Sending datacenters into orbit | E2203

👉 Register here to join the Founder University Japan kickoff! https://luma.com/cm0x90mk Today's show: *Starcloud has started sending AI chips into orbit. So is this where the datacenters the power AI will one day live? And does wifi work in the vacuum of space? We're asking the TOUGH questions. PLUS Jason and Alex are doing a deep dive on all this week's OpenAI news. Will they ever be able to pay back all these GPU purchases? What happens to the wider economy on the off chance they don't thrive? And what's with these rumors that ChatGPT has stopped giving medical or legal advice? All that and a look at TrustMRR (and why Jason advises you not to publicly share your Stripe), why Jason thinks Netflix should buy CNN, our hosts favorite Nazi hunter movies, and MORE. Timestamps: (0:00) Would you trust an LLM with your health? (2:08) Jason is bringing Founder U to The Kingdom AND Japan, so he's streaming in today live from Riyadh (4:20) Jason's guide to mastering international travel. (Shoutout to Whoop) (5:05) Are the big AI companies going TOO HARD on GPUs? And does this matter? (11:30) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (14:53) What happens to the wider economy if ChatGPT FAILS? Who gets hit by the "contagion"? (18:22) Jason's more likely scenario: What if ChatGPT becomes just one player in a larger market? (21:22) Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year. (23:57) ChatGPT can still give you general health and legal advice… just not a full diagnosis (31:57) Nexos.ai Stop Shadow AI in its tracks with the unified platform for secure AI adoption and productivity. Try it with a free 14-day trial at https://nexos.ai/twist. (33:09) TrustMRR and startups sharing their Stripe data… Why Jason says total transparency might be too much (38:35) We're really sending datacenters to space! Starcloud made it happen. (41:02) Does wifi work in space? A TWiST investigation… (47:01) Checking in with Polymarkets on the NYC mayoral election and the government shutdown (53:09) Legal AI startup Legora (from Sweden) is now a unicorn… why this niche is growing so fast (58:14) Netflix wants to buy WBD… Here's why our hosts think they should keep CNN. (1:07:58) BUT WE DIGRESS: Lon and Jason's favorite Nazi hunter movies (1:10:25) Founder Q's! The best way to track runway and burn rate for early stage companies. Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year. Nexos.ai Stop Shadow AI in its tracks with the unified platform for secure AI adoption and productivity. Try it with a free 14-day trial at https://nexos.ai/twist.

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  If you told me your health is at risk, here's your choices. This one doctor is going to give you, these three doctors are going to give you their best advice. Or you can pick these three L L M's and you can feed the information, same information you give to these three doctors or these three L L M's. I'm taking the three L L M's. That sounds crazy, I know, but I think for almost every case I would do that. What would you do, Alex?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Uh, I would take, talk to the physicians because I have a great number of them in my geographically local family here and I hear about what people bring to them from L L M's and what kind of advice they're getting. Not just chat G P T, but the whole gamut. And I don't think that the app, Jason, the average person's not very smart, so they're not doing great research or they're not.

• 0:47Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm just saying for you, for you though.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  I, even with all that, no.

• 0:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:52Jason Calacanis?

  And do you think in the coming years it would change?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Oh, five years from now? Oh God, I mean, I'm either gonna be in a flying zooks or I'm gonna be digging in the ground with sticks. So I'll take the L L M's in five years. Yeah.

• 1:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So I think it's, then it's just a matter of time. We're in agreement.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I think most, most A I questions is just your time horizon, you know, like.

• 1:09Jason Calacanis?

  So you know what this sounds like to me? It sounds to me like people with credentials are going to start suing the L L M's for giving advice without a license.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  This week in startups is brought to you by Nexus. Stop shadow A I in its tracks with the unified platform for secure A I adoption and productivity. Try it with a free 14 day trial at nexos.ai/twist. Pilot, focus on your product, let Pilot handle the bookkeeping. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year. And Squarespace, turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

• 2:08Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Yes, we're back. It's November 3rd. Here we go. Not only is the summer over, but the fall is ending and we will soon be in full-on winter. But before then, I am in Saudi Arabia. I'm in the Kingdom. I'm in Riyadh. We had our first day of Founder University today, and it went spectacularly. For those who don't know, Founder.Undercity is a program I've done 11 cohorts of in the United States. It is a pre-accelerator. It's where teams of two or three founders get together and build an MVP, a prototype. They could be incorporated, they may not be incorporated, and then we help turn

• 2:51Jason Calacanis?

  your startup idea into a reality. We accepted 350 people to the latest cohort in America. That was too many, so we're going to bring it down to 250 in the next cohort. But we decided to do it with our friends at Sanabel, which is the venture arm of the PIF, which is the Sovereign Wealth Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And if you go to mina-launch.co, you will see our website there. And after a couple of days here in Riyadh, Alex, I will go to Dubai, and then I will say goodbye to Dubai, and I will get on a plane to Tokyo. And then, in Tokyo,

• 3:34Jason Calacanis?

  I will announce that Founder University in partnership with Jetro, the Japanese Enterprise Economic Trade Organization, that we will be bringing Founder University. I'm just going there to announce it. We'll be coming to Japan in January, and we'll be opening up applications for founders in Japan to start companies and join our cohort there. So we'll be doing cohorts. Every year in America, Saudi Arabia, and Japan. The business class and the first class cabins now on these airlines. I took American Airlines and British Airways combo from Austin to Dallas,

• 4:16Jason Calacanis?

  to London, to Riyadh. So it was three flights, but man, this, uh, these nice planes are unbelievable in business class now. And I was traveling with my friend who is one of these, you know, really considered Austin biohacker type folks. And I slept, I took some supplements, went right to bed, eye mask, sound, dampening, earplugs, all that kind of stuff, slept like a baby, then stayed awake, and then did the same thing. And so that's why, you know, I'm doing the show here. You'd be like, oh, take a day off from the show, but it's 8:00 PM here. I'm actually trying to stay up till 10, 11, so that I can reset my clock.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. You actually don't sound like shit. I kind of, I kind of, no offense, but I've had jet lag before too. I kind of thought I was gonna like extra caffeinate and kind of run things today. Well, you limped along like a good sport, but you actually seem 100% there. All right. Uh, speaking about people who might not be getting enough sleep and are a little bit cranky, I think Sam Altman kind of blew up the internet recently by shooting back at one of your friends, Jason, over at the BG2 Podcast. Uh, we don't usually like podcasts about someone else's podcast, but in this case, Sam Altman kind of cut loose, let's say, uh, telling Brad Gersner, uh, kind of to be quiet about concerns about OpenAI's revenue versus its infra spend, Jason.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Brad Gersner says, hey, you know, your revenues are about $13 billion this year. Sam, you have $1.4 trillion in compute commits over the next four or five years, you know, 500 billion to Nvidia, 300 million to AMD and Oracle. So how are you going to pay for all that? And that is when Sam kind of unloaded. So here's his response to Brad's question.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  And you've heard the criticism, Sam? First of all, we're doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  I just enough like, you know, people are, I think there's a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares. I don't, I don't think you Including myself, including myself. Who talk with a lot of like breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever, that would be thrilled to buy shares. So I think we, we could sell, you know, your shares or anybody else's to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter, whatever about this very quickly. We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it's going to continue to go grow. And that not only will chat GPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  That our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing that AI that can automate science will create huge value. So, you know, there are not many times that I want to be a public company, but one of the rare times it's appealing. Is when those people that are writing these ridiculous, OpenAI is about to go out of business and you know, whatever. I would love to tell them they could just short the stock and I would love to see them get burned on that.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  I think it's a great place to end, Jason.

• 7:13Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, yeah.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  People were a little surprised at his kind of F off response to Brad. I'm curious what your first thoughts were and with some more time, what do you come up with?

• 7:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'd say two things. Number one, he's obviously being a little jokey. And I know Sam personally for a long time, like 20 years, I guess that we've known each other. So I think he's being a little cheeky there. I don't think he crashed out, like full on crashed out, freaked out. I think he was kind of pushing back a little bit and listen, on the All In Podcast, here, other podcasts, it's known for being a little bit more full combat, right?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:50Jason Calacanis?

  And I probably have a part in that, obviously. So I think he's being a little bit combative. Because that's what podcasting is in. Twenty twenty five. And he could also be just like I'm on the road right now. A guy's been on the road making a bunch of deals. He could be tired. He could be tired of answering that question and just say, listen, if you don't believe in us, sell the stock, which is a completely valid thing to say. And his other point, which is completely valid is if you, when we're public, this will be easier for everybody to understand. Now, let's take the other side of it. Okay. There is a really big issue he does have. They've been saying they have 1.4 billion dollars in commitments, right? Triller.

• 8:35Jason Calacanis?

  Hundreds of billions of dollars. They've got a company that last we know was making 13 billion. He said it's a lot more than that. So I would say a lot means, I don't know, three, four, five billion more. So let's say maybe he's got 18 billion in revenue right now. Maybe that's his run rate, you know, a billion and five a month is incredible, right? So this is a lot of money, a billion five a month. It's 50 million dollars a day, right? Yeah, 30 billion a day, 50 billion. It's a lot of money. This thing's printing off here. So it is, however, very valid to say if they're losing 10 billion a year, and I think that's the number, eight, nine, 10 billion is what people say they're short every year.

• 9:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you start to put these numbers together. There was a rumor that they would raise 60 billion in an IPO. Yep. And if they're deploying 1.4 billion in five years, 300 billion a year. He said four in this clip, Brad, but maybe it's five years. Who knows? Four or five years is deployed over. We're talking about three, 400 billion deployed a year. Well, that's a lot of money. And even if it was deployed over 10 years, it would be 140 billion a year. If it was deployed over 10 years, let's say the numbers are totally incorrect by a magnitude and it's like. Or or double, um, then if they're making a hu- and they got to a hundred billion,

• 9:59Jason Calacanis?

  if this revenue went from eighteen to thirty-six to seventy-two and it just kept doubling, like in a couple of years, they're making a hundred billion, but they're spending a hundred forty billion, they're losing forty billion a year, that means the IPO cash, the sixty billion, would get eaten up in but two years. And in this model, we'd get eaten up in six months, if it was in fact going over four or five years. So this is important math. What we don't know, and we actually had this conversation, you're like, yeah, we can't find this information. Um, and if we're wrong and you can find this information, by all means, tell us in the chat rooms. How guaranteed are these contracts? And we will probably find out what conditions there are on these contracts, what milestones, what outs there are.

• 10:42Jason Calacanis?

  You can typically cancel or change or defer a contract at different times. So let's say they did buy three hundred billion in compute from Oracle. Is that the number, three hundred or four hundred billion? Three hundred. Three hundred from Oracle. Let's say that contract says it's up to three hundred billion and it's intended to be deployed in six years, fifty billion a year, but the buyer can reasonably extend that in six-month increments, ten times. In other words, for another five years. You know, there, it's not uncommon for those kind of things to be in contracts. So maybe they're on the hook for the whole three hundred fifty billion, maybe they're on the hook for the first hundred and they can cancel the last two hundred.

• 11:25Jason Calacanis?

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• 12:10Jason Calacanis?

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• 12:27Jason Calacanis?

  So maybe the 1.4 billion in all these just mind-boggling commitments that have been made are not guaranteed. And maybe the fault that we have here is that we're all thinking they're guaranteed. The people who are making the money on the other side are indicating to the markets it's guaranteed, which makes their stock go up, which is another can of worms. And they are probably going to report in the next quarter or two because these all occurred in the last three to six months. They're probably going to report soon what the details of those contracts are, where maybe analysts will start asking them. And when they do, maybe it turns out the 1.4 billion in commitments is only he only owes

• 13:10Jason Calacanis?

  10% of that or 20% of that actual number.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that number is going to sink the company because much like you, I think it's a little bit flexible. The only thing I'll say is you can only extend certain deals so long in terms of repayment periods, Jason, because if you buy the GPUs, they begin to depreciate, not only if you're using them, but also if you're not, because new technology is coming. So there is kind of a ticker on this. It's not like a bridge. We can just extend its lifespan by five years. This asset is just non-durable in a way that some fixed cost investments tend to be. So I I'm with you. I'm not that worried. And just to add more fuel to this fire, OpenAI isn't worried. They just announced today a $38 billion deal with AWS. So, okay.

• 13:52Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Yeah. So if they're not guaranteed, but now let's take the other side.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:00Jason Calacanis?

  There is also the idea that people are speculating about on X.com that

• 14:10Jason Calacanis?

  there's speculation that if this, if they can't make these commitments and the company stutters or has headwinds, and if there's headwinds, what would happen to these commitments? In other words, if they couldn't make these commitments and they broke these commitments, okay? Yes.

• 14:28Jason Calacanis?

  So that means Oracle stock, I believe, went up 20% or something after that announcement. Huge. Right. So what would happen in that case? What would happen to Microsoft if their 27% ownership of OpenAI wasn't worth $270 billion at a billion dollar IPO? But the company became worth 300 billion or 200 billion and that 27 billion was only worth 50. So you get the idea. We could be in a situation where there is a contagion. Yes. Let's just say there's a 1% chance ChatGPT fails, a 2% chance. Sure. 2% chance it fails, 2% chance it gets caught up in legal, you know, things that cause a problem, the Elon lawsuit, the New York Times lawsuit, whatever it is.

• 15:14Jason Calacanis?

  Whatever reason, they don't win big and they don't become a trillion dollar company, which a company with 13 to 18 billion in revenue is not worth a trillion, obviously, but everybody's marking this as a trillion dollar company now. If it is not worth a trillion, then there would be a contagion and who would get hit by it? Nvidia would lose hundreds of millions in revenue, Oracle 100 million in revenue. Looks like Microsoft would lose hundreds of millions in revenue and now Amazon Web Services would lose close to 40 billion in revenue. A lot of stocks on the same day, in the case of a ChatGPT failure or even a flattening, it would be a black Monday. It would be like 20% drawdown in these stocks, 30% drawdown. It could crash. The AI boom.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so a couple of notes about that. One, agreed, across the board there. But for context, if you lost 20% of the stock market, Jason, that would take us back to what, like, December 24?

• 16:07Jason Calacanis?

  Like, I, correct.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not the end of the world. Terrible day, but I don't think crashes the tech industry. The other thing is, I went through all the big tech companies earnings, and one thing that Satya said a lot on their calendar Q3 fiscal Q2 earnings call was that this computer building out is fungible. And by that, I think he means you can kind of swap out first and third-party demand. So if OpenAI comes to them and says, hey, guys, listen, we only need 80% of that $250 billion marginal Azure commit we made. Well, I think Microsoft can just use it. So I think that that helps a little bit. But you're right. A lot of things are depending on OpenAI, Jason, actually, as you said, on, on X, and you're a little worried about competition, I think.

• 16:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so this is my next, like, scenario. So just to give you one scenario, which is ChatGPT fails. And you could include in that, what if LLMs are overhyped? And all at once, they hit a ceiling, and for two years, they don't get better. And they're, as amazing as they are today, they don't really change the world the way we think they are. They don't replace as many jobs. They don't, the agentic stuff doesn't work. They don't replace all the call centers. They don't replace all the salespeople. They don't replace all the, you know, cab drivers, etc. Well, if that were to happen, then you could have like a serious contagion where,

• 17:34Jason Calacanis?

  you know, ChatGPT were to fail, and then like Domino's, all the other companies would fail as well, right down the line.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:41Jason Calacanis?

  If like, and when I say fail, they just wouldn't reach their potential is actually probably the way to say it. So we're pricing in perfection, and that these things are going to have a dramatic impact on productivity. And they're having a dramatic impact on productivity now, but if it stops and plateaus, that would be a problem. But here's the other risk. This, because the risk I just explained, like, the, either the entire sector doesn't deliver, or ChatGPT doesn't deliver. I put that at less than 5% combined.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:06Jason Calacanis?

  One in 20, like, so if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons with the one in. You know.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  If you're rolling a D20, you can.

• 18:14Jason Calacanis?

  Is there a D20? I know it's a D30, but you know.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  D20, you can roll a not zero. Yeah.

• 18:19Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. So it's sort of something to that effect. Now, here's one that's more likely. Competition.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:27Jason Calacanis?

  Because the company is priced to perfection. In other words, based on 13 or 18 million, they're trading at 30 to 50 times. Their price to sales ratio, right? 30 to 50 times their revenue. At 500 billion and at a trillion, they would be at almost, you know, double that. They would be at 60 times, 70 times, 80 times. Their revenue. Now.

• 18:52Jason Calacanis?

  What if?

• 18:55Jason Calacanis?

  Claude's API, because I saw some notes that Claude's API was beating ChatGPT's API. I just saw a chart go by that was getting more popular. What if Cursor's new LLM for coding is just much better than ChatGPT's? What if Grok or Gemini? You know, start taking some of the consumers away from it. What if Apple does a partnership with Meta or? With Google and Gemini gets all the Apple phone users. In other words, what if they don't get all the market share? What if they lose the market share? ChatGPT's market share was at 100% of LLM traffic. Of AI answers traffic, they were 100% at one point. Now they're down to like 80 or 85%, I believe.

• 19:37Jason Calacanis?

  Which is still a massively dominant position, but what if they go down to 50% or 30% eventually? And there's five major players.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:44Jason Calacanis?

  Then that could also mean that they can't reach that $1.4 billion commitment. What if? The utilization of these chips, like we saw the research on DeepSeek and coming out of China that they were using OCR. To, you know, store data and process data like 10 times more efficiently. What if they don't need all that compute because the open source community gets it right and it? Takes 10 times less to provide the same thing. What if the? Price becomes so deflationary that? You know, paying $20 a month is not necessary because Gemini decides it's free. Google just says it's going to be free. Apple says it's going to be free. And what if Amazon just says, yeah, you know what? Screw it. We got to protect the AWS

• 20:27Jason Calacanis?

  franchise. We're going to just put up open source L L Ms and, you know, we'll just make this so cheap. It's close to free and there's no margin. Well, then you're going to have to price chat GPT like a SaaS company. And oh, boy, a six times multiple of earnings, or, you know, a 10 times multiple of sales might not look as good, right? It's hard to become a trillion dollar company if you're being traded at 20 times earnings, or 10 times sales, or five times sales. So that margin compression could also cause a downshift. I think that's a 50% chance happening. So I think it's 45% right now. That OpenAI

• 21:07Jason Calacanis?

  continues their dominant run. 5% chance the whole sector end or chat GPT hits a major, you know, plateau. And then there's like, a 50% chance that competition makes it impossible to spend that 1.4 trillion and the technological risk. Probably the best part of being a founder is watching a project that started as just an idea blossom into a full fledged startup. The worst part, it's bookkeeping. It's boring. It's detail oriented, and it takes time away from building your product and hey, growing your team. It's time for you to let Pilot take care of all this bookkeeping so you can get back to running your company. Pilot's the largest accounting firm, and it was built just for startups. They understand the technology industry and the landscape. They know the

• 21:51Jason Calacanis?

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• 22:35Speaker 01

  You know, if it ends up the case that a lot of these companies don't need as much info as they think, or that demand doesn't surface, other companies are going to really struggle. I mean, CoreWeave, whacked. XAI, which is spending a lot of money on building Colossus 2, whacked. Like, I mean, the only company that I think doesn't have a major footprint is Anthropic. Like, shout out to them for not buying GPUs, I guess.

• 22:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And here's the other thing. When people worry about this stuff, I don't worry too much because I think we're in the situation where it doesn't really matter if these people lose a little bit of money. The people who are putting up the money can afford to lose it. If Google and Facebook, you know, blow their earnings a couple of years building out this infrastructure, it's not the end of the world. So, carry on, everybody. And I think it can give Sam a little grace. It wasn't a good moment for him. I think people might be overreacting to it a bit.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Oh, he's handling this so much better than I would. If I was him, going around the world, jet lagged, exhausted, trying to literally save the global economy.

• 23:36Jason Calacanis?

  He's on a global 650. He's good. And don't worry about Sam. Unlike me, he's got a global 650 minimum. You might have a G800. You might have the 800 at this point.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Sam, do you want to come on the show and tell us what you're flying in? We'd love to know how you're handling jet lag. And if you too are big on whoop.

• 23:53Jason Calacanis?

  All right. What else do we have here on the dock?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  All right. Next up, Jason, I want to talk about OpenAI and legal and medical advice. This is all over X this morning. People are saying, oh, my gosh, had they just neutered ChatGPT? Because if they did, back to your point, that can limit usage and so forth. I'm here to tell everybody that they have not lobotomized your favorite chatbot. Instead, what they have done is changed the terms of service a couple of days ago, Jason. And now, ChatGPT will effectively offer you information on medical and legal questions, but it will not offer advice to you. And in the new version of the OpenAI kind of Terms of Service, there is a line that says, you cannot use our services for the provision of tailored advice that requires a license such as legal or medical advice

• 24:39Speaker 01

  without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional. This, to me, reads like CYA.

• 24:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So I guess there were a couple of accounts on Twitter that were saying there is ChatGPT is no longer going to give health advice. And people were legal or financial. And immediately people said, well, that's what I use ChatGPT for most.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  That's the use case. Yeah.

• 25:00Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, so like literally I take a picture of all the supplements I'm taking and I say, what else should I take? What are these known for? And I will take a picture of my creatine, my electrolytes, my protein powder and my collagen. When I make like a shake in the morning, I put it all together and say, hey, what is this? What impact is this going to have on my workout today, et cetera? And, uh, you know, I'll put it in my little health tracker. So now they're going to instead of saying, hey, you should add or you should consider adding these things. I guess they would say a doctor, right? Or the FDA says you should have this many grams of

• 25:39Jason Calacanis?

  protein. Peter Attia says you should have this many. So this does feel like they are concerned about practicing without a license. And I think this reflects how good they are. It turns out there was a study, uh, which we'll have somebody look up right now. I think it was John Hodgkin, Hopkins, or it might've been Harvard, did a study on just general practitioners, GPs, doctors versus chat GPT and large language models giving advice. And they, they sort of tested all of them. And it turned out, you know, head to head, the LLMs did better than the doctors.

• 26:22Jason Calacanis?

  Then, uh, they did bedside manner. It turned out chat GPT like, uh, or all these services did like much better than the doctors because they're patient with patients and they have great bedside manner.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  So just Jason backing you up there, there is a Johns Hopkins University study from, uh, mid 2023 entitled, the doctor is out, but it's okay. Chat GPT can't answer your questions. Uh, found that chat GPT outperforms human physicians in quality and empathy. And then there was also Times coverage of similar studies in November of 24, saying that, quote, "A small study found chat GPT outdid human physicians when assessing medical case histories." So essentially, we are seeing doctors take this stuff up as well, but they can interpret, they can better understand and find obvious errors.

• 27:06Jason Calacanis?

  Can they, can they find errors? I, you know, I, I would actually say if you told me, um, if you told me your health is at risk, here's your choices. This one doctor is going to give you, these three doctors are going to give you their best advice. Uh, or you can pick these three L L Ms and you can feed the information, same information you can give to these three doctors or these three L M's. I'm taking the three L M's. That sounds crazy, I know, but I think for almost every case I would do that. What would you do, Alex?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Uh, I would take, talk to the physicians because I have a great number of them in my geographically local family here. And I hear about what people bring to them from L L Ms and what kind of advice they're getting. Not just chat G P T, but the whole gamut. And I don't think that the app, Jason, the average person's not very smart. So they're not doing great research here. They're not.

• 28:01Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm just saying for you, for you though.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  I, even with all that, no.

• 28:06Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Yeah. And do you think in the coming years it would change?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Oh, five years from now? Oh God. I mean, I'm either going to be in a flying zoos or I'm going to be digging in the ground with sticks. So I'll take the L L Ms in five years. Yeah.

• 28:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So I think it's, then it's just a matter of time. We're in agreement.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Oh, I think most, most A I questions is just your time horizon, you know, like.

• 28:24Jason Calacanis?

  So you know what this sounds like to me? It sounds to me like people with credentials are going to start suing the L L Ms for giving advice without a license. And you did have this suicide and I believe the, the suicide, there's a serious suicide case that chat G P T was involved in, not the person who worked for chat G P T, who was the whistleblower. That's the Joe Rogan clip we could play, uh, which was crazy, uh, on top of the Tucker Carlson one. Um, and we can get into that, but I think the, you know, more relevant one is.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Adam Rain, who died by suicide in April, and he was deep into conversations with ChatGPT. And if you recall, everyone listening, this is one of the things that led to OpenAI releasing data about people using the service while under chasing heavy mental distress, let's say. And also, they changed how they handle outreach to crisis response call lines, and also how they respond to people who are, as I might say, losing it while chatting to the chatbot.

• 29:29Jason Calacanis?

  So, according to the lawsuit that you just mentioned with Rain's, the lawsuit says, quote, "ChatGPT actively helped Adam explore suicide methods."

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Wow, this is the one where it said it couldn't, but if you ask me to do it in a story world building setup, I can. And he took that easy workaround?

• 29:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I guess. This is some dark stuff. So I will give ChatGPT some credit here. I'll give OpenAI some credit for maybe trying to get ahead of the how great these things are giving people a false sense of security that they should blindly rely on them. And so maybe they'll just start giving more disclaimers. And I was talking to some friends over dinner about this when the story broke. And I just said, all they have to do is have anytime anything health related, finance related, or legal comes up, they say, legal is a serious, you know, practice. We can give you general information from this experimental software. Please do not rely on it. And they should just give that paragraph. And then

• 30:34Jason Calacanis?

  you should have to check a box that says, click here to sign you have read this.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:39Jason Calacanis?

  Like you do for your terms of service, or maybe even like a DocuSign, sign it and say, I release all liability from ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, etc., for any responsibility for me using this health information to make health decisions.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yes. I think also they're trying to front run regulation because if they didn't do this sort of thing as the most popular consumer facing AI tool, they're catching all the fire. Like you mentioned earlier, the API between Anthropic and OpenAI, how Anthropic is winning. It's true, Anthropic's business is growing very quickly on the back of enterprise sales, whereas OpenAI is majority chat GPT subscriptions. So they're at the tip of the spear here. And if they screw this up and then Congress comes down with, you know, regulation from hell, everyone's going to suffer. So they're kind of doing, I mean, God's work in a way by limiting us from, I would say, misusing these tools as oracles versus what they are, which

• 31:36Speaker 01

  is large language models. And I don't mean that as a diss, it's more of a statement of fact. They're not omniscient, they don't have consciousness. And I do think people spend a little too much time trusting them here. That said, whenever OpenAI tells me you won't do something, chat GPT, I scream. I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm not for do it. So I'm on both sides of this one, Jason.

• 31:56Jason Calacanis?

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• 32:40Jason Calacanis?

  probably paying for two or three things over and over again redundantly. Finally, your admin team gets full visibility and oversight into what's happening. So your team can enjoy all the productivity gains of AI without the data leaks and your platform remains compliant while your data stays safe and secure. But don't take my word for it. Try it yourself. Go to nexos.ai/twist for a 14 day trial. That's N E X O S dot A I slash twist.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Next on the docket is a find from the production team. We have talked on the show quite a lot about how startups might be reporting gross revenue instead of net revenue or contracted ARR versus real ARR. Well, what's a great way to find the source of truth, Jason? It's linking your Stripe account to a public database so everyone can see how fast you're actually growing. So to that end, Marcus and I have found for you, trustmr.com. Check this out. This is a list of 100 companies that have connected their Stripe and you can literally just see how much revenue they have and how quickly they're growing. Take a look. I love this, right? So the number one, number one company is this and you can see its revenue

• 33:50Jason Calacanis?

  over time. This being data expert, tech creator, has 3.4 million in all time revenue, 168,000 in the last 30 days, 4,589. Yeah, there was a company called Buffer that was doing social media posting and Buffer was part of that build and public group. So what's great about this is, hey, most people are not going to put their content up here, but this is all time revenue. If we just check that down box there, and I see here, you just put your restricted API key in, but instead of all time, let's do this month or 30 days.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So 30 day winner is hype proxies.

• 34:30Jason Calacanis?

  Well, now every VC is coming here to set up meetings with these companies. So the upside here is you've just got the entire investment community to come here and go talk to you about your company. The downside is that you've just inspired people to create a version of your software and charge half as much or turn your software into a feature. And this goes to the should I build my startup in public discussion that I keep having with people? And you got to be careful. Sometimes giving a revenue milestone can get you a little bit of action and press and information, but you are educating people and it's a very competitive

• 35:10Jason Calacanis?

  world. One thing I've seen over and over and over again, not to single out Y Combinator, is failed Y Combinator companies who got the 500K from Y Combinator, the 125K and then the convertible note.

• 35:26Jason Calacanis?

  Just literally ripping off other companies in the marketplace because they can't think of an idea, but they have some money and they want to make a go of it. So they just take another startup's idea. And there's been some gnarly cases where young entrepreneurs do stupid things. And it's not just Y Combinator, but I think it happens in Y Combinator because you have this combination of a startup with builders who can build quickly, who have been selected because they're kind of hackers and they like to break rules. Remember that question they asked? What's an example of you breaking rules in your life?

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Social hacking or something. Yeah.

• 35:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there's some like rule there. So you have rule breakers who are known to build fast, who have some money in their pocket. And then they fail. And instead of coming up with their own idea, they come here. So imagine if, you know, there's 200 people in a Y Combinator class. Okay, 10% of them can't figure it out. So you got 20 people with 500K and two developers, three developers, whatever, three builders. What should they do? They should go right to this list and steal these ideas. And that's the dark side of this and why I would recommend not doing it.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Not doing it. That was kind of my question to you is should startups do this? Because, I don't know. I went through this list. I'm not a VC, but I'm keeping track of companies for us. And I was just like, who do I know on this list? Who is not, who do I not know? Who is news? As a small addendum, Jason, there is a, there's a fake version of this now. If you go to fake-mrr.com, it's the exact same thing, but done in a whimsical format. So if you want to see how totally real company and Walmart, Walmart are too. People are having a lot of fun, which I, which I appreciate.

• 36:59Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's an interesting concept. And in a world without people stealing each other's ideas and so many overfunded teams in the world in a peak, we were in peak Zerp, now we're peak AI bubble.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:16Jason Calacanis?

  So if it wasn't peak bubble, or like we're kind of, we're getting to peak bubble, I would say, when the whole discussion of the first half of the show is some lunatics spending 1.4. Trillion dollars, not billion trillion dollars. There's a startup spending 1.4 trillion dollars on infrastructure. Like it's pretty heady out there, folks. So I would be careful inspiring people to go steal your business idea.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  For for 1.4 trillion is is 1400 billion, which is just.

• 37:48Jason Calacanis?

  It's 1400 unicorns.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  All right, Jason, before we move on, I have a thing I wanted to ask you about. So Jason Limkin.

• 37:56Jason Calacanis?

  You could give 14,000 startups $100,000, $100 million. You could fund 14,000 startups with 100. No, is that right? Wait. Yeah, I think that's right.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  I I mean.

• 38:09Jason Calacanis?

  You'd be a billion dollars to 1400, which means 100 million to 14,000.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:16Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's the numbers are so big. I'm like, actually not believing the back of the envelope math I'm doing from halfway around the world with jet lag.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  That's the problem with it. You know, I mean, 1,000,000 is a million, 1,000 millions, a billion, 1,000 billion is a trillion. And so it gets big, really, really quickly. All right. Next up, Jason, Star Cloud is finally in space. They went up on the latest SpaceX mission and dropped their first satellite into space. Would you like to see a Nvidia GPU take flight from SpaceX?

• 38:49Jason Calacanis?

  I know Jensen does.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Yes, he does. All right. So here is the clip of Star Cloud's first H100 going into space.

• 39:03Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 39:05Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go. I guess.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  Star Cloud one separation confirmed. I side three separation confirmed. And that was our final payload of the bandwagon for mission manifest.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I thought that was super duper cool. Um, we've been talking.

• 39:20Jason Calacanis?

  What that's attached to is that attached to the to the, you know, like a Falcon nine or something like that? Or is that their unit now attaching H100s?

• 39:32Speaker 01

  So this, this is the first kind of demonstrator device from the company. And when we had Philip Johnston on the show earlier this year.

• 39:41Jason Calacanis?

  Episode 2073.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yes, this is a one kilowatt, so not very powerful, 50 kilogram satellite that I believe has a single H100 on it. So this is a, let's get it up in space. I mean, you have to deal with radiation. It's a different, you know, level up there. Cooling is different and so forth. But the cool thing is now that they have this up into space and working, by the way, they didn't lose connectivity to it. So that's fantastic. They're working on their next satellite, which is going to be, I believe called Star Cloud 2. The company rebranded from Lumen Orbit earlier this year, but it doesn't really matter. It's going to have about 100 times more GPU capacity. So the company is now, you know, stellar, and then soon it's going to be a fleet. And I, I don't know, Jason, I just, I, this company was one of those, you see it YC demo day, you're like, sure, data centers in

• 40:28Speaker 01

  space, why not? But in like two years, they've gone from founding to actually having a GPU in space that works. So I'm blown away.

• 40:35Jason Calacanis?

  Which says a lot about SpaceX's cost of putting stuff in space, that nascent startups can actually get to space, right? Without SpaceX, that wouldn't happen. So that's really interesting. I guess the question is, do the satellites want to connect to it and actually offload a job to it? Or like, so that would be their customer is there's a satellite up there and do they dock with that satellite? Or how does a satellite get data from a satellite to the H100? Is there a standard for that? Like, does wifi work in space? I know it's a very stupid question, but I would assume wifi doesn't work in the vacuum of space? Or it works really well?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Well, given my, my deep, you know, physics PhD that I have, the way that he explained to me was lasers, essentially in between different satellites to connect them in orbit. Compute is going to be one of their markets, but I think more near term, they're going to be working with, you're basically using lasers to send it up and down from the planet. And he says that there is an advantage to having optical for that versus connecting to ground centers. You're going to have to help me out with the terminology here, Jason. The, the places on the, on the earth where we talk to satellites traditionally using radio waves and such, that's much lower bandwidth. But with their second demonstrator, they are going to have the ability to beam stuff down with a laser, which is much higher throughput. But right now, I, I just think they're trying to do like,

• 42:00Speaker 01

  The kindergarten version of their future products to make sure that they can do it. The company, though, is not derisked. I don't want to overly sell this. They definitely still need lower launch costs to get the amount of solar panels and GPUs and stuff into space to make their idea function. So

• 42:13Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  But I don't know. I'm just, I was so jazzed for them. Like, you ever just get excited for a founder that you meet and you really like, and then something good happens? That's why I wanted to

• 42:23Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely, yeah. And so I see here, just asking producer Claude to help us out at claude.ai. And we'll give you a promo code in a second. Radio frequency communication, most common methods. Spacecraft use radio transmitters and receive with directional antennas. Common frequencies, S-band, 2.4 gigahertz. That sounds like here your Wi-Fi home. Data is modulated onto radio waves and beamed between spacecraft, requires line of sight between transmitter and receiver. Optical laser communications, which is the newer faster technology, uses laser beams to transmit data at much higher rates than RF, can achieve gigabits per second versus megabits

• 43:03Jason Calacanis?

  for RF radio frequency, requires extremely precise pointing since laser beams are narrow. NASA LCRD, laser communication relay demonstration, demonstrate this technology is less susceptible. Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, and I guess there's distance and power limitations on these, but that's how data is sent in space.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Now everyone knows, but we have startups that are working on building space tugs, that are working on in-orbit refueling, that are working on trash cleanup, that are trying to put GPUs into space. We're talking about in-orbit scientific experiments from Varda, in-orbit factories. If I was starting a VC fund today, I would just raise as much money as I could and give it to all these awesome companies because I'm really, really bullish on the space economy in the next 10, 20 years.

• 43:50Jason Calacanis?

  There, you know, with this whole space economy, though, there needs to be a customer other than the space industry. So it feels like we're picks and shovels, but what is the actual benefit to humanity? And I think the best thing I've heard is that mining certain things off of asteroids, et cetera, and the collection of some of those minerals, rare earths, you know, like maybe they're rare on Earth, but not rare on asteroids type thing, that those might be the big win? That's what I'm waiting for is like, what's the big win? I mean, scientific discoveries are great, but You know, are some of the moral victories or intellectual victories that don't actually translate into a monetizable revenue stream for a product or service to sell to other

• 44:34Jason Calacanis?

  humans and businesses on the planet? That's my only concern with these businesses. I know that there's a great business in, you know, sending stuff up there, but you know, Elon founded a business a lot of people are willing to pay for, which is SpaceX. People want to have Starlink.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, Starlink, I mean, if they broke out Starlink, how much would that company be worth, Jason?

• 44:57Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's a hundred billion dollar company out of the gate. Yeah, I don't have enough information to know, but I mean, it's, I mean, I think there'll be, I think there'll be a billion people who are paying for Starlink eventually.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see that. To answer your question, though, what is the actual, like, use case? By the way, this echoes to me like crypto conversations and also early AI to some degree. It's kind of fun to be, end up doing this kind of on repeat. Picking a company from the bucket, Albedo Space is doing very low Earth orbit imaging of the planet with some special tools and techniques they're doing with that. They're another company that I've tracked for a while, but to make their technology work, they need to have very, very low satellites, which means that they have high drag, so they burn a lot of fuel. So they need in-orbit refueling. So I think we're starting to see some applications that will use the picks and shovels that we're building, but you're right, we're not there yet.

• 45:46Jason Calacanis?

  I do believe space stations, we're going to announce an investment shortly, and I think space stations are going to become like the next card to turn over in this. You know, people are going to want to have a permanent home in space, and there's going to be a lot of providers, non-governmental providers, who are going to provide, you know, I don't want to say Airbnb of space, but there's going to be a need. To have permanent installations in space, whether it's for a data center or for people or for shipping stuff. So it's it's coming, folks. It's going to get really interesting in the next

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Axiom Space is one name in the private space station game. And also, if you want to look at asteroid mining, TransAstra and Astroforge are two more names to add to the mix. All right.

• 46:38Jason Calacanis?

  And what is our code for Claude? I just did a Claude promo. We shouldn't do throw in the we missed to throw in the code there.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no worries. Claude.ai/twist. If you want to save 50% off your first three months of paid Claude access, we use Anthobics Claude here at Twist each and every day. It powers every show. We live and die by it. Come join us if that's your jam.

• 46:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's it's awesome. Well worth paying for. All right. You know, I I'm on the road right now. And I've seen there's a lot of polymarkets going on that I just want to check in on.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Hit me up.

• 47:14Jason Calacanis?

  I wanted to check in on the New York City mayor election. And I have an announcement after we see what's going on on polymarket with this New York City mayor election because I've been hearing that Cuomo is coming back. And that these there's some polls, I saw this on social media, but I don't trust polls and stuff I see on social media anymore. So when I want a version of the truth, I just go to polymarket. It's got the Zohan. The Zohan is the Zohan. The Zoron is at 94%.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And even more so, Jason, look at the trend. Plus one versus Cuomo down one. Now, for folks out there who don't know what we're talking about, this is the New York City mayor election. No, this is not for president. It may feel like we talk about it as much as a presidential election, but because New York City is, oh, I don't know, Jason, one of the capitals of the world and a financial titan, it gets outsized media and press attention.

• 48:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and also, he's 30 something years old and a socialist. And I guess, you know, I don't know how to say this, anti Zionist?

• 48:23Jason Calacanis?

  Pro Palestinian, I don't, I don't know exactly how he frames himself, but my Jewish friends in New York are very concerned about his stance on Israel. So, New York, a lot of Jews, a lot of Jewish brothers and sisters there I've got.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  There's a lot of Jewish people in New York City, absolutely.

• 48:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and they're like, what's going on here? And there's a lot of capitalists there, too. But here we are, folks. I, I think poly market gets it right. So.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  What, uh, what else did you want to check out on, Jason?

• 48:52Jason Calacanis?

  Um.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  I was, I'm keeping track of the government shutdown myself.

• 48:56Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, is that, yeah, it's very interesting because I guess what we're trying to figure out is when it ends?

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the thing that I wanted to highlight, uh, for everyone today on this play market, a couple of things. One, I like play markets that have lots of volume. This one is nearly six million. Uh, but it's the decline of optimism. So if you're on the audio version, we're looking at a chart right now of just when will the government shutdown end? And the furthest out option, Jason, is November 16 plus, and it just keeps getting higher, which to me implies we could have at least another two weeks of the shutdown, making it, I think, the longest shutdown in history. And it doesn't seem that anyone who's making hedging bets here thinks this is going to change. And that to me is just an indictment of, um, my nation, our nation's current political good luck.

• 49:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. What a disaster. Um, uh, November 16th plus is 54%. And I, as you can see, there was a ton of volume. See, this is actually the interesting thing of a time-based one. If you scroll down, just to teach people the poly market, uh, how poly market works, you can see they're resolved. So if you scroll back up, you'll see like, uh, yeah, so you see view resolved. So what you can see here is that if you had been betting on this and wagering and, you know, uh, you could have bet before 15th, before October, before the 19th, before the 20th, those have been resolved. So this is like, continues to resolve itself.

• 50:29Jason Calacanis?

  So I guess the November 3rd one resolves, you know, later this week, November 7th, over the weekend, et cetera, et cetera. Man, this is really interesting. I, I kinda like the government being shut down because I think we're spending too much money.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  I don't think we're saving, we're not saving much.

• 50:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, like, doesn't all the money just go back out anyway? Like, everybody just gets their paycheck. So the only people suffering here are people who are civil servants.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  So.

• 50:58Jason Calacanis?

  Unless they're the ones in charge and they still get paid.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  There's, there's a, there's a disconnect between, uh, business and government that I think people get a little bit mixed up. So, um, in a business, Jason, what's the number one expense most of the time? Humans, right?

• 51:12Jason Calacanis?

  People, yeah, humans.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's much, much smaller fraction of the government spend, uh, than compared to corporations. And so when people show up and try to like, cut staff as a way to like dramatically reduce the federal outlays, it doesn't work because most of it is entitlement programs and earned benefits. So I don't think the shutdown actually saves us much money. I just think it makes the country worse.

• 51:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and those 600,000 furloughed workers, um, those folks are furloughed, which means when they come back, they get their money, I guess. And then there are a bunch of them, God bless them, who've been working now for a month.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:45Jason Calacanis?

  Without pay?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's brutal.

• 51:49Jason Calacanis?

  Which is, is brutal. And then people are, I mean, I understand like the food stamps program is abused massively, you know, who knows 10, 20, 30, 40, 50%, who knows what the abuse is? Whatever it is, and you can buy soda on it, you could have tons of complaints about it, but there are some people whose food is, you know, like they're, I don't know if they're gonna starve, but there are people who are gonna struggle. And so I just wish these people would work together in a more functional way.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

  Disgracia.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Disgracia all around. But at least we have a poly market to keep us entertained, Jason, as we fiddle while watching Rome burn, you know?

• 52:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, well, no, what actually is really great about it is there's another poly market I saw, which is, will it be the longest in history?

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 52:35Jason Calacanis?

  And I didn't know this, but you know, that's one of the things I like about poly market is I can start to build mental models of what's going on in the world. And I didn't actually know what the longest shutdown was. It was December 2018 to January 25th, 2019.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  So according to Claude, that was 35 days and that was during the first Trump administration. And this was the fight over the southern border wall. But we're at 34 days now. So if the government doesn't radically immediately open by tomorrow, well, congratulations, everybody. We've done it. A new all time worst. Would you like some good news, though, Jason, to put a little smile on your face? All right. Another twist 500 company is in the news. This time it is Lagora. It's a legal AI startup or maybe an AI legal startup. Swedish offices around the world just raised 150 million in a series C led by Bessemer. Now a unicorn, 1.8 billion dollar valuation and its customer count, I think effectively doubled while it added another 20 markets since its last round.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  And the company's CEO Max Unistron says, quote, "We are seeing astronomical demand for our product. Legal professionals across the globe are adopting AI into their work at an unprecedented rate." So I was curious, what does that mean for other legal AI companies? I went to the twist 500, I polled all of them and it turns out they've all raised money in the last month, more or less. So I think what we're seeing here is a really impressive locus of market adoption and demand for generative AI products in a new industry that is not software development. But Jason, I'll just say structured language, huge corpus of information, historical record to pull from. Those are things that LLMs tend to do well. So maybe it's not a surprise that we're seeing legal AI companies

• 54:17Speaker 01

  do so well. But I was just blown away by the amount of capital going into Eve, Nexel, Spellbook, Harvey, EvenUp and Lagora in the last like 30 days.

• 54:26Jason Calacanis?

  So yeah, there's, and there's a couple of things that lawyers do. You know, of course there's research, like you're researching a case. And, you know, research has had Westlaw and LexisNexis and services like that. But being able to use AI to do it and do natural language queries, you used to have to learn how to use LexisNexis really well. And there were some people in the firm, your law firm, who knew how to use it really well. So you just go to them and you would pay like buy the page, buy the search. It was not cheap. And then you would just pass those like five cents a page, 25 cents a page of research on to your clients anyway. So I remember it was like, You know, you might be doing thousands of dollars worth of legal research on those services.

• 55:10Jason Calacanis?

  Now you can have all that corpus into an L L M and the ability to, you know, not pay for it. Really interesting. But drafting documents is something that

• 55:23Jason Calacanis?

  people do all the time and they have document management systems. But to be able to draft a document using A I is really powerful. Because if you said, I need

• 55:34Jason Calacanis?

  a non disclosure agreement for Alex and Jason, they both work at Launch. You know, Launch has its own template. They have the names of the company. You have your name, your social, whatever information. A lot of that drafting could go a lot quicker. And then the third thing that lawyers spend a lot of time doing is reading documents, right? They have to process them. And document review is the other thing you get charged for. So if you get, I don't know. If you get sued, okay, you have a human resources case. Now you gotta go find all the documents associated with that manager, that employee, when they started, all of their emails, all of their Slack messages, right?

• 56:18Jason Calacanis?

  In the case of discovery, you're researching those documents. And then there could be legal documents. Oh, we're doing an M and A deal. We did an M and A deal. We're being sued. You hire a new counsel to, you know, do the,

• 56:31Jason Calacanis?

  to do this, you have to go get binders of documents, folders and folders of signed documents and summarize them and read them. Like you're saying, research, drafting and reviewing. Those things are just so custom made for an L L M. Now, the problem is, you can't make mistakes. No. So this software, I think, is gonna need time to fully bake. So, and then people get lazy and they don't check their work. So there was a case of somebody who drafted a document. And sent it to court with fake stuff in it. We covered that two years ago.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I've seen that recently, but then my second thought was I haven't seen that only once.

• 57:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  People are sometimes quite lazy and if you give them a tool, they will just kind of copy and paste it in and they're gonna get into a lot of trouble. The thing though is what I was surprised by as well, Jason, is the diversity of business plans for these companies. It's not all Harvey clones. Just for example, EvenUp, which raised 150 million, Bessemer LED, is working on just the personal injury legal space. Eve wants to help people that are at the plaintiff's side of legal cases. And Nexal is actually building kind of like GTM software for for legal firms. So we're seeing a kind of a multivariate approach here. I don't know if all these will end up being companies versus features, but it's not just the same idea and then nine clones, which I think is very encouraging.

• 58:02Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I feel like talking to editorial director Lon Harris. I've been seeing that this Warner Brothers, which I sold out of, I took a bath on my J trade. Hey Lon, how are you doing? Good to see you from around the world. Tell us what's going on with Warner Brothers.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  Sure. Well, so Warner Brothers, they sort of announced a few weeks ago that they are considering offers, basically putting themselves up for sale, announcing to the world they they are planning to sell the company or possibly to split up the company. That's what it's more and more looking like. So we've had Paramount, the newly merged Paramount slash Skydance, the Ellison family, of course, took that over. So now they run Paramount. They were thinking about trying to take on Warner Brothers Discovery. There was some concern that this would mean two of our largest sort of news organizations, CBS News, which is owned by Paramount, and then CNN, which is owned by Warner Brothers Discovery, would both be in the hands of a sort of Trump-aligned or at least loosely Trump-aligned Ellison family.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  But for so far, Warner Brothers has rejected those offers. They're too low, is what the trades are saying. So now Netflix has hired an investment bank and sort of. Is sort of circling Warner Brothers and trying to see if there's a deal. Now Ted Sarandos kind of talked around this during their last earnings call last week. He's suggesting the interest of Netflix is entirely 100% IP. So Warner Brothers owns, I'll give you a brief list. DC Comics, all of the HBO shows, Harry Potter, Barbie, Looney Tunes, The MonsterVerse. That's that Godzilla, King Kong franchise. It, the Stephen King franchise, Lord of the Rings, Mortal Kombat, Final Destination. Blade Runner is also with the Warner Brothers.

• 59:46Speaker 04

  So that's what Netflix is looking at and licking their chops. Like they want to make Batman shows. They want to make a Harry Potter movie. They want to make all of this stuff. Now what Sarandos is suggesting they're not interested in is the cable TV business and all of that infrastructure. So in addition to CNN, Warner Brothers Discovery owns Discovery, TBS, HGTV, Food Network, TLC. This was all that stuff Zaslav was so excited about, like the 90 Day Fiance verse they were launching on HBO Max. That stuff Netflix not interested in. They don't want all, they want to make their own reality shows. So they're thinking of maybe they would buy the Warner Brothers movie and TV studio.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  And then spin off the cable networks into their own company or something else.

• 1:00:32Jason Calacanis?

  They should go, obviously they should buy the IP. It's a no brainer and they can outbid everybody except for Apple, Amazon. And where's Apple and Amazon and all this? Like Apple owning HBO is the obvious best home for it because Apple likes prestige.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, when you could always see these like hit Apple TV shows would be right at home. They're trying to make HBO content anyway, stuff like Severance, Silo, Slow Horses. Those are all just HBO shows that ended up on Apple.

• 1:01:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, very precious, very manicured, very well thought out, very auteur, I guess would be the best word, very auteur.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Silo was good. Those books are fantastic and they did a pretty darn good job bringing it to the screen.

• 1:01:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so I don't know spoilers, please. So I just, here's what I, first of all, I just want to say my J tray got crushed. I lost $24,000 on this F and stock because I sold it at eight bucks.

• 1:01:29Jason Calacanis?

  What is it at right now?

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Oh, what's Netflix today?

• 1:01:32Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they just. Netflix. I kept my Netflix.

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  Oh, Warner Brothers, 2239.

• 1:01:37Jason Calacanis?

  There, okay, I bought it at 16. I sold it at eight because I was so disgusted. I had lost money on Disney. I had lost most money of all my J trades. The biggest loser was Warner Brothers. And I love Zaslov and I love these assets, but I was just watching this thing for two years go down and down. And I said, you know what? I have all these other stocks going up and up. I had to sell some winners and I had a big profit. So I was like, okay, let me use some of these losses to offset it. So I sold it. But if I had held it instead of losing $8 a share and 24 grand, you're telling me I would have made $6 a share and I would have made like 20 grand. But it doesn't matter because I was offsetting losses. It's all good.

• 1:02:18Jason Calacanis?

  They should keep CNN. This is the one piece. That's a wild card. I predict they keep CNN. Why? There are people who love CNN and having CNN as part of Netflix would give you a reason to keep it open all the time.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Jason Calacanis?

  And it's global. Now Netflix has a global business. There's CNN in every country around the world. And if there isn't, whatever pockets where there isn't CNN, what an amazing opportunity to expand the franchise. Now, the reason Ted might not do it is because of politics and toxicity and stepping in it. But if they went back to CNN, just doing straight reportage and not having like a bunch of emotional, which they've tried to do. Zaslov has moved CNN in the Trump 2.0 era to really trying to get back to a centrist, non-opinionated.

• 1:03:17Jason Calacanis?

  And they, they hired that right wing guy who just dunks on everybody on, when he's on panels. And they've kind of deprecated having it just be all, you know, Trump derangement syndrome, whatever. And they, they tried to just be more even keeled, but I think maybe they don't want to be involved in anything as toxic as politics and news. I think it's a mistake. I think you play the long game. You got three years to navigate the end of the Trump era, or seven, but I'm gonna go with three. See, Paulie Mark, does Paulie Mark have Trump taking the third term?

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  I'm on.

• 1:03:55Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my god. That's the one I wanna put money on.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Now, Trump is, he was, he was saying, he was doing all of that sort of stuff around it with the hats or whatever, but now he's sort of saying he was just joking and he doesn't really think he's gonna do a third term.

• 1:04:09Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so he's definitely doing it then.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  Well, that's what Trump is saying this week, but who knows if you can believe it.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  4% on Paulie Mark, it's presidential election winner 2028 poll.

• 1:04:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Donald Trump, 4%, Marco Rubio, 5% to give you how much faith the market currently has in a third Trump. JD on top, Gavin second, AOC third.

• 1:04:27Jason Calacanis?

  I think, now wait, I can't bet against AOC. Oh no, I can bet no on AOC.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  You can buy, you can buy no.

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  You could bet, yeah, yes or no.

• 1:04:34Jason Calacanis?

  There's no way AOC is winning president in 2028, right? That's not happening.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  It doesn't feel super likely to me. I mean, like, we, the Democrats, they're really finding a lot of enthusiasm for the base. They are, do tend to be sort of left, you know, like Mondani, Bernie Sanders, AOC, they're the ones that have a lot of hype around them right now, but that doesn't necessarily mean.

• 1:04:53Jason Calacanis?

  That doesn't mean you win.

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  They're gonna win a four year, no, I don't, I don't think, I don't think that.

• 1:04:57Jason Calacanis?

  Besides, you have to win the, this means win the nomination and win the presidency.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 1:05:01Jason Calacanis?

  Make it to the finals.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  Win the general.

• 1:05:03Jason Calacanis?

  And then you have, yeah, yeah, it's not, it's not happening.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't.

• 1:05:05Jason Calacanis?

  So what do you think of my idea here?

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  No, I.

• 1:05:08Jason Calacanis?

  Who said 2%?

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Ivanka.

• 1:05:09Jason Calacanis?

  Me?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  No. Are you on here?

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  Uh, I don't think so.

• 1:05:14Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, so what do you think of my idea with CNN?

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Well, I think what's so interesting about it is just if you remove the political angle entirely, CNN is one of the most established live brands in the world, and that's exactly what Netflix has been trying to position itself. They wanna be, you watch live events on Netflix, not just VOD, Squid Game, whatever. They want you to watch boxing matches, they want you to watch football. So like, live news, 24 hour news seems like a perfect complement to that. So I think it is an interesting idea.

• 1:05:46Jason Calacanis?

  They should buy CNBC as well.

• 1:05:48Speaker 04

  Well, I, I think the, the idea that you're gonna step in and say, we don't want all media to be in the hands of a few people, it kind of, there's a hero narrative in this for Netflix as well. Like, we're gonna step in and save American journalism. It was all gonna go to this one family was gonna control all these news networks, but now we're gonna take it and we'll step up and be the steward.

• 1:06:09Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right, because the other option that we didn't mention was...

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  Is the Ellison's, who already own Paramount Skydance, they already own CBS. So if they get CNN too, that's a lot. And actually, David Zaslove has spoken to this pretty specifically. Last week, he was at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's humanitarian dinner, giving a keynote. And he said, quote, "When the government controls the news, that is the end of democracy." So he didn't name names, but everybody sort of feels like that's what he's saying, that he's being pressured. And there has been, now, none of this is confirmed, but there has been some suggestions in the media, CNN reported on this, actually, that the Trump administration has been signaling that they may not give approval, regulatory approval, to any acquisition that isn't the Ellison's taking CNN.

• 1:06:56Speaker 04

  Like, they wouldn't, the FCC would shut down a merger between Netflix and CNN, or whatever. That's just the room, we don't know if that's true.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I think it's a pretty good point. And today, in a transcript of the 60 Minutes interview that Trump did, which is not part of CBS, which he helped facilitate the transaction with the Ellison family and so forth, um, he specifically praised the new editor in chief of CBS and so forth. So I think we're getting into a Hungary territory. We're going full Orban or...

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  Right, and I think, I think we can sort of see that the Trump administration would prefer that CNN end up in the hands of an allied sort of group than, you know, Netflix or another loose cannon company. Although, not, not that Netflix is necessarily Trump's worst enemy. I mean, I don't think any of these companies would go at him necessarily. But anyway, it's an interesting situation.

• 1:07:41Jason Calacanis?

  Shout out to Simon Wiesenthal. Uh, not, people don't remember, but he was like the greatest Nazi hunter.

• 1:07:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:07:51Jason Calacanis?

  Full time. Brought 1,100 Nazis to justice. While I have you here.

• 1:07:58Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:07:58Jason Calacanis?

  Best Nazi hunter film or film threadline?

• 1:08:05Jason Calacanis?

  Or TV show.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  I mean, I would say.

• 1:08:07Jason Calacanis?

  I have my own, but I want to hear yours.

• 1:08:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there is. One of my favorite movies of all time is a 1969 French movie called Army of Shadows. Uh, by a guy named Jean Pierre Melville is the filmmaker and it's just a French resistance. It's a bunch of different stories interconnected about members of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation. And it is incredible and it's like, it's a great movie to watch like right now because it does have that kind of like, it's very motivating and it's very exciting and it's very compelling. Um, just like following along on these little missions and how they sort of went about sabotaging and what they would do if they got captured and all this stuff. Really great movie that's about, uh, I guess Nazi evading and Nazi thwarting more than Nazi hunting.

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  I do really like that. I'm trying to remember which one it was.

• 1:08:57Jason Calacanis?

  The Boys from Brazil is the classic one.

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  That's a great.

• 1:09:00Jason Calacanis?

  The Boys from Brazil. You ever see that?

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:09:04Jason Calacanis?

  No, I know one scene.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  No, honestly, I mean, I'm not going to lie. I don't think I've even heard of this, uh, but here is.

• 1:09:13Jason Calacanis?

  The Boys from Brazil is a 1978, obviously in Glorious Bastards.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Here's the, uh, the cover of the, uh, Boys from Brazil.

• 1:09:20Jason Calacanis?

  The Boys from Brazil is amazing.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  I was, I was gonna say, there's also.

• 1:09:23Jason Calacanis?

  Olivier.

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  There's that great X-Men first class sequence about Magneto. Magneto being a Nazi hunter, yeah.

• 1:09:30Jason Calacanis?

  Was so great when he hunts them down in their like Bavarian village in Brazil.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, he finds them in South America, yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Yes, I forgot about, I was.

• 1:09:40Jason Calacanis?

  Great scene, which I think is inspired by boy, with the coin. I think that's inspired by Boys in Brazil.

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  For sure, it for sure was, yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  I, I just think it was a big TAM for, uh, Nazi hunting videos and movies. I think some startups should make more of these because apparently we can just, there's a lot of good ones.

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  Well, the great thing, I mean, and Spielberg talked about this when he made Raiders of the Lost Ark. The great thing about making Nazis your villain is you could do anything. People don't care. You could blow away a hundred of them. James Gunn actually has been having fun with this on Peacemaker, the HBO Max show. Like if you set up that your bad guys are Nazis, you can gun down a whole field of them and everybody's like, hooray, bravo, good job.

• 1:10:16Jason Calacanis?

  Melt their faces with the Ark of the Covenant.

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  Right, nobody feels bad no matter what gruesome awful thing you want to do to them in your movie because they're Nazis.

• 1:10:24Jason Calacanis?

  All right, folks. I think I think it's time for me to hit the hay. But before I do, maybe I should do one founder question since you're here, Juan.

• 1:10:33Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 1:10:33Jason Calacanis?

  Do you have a great founder question? Because I literally spent the whole day talking with founders. I did the Founder University presentation that you helped punch up.

• 1:10:40Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:41Jason Calacanis?

  So I did that for an hour this morning. I walked. It was great. People loved it. So great job on the presentation.

• 1:10:47Speaker 04

  It's a good presentation. Yeah, we went through it. Kabir and I spent a long weekend going through that. Slide by slide.

• 1:10:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you guys worked over the weekend for me. Thank you for that. That's right.

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, could be Bianca too. Bianca helped. She's been very busy in in the kingdom, but she helped out as well.

• 1:11:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  All right. So I do have a good founder question here from Wormsail7908 on r/startups. They're asking, founders who've raised angel or seed rounds, how do you track runway and burn rate? And how painful is it creating investor updates? This was such a good question because it's so it's it's so directly a Founder University question that we hear from all the time. They wrote, I'm researching how founders manage runway tracking and investor updates after raising angel or seed rounds. Trying to understand if there are real pain points here, if most people have figured it out. Would love to hear how you handle it, what tools you use, what's annoying, what works well, and so forth. So Jason, what do you think is the best or simplest way for early, early startups to track their runway and burn?

• 1:11:45Jason Calacanis?

  Very simple. There are tons of accounting firms out there who do this kind of work. And they'll send you every month a P and L and they will send it to you somewhere around like 10 days after the close of the month, 15 days after the close of the quarter. And you have to have your accounting right. The good news is in year zero or one, you may not turn on revenue, or if you do, it's a pretty simple revenue. So and your costs are usually limited to your gusto account, like what your salaries are. Or and like you bought some computers and maybe you got some credits from, you know, Google or Amazon. And, you know, maybe you're paying for some cloud as well. So.

• 1:12:26Jason Calacanis?

  You essentially take your last three months burn, you average it. Okay, so let's say you burned 50K and then you had a big month because you bought some laptops and it was 70K. And the next month you made a little more money and it went down to 40K or 30K. So you have 50, 70, 30, 150K in losses in a quarter. Instead of doing it based on one of those three numbers, you just blend the three together. You say, based on the last three months burn rate, which is revenue minus spend, positive or negative number, if it's negative, it's a burn. If it's positive, it's your runway is infinite. And it's always great to get that email, infinite runway.

• 1:13:08Jason Calacanis?

  So when you go to $1 in profit over your spend, you're now infinite runway. But if you had a burn of 50K a month and you have 1 million in the bank, you have 20 months of runway, 50,000, your average burn for the last three months. So you say, based on our average burn for the last three months, we have approximately 20 months of runway. And I think a short overview at the top of what you do. Hi, we are Uber, we are everybody's private chauffeur. We operate in three cities, we're opening up two more cities.

• 1:13:43Jason Calacanis?

  And then you might have team, product, customers, you know, fundraising or corporate activities. And you just list two or three sentences of narrative. If you have a chart, you put in a chart. And then at the bottom, it's always good to put requests. Why do you put it at the bottom? You want to see who gets to the end of your rider. Famous story like take the brown M and M's out of the.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  Van Halen, I believe is that story.

• 1:14:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And so they had at the bottom of their rider, take out the brown M and M's. Why? They wanted to make people, make sure people got to the end of the rider. The rider being the conditions into which they would play in an arena. So here you put at the bottom, things you can do to help. One, we're looking to get press in the legal press for our legal LLM solution. This includes the following journalists and whatever. Two, we're looking to fill these three positions. You can retweet that we're looking, my tweet here or my LinkedIn post. Number three, we're going to be raising in the fall. We're looking for connections to these series A firms. Here's a list of the company, here's a list of the firms we've met with. Please put your name on it if you know any bit of the firm and who you know. So you'd like a call to action, something for your investors to do.

• 1:14:55Jason Calacanis?

  Monthly is great. If you do it monthly, you will have a deep, meaningful relationship with your investors. If you do it quarterly, you can have a great relationship with your investors. If you do it less than quarterly, your investors might feel, unless you're just having massive success and they're seeing you do crazy fundraising and reading about your press, they might feel like maybe you're ungrateful. And the only time you do email them is when you've sent updates. So a lot of times we'll get an email, "Hey, we have three months of runway and I haven't heard from the founder in a year." So we literally, you know, try to train our founders to do this. We put it in our documents even, like as part of our agreement, we have information rights

• 1:15:39Jason Calacanis?

  and we'll get a quarterly update and we like to find what we're looking for. Not because we need it as much as you do, but because, as the founder does, but because we want to see the founder succeed.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Jason Calacanis?

  And if you're not a good person with sending updates, like I'm not, because I'm so pulled in different directions. For my updates for my venture funds, I deputize Jackie and our team, a partner at our company, to write them and send them. And if I have a time to edit them, if I don't have time to edit them, they go out from Jackie. And I'll read it when other people read it, which is actually in some ways like even more honest because I didn't see them. So I like the idea of even deputizing somebody on your team or two people on your team. You're responsible on for the product and this, and Alex, you're responsible for this and this. And then if you're not the type of person who stays on top of these things, you forget, deputize your other co-founders or somebody on your team and say,

• 1:16:38Jason Calacanis?

  "I want you to write this update in this format by this date, have all the numbers in, and then I will write an opening paragraph. If I don't write the opening paragraph by this date, please send it and just send it from you, the VP of Operations or the General Manager of the startup or the VP of Product." Um, they're really important. You don't need software to do it. You can find a million templates online, but short is better than long and short is much better than nothing. And no numbers means, no numbers means bad news.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Jason Calacanis?

  Numbers typically mean good news. So when you don't give numbers, people just assume, oh, man, the startup is screwed, or you don't hear from people.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Screwed.

• 1:17:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's a 90% chance, as I wrote in my book, like if you don't get updates, it's a 90% chance it's going to zero, 10% chance it's Uber. Or Robin Hood. But in truth, Travis sent regular updates. Even Travis sent regular updates. Why? Things were going so well. He kind of wanted to connect with investors and he had requests of us of things we could do to help. And he was putting us to work. So put your investors to work. Great question. And I hope that's helpful.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  All right. I'm sure was. Well, Justin, let's get you to bed. Overall, there in the Middle East, Lon, you and I are going to get back to work, but this has been another Good Speaking Startups. We'll see everyone live on Wednesday. Bye. Bye bye.