Apple Drops $500B on AI while Google Gemini Eyes Your iOS Devices! | E2089

Today's show: Jason and Lon break down the latest trends shaping AI training, the evolving job market, and the shifting landscape of social media. A tribute to Steve Jobs on what would have been his 70th birthday explores his lasting impact, Apple's massive $500 billion AI investment, and the future of US manufacturing. The conversation dives into Outlier's role in AI training data, its effects on journalism, and broader job market implications. Jason also shares insights on autonomous vehicles, Apple's AI strategy, and the latest in crypto—covering meme coins, regulatory battles, and the state of angel investing. Plus, a look at Oscar season and the cultural moments making waves. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Lon kick off the show!(2:59) TikTok discussion and Steve Jobs' 70th birthday tribute(4:36) Jason's history with Steve Jobs and impact of blogging(8:56) Jason's interaction with Steve Jobs about podcast monetization(10:13) Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST(11:27) Steve Jobs' legacy and Apple's innovation(14:12) Apple's $500 billion investment in AI and TSMC chip manufacturing(20:08) Vanta. Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(21:18) Geopolitical implications of Apple's US manufacturing investments(24:06) Outlier's role in AI training data and legal risks(27:02) Journalists in AI training and job market implications(30:40) Vapi. Go to https://www.vapi.ai and use code Twist200 to get $200 in credits(32:39) Outlier's AI training recruitment and global reach(34:14) AI's future in various industries(36:53) Experiences with autonomous vehicles and Waymo(37:23) Hot-swappable LLMs and Apple's AI integrations(41:03) Commercial implications of AI deals for Apple(43:08) Public access to podcast docket and meme coins discussion(47:03) Milei's meme coin and libertarian views on crypto(52:15) Crypto trader's tragic incident and dangers of investing on margin(58:19) Jason's gambling habits and future of crypto regulation(1:01:05) Angel investing and Oscar season discussion * 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 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonharris * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:13) Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST(20:08) Vanta. Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(30:40) Vapi. Go to https://www.vapi.ai and use code Twist200 to get $200 in credits * 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?

  I've been reading a whole bunch about this company outlier.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Outlier is one of many companies that's providing these kinds of services like a human editor to aid in training your AI model.

• 0:12Jason Calacanis?

  And here's the great news. If you are a worker at Google, or you're a worker at Facebook, or you're a worker for our government, you can collect that paycheck while doing this in your office. Now they're going to send you back to the office. When you get back to your office.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Don't tell Elon.

• 0:26Jason Calacanis?

  Don't tell Elon. This is why overwork or overemployed is such a phenomenon. I guarantee you, people are doing these while they're ostensibly working at other places. I know it because.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Oh, I've got a window open right now. I've been doing this the whole show.

• 0:40Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, fantastic. Great. Well, double dipping. Here we go.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist. And Vapi. Add real-time AI-powered voice conversations to your apps or business in minutes, not months. Go to vapi.ai and use code TWIST200 to get $200 in credits. That's over 1,000 minutes in free calls.

• 1:21Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me, producer Lon is here. And Alex is on a little vacay. He'll be back, I think, on Monday. Is that right, Lon?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  I believe that is correct. Yeah, we're got this week to ourselves and then Alex returns next week.

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  Big show on Wednesday. Big show energy coming when we have Vlad from Robinhood and Raul from Superhuman, two of my earliest-stage investments that have had incredible success. So I'm going to talk to both of them about how they're doing with their businesses and startup lessons, all kinds of great stuff. So this Wednesday's big Wednesday energy. Make sure you tune in live, youtube.com. Do a search for This Week in Startups. Hit the subscribe button, click on all notifications, follow me at x.com/jason or follow Jason Calacanis on LinkedIn. Those are the three places we stream. Live Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 12 Texas time, 10 a.m. Pacific time, 1 p.m. Eastern time. But those two interviews, they might run on Friday or next Monday. So just keep that in mind.

• 2:20Jason Calacanis?

  If you tune in live, you get a real good preview of what's coming down the pipe. We've got a pipeline of great stuff and we're expanding the social footprint. Where can people find us again?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  We're on at TWI Startups on X. We're at This Week in Startups on LinkedIn. Go to Instagram, This Week in Startups, all one word. We've also got the subreddit going. I'm back in there moderating r/twistartups. And TikTok is next on my itinerary. We're gonna get over there and start posting there because, you know, I'm 46 years old. I gotta be on TikTok, right? That's where, that's where all the middle aged divorced guy energy of people are going.

• 2:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's so addicting. Everybody's there. I want to start doing some videos just for TikTok in the coming weeks. Something I've been wanting to do, and I think I gotta do reaction videos because I noticed there are so many great videos, even historical ones of people who've been on the program or me interacting with famous people. It might be fun to go through some of the things I said. And I like these videos where people do reaction videos or they talk, play the video, talk.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got your head in the corner commenting on what people are watching. That's, that's classic TikTok.

• 3:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So I want to learn that genre, as it were. Speaking of genres, today would have been Steve Jobs 70th birthday, I believe. I'm pretty sure it's 70 because I saw that Tim Cook did a nice little tribute on X.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  You are right. 1955. He was born February 24th, 1955.

• 3:50Jason Calacanis?

  Well, 20 years ago, when I was doing Engadget and the company Weblogs Inc., Autoblog Joystick. We were real pioneers in podcasting and. Blogging back then, I wound up selling that company to AOL 18 months after I started. It was a big part of my success in those early years. And I would go to a conference that Walt Mossberg and Karen Swisher would host called All Things Digital, All Things D. And this is from 2005, when I had started, first started doing podcasting. I did a Calacanis Cast, which eventually became this program, This Week in Startups.

• 4:30Jason Calacanis?

  And we did a podcast for Autoblog, which were two of the first five to 10 podcasts ever. Shout out to Dave Weiner, who created RSS and the podcasting technology, along with the Podfather, Adam Curry, two legends who don't get enough credit. But let's play the clip here, and Lon, you can give your thoughts after. Here we go. Steve, there's a thousand bloggers at Microsoft and bloggers that, people at Apple, I understand, are not allowed to blog, and you don't blog. I'm saying employees. Why is that?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Well, I don't blog for the same reason that I read Bill describing why he doesn't blog. It's a pretty time consuming thing. And once you start, you kind of feel like it's one more.

• 5:14Jason Calacanis?

  Bill Gates in the audience. Fifty year old Bill Gates.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  But in terms of blogging at Apple, you know, again, we have a lot of secret stuff going on. And it's, it's one of those things where we'd really rather not have to have some of our employees spreading that around and not have to get upset with people who, you know, made a bad judgment about what to put in their blog and what not to put in their blog.

• 5:39Jason Calacanis?

  So pause there. For context here, I was running the blog company at Microsoft, and a guy named Robert Skobel had infiltrated, he was working at Microsoft. He created, he took the blog platforms that were already out there, and he just said, "Everybody at Microsoft, start writing about what you're doing." And he would run around Microsoft with a camera and make short videos and talk to them. I don't know what's going on with my haircut there, but I'm obviously way a little bit more than I do now. That's like a really interesting, it's not even a mullet. What is that? It's like a cap? Everything the same length?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  It's almost like you've got, you're doing like a little pompadour thing. Then you've got like this little flip in the front, but it's it's instead of going up a little, it's down. I I don't I don't know what that's called.

• 6:18Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know what this is called. I think it's called like super cuts. Maybe I was on a budget. You gotta remember, I was kind of broke back then.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I met you about two years after this, and this was not your look anymore. You had a totally different look by then.

• 6:27Jason Calacanis?

  No, I mean, this is like preppy, uh, Brooklyn, J Cal. Yeah. And I don't know what's going on with the collar of that shirt is a little bit off. But anyway, putting aside my aesthetics at that time.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  You've had a glow up since then, for sure.

• 6:39Jason Calacanis?

  Had a little mini glow up since then.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 6:41Jason Calacanis?

  But the blogging thing was an interesting question because blogging had become this radical medium. We take it for granted now that anybody would publish. But back in that day, everything you said as a technology company was interpreted through the media, right?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 6:56Jason Calacanis?

  If you were releasing a new product, and this is why this Wall Street Journal D conference, and Rupert Murdoch owned this conference. I think he paid Karen Swisher and Walt Mossberg 500,000 to a million dollars a year to host it, which was very controversial at the time. But it made, you know, 10 million bucks. The tickets were, I don't know, at that time, probably 3,000, $4,000. I couldn't afford it, but I got a journalist pass.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Well, you're rubbing elbows with Bill Gates. He's sitting right there.

• 7:22Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it was pretty, pretty cool. All of those people, um, who were doing stuff at that time were being interpreted by the Wall Street Journal. So if Bill Gates came out with a new product, there was no YouTube at the time. I think YouTube had just launched, but it wasn't like it is today. Twitter wasn't launched. The iPhone was launched, uh, right? In 2005, was the iPhone one?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Hmm, no, not yet.

• 7:44Jason Calacanis?

  No iPhone yet, right?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  No iPhone yet.

• 7:46Jason Calacanis?

  That really dates this.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  2007. That was 2007.

• 7:49Jason Calacanis?

  2007, right. So shortly he did that. And podcasting had just come out. And this event was a seminal moment because Adam Curry was there and he had negotiated with Steve Jobs to in.

• 8:02Jason Calacanis?

  iTunes and iTunes is where you bought music to allow you to go to iTunes and add an RSS feed like you take the URL of somebody's podcast and put it in there and then it would put on your iPod, which was a music player from back then, an album that said podcasts and you could subscribe to podcasts and it would show up on your iPod. It would download it when you synced your iPod because iPods didn't have an internet connection and back then we were using, I guess, like whatever the precursor to 3G was, like very low data. You couldn't download over data, audio or video at that time on a mobile phone and the mobile phone you would have been using would have been a Nokia. So no bueno on an MP3, but you would download them and the next day you would listen to these podcasts

• 8:44Jason Calacanis?

  and I had a couple of them, as I said. So I was going to ask him next, I had a two-part question. One was, why don't you blog? The second question I was going to ask him is, would he allow us to sell our podcasts for a dollar and create a revenue stream? Because I was desperately trying to figure out how to make money off these things and let's play the second part of the clip. Will you be able to add any RSS feed to the, or any podcasts RSS feed to iTunes? Or is it only through the store?

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Oh, you'll be able to add anything you want, completely open. We're just working with the open standards out there. Yeah.

• 9:13Jason Calacanis?

  And will you help companies like ours sell podcasts, you know, be an audible? So if we wanted to sell a podcast through your service, would you help us do the fulfillment?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  You know, we're planning on having all the podcasts be free at first, but zing me an email with what you've got in mind and we're open to anything.

• 9:30Jason Calacanis?

  Same email I always send it to you?

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:35Jason Calacanis?

  So.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Big laugh. It's always nice to get a big laugh from a crowd like that. That's a good feeling.

• 9:40Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, people think like me making jokes and being witty is like a new thing. I've been doing this my whole life, but the funny part about that was I knew I was telling a joke in the moment, but I did have Steve's email and we would trade emails.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 9:54Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, because of Engadget. He read Engadget and he would tell me if we got something wrong and he's just such a giant. I miss him so much. I didn't have a personal relationship with him, but I met him a dozen times. I was in like press junkets with him, you know, one-on-one a couple of times. I had conversations with him.

• 10:14Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:59Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:27Speaker 01

  I was one of those people when Steve Jobs died, where I was a little skeptical on the globe-shifting genius stuff. It's like, you know, I mean, I always think of these things as these companies are teams. This is, these are collaborative. Anytime anybody's like, this one guy is the genius. You're, I'm always a little cynical on that. Like, well, they were in charge of this huge group of innovative people, and they all came together to make the iPhone. But if you look at Apple post-Steve Jobs, it's clear that something has fundamentally changed. I think going back, hindsight being what it is, he was obviously bringing a level of whatever, creativity, or, you know, like ambition, whatever it was, that Apple is not the same without him as with him.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  So I think that, like, his legacy has been cemented over the last few years of Apple coming out with various technologies that are not as globe-shifting as the iPhone.

• 12:21Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, exactly correct. Steve Jobs put Tim Cook in charge and it was a controversial move because Tim Cook isn't like a creative force visionary and I think he would admit that, you know, obviously not comparable to Steve Jobs. Nobody is.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 12:35Jason Calacanis?

  But he was the supply chain guy. So what did we see since Steve's passing? How many years has it been since Steve passed? My gosh, it's gotta be 10 years now.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  He died in 2011. So yeah, close to 15 years.

• 12:47Jason Calacanis?

  Unbelievable. And it's just such a presence that's missing. He was at that time, kinda like Elon in terms of his presence everywhere and you know, the attention he got. Bill Gates always kinda like second fiddle to him because Steve's aesthetics, his products were so much better at the time than Microsoft's. Microsoft had more products. Microsoft had more revenue at the time.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  He was always that archetypal like coder developer nerd. Like he was the guy behind the scenes writing the code. But Steve Jobs was that like the creative artistic visionary where he wasn't just building products that worked right. He was thinking about the future and like, what does, what's everybody gonna be doing in 10, 15, 20 years? And so I think it is a different kind of idea.

• 13:38Jason Calacanis?

  I wonder, now that the Steve Jobs roadmap, the one of the last things he was working on was like TV and solving the TV problem.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:46Jason Calacanis?

  Which Apple TV was set to do, which was to just let you do a search with Siri for anything on your Apple TV and not worry about where it lived and just give you, you know, that kind of thing. But he was, he missed the AI wave. I wonder what Steve Jobs would be doing right now during this period of time with AI. And I can tell you, it would not have been like Memoji AI or handing it off to OpenAI. I mean, he would have been in the thick of this.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  I think that's it. You know, Steve Jobs, his vision, it was always the walled garden. We're gonna, we're gonna create our own bespoke version of this technology that just works intuitively. And you don't have to worry about all the, you know, setting it up or the complexities it's gonna be. A perfectly smooth experience. So I think very different from how we're seeing AI develop now where things are leaning towards open source and it's all these different tools and products that you can sort of mix and match on your own. I think Apple would have had a much more like here's Apple AI, here's the suite of products and it's all our, it's all in-house in our system. It doesn't interact with everybody else's whatnot.

• 14:53Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Speaking of Apple, big news today, um, and this goes to the make America uh, independent again, I would say.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Innovative again, whatever you're.

• 15:06Jason Calacanis?

  Resilient again.

• 15:09Jason Calacanis?

  Manufacturer, uh, mama. Make America manufacturers again, mama. So that'll be one of our trends here. Apple has announced plans to spend $500 billion, hire 20,000 people in the U S over the next four years to build AI servers. Company said it was his largest spend commitment ever.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Ever, um, anything ever. It's a 250,000 square foot factory they're putting in north of Houston in Texas. That's going to be a Foxconn plant uh, for assembling advanced servers. Now, of course, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company, famous or infamous, depending on your uh, perspective for assembling iPhones overseas in particularly Chinese factories. The working conditions in Foxconn factories in China, a longstanding issue for Apple. Uh, Foxconn already has AI servers operating in Mexico. So they're going to move some over here. It's part of an elaborate plan to avoid potential Trump tariffs. Rather than bringing in all of these servers from elsewhere, they're going to make them right here in the U S so they don't have to pay

• 16:13Speaker 01

  the 20% plus premiums. Foxconn also planning data centers in Arizona, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, elsewhere, maybe. And it is important to bear in mind, just for clarity, the servers are going to be assembled in the U S. Some of the parts like the chips and other advanced components, they're still going to import from elsewhere to then assemble the servers within the U S.

• 16:35Jason Calacanis?

  This is a tough thing here because. Uh, $500 billion in servers, uh, in a data center is a curious thing to happen here. Because they don't have their own language model. So I am confused. What is the point of these 500 billion and this giant data center? They are going to put what servers or GPUs in here? Are these going to be Nvidia servers? Um, are these going to be, you know, some new servers? It's, it's very unclear. And then what would this giant, you know, data center actually do? Is it going to be competitive with Colossus by Grok and Elon Musk?

• 17:19Jason Calacanis?

  Is it going to be competitive with Sam Altman's OpenAI and what they're building? Or, you know, I have my own theory. Apple has not been in the data center race and doesn't have a cloud computing offering like AWS. Or Azure for Microsoft, or Google Cloud, or Oracle's Cloud, right? So you get these four giant clouds. If you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup, you can go, um, you know, instead of standing up your own servers, you just rent them, right? And, and people can move between them really well. It's awesome. And Apple doesn't have one. What if Apple did have one? And then if you were an app developer, it was somehow deeply integrated into the app store.

• 18:02Jason Calacanis?

  And if you were a media company, you somehow could leverage it as well. This could be very interesting. It would be a totally new revenue source. Now, they would be the last person to the party, obviously. But they do have this advantage and they have a huge developer community making apps. Right. So if they made it, you know, free for apps or a hundred dollars a month for apps that are, you know, have X number of users, I think they could get a lot of that business. And then they could do deep integrations into the phone. It would be trusted. So maybe that's what they're planning here.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  The New York Times does say these servers are going to contain chips made by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, uh, or you know, TSMC, one of the world's biggest suppliers of these. So they're going to be, the chips are going to be made in Taiwan, uh, and by the Dutch company ASML.

• 18:51Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting stuff because you know, TSMC actually makes Nvidia's, right? Nvidia

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 18:56Jason Calacanis?

  Does the architecture of them, the actual assembly is being done there. So I wonder if this means Apple is going to be making their own AI chips. I don't know if they already do that, but you know, it's kind of interesting what we're seeing here with President Trump. He wants to do onshoring. Um, that's a big focus and, and he's very, you know, interested in maybe becoming independent of TSMC and China and having our own supply chain. This doesn't solve that problem if TSMC is making them, but TSMC is making fabs here in the United States. So this feels to me like the decoupling from China, which is a huge priority.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:40Jason Calacanis?

  Who is the biggest manufacturer, biggest American company involved with China? It's Apple.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Right. And this does tie directly in Biden last year before leaving office awarded TSMC 6.6 billion in grants to build more chips here. Uh, some of those chips are already being assembled in a plant in Arizona. So you're absolutely correct. This is part of decoupling all of this as best we can from China and bringing that manufacturing over here.

• 20:09Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:53Jason Calacanis?

  helping you streamline your audit. And the platform connects you with trusted VC SOs to build your program, auditors to get you through your audits quickly, and a marketplace for essentials like pen testing. So here's your call to action. Whether you're closing your first deal or gearing up for growth, Vanta makes compliance easy. Join over 8,000 companies, including many Y Combinator tech stars and launch startups who trust Vanta. Simplify compliance and get $1,000 off at vanta.com/twist. That's V A N T A dot com slash T W I S T. I wonder geopolitically if this means, hate to get big picture here, but zooming out.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Let's zoom out.

• 21:35Jason Calacanis?

  This means that China is going to invade Taiwan and we're not going to defend Taiwan. And we're in a race to get Taiwan semiconductor on short here in the event that happens. Now, hopefully it doesn't happen. But I think, you know, everything I hear from people on the inside is that we are.

• 21:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  In big picture geopolitical terms, Trump's very anti the idea of America being the global cop, the everybody's protector, having all of our fingers in all of these different pies. And that was an increasingly big topic during the Biden years was, you know, China's ramping up militarily in the South China Sea. There definitely are increasing hints that, you know, Xi wants Taiwan back. And just like Putin wanted Crimea and Ukraine back, Xi wants Taiwan back. And so, yeah, I mean, I think US foreign policy for the last several decades has been, we're Taiwan's ally. If China invades Taiwan, we're going to back Taiwan.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  And you know, the semiconductor industry being in Taiwan was only an added inducement. We have to defend Taiwan at all costs. I think President Trump sees things very differently than that. He doesn't want to be on the hook to fight China in the event that Xi goes after Taiwan. So, right, so big picture.

• 22:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's almost like he's trying to force. I feel like Trump is trying to force a multipolar world where we're independent, isolated. If China wants to, you know, have some adventures in that area and take over Taiwan, so be it. If Russia wants to, you know, do things on their border, that's up to the EU to defend it. But the United States is going to focus on the North American continent.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you could hear it explicitly when J D Vance is attacking, you know, globalism. This is what he's, this is exactly what he's talking about. This idea that all of the allied countries of the world are a united front against all of the evil doers of the world. And that's just how America has viewed the world since, really, since the end of World War II, the Cold War.

• 23:39Jason Calacanis?

  It's fascinating, too, because it's a very democratic position to not be the world cop, you know?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, if you went back to when I was like in high school in the 90s, of course, it was very progressive liberal, like, why are we intervening in all of these other countries' business? That's their business and it's just economic colonialism and we should get out of, you know, all of these other countries. And now, because it's President Trump doing it in a lot of ways, it's, you sort of flipped and Democrats hate the idea.

• 24:06Jason Calacanis?

  I've been reading a whole bunch about this company, Outlier.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  You were.

• 24:11Jason Calacanis?

  Is a training data company. Now, what is training data? As you know, all these AI models are slurping up data off the open web. They used an open web crawler, this open web project, they did it without getting permission. That's why the New York Times is in a lawsuit and countless other peoples. You put that against the backdrop of, well, how do we get more information into these systems? There was a really interesting product that captured everybody's imagination 20 years ago called Mechanical Turk. There was some Saurus, which was doing tagging of like images and data entry. There's business process outsourcing in the. Philippines and India, that's always occurred where Westlaw and LexisNexis would take

• 24:55Jason Calacanis?

  legal documents when they were faxed, you know, back in the day and they were print and they would literally type them in and do data entry. Well, now we're entering a new phase, which is finding subject matter experts and then having them do queries, look at the results and fix the results. And I think they're actually going and putting primary data into these based on each vertical. Why is this important? Getting sued could cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars. You could get an injunction against you. And so there is an opportunity here for startups to take subject matter experts, humans, have them go find information on the web and have them type it in. Now, they could be stealing the information as well. But because

• 25:38Jason Calacanis?

  they are a little bridge with this outsourced company, it doesn't matter because OpenAI, let's say, or, you know, some other language model, Anthropic, could hire this company. And I don't know the details, but they could hire a third party and these third-party data providers exist everywhere. Who knows how they're getting the information? They could be scraping, they could be writing it in, they could get subject matter experts, all different ways to do it. And then they buy that from them. That company indemnifies the company. They just bought the data from them. If there was ever a problem, it's at arm's length. The same thing was done to seed social networks. People hire third parties to put content onto social networks. Another way of saying, paying people to go rip videos from other sources, put it on there. There was a

• 26:21Jason Calacanis?

  very interesting angle to this story about journalists.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  So basically, uh, Outlier is one of many companies that's providing these kind of services, like a human editor to aid in training your AI model. And a lot of those jobs are going to former journalists, people who are at risk or have already lost their job to AI are now helping to improve and fine tune the AI systems that, uh, you know, are putting them out of work. Journalism jobs in 2024, 2025, increasingly hard to come by. The news industry cut around 5,000 jobs just last year. That's a 9% spike from 2023, the year before. And these outlier type AI training jobs, they're fully remote. They're consistent whenever you want to work.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  You can do them full time, you can do them part time. They pay $35 an hour or more. You can see why as a freelance writer, this is a perfect fill in supplemental gig for me. I can, if I only have 25 hours of writing work to do this week, another 15, 20 helping to edit AI systems. Well, now I'm full time employed. So far, I, I, I totally appreciate what you're saying that you could use these to actually build the training data for your models. So far, what outlier is doing mostly is having them sort of fine tune the results. So they're fact checking, they're looking for hallucinations. And if there are hallucinations, they're reporting them and correcting them.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  And they're even noting when they get responses from chatbots that pull from inaccurate or less than ideal sources. So if it sees, oh, the chatbots relying too much on blogs or personal writings or op eds or social media posts that aren't verified. We should refocus it to more verifiable, reliable sources. So one thing I thought was interesting, if you think about it, it's basically the work a human editor used to do for a human writer. Check your sources, make sure your facts are right. If something doesn't sound, fix your grammar or something doesn't sound right. So that it's, that's, that job has really not changed. You're just helping a chatbot get better at writing instead of a, you know, a green reporter who's just starting out.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Uh, outlier is owned by SF's, uh, Scale AI. The company's valued at $13.8 billion. Their customers so far include OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft. So these, these journalists are feeding the biggest, you know, they're working for chat GPT basically.

• 28:51Jason Calacanis?

  This is a good use of funds if your company is worth a couple of hundred billion and you're raising 10 billion. I mean, $35 an hour, you know, if you were to do a million hours of work would be 35 million. If you did a 10 million hours of work, it would only be 350 million. 10 million hours of work, I think you could recreate the corpus of everything in the world.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  That's a lot of time. Yeah. So this process is called reinforcement learning with human feedback, R L H.

• 29:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And it's outlier.ai. We should definitely get the CEO on the program.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:24Jason Calacanis?

  But it's interesting that they're going after journalists. And this is the point. New work is always created. Here it is. New work is being created.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:32Jason Calacanis?

  And I bet you that this work pays better.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  35 an hour is good, man. I've definitely got, I've definitely had writing jobs that did not pay 35 an hour, like not even that long ago.

• 29:43Jason Calacanis?

  If it was work from home as well, it's a $70,000 a year job, you know, just times it by 2,000. That's incredible job for work from home.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Think about it. You just log in when you're ready to work and because it's not, you know, they've always got plenty to do. So you just log in.

• 29:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Here's your day's assignment. Okay. I did my eight hours.

• 30:02Jason Calacanis?

  I'm done. And here's the great news. If you are a worker at Google, or you're a worker at Facebook, or you're a worker for our government, you can collect that paycheck while doing this in your office. Now they're going to send you back to the office. When you get back to your office.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Don't tell Elon.

• 30:17Jason Calacanis?

  Don't tell Elon. But no, this is the, this is why overwork or overemployed is such a phenomenon. I guarantee you, people are doing these while they're ostensibly working at other places. I know it because.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Window open right now. I've been doing this the whole show.

• 30:32Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, fantastic. Great. Well, double dipping. Here we go. But we'll be in an office soon in the studio. So I'll be over your shoulder and I'll know if you're doing it.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Be noticing.

• 30:41Jason Calacanis?

  2025 is going to be the year that voice AI really breaks out. Voice AI is going to change everything. And this technology is perfect for building a chatbot or automating customer calls and basically creating these next gen voice experiences. But building with these tools is so difficult. It's just a bear. It's going to take. Your developers months to build and test anything even basic unless you use VAPI. V A P I. This is the fastest and easiest way to integrate voice into your products. It's just the most simple API you've ever used. It helps you build, test and deploy voice agents in just minutes. And you can create ultra realistic AI voices and customizable personalities.

• 31:24Jason Calacanis?

  I like that part, all with real time response speeds. You know, it'd be great. Maybe I just demo it. Okay, listen to this.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  Hey, Jason, it's great to be on your podcast.

• 31:34Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay, great. Are you interested in being the co-host of the podcast?

• 31:38Speaker 04

  I mean, I'd love to. Just imagine the banter AI and humans, the ultimate duo. But I think I'll stick to helping out with Vapi for now.

• 31:46Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  What's up in the startup world today?

• 31:48Jason Calacanis?

  You know, we have so many things going on in the startup world, including AI. So I'm wondering if you have any tips for founders on how to create great AI experiences?

• 31:58Speaker 04

  Totally. I mean, first off, keep it simple. Focus on solving real problems for users. Then make sure it feels natural. Good conversation dynamics are key. Oh, and don't forget to optimize for speed. Nobody likes waiting for a response. What do you think?

• 32:12Jason Calacanis?

  That sounds really good to me.

• 32:14Speaker 04

  Take care and chat soon.

• 32:16Jason Calacanis?

  I say, these are ready for primetime. And if you want to give it a try, you can see it works. Now you gotta give Vapi a try. V A P I dot AI. Vapi dot AI. Use the code TWIST200. T W I S T two hundred to get $200 in free credits. That's over a thousand minutes in calls. Great job to the Vapi team. The ad we showed there was outliers looking for talented accounting and tax experts to help train generative AI models. And you need a bachelor's degree or higher in agriculture-related subjects, experience working as agriculture.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Right. I think this is what's fascinating. They're really, they're not just looking for random freelance writers. They want category experts, people that have expertise in very specific niches. Because, you know, they're gonna, they've got so much data they've got to sift through. They need somebody who's just gonna focus on farming, agriculture, you know, like interior department stuff. And then I'm sure there's other people on, you know, nutrition and food, like everything a newspaper would report on, you know. It's really fascinating stuff.

• 33:21Jason Calacanis?

  There's a ton of other people who are doing this, Appian, data annotation.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Sure. Scale AI, the, the, the, the parent company of Outlier is doing some of this themselves. I also thought it was interesting. They're looking for people in international languages. They want people to do this in Thai, Dutch, Hindi, Swedish, Spanish and French now too.

• 33:39Jason Calacanis?

  Funny joke from Cecilia Hack. We can pull up here. Outlier is looking for advanced English writers to help train AI systems and LLMs.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  When they offer to pay you to help make your journalism job become obsolete.

• 33:52Jason Calacanis?

  In some ways it's true, you know? If you're an accountant and you train this and there's a hundred accountants training this and they do a really good job, then maybe the AI will be doing those accounting jobs.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. If they do a good enough job, this can take over the, the writing of blurbs. They don't need blurb writers anymore if the AI gets good enough.

• 34:14Jason Calacanis?

  And captions, all that stuff. And then you think about like pilots. When I was talking to some of the jobbies of the world and other, uh, you know, uh, Kitty Hawk, which then got subsumed by some other company at the All In Summit last year. One of them said, we're just trying to make the best pilot in the world. The singular best pilot in the world, like Sully.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Like air, airplane pilots?

• 34:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Like, do you think you're going to fly in a plane that's, that's being flown by a computer?

• 34:41Jason Calacanis?

  That is what VTOLs, the vertical takeoff and landing.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  You first.

• 34:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here's the thing. It turns out actually that already 80, 90% of flying is done on autopilot.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Of course. There's, right. I get that. I get that.

• 34:57Jason Calacanis?

  Say the 20% that isn't is the landing in a lot of cases and the takeoff or whatever. And then when you get up in the air, they press the button. But sometimes they press the button when they're landing. You put it all together, that last 10 or 20% will be figured out by AI and it will be done better. Just like driving and cabs will be better than your average cab driver because humans are fallible. Whether that happens in five years or 15, we can debate, but it's happening. And, um, I think that those rote jobs, truck driver, pilot.

• 35:31Jason Calacanis?

  And cab driver will be done better by AI, certainly 10 times better. Because almost every time it's pilot error, it's almost every time it's a driver error or distracted driver. And you still need to have some experts in the loop to take over. But yeah, it's going to be pretty impressive. Uh, when we see that happening.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Wow. All right. Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I'm going to wait for a few other, I'm going to wait a few years before I get into an AI airplane. That's just, that's just.

• 35:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to be a process. You know, if you look at Waymo, Waymo in San Francisco, it's pretty amazing when you take one, but it goes slow, it's jerky at times, it takes weird routes, you know, it's not for everybody.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  I tried my first Waymo the last time I was in Austin a few weeks ago.

• 36:15Jason Calacanis?

  It was open through the.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Uh, Amanda and Z and I took a, took a Waymo while we were hanging out.

• 36:22Jason Calacanis?

  Did you have, did somebody have the invite from the Waymo app?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  It was Amanda, Amanda, your friend Amanda has.

• 36:28Jason Calacanis?

  What they're doing in Austin is I think, because they, somebody from Waymo invited me as well. I got to click the link.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to have an, I've never been in one because I didn't, I didn't have access.

• 36:37Jason Calacanis?

  So that's the test. And it did it, what was your impression of it?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  I was very impressed. It worked perfectly. It, at one point, we made sort of a weird like three-part right-hand turn that was a little nerve-wracking, but not really. There was, at no point did I feel in any danger at all.

• 36:53Jason Calacanis?

  Another trend that's happening, um, that's pretty clear. And I tweeted about it today. We like to focus on trends is hot swappable L L Ms. Hot swappable means you can just, like I was saying, with Biden, they were going to hot swap Biden, which they did. You can hot swap hard drives. What that meant is you could pull a hard drive out of a server, plug another one in and the RAID array would um, just balance and redo the backups. And you could hot swap, which means you take it out, the system doesn't stop running. Well, with L L Ms, we're going to start seeing hot swappable L L Ms. And there was a tweet by Aaron Paris, Aaron P six one three.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, from Mac rumors. He's a, he's a Mac rumors guy.

• 37:34Jason Calacanis?

  He tweeted this, um, uh, cause you know what they do is is really interesting. They they go into the betas and they look at the code somehow.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:43Jason Calacanis?

  And then they find little breadcrumbs. One of the breadcrumbs here is that in iOS eighteen point four, we might see Apple Intelligence instead of just being able to launch a conversation with ChatGPT by OpenAI. They could, you could pop one open with Gemini. Uh, and I think Gemini is a bit better than OpenAI right now. And so this is interesting.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  We're looking at down the road somewhere. This is obviously not coming in iOS eighteen point four necessarily. But uh, they're they're laying the groundwork for maybe integrating Gemini along with uh, OpenAI's ChatGPT into iOS at some point. Nine to five Mac says we're probably gonna see Apple Intelligence debut by iOS eighteen or nineteen. Apple has already said they are hoping for the conversational Siri model to be here by iOS nineteen. Apple demoed its Apple Visual Intelligence suite of products and features back in September. Uh, but nonetheless, the company may be giving users more options in terms of AI services.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Uh, there's some suggesting that maybe perplexity and even other models could get in on this over time. Uh, Barry Schwartz responded to this Aaron Paris comment and suggested maybe rather than it just being Gemini, it could be specifically integrating Google data into Apple Intelligence. Like, could it be Google Shopping results being pulled in, but not necessarily full Gemini integration into iOS. Aaron says no, but did not uh, decline to go further in in terms of why that's impossible.

• 39:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a different product is the answer. I think that this is the next giant search deal. And that obviously Android has integrated Gemini on a very deep level. So I specifically bought the Google Pixel nine fold. So I could experience both the fold and experience Gemini integrated into the Android operating system. In fact, I bought you one. Or I asked them to buy you a Pixel nine, so you could uh, experience that as well.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  On its way to me right now.

• 39:47Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. And not the fold. I got you the regular one. The fold's a bit much, and I think it slows you down.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  I don't need the fold. I'm okay.

• 39:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I'll say I have found it really nice when I'm at a cafe or I'm on a plane. I do find myself opening it up and watching a YouTube video.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 40:04Jason Calacanis?

  Or, uh, which is very nice experience.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  I got the MacBook Air though. It's so, it's, it's almost like a tablet mixed with a laptop. I bring it everywhere.

• 40:14Jason Calacanis?

  I like having three, four screens with me at all times when I travel.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:18Jason Calacanis?

  So I bring my iPad Pro, which is giant. I bring my MacBook Air. I bring my Google Pixel Fold and I bring my iPhone.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 40:26Jason Calacanis?

  And I like having the optionality of different ones for different purposes. I also like, you know, since I'm an angel investor in all these companies being focused on that. But let me pull up my, um, my tweet here for a second and I'll, I'll just tell you what I think is going to happen here because of hot swappable L L Ms. I think Apple will obviously let you choose which one you want to do. They do that now with search, right? You can pick DuckDuckGo, you can pick Bing. If you want to go into the settings, you can pick which music app. You launch by default which maps app and you know, it was a lot of hand wringing and Justice Department pressure. And pressure from other companies causing, you know, Apple to have to, you know, add that. Back in the day, they didn't allow third party media players. They got pressured into putting V L C on there.

• 41:08Jason Calacanis?

  They didn't allow third party browsers. They got pushed to put Opera and Firefox and Chrome on your I O S. And obviously, you know, they don't want to get caught up in, uh, banning other music services from iPhones because that would be a bad look.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:24Jason Calacanis?

  So obviously Apple's going to let you pick. When you talk to Siri, I think you'll, in your settings, say Chat G P T, Gemini, Grok, whatever you prefer. But this is going to lead to a commercial deal and, uh, then Chat G P T and Gemini, uh, Grok and everybody flawed. Will all bid on it. I think Apple will get at the start at least a billion dollars annually for this.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 41:49Jason Calacanis?

  This is big business.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:51Jason Calacanis?

  And I think they'll do like a five-year deal, very similar to what they did with Google Search, right? When you do on your phone, and this was really important, and this is tens of billions of dollars a year for Apple in pure profit, that your, that the default is Google. But I think this is going to determine like 10, 20 points of consumer queries to language models. In other words, as great as ChatGPT's lead is, if they don't get this deal with Apple and Gemini does, then Google's going to have done what they did with search. They locked down Android for half the queries, they locked down iOS for the other half. So if Android uses Gemini with default, they're already at like 50% of the queries that could come

• 42:33Jason Calacanis?

  from a device. And so the iPhone deal is going to determine who wins the language model wars and the AI query wars in all likelihood.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that makes, I think that makes total sense. And it's interesting how these companies are sort of battling over this same thing in so many different areas. We just saw like Apple and Google are fighting over streaming now and who does Apple TV get to be, get to live on Android devices? And so it's just, it's just the next front in that ever, ever non-ending war of who, who's allowed into whose platform and who's walled garden.

• 43:08Jason Calacanis?

  All right. If you want to check in on the docket, go to thisweekinstartups.com/docket. We are making the docket public. If you're using the docket, you can put comments on the docket. The team will see them. We start working on the docket in the morning before the show on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. So you can watch us actually in real time build the docket.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  This week's startups. Get started the night before. It's a lot. It's a lot of work.

• 43:30Jason Calacanis?

  It's a lot. It's a lot of docket and we get to only about half the stories. I like to have twice as much docket as I need. And then, uh, you know, that means we can serve up a great show for you. And what you see live is about 125% of the show we wind up publishing. In other words, the published show is 80% of the live show and the docket is 2X the live show. So there's a lot of content there that we don't get to, and you get to have all that content right at your fingertips. Let's go to the next story here. This one is underreported. I think it's important. You know, there's a real problem with these meme coins. And I think the problem is one group of people sees them as collectibles. Which is fine if you want to have that interpretation.

• 44:12Jason Calacanis?

  But how they present, as I talked about on All In on Thursday with the Collison Brothers, they present as stocks, even if you believe they're collectibles. And there are a certain number of shares, there are a certain number of coins. They trade, and they trade in some cases on platforms like Robinhood, Coinbase, et cetera. And people share charts of them, and they have a ticker symbol. So it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, but people don't want to believe they're a duck.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  This is what always gets me about the collectibles thing. I think you're exactly right. When you are a fan of a collectible and you're a collector, it's always about the individual item. You're not looking at, well, here's the Pokemon index for this week. It's about this individual card, or this pack, or you're looking for one item that you particularly want. With, you know, Funkos are everywhere, but you want that one special Funko that's worth so much. And that's not what meme coins are. Meme coins are commodities. They're stock. They're, I want to get a certain percentage of this and invest in it, hoping that it goes up in value. It's totally different, I think.

• 45:22Jason Calacanis?

  It is, but I will say that, you know, you can go back and forth on this. If you go to, you know, I've been looking at maybe buying another Corvette. You know, I had a Corvette when you met me.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:35Jason Calacanis?

  And let me just show you something here. So I've been going to hagrid.com.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 45:41Jason Calacanis?

  And so, you know, I can look at, over time, what a 19, I want to buy a 1970 to 1973 Corvette. These things are incredibly affordable, $30,000, you know, and there's other versions of it. Two-door convertible, eight-cylinder, there's engines, whatever. But people do, uh, look at, over time, how much they cost in charts. And I can, you know, if I was paying for the professional thing here. So I don't think, you know, collectibles do have a trading price.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Right, but you're not looking at the daily Corvette market. You want that actual car. It's, it's more than just, it's not purely a financial instrument.

• 46:21Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, right.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And then, so I do believe NFTs, even though they're just digital. You know, there could be one of one, there could be one of 100, like there's prints, anyway.

• 46:33Jason Calacanis?

  Wherever this goes.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Closer to the collectible argument, it's still like you're kind of buying a receipt for the art. There were complexities, but.

• 46:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Uh, so here's my thinking on this. And here's what I said about Malay's meme coin. What Malay did was he rug pulled the people who put him in office. The people who voted for Malay are the ones who got hurt here. And when you think about leadership at its core, you know, the appearance of impropriety is impropriety in my mind. That's the leadership standard that should be here. So even being near this, your sister launching it, your brother launching, whatever it is, the taunting of his own followers. You know, I'm out on Malay right now. This is what he said. The reality is if you go to the casino and lose money, I mean, what is the claim? If you knew that it had these characteristics, leaders own their mistakes. They don't attack the victims. You take ownership of it.

• 47:25Jason Calacanis?

  And the way you should judge people, I think, is what they do when they're given a lot of power and what they do when they make mistakes. Malay is a failure on all of those fronts. It's absolutely important. A lot of people say, why won't you talk about the Trump coin?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that comes up in the all in subreddit often.

• 47:42Jason Calacanis?

  A lot. Okay, let me address this. All in is four people, right? One of them works directly for Trump.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Not, he's the crypto czar, sir. He's the crypto czar.

• 47:56Jason Calacanis?

  I, because of my friendship with David Sacks, people will weaponize me to say, even Sacks's friend says these things. And obviously it's uncomfortable for him, I'm sure. I don't know this to have me as a friend because I'm popping off about all kinds of topics. I feel the same way about the Malay coin as I do the Haq to a coin, as I do the Dave Portnoy coin, as I do about the Trump and Melania coins. It's all the same to me. It's all a grift. The rules of the road are designed to have the people who host it do the transactions. They get paid tons of fees on the transactions, apparently, and the snipers. So I think the game's rigged.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Five or six different ways to rig it. Like every time they like, there's a lot of new wrinkles or these people figured out even a different. Way to skim off the top or yeah.

• 48:44Jason Calacanis?

  This one probably was one of the most egregious in terms of those respects. And then maybe on the spectrum, the Trump coin was the least egregious because they had like a holding period for the 80% owned by Trump and his family or this company.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:00Jason Calacanis?

  So, you know, you can go back and forth on this. People are debating, is the Malay coin, the Huck Tua coin, the Dave Portnoy coin or whatever he did and this and the and the Trump and the Malay, are they all the same? No, they're obviously different. I think because these things trade the way they do, that there needs to be some more thoughtfulness about them. Uh, and you know, having an accredited investor test, if you want to participate in these things would be a great way to start because it would create friction. If you want to trade these things, you need to have taken a course. And there's a lot of libertarians who are like, nope, I can tell you how crypto people think.

• 49:39Jason Calacanis?

  Crypto people think that the people buying these are sheep and pigs, you're sheep and pigs to these crypto people. And they've said this to me and I've been in conversations with them. They're libertarians. They believe if you're stupid enough to buy these coins, knowing it's an insider game, then you are the sheep going to slaughter. And that if you try to get really smart about it and you're well, and you know, you have made some money on it. They will eventually slaughter you like a pig. And there is actually a term, I think it's called pig butchering or something.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  I believe that is what.

• 50:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And so they literally in crypto have a technique of having a woman account. Go find stupid guys who are getting into crypto, get in their DMs. They then send them to exchanges that aren't real. They tip them off on crypto. People buy the crypto in these pig slaughtering or pig butchering scams. I think pig butchering is the proper term.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  It's an old term. It refers to any scam where you build a trusting relationship with your victim over a long period of time. The idea that you're fattening up the pig. Often in, and I mean, we've seen this throughout the history of, you know, long cons or whatever. You use a fake romantic relationship. So you would use a woman to hit on a man. Over time, get him more and more trusting, willing to put more and more money in. You're fattening up the pig for slaughter, essentially.

• 51:07Jason Calacanis?

  So you, you know, buy a couple of mean coins. You make a little bit of money. You make a thousand dollars. You make $10,000. You make $25,000. And then, or maybe it's one, two, three, then they get you to put 50,000 into the fourth coin. And then they shut the website you've been going to this whole time and trading on is a fugazi, a fugazi. It's not real. It doesn't exist.

• 51:31Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, insert Matthew McConaughey here. And so I think that's what these are.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  You've, you've seen House of Games, that, that David Mamet, uh, movie. It's great. It's Joe Mantegna plays a con artist who teaches this author and psychiatrist, like how to, the nature of the business. But he explains in an early scene, it's called a confidence game, not because you put your confidence in the con man. It's because they put their confidence in you. And when people are reciprocal, so when a stranger trusts you and puts their confidence in you, it prompts you to want to do the same. You trust them. You reciprocate to them. That's how people get scammed. The, the stammer appears to put themselves out on your behalf. And so you feel like, oh, well, they, they're, they're helping me out. I gotta help them in turn.

• 52:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  So beware.

• 52:17Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, that's how I feel about it. Um.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  So anyway, that leads us to today's story.

• 52:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, tell me what's, I mean, I don't even want to believe this is real.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  It seems like it's really, it was, I mean, it, it could be an elaborate hoax, but it would be pretty elaborate.

• 52:30Jason Calacanis?

  So let's, let's put that disclaimer here. And then I guess we're supposed to do a trigger warning about self harm. So if you're somebody who.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  We won't get into graphic detail. We're not gonna show you anything.

• 52:40Jason Calacanis?

  We're not getting into too graphic detail, but it's a graphic story if you've been impacted by self harm or people who've committed suicide to and out of the program now.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  So the disclaimer, we're about to discuss a, a self harm related story. So a 23-year-old crypto trader named Mr. FU, he uses the real word, but I'm going to say Mr. FU, apparently shot himself while streaming live on X after he lost a final $500 in a meme coin rug pull. His dying request before pulling the trigger was for his fellow traders to start a meme coin in his honor, which some of them did. It's called Mr. Coin. It is available for trade right now. There was at least some debate in the forum after he died about whether or not this would be ethical to profit off of his suicide. Somebody eventually did it anyway. There's speculation that this was a stunt gone wrong.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  There seems to be on the blockchain, a developer sent Mr. FU a supply of this meme coin that was named for him before his death. So they seem to be already planning for the aftermath of the shooting before it happened. There have also been speculation that it might have been a Russian roulette type situation because apparently the gun clicked once or twice before the fatal shot was fired. So we're still, lots of questions remain. And like I said, maybe these guys are just very, very clever. There's money involved. Maybe this is all a big hoax and we were falling for it, but I don't think so. It seemed to be a fairly legitimate story from what I could tell.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  The community reacted with shock, horror. People are very upset. We pulled a few tweets here of people who are devastated by what happened. But other people are calling out the community for hypocrisy and being upset. Danny Worldwide tweeted, "We've seen a million coins that involve deaths and suicides from justice. But when some random dude offs himself on stream and asks people to make a coin, that's where we draw the line? Got it. Play the white knight." But another anonymous commentator responded, "The meme coin industry is pure evil."

• 54:43Jason Calacanis?

  You know, this is, I think...

• 54:46Jason Calacanis?

  If this is real.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  If this is real.

• 54:49Jason Calacanis?

  Big if.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Put that out there.

• 54:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Um, if this is real, I think what you should take away from it is people losing money. Uh, who don't have it can put people into a serious sense of despair. And it can cause extreme hardship, uh, so much extreme hardship that they might kill themselves. And do something irrational. And this doesn't mean that gambling shouldn't exist in the world, but I can tell you, being a, you know, a somewhat high stakes poker player, I have played with people who should not be in games. How do I know they should not be in the game because, well, like, I don't know, they're an actor

• 55:31Jason Calacanis?

  or something, but not like a notable actor who makes 20 million a film, like a TV actor or a reality actor. And I've watched people I know do not have the means to play in certain games, play in certain games and, um, then lose and then be put on a payment program. Then, you know, all kinds of hardship, you know, their spouses leave them. Gambling is really dark for 5% of people or less.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  The last time I went to Vegas, you know, you got to wait in line to get your loyalty card. So when you play, they can keep track of how much you're betting, maybe you'll get a free meal or something.

• 56:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  So right by where you wait for that is the room where you can sign up for a line of credit at the casino. And so when I got there, I'm like, who is, I, I, in my head, who's doing that? Nobody's doing this. They just have that office there. But just while I was in line 10 minutes at the Venetian, three or four people must've gone into that office.

• 56:24Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I can explain that.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  A line of credit at the casino.

• 56:27Jason Calacanis?

  I, I have a line.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 56:30Jason Calacanis?

  But what it is, is it's not as pernicious as you think. When I go play in like the World Series of Poker or like some high stakes game or whatever, I need to send 25K, 50K there.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 56:41Jason Calacanis?

  Cause the buy is 10K. I'm not actually getting a line of credit. I'm doing wires. So that same room is where you wire money in.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:49Jason Calacanis?

  And they will give you a line of credit at a, you know, whatever, 10% fee or whatever, and you can pay it back. But yes, it is a dark thing that exists. And I think

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Don't gamble on credit, folks.

• 57:01Jason Calacanis?

  No, don't gamble on credit.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 57:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, this is what margin is. So on Robinhood, when you trade, one of the criticisms is people can trade on margins. So but you have to have a certain amount of money there, I believe. And so they have become very, and we talked to Vlad about it on Wednesday. They've become very dialed into this, that some people trade stocks, you know, more for entertainment value, just like I play prize picks for entertainment value. I love prize picks. I do it every Knicks game. I bet $100 to $500. It's like nothing to me. It's when I buy tickets to the Knicks. You know, I'm spending a couple of thousand dollars on those tickets because I get decent tickets.

• 57:46Jason Calacanis?

  You know, me putting 100, 500 bucks in the game is nothing, but it makes me more engaged in the game because I'm betting on individual players and props and parlays. And I love it and it's just fun for me. It makes the game more interactive.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Like betting on the Oscars, yeah.

• 57:58Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you bet on the Oscars?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not, not, not $5,000 or whatever.

• 58:03Jason Calacanis?

  Where do you bet on the Oscars?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  I've got a bunch of film writers and YouTube guys. We have an Oscar pool, so I'm in on that.

• 58:11Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, how do I get in on that? I want to do an Oscar pool.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  I'll email Rob after this. You can be in on our Oscar.

• 58:16Jason Calacanis?

  What is it? A Hyundai a person and you just pick your winner?

• 58:18Speaker 01

  20 bucks, 20 bucks.

• 58:19Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to be in a $1,000 pool for the Oscars.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  We're not, we're film writers.

• 58:25Jason Calacanis?

  If you want to do a $1,000 pool for the Oscars, let's set it up. We'll give 10%.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  That does sound fun.

• 58:30Jason Calacanis?

  That sounds like a little high stakes.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Not on credit.

• 58:33Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe you'll be my sharp. I'll be the money. You be the sharp. We could get in there.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, start. Oh, you should start a like a rich guy Oscar pool because I'm pretty good.

• 58:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I would like to start a rich guy Oscar pool.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  I'm pretty good.

• 58:44Jason Calacanis?

  So.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Do you want to talk about award season? We could jump into that.

• 58:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we'll jump into that. I just want to, just wrapping up the meme coin thing.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Put a cap on this, yeah.

• 58:51Jason Calacanis?

  This is what I think will happen in this administration. The last administration too cold on crypto. No regulation, just follow the securities law. That obviously doesn't work because this is a new thing in the world. We've pointed out endless times that trading cards and stocks.

• 59:08Jason Calacanis?

  This is, you know, somewhere in between, right?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:11Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And then some coins have utility. You use them, you burn them to get a service online. That's different than a stock or a commodity. Some of them are centralized, some of them are decentralized. Some of them, there's a controlling party that owns 80% of the coins. I believe like maybe XRP would fall into that category where it's centrally controlled. Bitcoin not centrally controlled.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  The problem is our government is composed of 85 year old people and they just, they think of crypto as this monolithic thing. There's a thing that was invented called crypto and we need to figure out what to do about it. But actually crypto is just this umbrella term for a thousand different financial instruments and inventions and concepts.

• 59:53Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. You've got NFTs, you've got DAOs, you've got meme coins.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  I feel like every day there's a new, here's a thing that's been built with blockchain. It has elements of crypto, but it's not exactly like Bitcoin.

• 1:00:06Jason Calacanis?

  And in between the new regulation that friends of mine and the SEC chair and everybody are working on, that'll be just right. But right now we're in a too hot period.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:17Jason Calacanis?

  To call with Gary Gensler, too hot with no, but no rules in between these administrations where people think they can run them up. And then eventually I think we'll be just right. And so my best advice is do not participate in this with money you can't afford to lose. You know, keep it to 5% of your net worth, expect to lose it all. So by the way, what I tell people when they're angel investing in startups, I say, if you're angel investing in startups, only invest money that you can afford to lose. And here's a book I wrote about it. It's on the shelf back here. Read the book. It'll explain, you know, the power law, it'll explain diversification, it'll explain the time horizons called angel. Or you can just read the power law and understand that like.

• 1:00:58Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. Twenty-nine of thirty bets, thirty-nine of forty bets will return no capital. One will return, hopefully, in this portfolio theory called venture capital or angel investing will return the majority of your returns. But let's talk about Oscar season as we get to the end here. I asked you just a quick question because you see everything. I'm assuming you've seen all the major films.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  I've seen, there is a Best Picture nominee I have not seen, I'm Still Here from Brazil. It's only in theaters. I haven't had a chance to get through it yet. I'd really like to see it. Walter Solis, the guy who directed Central Station, which is a great, a great Oscar movie from the nineties. It's his new film.

• 1:01:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I just want to point out Timothy Chalamet. I didn't see the Dylan film yet.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Oh, it's great.

• 1:01:39Jason Calacanis?

  But we'll watch it. It was great.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  I really liked it. Yeah. He does a great, he does a great job. And he's singing. It's all him singing and playing and he's.

• 1:01:47Jason Calacanis?

  And that's not a gimmick, right? That's like, you consider that performance and like, you know, add it to the story.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  It's very impressive the way that he, he's not, it's not just like an impression, like he's not just doing a Dylan voice. He's like evoking Dylan in a way that.

• 1:02:04Jason Calacanis?

  He's channeling him.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really interesting. And he does, he's, he's great.

• 1:02:08Jason Calacanis?

  So if you compare it to Ray Charles, what was the Ray Charles film?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Ray. It's just called Ray with Jamie Foxx. That's the Taylor Hatcher film.

• 1:02:16Jason Calacanis?

  So I was impressed by that. Is it similar in that way?

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  I think it's, it's similar in that way where it's not like, it's not like he's just, he's doing like an SNL Ray Charles. It's like, he's really embodying the spirit of Ray Charles in this kind of interesting way where it's a real performance. I mean.

• 1:02:33Jason Calacanis?

  And Walk the Line would be the other one?

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Right. James Mangold, actually, the same director as this one, also directed Walk the Line.

• 1:02:39Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. So I enjoyed Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Jason Calacanis?

  Doing Johnny Cash.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Interestingly, Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash in A Complete Unknown. So Johnny Cash is a character in the Dylan film.

• 1:02:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So we've got the whole nineteen sixties, seventies cinematic universe. But he's got a pretty controversial acceptance at whatever award show was yesterday. Yeah.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  SAG. The SAG Awards were, were last night. Conclave won Best Ensemble. Conclave and Enora are sort of duking it out for Best. Picture right now that's most, most people think it's going to be one of those two. Uh, Demi Moore won the best actress award for The Substance and Shalhoub May won for his portrayal of Dylan. In his speech, he very openly says he wants to be one of the great actors. He says, you know, I know these are subjective awards, but it's very important to me because I'm in pursuit of greatness and I want to be one of the greats.

• 1:03:31Jason Calacanis?

  I would normally be turned off by that, but here is the video. Let's watch the video and then we'll give our comments. Yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 05

  I can't downplay the significance of this award because it means the most to me. And I know we're in a subjective business, but the truth is I'm really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight. I'm as inspired by Daniel Day Lewis, Marlon Brando and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there. So I'm deeply grateful to that. This, this doesn't signify that, but it's a little more fuel. It's a little more ammo to keep going. Thank you so much.

• 1:04:09Jason Calacanis?

  Think he's like still stuck in his Dylan impersonation.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  It's a little bit like he's still doing a voice, a little bit like a, you know, Elvis, uh.

• 1:04:17Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to say I'm very, very in pursuit of excellence and I know that this is a subjective thing.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit like Austin Butler, how he couldn't kick the, the Elvis voice for a little while.

• 1:04:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, um, that's fine with him. Sometimes I get stuck in an impersonation. I get stuck in my Jordan Peterson now all the time. When I'm at dinner, I do Jordan Peterson with people.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Santa Canis too, uh, was a hard one to draw.

• 1:04:39Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Santa Canis, I had a hard time getting out of that one. Uh, but my Jordan Peterson, it's just, you know, these young men, who's looking out for them?

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  I just do Kermit. Uh, you know, it's, um, you know, when you're back high hole, when you're looking out for install.

• 1:04:56Jason Calacanis?

  Someday we'll find it. The rainbow connection. It's like someone between Kermit and I don't know what.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a little bit like this Kermit, Kermit was a.

• 1:05:05Jason Calacanis?

  Get back on track.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Twenty nine years old, Timmy's the youngest, uh, lead actor winner ever at the SAG Award.

• 1:05:11Jason Calacanis?

  Who's going to win best picture?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  You know, I have my Oscar ballot here. I went with Enora. But I think it could also be Conclave. I'm very.

• 1:05:21Jason Calacanis?

  Enora is about.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  It's a Sean Baker film. The guy did The Florida Project, Tangerine, Red Rocket. Uh, this is his newest one. It is about.

• 1:05:31Jason Calacanis?

  Indie director is what they're saying.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  And it's, uh, Mikey Madison, who you saw in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She's in the new Scream movie, uh, Scream V, I believe. She, uh, plays a sort of a, a stripper escort. She, uh, meets this, uh, the son of a very wealthy Russian oligarch who's, uh, in America, spending money, doing drugs, partying. Uh, and this guy basically hires her to be his, you know, girlfriend for the week. They go to Vegas. They're having so much fun. They get married while they're together.

• 1:06:04Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  The Mikey Madison, the, the, uh, stripper, she believes this is her golden ticket. She's arrived. Her future is set. But this guy's parents are like, you're not getting married. We're getting this annulled. So it becomes this kind of uncut gems thriller while.

• 1:06:21Jason Calacanis?

  I love uncut gems, man.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  The oligarchs enforcers are trying to force them to get divorced. Mikey Madison is like, F you. We're gonna go live our lives and be happy. And it becomes very chaotic, but it's also funny and it's sort of, uh, you know, like.

• 1:06:35Jason Calacanis?

  My friend Megyn Kelly, uh, MK Ultra, as I call her, uh, was just on her, uh, pod. She was like, this is it. This is a pour into Christianity, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Oh, Conclave. Uh, Conclave is, uh, where we may see the real life version happening any day now. It is basically a movie opens, the Pope dies. The, uh, Ralph Fiennes plays the Dean of Cardinals who has to call all the Cardinals together.

• 1:07:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  To, it's about if you follow the process of voting for the new Pope, but they make it into a sort of a noir-y detective thing where all of the candidates to be the next Pope, there's, there's a scandal, there's a problem, there's a mystery, there's something they're hiding. And so Ralph Fiennes has to use this conclave to like dig into the truth and figure out what's going on with all these Cardinals before they vote on the new Pope.

• 1:07:26Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, we will see you on Wednesday. This week at startups.com/docket, youtube.com. Go search for this week in startups, put your bells and whistles on so that we can get at you. He's x.com/loans, L-O-N-S. Four characters only, I'm right behind him with five, x.com/jason. Thank you to our partners and sponsors, thanks producer Matty and our producers Chris and Court. We will see you all next time, bye bye.