KPop Demon Hunters breaks records, Grok speeds up, and an AI-powered browser deep dive | E2171

Today's show: *"KPop Demon Hunters" is one of the year's biggest smashes… AFTER Sony sold it off to Netflix for cheap! Hear about what went wrong with one of the year's worst deals… PLUS Grok is counting on SPEED to help it outpace rivals… How Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) ran into trouble on the podcast circuit… Nvidia's big earnings report, and why everyone is watching that company in particular SO closely… PLUS a new Polymarket predicting the future of OpenAI! Timestamps: (0:00) How Sony missed out on "Kpop Demon Hunters" (10:15) . TECH: Say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today. (11:20) Show continues… (13:59) Why some politicians struggle so much on podcasts (19:30) AWS Activate - AWS Activate helps startups bring their ideas to life. Apply to AWS Activate today to learn more. Visit aws.amazon.com/startups/credits (20:53) Show continues… (30:24) 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 (31:37) Grok is relying on SPEED to outpace rivals… and it's working (41:23) Are AI companies playing a mega-budget game of chicken? (42:31) Why everyone's watching Nvidia's earnings so closely (47:50) Jason says he'll NEVER go back to a non-AI browser (53:32) Polymarket: Is OpenAI going to release their own browser? 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: (10:15) . TECH: Say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today. (19:30) AWS Activate - AWS Activate helps startups bring their ideas to life. Apply to AWS Activate today to learn more. Visit aws.amazon.com/startups/credits (30:24) 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 Ready to level up your AI collaborations? Head to www.claude.ai/twist You can't do everything we're doing without a paid plan… But TWiST listeners get 50% off their first three months of Claude Pro. Just go to Claude dot AI Slash TWiST to get started. 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 Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  What's interesting about this is we're now starting to see a couple of different cohorts. You got the non-MAG7, I'll call native, models, OpenAI, XAI, Anthropic. Then you got the MAC7, in some cases, pursuing models. I understand Amazon has a model now. Apple was doing something in vision and images. This is Microsoft, obviously. We know Gemini doing very well at Alphabet. And then Meta has Llama. The Llama. Yeah. And then you got the Chinese companies coming in with DeepSeek and Moonshot, Baidu. And I guess the question is, we're now in a game of chicken.

• 0:40Jason Calacanis?

  With these companies, who can keep building data centers, keep raising money, and then race towards the cliff, hoping that the cliff turns into a bridge, with the bridge being revenue and customers willing to take out their wallets and give $20 to $200 a month, you know, $250 a year to $2,000 a year to use these platforms?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  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. AWS Activate. AWS Activate helps startups bring their ideas to life. As you build and scale your business, Activate credits grow with you to support your changing needs. Apply to AWS Activate today and receive up to $100,000 in credits. Visit aws.amazon.com/startups/credits. And .tech. Say it without saying it.

• 1:52Speaker 01

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

• 1:59Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. We do the show Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And with me again, my co-host, Alex Wilhelm. How are you doing, brother? I'm doing fantastic. Great. Happy Friday. Ed, the editorial director at my investment firm Launch and my media company, This Week in Startups, Juan Harris.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Hey, hey.

• 2:22Jason Calacanis?

  We've got a big docket here, big docket energy. And I know we've been working on twist bets. And we now have all the wagers starting to come up. You can pull that page up and we'll see where these things wind up. But we have the unemployment rate bet. That's going to come due at some point. And oh, wow, that's we have to make sure we have this bet cleared. Below 5% 5.5% in six and 12 months. So we made two bets. Ah, got it.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was going back to the transcript. And it turns out when you and I banter about a bet, sometimes it's slightly hard to figure out exactly what we were wagering on. So I'm trying to make it as fair as possible to everyone involved with these discreet wagers.

• 3:05Jason Calacanis?

  Confirming the bet, because I've been involved in a lot of these side bets and like my poker groups, etc., and degenerates. What they do is they restate the bet on text in front of everybody else, and then confirm the bet. And so now, everybody has it. You screenshot it, and you put it in your calendar, and then you settle up.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  We're gonna have that up with its own URL hopefully by next month. Well, actually, Tuesday, Jason, because we're not going to be here on Monday. It's going to be a holiday here in the States.

• 3:36Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my goodness. We're taking a holiday now. What is happening? We were like so good about just working hard, and now everybody's taking an actual day off.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Labor Day, the bane, the bane of your existence, Labor Day, the worst one of all.

• 3:49Jason Calacanis?

  Labor Day. It's Labor Day. We should all work a 12-hour day. What are we talking about here? It's in the name, folks. All right. Where to begin? Lon, I see that you are on the program, which means there's something going on in pop culture. I'm hitting with it.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think we need to talk about Netflix's K-pop Demon Hunters. I have watched the film. I'm not sure if you two. Jason, you have daughters. I'd imagine you might have seen it by now.

• 4:12Jason Calacanis?

  They're so into this show. Yes, they're watching it. They're trying to rope me into it. I don't know what it is.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  It is now the number one most streamed Netflix original film of all time. It just took out red notice this week. 236 million views. It was also the number one theatrical movie at the box office last week. Netflix had in about 1,700 theaters across the US. Saturday and Sunday only, they had sing-along versions of the movie, and it came in number one, $18 million at the box office. It bested Weapons, Freaky or Friday, Fantastic Four, all these late summer hits, and another record. Four songs from the film are on the Billboard Hot 100 this week. That is an all-time record for any movie soundtrack in history. All that's interesting that a Netflix original is blowing up to this insane degree,

• 5:02Speaker 02

  but I think what makes this even more interesting, this movie was actually produced by Sony Pictures Animation during the pandemic. They had a pandemic era deal with Netflix. Netflix and Sony produced these movies together. Netflix gives Sony back the full production budget plus $20 million per film, and then they released the movies directly on Netflix. Now, that seemed like a good deal for Sony during the pandemic, but now Sony has lost this IP that could have been like a huge franchise. Now they have to share this huge IP with Netflix when it could have been, I mean, this could have been a billion dollar grossing theatrical.

• 5:41Jason Calacanis?

  This could have been their Marvel, you know, their next Spider-Man. Sony has a couple of things, right? They own the, they, when Marvel was but a comic book company, they sold the different comic books.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  They kind of share Spider-Man with Marvel now, but this has been a big pain point specifically for Sony. Just last year, CFO Hiroki Totoke said in an interview, whether it's for games or films or anime, we just don't have that much IP that we fostered from the beginning. We're lacking that early phase of IP, and that's an issue for us. Well, here's an example. They actually hit a grand slam home run, but they sold it to Netflix before they even had a look at the movie, and so they didn't get the huge benefit out of it. So I, I mean, that, that's what's going on. They're, they're working currently Netflix and Sony collaborating on a sequel, but this could have been billions of dollars for Sony that they sort of.

• 6:30Jason Calacanis?

  So they still own half of it, or they own some portion of it or unknown?

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they own an unknown chunk of it right now, but despite, no matter how big it gets for Netflix, they only get their $20 million payment, which they already got. They won't earn any additional, maybe they'll make a new deal for the sequel, who knows? But yeah, they, they kind of gave away what could have been a billion dollar property, it seems like for $20 million, not a great deal. And, and, you know, they, throughout the streaming era, Sony's kind of seemed like the smart one, like NBC, Universal, Paramount, Disney, they spent billions of dollars on these streaming platforms and they're still lagging behind Netflix. Sony seemed like the smart one there. They don't have a streaming platform of their own. They just license all their content to the highest bidder. But here's a situation where, you know, they licensed the wrong thing and they made a kind

• 7:19Speaker 02

  of a bad deal.

• 7:20Jason Calacanis?

  A self-inflicted wound.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they kind of lost out huge on this one.

• 7:26Jason Calacanis?

  This would be, this could wind up being the equivalent of Whatlon. If this goes seven movies and 10 seasons, 20 seasons, give me the equivalent. If it goes 20 seasons and seven movies, what would we compare this to in animation land?

• 7:43Speaker 02

  I mean, what you're, you know, what you're talking about going that huge would be, you know, something like a Transformers level franchise, something, I mean, even approaching like a Star Wars level franchise. I don't know if it would go that big, but yeah, I mean, certainly you could get several films, several shows out of this, like, you know, something on-

• 8:02Jason Calacanis?

  And this is anime.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  It's animated, right. So, I mean, something on the level of like a SpongeBob kind of franchise. And we know how crucial stuff like that has been for Paramount, where it's a TV show, it's a series of films, and the merch. I mean, that's the other thing is the merchandising, the shirts, the soundtrack albums, you know, they could put this thing on tour.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's actually very interesting, Lon, because you said they were hosting sing-alongs in the theater. So I thought, okay, people have to know the music. How much are they listening to it? I pulled up Spotify data and then I ran an analysis. They have seen thus far from the soundtrack of this film, 2.25 billion streams.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  On Spotify alone.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Also, those sing-along screenings, they have, it's subtitled. So like you, that's how they do sing-along screenings. They put the lyrics on so you could, it's like karaoke. So you can sing along live with the movie in the theater.

• 8:51Jason Calacanis?

  And this was done in English. This isn't a Korean, South Korean product-

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Correct. This is an American-

• 8:55Jason Calacanis?

  That was dubbed. This is American from the beginning. It just happens to have K-pop in the name.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Right, because K-pop is so huge. And there are, the, the singing voices of all the characters are provided by real K-pop stars. But no, it isn't, it is an American film with a lot of American, you'd recognize a lot of the voices.

• 9:12Jason Calacanis?

  This thing's gonna wind up being like Harry Potter because, or Lord of the Rings, because what's gonna happen is they're gonna do a live version of this, and they're gonna do a play.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Not to. They'd be fools not to tour this.

• 9:22Jason Calacanis?

  Can you imagine the play? A play on Broadway or traveling? Because they did a Harry Potter play at some point. I think it was quite successful.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  The Cursed Child, it's called.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  I read that, yeah. It was okay.

• 9:32Jason Calacanis?

  Look at you nerds. Look at you two nerd balls. You admit it? You read the book?

• 9:36Speaker 02

  I didn't. I have not read the book.

• 9:38Jason Calacanis?

  That's for children, Alex. What are you doing?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  I'm familiar.

• 9:41Jason Calacanis?

  I'm concerned.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  So, I mean, in Child Alex, back in the day, used to go with his friends to the Barnes & Noble or one of those bookstores. Borders. I'd been there to get the new Harry Potter book Borders.

• 9:52Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God. Did you have any pictures of that? Do you have a picture of yourself with hair online? Please find that.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  That makes you feel so old.

• 10:00Jason Calacanis?

  Producer Claude, make me that image, please. I need to see Alex in line with a big mullet. Alex with a mullet. Go, Producer Claude.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  I feel like Jason's just discovering how big of an enormous dweeb I am, and I'm terrified it's gonna let him down.

• 10:17Jason 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." That's instant branding for you.

• 11:01Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  That makes me feel so old. I was already working at a bookstore. Like, I was selling kids' Harry Potter books at that age.

• 11:26Jason Calacanis?

  So, you may have sold it to Alex. Alex might have come in with his Alex mullet.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  I remember.

• 11:30Jason Calacanis?

  We're gonna have a mullet. We're gonna have a mullet day here. All three of us, we just put on a mullet wig and we just do the show. We don't mention the mullets. It's just a mullet show.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  I could go natural. I'm not that far away. I could do a natural.

• 11:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I don't know about the mullet. You got more like the Stravos.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, Stavros. Yeah, the bald up front, party in the back. Yeah.

• 11:50Jason Calacanis?

  I just realized I didn't know Come Town all that much as a podcast. I know about the dirtbag laugh because I'm a big Red Scare fan and I know the Red Scare.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  And Chapo, Chapo Trap House is a big part of that.

• 12:00Jason Calacanis?

  It's all part of the dying square movement, but it turns out there were three co-hosts on the show. You and producer Nick from All In, formerly a producer from here. There's three principals from there. Adam Friedland, right?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:12Jason Calacanis?

  Is it Friedlander or Friedland?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Friedland. Adam Friedland, Nick Mullen, and then Stavros.

• 12:18Jason Calacanis?

  So Stavros went on to do The Bear, comedy, and he's a huge, huge hit.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's hilarious. He's also, uh, he, he's on, he did a movie this year called Let's Start a Cult. It's really funny. It's on Hulu right now. You can watch.

• 12:32Jason Calacanis?

  And he was just at Cannes, I think, with a film. And so he's at this film with,

• 12:39Jason Calacanis?

  Jesse Plemons. Is that the character actor now?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Oh, is he in Begonia? Yeah.

• 12:43Jason Calacanis?

  He's in Begonia.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  He's in the new Yarn.

• 12:45Jason Calacanis?

  So I saw him trending on, so this guy's career has blown up. He's an indie star. He's a TV star.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Huge podcaster, big comedian. Yeah, he's doing a lot of stuff.

• 12:54Jason Calacanis?

  I like this guy. He's Greek. I need to meet my Greek brother at some point. I want to meet Stravos and hear his story. Let's book him for the show at some point.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  I'll try to get Stavros on. I'd love to have Stavros.

• 13:02Jason Calacanis?

  I would like to get Stavros on. Then there's Adam Friedland. He's got the Adam Friedland Show, which is like a surreal, like he's a comedian, he's sardonic, and he's got an old style set where he just interviews people. And it's, it's a little bit meant to be weird and awkward, like Between Two Ferns, yes?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, I wouldn't, Between Two Ferns is like a full-on parody, and I don't think it's, it's not scripted like that, but it is like a, you know, it's like that new style where it's supposed to be very kind of loose and it's, it looks like a talk show, but it doesn't really follow most of the talk show rules.

• 13:38Jason Calacanis?

  So I like this guy, Adam Friedland, because I watch his clips. I see them come up on TikTok, Instagram, et cetera. And he's witty.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  He's going very viral right now because of this Ritchie Torres interview that he did.

• 13:47Jason Calacanis?

  That's why I pulled it up. The other day. Explain what that is. What, what happened with Ritchie Torres? I watched a clip of this and he was very emotional. And the guy Ritchie Torres was a little, um, What's the word?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I've got some choice words for it, but he comes off very cold. It's very, they're discussing Gaza. Representative Ritchie Torres, he is a Democratic Congressman from New York. He actually represents the Bronx. Yankee Stadium is in his district, which they discuss on the Friedland Show. So he's notable as one of the fiercest, staunchest pro-Israeli members of Congress, where he is just, the United States has to back up our Israeli allies 100%. And Friedland is a progressive American Jew who lived in Israel for a while and is very opposed to Israel's war in Gaza and the treatment of the Palestinians. And so they're having this kind of debate, but it has gone viral because Friedland is

• 14:44Speaker 02

  really making this very emotional appeal, like, how do you look at this footage of what's being done to these Palestinians and now feel for them? And Torres is very much falling back on cable news style talking points and the same arguments you've heard 100,000 times. And it does, I think it comes off very mechanical and...

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I noticed. He was very like mechanical, not heartfelt, not sincere, I guess would be the word.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 15:08Jason Calacanis?

  And then Adam is breaking down. He says, listen, I grew up Jewish. They taught us about the Holocaust, obviously. And then I believe that we're perpetrating a genocide, or if anybody's perpetrating a genocide, I'm paraphrasing his words, like, I can't stand by after you, I don't want to say indoctrinated, but after you educated me on the Holocaust, would probably be a better word, maybe?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:34Jason Calacanis?

  And felt very deeply connected to that horrific thing that happened, to our culture, to my great grandparents. And then I see this and I, it's causing massive dissonance in him and... Then he's being responded to by a guy who is, like you said, doing.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  He's just, yeah, jumping like, oh, like, but that, but that's Hamas and Hamas started it. And all this stuff that, and I'm not like, we don't have to get into the arguments themselves, but just all of the things you'd expect to hear on, you know, cable news with two people like.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  But it goes to show how popular Adam's show is that we've all seen these clips bounce in our social media, a very effective broadcaster.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, well.

• 16:12Jason Calacanis?

  An incredible broadcaster, yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  And I think it also shows why Democrats are struggling so much with the podcast revolution. And like, they're just, they're just kind of unable to, whereas a lot of Republicans have the ability to go on these shows like JD Vance on Theo Von. And look, I'm not a JD Vance fan, but he feels very natural on that, in that show. He can just take off the politician hat and chat with Theo Von like two guys chatting. And repeatedly, when we see Democrats get on these kinds of shows in these same kinds of environments, they don't seem to have that ability to do that. And Friedland is practically begging Torres to just like, take off.

• 16:50Jason Calacanis?

  Show some humanity, just stop talking like a politician and let's talk like humans.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  I think the, the problem is that these positions get codified on sides, to, to paraphrase what you just said, Lon. And so people end up just wanting to represent a particular, as we say, party line. Now, Richard Torres is not someone that I'm hyper familiar with because I'm not from the East Coast originally. I know that the California reps a lot better, but I do think that especially on issues like, like Israel and Gaza, people have formed opinions so strong that there's not a lot of debate to be had in some ways. Like when I, I read a lot of tweets from people on the progressive left, the Jewish progressive left, you know, the right, the Jewish right, and there doesn't seem to be any actual discourse whatsoever. I don't see anyone ever going, that's an interesting perspective, I'll think about that. It's just shouting.

• 17:39Jason Calacanis?

  And you're not allowed to change your position or say, I don't know, or I'm unsure. Let me tell you my position. I'm unsure what's going on over there. I feel like I can't get precise news, but I can tell you that hundreds of thousands of people starving and being not in their homes is a tragedy.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:56Jason Calacanis?

  I, I don't have to pick sides. If it was either side, we're starving, starving equals bad. Now, if I say that, does that mean I'm anti-Israeli? I, and people are trying to make me choose a side in a multi-thousand-year conflict.

• 18:15Jason Calacanis?

  In which it's filled with suffering, am I supposed to make, how do you pick a side on what happened in October 7th and what we've seen in the last 30 days in Gaza?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  And I think-

• 18:24Jason Calacanis?

  I can't pick a side on either one of those, they're both horrible.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think a lot of the reaction to this has been like, well, what is Torres supposed to do, switch sides because he's on this podcast? And like, no, I don't think that, I don't think he would have needed to switch sides in order to turn this appearance around. I think what people were looking for is exactly what you just said. It's regardless of where you come down on what should be done, what are the next steps? We have to take a moment and acknowledge that these images we're seeing from Gaza are horrific and that the treatment of those people and leaving these people to die in refugee camps and blowing up their refugee camps and killing journalists and like, we all can agree-

• 19:05Jason Calacanis?

  Just bad.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  That is not something that should be done. That is bad, that's horrible, we don't want to see that. What can we do to make that stop? Beyond that, whatever you think your proposal is for how should America engage, I don't even think the conversation ever got to that level because they couldn't agree, Torres was unwilling to even acknowledge like, what we're seeing from Gaza is horrific and no one should be subjected to treatment like that.

• 19:32Jason Calacanis?

  We're all familiar with AWS, Amazon Web Services. That's the cloud platform that powers so many of your favorite brands. But do you know about AWS Activate? That's their program for startups where they provide up to $100,000 in AWS credits for all startups. Whether you're backed by an investor or you're bootstrapping, money is time to keep innovating, time to delight customers and time for you to keep gaining traction. You need runway and AWS's Activate is going to help you with that runway. We hear this story from so many of our founding university companies. They're finding product market fit, the words getting out about their product, just a little boost, finding some savings here or there to get a little extra time can be the difference between getting traction and bringing in revenue or, hey, let's call it what it is,

• 20:17Jason Calacanis?

  running out of money, okay, and shutting down. AWS knows this, that's why they've created the ultimate toolkit for early-stage startups. Startups looking to boost growth with AWS Activate, you're gonna get up to $100,000 in AWS credits, hands-on support and training, plus exclusive discounts with some of our favorite companies and tools. So start getting the support you need at every stage of your startup journey. To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/startups/credits. That's right, aws.amazon.com/startups/credits. It's great that we have platforms that exist now,

• 20:57Jason Calacanis?

  specifically YouTube, podcasting, Substacks, Beehive, emails, X, you know, pick your platform, where new voices can join the discussion and just participate in it. And people get all bent out of shape about a venture capitalist, a CEO, a comedian joining the discussion. You don't have to be bent out of shape for it. You can just put that into context. If Adam Friedland's a comedian, but his first-person experience, his lived experience, to use a term, that's valid, but you can put it in context. If Joe Rogan has a discussion or Theo Von, and you think Theo Von is like, you know, maybe not the most astute person when it comes to geopolitics,

• 21:41Jason Calacanis?

  or I'm not, or Sacks is not, or whoever's not. Okay, you can have that feeling and you could just put it in context. He's a comedian who feels sad when he sees images of people suffering. That's a valid thing. It doesn't have to be the totality of the reality that's occurring there. It's a comedian's Yes. opinion. So, okay, now I have a comedian's opinion. Now I have a Jewish podcaster in New York's, you know, liberal suffering and, you know, cognitive dissonance. I have Lons, I have Alex, you have mine. You could just put all this together and make it into a framework for you to make a better decision yourself. Thank God we have more voices coming to the table, not just captured.

• 22:26Jason Calacanis?

  News programs where they're reading talking points that have been assigned to them. They, they give these guys talking points on Sunday.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 22:32Jason Calacanis?

  Both sides, and then they have to repeat specific words and phrases.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:37Jason Calacanis?

  And that is the death knell of this in an age of unfiltered, honest discourse.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  That's why I love Theo Von.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  The, the Breakfast Club host this week, uh, he labeled Hakeem Jeffries, another Democratic rep who's very pro-Israel, AIPAC Shakur. And I think that's what, that's what this all is highlighting is like, these guys have these lobbying groups and these special interest groups that are dictating policy, telling them exactly what to say. And when you get on, you know, when you go on and do an MSNBC hit, that might work out fine, but when you go on Adam Friedland's podcast, he's gonna call you out.

• 23:13Jason Calacanis?

  Have you not watched, what's the theory here? You didn't watch it? I think sometimes people don't watch the podcasts that are going on.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you watch the clip.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Most people don't prep.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  If you watch the clip all the way to the end, one of the last things Friedland says to Torres at the end of the interview is, I know your people told you not to come on the show and like, maybe they were right. Uh, so clearly Torres was not as familiar with that show as he should have been. And he had people who in his corner were like.

• 23:35Jason Calacanis?

  I'd like to see him come back and take a second shot at it as like a human, not a robot. Alex, your thoughts, you were trying to interject.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Oh, he was just, it just, my favorite Theo Von clip is when he was talking to, I believe President Trump, and he said, uh, cocaine will turn you into a damn lighthouse, homie. And that is a statement that is so hilarious by itself.

• 23:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  And let alone in the context of speaking to the president. And now contrast that with how we approach presidential debates. Now, I'm not saying Theo Von should moderate the next presidential debate, but think about the difference in tenor of questions and what you might be able to learn from somebody by having them in a more relaxed conversation versus essentially trying to recreate the White House press room in every single interview.

• 24:13Jason Calacanis?

  I want to just go back and circle back around to the K-pop demon hunters. I know that's a little bit of a.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Sure, let's do it. Let's talk K-pop demon hunters.

• 24:19Jason Calacanis?

  I've always felt I would have been a great studio head.

• 24:23Jason Calacanis?

  And I feel like that's still a possibility for me, Lon, because.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:27Jason Calacanis?

  I feel like studio heads is such a mercurial. Insane, deranged position in the world that you get to green light stuff and you have

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:36Jason Calacanis?

  Like an undue amount of influence over that. And then you have these hits and bombs. I just love it. I read the Barry Diller biography. The kid stays in the picture. I love that job. And I think there's a huge opportunity here around IP. And I've talked to you about it, Lon, over the years. Based on like Toho Studios and our mutual love of Kurosawa and how they did things. I would really like to fund a startup, I would incubate it, of trying to create the next K-pop Demon Hunters, the next Squid Game, but use the new mediums to do it. There's a new short form, Lon, I don't know what it's called, but it's very popular in China, where you watch like a 90 second or a three minute vertical video.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Micro drama.

• 25:22Jason Calacanis?

  Micro drama, thank you.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 25:24Jason Calacanis?

  I love these micro dramas. And I talked to Brian Alvey, who had a comic book company for a little bit after we saw Weblogs, Inc., about this. And it's, it's hard, but I think you could create a little mini studio that doesn't try to make money in the short term. They just try to build characters and IP.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Well, do you know about Naver? N-A-V-E-R.

• 25:46Jason Calacanis?

  Of course. Naver is like basically the Yahoo of Korea. I met with the founders 15 years ago when I started Mahalo.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  So they have a, like, they call them webtoons. They're basically online comics. What we would think of as online comics that are a huge source of IP for Korea and Japan. Like, they're constantly making animes or TV adaptations or movie adaptations of stories that got popular on Naver as a webtoon and then got turned into this next thing. Like, a lot of the Netflix anime originals or new anime shows you'll see out of Japan started life, or like even Korean TV shows, a lot of them started life as these, you know, basically manga or comics, but they were not published on paper ever, just exclusively from the internet.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Before we jump back into this, Jason, there's a company doing this. It's called Microco. And this is an article from earlier this month. They want to take the microdrama phrase, infuse it with AI and avoid somehow the Quebee comparison, which is the obvious thing. If you don't recall, folks, Quebee was a short-lived, short-form video project.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Right? Quibi, not Quebee.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Quibi.

• 26:53Jason Calacanis?

  It was a terrible name, but it was Katzenberg. Katzenberg comes up as a young assistant in the Barry Diller. He was, I think Barry Diller's assistant for a little bit, or one of the heads of Paramount Pictures or Gulf Western. And he's a friend of mine. I play cards with him sometimes and we chat once in a while. Katzenberg's like one of my favorite people. And he had a really good idea there. I think the problem was too much money going too big. Remember they had a $2 billion valuation before they started?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:21Jason Calacanis?

  You can't have a $2 billion valuation. You gotta have a $50 million valuation. You have to raise 10 million. You have to go slow. You have to learn and you have to make mistakes. And the thing that I got out of the Barry Diller biography was that he just liked to fail fast and learn by doing. And that's how he did his entire career. Barry Diller created the movie of the week. Lon, you can explain to people what this kind of cultural significant was, but he, when he took over CBS, decided to do the movie of the week.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  It was ABC, wasn't it? I think it was ABC. It was ABC. Yeah. The ABC movie of the week. I think so, right?

• 28:00Jason Calacanis?

  I think he was in third place.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Cause that was like duel. Duel is the most, Steven Spielberg got his start doing these. Duel, that first Spielberg film was an ABC movie of the week, famously.

• 28:10Jason Calacanis?

  And it turned out that the movies of the week, they had had all the different movie studios pitch them. And he said, you know what? We're just gonna do it ourselves. We're not going to give the creatives the ability to like just go off for two years and make something. We're gonna actually have a process here where they pitch, we iterate, we read the scripts, and they have like tighter controls on it. And they made so many amazing films. Some of them had like six or seven. Uh, sequels to them.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:36Jason Calacanis?

  It was the number one show.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  The other interesting thing I was gonna say IP wise was they would do, they would make a lot of pilots as movies of the week and then the popular ones would get TV shows. So like Starsky and Hutch, Six Million Dollar Man, Kung Fu. Those all started as ABC movies of the week that then became, took on a life of their own as shows.

• 28:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this was like a crazy idea. So there's always, even though the media space feels like it is the toughest business in the world, and it is in some ways, there are opportunities here to take the new mediums, whether it's AI, generative AI specifically, TikTok, you know, shorts, vertical video, or panels on Instagram, and you could figure this out. So if somebody out there is like, um, got a lot of energy for this, I would love to hear some pitches on it. [email protected] for life. All right. Thank you, uh, editorial hair director.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 29:36Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's the proper way to say it, air director.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll take that. Sure.

• 29:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, sure. Air director. Okay. Uh, thank you.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:43Jason Calacanis?

  All right. We'll drop him off and continue going through the docket because I'm sure there's a lot of tech news that we haven't talked about since Wednesday.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Yes, very, very much so. Although it's not gonna be as fun, everybody, as, as K-pop Demon Hunters. We're now gonna go eat our vegetables. Uh, but Jason, there's quite a lot going on.

• 30:00Jason Calacanis?

  There's your dad joke, folks. Dad joke number two. Doom, I need my stinger.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Dang it. I'm trying so hard to not-

• 30:06Jason Calacanis?

  Keep doing them. I wanna have like a stinger that like, everybody groans and then there's a layer of cricket. Somebody in the audience make like a great stinger for us. Dad jokes from Alex. I'll pay you like 500 bucks to make me, whoever makes the best stinger for this, we'll, we'll pay you 500 bucks. I'll pay a ballot to you personally.

• 30:27Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:09Jason Calacanis?

  dig up the most relevant facts and context. And their equity funding screener includes private companies, not just the public ones. They save us time and they make us superhuman. So start your AI search and market intelligence journey today and get deeper insights to power your business. We're even going to start you off with a free trial. How great is that? alpha-sense.com/twist to get started. Make sure you use that URL so they know we sent you and you can get this great deal. But let's get started here. I know XAI has a coding model and that people are kind of losing their mind over it. Yeah?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fantastic. So everyone knows XAI is Elon Musk's foundation AI model company, competing with Anthropic and OpenAI. And we talked about them on the show when they launched the Grok 4 family of models, which, as we said at the time, were quite good. They ranked very high. People quite like them. Now, they're also new. It's called Grok Code Fast 1 with dashes in between. This was, quote, "built from scratch," starting with a brand new model architecture. And they built it alongside some partners, Jason. So as they were building it, they were talking to Cursor and GitHub Copilot and Windsor and others to get feedback to make it better. Now, what's really interesting here, because we have other models in the market that are pretty good at coding, from Anthropic in

• 32:25Speaker 01

  particular, this one is fast and cheap. For use, it's only 20 cents per million input tokens and only $1.50 per million output tokens. And for reference, Jason, that's cheaper than GPT-5 Mini. And it has a really, really quick token throughput. So it's just quite impressive.

• 32:42Jason Calacanis?

  And here you go. Here's the model performance on the XAI site. As you can see here, you have the output price per 1 million tokens and tokens per second. Tokens are, you can think of them as words or chunks of knowledge. And Grok Code Fast 1 is the cheapest and the highest tokens per second. And then if you go look at, you know, Grok 4 and Gemini, GPT-5, Claude, Sonic. Sonic, very expensive. One of the great things about what we're seeing in a competition like this is how, what's the economic term, deflationary, I guess, this technology can be.

• 33:25Jason Calacanis?

  If you want to win, you can change the world by making something that was previously extremely expensive extremely affordable. And you see this in everything from tickets for airplanes, right? That's like an attack vector. We're going to make flights cheaper. You can see it with food, cloud kitchens, delivery of stuff. You can see it in hotels with Airbnb and hospitality, right? And so here we're seeing it as the, I guess, way for XAI to catch up. When you're behind, when you have a couple of players ahead of you, what are strategies for startups? You know, one of them is to make something free or to make it dirt cheap. That gets people's attention.

• 34:09Jason Calacanis?

  And then there's a certain group of people, usually the vanguard, the early adopters, who will notice something like that. So you can make it better. That's always good. Another attack vector is to make it cheaper. And another attack vector is faster. So if you want to beat people, better, faster, cheaper are the three things you're looking at. And if you were to look at Elon's success at SpaceX.

• 34:35Jason Calacanis?

  Cheaper and better, right? And then you look at his electric cars. They were faster, but more expensive and better. Actually, it wasn't even better. They were just faster when the

• 34:50Jason Calacanis?

  Then when the Model S came out, it was faster and better. And then when the Model 3 came out, it was faster, better, cheaper.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  All three.

• 34:57Jason Calacanis?

  All three. And then you look at BYD being, you know, what is it? Be your dreams? Be your dreams.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Build your dreams.

• 35:05Jason Calacanis?

  Build your dreams. I think it's build your dreams. Yeah. And so you look at BYD, they're cheaper. They're not faster. They're certainly not better, but they're going after cheaper. And the Chinese government is subsidizing them and they are ripping through some markets. You know, and it's quite unfair when the government price dumps like that. But hey, that's the game on the field right now. So it is what it is.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Right now. Jason, I want to illustrate exactly what you're saying in the form of a chart. One thing that I track a lot is how AI models rank and then how much they get used. And one place that we look at that usage data is on OpenRouter. It's a service that lets people kind of pick and choose models for their inference needs. And I don't bring it up too much because it is a partial data set and try to avoid those. But sometimes something moves so quickly that I think it is worth our time to look at.

• 35:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it could be directionally correct. It might not be the perfect data, but it could be directionally correct. Yeah, hit us with it.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Especially when the direction is this clear. So what I'm showing on the screen for folks listening to the audio is the combined tokens processed on OpenRouter, which is a venture backed startup for all of XAI's models. And Jason, as you can see here, the teal bars are when Grok 4 came out and their usage did go up by maybe 30, 40%. Then they started letting people use Grok Code Fast 1 and it tripled

• 36:24Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  to up to 80 billion tokens. I think that's a day. So it's been a dramatic increase in XAI's, I would say, in-market share. And I think that's critical because they've been building good models, but I don't think they've been commercializing them or getting revenue out of them as effectively as I might have expected. But here they have a demonstrable, straight up hit.

• 36:44Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. And Microsoft, which has a very deep relationship with OpenAI, but let's call it perhaps tenuous, at times conflicted. Because they own forty nine percent of the company until it hits some amount of revenue. It's whole convoluted deal structure that is a headwind for OpenAI. All this convoluted nonprofit to for-profit, the Microsoft relationship, the nuance of that relationship, which has them making back a certain amount of money, and then it becomes public domain. It's just all very weird, but it's a real testament to how great their product is and

• 37:28Jason Calacanis?

  how the utilization of it and their product cadence, how often they release new stuff, that despite all of the hair on those deals and the corporate structure, they're able to keep this thing growing and the revenue growing. If you have revenue growing, it can make up for a lot of mistakes, but you shouldn't make these kind of organizational mistakes. You should avoid those. That's why you've got to have good attorneys, good board of directors, et cetera, which they did not. Maybe they had good attorneys, but they didn't certainly have a good corporate governance. But Microsoft, I'm guessing, has seen enough to know that that relationship is not reliable? And they're doing what exactly, Alex?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  So Microsoft's AI division, named Microsoft AI, or M-A-I, if you will, has put out two homegrown AI models this week. Now, Microsoft has released some models in the past, but these are more flagship, these are larger, more general use. And so the one that we need to talk about is called M-A1 Preview. It's a mixture of experts' model trained on fifteen thousand H100s, so they put a lot of GPU power behind this. And it is a model built for kind of a purpose inside of the Microsoft domain. So it's for following instructions and providing helpful responses to everyday queries. Think about things like Office Copilot, Jason is my guest. What's interesting to me is that they immediately charted with this one. So I was over on L M Arena, which runs a lot of side-by-side tests to track out which models are best across which metrics.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  And this one charted up to the thirteenth best model in the world, which I think for a preview from Microsoft's AI division for their first model of this sort is quite good, but it's still very, very Very far behind what OpenAI has cooked up because right now, if you look at the top of the charts, it's Anthropic and it's Google and it's OpenAI and then Microsoft's far down below. But this de-risks them, Jason, because if they have their own model, they don't have to pay anyone else's margins. So in time, I can see Microsoft moving away from OpenAI's models for stuff inside of the Microsoft world and still offering them, of course, on Azure and so forth. But this strikes me as Microsoft saying, we don't only have OpenAI in our pocket, we do have our own smart nerds who are cooking up new models.

• 39:35Jason Calacanis?

  Important hedge and they had hired, was it Ilya that they hired?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  No, it's Mustafa.

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Mustafa, right, sorry. Mustafa got hired by Microsoft to become the CEO of Microsoft AI. So I'm going to assume that this is under his management. What's interesting about this is we're now starting to see a couple of different cohorts. You got the non-MAG7, I'll call native models, OpenAI, XAI, Anthropic. Then you got the MAG7, in some cases, pursuing models. I understand Amazon has a model now. Apple was doing something in vision and images. This is Microsoft, obviously. We know Gemini doing very well at Alphabet. And then Meta has Lama.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Lama, yeah.

• 40:23Jason Calacanis?

  And then you got the Chinese companies coming in with DeepSeek and Moonshot, Baidu. And I guess Mistro in Europe would be, I would put them in that first group. So you kind of have these three groups, the MAG7, the non-MAG7, and then the Chinese ones. I think it's starting to come down to who has the wherewithal and the deepest pockets to stay in this game. This is not, this is not a cheap game. This is like being in like the F1 or in like, what were those sailing races that Oracle would always win?

• 40:58Speaker 01

  America's Cup.

• 40:59Jason Calacanis?

  America's Cup, like it's expensive to field the team.

• 41:04Jason Calacanis?

  I guess and also like professional soccer too, right? Like it's not cheap to have Arsenal or Newcastle, whatever the teams are there.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  I'm glad you started with the best team in the Premier League.

• 41:14Jason Calacanis?

  Newcastle. Oh, Arsenal, okay.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Just to point it in perspective though, Jason, so the F1 racing world is famously expensive. They did put a cost cap in, so now it's about 140, 150 million a year. That would get you what? Seven GPUs and a cooling rack? I mean, it's funny how much more expensive this stuff is.

• 41:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's, it's, and then I guess the question is, we're now in a game of chicken. With these companies, who can keep building data centers? Keep raising money? And then race towards the cliff? Hoping that the cliff turns into a bridge with the bridge being revenue? And customers willing to take out their wallets and give 20 to $200 a month? You know, $250 a year to $2,000 a year to use these platforms? And there probably don't need to be 20 of them. It's probably going to whittle down. It would be great if there were a dozen available, but it will eventually be six.

• 42:18Jason Calacanis?

  So we're going to see, six seems like a good number. Yeah.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  I think six, you know, three from the US, two from China, maybe one from Mina, Europe area? You know, somewhere that's something like that? I can see that.

• 42:31Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Wow, I guess maybe we should talk. I know you love revenue and I saw my friend Brad Gerson talking about Nvidia. And there is a, you know, pursuant to what we just discussed in this game of chicken? Who's willing to build the most data centers and fill them with Nvidia gear?

• 42:55Jason Calacanis?

  My lord, six customers are now 85% of Nvidia's revenue in the last quarter. Break it down for us. Yeah.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  All right. Nvidia is a company that if you are a gamer, you have known for a long time because they make graphics cards for computers. Turns out those little computers are great in mass scale to handle parallel calculations. And so as the AI boom has expanded, Jason, people that run AI compute are buying mountains of GPUs. Now, there's only so many companies out there that are building what we call hyper scaled compute, which is your Microsoft Azure, is your Google Clouds, your Amazon AWS, et cetera. What this means is the number of companies that are really buying enormous sums of GPUs from Nvidia, which is the leading GPU company in the world, isn't that many. There's only like, as you said, you know, maybe six future AI companies. There's only probably five or six hyperscalers in the world today. So unsurprisingly, they buy a lot of stuff from Nvidia.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  And unsurprisingly, that yields a really funny customer revenue count. In startups, Jason, if you saw a company come in that had one customer that was 80% of their revenue, big red flag, you don't want that level of customer concentration. So people are a little worried in Nvidia's case. So how big is their number one customer? 23% of revenue in their last quarter.

• 44:09Jason Calacanis?

  And that's probably XAI or OpenAI, I think, have the biggest because Colossus was the biggest. So it's gotta be XAI is number one.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  I mean, it's gotta be top three.

• 44:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's gotta be one and two are OpenAI and XAI. You gotta think. And then after that.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Meta, which is spending tens of billions as well and doesn't have its own in-house chip division the same way that Alphabet does, for example, with their TPUs or the training chips over at Amazon's AWS group. So basically there's one customer 23%, another one 16%.

• 44:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's Microsoft because they have Azure and Azure powers OpenAI. Actually, that's probably what's going on here is that OpenAI is buying them, but they also have a deal where they get compute from Microsoft. That was part of that original hairy deal we were just talking about. So maybe it's Microsoft because they represent two of the language models or two of the big players.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. But 23, 16, 14, 11, 11, 10. That's, you know, most of Nvidia's revenue from just a handful of companies. And this is why people are so worried about Nvidia's earnings, Jason. Like, if you think about, you know, when they dropped, everyone was really holding on tight because if they miss, it implied that the hyperskillers weren't spending, it implied the AI demand was slowing, it implied that, et cetera, et cetera. So it was kind of a linchpin earnings report.

• 45:30Jason Calacanis?

  You know, this could be a stop and start kind of a situation where it takes time to digest the models, it takes time to finish the products and get them to market, and then the software and the developers become more efficient at utilizing the infrastructure. So there's a confluence of factors here that are going to trend towards growth for Nvidia. But what if somebody like Alphabet says, hey, we're gonna be, we have our own silicon, Amazon's working on their own silicon. I think we have enough H100s and whatever, you know, and we're going to just try to build on our own.

• 46:10Jason Calacanis?

  And the long tail of demand here is also significant. There are startups who are using Azure, Google Cloud, et cetera, for their GPUs. So those are long-term going to keep buying, you would think.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Also, OpenAI's Sarah Fryer, I think we mentioned this on the show a week or two ago, she did an interview with CNBC. It's the CFO, thank you, Jason. And she said that they're still constantly under compute. And so at least for today, there remains a shortage of free GPUs to use at scale, but we are seeing some other changes as well. So a story that we're not going to focus on today, but I'll just mention it. Alibaba is mentioning over in China that they're working on their own chips that's going to help out with the intra-China GPU shortage. So everyone wants Nvidia's market cap. They are the number one most valuable company in the world. You're not worth four trillion plus without having everybody taking shots at you. But, you know, to quote The Wire, "If you come at the king, you best not miss." And thus far, no one's really managed to slow down Jensen and his team.

• 47:11Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, yeah, and we have to get our hands on this Claude browser. We had a great experience with the Comet browser.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  The browser, though, Jason, is a, is a way to you, to let Claude run Chrome for you versus a distinct, uh, whole cloth browser, just so people are, are.

• 47:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, everybody's used, everybody basically uses Chromium, I believe is the name of the open source project, or Mozilla, which is the Firefox project. Both of those are open source projects. You would never write a brow, a modern browser from scratch. You would use those basic, um, architectures and then have those, uh, you would wrap them, basically. And, uh, I use the Brave browser and Comet now. Brave I use because of the protections and getting rid of ads and privacy. And, uh, it's fast. Uh, I think it's also fast because it's not letting people cookie you and all that's cruft slows you down.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:08Jason Calacanis?

  In terms of web speed.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  But tell me about Comet. I'm curious. You've been using it now for a couple of weeks, I think. A month, yeah.

• 48:15Jason Calacanis?

  Definitely a month, yeah.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  An AI browser, the future, Jason. Has it changed your productivity, your workflows, how you approach the internet?

• 48:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it has. Um, you know, Perplexity's got a pretty good search product. Um, and the Google one is kind of two different products. They haven't moved to the AI need of search on Google. You can use it. But, uh, Perplexity does a nice job with like a comprehensive search, which was pioneered by Mahalo, my company when humans were doing it, and, uh, Naver and Down in Korea, both of those Korean companies. Um, and so they do a good job at that comprehensive search. Um, not for everything, but pretty solid. And they're taking a Yahoo-like approach now where they have shopping and finance, I think. And so Yahoo Finance for me isn't as good as Perplexity's finance product. So when I'm checking stocks,

• 49:04Jason Calacanis?

  I find myself using Perplexity's Stock Checker instead of Yahoo Finance and Google now. Um, because it does an interesting thing. It goes and searches and summarizes the news with AI, as opposed to just natively listing the stories.

• 49:20Jason Calacanis?

  And so they're kind of intercepting my clicks from going to MarketWatch or to Fortune or whoever's covering what's going on at Robinhood or Uber or Korean Defense or whatever I'm in at the moment. So I do find that, what's that?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  So bad for Yahoo.

• 49:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, Jim Lenzon's got to decide if they are going to super invest in AI to summarize their partners' stories, but I think they have a prisoner's dilemma there because I think they make money by sending traffic to their partners. I think their partners pay for placement or because you see some of them say sponsored on them in their news stories.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:59Jason Calacanis?

  So if you were to summarize them, well, then you don't get the advertising there. All these AI companies don't have advertising products, so their products are kind of like Uber or Lyft in the early days where they're being subsidized by venture capital.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:12Jason Calacanis?

  And if you could get a summary of all the stories without any advertising or crft in it, and then Yahoo needs to have the crft in the advertising, man, that's a huge advantage for making a better product than Google's, which is filled with ads as well.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:27Jason Calacanis?

  But I do like using it for multi-step processes. So I will pull up the assistant on a page and I'll say, hey, summarize the themes here in this story, or please go find these individuals LinkedIn's for me and go follow them on LinkedIn. And it doesn't quite work perfectly yet. And it's all based on Claude, by the way. I use Claude as my, I use Comet as the browser, but I use Claude as the language model. So very interesting that the browser, you can kind of like, you can pick a search engine, DuckDuckGo or Google or Yahoo, whatever. You can actually pick what language model you use. And I don't think I can use a non-AI browser ever again.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Ah, see, that's interesting. So it has changed your behavior patterns for life, which means that we actually have turned a new page in browser technology.

• 51:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I think so, yeah. When you have the assistant there at the side, when you have the one-click summary of the page, when you can fire off like a, I'll call it, a light agent to do something. Sure. Um, it works relatively well. Not good enough yet, but if I want to, like when I was having my Mexico City trip I took, I was like, go to these websites, figure out the consensus of all the best restaurants, you know, near this hotel, uh, in this neighborhood, which was Roma, where I stayed, um, and then put it in a table and then give me the Yelp link, the Instagram link, you know, and the TripAdvisor link or whatever, and, um, and the Google Local link, and it kind of did a decent job at that. Almost

• 52:01Jason Calacanis?

  sixty percent of what my Athena assistant would do. So I had my Athena assistants do it. I did it. Now I've trained my Athena assistants to use Comet to do this. So I'm using a combination of Athena assistants and the emerging technology, and that's seems to be a winning combination for me for getting more done faster. And if you want to know what it's like to have an Athena assistant, I have two of them. They work seven days a week. They have a split schedule. Some days they overlap by half an hour. And I have them in a iMessage group. I have them in a Slack. And I was like, give me the restaurants, rank them by Michelin stars, rank them by the reviews or whatever. They do all that, a little bit of AI, a little bit of their manual stuff. And then I gave them my OpenTable account. I said,

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  get me two restaurants per night based on this list. One reservation at 5:30, one reservation at 7:30. Then I said, I will tell you which reservation I'm going to use around four o'clock, so the restaurant can give it up. They don't mind you doing that. Um, and the ones that are hoity-toity sometimes will give you like a $10 per person cancellation fee. Yeah. Which is, if that happens to me, I'm happy to give a restaurateur, because my dad was one, and I know it's a hard business. I'm happy to give them the 20 bucks. If I don't cancel within an hour or two, whatever their policy is. And, um, man. That makes your life real simple. You have options and it really works well.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Also, you're making me incredibly hungry because I'm a huge fan of Mexican food. But this brings up a really important poly market, Jason. People are trying to figure out what's going to happen with OpenAI launching its own browser. We've seen reporting that this is going to come. Now, this is a relatively small market and I wouldn't normally bring up a smaller one, but there's something very interesting that happens if you click a button. Watch this. If you change the timeframe here on this poly market, this one is OpenAI browser by September 30th. Not that high of a chance, about a third. If you click on change the date to October 31st, suddenly people think there's a two thirds chance. So it does appear that some people are really wagering that this OpenAI browser is going to come either in the first month of Q4 or around there. So here's hoping they're right because if Comet is good, then I would love to see more browsers doing the same thing, competing.

• 54:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, shout out to our friends at Polymarket because one of the great things here, and I don't know what the rules are on this, but if you have inside information, are you, like if you worked at OpenAI or you were, let's say you're a recruiter and I'm a recruiter and OpenAI had me recruit 10 people to work on a browser six months ago.

• 54:40Jason Calacanis?

  And then they said, we don't need any more, there's no more open recs for that.

• 54:45Jason Calacanis?

  I might be able to discern, okay, they're getting ready to launch it. And if those people are still working there and I check their socials. Now, is that proprietary, is that inside information? It's not? Like, I wonder how that works for, I mean, I know how it works in sports leagues, like you're not allowed to like miss your free throws to, you know, get the under.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:06Jason Calacanis?

  But how would that work on a poly market or any prediction market?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  So insider trading laws apply to securities and I, as far as I understand it, we're trying to narrowly define securities to leave crypto alone. So I'm going to presume that poly market doesn't land there. There are some states that have insider betting laws, but that's not as broad across the nation. And when we're talking about what poly market does, it's, is it technically betting? Is it wagering or is it investing?

• 55:34Jason Calacanis?

  Investing in an outcome is a way to say it.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Here's a funny thing. Some experts argue that allowing insiders to trade may increase market accuracy.

• 55:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Though this conflicts with fairness. Yes, it does. And yes, it would.

• 55:48Jason Calacanis?

  So they don't, yeah, I think that's a feature here. I want the insiders doing this because it means the data will be more accurate. So like when I was saying Biden is going to be hot swapped and I made that incredible call as no Schrecanis on All In and here, you know, it turned out I had heard from people like, you know, yeah, and I wouldn't say, as I say, call them insiders, but in and around the political arena that they felt that was going to happen. And I felt it certainly was going to happen because I thought it gave them a free second chance at winning the election, right? If you knew you were going to lose and you got this free second chance, why wouldn't you take it?

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:26Jason Calacanis?

  Right? And as I explained, like, why would you do a June debate with Biden if the debates normally start in September? That when I heard that they had done that, like in, I guess in May, they announced it or April, I was like, wait a second. And I'm not an insider, but I had an insight, which is, oh, the Democratic Party is setting up and stress testing Biden's ability to win this race. So they have enough time to hot swap. And that's actually how I made my decision.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Good news. Producer Claude just got back to us and traditional insider trading laws don't apply to prediction markets because they fall under the CTFC's jurisdiction and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, I don't think deals as much with insider regulation versus just keeping tabs on the commodity market. So should be okay. Actually, let me rephrase that. It may be okay. This show is not legal advice and if you do get in trouble, you're not allowed to call us.

• 57:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  We're just fans of wagering and predictions and figuring out what's going to happen next.

• 57:23Jason Calacanis?

  I do think if you are the principal in this, like if you were Sam Altman and you get to pick when you launch, you're not allowed to participate based on the terms of service at Polly Market.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  That would be, that would be fair. Also, by the way, producer Claude is brought to us by our dear friends over at Anthropic and we talk about them all the time on the show, but we talk about them most of the time in a non-sponsored format.

• 57:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, they're, they're a partner on the program, as is Polly Market. Yeah. So we are so lucky to have the top brands partnering to bring this amazing episode. It's not cheap to have someone like Alex here. It's not like we don't this is an expensive talent you have on this program.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Ruinously costly. But if you do want to dig out more about Claude, you can go check it out at claude.ai/ twist. And now I'm going to get five internal points.

• 58:11Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen, another amazing episode of This Week in Startups is in the can, as my dear friend Leo Laporte would say. Another twit is in the can. Shout out to my guy. Shout out to all the people who made podcasting happen. My friend Dave Weiner created RSS, big part of my career. I sent him a little note just thanking him for the impact his technology had on my career. So thank you to my friend Adam Curry, who created podcasting along with Dave Weiner. He's got a great show, No Agenda. He's doing this like podcasting 2.0 thing. Oliver, I want to book him for the show, please. Adam Curry, would love to have Dave Weiner on and hear what he's up to. He's working on some content management systems using WordPress, I understand.

• 58:54Jason Calacanis?

  And Leo Laporte for being a pioneer in the space and teaching a lot of us how to be broadcasters. So thanks to all those legends, they don't get any credit. Like, Theo Von doesn't know who Dave Weiner is. Theo Von, you know, Joe Rogan knows who Adam Curry is because he has him on his podcast. If you want to see Adam Curry on a podcast, he does Joe Rogan once in a while. Adam Curry had convinced Steve Jobs to in iTunes. iTunes was where music used to exist on your laptop and would put the music on your iPod before there was

• 59:26Speaker 01

  That young?

• 59:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, before there was, yes. Before there was an iPhone, there was an iPod. And he convinced him to have in the menu, add RSS feed.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 59:37Jason Calacanis?

  And you would cut and paste the RSS feed from somebody's blog or podcast and put it into iTunes and then it would sync it to your iPod. If that hadn't happened, and Adam Curry and Dave Weiner didn't do it, there would be no Joe Rogan, there would be no All In, there would be no

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Ah, so they're responsible for the second Trump administration. I see.

• 59:55Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, God.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  It's Dave Warner.

• 59:58Jason Calacanis?

  You want to know who's responsible for the second Trump administration? It's pretty simple. The Democrats did not field a qualified team.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Joke, joke, joke.

• 1:00:07Jason Calacanis?

  I said dad joke. No, I just, I hate the fact that people think that like this, like podcasters create this. You have to field the team. This is my message to the Democrats. Like, field the team. You can't put rec players. You can't put a retired player against Kobe Bryant. You gotta have like a sharp player if you're gonna be up against like a media savant like Trump.

• 1:00:35Jason Calacanis?

  It's just got to be odd. I mean, the Democratic Party is just so frustrating. Ay, ay, ay. Bring me the America Party. That's what I want. We'll see you all next time. Have a great weekend. Enjoy the long weekend.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Enjoy the long weekend. We'll see you guys on Tuesday.