted.

• 1:28:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Jason Calacanis?

  That's the winner. Number three is the winner.

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:28:50Jason Calacanis?

  The other two are the runners up.

• 1:28:52Speaker 00

  Yes, Jacob and I agree.

• 1:28:53Jason Calacanis?

  You agree with me?

• 1:28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jacob and I both had this selected as our number one. I think for exactly what you said, it's what we asked for very specifically. It's, it's pretty quick, like it, it responds with facts right away. And I like that it has an add-on of you can also get roasted. You can also get a really clean transcript. You can also get just sort of like notes and accompanying. It's, it's sort of broad enough and it thought of everything.

• 1:29:18Jason Calacanis?

  This has been incredible. Congratulations to the winners. If a winner doesn't claim their pro- I'm declaring the third one.

• 1:29:26Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:29:27Jason Calacanis?

  Is, is first place.

• 1:29:28Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:29:28Jason Calacanis?

  I'm agreeing with you two. And then I'm going to give the other two the honorable mentions.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  Great.

• 1:29:32Jason Calacanis?

  Um, and I think I'm going to encourage them to all keep pulling on the thread here. That there is a business here in this, uh, that people would pay for. I like all of them. Uh, I'd love to meet the developers. I want to hire a full-time developer to work on this with me as a company. Um, so I don't know if this is a great way for us to source talent. Uh, cause you know, I have this annotated project that I want to do.

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  Yes, that's our next bounty. Look out for that one.

• 1:30:00Jason Calacanis?

  Bounty is annotated. So, um, what would be a fair way to do this? First prize, 3K. The, the, the second and third, or the two honorable mentions, 1K each. Is that reasonable?

• 1:30:09Speaker 00

  I think that sounds very fair. So Ricky Rivas, congratulations, you've won 3K. We'll be in touch. Uh, I know we, I know we've got him on X, so we'll find him. And Lemon Slice AI and Bo, $1,000 each. Congratulations to you guys as well.

• 1:30:22Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, look at that, the wedding goes crazy. Um, here's what I'd like to do as well. Um, if, okay, when we give prizes like this, you gotta pay taxes. Uh, to the best of my knowledge.

• 1:30:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:30:34Jason Calacanis?

  So we're probably going to need to get you to fill out like a little tax form. Cause it's over $600, I think.

• 1:30:39Speaker 00

  We'll put him in touch with Heidi, she'll figure it all out.

• 1:30:41Jason Calacanis?

  So, yeah, we'll figure it out. Um, we'll send it to you. And then, um, it's all open source, so great. Uh, you guys, uh, open sourced it. And if you build it further, you own it, you know, I don't, I'm not taking any claim to ownership here. Um, but I, I really like it. If, I hope they join us for the annotated project as well and do that bounty next. It will probably take like a month or two to run through that one and do the similar process, but even better. I love this bounty program because it's fun. It shows the creativity. We get to give feedback on it. And, uh, if you don't- Claim your prize. I will either rotate it into a future bounty, or I'll donate it to the charity of your choice.

• 1:31:25Jason Calacanis?

  As long as it's not something crazy. Like, just pick something.

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, pick that normal charity. So This Week in Startups.

• 1:31:30Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want anybody to think I rug. Did I rug pull anybody lawn? Or did I do this in a front?

• 1:31:35Speaker 00

  I think we did this in a perfectly fair. It took us a little while. It took us longer than I think we'd hoped it was gonna take us. But a lot of people entered. We had to install and check out a lot of apps. We wanted to be thorough and very fair. Not just give it to the first good one that we saw, but take a holistic view. So, yeah, I think we'll take a little bit longer. And you can go to thisweekinstartups.com/bounty if you want to keep an eye on the active bounties that we're looking for and jump in. And yeah, the next one that we want to do is for this annotated app. I will give you a little taste here. Annotated.com, it's an extension for clipping and reacting to content from any website. So you see some text, you see some audio, there's some video that you want.

• 1:32:17Speaker 00

  So users can annotate any piece of content like that. It then creates a landing page with a link to a news story or the post. And then people can react with that annotation on that landing page. So, you know, think of the sort of a variation on something like Reddit, where you're creating a topic that then becomes a whole thread that people can comment on. But instead of it just being you type into Reddit, you're sort of taking a piece of content from elsewhere on the web, and that is jumpstarting the conversation. I was saying before, Jason, this reminds me a lot of an old school service called Delicious that I used to love many, many years ago, which was also kind of a similar kind, like, find a quote or a good blog post, and then you pull it in, bookmark it, and then other people can see what you bookmarked and comment on it. This is sort of the next level of that, I think.

• 1:33:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm really excited about this because I bought annotated.com, I think, 20 years ago for 30 or 40K. And that was gonna be my next startup. But I went with Mahalo and said. So my concept here is that we lose a lot of the, this is like cruft and like the dead web, you know, like things die. And so what I want to have happen here, I'm just gonna unpack annotated a little bit, if I may.

• 1:33:26Speaker 00

  Please.

• 1:33:27Jason Calacanis?

  You're on a New York Times story. Just came out, it's controversial. You're the subject of that story, right? You highlight your quote and then you reply and say, I didn't say this, or I said this, but they left out the second thing. Here's my screenshot of what I actually said to that person. And now you have this permanent object. And I'm not including blockchain in this, but a permanent object. So that if they go change the quote, like let's say in that New York Times story, where they got a fact wrong and you fact checked it and you put it there, that object exists forever as a moment in time. Let's say there's a video and it is the promo video for this new product that's coming out, right? And you say, I want

• 1:34:07Jason Calacanis?

  to, or even better, let's say Joe Rogan has somebody on talking about the, somebody's talking about the COVID virus, you know, in the height of the mania.

• 1:34:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:20Jason Calacanis?

  And they say something that is incredibly prescient, prescient, and they got it right. Like they nailed it, right? Like the clip of, hey, it's the Wuhan virology lab and the Wuhan virus, it's in the name. Like, who was that that made that? Jon Stewart?

• 1:34:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:34:36Jason Calacanis?

  You take that Jon Stewart clip, you do it, you say, hey, look, it was proven right. Here's all the facts, right? So, and then underneath it, people could comment and you could have like a debate. And then you might have 50 different people comment on that same object. The object is the URL, but we will take the, you know, let's say up to 30 seconds of the original video, we'll downgrade it to like lower. So you can do fair use. It is fair use to use other people's content if you're doing commentary. So I could take, you know, anything, a song, a book.

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:08Jason Calacanis?

  And as long as I don't take the whole book, I just take a small portion, the enough for me to do the commentary, that would be fair.

• 1:35:14Speaker 00

  And it's the linking back, I think. Like we, one thing we do all the time on our Twitter account is just pull, like if I see a really good quote in another podcast or somebody else's video, I'll just take a 30 second, you know, segment, just the quote I liked, and we'll share that. But then the follow-up tweet is always, here's where to go to watch the entire interview. As long as you're doing that, I don't think people get upset.

• 1:35:37Jason Calacanis?

  I used to want people to get permission before they clipped. I've changed my position on it. If you do commentary, that's fair use. If you're taking, like if it was a hour podcast and you take And all you do is rip 12 clips, which like some pod clips, company was doing that and I had to stop them because it was like, it's the whole episode, dude. And you're, the way they were putting it, you never had to go back and watch ours. So we don't even know people watched it. But if you do a small clip, we have a watermark now. I put the watermark on All In and This Week in Startup. Now, everybody's now done that. And the rules on Twitter, Nikita has said, hey, if you crop out the watermark, then I'm going to suspend your account or take you out of the, take you out of the creators program, is I think what he's doing. Actually, he doesn't suspend the account.

• 1:36:22Jason Calacanis?

  Takes them out of creators program. If they do it over and over, they might suspend.

• 1:36:25Speaker 00

  But I mean, I do this on our account all the time. And nine times out of 10, the original podcaster reshares or likes or leaves a comment on our video because they recognize that we're sending people back to them. We're raising awareness of the show that they're doing and the great content that they're making. So nobody, yeah, I don't think anybody really objects.

• 1:36:44Jason Calacanis?

  Now, the fact checker, you know, podcast companion, that was like a project I wanted to see in the world, but annotated as a company I want to see in the world. And I may form a company out of this. So whatever you do in this bounty, consider your ideas, public domain, open source, nobody owns them. I don't own them. You don't own them. It's just open source. Anybody can fork it and do whatever they want. That's the rules of this contest.

• 1:37:07Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:37:08Jason Calacanis?

  Now, I might in the future incorporate some of those ideas, start from scratch, fire up another open source project, or make it proprietary and make this into a company. So just so you know, this is my way of providing a bounty for two reasons. One, it's fun for the show. And two, I might find a team, a founding team, who I might be able to fund to actually make this into a real world product. Inside a venture capital firm, I'm allowed to, in our documents, incubate companies. So I'm allowed to create a company and incubate it, which Sacks did at Kraft famously, or the Snowflake, I think Snowflake came out of that and Kraft did his AI version of Slack. Anyway, there's all different ways you could do this as a venture capitalist.

• 1:37:50Jason Calacanis?

  If your documentation says you could incubate a company. And when you do that, the holding company, the venture firm gets like 50% ownership. You might give the team 50% ownership that you hire eventually. You know, the founders and the team, like stock option pool. And then you would give your investors who underwrote it, let's say you pick a $10 million valuation and the venture firm incubated it. And they spent a million dollars in venture capital from your LPs on it. They get, I don't know, 10 or 15%, maybe give them a little kicker. You give them first bite of the apple kind of thing.

• 1:38:21Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:38:21Jason Calacanis?

  And LPs are cool with that. You just can't do it over and over again and like not have a winner or like, you know, make it unfair. So it has to be, has to feel fair to LPs. But that's a new thing venture capital firms are going to be doing more and more of, I predict. And I'm going to be, when we do launch fund five in first quarter of next year, it's one of the things I'm going to like earmark 20% of the dollars, 10% of the dollars, something like that for incubated ones. Because we often find a team and we have an idea and we want something to exist in the world. So we might, it might be a way for us to manifest good ideas that we come up with here on the show and, you know, that the world needs to.

• 1:38:57Speaker 00

  We're, we're full of good ideas here on the show.

• 1:39:00Jason Calacanis?

  We are starting our associate and training program. We have five amazing associates starting. Two or three of them are going to work with Lon doing research and producing the show here as we, you know, get the word out and we train them up. We should probably deputize because I want to have this concept of one producer per one episode a show. So we have four shows going out a week, three this week in startups, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then we have this week in AI, which tapes on Tuesday drops on Wednesday. We want to have one producer on each. One of the producers should get the bounty program to manage. So just when you're doing your management as editorial director, let's give one of them tactical, practical, give one of them bounties. See you all next time. Bye, bye.

• 1:39:37Speaker 00

  Bye, folks.

• 1:39:37Jason Calacanis?

  Go Knicks.

• 1:39:38Speaker 07

  Thanks for watching This Week in Startups. If you liked this episode, check out more. If you're a startup founder, Founder University Cohort 13 kicks off this fall. It's a 12-week program that provides guidance on building your product, launching to real customers, and pitching to investors. Top startups receive $25,000 or $125,000 in investment. Apply now at founder.university/twist. Already have traction? The Launch Accelerator invests $125,000 and connects you with 500-plus investors to help you raise your next round. Apply at launchaccelerator.co. If you're an accredited investor looking to gain access to quality deal flow, apply for Jason's Angel Syndicate at thesyndicate.com. We find. Two to three deals a month.

• 1:40:23Speaker 07

  And check out This Week in AI, Jason's experts-only roundtable with top AI founders and operators every week. Find it thisweekinai.ai. Check out the TWIST ticker, our daily newsletter, at thisweekinstartups.com/ticker. Follow the show on Instagram, follow the show on X.com. This Week in Startups publishes three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5:00 PM Central Time. You can submit an audio or video file question by emailing it to thisweekin.com.