Figure's 03 Chore-bot, Jake Paul Sora takeover, ChatGPT app integrations, and more | E2191

Figure's 03 Chore-bot, Jake Paul Sora takeover, ChatGPT app integrations, and more | E2191 Today's show: Figure's butler-bot could be cleaning up after you soon than you think! On a Friday TWiST, Jason and Lon are checking out the Figure 03 demo reel, checking out the humanoid robot that could soon be hanging out in your house, doing your chores. Lon's a bit skeptical that full-sized Westworld drones will soon be on everyone's home but the technology is obviously moving forward at a rapid clip and cutting-edge AI models are making the bots smarter than ever. PLUS… what will be the impact of Presidents Trump and Xi's new fight over rare earth minerals? Why are Jake Paul and Mark Cuban starring in SO MANY Sora clips? How well do these ChatGPT app integrations work, and why are they going to free users first? And much much more, on a can't-miss new TWiST Timestamps: (0:00) Figure's humanoid and its new capabilities (2:15) Show start: Jason welcomes co-host Lon Harris (6:24) The global dependency on China for rare earth minerals (9:48) . TECH: Say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today. (10:54) Sora, AI likeness & deepfakes (17:05) DEMO: Producer Oliver showcases ChatGPT's new integrations! (19:45) Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! (27:54) The future of AI: Will there be thousands of app integrations? (30:41) Alphasense - Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at https://www.alpha-sense.com/twist (33:44) Discussing Reflection AI: A new American open-source model (40:35) Reddit Rapid Response: Why young professionals should work in the office (47:50) How AI is eliminating entry-level jobs & the need for executive training (54:15) Jason's pitch to shut down the USPS and turn post offices into nursery schools (58:25) Jason shares his personal journey with GLP-1s & Ro.co (1:01:05) The Figure One robot: New video and future potential (1:04:20) How LLMs are the key to unlocking humanoid robot capabilities 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: . TECH: Say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today. Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! Alphasense - Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at https://www.alpha-sense.com/twist Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Investors are loading into this company at this crazy valuation. They don't even have a customer yet. There was a little controversy. Is BMW a customer or not? Looks like BMW is in fact using them in production. They've they shared a video of that.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  That was still a little controversial, that video. A lot of people are arguing an arm would have been better for that job than the whole robot. Or what's the robot really doing? So there is still a lot of back and forth even after they shared.

• 0:23Jason Calacanis?

  There always is. There always is with new technology, but this thing looks great. It's stunning looking and of course, the fixed robot's going to work better for tighter tasks, but it will ultimately not have the flexibility of going around the world. What I like about this new figure one is it has inductive charging at the feet. Somebody took a screenshot of the foot and you know, these things are probably a couple of years away from being in your home, doing productive stuff. And they, the world is made for, you know, the world we created as humans is made for the human form, like our shelving and et cetera. And what you're seeing here is this thing is, they show it here, you know, bringing food out to the table,

• 1:06Jason Calacanis?

  washing dishes, putting out water glasses.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  It's the very classic.

• 1:10Jason Calacanis?

  They're showing this for a reason.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Robot butler. I mean, this is exactly what you'd think of if you had like a robot maid, a robot butler. It's cooking for them. It's cleaning the house. It's bringing them stuff. It's playing with the dog here.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  This week in startups is brought to you by AlphaSense. Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at alpha-sense.com/twist. Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options and more done. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. And .tech, say it without saying it.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today.

• 2:15Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. Alex has some sick babies and nannies. You know how it goes. Two or three times a year, this happens when you got those kids. They come home from school. And with us today, Lon Harris is here to co-host the show. Oliver, you're still on camera. You probably want to turn your camera off then. There we go. All righty.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Producer Oliver, folks, give him a hand.

• 2:40Jason Calacanis?

  Doing a great job.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  He's editing and manning the show today, all by himself for the first time.

• 2:46Jason Calacanis?

  I love it. I love it. Well, what's on the docket? Let's get to work.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Sure. Number one, we got a big story that you may have noticed your stocks maybe took a little bit of a tit today. That's because President Trump has threatened to cancel a planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping after the country has restricted US access to rare earth minerals. There is, of course, a very long Truth Social post from our president. We could pull that up. Actually, do I have that?

• 3:12Jason Calacanis?

  He is the main character, isn't he?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  He is our main character for today. Here is the tweet, so let me pull this up.

• 3:18Jason Calacanis?

  He's the main character every day, let's be honest.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  He's trying his best. So this, he posted an essay this morning about his issues with China. Some very strange things are happening in China. They are becoming very hostile, sending letters to countries throughout the world that they want to impose export controls on each and every element of production having to do with rare earths and virtually anything else they can think of, even if it's not manufactured in China. Nobody has ever seen anything like this. It would clog the markets. It goes on and on and on. He threatens to cancel the meeting. He says there's no reason to meet with President Xi in two weeks. He also complains that the Chinese planned this announcement specifically to overshadow his big peace in the Middle East announcement.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  And he's promising major, major new tariffs on China that threaten to reignite our sort of trade war back and forth with the Chinese. Now, why this matters, these minerals that we're discussing are desperately needed by US companies. They have a lot of applications in defense, but we are mainly concerned with their applications in the semiconductor market. They're considered vital. to America's competitive edge in AI. So that's really where we're sort of worried. And the big question on everybody's mind, is this a permanent change? Is this China's policy now? Or is this attempted leverage ahead of these planned trade talks, which may or may not go ahead? So what do you, what do you think, Jason? Is this a, is this the new reality of our world?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Where everybody's going to have to make their own rare earth minerals? Or is this just, you know, like they're ahead of the negotiation? They're trying to get the best deal they can.

• 4:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I always tell people, remember my, you know, rules of President Trump. Number one, he says a lot of things. And number two, always wait like 72 hours before, you know, thinking that these things are going to stick or could be permanent in some way. So he likes to riff in public, riff on, you know, truth. And before that, on Twitter, it's kind of a superpower he has in terms of just communicating directly with the populace and doing negotiations with people on social media. This is the new reality. A lot of companies do this, a lot of CEOs do it. So I would just pause and not worry about it. I think every time we've seen some sort of negotiation, whether it's what's happening in the Middle East,

• 5:39Jason Calacanis?

  and he deserves all the credit in the world, you know, for the ceasefire there. And let's hope it goes all the way to permanent peace. I think it's got a pretty good chance, probably, I would say, majority chance of that happening. And then, you know, hey, listen, he's worked relentlessly to try to get the Ukraine and Russia situation resolved. Hasn't had success there yet, but he might. And I think the, the, the peace Nick hippie dippy President Trump is one of my favorite Trumps. He's just, he's great at these negotiations, even though you might not like the way they're executed or they might cause a lot of hand wringing along the way. So I wouldn't worry about that. And then when it comes to rare earths. You know, you do rip up the earth, you scar the earth when you are pulling these out of the ground.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:23Jason Calacanis?

  China has a top-down control system and they realize the value of these. They're not precious about the environment like we are in the United States or certainly in Europe. So they're roughly two-thirds, 70% of the rare earths production and processing. Processing them is a bunch of work, too, in the world. So, you know, we do need to take care of that dependency. We have plenty of rare earths here. Brazil's got a ton. Australia's got a ton. There's tons of rare earths around. It's just a matter of, do you want to do the processing and can you do it at a reasonable price? And just like we saw with PPE and chips, we're just going to have to live in a world where we become a bit more resilient.

• 7:07Jason Calacanis?

  And I guarantee that's what's going to happen. We will see us turn on rare earths here. We have plenty of them in Nevada and other places. We're just not doing it. And so, this, the fallback plan to letting other people rip up the rare earths and process them at the cheapest price possible, AKA globalization, is to go to the next provider, Australia, Brazil, whoever, and do a deal. In fact, Ukraine has a lot of rare earths. Remember when we were doing our negotiation there, Trump said, we're going to keep supplying weapons if we can get access to those rare earths and be your partner on it. So that's

• 7:46Jason Calacanis?

  probably why he flipped sides from being a bit pro-Russian to being fully behind Ukraine. So it is what it is. I wouldn't do too much hand wringing about it. The stock market is looking for a reason to pull back because it's been so hot.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  I did ask producer Claude what percent of the world's rare earth minerals are found in China. Great response. China holds approximately 36 to 38% of the world's known rare earth mineral reserves, but more significantly, China produces about 60 to 70% of the world's rare earth minerals annually, giving it a very dominant position there. So that is, we could sort of get more. Competitive in the U.S. in that, but we have not yet. And I would remind you, if you want to level up your AI collaborations like we just did, you go to claude.ai/twist and twist listeners get 50% off their first three months of Claude Pro. What a deal.

• 8:39Jason Calacanis?

  What a deal and a great service. We love using it here every single day. What else is in the news?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Every single episode, we rely on producer Claude. So number two, we got to talk about this. So Sora, very much in the news, hugely popular app. It's blowing up. It already hit 1 million downloads in just five days after launching. That is very notably, according to OpenAI, faster than ChatGPT hit the same milestone. So now ChatGPT indispensable, 800 million regular users around the world. Could we be looking at that kind of a future for Sora? It's been number one on the Apple App Store since launching. But of course, there's been a lot of controversy about the inclusion of real people. There was a Zelda Williams, Robin Williams' daughter has publicly asked people, please stop sending her AI-generated videos of her dad. It makes her very sad.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  There was another controversial thing. A lot of people are making offensive videos of Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair being blown up or being thrown off of buildings. People are, as we mentioned on the show the other day, people are making Martin Luther King say crazy things. The Motion Picture Association of America is very upset about it.

• 9:48Jason Calacanis?

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

• 10:30Jason Calacanis?

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

• 10:51Speaker 01

  There are a few celebrities that have now embraced Sora2 as a way of getting themselves out there, promoting what they're doing, marketing themselves. So we've got two key examples so far. The first, Jake Paul, the YouTube influencer turned wrestler boxer. He says that he is an OpenAI investor now. He's been advising the Sora team behind the scenes and that he agreed to be the first celebrity name, image and likeness cameo user. And so he goes, you know, this has been great. It's been, you know, very helpful for him in promoting himself. We've got a screa- uh, let me share this real quick. He, uh, he posted this tweet showing-

• 11:29Jason Calacanis?

  The idea here is, it's, it's a, he believes that letting people do whatever they want with his likeness makes him more popular, so have at it.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, in his view, he says, "In six days, my cameo generated over $1 billion views." And, you know, so if you're an influencer, if you're part of the attention economy and your whole goal is to grab people's attention, I mean, that's success in a way. We do have some of the Sora's, you can see, they're not necessarily all kind to him.

• 12:01Jason Calacanis?

  So he's, yeah, they got him acting as a baby. So you have to have a thick skin for this, they put him in drag.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Here he's a pregnant lady having a shower. A gift for me? Oh, okay, let me see, let me see. Oh, girl, look at these colors. So, so we can see, uh, and the, the other example, uh, Mark Cuban has put himself in.

• 12:21Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  He now will let you, anybody on Sora can make videos with Mark Cuban, but the clever wrinkle here, most of the cameos include a promotion for his company, Cost Plus Drugs. He actually got it so at the end of the cameo with him, they actually bring up a little message saying, you know, "Visit Cost Plus Drugs" or "Promoting Cost Plus Drugs", which is a pretty fascinating wrinkle.

• 12:44Jason Calacanis?

  Is that a feature you can do where you say- You can use me, but you have to give me the end slide like that's an actual feature in this or?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  No, not they they somehow behind the scenes. They set this up with Mark Cuban. You and I don't have the access. Well, maybe you could contact Mr. Altman and get in there. But yeah, let's take a look. Here is one of I made a I made this this morning to show off. Mark Cuban and cost plus drugs in Sora. Let's start at the beginning.

• 13:11Jason Calacanis?

  Launched something I'm really proud of. It's called Paymorefordrugs.com. You pay a little extra. You feel like a VIP. See right here on the site. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up. What? It's premium?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  So there you can see.

• 13:21Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, that's funny. So you used me because I gave you permission as a friend or mutual to use my likeness. So you put me in there with them.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had you guys make a little a little drug commercial together, but I didn't tell it pull up cost plus drugs.com at the end. It did that all on its own.

• 13:38Jason Calacanis?

  This seems like a reasonable wrinkle to the you can use my likeness. They're being very granular about it. They obviously took a lot of lessons from YouTube's content ID system. I think what they should do is give you the ability to put a banner at the top of the bottom persistently in all of these. Put a watermark on it like they have Sora and the watermark should be like whatever you want it to be cost plus drugs.com. And it should you should be able to place it wherever you want. If so, for mutuals, I could say, do whatever you want.

• 14:08Jason Calacanis?

  But you have to end with a slide, just like that TikTok slide that shows your account and does that little bloop.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Bloop.

• 14:13Jason Calacanis?

  Sound effect. Yeah, you could. You could make that required. You could just pick and choose what you want to do as a brand or as a character that's owned by a brand. And then you could start to put in things you don't want done with the brand. So please, I don't want to, you know, have you do any gender bending, you know, swapping ideas. I, you know, I find that offensive or I'm cool with that. So.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Right. Or don't no violence, you know, like you no sexual situation like you could see how.

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  No politics.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Right. People could start to sort of distinguish the kinds of stuff that they want. I do think that's I feel like we're in a cultural shift moment. There was that trough of disillusionment. Everybody kind of hates AI and there was a big push against. It, you know, and now I feel like we're, we are starting to come out of it. I don't know if you saw Disney did the Tron Ares.

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  This week and they had, not only did they had Tesla Optimus robots running around, but they had a whole thing where you could use Grok to put yourself, if you were attending the premiere, they had a whole station where you could make yourself in the

• 15:17Jason Calacanis?

  Very cool.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  On the grid from Tron using Grok. So I do feel like.

• 15:21Jason Calacanis?

  I got invited to the San Francisco premiere. Thanks to my friend, Jared Leto for inviting me. Sorry I couldn't make it.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Stars in the new film?

• 15:28Jason Calacanis?

  Stars in the film. I can't wait to see it. It looks pretty good, actually.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  It does look cool. I like that.

• 15:32Jason Calacanis?

  Very cool.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  That Nine Inch Nails soundtrack sounds good. All right. So.

• 15:35Jason Calacanis?

  I actually listened to the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack on my new, I get, I'm in love with the speaker brand KEF. It's not a sponsorship. I just like it. And I have CoBuzz. I talked about that. Not a sponsorship, Q O B U Z, where they have the high-res files. And I did the high-res Nine Inch Nails soundtrack on my new KEF portable speaker and it was delightful. Man, what a great soundtrack. I think it's gonna win awards. Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  It's cool.

• 16:00Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I think they understand like Blade Runner and Vangelis. You know, you can get like these really serious.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:07Jason Calacanis?

  Stars to do this kind of sci-fi music. Interstellar has a pretty epic one.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, like Johnny Greenwood from radio had started doing P T Anderson movies. He just did one battle after another. And Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor have been doing that. Yeah. Daft Punk did Tron Legacy. So yeah, it's happening more and more and they're, they're all.

• 16:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. It's a nice, it's a nice collaboration. Mark Knopfler did a, started doing a bunch of soundtracks in the eighties because he just had so much creative energy.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Oh, there's, there's, I'm blank. We'll talk about it later. There's an eighties movie that ends with a very memorable Mark Knopfler song and I'm just blanking on it right now.

• 16:41Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, it's probably A Local Hero is what you're thinking of.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  There you go. That's the one I was thinking of. Uh, all right.

• 16:45Jason Calacanis?

  Local Hero, great film.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  It is a great film. So OpenAI has actually introduced integrations of various apps inside ChatGPT, so you can interact. It's almost like the first level of agentic AI to come to ChatGPT. You can use ChatGPT to actually effect changes and do things in various connected apps. We're joined now by producer Oliver. He made a little demo video showcasing how some of these integrations work.

• 17:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right, producer Oliver graduates from high school in two years. Nice to see you. God, he looks so young on camera. What did you, what did you learn about the product? I tried to use it because I saw the demo you sent me, but it wasn't in my ChatGPT yet, GPT yet. So is it something you have to do?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  So the apps in ChatGPT is not available on work accounts, which is a problem that I faced. So I had to use it on my personal account. Then also you have to enable all the different connections.

• 17:39Jason Calacanis?

  You have to go into settings. Wait, why, why would they launch it? I guess I have my personal account here, but why would they launch it not to business users first and give it to the free users? It makes no sense. This is exactly what Google does. It's so dumb.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, Google does the same thing.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  It's also what they did with Sora. It's just what they did with Sora. They bypassed the paid level and they just started giving it to people with invites for free. No respect, no respect for the subscribers.

• 18:03Jason Calacanis?

  I get no respect for putting my credit card in. Okay, so show us how it works. Let's get to it. So what are we seeing here?

• 18:09Speaker 03

  So you're able to connect with the different applications, as I mentioned, Canva, Expedia, directly through ChatGPT, simply by using the at symbol, then typing that company name, and then it'll know that you're trying to use that app. So here I'm enabling the connections, connecting to Figma. You had to download your account and have it open kind of on your screen. So the first kind of example I did was Spotify. So I kind of had the example of some coworkers wanted a playlist from me. So I went into ChatGPT, said at ChatGPT, created a playlist for my coworker. They like these songs. I like these songs. I kind of wanted them to have some songs in the playlist they would relate to because sometimes, you know, people don't like a full new batch of songs.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  So I was able to prompt ChatGPT to create a playlist and it was able to create it in like 10 to 30 seconds. It was pretty quick. And then it had this playlist of um that I can bring, that I can open from ChatGPT directly into Spotify.

• 19:09Jason Calacanis?

  This is really interesting.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  I use the Spotify one too, and it's amazing. You can give it like three or four very granular instructions and it will follow. So I was like, find me the most popular songs that appeared originally on 90s movie soundtracks and don't include any other songs that I have on any other playlists. And like instantly, it followed all those instructions. So you can really like, start thinking layers deep about what kinds of music you want it to find and it'll find it for you. It's pretty cool.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, listen, we meet a lot of early-stage founders here at Launch, my investment company, and some, they don't have a lot of traction yet. They just have an idea. Maybe they haven't even finished their product. They've just got an MVP. But they still need investors and accelerators like ours to take them seriously. And you know what? We can't just wire money to your Gmail or your PayPal. That's not how it works, folks. We need to know that you're a legit and official business. We need to know your company is incorporated. That's why you need Northwest Registered Agent. It's the service that will help you run your business the right way from day one. In 10 clicks and in under 10 minutes, you're going to file for your LLC or a C-Corp if you're a startup, get a domain name, launch your official website, claim your business email,

• 20:27Jason Calacanis?

  and even fast-track your trademark application, which some people forget to do. We're talking about more than just company formation. This is your entire identity as a business. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist and show the world you're in business. And make sure you use that URL slash twist so they know that we sent you. I love this because one of my first use cases when using these LLMs was to say, hey, I'm a big fan of Mark Knopfler and what other artists would be similar. And it told me about this artist, Chris Ray. And then I got into Chris Ray and went down that rabbit hole and it never made that connection for me on Spotify. So they must have ingested all of this information or all the information on the web and then they've normalized it and you can take actions. So

• 21:12Jason Calacanis?

  it reminds me of the Comet browser where we'll take actions. It's actually after you authenticate with it. And this is what I showed in my No Schrakanis KPMG talk this year was Exactly. Hey, what if you could authenticate ChatGPT at the New York Times website or New York Times at the ChatGPT website? And here you're kind of doing the latter. You're authenticating your ChatGPT into other services and then you can interact with it in ChatGPT. And what will be very interesting is when you can do this across two different services. So if you said Yeah, exactly. Email, you could say you want to do this playlist and then you could say, please email it, make a Canva invite to a listening party and then email it to my friends and thread together three instructions. Yeah.

• 21:53Jason Calacanis?

  Just by having the at and just by at mentioning things in here. Really interesting. Good job by the team over at Spotify and

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I will say that Spotify was, I think, the best done integration. The other ones were impressive, but I think Spotify has a great UI. They have great recommendation algorithms already built into Spotify.

• 22:14Jason Calacanis?

  What's your next, what's your next one? Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. So here I have Canva. So I use Canva a lot. Canva has a lot of great tools. You have the different effects you can use, the different gradients you can bring in. So I had it create a poster for a DJ event called Another Kick Drum. And so I kind of gave it a little bit of a prompt and it, this is one that I thought was the best. You can see it's kind of, it's, it's okay. I ask it to make some gradients in the background and have like a retro house aesthetic. I didn't think it did a great job, but I think it was okay. But the great thing about that is you can actually open it directly into ChatGPT in Canva, then edit it from there. So it's kind of great in terms of the ideation stage where you can really get from zero to one and kind of get a lot of ideas and then kind of go and build on it yourself. So that's kind of where

• 22:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, or hand it off to a designer, right? So a lot of times The customer inside of an organization, you know, and on the sales department, the event production department, the HR department, they want to make something, they make a rough draft of it and then they send it to the designer. Well, here, you know, instead of writing a design brief, which would be all text and maybe linking to a, you know, a inspiration board, you're like making some versions and then sending it to the design team, but they can just start editing. Really great integration there as well. That's fascinating.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  And then one thing I loved about it actually was that when you open it in Canva, this is expected, but I think a great hard thing in Canva is finding like a great text font. So you were able to actually go into Canva and you can see it and knew what font that was. And then I was able to use that font or choose another one. So I think that was probably the, the best part of this integration.

• 23:49Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting comment from Bay Watson in our live YouTube room. If you're not on the live team, go to thisweekinstartups.com/youtube and it will subscribe you and you can put the bell on and you'll get a notification when we go live on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. And Bay comments liability. That's why I think they use the free accounts. Really interesting.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yes, that makes sense.

• 24:12Jason Calacanis?

  That people are paying for it. Yes. That's a really great insight.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I bet that, I bet that's correct. I bet that is right. Cause then it's like you're doing it as an individual. That's different from launch doing it. Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  And something that was interesting about the Canva ChatGPT integration is Canva was actually the only app that you couldn't use with the free plan. So I had to actually get ChatGPT plus in order to use the Canva integration. And they did say that this is because Canva needed deep research, which I guess makes sense because, you know, it's pulling together all these different fonts and images. So that was just another interesting note there.

• 24:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  All right. What's, what's this next one? Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we have Figma here. I haven't spent much time in Figma, but I know a lot of people love it. And some of the early examples that I saw on X and YouTube were people creating org charts. So I created an org chart for a big DJ event that I was referencing in the Canva video. And you can see you're able to open it up in Figma, similar to how you were able to in Canva as well.

• 25:06Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. Well done to our producer, Oliver. Nicely done, Oliver.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I used one more. I tried the Expedia one, that one I thought was a little disappointing, I'll be honest. It it it it has similar problems where it can't do the last step, you know, it's like, well, I found three great trips, but I can't book it for you. You should go to Expedia and do that. So I it doesn't have like as deep an integration as some of the other ones.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I will say last thing, the the Expedia and Booking.com is kind of the same problem where you're you can't get as far as you can in Spotify where you're able to like open it up or in Canva, you're able to open it up and kind of start, that's kind of a great end product there and that you can use. But in Booking.com, it kind of just gives you some options and you can't really go deeper. But I will say, some of the apps that are coming soon are Uber, OpenTable, DoorDash. So I'm really excited to see how those are able to integrate. Or you can be able to call Uber directly from your chat. So I think that moving forward, this is gonna, apps directly in the chat interfaces are gonna just make everyone spend more time in these chat interfaces. And I think it's pretty exciting. I'm excited to see how that goes.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Another question, oh, sorry, go ahead.

• 26:18Jason Calacanis?

  No, do the question.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say, we have another question from the notice. Sarah Freeman asks, what do you see as the impact to the need or sometimes potentially competitive advantage to company website UIs appearing versus just using the app in ChatGPT? So I think Sarah is asking like, is this always going to be a thing where we're going to go to Canva to finish working on our design? Or do you think one day soon, Canva will be fully integrated in ChatGPT and we'll just use it there?

• 26:48Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think, Oliver? You have a prediction?

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that

• 26:51Jason Calacanis?

  Master Oliver, yeah.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  I think that that's what OpenAI is leaning towards. In the Zillow integration, you could actually like go into Zillow and zoom in on different maps and even click on the property like you would in Zillow, go through the photos. So Zillow kind of had the most full UI in ChatGPT. So I think it will be possible. I think that you, I think that it might become strained in ChatGPT, might be strained having all of these different integrations. So I think that they We'll do that, but only for a few apps. I think that one thing that was interesting in their announcement is that they said that apps that meet the standards provided by our developer guidelines will be eligible to be listed.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  And this is the important part is that they said that the most, those that meet the higher design and functionality standards will be featured more prominently, both in the directory and in the conversations. So I think that there will be 10 to 15 apps that have a great UI and that will

• 27:52Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, they'll be, they'll wind up being. Yeah, there'll be thousands of these. It'll be exactly like the App Store and that's how they're modeling it. And this is like their second or third swing at the bat, doing these integrations. And there'll be a second way to do it, which is you'll be able to launch a browser and we do a thing here where one of our Athena assistants, if you want an Athena assistant, you want to use my discount code, go to athenawow.com and it'll give you like a month off. And I have two of them. And what's super interesting is I had my Athena assistant just tell me every week, hey, of our founders, what are they promoting on LinkedIn or on X? Just let me know what's going on in the portfolio on social media so I can engage with it.

• 28:36Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe I give people a retweet or I give them an at a boy, at a girl, reply, whatever it is. So this week I tried a test using the comment browser powered with Claude AI. And I put in 10 of those LinkedIn posts from people in Founder University or the Accelerator. And I said, open each of these pages, like the post, repost the post, visit the profile, find the follow button, hit follow, then try to find the connect button, which sometimes exists and sometimes doesn't exist, and then connect with them. And then create a report on what you did and which of the steps worked. And then go back and spot check three of the things I asked you to do and if they worked, and it did it.

• 29:20Jason Calacanis?

  Now, this was like a multi-step process and I was like, this is pretty interesting. And then I did one this morning, hey, go find me the top 100 private companies, find two sources, put it in a table, and then go to the twist500.com list and tell me what's missing. And it couldn't quite do that one, which I don't know if it's like its ability to scrape the twist 500 site and our navigation there, which it might be. But it did some, it did some of it. So I think there's going to be multiple ways to do this. And this is a big challenge for each of these brands, because now they have an intermediary who's intercepting them, which means they might charge them money.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:02Jason Calacanis?

  So that's going to be the business model here. For the free accounts, when you're just going to say, I want travel results, and it's going to default to Expedia or whoever pays the highest price. And it's going to be like, yeah, our partner Expedia, boom, here it is.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:14Jason Calacanis?

  And you're going to have to explicitly say, no, I don't want Expedia. I want to go directly to the United website, which the browser will do. But really interesting progress here. We're starting to see the applications and the proof of concepts turn into actual functioning products that save you time and delight you. Great job, Oliver. Come back next week with another demo, okay?

• 30:42Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:25Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:47Speaker 01

  I, one other thing I think that's interesting on Spotify. They tried to make their own AI, like they have that AI DJ. But it doesn't really work that great. The ChatGPT plugin for Spotify is so much more powerful already than Spotify's native UI. I think, or native AI. I think that's what we're seeing is like, all these companies were like, oh, we're going to just make our own AI. It's a little harder than maybe they thought. OpenAI.

• 32:12Jason Calacanis?

  This becomes a distribution channel, so it's worth it for anybody with a product to create this. And then it's also worth it for them to make their own mobile app in this example, to make their, and to incorporate other LLMs as their default at their websites. You're going to have tons of open sources. Another company here in the United States, which just announced a big round and they're just doing open source like DeepSeek in China. So we're starting to see open source LLMs come to America and funded companies doing that. You know, I, I think the functionality we're seeing today is going to be easily done by an open source, free LLM, running on your local computer or phone.

• 32:55Jason Calacanis?

  So eventually it's not like ChatGPT will be giving you this functionality because they have a billion users. Or XAI will have a half billion users or two billion users, wherever it winds up. So they'll be like distribution partners, but I think all of this functionality is quickly commoditized. It used to be United just didn't know how to make a, you know, a website. Or, you know, Walmart and Target might make an app. Or United might make an app, but they were kluge and so people would just go to Amazon now. I go to a local restaurant or a local coffee shop and like they have their order ahead app. McDonald's has a great app. Starbucks has a great app. You just, it's gotten easier to make this stuff. And so the same thing will happen with AI.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Do you want to talk about Reflection AI, the open source American AI company? What a beautiful segue you laid out.

• 33:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's do it. Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  They're on the docket. So the question is, can the US really compete with China on open source AI? The American AI company Reflection AI, they hope to answer this question. They raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation. That's a massive 15x jump from the $545 million valuation they clocked just seven months ago. That's according to TechCrunch. The company was founded in March 2024 by former Google staffers, including Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for DeepMind's Gemini project, and Iyanis Antonoglu, who co-created AlphaGo. So they are very similar to what DeepSeek's doing. They're building open source AI models. They're trying to make them sort of faster and more efficient than some of the big behemoth

• 34:29Speaker 01

  models that we've been seeing from OpenAI, XAI, and Anthropic. So the, here's the quote, why, what they're trying to do differently. "The frontier is currently concentrated in closed labs. If this continues, a handful of entities will control the capital, compute, and talent required to build AI, creating a runaway dynamic that locks everyone else out." So this is their sort of attempt to respond to that. And of course, with Chinese, we got a lot of very popular Chinese open source models, but they pose a lot of security risks for the West. Am I sending my company's data to the CCP or other bad actors in China and so forth? But there is still lingering concern that China is going to develop the

• 35:10Speaker 01

  most used AI models if everybody decides open source instead of closed source is the future. So this is sort of a hopeful attempt to remain competitive on that level. We had AI czar David Sacks, friend of the show.

• 35:26Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I know him.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Friend of, yeah, friend of Jason.

• 35:27Jason Calacanis?

  I've met him.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've met him a few times. So he has actually chimed in on this. I will screen share it with us presently so we can take a look.

• 35:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I see it here. It's great to see more American open source AI models. A meaningful segment of the global market will prefer the cost, customizability, and control of the open source. That open source offers. That open source offers, we want the US to win this category two. So you notice the word two at the end. You know, David is in a unique position because, well, he's got a lot of friends and partners in the industry. His previous firm had a bunch of investments he had to divest from. And so he's doing a really good job here of, you know, playing the statesman correctly and saying, I'm not picking winners. I want to see many winners in the US, a vibrant ecosystem and really a lot of investment and a lot of competition.

• 36:17Jason Calacanis?

  He's done an A plus job, David, in his position. And it's not an easy position to be in because, you know, you've got a global competition going on here. We have a unique administration that has many different factions. It's got many different factions inside of it, you know? And you got, you got a leader who is involved, has got that main character energy. He wants to be involved in anything. I gotta say, you know, Saks has a, anybody working in the Trump administration, 45 or 47, it's challenging. He's a polarizing guy and, you know, that, it is what it is. But he's done a really good job of sticking to his lane, sticking to his knitting, staying in his lane and really focusing on what matters. And what matters in terms of his role there is getting that government the heck out of

• 37:01Jason Calacanis?

  the way so that there is a vibrant competition. Reflection AI, I would love to have him on the program. Let's, let's book the CEO here. But I'm rooting for them because the original mission of OpenAI was to be open source. And I hope they make a model that really challenges the closed source models and the expensive models and drives price down. And they'll make a great business having, I'm sure their business model will be, just like WordPress, hey, we got this open source project here or MySQL, we got open source project here, but we have a for-profit, you know, so there's a .org and a .com. Right. The .com, wordpress.com, you pay for hosting, but wordpress.com has to deal with WP Engine, which, you know, some people prefer over wordpress.com hosting.

• 37:44Jason Calacanis?

  You know, so you, when you open source this stuff, you, you create a bunch of competitors if it works. So Reflection AI will inspire a bunch of people to create hosted versions of their product, including AWS, including Google Cloud.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  But this is what we want to see. We want to see free versions, and this is great for startups most of all.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:05Jason Calacanis?

  Because startups are going to move faster, they're going to fork this thing, they're going to make unique contributions to it. And, you know, open source almost always wins, unless there's a network effect. And so I think, you know, the question here is, will the network effect of XAI plus, you know, the massive Colossus data center and

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:26Jason Calacanis?

  the Twitter data, now X.com data, will OpenAI with their Sora proprietary data now, which I think that's what that is, it's a, it's a, it's a play to get proprietary data, you know, and their network of partners, will that give them enough to win over developers? Or would developers say, you know what, I just don't want to invest in, you know, this category? So you see this all the time. People have a choice. Should I use an open source version of Slack? And you know what? The network effect of Slack and the feature set and the cost is below, you know, the hardship that, you know, running an open source Slack does.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:03Jason Calacanis?

  But for databases and servers, people go all open source because they, they think that they're more secure, more stable, and more scalable.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, it goes back to the commodification of LLMs that we've talked about so many times, how they're, they're the product right now, but one day soon, they could be the layer upon which the exciting products are being built. Alex, before he got sick, he did leave us one question for you here in this story. How do you think Reflection AI is going to make money from these open models? They can't really just do the normal

• 39:35Jason Calacanis?

  Hosting.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  open source playbook of, oh, so hosting their code for others to use?

• 39:39Jason Calacanis?

  Hosting it. Yeah. So, you know, just like WordPress, like you could literally take the WordPress code, put up a server and do all that. But if you want the latest version, you want faster servers, you want somebody doing the security and the operations and upgrading it and installing the patches, you just go with the hosted version. And the cost of you managing your own reflection AI servers, if you're doing something small to midsize, is greater than having the reflection AI team hosted. Now, if you're a giant company, if you're Amazon and you decide, or you're Walmart, and Walmart decides, hey, we want to have reflection AI doing stuff internally

• 40:21Jason Calacanis?

  or doing stuff on our website, yeah, then you'll stand up your own server cluster and manage it yourself because you have a tech team.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Right. Fair enough. All right. We got, we got a pressing question from Reddit. You want to field this one?

• 40:33Jason Calacanis?

  I love a good Reddit rapid response.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  We love a good Reddit rapid response. So here's the query. It's from r/startups, where we spend so much time. Dear Needleworker359 writes, should I recruit locally or go fully remote? I'm in the early stages of building a startup and trying to figure out how much in-person collaboration really matters. Now, part of me loves the idea of having a team close, being able to grab coffee, brainstorm in person, do something like a Christmas get together and build real camaraderie. I feel like those small in-person moments help shape culture early on, but the other part of me knows that by going remote, I could tap into a much larger talent pool, maybe find stronger technical talent than what's immediately nearby. So to those of you who've built early teams, they want to know, did being local make a huge difference? Is it more about finding the right people

• 41:21Speaker 01

  wherever they are? And if you do go remote, how do you keep a sense of connection and shared culture?

• 41:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, the companies that are in office and, you know, will have, companies in office will have better product velocity, better cultures, they'll move faster because they'll be finishing each other's sentences, they'll be out whiteboards together. It's just really high bandwidth when you're in the same room. And it turns out, I would say, about half of people who are working remote are phoning it in, are doing less, they're, you know, they're just not as efficient. And you don't have mentorship either. And then I would say the top 20% are more effective working from home because you

• 42:08Jason Calacanis?

  take out a commute and you maybe get a discount on salaries because you're shipping the work to a lower cost place. And you have that advantage as the person kind of notes that you're tapping the global workforce. But I'll give you one important thing. And then I would say maybe 30% of people in my experience, this is my lived experience, are as effective in the office or remote. So I've decided to go back to in person. We now have, when I had my management meeting the other day, I think we had 11 people in the office and

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's 11. It's 11 when we fill up that room with our management meeting. Yeah.

• 42:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And then maybe nine remote, I think is the total now.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds about right. 20 person organization and a little more than half are here.

• 42:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And I'm not going to hire more remote if I can avoid it. And I'll continue moving people who are remote back to in office if they're not, you know, the highest level of performers. So that's the way I've managed the transition. But I will tell you, VCs, if they see your five or 10 people in an office and 100% in person, they will fund your company at twice the rate of remote teams. VCs have seen this up close and personal. The in-person teams move faster, have better product velocity, have better cultures, more excitement. And they just go further faster. If you want to raise money.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  You have a personal stake. When you show up every day, you have a personal stake in the product, in the company, in the team. You are motivated to see it succeed. When you're at home, I did, I worked from home for five years and you get disconnected. You're doing your work and then you're sending it out into the void and you don't ever see what happens to it. And I feel like that disconnects you from the goal. You're not goal oriented anymore because you're just like, well, I got to get today's stuff done and then I'm done. I can watch TV. And I feel like being here makes me more focused on what we're actually doing.

• 44:05Jason Calacanis?

  I'll be totally honest, like, I think people get depressed working from home and being socially isolated. And I think young people can't be mentored remotely. So who can you have remote? I got a guy, Matt, who works for me and is an incredible salesperson. He likes to ski. This guy is a killer. Just top three sales executive I've worked with and I've worked with hundreds. Love working with them. And I told him, I don't care where you want to work. I don't care how you want to work. Put up numbers like you're putting up. You can be difficult. You could be easy to work with. You could be, I don't care if you're selling stuff from the, he likes to ski like me. I don't care if you're selling

• 44:45Jason Calacanis?

  from the ski lift. Put those numbers up. Now, for everybody else, young people, no, no, sorry. Now, I do have some high performers because we were remote during COVID and I just said, hey, you're grandfathered in. If you're in the top third of performers, I'll make another note. If you are a young individual, you want to be as close to the CEO as possible, the founders, as close as you can get to power, you want to be. Why? You want them to notice you. You want them to, you want to impress them so you can have career advancement. You can't do that remote. It's hard to do remote. You're just a cog in the wheel of your remote and that is a two-way street. I think you kind of alluded to this because you're not invested in the company,

• 45:26Jason Calacanis?

  which means the company can move on from you at any time. And yeah, there's no, like, no, no problem. Yeah, you're not part of the culture anyway. We can just move on.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  I think it goes both ways. Yeah, absolutely.

• 45:37Jason Calacanis?

  And the person can be like,

• 45:38Speaker 01

  that's just work arriving every day and nobody knows where it came from. It's like, okay, that got done, but there's no face behind it. It does, it definitely is a two-way street.

• 45:46Jason Calacanis?

  And, and, you know, I gotta say, I started, you know, really investing in young people coming out of college. Why did I do that? I found a lot of the people who were more senior in venture capital had developed bad habits. One of those bad habits is never being in an office. One of those bad habits is working four hours a day and just not being hard driving. I found if, you know, if I hire folks right out of school and put them in a training program, like you just saw, producer Oliver come on here and do a great job, that because I am willing to invest in two things, professional development on the venture side, but also executive training, which you run here at the company, along with Jackie, in person, every morning at 9:00 AM,

• 46:31Jason Calacanis?

  the new people at the company go to executive training at the end of the day at 6:00 PM. They report back and they do another 15 minutes of executive training at the end of the day. Maybe unpack how that's worked for the four individuals we have in executive training here.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  I think it's great. I think it forces you to think more strategically about your day. I think that for a lot of people, it, you know, when work starts piling up, you've got a lot to do. It just becomes like a thoughtless, like I'm just going to start taking stuff from the top of the pile and jamming my way through it. And I think that what we sort of talk about so much in executive training is like looking at your entire day holistically and try to figure out where you can save time, where you can prioritize, and just kind of taking it up that one level. I feel like that's what we spend the most time on is like, well, I was going to take this two-hour chunk and do this, and then do this, and then do this, and it's all kind of haphazard. And it's like, well, how about really thinking about it in terms of the flow of your day? When does this need to get done? When does this need to get done?

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Could you do part of this and then move part of it to the next day? And just, just like being a little bit more strategic about that and your approach and time management and thinking about time management and planning ahead like, well, what if that takes me an extra hour? What would I not get done and push to tomorrow? And like, I feel like that is new for a lot of people who have not had a high-pressure job.

• 47:50Jason Calacanis?

  Executive function is something that's just, yeah, executive function is just not taught anywhere anymore.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:57Jason Calacanis?

  And this is going to be the big problem of the next decade.

• 48:02Jason Calacanis?

  If you come into the workforce and AI, as we just saw, is able to make a kick-ass playlist or an invite to a party, you know, it's going to be able to do a corporate event and it's going to be able to make a list of partners who, and sales, potential sales partners, and those were the entry-rung jobs. So all the entry-rung jobs, all the first jobs are going to be done by AI. This is why we're seeing a massive gap amongst young people, even with computer science degrees, getting jobs right now. It's going to expand, folks. I would predict we'll be sitting here next year and the number of young people unable to find jobs is going to go up at least 50%. That's a

• 48:46Jason Calacanis?

  big number. Like, if it's 6, 7, 8% right now, I think it's going to 10, 15.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  It's scary on-

• 48:51Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to take over the dialogue.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  It's scary on a few levels, because then it's like, well, if you don't have those entry-level people anymore, where does the next generation of that industry come from? And how do we train tomorrow's leaders if we don't have those entry-level jobs? I'll tell you, the one other thing we go over a lot in management training, and this is, as an older person in the workforce, you're probably with me on being frustrated by this. I feel like in schools, it is not results-focused. It's like, how far did you get? Well, you did your best. Well, like, this is three quarters of the way done. And so I feel like when you get a lot of young people in a business situation, there's a lot of like, well, I did it until I ran into this problem. And then-

• 49:27Jason Calacanis?

  So completion of the task is an issue.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Not just letting an obstacle be like, well, I have to stop, and then I'll go to my boss and say, there's a problem. It's like, well, what can we do to move that boulder out of the way? Like, could we go around it? Could we go over it? Could we smash it? And it's like, just training people to like, don't just throw your hands up when one thing goes wrong. Like, think about how you could solve it without having to bother another person and take them away from what they're doing.

• 49:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  And I think that is a skill that we do not teach young people, and then their bosses has to teach them when they're in their twenties.

• 50:01Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I had this happen domestically as well. You know, you own a couple of homes, and all of a sudden, estate management and managing properties becomes an issue, and the dishwasher's not working. It's given a code 37, and then people are like, yeah, the dishes aren't working. I've done the dishes by hand for three days. And I'm like, okay. And I put an iPad in the kitchen, and I just said, you know, go to YouTube. I showed them how to use VoiceOver. And I said, I'm getting an Era 17 code on my, you know, whatever dishwasher, GM dishwasher. What does it mean, and how do I resolve it? Find me videos in a summary. And I taught them how to use ChatGPT. I taught them how to use YouTube. And now people are just empowered. Here we go. And so this is actually, you know,

• 50:43Jason Calacanis?

  hitting everything from literally a housekeeper to a nanny. Hey, what are some things I can do on a ranch with kids on a rainy day? And it's like, oh, okay. Well, you can do a rain hike. Oh, you could do some look under rocks for insects and then make a catalog of them. So it's like all kinds of interesting things you can do, but you might not have been exposed to it. And this is, uh, yeah, great. So anyway, great job to you and Jackie on doing the executive training. All of my friends now are like, please take my child. I'll pay you.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  To executive train them?

• 51:14Jason Calacanis?

  I'll, I'll literally pay you to employ my child. So literally I could make a fortune right now, just telling my friends, pay me $50,000 a year and I will turn your kid into a venture capital. And I don't do that. I pay them a salary. But that's where it's going to come from. And that would be a paid apprenticeship. I think paid apprenticeship should come back.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  We keep talking about trade schools, but this is almost like the next, like, if you want to be an executive, there isn't a trade school for that specifically. There's business school. But like, that's almost where you're talking about a hybrid. It's business school, but as a trade school just teaches you how to do the job of being an executive. That's interesting.

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  What are people spending on college on average now? 40, 50, 60,000 a year?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's crazy.

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  You know, if you said to me, uh, listen, um, you know, your daughter wants to, uh, work in, uh, you know, fashion and you said, I have a fashion internship, uh, not an internship, a fashion apprenticeship and it's $30,000 a year. You pay for it and your kid does not get paid. I'd be like, $30,000 a year is half the price of FIT. I'll take that. I would rather them be in your place. So I think this could be an unlock. Now, obviously you got to give scholarships, then everybody can afford the 30,000 or whatever. But this model of apprenticeship, I think could change everything. And I don't need the money to do it, but I do think that this should exist in the world.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:40Jason Calacanis?

  It should exist in some way in the world.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  FITM, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in LA. Uh, if one academic year, 35K for an undergrad, 44K for a grad student. So that over two, three years, that's a lot of money. Imagine if you could just get an internship or an apprenticeship at a fashion company or a design company and just start working.

• 53:01Jason Calacanis?

  We have actually a startup in our portfolio. It's really clever. It's called extern.com. And you can do these externships.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Oh, very clever.

• 53:09Jason Calacanis?

  So you can, from home, go through some courses and get to work at great companies. And the companies are, you know, pretty interesting companies. And so extern provides you with fully managed project teams to accelerate strategic projects. So that's their pitch to the companies. And the pitch to the students is obviously pretty clear. Invest in your career, build real experience, work on remote projects to get real professional experience and start and stand out in the job market. So appreciate it if anybody goes and checks out extern.com and, you know, give me some feedback on how it goes for you. But really, I love the founder of this company. It's just a great company. And I just think education and like, anytime you have a problem in society, you create

• 53:53Jason Calacanis?

  an opportunity for entrepreneurs to solve it. Because you know the government's not going to solve it. If the government gets involved, it's just going to be a disaster.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  How dare you?

• 54:00Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, these guys can't even keep the airports safe. I'm no offense. I'm just saying, you know, like, I know people are under stress at the airports and everything like this, but I just, the government just doesn't know how to get stuff done.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  We fired everybody from the post offices. The post office is a nightmare now. I had to go there the other day.

• 54:17Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, the post office has always been a nightmare. Come on. I mean, no offense to post office delivery people, but that thing's gotta go. I don't think I've ever gotten more hate than my, shut the post office down or change it. But I said, in any major city, here's what I want you to do. I want you to make it $10 a year to get postal mail. And then I want you to make it $10 a month to opt out of postal mail and have the mail sent to one of these scanning in companies. Literally, I would pay $100 a year to not get postal mail, to opt out of it.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  It's 90% crap.

• 54:48Jason Calacanis?

  And have it all scanned in for me. Yeah. And they should literally double the price. No, they should 10x the price of people sending these goddamn catalogs. It's ridiculous. And if you made it once a week, like if you told me I could pay $10 a month instead of getting it every day to get it twice a month, I would do it. Like if they scan it all in, they just, you know, and take out all the flyers, they should really professionalize. And the only people who really needed Are people who are in remote locations that UPS, Amazon drivers like can't get to? And then you might have some price gouging, whatever, but there's nobody in a modern city who needs it. So why don't you make it like, if you come pick up your mail from the post office, we'll, we'll pay you $10 a month, right? You get a gift card or something. There, there's something better to do here. And then you could take all those post offices,

• 55:32Jason Calacanis?

  which are great real estate typically, and use them for something else. My pitch was to make them nursery schools and then let everybody have nursery drop up. If you-

• 55:41Speaker 01

  We need more childcare for sure.

• 55:43Jason Calacanis?

  If you just said to the average, if you said to Americans, get your mail once a month for free, twice a week for 10 bucks a month. And we now have a universal nursery school. You can go anytime you want. And for 10 bucks an hour have, you know, but 10 bucks an hour. And maybe people under a certain dollar amount get, I don't know, $5 an hour or 10 hours a month free. And we'll just take all the post offices and make a childcare. And you just can drop off anytime and it's cameras in there. It's-

• 56:13Speaker 01

  The mail carriers are watch your kids. They, they, we got a new, they don't have to lose their jobs. We flip them right into the new business.

• 56:20Jason Calacanis?

  There aren't that many of them. So you could literally give them a great ramp off point. And you could say to Amazon, UPS and everybody else, hey, we want you to hire these people and respect their pensions or whatever. And you can basically bid to get those people over into your job. So here we go. And it's going to happen anyway, folks. Like, I mean, the Amazon same day delivery in Austin is absurd.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Oh my God, it's crazy. You-

• 56:46Jason Calacanis?

  I'm like, no, no, too fast.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Like sometimes I leave my house and like the thing I ordered is already there. Like I haven't even, I didn't even seem possible that it would be there yet. Like within an hour-

• 56:58Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know how they're doing.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  No, I don't, it's crazy.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  Literally like you order it and they're like, okay, house 4 to 8pm. And you're like, ma'am, it's 2pm.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I-

• 57:07Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not going to be home till then. I literally will order something at the office.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't even need it yet. Yeah, that is-

• 57:12Jason Calacanis?

  And then with the drones coming, it's going to be nuts. I mean, it's literally going to be like you. And did you see this other feature? Speaking of UX and great features? A lot of times now, when I order something on Amazon, when I open the Amazon app an hour later, it's like, add to your existing order coming at this time, and you click it, and it's like double DoorDash, or whatever they call it, Double Dash, or whatever.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:33Jason Calacanis?

  And it's like, oh, they're packing your stuff up, and then it gives you a list of things that you could add to it that are, I guess, in that depot or that facility.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Right, that are close by.

• 57:43Jason Calacanis?

  So it's not the frustrating things that you can't get.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. They also, I have an Amazon Fire TV now, and it pops up a message on my TV when my package arrives. That's crazy. So if I'm watching TV, it's like, Lon, your shorts are here. Like, that's wild. That's the future.

• 57:59Jason Calacanis?

  Right, and so you're buck watching whatever you're watching, and you need to put on a pair of shorts.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  I had another pair of shorts on. I'm not naked watching TV.

• 58:05Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know what's going on here.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  My new pair of shorts arrived. Anyway.

• 58:08Jason Calacanis?

  You look good on the show, but your wardrobe, otherwise, I mean, I just, we talked about this on the show before, I'm, I know what I'm getting you for your Christmas bonus. I'm sending you to a haberdasher.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  All right.

• 58:19Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna class you up.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Another, another stop-at-suit supply for me. Speaking of, speaking of great companies that we love that look great, Ro.co, we should talk about these guys. If you've been a longtime Twist fan, you've heard us talk about them. Jason, let us know about Ro.co.

• 58:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, as you know, I was a fat bastard, and people didn't mock me enough. Some people did. Some people took screenshots of me being fat and dunked on me. Like, you're a fat Greek. And I'm like, fair enough, I am a fat Greek, and I used to be thin, I used to run marathons, and then I would share pictures, and people would be like, well, what happened? And I'd say, you know, I really don't know, it kind of got away from me. Every year, I added two pounds, and, I don't know, 20 years later, from my 30s to my 50s, I was 213 pounds. I heard Kevin Rose talk about Ozempic when he's talking to my friend. Timmy's podcast.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Oh, Tim Ferriss?

• 59:13Jason Calacanis?

  Tim Ferriss's podcast, yeah. So, I was drawing a blank, I was like, was he on Lex, or was he on Tim? No, it was on Tim Ferriss, they were doing their random show they do. So anyway, I get on the GLP train, and I never realized how much food noise. I was thinking about food all the time. I start taking GLPs, I start losing a pound a week, a half pound a week. Anyway, here, three, four years later, and I lost 40 pounds. And I didn't talk about it at first, because I don't know the science, etc. I don't want to be promoting stuff, I'm not sure exactly how it works. Well, I've done my research, the research has started to come out, tens of millions of people are benefiting from this, and so, I created a partnership with my friends at Ro.co. It's a great company. You know, ro.co. Maybe you get rose sparks. Maybe, you know, hey, it is what it is, folks. Maybe you gotta get, you're taking the propecia, keep your hair.

• 59:56Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe you're got some other situations, but I'm gonna talk to you about one situation, which is FDA-approved weight loss options. And you can do it with your insurance or without your insurance. They have great prices and no shame in the GLP-1 game. Check it out, folks. See if it's for you at ro.co. I love ro.co. I love being svelte. Lon, you know how many problems went away? My sciatica, my back pain, shoulder pain, all of it gone. I went from skiing two or three hours a day during the ski season and all kinds of pain. I would get off the mountain and I needed to stretch. I needed to hit the hot tub. I mean, I'm popping Motrins like they're M&Ms. Now, I go off to ski mountain, I have a little chili, sour

• 1:00:39Jason Calacanis?

  cream, a little cheddar cheese. You know what I do? Go back out on the mountain for another hour. I don't feel any pain. My pain went away, when the weight went away, to the point at which now I had a 35-pound weight vest and I hike around and I ruck around my ranch. ro.co. Anyway, I'm very passionate about it.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, losing all that weight, you're carrying all that extra weight around with you. It is taxing on your body. Let's move on. We gotta talk about Figure. Figure showed off their third-generation robot, the Figure O3. The robotic company recently raised $1 billion in new funding, partially on the strength of this robot. O3 has a completely redesigned sensory suite and hand system. It features better human-robot interaction.

• 1:01:24Jason Calacanis?

  Show me.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  An improved audio system. Let's see if I can find the...

• 1:01:29Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, come on. A video is worth a billion words.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Do I have a Figure video, guys?

• 1:01:34Jason Calacanis?

  There is a video of it. They shared a video.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  I know there is a Figure O3 video. I just don't know if I have it here, but I'm going to pull it up for us right now.

• 1:01:40Jason Calacanis?

  No problem. And just so people know, there was, while you get it ready here, I'll just fill people in on the fact that we've discussed this a couple of times. They raised that billion at a $39 billion valuation. You do that, you're gonna get a lot of criticism. Why? People are jealous and people get concerned about sky-high valuations and the VCs. Felt like, oh, all these SPVs and, you know, dentists and whatever, direct investors are loading into this company at this crazy valuation. They don't even have a customer yet. There was a little controversy. Is BMW a customer or not? Looks like BMW is in fact using them in production. They've they shared a video of that.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  That was still a little controversial, that video. A lot of people are arguing an arm would have been better for that job than the whole robot. Or what's the robot really doing? So there is still a lot of back and forth, even after they.

• 1:02:27Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, there always is. There always is with new technology. But this thing looks great. It's stunning looking. And of course, the fixed robot's going to work better for tighter tasks. But it will ultimately not have the flexibility of going around the world. What I like about this new figure one is it has inductive charging at the feet. Somebody took a screenshot of the foot and, you know, these things are probably a couple of years away from being in your home, doing productive stuff. And they, the world is made for, you know, the world we created as humans is made for the human form, like our shelving and et cetera.

• 1:03:03Jason Calacanis?

  And what you're seeing here is this thing is, they show it here, you know, bringing food out to the table, washing dishes, putting out water glasses.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  It's the very classic robot butler. I mean, this is exactly what you'd think of if you had like a robot maid, a robot butler. It's cooking for them. It's cleaning the house. It's bringing them stuff. It's playing with the dog here. You know, I don't know. I mean, I gotta be honest, it's hard for me to imagine that everybody is going to have like a five foot tall humanoid, faceless robot in their house. Like, I absolutely, will these things be in every factory? Will these things be on construction works? Like, of course, you don't have to sell me on that. But I don't know. It's hard for me to imagine going to a person's house and like, the robot brings you a lovely snack. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.

• 1:03:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you're right in the short term, wrong in the midterm, too long term. These things are going to, you know, just like it was crazy to think people would have a doorbell that rang your phone. People thought it would be crazy to have. Lane assist or adaptive cruise control and then all of a sudden they have FSD. I can tell you I've been having a pretty good experience with FSD. You know, I'd say three out of four rides are flawless. So we're on the cusp of something really interesting here. The robots and the dexterity and everything, that has existed for a while. It's existed kind of for five or 10 years. We started seeing Boston Robotics doing backflips 10 years ago. What's happening here that's unique is the LLM is interpreting the world and letting it know what to do.

• 1:04:37Jason Calacanis?

  So if you were to give it the command, hey, tidy up the house, it would be like, okay, tidy up the house. What does that mean in the in the sense of the kitchen? In the kitchen, it means putting all the dishes in the dishwasher or washing them. It's going to, just like we saw ChatGPT handle the Spotify playlist. Each verticalization is going to be done, you know, like every six to 12 months. And then you'll see the fluidity of how it works. I've been driving autopilot and FSD for over a decade and I've watched it go from being absolutely flawless on the highway, but kind of scary on the streets to being absolutely flawless 98% of the time, I'd say. 97% of the time, something in that range.

• 1:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  And so, you know, here we are, folks. It's going to work. And I would love to just even have one of these just to do security patrols around the ranch. I mean, I would literally get one of these to just walk around the ranch and, you know, put out bird seed and all that.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  But one clear advancement that I think you can tell is the early days of these robots, the the commentary was always like, any individual thing you wanted to pick up or move, you had to like teach it about that object in particular, like how how to actually pick something up, how heavy it's going to be, how to hold it so it doesn't fall. And you could see that the AI that's working in this robot, it it understands the difference between like a cabinet and a drawer. It understands you have to lift a dish differently than you'd lift, you know, like another kind of flat object or smaller object. Or here we can see it putting a Tide Pod into the washing machine, which is like a fairly delicate sort of maneuver. So I feel like we've definitely.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Definitely seen a lot of advancement there like it can figure out how to fold a towel as opposed to pick up a heavy object and move it which is without being trained on each specific object.

• 1:06:30Jason Calacanis?

  You know, and the way it does that is familiar objects, it puts it into a queue for you. So if you have any of the modern home security cameras, there is this process of it will give you a queue of people's faces and say, who is this? And you say, oh, that's Jason. Oh, that's Lon. And then in the future, when you get a notification, it says Lon's at the office.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:53Jason Calacanis?

  Jason's at the back door. Lon's at the front door. Jason entered, you know, the parking lot. And so you would be surprised at how fast this is. If it was trying to figure out your house, it could make a queue of every item it sees. And it would say, you know, here's, you know, I don't know. Here's, you know, this portable speaker. And you say, where does it belong? And you say, it belongs in the dresser, you know, in the side table in my master suite. Boom. Or my primary, I can't say master suite anymore, in the primary.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Jason Calacanis?

  Please don't cancel me. I'm gonna be, I'm like an old dog.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  I think you could still say master suite.

• 1:07:30Jason Calacanis?

  I know.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  I don't think people would get that upset.

• 1:07:31Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no, no. In California, I said it like multiple times, looking at houses. And I kid you not, I got admonished twice.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:07:40Jason Calacanis?

  People are like, you can't call it the master anymore because that is slavery and you have to call it.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Master slave, right. Yes, yes.

• 1:07:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's just like, okay. I'm sorry. It was not the intent here. I was not doing a callback to, yeah, the civil war. But anyway, it's gonna be pretty easy to train these things. Great show, Lon. Everybody will see you on Monday on This Week in Startups. Go to thisweekinstartups.com/youtube and it will give you this subscription button so you can subscribe there. Go to thisweekinstartups.com/tiktok or go to thisweekinstartups.com apple. And

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Give us a review. Write a review.

• 1:08:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Write a review on Apple and we will shout you out on the show. We're going to append the great reviews and comments. So I think you can comment on YouTube. You can comment on Spotify now and you can do reviews on Spotify and you can do reviews on Apple. I mean, if you can afford it, if you got a couple of extra stars laying around, your boy Jake out would appreciate it and I'll give you the shout out on the show. Talk to you soon, folks. Bye bye.