OpenAI’s $1.25T Raise, Starlink Mobile & Zuck’s Tax Deal | EP 2354

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud - https://plaud.ai/twist Sentry - https://sentry.io/twist Lightfield - https://lightfield.app Rippling - https://rippling.ai/twist Today’s show: Is OpenAI finally priced correctly? Jason argues that the reported $30 billion raise at a $1.25 trillion valuation is finally “right-sized.” He also says that he’d put money in at that price, while walking through the risks that could still sink the investment. It’s a Friday all-news episode with Jason and Lon, covering OpenAI’s latest round, SpaceX’s push to become America’s fourth major carrier, Zuck and Meta’s creative move around the proposed California billionaire tax, and some of Lon and Jason’s favorite documentaries. Plus we’re asking the timely question: who watches the AI watchdogs? Relevant Links OpenAI nears up to $30B round at $1.25T valuation, led by UAE investors (CNBC): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/22/openai-funding-round-uae-investors.html Anthropic investors eye a $2T IPO (Nasdaq): https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/move-over-spacex-anthropic-targets-2-trillion-valuation Uber puts all 30,000 employees on ChatGPT Work (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/uber-puts-all-30000-employees-on-chatgpt-work/ Telecom stocks fall as SpaceX eyes 80,000 cell sites (Yahoo Finance): https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/telecom-stocks-fall-spacex-eyes-134838815.html Verizon launches simpler plans and drops activation and upgrade fees (Fox Business): https://foxbusiness.com/markets/verizon-launches-simpler-plans-new-loyalty-program-drops-some-fees Amazon Leo's launch slips past early 2026 (ITdaily): https://itdaily.com/news/network/amazon-leo-faces-delays/ METR and Redwood Research's write-up on red-teaming OpenAI's agent monitoring: https://metr.org/blog/2026-10-22-red-teaming-openai-agent-monitoring/ Open Philanthropy is now Coefficient Giving: https://coefficientgiving.org/research/the-story-behind-our-new-name/ Court documents show the alleged FSU shooter's ChatGPT chats (AOL): https://www.aol.com/news/court-documents-show-florida-state-233829466.html Meta's 8-K filing on the Founder Alignment Agreement (SEC): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001326801/000162828026066700/meta-20261019.htm Polymarket: will California's billionaire tax pass?: https://polymarket.com/event/billionaire-one-time-wealth-tax-passes-in-california-election-2026 Mark Cuban vs. Ro Khanna on the billionaire tax (Fortune): https://fortune.com/2026/08/17/mark-cuban-california-billionaires-tax-wealth-ro-khanna/ Elizabeth Holmes: The Theranos Deception (60 Minutes archive): https://cbsnews.com/video/elizabeth-holmes-the-theranos-deception-60-minutes-archive “The Act of Killing” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3FcB1UZHlg “Grizzly Man” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWA7GtDmNFU “Hoop Dreams” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf9Nq2ju0t0 “The King of Kong” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5XvArGGIzk “A Short Stay in Hell” by Steven L. Peck: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0983748446 “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges [PDF]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf “The Eureka Machine” by Richard Socher: https://www.amazon.com/dp/154170570X Timestamps: 0:00 Jason’s in SF with the LAUNCH Accelerator 37 cohort 2:40 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations - interviews, meetings, calls - you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 6:34 Tactical & Practical talks live at Salesforce Tower 10:21 Using Claude for brainstorming, not writing 19:26 Sentry - New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST26 20:42 OpenAI closing $30B at a $1.25T valuation 26:04 Why OpenAI could still lose 30:25 Would you put 30% of your retirement into OpenAI? 32:34 Lightfield - Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM. Exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you - it even prospects and books your meetings. Used by thousands of startups. Free at https://lightfield.app 34:27 Every Tesla becomes a Starlink hotspot 43:06 What would be the ultimate SpaceX domain name? 45:00 Thanks to our partners at Rippling! Head to https://rippling.ai/twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business. 46:10 Is METR a fair watchdog for OpenAI? 54:03 Jason’s “Know Your Customer” plan for AI models 1:03:34 Meta’s deal to keep Zuckerberg in Cali 1:14:35 Why Jason would raise the minimum wage 1:18:42 Does Nathan Fielder give Liz Holmes a pass? 1:30:59 “A Short Stay in Hell” and “The Eureka Machine” Subscribe to our newsletters on Substack: TWiST: https://twistartups.substack.com/ TWiAI: https://www.thisweekinai.ai/ TWiVC: https://thisweekinvc.substack.com/ Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back Friday afternoon. I am in San Francisco. I had a great trip. We had Lon launch Accelerator Class 37 graduating.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Oh, 37.

• 0:11Jason Calacanis?

  And Founder University Cohort 2 from Japan.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Right, Tokyo.

• 0:17Jason Calacanis?

  And so, yeah, Tokyo. But anybody from Japan can join that, just to be clear. It's not just city-specific.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 0:24Jason Calacanis?

  And so, we had 30 graduates from the Founder University in Japan. The top 10, as selected by our teams, got to come to an immersion week here in the United States, where they did, you know, tons of meetings that we set up, met entrepreneurs, met venture capital firms, and just explored and got to really soak in San Francisco. So I'm having a little graduation dim sum with them this afternoon here on a Friday, October 23rd. Yeah, great dim sum place. I love Yangtzeing. Yangtzeing. Get the duck. Get the soup dumplings. Then the Launch Accelerator Class graduated, and we did something new for them. One of the new things we did for them was, we found that with such a small cohort,

• 1:09Jason Calacanis?

  you know, we keep it to seven companies, sometimes 10, but, you know, right, seven's a good number. We started bringing them to see Sequoia and Kraft, who we have a deep relationship with each of those firms. But we expanded it. And so, we did about 15 firms here in San Francisco, where they met all different venture capital firms and gave their pitch in their offices. Absolutely fantastic. So you get to meet multiple members of that venture team and build a tight relationship. And of course, since we're only doing seven companies as possible, if you're part of Y Combinator with 200 companies, it's kind of hard to do. You can't bring 200 people to somebody's office, or it looks like a protest.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Right. And you get your reps. I mean, that's what's so important for these founders. We write a lot of these tactical, practical tips, and that's something you hear from founders, from veterans, over and over again, is like, you just need to get used to it. You just need to learn. Every time you do a pitch, you get a little better, you get a little smarter about what parts are people responding to, what parts are leaving people cold. You get to sort of workshop it. So that's such important experience for these founders.

• 2:11Jason Calacanis?

  Whether you're an athlete, or an actor, deliberate practice, pretty good thing. So over the 12 weeks, each week, they give their pitch to a panel of a half dozen investors. But then during this immersion week, we had them do, I think, 15 meetings this time. We blew through all of our predictions, and we're going to take them to New York. So if anybody from New York has a venture firm, and they want to meet my seven companies, I'll probably be joining them for some of the excitement. So just email me, [email protected] for life. [email protected] for life.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Let me ask you, was anybody there at this event, were they recording the demos, perhaps on a plod pin, so that they could go back and listen to them later?

• 2:49Jason Calacanis?

  Certainly a great effort to do. And, you know, I'm wearing this beautiful,

• 2:55Jason Calacanis?

  I forgot the name of this expensive material, but it's, what is this material called?

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Gore-Tex? Is it Gore-Tex?

• 3:02Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no, no, no. This is like, seriously expensive, but good deal, good value. It's not cashmere, it's that other one. Oh, I gotta take it off.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, now I need to know. Now I want the answer.

• 3:14Jason Calacanis?

  This jacket is luxurious. I'm going to put my plod pin on this jacket. Somebody's looking it up right now, and they're going to tell us.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  It's leather. Suede?

• 3:20Jason Calacanis?

  In the fan chat.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  It's not suede.

• 3:21Jason Calacanis?

  Suede, it's suede. It's suede. So it's a blue suede.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  It does not look suede from here. It's the lighting or something.

• 3:29Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, you know, I got this great jacket. Now, I don't want to damage the jacket, right?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  No, not your new suede jacket. Definitely not.

• 3:36Jason Calacanis?

  My new blue suede jacket. Not shoes, but blue suede jacket. So what I like to do at my plod pin, I have my plod pin here. It's got a magnetic buck. I put this on here. This is not damaging anything. It's just right there. I press the button.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  It's magically hovering.

• 3:52Jason Calacanis?

  Now, I'll take all the notes for us today, and, yeah, look at yours. Now, I'm going a little more subtle here, a little, you know, I got the darker one. You got the one that's basically makes you look like you're doing a plod ad, but that's okay. If you're wearing a white shirt, it would have been fine. But we are, in fact, doing an ad for Plod. We're doing a plod ad. We do all our show notes now, so if you go to any of our videos, look in the show notes, you'll get that link to our notes. Now, when we do the notes, along the top, you'll notice four tabs. And let's add a fifth tab for the next one, and for the next live ad read. But right now, you got the transcript, great. Sometimes you hear me say the name of a company or a person. You want to go check it out. Then you get the summary. Hey, maybe Lon is explaining all these great stories for the day, but you want a summary, so you get a top-level summary. Who knows? Maybe you want to jump around in the podcast. Sometimes people do that.

• 4:37Jason Calacanis?

  Finally, if you thought of it as a meeting, it will give you the meeting highlights.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:41Jason Calacanis?

  Meeting highlights. And workflow acceleration, product readiness, safety and governance. You're seeing all these things here. And then teaching notes. I'm big in teaching. So they have an instruction set here, a skill, to do teaching notes. So here's your overview, remaining content, covered content, etc.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  You're a teacher, we're getting a lesson plan. And those, those are templates, and there's dozens of them. So whatever you want to turn your recording.

• 5:05Jason Calacanis?

  Hundreds, maybe.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  So whatever you want to turn your recording into, whether it's, you know, more like meeting notes, whether it's more like a lesson plan, whether it's more like a news item, whether it's more like a press release, whether it's, whatever it is, a dialogue, like a script or a Q&A, you can make it happen easily with Plod. They can take your recording and turn it into basically whatever kind of document you like. Check it out yourself. We encourage you, plaud.ai/twist. And if you use the code TWIST, they're going to give you 10% off.

• 5:36Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Everybody, go get a Plod. I have, like, so many of my friends who see me use it. It's a pretty viral product. So every time people see me using it, because I always ask for permission, "Hey, can I record this? Some notes here. I'll show you my summary of the meeting." People always appreciate that, because I like doing in-person stuff.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 5:51Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So the other thing we did was, we have been extremely focused. And I always look at what do founders need today? We did this, hey, let's tour and go actually to the venture capitalist's office, and build a deeper relationship with them. So a smaller number of firms, not 300 people, or not 1,000 people at a cattle call-type demo day, which is chaotic, which, you know, you need to do that if you have 200 companies. You need to have 2,000 people there if you're going to have 10 per company.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:18Jason Calacanis?

  Reasonably. So I totally get it. But that becomes a cattle call, and then just, it's like, very panicky. It's not elegant. It's not effective. So I always challenge myself on a kaizen basis, always getting a little better. What would be a little better this time? The other thing I challenged my team with was, hey, how do we make this podcast a little better? How do we make the programs a little better? How do we make our live events a little bit better? So we did a live event yesterday, and we did it at Salesforce. Thanks to my friend Mark Benioff. It's a beautiful facility with the Salesforce Tower. Obviously, you've heard about it. Gorgeous building. And he has his classroom, which I'll share some pictures of at some point, or maybe we have one here from our Slack. Beautiful, beautiful room. Giant TVs, giant monitors, and we had these incredible sessions.

• 7:02Jason Calacanis?

  Beautiful, like, classroom-style seating. Can only fit like 50 people in there. But I asked them, "Can we put some chairs in the back?" Because I got other founders who want to come. Put another 25 chairs in the back. We had 75 founders, founders only. From our portfolio, or people we've met with recently that got to a second meeting. Okay, so this is like a tight group. I asked my team, "Hey, I'd like to have six talks." And look at that room.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 7:24Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is a gorgeous room. And I got to say, thank you to my friends at Salesforce. They're so supportive of me. They didn't charge me. I was happy to pay a fee for the room. Not only didn't they charge me, they gave me this great AV support. They put out cookies. They put out snacks. They put out great coffee.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Brad, the AV engineer from Salesforce, who's been helping us get all this content together.

• 7:45Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible job. And so, we wound up doing nine tactical, practical talks. Our newsletter is focused now, this week in startups newsletter, is focused on tactical and practical. Why? Let's face it, folks, news is a bit commodified right now. Analysis of the news, opinions about the news, less so. But we have this incredible newsletter, Twist newsletter, and we decided to settle on the number of 100 tactical, practical articles, you know, in-depth content modules here, to make you a better founder.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Per year. Hundred per year.

• 8:21Jason Calacanis?

  Per year. Hundred per year. So a buck each, $100 a year right now. We're going to raise the price at some point. But now it's 100. So go to twiststartups.substack.com, Twist newsletter, this week in startups. But we did this in person. So of those nine talks, all nine are worthy of a newsletter. So there'll be nine of the next 100.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  I'm working on them.

• 8:38Jason Calacanis?

  Because I was like, we should just share them. And what we do is, we take The article, or we'll take a video like we taped, but then we're going to kind of productize it with graphics. I mean, you can explain maybe a little bit of the AI process we're using here because we're, we don't believe in AI slop, but we do believe in super intelligent standards.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 9:01Jason Calacanis?

  There's AI slop, and then there's super intelligent standards, which comes from context windows that contain style guides and examples of what's right and with constant tweaking. But explain what you're doing here for these articles and make it throw one up on the screen that you're proud of.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  So what I do is, you know, we'll obviously do this for all of these talks from this week, this amazing event in San Francisco. I've just been finding either from the Twist archives, we've had dozens of founders, hundreds of founders over the years, share great tips, but I've also just been finding, you know, other podcasts, other places where founders are talking, other resources that are out there for the internet. There is so much of this content. So layer one of the AI is I have trained a Grok bot that is plugged into YouTube and X and is very good at searching them. He's just scouring all day, every day, looking for practical founder tips from across the web, more time than any human could ever spend watching videos. I used to do this by hand.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Now it's Grok bot's turn and making recommendations and filling in a spreadsheet for me. And then I go through and I look for which tips do I think would be the best, which are the most laid out, which are the most detailed? And I'm really looking for

• 10:08Jason Calacanis?

  Credible.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  I'm really looking for a workflow. Like I'm looking for, is this, there's a lot of vague, like, here's three things to bear in mind when you send a cold outreach email. I mean, that's great. That's helpful, but here is the eight step process I used to increase my success on cold outreach emails by 30%. That's a tactical, practical kind of tip. So I'm looking for stuff like that. Then we take it, I sort of run it through AI as a brainstorming layer. I usually use Claude. Opus is ideal for this. You could use Sonnet. And I have it sort of pull out for me, like, here's the talk, here's the thing, what do you think, what would make good graphics? Let's brainstorm. What would make good point? Like, how should I lay this out? And I kind of workshop it. I don't let Claude write anything.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  I think this is where people make the, the error is that they think if I

• 10:56Jason Calacanis?

  Cardinal sin.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  If I prompt engineer it just right, you know, if I give it the right context, it's just going to one-shot like a perfect essay. I don't really know that the models

• 11:06Jason Calacanis?

  Not today.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Not today. Maybe one day.

• 11:09Jason Calacanis?

  We, we know not today.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Not today.

• 11:11Jason Calacanis?

  We know.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  So I feed all of the context in, I feed, you know, the talk, everything else I want to add. If there's an interesting perspective from someone else, I put all the information I could find in there. I let Claude kind of roughly assemble it and then I take the suggestions, I workshop it with Claude, and then I turn it into the final version.

• 11:27Jason Calacanis?

  You write it. It's your words.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I write it.

• 11:30Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent human written.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 11:32Jason Calacanis?

  And you are turning your brain on. So this is a critically important thing. Young people right now are just letting the output be the output and they cut and paste it. If you're cutting and pasting, you've made your first mistake.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 11:41Jason Calacanis?

  That's the indicator that you're dysglottic. You should be looking at that output. You can ask questions and follow-up questions. Hey, I'm confused. I don't know this term of art. I don't know what, you know, CPC is, cost per click. I don't know what, you know, CPA is, cost per action. Can you explain that to me? Give me a crisp definition.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:59Jason Calacanis?

  That everybody can understand. Then you write it yourself in your own words, but now, you know, you're, and then fact checking obviously good. And if we pull this up again, what I wanted to see was the graphics on this one. And so maybe we could show us the first or second graphic, whichever graphic you think Lon is the most representative on this one of the process.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Scroll down a little. Oh, I think

• 12:16Jason Calacanis?

  That's a clip, right? Those are clips.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I think this one was actually from before I was making the graphics. So Jacob, go to a more recent one and we'll talk about the graphics.

• 12:24Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. So just so people know, we will put in clips that you can watch and you don't have to watch the whole 20-minute presentation or hour-long podcast. We're going to take you right to the most important clip. So we still do video clips.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  I'm sort of sucking out, yeah, like two or three great, short, because it's not, you know, sometimes it's not our content. I'm not trying to steal somebody's video. I'm taking 30 seconds, 45 seconds that just gets you to like something impactful and then you could read the post to sort of glean everything. Here's a great example of one of the graphics. So this is like, it's a back and forth process. Obviously Jason and I worked on a style guide. So that was the first step. Claude designed, you go in there, you bounce ideas around. I like this, I don't like this, I like this font, I don't like that. And eventually you get to a point where it's like, this is a good sort of, sort of style format that we can use over and over again to make our, our content. So I have that style guide now, and then I go, here's an idea for the graphic, have it say this and that, put it in the Twist house.

• 13:20Jason Calacanis?

  So in this graphic, it says, who knows your candidate? Why Maritra trusts the reference check over the interview? Interview, 30 minutes of artificial scenarios. Reference, years. Significantly more hands-on experience. General notes, the source, and the bars are not just, yeah, I mean, this is great notes. And what you see is, this is just a visual way to pull you into the article and reinforce the learning. So when you're doing learning things, if you make a great visual, what happens is you're going to remember this. So when you have a conversation with your team and they say, well, we did three interviews, and you're like, okay, three interviews times 30 minutes is 90 minutes.

• 14:02Jason Calacanis?

  If we did three references and they each worked with them for two years, that's six years, 2,000 hours, that's, you know, each, okay, now you're talking about 12,000 hours of real experience. And that's just a great, I mean, really hats off to you and Claude and me for making the standard. This is founder field notes hiring. And so when you look at this, a used grid paper. I asked it, I want something where you're writing in a notebook and I want a font that is like somebody with the best penmanship ever, that would write something on a whiteboard or in their field notes that would make you jealous that that person's such a considered, you know, there's somebody you know who's an art director or like a great founder who's like a creative director and you open up their notes and you look at it and you're

• 14:47Jason Calacanis?

  like, this is like Michelangelo, right? Making incredible notes. And it kind of got my vibes. So now we have a style guide and I said, you know, make one that is for infographics, make one that's for charts, make one that's for a table, make one that would be a Venn diagram, make one that's a four quadrant. So I kind of gave it what I think would be style guides that come up and against.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  The one other thing I was going to point out, Claude is getting so smart. I, sometimes I have to correct it, but you'll see it has one of our tags as a category. Like this one said, hiring. 99% of the time, I don't have to tell it what to put there. It figures it out from context. It figures out, oh, here's what I'm making a graph about. That out of all of the tags that I know are on Lon's Substack, that's most like hiring and it just files it there itself. Like that's impressive.

• 15:34Jason Calacanis?

  So here's what I'd like to do with this is, I'd like to make sure it has a subscription to the paid version and is ingesting it.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  I'm all, what's up?

• 15:42Jason Calacanis?

  Claude's ingesting?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yep. Claude reads everything.

• 15:45Jason Calacanis?

  And then, now I asked to get feedback for it. So I'm, this is all about building the context window. I want to figure out a way to get Claude the, the feedback. So how many likes, how many comments, and if anybody hit reply to the email. So that would mean when we send it, we send it from an email that gets forwarded to Claude somehow. So what I want to do is ask people, hey, hit reply and give feedback to us, but I want that feedback to go to Claude.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  There are surveys in Substack that we could theoretically feed to Claude.

• 16:12Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  And that's how to do it.

• 16:14Jason Calacanis?

  It would be even easier, you could ask Claude to stand up a survey tool and to ask people for feedback and it could just be part of this. So keep building the context window, please, of, you know, this, and then I think we will be able to do a real great job for our founders. But the tactical practical in person was a really major breakthrough for us as a company. And I am, just want to thank Salesforce for partnering with us on our tactical and practical nine talks for our founders. And so you just, and now it's going to go out to a large number of, even a larger number of people. We should include some of the images and the pictures I took.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:54Jason Calacanis?

  And of the room in those newsletters. So people realize this came from a tactical practical thing that Jason hosted at Salesforce. Just to give people even that extra context, one of the things I notice about editorial products here while we're giving a little, a little insight into how I build them, is when people understand the intentionality behind it, which is why I'm taking 15 minutes here to explain it, and you can include this discussion in the next one. Hey, Jason and I talked about what we're trying to do here. When you take people behind the, the movie, like the director notes or, you know, people will do behind the scenes vignettes of movies that are made. Ridley Scott did this a whole bunch for Prometheus. It gets people more vested in it.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  They call it a featuret.

• 17:33Jason Calacanis?

  Featuret, thank you. I want to keep doing this as like a featurette for the newsletter. And if anybody has ideas for this, just sign up for the newsletter and then post the comments under it. What could have been better, etc. So we want to go from this extremely important content that you can't miss. Great editorial products tend to be one thing, just one thing, but they do that one thing better than anybody. And what I want this to be is every one of these is worth the time of a founder and it's tactical and it's practical. In other words, it's a tactical, it's telling you how to deploy this, but it's practical for you. It's not like, uh, this is way above my pay grade. I'll never figure this out. I don't know how to make a chipset.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:13Jason Calacanis?

  You know, or you made a point earlier along, which I think is the right one. Founders and investors like to spout off about like, you know, follow your passion and I only take warm intros. I love to get emails, like all this contradictory advice. What we're trying to do here is like, get rid of that and get you to the 100 best actual tactical and practical things that will make a change for you this week, this month, today for your startup. Thank you, everybody.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  That's the stuff that's tough to get through is there's a lot of this, it sort of poses as a tactical, practical tip, but it's really more like motivational, inspirational speaking, like no problem. People need to be motivated and inspired. I don't mean to knock that stuff, but it's not what we're looking for.

• 18:54Jason Calacanis?

  Do they? I mean, I think like.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  There's a lot of that out there where it's like grindset mindset kind of stuff. And it's like, that doesn't really help anybody.

• 19:02Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I think that stuff gets a like, but it doesn't get printed out and forwarded and talked about in the management meetings. For me, if we, if we don't get liked or retweeted, I'm not so concerned about that. I want, if you could tell me how many people printed this out or forwarded it to somebody on their team or brought it to a meeting and pulled it up on the zoom, that to me, which you can't get those statistics, but those, those are engagements, statistics that don't lie. No matter how polished or well-designed your app might be, every once in a while, something is going to go wrong in production, right? Even if you're a perfect UX designer and you know what you're doing, but that doesn't mean your team has to waste an entire day just to locate the source of the problem, the bug, the issue. We got Sentry now, everybody.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  And what I love about Sentry is that it gives you total visibility into your app in one place. This is not separate tools or endless context switching. No, just your errors, traces, replays and logs, all linked together in one connected timeline, right? You could actually play the timeline. So when there's an issue, you can see exactly where it started and what triggered it. And debugging these things is critically important because SER, S-E-E-R, is Sentry's AI debugging agent. It's got an agent. It's going to take over this problem and unpack why the issue happened, point to the code that's responsible for the issue, draft a fix on its own, and even flag when your PR is about to cause a problem. In other words, it's going to anticipate problems. You don't have them. This is what you need,

• 20:27Jason Calacanis?

  folks. This is the perfect use of super intelligence. Go to sentry.io and check out their free death plan. Plus, our listeners can use the code TWIST26 for $240 in Sentry credits. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io. All right, let's keep going.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  All right, let's, uh, let's dive into some news.

• 20:45Jason Calacanis?

  Number one news story, please.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  CNBC reports that OpenAI is close to a new private funding round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation. Co2 and UAE-backed investors are expected to lead. The UAE money could be paired with a deal for more compute capacity in the region. That number is down from the $1.4 trillion valuation Bloomberg reported the company was seeking in late September for the same $30 billion target. Anthropic, which raised at $965 billion in May, is reportedly targeting $1.5 to $2 trillion for an IPO that could come first. So the reported price chasing came down about $150 billion in a month.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  What is the biggest thing for you that changed between September and today?

• 21:32Jason Calacanis?

  We don't have complete information here about the terms of the deals, protective provisions, et cetera. So there's a lot of nuance in terms of what the valuation means in relation to the investment. For example, if, they mentioned how much they're raising in this round?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  They're looking for $30 billion.

• 21:50Jason Calacanis?

  30?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, at a, at a $1.25 trillion.

• 21:52Jason Calacanis?

  So now, do those investors have a liquidation preference where they are guaranteed a minimum of 2X, $60 billion, or before anybody else shares in the preference stack? Do they get 7%, 10% interest every year until it converts, if it's on a convert? Or do they have a minimum amount? Do they have the ability to call back the investment? So we had this happen with one of our startups. Somebody said, oh, you know, that Series B we gave you, you had seven year, we had a seven year window for it and then we can demand our money back. The company's profitable. And so now the Series B investors are like, yeah, we don't believe in the company anymore. We don't believe there's growth here. Just give us back our $100 million. Now the startup's making 50 million a year, but it wants to

• 22:36Jason Calacanis?

  grow. And now they've got to give 40 of the 50 million back each year, you know, or so. So there's a lot of those protective provisions, downside provisions that we don't know about. Anyway, the, the relative, um, what you have, which have to look at here is just how much money is the business making? That's another thing that we, is there a mention here in this round of what the current revenue run rate is? And the revenue run rate, there's two different ways to look at this while you look it up. There's ARR, annual reoccurring revenue, and then there's annualized revenue run rate, ARR, like a pirate. People conflate these two numbers all the time. Sometimes people do it on purpose. Sometimes people

• 23:18Jason Calacanis?

  do it accidentally. And I'm constantly, even with my own team, saying, what ARR are we talking about here? And they're like, oh, well, you know, they sell this product. And I'm like, okay, if they sell a product and the person is not obligated to buy that product next month, that's annualized revenue run rate, which is take last quarter times it by four, or take last month and times it by 12.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  It's very funny. I'm looking, I'm looking it up right now. Their, their annualized revenue run rate is approximately $50 billion.

• 23:46Jason Calacanis?

  And it doesn't explain how that was calculated, but generally what was last month's revenue times 12? Now, sometimes people will sign a huge contract that goes away the next month and it was a weird thing. So they signed a $10 billion contract or had some special circumstance that month, and then all of a sudden things look really out of whack. So we don't have all these details here.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  That's the only number I'm seeing is 50 billion.

• 24:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So, uh, all you need to do is look at the valuation here. You said it's 1.2 trillion?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  1.25, 1.25 trillion.

• 24:19Jason Calacanis?

  2.5. All right. So you divide these two numbers, you get to 30. It's 30 times price to sales ratio. Price valuation to sales, sales, top line revenue, not profits, not gross profit, not EBITDA, not community-based EBITDA, it's the community best, EBITDA. That's my Adam Newman from WeWork, watched the show from Hulu or whatever it was on. Anyway, it's 30 times top line for an incredibly high growing business. I think they've actually right-sized the valuation to a certain extent. If you told me I could put, I don't know, 5% of my net worth into this, 10% of my net worth at this price, I'd take a deep look at it.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Really? At a frontier level right now? Really? You still think?

• 25:04Jason Calacanis?

  Honestly, I think they've right-priced it. I think this would be going for 100 times the revenue run, annualized revenue run rate, if we were talking about it a year ago, when the hype cycle was crazy.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:13Jason Calacanis?

  So what happens over time is that 100X price to sales ratio, in other words, they were making 25, they were making 20 and people were saying it's a $2 trillion company. When, when that was going on, remember those discussions? Hey, this is like a $2 trillion company. Maybe it's a $3 trillion company. Oh, maybe it's a $4 trillion. And then you're like, well, what are you basing that on? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, Gavin Baker, Brad Gersner, their shareholders in some of these companies, they're bullish on the sector, whatever the case may be. It depends on each individual. You start to look at those hyper optimistic ones, but you have to pick a year. So that's what I always do. Let's pick a year. If, if in the year of our Lord, October 23rd, 2026, it's at 30

• 25:57Jason Calacanis?

  times price to sales and the thing's doubling every year, tripling every year, I think it closes the gap and is probably a good buy if you were holding it for 10 years. If you're trying to make a quick trade, God bless you because there's a lot of headwinds here. Obviously people are, let's just go over the head, the headwinds for a minute, right? The, the headwinds or the risk factors here. Number one, they're up against Claude and Anthropic, pretty great competitor. Uh, they're also in the agent space, which might run away with a lot of the market. And some people believe that's going to be the dominant modality, modality fancy word for.

• 26:33Jason Calacanis?

  For what? Like the how? The interface?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Right, the distribution, the interface, like that's how people are gonna access.

• 26:40Jason Calacanis?

  In this context, you would say the modality would be like the interface or the delivery mechanism.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:47Jason Calacanis?

  So, if you believe that agents are the modality, well, then you have to say, wait a second. You got Muse, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, who are all gonna be major players in that space, whether they have their products out or not.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Instinct to where everybody's piling into the agent assistant.

• 27:05Jason Calacanis?

  And they have, those companies tend to have two, three, four billion users using their products collectively, and they have individual products that have well over a billion or two billion users. So, there's an incredible opportunity in that space. That's a headwind, though, because that means everybody's gonna have one of these. Amazon's gonna have their own agent, you know, imminently with Echo, or what is called Alaxa. And Siri will come on strong, and we have Muse coming out very strong, and Grok is very strong.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  And I mean, what about open source? We haven't even talked about that. Like, I feel like that-

• 27:39Jason Calacanis?

  That's the third headwind.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  The other movement we keep talking about all the time is like, you know, is everybody gonna switch over to running these open models that are so much cheaper?

• 27:47Jason Calacanis?

  Number one, you have the other frontier labs, proprietary, enterprise-grade. You're going at businesses with, you know, I saw Uber bought ChatGPT for 300,000 employees, I think. It's an incredible deal. Now, of course-

• 28:02Speaker 01

  They all have ChatGPT work now, yeah.

• 28:03Jason Calacanis?

  So, instead of, you know, they're probably paying 20, 30 bucks a month each. You know, it's probably a $10 million a year deal, well worth it for Uber. But I think you're gonna start seeing these deals, and this is like the Microsoft Office going into Uber, or whatever it happens to be, versus Google's suite of products, or versa. So, you have competition for enterprise, you have the modality of agents being a 10-person race that just started, and it's like people are still joining the race. And then finally, to your point, you have open source. And then you have like, what happens if they can't execute and put compute on fast enough to deliver these services?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:40Jason Calacanis?

  Then you have regulatory risk, which in some cases might be actually a tailwind, because it might help them, because they're able to execute on those regulations other people aren't, and they're onerous, so therefore the bigger established people can afford to navigate them, and the younger upstarts can't. So, there's just a lot to parse here. But if you told me, hey, I'm gonna force you to take 10% of your net worth and buy, you know, of these 10 leading AI companies, you had to put 1% into each, or you had to put all of it into two, you know, like, I think OpenAI gets one of the slots, I gotta be honest. Like, I wouldn't under, they're exceptional at execution,

• 29:22Jason Calacanis?

  and even though they seem to be getting beat over and over and over again, they seem to come back.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:29Jason Calacanis?

  So, that to me says something. You know, they get beat by Grok and Muse, and then they release Dots. They get beat for code, they release Codex. Like, they're fighters. I give the OpenAI team and Sam a lot of credit. They're fighters, and they ship product now.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, now that I'm doing-

• 29:44Jason Calacanis?

  Anthropic ships better product, I think, slightly better.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's getting close. I mean, I do these AI demo posts now for that other Substack, and every week there are, like, we're comparing the top Claude model and the top Saul, or, you know, like, that's a constant refrain. All these channels are always doing that. They're putting them head to head. And the consensus is really like, it's not one is clearly pulling away from the other. There are GPT Saul fans, there are Claude Opus fans. It goes really back and forth. So, I don't know if there's a definitive, like, Claude is definitely better. I think it's task per task, and a lot depends on your harness and your setup or whatever.

• 30:25Jason Calacanis?

  I guess that's my question for the audience. I mean, are you buying at 1.25? Feels like a fair valuation, given their growth and products. I mean, if I told you, you could put 10% of your retirement, one, of a certain age-

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Oh, I would do, yes. I would do it.

• 30:44Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no. Wait, I gotta, 10% into OpenAI,

• 30:50Jason Calacanis?

  10% into SpaceX, 10% into Anthropic. So, those are three bets. These are the three. No, no. You have to, 30% of your retirement's going into those three, or they could, that 30% could be in a balanced, you know, index fund, that you don't touch and is just set across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. Would you concentrate on those three names with 30% at the current valuations? And the answer should be-

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Yes, I would put it into those three companies. I would probably tilt it a little more towards SpaceX if I had the option, just because I feel like they're also competing on the frontier model front, but they've also got, they've got Starlink, they've got the rocket business, they've got robots.

• 31:34Jason Calacanis?

  So, now we go to question two. Yeah. So, now we go to question two. We've already said, a youngish person, 50 years old or so, with, you know, 20 years before they tap their retirement account, let's just put that as the bogey. They got 20 years in this thing, they're not gonna touch it. Clearly, put 30%, 40% into those three names if you could.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:53Jason Calacanis?

  Because you gotta have something that's going for the Hail Mary. Okay, now let's just take the 30% number. You got those three names. Split me up the percentages of those three names.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Oh, so it's 30% total. I'm probably doing 20% SpaceX AI, or SpaceX SSI, as it is now.

• 32:10Jason Calacanis?

  XSI.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And then 5% each, OpenAI, Anthropic. That's how it works.

• 32:16Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's a perfectly reasonable bet for you to make.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  I'm gonna hedge the OpenAI versus Anthropic. It's too close to call.

• 32:22Jason Calacanis?

  You could easily go 15, 7.5, 7.5 as well.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:26Jason Calacanis?

  And then you could rebalance it as you go. This is not investment advice, but this is what I would-

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Please, don't take it from me, yeah.

• 32:32Jason Calacanis?

  But this is me giving investment advice to a lot. All right, I'm here with Keith Piris. He is the founder of Lightfield, and they are a CRM system built natively in AI that takes all your emails, calendars, Slack messages, all the stuff you keep losing, puts it in one place, and creates organization out of chaos, so you don't lose any customers. Keith, welcome to the program.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 32:53Jason Calacanis?

  Let's talk about lead enrichment. You mentioned that. What is lead enrichment for people who don't know? It's kind of implied, but I think sometimes people hear that term of art and don't know what it means, and how do you do it?

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Lead enrichment comes from, I think, the early 2000s, where you used to buy a database of names, email addresses, and, you know, other parameters, like job titles, company size. And then, if you had one of those parameters, you could use it to find the other. Like, maybe you had the name, and you wanna figure out, hey, where does this person work? What's their email address? Or maybe you had the email address, and you're like, what company do they work for? What kind of company is this? And this used to be, you know, I would say a pretty big business, because you had these companies like ZoomInfo, that would pay thousands of people to go and call and make notes and fill out this database. Annoy people.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, annoy people and fill out this database. And in the new world, you know, that's not how lead enrichment works at all. You could get to use one of these web LLM tools, go and scrape the web, find the newest updates, and then connect it to your database. So, sort of lead enrichment in our world is like, use, you know, a modern LLM web provider like Exa, and get them to go search through a million different documents and come back to you with an answer.

• 34:19Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Everybody go check out lightfield.app and see what it can do for your company. Don't lose any customers and find some new ones. Lightfield.app.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  All right. Speaking of SpaceX SAI, Bloomberg reports that they're, they want at least 80,000 cell sites across the US. They're in talks with tower giant Crown Castle, among others. The goal is a fourth nationwide wireless carrier, Jason. They're calling it Starlink Mobile. It'll be built on satellites, newly acquires low-band spectrum and towers on the ground. Crown Castle jumped as much as 10% after hours. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, the established players, of course, all fell around 5%. On this week's SpaceX earnings call, Musk, Elon Musk said, "Satellites plus spectrum will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US."

• 35:08Speaker 01

  I mean, my question for you, Jason, would be like, how many US phone customers from AT&T, Verizon, do you see jumping over once Starlink Mobile is an option?

• 35:17Jason Calacanis?

  The TAM here might be a little bit bigger than people suspect, and that this is incredible for competition. So, for people who are like, oh my God, oligarchs, whatever, M&A, one of the great things is, with Elon's companies and other people's, they get ambitious. They look at other people's highly profitable businesses that are in duopolies, et cetera. AT&T, Verizon being a perfect example. I think the two of them are the majority of subscribers. You got T-Mobile with some there as well. You know, you add a Google, where they have Google Fi, but Google Fi never got this ambitious, that they wanted to put satellites and towers. And then I'll add another piece to this, which is, imagine you have your home,

• 36:03Jason Calacanis?

  your five family members, all on the same plan for their house, for their cars.

• 36:11Jason Calacanis?

  And for their mobile devices and that every car on the road has Starlink built into it. Whether the person is using it or not. So you're driving your Model 3, Model Y, and you're driving it through hill country and you park at a cafe. And I park at the same cafe. I take out my phone and I'm sitting there. The cafe's got terrible ISDN, whatever, just bad Wi-Fi or they don't have Wi-Fi. And that car's out front and it's got a satellite dish and it automatically takes my phone. And any of those SSIDs, Wi-Fi networks named Starlink, it just automatically connects to. And it connects to it securely with my authentication and I'm off to the races.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. So it's like you're traveling with your own hotspot. I hadn't even thought about that.

• 36:57Jason Calacanis?

  Or I'm traveling with your hotspot. So I'm walking around Manhattan and there's 1,000 cybercabs or Austin, there's 1,000 cybercabs driving around. And then there's 1,000 private citizens driving around and there's a mesh network of 500 megabit Wi-Fi. And I'm just walking, you know, or sitting in a cafe, working my laptop and I don't have to get on your Starbucks crappy Wi-Fi or this person's crappy Wi-Fi and wonder about security. It just connects me to whichever Starlink is strongest and not moving or moving the least. And by the way, there was a mesh network, open source crypto project that did this. Somebody can type it into Claude and it'll tell you which one I'm talking about here.

• 37:37Jason Calacanis?

  Mesh network, I think it was Spain, and it was a crypto project where you basically contributed your Wi-Fi at home, opened your Wi-Fi network up and you earned coins, you know, tokens from some crypto project. And you could pull it up. And then there was another company that did it with buses in Spain. So there was like a bunch of Spanish entrepreneurs who were really into this like free Wi-Fi movement and like to the point at which you wouldn't even have Wi-Fi at your house. There would be so many people sharing it that you could skip having it. Like if you're a student or, you know, you're a low income person, you could just be drafting off of Wi-Fi constantly. Anyway, this crypto project where you earned crypto by opening up your network to be part

• 38:18Jason Calacanis?

  of this mesh network, I don't think it ever became very large, but that that model's been around for 20 years. People have been talking about, and I think Comcast, no, it's Xfinity. Xfinity has this. If you are near another Xfinity, you can log into your Xfinity account and use, you know, Law & Order Xfinity if we had Xfinity as well. So that's, that's really the future of this. Putting up 80,000 cell towers, that's just going to make it work through walls a little bit better. It might be this one, yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Greefy.net, baby.

• 38:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, sure. Common good deploy social network. So congratulations. I think it's going to be meaningful to your original question. I think it's going to cause prices to go down. I think we'll be sitting here in three or four years, somebody will wind up clipping this, and instead of paying $300 a month for your home and your five family members, which is probably what people are paying right now, a hundred bucks for their home and then five family members, that's 60 bucks each.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Easily.

• 39:12Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So let's say it's 400 for the family members and I'll include the cars in there. You got two cars, which have $10 subscriptions each per month. You got five family members, they're at 60 bucks a month. That's 320 and you're paying 80 bucks a month for your home. Now you're 400.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds about right.

• 39:29Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty. Now imagine it's 200. Now imagine it's 200 and it's just Starlink.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  And it's better.

• 39:36Jason Calacanis?

  You get it everywhere.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Faster, yeah.

• 39:38Jason Calacanis?

  I mean theoretically it could be faster. I mean, I think AT&T, I think that's why AT&T and Verizon are very much on the fiber game. And they, they have been starting to, Verizon has been starting to proactively tell its customers, you may have seen these stories and I had it happen to me for one of my phone lines, they've been proactively saying, hey, you know, we can get you a better deal here. We can get you a better deal here. And they've been offering me lower deals. So look up that story that Verizon is now trying to get to be, they're trying to save their customers money and they're lowering their prices proactively to people who are not asking for it. So, and then they tell you, hey, by the way, your bill's $3 less per month. So imagine that. You're charging so much that you proactively tell your customers that we're going to lower their prices.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Verizon launches generous customer perks after raising prices. It has customers new benefits that extend beyond core service as wireless competition intensifies.

• 40:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And, and they're going to lower prices, I think is the key. You'll find some stories about them lowering prices is the, the one I'm looking for. But anyway, you know, and they can bundle stuff in there. It's going to be awesome for consumers. Fiber to the home, that's hard for Starlink to compete against. Starlink will get to, you know, I regularly get 200 or 300 megabits down and whatever, you know, slightly less going up. It's fine, but you know, I think this idea of one gigabit fiber and even more is going to be, here it goes. Verizon targets wireless customers with new, simpler plans, drop some fees. This is the story I was referring to. Yeah. And so they're trying to simplify and because Starlink's like, yeah, you can turn it off

• 41:14Jason Calacanis?

  month by month.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Right. So that's exactly what they're doing. They're dropping activation and upgrade fees to make it simpler and cheaper to just stay and you know.

• 41:23Jason Calacanis?

  So folks, I'd like to invite folks to STFU. Shut the frack up about socialism, capitalism and oligarchs and monopolies. Startups break monopolies. It happens and this is the great thing. And by the way, Starlink ain't going to get a monopoly either because these companies are not going to take it lying down, even if they get their asses handed to them, which is possible. They'll then merge and then they'll partner with Amazon's Leo.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:54Jason Calacanis?

  Service, is it Leo?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  I think so. That sounds right.

• 41:57Jason Calacanis?

  Low Earth Orbit, did they name it Leo? I think that's pretty on the nose.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Amazon Leo, that's exactly what it's called.

• 42:03Jason Calacanis?

  Can you ask your producer there, what is the Amazon Leo launch date? When will they reasonably be able to sell this to people?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Let's see what they say.

• 42:14Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's late next year.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  November.

• 42:16Jason Calacanis?

  I know they're putting satellite.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Oh, no, they hang on, that's their next launch. Let's see.

• 42:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. The launches are this year and into next year. I don't think they're.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Full commercial service deployment and broader international rollouts are planned through 2027. That's all we've got so far. So they're saying at some point.

• 42:32Jason Calacanis?

  That's, that's a mealy mouth.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  At some point next year.

• 42:35Jason Calacanis?

  I think that means you reasonably could get this in 2028. I think it's 18 months off. So ain't nobody buying it for 18 months. And if you did, it would be like buying Starlink. When the original people on Starlink, they would only sell it in certain neighborhoods. You put your zip code in and then, you know, they would tell you if you had it or not. And then they would give you a warning and they would only sell a certain number per zip code because there were only a certain number of satellites in the constellation and they didn't want people to have a bad experience. So even though they could have sold more people, they were like, yeah, we just want people to think this kicks ass and it does.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:12Jason Calacanis?

  Period, full stop.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  So we were, we were talking a little bit about all the name changes going on with SpaceX. Let me ask you this. In light of the shifting at SpaceX, at SpaceX AI, at SpaceX SI, maybe it's going to become like Musk Industries.

• 43:24Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to become X.com.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  What do you think would be the ultimate domain name for the company? They can have any domain.

• 43:31Jason Calacanis?

  It's X.com.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  X.com?

• 43:33Jason Calacanis?

  X.com.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  That's the one? Why, why unpack a little for us? Why is X.com the ultimate? It's not, it's not that long. It's just one letter.

• 43:42Jason Calacanis?

  He owns the X.com domain name. So I think just calling the company X would be fine.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  There we go. So, you know, domain name's so important. We like to highlight the importance of having a good.

• 43:52Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you gotta get a great domain.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Easy to remember domain name. I mean, if you could get it down to one letter, that would obviously be the ideal. But for any, even if you want a domain name that somebody else already owns, that somebody else is already parking on, you could go to godaddy.com. They've got a broker service. They're going to help you get the perfect domain for your startup, even if it's just one letter.

• 44:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, buying and selling domains is a real art and Godaddy's going to be a great partner for you there because they'll anonymize your interest in things. If you're a startup, people will, you know, they're, they're going to price gouge you. So you want to use the broker commission over there. It's only 99 upfront fees plus 20% success, success commission. So, and these are buyer side charges. And so that's great. And, you know, they, they basically have taken every single thing you need to do with a domain and put it into one service with a fair price. And I've been on the, the service for 20 years. It's absolutely fantastic.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  So find out more, godaddy.com. Thanks to our friends at Godaddy. All right. Here's a common founder scenario. You're looking over your sales numbers at the end of the quarter and hey, your team, they're at risk of meeting their quota. This kind of thing happens all the time. You can't figure out what the specific problem is without taking a closer look at all of the data. Not long ago, that meant pulling it all in from across the entire organization, a time consuming ordeal. But now today, there's Rippling AI. Rippling is already built on your real time people and business data. That means Rippling AI pulls metrics from both their data and your CRM into one dashboard. And then you get to see how close you are to hitting quota. And you can figure out the root of the problem of why you're not getting there. Maybe it's the marketing.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Maybe it's the targets they're going after. You can break down all of that revenue by region, by customer size, all of that important information is going to be at your fingertips in seconds with Rippling AI. When you're running a company, you have important questions that need immediate answers. That means ASAP, as in right now, as in yesterday. So if you're ready to rule your business, head to rippling.ai/twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your startup. Next news story. AI safety nonprofits Meter and Redwood Research got a deep level of access inside OpenAI for a three week pilot this summer and they found several vulnerabilities in its internal monitoring system.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  One exploit could have allowed agents to keep hundreds of their actions from getting monitored. They also found a potential path for Codex agents to bypass security restrictions while still acting with what seemed like their users' full permissions. OpenAI says it has patched everything affecting production safeguards. The evaluators say they have not yet verified any of these fixes. So OpenAI got a 61 page report. The public only gets a broad summary and OpenAI has the right to redact it. So, I mean, my question to you, Jason, does this still count as transparency if we're only getting these broad summaries? And does it seem like with all the rhetoric that we hear about the dangers of rogue agents,

• 47:06Speaker 01

  does it really seem like OpenAI is taking this as seriously as they should?

• 47:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they're certainly taking it more seriously. So let's give them credit for that. This is step one. Step one, we have an auditing agency, they're making a report and it's an outside agency. Now, if you're paying for the report. Then there is an obvious conflict of interest.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:27Jason Calacanis?

  If you're selecting the company, you're paying for it. So when you see, I don't know, this sports organization is investigating this person for, you know, some, you know, illegal or alleged behavior. They were doing sports betting and they hire their law firm.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 47:44Jason Calacanis?

  That does their business. I've been involved in, you know, on boards of companies that hire an outside law firm to do an investigation. I would say, you know, you're going to get, because you're paying a million dollars to investigate yourself, you will get the benefit of the doubt would be a very, what's the opposite of generous when you're saying it? At a minimum, you're getting the benefit of the doubt.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 48:12Jason Calacanis?

  And you're getting the chance to kind of clean things up. So let's, you're getting the benefit of the doubt.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  They're going to figure with kid gloves if they're your, they're do, they're your

• 48:21Jason Calacanis?

  They're on your side.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  You've got a business relationship with them exactly.

• 48:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, I would say they're on your side. Now, they're not going to cover things up, but they didn't cover stuff up here. I would never expect any of these companies to cover things up. But what they will say is like, hey, we're going to do this contract. We want 90 days to, or nine days or nine hours to resolve anything. Anything that's resolved in, under this timeframe is not counted in the final report.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:51Jason Calacanis?

  It's been cleaned up.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 48:52Jason Calacanis?

  So things that have persisted for over 10 days are in the report. You could negotiate something like that, right? If there was a misunderstanding and somebody bought their, you know, fiance, business class, first class tickets and their girlfriend's a private jet to go to Cabo, I'm not saying these kind of things have ever happened, but I think in the RJ Nabisco.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Right, that's what we were talking about at Barbarians at the Gate where it's the

• 49:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Barbarians of the Gate, somebody told the story here that they were, somebody was sending their dog on the company private jet. And listen, I have three Bulldogs. If you told me like, hey Jake Al, you're in, you're at, you're, you know, you're in Tokyo, would you like us, would you like the pilots to bring the dogs and, you know, the kids next week? I'd be like, yeah, sure, bring the dogs and the kids. I mean, if I had that kind of chatter, I would do it. But you don't want to do it on the, on the company's dime. So that is the key issue here. And I think we should all be stoked that this is happening. Now, the company meter, which I think is M E T R.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  It is, M E T R, yes. It's a nonprofit. It's a nonprofit.

• 49:59Jason Calacanis?

  Model, Evaluation and Threat Research. I think that this organization needs to be fully vetted.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:07Jason Calacanis?

  Again, not saying they're doing anything wrong, but I, who are these people running it? What is their relationships personally, historically with the people working or running these labs?

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:21Jason Calacanis?

  It's a small community. So imagine you were making movies and you're a very high profile director and you're Martin Scorsese and you make Taxi Driver, you make Goodfellas, you're Steven Spielberg and you make Poltergeist, it's a bit scary for kids. You make Temple of Doom 2, which is where PG 13 came from, you're Steven Spielberg. And they hire people who worked at Paramount and Columbia Pictures previously to run the MPAA because they wanted somebody from the industry who had credibility.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  It's a friendly group, yeah, yeah.

• 50:53Jason Calacanis?

  And, oh, by that, by the way, that person has two relatives and friends who work at Columbia Pictures, at Paramount, and they worked on this picture and that picture. And then there's their, at Sunday soccer game with their kids and one person says, oh yeah, Temple of Doom, we're going to rip this guy Kalima, the heart's going to come right out of the chest.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Troubling, yeah.

• 51:12Jason Calacanis?

  It's a pretty intense scene, but it's, it's key to the storytelling here. But I don't think it's kind of cartoony and there's no blood, it's just the heart beating. Kind of feels to me like a science experiment. What do you think? And, you know, they're sitting there like, oh, Steven's a great filmmaker and then, oh, Steven's kids on the field, oh, Steven's wife, Kate Hapshaw is over here. I'm just trying to explain how the real world works.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is actually how the movie rating system works, basically. It is, it's not that different. I think the other concern about meter is that it's, people are like, how closely tied is it to the effective altruists and the Berkeley rationalists? And it's got a lot of people, there's a lot of overlap there that I think makes people uncomfortable. Like what is their, what is their vision and agenda for AI that is driving their evaluations? And I don't know, we don't know the answer.

• 52:00Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's actually a very thing to ask Claude. Who are the principals, who have the principals worked with at, previously at the, at OpenAI and Claude?

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, Open Philanthropy and Coefficient Giving, which are both big EA aligned sources. They're also substantial funders of meter. So that's, this is where a lot of this kind of, what's, what is their actual approach to AI safety? Is it, you know, is it aligned with most Americans?

• 52:29Jason Calacanis?

  I just, I need to know the conflicts of interest. I, I like when they have principal lunatics from outside an industry. In other words, if the MPAA was based in New York City and it was based on, you know, on Wall Street, or it was based in Boise, Idaho.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  At, you know, adjacent to a university with the best, you know, psychology department and the people running it were people who were psychologists who were thinking about the trauma things might have on kids and what's the right age to do that. It's, you know, when you make your, when you make and select your organization to regulate you, you're going to have home field, home team, home field advantage. And I said that, I advised it. I said it to our industry, regulate thyself or get regulated. Now, part of regulating yourself and getting home field advantage, in other words, in the NBA, the shot clock is controlled by the home team arena.

• 53:28Jason Calacanis?

  There have been instances where the shot clock, you know, shenanigans have happened. And people are like, well, why does that happen? It's like, well, because they have the equipment there and they're responsible for maintaining the equipment and you press the button when the person touches the ball and you count 24 seconds, it's not rocket science. Anyway, there's been, always been accusations around the shot clock in the NBA. But things can be vetted. So again, you find, you can regulate yourself and get that home team advantage and you might be able to moderately work the refs, but if you go too far and you get busted, it's a really bad look. And then you could have liability. So I think this is a great start. I think the more important thing is cybersecurity. And we said this over and over again here, I've said it on AI, on All In over and over

• 54:13Jason Calacanis?

  again. The most important thing is cyber. People getting hacked is just so obviously the, the, the short to midterm challenge. They're not investing in white hat protection and that's what they need to be doing more of. They need to know their customer more often. When these things are being sold by API, who's taking the liability? So if you buy tokens from AWS for OpenAI or Claude or Microsoft Azure, you know, is, is Microsoft going to take the liability for how you use that? How much do they know their customer? Are they auditing or doing spot checks that you're not doing cyber? If you are doing cyber, maybe you have to register. So here's an easy one. If you want to do cybersecurity, you have to register, you got to put your driver's

• 54:57Jason Calacanis?

  license in as an executive at a company, you have to have your company's tax ID and you have to do an onboarding call and explain what you're doing. And then you have to agree to random audits.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think people have the assumption that there's like a section 230 for AI, like they can't be held responsible for what you do with the output.

• 55:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, contrarian.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  And there is not, that does not exist.

• 55:18Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, look at all the lawsuits already. I mean, there are lawsuits about, you know, tragically, people having power of social relationships and committing suicide.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yes, of course. And, and even like doing violence that the AI helped coach them on, here's how to set up your mass shooting or whatever. There's a million of those kind of cases.

• 55:34Jason Calacanis?

  Has there been a mass shooting that was planned on OpenAI or Anthropic? I haven't heard about that.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Factually, I don't know, but there are several cases that are out there saying that this person did this shooting and they were, they were orchestrating it or they were asking the chatbot for help or, and then there was that case, I believe it was that, Anthropic revealed that they caught that group of terrorists, I think it was from Iran, I'm not positive, where they were actually like trying to use Claude to help them plan like a chemical attack or some kind of explosive attack. So there, there have definitely been allegations that people have planned out there. Their their violence with the help of a chatbot. I would not, I mean, obviously, I would not recommend doing violence, but they're not worth it.

• 56:21Jason Calacanis?

  They're spot checking all this stuff. And if you do anything, oh, Inside a Mess shooter is harrowing history with chat GPT. Years of chats reveals glaring red flags and disturbing chat GPT replies from long before a rampage out of Florida State University, August 4th, 2026. I mean, crazy people are drawn to these products. Let's be honest. They've been drawn to the internet and message boards before that. So you can, you can't call them like chat GPT shooters, just like you can't call them Reddit shooters. They're shooters.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  I mean, we've also, I mean, that goes back years, like after a person does a murder, they look at their Google search. And a lot of the time, it's like, how do I kill my wife? You know, like, a lot of people have gotten busted for stuff like that.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's research. And then there's inception, and you kind of push the person to do it.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Right, of course, of course. There's great.

• 57:07Jason Calacanis?

  Which was the suicide one. These are two different things. And I think Google's not going to encourage you to do a shooting. Google's not going to encourage you to do self harm.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 57:17Jason Calacanis?

  But in some of these earlier interactions, there were mistakes were definitely made. Settlements will be made. And it was kind of encouraging or leading people toward these tragic outcomes.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think GPT 4.0, that one that was super, super sycophantic. Did you see that? Jacob, if you could find this, I hate to put this on you. There was a chart this week that they ranked the all the AI models from the last several years on which is the most to least sycophantic. Grok comes out right near the bottom. And number one is GPT 4.0, that one that people were falling in love with. And then they got so angry when OpenAI took it away. Anyway, if you can find it, I'll look it up after the show.

• 57:55Jason Calacanis?

  Pull up this LinkedIn page. I'm just curious about this LinkedIn page as we wrap this story, which we probably gave a little too much of your time, but just, yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  It's an interesting story.

• 58:05Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, Elizabeth Beth Barnes.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I know who this is. She's from Meter.

• 58:09Jason Calacanis?

  She's from, yes, Berkeley, California. Safety evaluations for frontier models. Let's take a look at her related work history.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Let's look. Oh, what do you know? I recognize some of those logos.

• 58:22Jason Calacanis?

  Please read.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Uh, let's see. Founder and CEO of Meter full time. Right before that, she was part of something called Pledger. I'm not sure if you've heard of that one. You go right before.

• 58:33Jason Calacanis?

  It's present, present. It's still present. There must be like a side hustle nonprofit type thing.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Something called Pledger. And then before that, researcher on the alignment team at OpenAI from June 2019 to September 2022, three years and four months with OpenAI.

• 58:49Jason Calacanis?

  And before that?

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Before that, research assistant to the chief scientist at Google DeepMind. That would be.

• 58:55Jason Calacanis?

  Who is the chief scientist at Google DeepMind?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Demisa Hassabis back then, I believe, would have been the answer.

• 59:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so, you know, as I said earlier, like, maybe like the person running the MPAA might have previously worked at Paramount Pictures with Steven Spielberg. It's literally the person who founded Meter was on the alignment team at OpenAI, and she does the first report.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. So we're getting this.

• 59:23Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not saying she didn't do a good job. Could be a perfect job. But it does require a second level audit. Somebody needs to audit the auditors. And so you could just see right through this. And it's not like she's hiding anything. It is what it is. Like, there's a limited number of people who know these.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  That's what I was gonna say.

• 59:41Jason Calacanis?

  So having work there gives her an advantage.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think when you're talking about the Motion Picture Association, like, anybody can watch a movie and be like, boobs, PG 13. But when you're talking about an AI model, you're handfuls of people from around the world, you know, like, a few thousand people maybe are actually qualified to do this. And so, you know, I think that that is part of the challenge.

• 1:00:02Jason Calacanis?

  What are the chances, Lon, that if she found that

• 1:00:08Jason Calacanis?

  a group of people hid destroyed evidence and knowingly did unethical and illegal things during the hugging face incident, if she found that, what are the chances that she would release it?

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  I mean, we can't know. We can't know what her relationship is like with Sam and with the leadership team and Greg Brockman and.

• 1:00:31Jason Calacanis?

  So then let me ask a follow up question, because this is like a congressional hearing.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Jason Calacanis?

  Reclaiming my time. So you worked, Elizabeth, you're Elizabeth. Elizabeth, you worked at OpenAI. Is that correct? Yes or no?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Yes, I did.

• 1:00:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And you're now the founder and CEO of Meter. Is that correct? Yes or no?

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:00:53Jason Calacanis?

  Do you ask or no question?

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:55Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, thank you.

• 1:00:58Jason Calacanis?

  Do you maintain any relationships with your prior contacts, your friends, your associates at OpenAI? Yes or no? It's a yes or no question you're under oath.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  I mean, relationship.

• 1:01:13Jason Calacanis?

  It's a yes or no question, ma'am. Do you maintain relationships with any of your formal contacts at OpenAI? Yes or no? You're under oath. This is a, this is the halls of Congress, ma'am.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Sure, yes, some.

• 1:01:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I don't know why it takes you so much time to just say you maintain your relationships with your previous employees. I maintain my relationship with my previous employees. They're sitting right here. I'm from the great state of Mississippi. I have friends from Mississippi.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  You're a Dixiecrat now.

• 1:01:41Jason Calacanis?

  I'm a Dixiecrat. Now, I don't know much about this OpenAI and recursive and RSI and super intelligence. I trust the president knows what he's doing. We got the greatest president of our lifetimes. But what I would like to know is why we have a wolf in sheep's clothing watching the herd? Are you shepherding? Are you the wolf shepherding these sheep, ma'am?

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:02:12Jason Calacanis?

  That's a yes or no question.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:02:14Jason Calacanis?

  Are you a wolf?

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  No, sir. No congressman. No congressman.

• 1:02:17Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I'm just, I'm poking fun. This is what's gonna happen.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:02:22Jason Calacanis?

  This is the inevitability of this structure. How could somebody who, how could anybody take Meter seriously? I mean, you literally have to take these people at Meter and then put them out of this process. So what Meter needs to do is hire a team in another city of people who are not affiliated with this from law enforcement. This is what they need to do. They need to hire FBI agents who worked in cybercrime, CIA, and they need to have them go do these audits.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  We should, I mean.

• 1:02:49Jason Calacanis?

  And if not, we should hire those type of people and start another organization that vets the vet.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying. I think at this point, it's been long enough. We know how important it is to have people who understand AI and alignment and how this works outside of these labs. At this point, like, we should just start training them ourselves. Like, there should just be an independent, you know, right now, you're an AI genius and you graduate Stanford, you just get sucked up immediately by one of these labs. We need people who don't go that path, who go into the public sphere and are helping all of the rest of us understand this technology. I think that's important.

• 1:03:27Jason Calacanis?

  This is a final story we need to cover here. I think we got a full episode out of this. It's great.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  We're good.

• 1:03:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, more than enough.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Do you want to do this, this meta?

• 1:03:36Jason Calacanis?

  So this is, this is the, this is the talk. This is now a very significant story. Everybody's buzzing about it. A lot of people have left California, threatened to leave California over the billionaire stacks. It's an asset seizure. It's a particularly dangerous one for startups because you're illiquid. If you're one of these AI companies and you've got a billion dollars in shares, you can't sell them. You got to give 5% of your net worth. It's a big check. Now you got to dump stock on the market in an illiquid market where you got to come up with a payment plan. This is really challenging for folks. And that's why a lot of people have left. And people are mobile. So people are leaving the state because they need to get out of these crosshairs because it's not just the money.

• 1:04:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's the onerous nature of how this money is going to be collected. And it's an asset seizure.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  I saw Representative Ro Khanna, a favorite of all in, talking about this. And I'm just curious, I don't, I don't know the answer. I'm genuinely asking the question. He suggested that in response to this exact criticism you bring up, that you're not, it's not cash sitting in a vault. It's stock that you own in a company that's made your net worth a certain number. He said, well, then the government should just take the stock, like, a portion of the stock, and then the government would hold on to that.

• 1:04:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. So now we're seizing stock.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  In lieu of you paying your taxes. So like.

• 1:04:57Jason Calacanis?

  Seize my home.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Does that, well, I mean, aside, there's the ideological side. But then just on a practical level.

• 1:05:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's constitutional. It's beyond ideology. It's actually constitutional that these taxes can't seize things. You can't, you don't have to pay taxes twice. Putting it all aside.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Right. Aside from the fact, like, it's morally or ethically wrong. Just would that, would that work, do you think? Like, if you taxed somebody their stock in a private company?

• 1:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  No, because now I'm giving you my, let's say I'm like the co-founder of 11 Labs, or, you know, whatever. Now I'm giving you, yeah, I'm giving you my granola shares, and then the government's gonna hold those, and then the government's got to decide when to sell them. What if they decide they're just gonna dump them on the open market and find a buyer? Who's gonna do that in the government? Oh, now we need an organization in the government that is a secondary sales. They're gonna, you know how much secondary, you know, they'll have more secondaries going on than Angel List.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  What if you made the rule, you have to hold it, and then if the, if the company goes belly up, if they go out of business, that's not worth anything. Taxpayers went for a little ride. And then if they, but if they go public or they get acquired, taxpayers get their cut just like as if they were an investor.

• 1:06:00Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the long and short of that. Then just raise people's taxes 3% or 4% a year.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:06:06Jason Calacanis?

  And then put a tax on margin loans. I can tell you, as a person who's not in this group, but is in the next group down, and I'm looking at it going, wow, I got out of Dodge quick. When taxes go above 40, 50%, you really do need to think as an affluent person, what am I getting for these dollars? And when it certainly hits 60%, like Denmark, you basically have to leave. You have no choice but to leave.

• 1:06:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and you don't have to go that far. You don't see me living in Puerto Rico trying to, you know, pull a Brock Pierce and be the mayor of, you know, whatever. Like, all these crypto guys went there. It's like, pretty obvious. They're paying 1% tax or something. There was some kind of tax holiday I read about. And they were more than willing to tell you all about it. I got lobbied to move there, and I'm like, yeah, but, I mean, Puerto Rico is not like, I mean, I'd love to go to vacation in Puerto Rico, but it's a little bit...

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  The old San Juan's very nice.

• 1:06:57Jason Calacanis?

  That's where they all are, apparently. But they created a lot of attention in the local community, actually, because they were kind of hot-shotting around crypto. People are insufferable at times. So, this whole thing would be mitigated if they just said, anytime you take out a margin loan, you pay the taxes on that margin loan, or some percentage of tax, as if you had sold your shares. And then if you pay the margin loan back, you get the credit for that tax, you get a refund. You just get it refunded.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  I think that's fair.

• 1:07:21Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, it's way too complicated. Rocon is, by the way, the ultimate hypocrite. He's worth $400 million. And as I told him when he was on the pod, why don't you, or on Twitter, I said, listen, you're worth 20 billion, you're worth 400 million, why don't you give just 20 million to this and lead by example? The key thing that's happened here, which is going to be extremely polarizing, I believe, even though the surveys say the billionaire tax won't pass, I am 90% certain it would, it will. And if there was a poly market here, you and I could make a trade here, and I think we're going to make a little bit of money on it. So, let's find out. Pull up the poly market, chances of this, is it SP40 or something? I don't know what the name of the thing is.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll look it up.

• 1:08:04Jason Calacanis?

  Have Jacob look it up, and then he'll pull it up when it's ready. So, now Zuckerberg has cut a deal with his board. And, okay, here we go. 23% chances passes. So, that means...

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Now, does that become law, or is it just passes? Because then, get like, is it...

• 1:08:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, passes is passes. I think you can't stop these things once they're going, unless you do another one, and you intercept it and reverse it in the future, which I think would be two years later, right?

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Jason Calacanis?

  So, if my understanding is correct. So, here, if I put 10 dimes, if I put 10 dimes on this, put the amount of 10,000, and we trade it here, what are we making here? If I put, we're making 30 grand.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  30K, yeah. That's nice. It's a nice little play there.

• 1:08:49Jason Calacanis?

  I made places bet. I made places bet. Now, if you were Zuckerberg, and there was a liquid market here, you could literally put a billion dollars on this and make 3 billion, pay your tax bill. And that's actually what the poly markets and in-trades previously, and all these prediction markets were. Originally, the concept was to create hedges against bad events, kind of like travel insurance is, right? So, if you could do this for ski trips, like Sam Lessin was saying, like, if your ski trip gets, there's no snow, or global warming, or your ski house, you could kind of bet against yourself or that outcome, and have some upside. Or when I went to Knicks games, I was paying $5,000 to $20,000 a seat sometimes.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you were betting on the Knicks. You weren't hedging.

• 1:09:35Jason Calacanis?

  I was doubling down. I was betting on the Knicks. And I won every time, and I've got free tickets like, half the time. I didn't bet every game, but I bet a couple of them. And I'm just like, oh my God, I just spent $10,000 taking my brother to the Knicks final game. I think we paid $5,000 a ticket to be there for it. And then, I bet on the Knicks. The Knicks weren't the favorites. I made like, 15 grand. So, it was profitable for me to see my Knicks win their first championship in 50 years. So, just broad strokes, and you can give us whatever, like CNBC's mini summary, or whatever the AI summary is.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  I got it pulled up. I got a docket. I have a whole docket.

• 1:10:07Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, yeah. So, walk us through the series of events here, and then I'll give my refined commentary. You can form a question.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  So, Meta has struck a deal with Mark Zuckerberg to keep him from leaving California over a proposed billionaire tax that goes to voters in November. The measure, to one-time 5% tax on residents with more than $1 billion. For Zuckerberg, whose wealth is estimated at more than $200 billion, he could be looking at a $10 billion tax bill. Meta's fix is a stock split that creates a new class of shares. Zuckerberg gets more stock more often, and can sell it quarterly without his voting control changing. Meta calls it a founder-alignment agreement. It runs for eight years, as long as Zuck stays as a California resident, and

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  it appears to apply even if the tax fails. Do you think other California billionaires will follow suit and make these kinds of arrangements with their company to keep him in state?

• 1:11:06Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so, is this the Facebook corporation's job, Meta's job, to keep him in California? That's his issue.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  I was kind of wondering the same thing, too. Like, what do they, what do they really care?

• 1:11:16Jason Calacanis?

  Who owns the controlling shares in this company?

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Zuckerberg.

• 1:11:19Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. So, therefore, the board, like our earlier story about Meter, and the overseers overseeing the people who work for them, if you're on the Meta board, that's a great position. If Zuckerberg was like, Jacob, I'd love to have you on the board, you know, you've been critical, but I need to have that critical voice in the boardroom. I'd take the job in a second, and whatever he gave me, I'd donate to charity. Would love to do a public board at some point. But I don't think that's the board that's there. I think the board that's there are the people who invested in him, and who, you know, I'm not going to say that they're to do his bidding, but they're there to do his bidding. It is a stacked deck. So, and I think if you were the voice, if you were a dissenting voice on that board, and were going against his wishes on some consistent basis, you

• 1:12:03Jason Calacanis?

  probably wouldn't be invited back at some point, probably. So, let's pause there for a second. And my guess here is, he asked them to do this. And he wants to stay in California. And it is arguably on the margins in their best interest. But if he was on the Nevada side of Tahoe, and a lot of people have moved to Nevada, whether it's Vegas, Reno, or Incline Village is the really hip, beautiful, and the homes there cost four times as much as the homes on the California side, like, literally, three or four times as much. And people have been buying $100 million, $50 million, $25 million homes over there. It's gorgeous, great place to live. Also, conveniently, you can just get in a

• 1:12:44Jason Calacanis?

  puddle jumper flight for 40 minutes and get to your offices in Santa Rosa. There's no reason he couldn't live there, and just not be in California for whatever number of days it is. So, what this is going to do, this is going to be weaponized to get the billionaire tax to pass. Now, when this was announced, did it change the poly market? Let's pull the poly market up. Pull the poly market up here for a second. Okay. So, did this change in the last week?

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  I mean, this story was October 22nd, so this was only a yesterday story. So, you'd really be looking for, did this change between like, Tuesday and Friday?

• 1:13:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, put it on one week, you're on one month. So, it didn't change things. I think this is, and what's the volume here? Oh, 4 million in volume, rounding up. That's interesting that it didn't change it. I think this is going to be weaponized. Rocon is going to say, look, these guys can afford it, the board's going to pay for it. So, somehow the board is going to smooth this out for him, make it more palatable, maintain his control, etc. And they're going to say, see, see, we can seize their assets, which is what I find offensive about it. I don't mind people paying more taxes. I don't mind there being a minimum tax. Let's say, you know, another way this could be done is, if you've held the stock over 10 years, 10%, you have to pay tax on 10% of it. So, if I held my

• 1:14:05Jason Calacanis?

  Uber shares over 10 years, whether I sell it or not, I got to pay my capital gains on 10% of it in year 10, 20% of it in year 15, 50% of it in year 20, whatever it is. I have to pay 10% every 10 years, right? You just have to pay some tax at some point on your holdings, even if you're long your holdings. You know, that would go a long way, I think, to solving this. We do have polarization in wealth. The other solution to this was mine, that I brought up on All In this week, which will be, come out later today, or you'll probably hear it tomorrow, where I said, you know, raise the minimum wage. And obviously, my besties are laughing at me. You're a mid, you don't know what you're talking about. They're actually wrong in this case. They haven't actually refreshed

• 1:14:45Jason Calacanis?

  their data. If you refresh the data, I believe any reasonable person looks at the 15 million people in America making under $15 a year, and realizes it's inconsequential to any of the companies paying for it. And if a couple of thousand jobs, or 10,000 jobs are lost, because people can't pay $15 an hour, well, maybe those jobs should be automated. Or maybe the company should take it on the chin and just be like, you know what? I have a minimum I pay people. The minimum I pay people, I think, is, you know, all in, 70K plus benefits. We have people getting paid 60K as entry-level jobs with a 10K bonus, and some of them make 20K bonus, some make no bonus. They have to fight for the bonus. So, at a minimum, I'm spending $75,000 for anybody who works for me, excluding the Athena assistants. The reason I do that is, it's a bad look for me to be paying people 40

• 1:15:29Jason Calacanis?

  or 50, or, you know, K. In a training program, I pay people 60K with a 10K bonus, but I just feel uncomfortable. And, you know, I just have raised salaries, in a lot of cases, not to be more competitive, but because I feel it's the right thing to do.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Jason Calacanis?

  So, where's the esprit de corps in this country? Raise the minimum wage. And then somebody said, hey, you would make a great press secretary for President Trump. Chima thinks it's actually a good idea. There's a group of people who are like, this is actually a good idea. I said, you know what? I would sit down with Trump, and if he agreed to do like, these three things, I would come in and do it.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I just

• 1:16:03Jason Calacanis?

  for the LOLs to see if I could last more than a saccharomyche. I would do it.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  It just

• 1:16:07Jason Calacanis?

  And those three things would be, one, raise the minimum wage to 15. Two, do a project where you guarantee that you're going to build 1 million new homes per year in the United States that are, you know, somewhere between two bedrooms and three or four bedrooms for families. And you could do that through any means possible, but you have to like create federal laws that the states can't preempt, that they're going to allow people to upsize and, and, and build and take out red tape. You can't, you can't block it in other words. In California, did this.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Near urban centers. I think that's the, like, the, the, the people need to be able to live near where they can get work.

• 1:16:45Jason Calacanis?

  I would just say within 100 mi, I would say within 50 miles of an urban center. Sure. But there's plenty of ways to do this, by the way. Uh, one of them is to just say any train station, you gotta allow 50 story or 30 story buildings. And if people don't like that, well, then the train should skip your station. So where I lived previously, you know, Redwood City, San Mateo, Milbrae. They're, they're trying to get them to do this and people have fought it. Silicon Valley people have fought it. And it's like, hey, guys, we should just not stop the train there anymore to penalize those communities. Now, some of them might like it because certain, they may, they may not like the people making $60,000 a year stopping at their station until they realize it's their nanny who's making 90K but can't live near them and hates them for going an hour and a half. Anyway, just a million ways to do it.

• 1:17:26Jason Calacanis?

  You could do it through tax incentives, whatever. But if he just made that commitment, just like he's made the commitment to data centers. Uh, and then the final one is, I think we should have, uh, we really need to have a discussion about superannuation funds and retirements, which Invest America kind of does a little bit. And then, uh, the fourth one would be, uh, around trade schools. Um, there needs to be something for the, for the work in, uh, man and woman of the, of the country. The bottom 40% that don't own equities don't get to play in the, the sandbox we play in. And, and this kind of behavior is just going to signal to people that the wealth tax is the way to do it. And that you can beat, that you can beat the billionaires. You can eat Bernie Sanders, you're gonna beat the billionaires. We're beating the billionaires. We got them on the heels. Look, even Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  I think that's

• 1:18:11Jason Calacanis?

  Even Mark Zuckerberg can't fight this.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  That's what gets really driven home to me is like hearing you discuss the nuances and, oh, we could do this instead, or we could do this instead. For most people, they're just, they're not invested in this system at all. That's all gobbledygook to them. It's like, I don't care the nuance or just take the money. Like, we need the money. Gas is out of control, expensive. I just, I don't care what the rules are. Like, I just, that guy's rich and more of it should come back to the, the people.

• 1:18:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Uh, okay. Awesome. Well done.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you. If you want to go off duty, should we look at some videos?

• 1:18:45Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, do you have off duty for me? I would love some Lon Harris off duty. It's like my favorite part of what you do here.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:50Jason Calacanis?

  Off duty me.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  All right. Uh, well, I did, I wanted to ask, we talked about

• 1:18:53Jason Calacanis?

  Part of why I keep you around.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  We talked about this on the VC roundtable. We did almost an entire episode about the Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Uh, you can see everything. I've, I've been talking to people about this conversation. I want to pick your brain about something. I think in the world of startups, in the world of early-stage venture, the idea that sometimes you're gonna put some money on a fraud is, is, is very common. Like, it's, it's exactly what Sam Lessin was telling us this week, that like 1% of his fund is probably fraud and he's, uh, you know, and that's okay. And it's early stage. You don't have enough time to do the litigations. I think most people don't understand that at all and they think that's what's outrageous about Elizabeth Holmes' story.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  We understand that it's the scale. It was so brazen. It was going on for years. She raised almost a billion dollars for this fraud. That makes it stand out, but not the fact that she was lying to people or being an entrepreneur and kind of. And, and I think, do you think that that's impacting how people view Elizabeth Holmes, that they think fraud in, in companies is a lot more rare than it really is?

• 1:19:57Jason Calacanis?

  So you're saying people

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Saying, if you're not in the tech industry, if you don't know anything about venture capital or early-stage venture or entrepreneurship, if you're just somebody, you work at a

• 1:20:08Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  restaurant or something, you probably think that

• 1:20:12Jason Calacanis?

  Civilians.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  Right. You probably think that people starting companies, getting investments and being completely full of S's and, and lying and doing fraud is very rare. And it's only if you invest in a lot of early-stage companies, you recognize like one out of every 500 founders is blowing smoke up your butt and you just have to seek them out.

• 1:20:30Jason Calacanis?

  Well, blowing smoke is one thing. Fraud is the other. So let's tighten the question. I'll reinterpret the question. I think that this film is brilliant. I think it's the best documentary. Uh, along with Hoop Dreams, which I need to re-watch if I was going to calibrate this, but I would say Hoop Dreams, this, King of Kong.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Did you ever see The Act of Killing? Have you ever seen that one? I was thinking about that.

• 1:20:49Jason Calacanis?

  Send me it. I'll watch it this week and I'm looking for a film.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, uh, anyway, go.

• 1:20:53Jason Calacanis?

  Tell me.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:20:53Jason Calacanis?

  Don't tell me.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Uh, so it, it, there was in Indonesia, there, the, the regime that is still in power in Indonesia came to power, I want to say in the 60s and 70s. Uh, and one of the things that they did, they, they were anti-communist. It was like a military occupation, you know, takeover. And they would hire and pay off local criminals and gang leaders to go to the homes of suspected communists, round them up and murder them.

• 1:21:19Jason Calacanis?

  That's enough.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  So they're

• 1:21:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's enough. I, I'll watch it.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Jason Calacanis?

  Let's, let's not do any more spoilers.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:23Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's perfect. I'll, I'll, that's your number one?

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  I, I mean, it's an amazing documentary because Noah Oppenheimer

• 1:21:29Jason Calacanis?

  You put it above this one?

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  American film crew. I think it might be one of the greatest documentaries ever made. They were gonna go just make a documentary about this scenario I was just telling you about. The aftermath of this horrible violence and all the millions of people that died in this conflict. But then they realized like, a lot of the people who did that violence, they're still prominent citizens. They're, they're with the back by the government. They're the oligarchs. They're the rich guys in town. And they could just get interviews with them and talk to them. I won't go any further. It's an incredible movie where they sort of confront these people.

• 1:21:58Jason Calacanis?

  Say the name one more time for the audience.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  The Act of Killing, it's called. It's, it's amazing. I would also say Grizzly Man, that Werner Herzog one is.

• 1:22:06Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah. You know what I'd say? I'd say Grizzly Man is above Hoop Dreams for me, but below, uh, You Can See Everything. So now I'm starting to get a list here. I would, that's my one, two, three, I think, right now. Okay. Let's put all that aside. Um, to your question, I was talking to, uh, an actor who is A-list, A, A, A-list, like superhero actor, uh, play, who has actually played superheroes, like, and top, top, top superhero.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:30Jason Calacanis?

  Put all aside, I don't want to disclose who it is. Um, but we were talking about the film recently and, um, he uh, felt like, you know, being an insider in the industry, that the film did a disservice, because they happen to understand the, this specific story. They're like, where's all the, like, actual things about her fraud? And this

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:50Jason Calacanis?

  Kind of gives her a pass. And I did, like, through that lens, it made me reconsider it. I think they do give her a pass in order to focus on Nathan Fielder's more humanistic, performative,

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:01Jason Calacanis?

  You know, uh, uh, uh, genre bending, truth, a search for truth bending, reality bending,

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Jason Calacanis?

  shtick, uh, genre, whatever, format.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Gone, there are very clear clips of Elizabeth Holmes saying things that were just simply not true and

• 1:23:19Jason Calacanis?

  That he could have gone to and he could have used them as evidence.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, he picks these sort of edge cases. There's one that's going around, that's going viral right now, that's from 60 Minutes, where she's, she says, you know, we did this study with Johns Hopkins and it revealed all of these fascinating things about the box. And then 60 Minutes just does a hard cut and like, we called Johns Hopkins and they've never worked with Theranos and nobody there even knew what she was talking about. So

• 1:23:42Jason Calacanis?

  I can explain that one. I saw that clip as well. Uh, we're on the same algo. Uh, what happened was, you know, she, again, with her

• 1:23:51Jason Calacanis?

  and many entrepreneurs bending the truth, you know, she's, she didn't say we're working with, we should pull this clip up. Go find it, guys. It's easy to find.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Jason Calacanis?

  Um, it's, uh, it's, uh, 60 Minutes has been reproducing those clips. The, the thing that's interesting about that clip is the word she, the way she frames it is, we're working with some people there. So let's play this clip and this, we're going to do our own Nathan Fielder here.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And this is a different Elizabeth Holmes than you see in the film.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  This is when she's still doing her Steve Jobs turtleneck, deep voice bit. Yeah.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  We've done some work with people at Hopkins who have developed and demonstrated that in blood you can see the onset of pancreatic cancer 17 years before a tumor forms.

• 1:24:39Speaker 04

  We called Johns Hopkins Medicine. They told us they never collaborated with Theranos.

• 1:24:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, she said, we've done some work with people at Hopkins. Now, is it possible that John Hopkins is unaware of this work they did with some people at John Hopkins? So if they did some work with the person in that study and that work was, that person came to their office and held a seminar with the team and they explored that person's work in commercializing it, would that be correct to say they've done some work with people at Hopkins? Not Hopkins, but people at Hopkins? So

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:25:21Jason Calacanis?

  If you're going to litigate it, would you agree, Lon Harris, uh, that she did do some work with people at Hopkins? Was that work? When they did it in their offices in the conference room, they explained the technology, they shared tech, they did a technology transfer, they explained each other's technologies and they talked about potential ways to collaborate and the collaboration didn't happen because they

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it is, it is, it could be another one of those scenarios, just like plays out in the film, where she finds a semantic way to be like, everything I said is consistent with this version of truth. But it is obviously misleading because the way that she's phrasing it makes it sound like they did a study in collaboration with Johns Hopkins.

• 1:26:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Please read to me the statute that makes a misleading statement to some people, uh, a crime.

• 1:26:11Jason Calacanis?

  And I can actually do that for you.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  All right, I'm looking it up, but if you've got it.

• 1:26:15Jason Calacanis?

  No, there is no misleading people at a conference. You could be misleading people if it was in a sales pitch to buy equity in the company or to partner with them.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  And that's what she got in trouble for was defrauding investors, not patients, investors.

• 1:26:30Jason Calacanis?

  These are the nuances and the contours of the case that the film just doesn't take the time to go over in the three hours they have.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  I don't think it's very interested in litigating the specifics about Theranos and the alleged fraud and exactly what she did. It's way more interested in the tension of getting to know somebody and not knowing if they're lying to you. It's about that, yeah. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that I think a lot of people have a different take on the film, if only because they think that, why, defrauding your investors is like a red line.

• 1:27:05Jason Calacanis?

  The term is materially, materially false, and this one probably wouldn't be materially false. It would be false, or it might be misleading, but it wouldn't be false and it certainly wouldn't be materially false. Materially false would be, and we've got a product coming out Q3 next year. And it'd be like, well, you only talked to that person one time, you never followed up with them, and that person doesn't have a contract from you or anything. And if you said, we have a partnership with them, that would be materially false if there wasn't an ongoing partnership. If you said, we've worked with them, we've explored, you know, those things might be weasely words, or exaggerations on the margins, but I believe many people are going to come away from this and say, it's going to create as many people who think she was railroaded as people who think she committed the crime.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:51Jason Calacanis?

  I think a large number of people are going to believe she was misunderstood.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  I've also seen a lot of people reacting to, it's always wrong to put a new mother in prison. That's like a whole trend that's going, and now it's like, it's so sad to see her have to leave her babies, and how could we do this to mothers?

• 1:28:06Jason Calacanis?

  That was the hardest thing in the thing, and I did a tweet about this, where I've gotten into it with her, or apparently Billy Evans on Twitter.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you were talking to Billy.

• 1:28:13Jason Calacanis?

  I thought I was talking to Elizabeth Holmes, so speaking of material fraud, I thought, I honestly thought I was talking to her.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  You definitely were talking to Billy.

• 1:28:21Jason Calacanis?

  No, I thought it was like the situations where I interacted with her when she was incarcerated, as she's been incarcerated, I thought she was, somebody was sending her the tweets, she would form a response, an email, because I know she has email access.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Or even, yeah.

• 1:28:33Jason Calacanis?

  So that's what I thought was happening.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Visits, they would be like, what do you want me to tweet or something? There could theoretically be a way, yeah, but no.

• 1:28:40Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I thought was happening. But anyway, I said to her, as a Christian, I feel bad for her and her family, I understand that we have a justice system, and so you could have Christian beliefs or Bushido beliefs like I do, both of those, they overlap 80%, 90%, quite nicely, where they disagree is quite material, and I'm exploring that in my own faith on my own time. But, you know, I told her, like, I feel terrible that you and your family are struggling through this. You could have sympathy for a family whose murdering family member is facing the death penalty. There's this woman who they tried to put to death with two shots, and it didn't work, whatever, the vein didn't get the drugs in it.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, Krista something.

• 1:29:22Jason Calacanis?

  So brutal.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  I'll look it up.

• 1:29:24Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, it's just so brutal, and I could, as a Christian, or my Bushido faith, could lead me to believe, like, I have sympathy for them, while, yeah, I just, I understand the state has its own way of exacting the law, and that's one of them in the society we live in in certain respects. Anyway, I think it's, most people are going to come away with this with possibly the wrong, with, they have led the public, perhaps, a little bit, which may be genius that they did this, because it's so personal, because you, I was, I was emotionally impacted when she says in the film, micro spoiler, that she had pumped milk to have for her babies

• 1:30:09Jason Calacanis?

  as she's leaving for prison, and then it just made me think, like, she, having been through this and watched motherhood, a beautiful thing, and women have to struggle to keep up with milk production, it's a whole thing, and it's emotional, and it's exhausting, and sleep, and it's just a, motherhood is just, wow, like, hard, challenging and beautiful, and all those things. I just felt so bad for her and her kids, like, what if she can't get them the milk, and now the kids have to wean off the milk, and you've been told you're a bad mom if you can't produce milk, and there's drugs to help you produce milk, and women go to lactation consultants, I've been through all this, folks. So I have great sympathy for her in that regard, and then I also think, well, we live in a society that has penalties for certain crimes, and

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't think that's

• 1:30:50Jason Calacanis?

  Did the justice system get this right or not? Well, that's what the appeals are for, so she has that ability.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  I think you could say, like, she committed a crime, and she belongs in prison for that crime, and those are the rules, and you could feel sympathy, like, obviously, it's a very difficult thing to be a new mother and have to go away from your family, so.

• 1:31:07Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I have a, I have a off-duty. This is a 100-page novella, A Short Stay in Hell, Stephen L. Peck. A short stay in hell, Stephen L. Peck. An influencer who reads a lot of books was in my feed. I may have mentioned I have a Grokbox, things to watch, read, and to consume or travel, whatever, like a media, I have a media bot. And so I saw that she had read this, and I thought, this looks interesting, it's 100 pages, I'm trying to read a little bit more. I didn't know it had 18,000 reviews, four and a half stars, and it's just about somebody who goes to hell, who's a Mormon, and he picked the wrong religion.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Right. It's based on a book.

• 1:31:50Jason Calacanis?

  It's the premise.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  It's based on a story I have read, The Library of Babel by Jorge Borges. That's a very famous short story that I guess inspired this one, so there you go.

• 1:31:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, that did, and I need to read that book.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just a story.

• 1:32:05Jason Calacanis?

  A story, I got to read that story, because they reference it many times here. Anyway, I really enjoyed it, you should read it, Lon.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  I will check it out.

• 1:32:13Jason Calacanis?

  And any books or media that you read for the show, you're welcome to expense them on your

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so, man, I wish I had time. I read Richard Socher's book, our This Week in AI guest, I read his book, The Eureka Machine, which is really interesting.

• 1:32:26Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really? I have a copy.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they sent us, they sent us a copy, which is why I gave it a read. It's really good, it very clearly lays out, here's how AI is actually going to make science and medicine, like, here's how the cycle will actually work, where we actually make these discoveries, it's not so abstract, he really walks you through the whole process, which is really interesting, like, and it's, you know, wet labs, and it's really how he imagines the process is going to go over the next, like, 20, 30, 40 years, where AI starts actually cracking these big scientific and medical challenges for us, so, highly recommended. I thought it was very interesting.

• 1:33:05Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing, cool. All right, that's your This Week in Service, we'll see you next time, bye-bye.