Can Nvidia Survive the Jensen Huang Spy Scandal? | E2361

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Stripe: https://stripe.com/startups Northwest Registered Agent: https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain Upwork: https://www.upwork.com Plaud: https://Plaud.ai/twist Today’s show: Nvidia’s board is investigating CEO Jensen Huang after he admitted to an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), the leader of Singapore cloud computing and data center interest Megaspeed. US officials now believe that Alice Huang may have been recruited by Chinese intelligence to spy on the Nvidia chief or use him as an asset. Jason’s take: benching Jensen would be the wrong move, and play precisely into the Chinese government’s hands. On a Monday all-news special, Jason and Lon dig into the unfolding Nvidia scandal: what it means about Jensen’s past statements regarding Chinese AI, the seemingly intractable chip diversion problem, and whether or not the China hawks were actually right all along on the issue of GPU exports. Plus: is Sequoia vs. Roelof Botha really happening, or is it just a media narrative? Why Apple CEO John Ternus wants to get more aggressive about using Siri as an agent. And why Jason thinks Democrat will focus more on slowing the spread of self-driving cars and humanoid robots rather than stalling new data centers. Relevant Links Nvidia investigates Jensen Huang's relationship with alleged Chinese spy (CNBC): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/08/nvidia-jensen-huang-investigation-china-spy.html What is Megaspeed? The Nvidia chip buyer at the center of the story (CNBC): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/09/megaspeed-nvidia-jensen-huang-alice-huang.html What the Nvidia board's probe could look at (Fortune): https://fortune.com/2026/11/09/nvidia-board-probe-jensen-huang-affair-suspected-china-spy-statements/ Shaun Maguire on nation-state kompromat: https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/2119582151985574371 Sequoia hits rewind, undoing 20 years of expansion (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/04/sequoia-hits-rewind-undoing-20-years-of-expansion/ FT: Sequoia partners blindsided by Botha's SpaceX board seat (summary): https://mlq.ai/news/sequoia-partners-were-blindsided-when-roelof-botha-joined-spacexs-board-ft-reports/ Ternus presses Federighi to move faster on an agentic Siri (The Next Web, via Bloomberg): https://thenextweb.com/news/ternus-federighi-agentic-siri-apple-ai-bloomberg Siri chief Mike Rockwell may step down (MacRumors): https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/09/apple-siri-boss-may-leave/ Introducing Inkling 2 Small (Thinking Machines): https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/inkling-2-small/ Thinking Machines nears a $5B round at a $40B valuation (Dealroom): https://dealroom.co/news/170334-thinking-machines-lab-nears-5b-round-at-40b-valuation-led-by-accel/ Nous Research introduces Arete-27B (X): https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2118822925445050435 Trump says deportations were "too tough" and hurt him in the midterms (NBC News): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-says-deportations-tough-hurt-midterms-rcna608208 Democratic wave has the robotaxi industry sweating (Axios): https://www.axios.com/2026/11/05/democrat-election-robotaxi-industry Musk bet big on keeping Texas red. What now for his companies? (CNN): https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/05/business/musk-texas-donations-midterms-spacex-tesla ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF (ARKQ): https://www.ark-funds.com/funds/arkq Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production to make room for Cybercab (Fox Business): https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/tesla-wind-down-cybertruck-production-texas-factory-next-year-make-room-cybercab Bring a Trailer: https://bringatrailer.com Peterson Automotive Museum: https://www.petersen.org Julian Wasser's 1968 photo of Joan Didion with her Corvette Stingray (Danziger Gallery): https://danzigergallery.com/exhibitions/julian-wasser-joan-didion Dueling proofs from OpenAI and Anthropic astound scientists (Scientific American): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dueling-proofs-from-openai-and-anthropic-astound-scientists/ Timestamps: 0:00 Jason's in his Jay Gatsby era 2:05 Plaud - If your work depends on conversations - interviews, meetings, calls - you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 3:22 How much damage does this scandal do to Nvidia? 5:57 Corporate espionage and Shaun Maguire's thread 10:49 Stripe - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on https://stripe.com/startups. 15:20 Winning the superintelligence race 17:43 Time to buy the Nvidia dip? (Not investment advice) 22:55 Northwest Registered Agent - Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain 23:44 Sequoia closes London office, but why? 27:45 Why Roelof's SpaceX board seat matters. 31:13 GoDaddy - GoDaddy helps founders seek out the perfect domain and will work through brokers if the name you want is already owned by someone else. Find out more at https://GoDaddy.com. 33:38 Deel - Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit https://deel.com/twist to learn more. 34:15 Apple CEO wants Siri to get more agentic 38:25 Lon got a new iMac! 41:56 Upwork - Upwork helps businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work. Post your job for free at https://www.upwork.com 43:08 New models from Thinking Machines + Nous 48:12 Local first, then on the cloud: how agent should run 53:12 Gov. Gina Hinojosa and robotaxi rules 57:42 Where to put the new data centers 1:12:18 Refusing the "exponential time hypothesis" Subscribe to our newsletters on Substack: TWiST: https://twistartups.substack.com/ TWiAI: https://www.thisweekinai.ai/ TWiVC: https://thisweekinvc.substack.com/ Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. It's Monday, November 9th, 2026. We have a lot to discuss, Lon.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 0:06Jason Calacanis?

  Obviously, Nvidia and the situation with Jensen has cracked wide open. There's a lot of palace intrigue at Sequoia Capital and the shuttering of the Scouts program, which was the program that got me into angel investing. Lots of drama there. And of course, Apple is finally realizing that they could be the number one player in agentic AI, superintelligence, if they can figure out how to make Siri not... I can't say the word anymore. The Dems won. What's the word? If they were not...

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Dumb, stupid.

• 0:45Jason Calacanis?

  Dumb. If they could get out of their own way.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 0:48Jason Calacanis?

  Before we do all of that on This Week in Startups, Mondays, every Monday, I'm gonna... And Friday, I put this on. You know what this is, Lon? Everybody loves me in my cream color, by the way. Did you notice that everybody's commenting in the comments about my cream?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  I have seen that.

• 1:03Jason Calacanis?

  Color scheme?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  I was saying pre-show, it reminds me a little bit of Fantasy Island. That's what it makes... You've kind of got that Ricardo Montalban Fantasy Island look going.

• 1:12Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome to Fantasy Island. That makes you tattoo.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:17Jason Calacanis?

  The bus, the plane.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that definitely makes me touchy.

• 1:20Jason Calacanis?

  It is the plane. I don't take the private jets anymore.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  No one in this room is getting my Fantasy Island jokes, but yeah, thank you for appreciating that.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Upwork. Upwork helps businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work. Post your job for free at upwork.com. Northwest Registered Agent. Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more with no purchase required. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain. Stripe Startups. Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits, expert insights, and a focused community of builders. Apply today on stripe.com/startups.

• 2:05Jason Calacanis?

  I need to make sure my Plod is on and running.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  And recording.

• 2:10Jason Calacanis?

  Especially now that I'm wearing these cream-colored... You know, I have all this Italy clothes. I have Italy... When you become a venture capitalist, you make a little cheddar. So I am kind of like in this Great Gatsby thing where, you know, I'm gonna go on a vacation and I buy, you know, four suits. It's not expensive, you know. I could go with a Banana Republic, a suit supply, you know, get some linens, the basics.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:32Jason Calacanis?

  So I have this like little section in my closet. I never wear it. But one day I was like, you know what? I'm gonna go light and bright. And now everybody's going crazy for it.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  You gotta start calling people old sport now. That's the only way to...

• 2:41Jason Calacanis?

  Old sport, yes. Old sport. So the Plod pin is on. You press the button. Now you're recording. Now I got everything dialed in. I'm gonna have a complete transcript, feed it into my Grokbot, have that, and have it tell me like in the future, did Jason change his opinion, yada, yada? Whether any action items of things to get done on the show, anything that could improve the show.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  That's super powerful.

• 3:04Jason Calacanis?

  People who want to join the revolution, what should they do, Lon?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Well, if you want to get your own Plod pin, you could hook it into your Claude. Now you could hook it into your Gmail and your Google Calendar. You could hook it into your Grokbot, whatever you want. You gotta go to plaud.ai/twist, use the code TWIST. They're gonna give you 10% off your new Plod.

• 3:21Jason Calacanis?

  And I suggest you buy both. There's one that goes on the back of your phone.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:25Jason Calacanis?

  Plod Pro, and then you have the pin.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  I've got the pin.

• 3:27Jason Calacanis?

  All right. First story up is the Nvidia story.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 3:31Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's...

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I'm calling it...

• 3:33Jason Calacanis?

  And this is a moving, moving target of a story.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  I'm calling it a GPU to a kill. That's my...

• 3:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, there you go. Everybody's getting in on it.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  It's... How often do we get to talk about spy stuff?

• 3:46Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's also like we process the memes so quick today that, like, the story comes out, it's absolutely disconcerting. And I'm like, oh, my God, this is a serious, serious story. And then they've already got short movies.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's within 20 minutes. It was everywhere. People were mocking it. It's over. Yeah, like, it's...

• 4:04Jason Calacanis?

  Mugging.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Everything goes crazy today.

• 4:07Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Get people the catch-up if they were, actually had a life.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Nvidia, if you were doing something for the last three hours. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted on Sunday in a memo to employees that he had an affair. Nvidia's board launching an investigation. This follows months of reports about his relationship with Alice Wong. No relation. A former executive at Singapore-based Nvidia customer, Megaspeed. Now, US officials believe she was actually recruited to surveil Jensen by China's Ministry of State Security. And Megaspeed is further suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips into China. Wong had previously called it a "normal business relationship." A committee of independent directors are now going to investigate, along with some outside counsel. For now, he's staying on as the CEO of Nvidia.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  The board says it has no reason to believe national security or any corporate secrets were compromised. Also Sunday, New York Times reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw a classified memo this spring warning top administration officials about this relationship. President Trump has come out in defense of Wong and Nvidia on Sunday night. He told reporters, "I haven't heard that he's done anything wrong," and said he would still consider bringing him along on a trip to Asia next week. So Jason, a lot of people defending Jensen and saying, well, this was inappropriate, but it didn't cross these legal or ethical boundaries. Where are you coming down on this? And how damaging is this to Jensen and the Nvidia brand?

• 5:37Jason Calacanis?

  This is happening all the time in corporate espionage. It's happening all the time. This happened in the internet era. It's happened to media companies. Obviously, it happens in defense. People are educated when you're an executive to avoid the following things, to look out for the following clues of you might be a target. Just assume you're a target if you're anybody powerful. Sean McGuire did a tweet about this, and it linked to... And he described how it happens. Like, you're out with your friends. They compromise your friends. Then your friend invites you back to, like, you're at some party and you're in Mexico and you come back and there's a bunch of attractive young ladies in the room if they're targeting you. Could be attractive young men in the room. Who knows?

• 6:22Jason Calacanis?

  Like, they do do this for gay people. They do it for women. This is not like only men, although it does seem like men get picked up for it the most often because maybe they're in the CEO slot on a higher percentage and maybe they're more dopey and easier to compromise. But all of that aside, this one has multiple levels of concern from what I've read. Number one, the backstory here is the company that this person is the CEO of is based in Singapore. That company does have access to the latest Nvidia chips, whereas China, you could only send

• 7:01Jason Calacanis?

  like two generations ago. You may remember David Sacks, Jensen, President Trump, AMD's CEO Lisa. They were all talking about, hey, this... It was about a year ago, maybe, when we had this big discussion, hey, should we be giving these chips to China if we are in a race? Well, we want to be the standard for AI around the world, so maybe we don't want to give them the latest, but maybe we want them on the last one. It was a reasonable argument because if you look at something like Huawei, Huawei has... Is a Chinese company. They make routers, 5G. Ban in the West in some countries. Other countries didn't ban them. And there's major security concerns around that, listening devices, et cetera.

• 7:43Jason Calacanis?

  And the Chinese will do anything, absolutely anything, to get an advantage. So will the Israelis. So will the United States. So will India.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  That's the game, man.

• 7:52Jason Calacanis?

  So will the UK. It's the game on the field. So that seemed like a very logical argument. But then you have Nvidia selling these chips and these things in Singapore, and then there's diversion. Fancy word for, you sold it to one place and they rerouted it to another. And there have been multiple cases of people getting pinched for that. Here's the Sean McGuire tweet, if you wanted to pull it up. So Copa Research, I have no idea who these people are, but on May 13th, 2025, they put a short on Nvidia. Nvidia was off to the races at that time period, if you remember.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 8:28Jason Calacanis?

  It's a surging stock. And it says here, Nvidia claims its Chinese business went to zero after April 2025 US trade restrictions. We believe in reality, over 20% of Nvidia's fiscal year 2026 compute revenues remain driven by China via illegal GPU diversion and Southeast Asian intermediaries.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:50Jason Calacanis?

  And then the third one, Nvidia vouches for Megaspeed. Now, Megaspeed, I believe, is the company in question that this spy, alleged spy, was running.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:00Jason Calacanis?

  It says here in the third tweet, "Its largest SEA chip buyer..." I don't know what SEA...

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Southeast Asian.

• 9:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Southeast Asian. Yeah. "buyer under US and Singapore investigation as having no Chinese ownership and free of diversion concerns. We uncovered documents, however, that suggest Megaspeed was financed by Alibaba through a Singapore shell company." Tweet number four, "Megaspeed's balance sheet exploded from $33 million at year-end 2023 to $3 billion at the end of 2024, driven almost entirely by $2.9 billion in refundable deposits received from an unnamed source. Same $2.9 billion was forwarded to subsidiaries like Speed Matrix. In June 2024, two months prior to commencing operations, Speed Matrix pledged its assets as collateral to Apex Enterprise Solutions Singapore, Singapore filings, yada, yada."

• 9:52Jason Calacanis?

  And on and on and on. And so these, this group of people shorted the stock. Then you get to number nine. And it's a photo of a bunch of people together, including Jensen and the alleged spy, Alice Wong.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah, there she is.

• 10:09Jason Calacanis?

  Not the same, not related anyway, just because they have the very calming.

• 10:16Jason Calacanis?

  So, and it says here, CEO Wong has walked alongside MegaSpeed at every step and seems to have a close relationship with MegaSpeed, MegaSpeed's Alice Wong. So when you say close relationship, that means they probably knew. The short seller knew this in May. They partied together in June 2024, same month as Apex Alibaba pledged, then dined together in May 25, just after trade restrictions. And they've already posted the three photos there.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't.

• 10:45Jason Calacanis?

  So anybody who is paying attention in May would have seen this.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:49Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:33Jason Calacanis?

  billing, invoicing, and taxes, giving you an overall view of your revenue so you can make smarter, more informed decisions. Learn more and apply for the program today by visiting stripe.com/startups. That's stripe.com/startups.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Stripe Treasury includes various distinct Stripe products. See stripe.com/legal/SSA. Stripe is not a bank. Checking accounts are provided exclusively by Fifth Third Bank, National Association Member FDIC.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  You, you wouldn't have necessarily needed to know that they were in a like romantic sexual relationship. I mean, maybe they did. But all, all this tips you off that like, well, they're, they're close friends, they're allies, they're looking out for each other. Like, that might have been enough to fuel the speculation.

• 12:16Jason Calacanis?

  So here we go. He's standing here next to Jensen, smiling, glass of wine. Then the second picture, he's there on a couch having drinks. Third picture, you know, it,

• 12:27Speaker 01

  It's clearly a close relationship. They're, they know each other and spend time.

• 12:31Jason Calacanis?

  Not my point. Not my point. My point here is this person who did this tweet storm knew. I believe they knew. And so they put their short position on and then started leaking this information. Now, when it got to the, you know, President Trump, that's going to be another issue. There's going to be a big investigation. So why is all of this important? Man, so many levels that we need to get to. The first, let me take this stuff down now. The first is anytime Jensen is going to talk about, anytime Jensen's going to talk about imports, exports, partnerships in China, the relationship with China, which I asked him at the All In Summit, like, hey, do we need to be at war with China? I don't know if you remember that moment?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  I do.

• 13:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And he was like, no, no, we could all win together, yada, yada. Every time he talked about these things, now you have to say, was that his honest opinion, his opinion as the CEO of Nvidia, his opinion as an American, or was he compromised?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:30Jason Calacanis?

  And they were saying to him, hey, you know, there could be compromise involved here, who knows? But they were holding it over his head and saying, hey, we need you to come out with this line of thinking. Now, I'm asking a question, you know, as a commentator to him. Other people are asking comments about China. And now we all have to think, whoa, in the back of our heads, boom. So now the number one chipmaker, top three players, four, top, top five player, but the largest company in the world at the time, right? And arguably, number one, along with, say, Anthropic and OpenAI, those three, and now I guess SpaceX probably, you know, would round out your top four of the top players. Now you gotta worry like, oh, what, what is his motivation?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:15Jason Calacanis?

  So that's one set. Now you have to also worry, what did Trump, Jensen, talk about? And what got back to the Chinese? So that's your second major concern here is state secrets, et cetera. Now, I don't get the sense that Jensen, as hard as it is to go through this with his family and is a family guy and, you know, divorce is terrible and the public shaming or the mocking, all of this has got to be incredibly hard for him to deal with. But also, he has obligations to the company and as an American to America. So now, he's going to have to just come out, put all this on the table. It's going to be highly embarrassing.

• 14:54Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, so I, he did something stupid, obviously, but he's a target. And, and so I think as a country, we're going to have to come up with a system where if you get compromised by the enemy, that that's the more important thing we have to fight as a society. And then educate people, please don't get yourself compromised at the same time. And what this means at the end of the day is America must win the superintelligence war. And the soup, the war for superintelligence is China and the US. That's it. It's a two player, two horse race.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  We should be over there trying to seduce their AI executives?

• 15:28Jason Calacanis?

  We probably are. I'll be honest. We probably are. I mean, I, I don't know if we actually use those tactics all that often, or if we do them off the books. But I would think we do some level of that.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  The CIA has definitely got a few people out there trying to be honeypots, for sure.

• 15:44Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know that we, you know, it's a really good question. And it is actually a good moment for self-reflection. It's like, are we, are those tactics institutionalized? Or are they like off the books, being done by people, but we don't actually do them systematically? In the West? I don't know. It's above my pay grade. But

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Right. The Jason Bourne.

• 16:02Jason Calacanis?

  America has to win the race.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  The Jason Bourne structure is always that these rogue elements at the CIA are exploring these programs. And even the director, even their boss might not know about it. You know, like Treadstone was just Brian Cox's evil little division. So maybe it's that. Maybe it's these guys, you know, the bureau chiefs going rogue or something.

• 16:21Jason Calacanis?

  Or they have resources off the books, right? I think like,

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, black ops.

• 16:25Jason Calacanis?

  There's all kinds of ways to bend rules, black ops, et cetera. There are people for hire for this. The big high order thing here is we must win versus China. And with the recent election, politics really plays into this. So we need to build data centers, a lot of them. We need to have more compute than everybody. We have to stop sending chips, probably even the older generation chips to China now. We're going to have to like maybe rethink this argument that was being made last year by the administration, by Jensen, that we should sell them the second level and we should have everybody on CUDA. Maybe we don't. That maybe the China hawks were right. There was a contingency, there was a contingent that said, absolutely not, do not send any chips to China. Don't give them

• 17:08Jason Calacanis?

  any advantage, even if we're a year or two ahead. Don't even send them the old H100s or whatever. And, and I think they won this argument of like, well, maybe we send some. This is going to be years of investigation, years. I don't think Jensen gets fired. He's too valuable to the company. He's going to get sanctioned, obviously. It's going to need to be more oversight. The board will probably change. Perhaps he gets divorced, loses, you know, some very large percentage of his shares. They don't have a prenup. So the, there's like downstream effect, downstream effect.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  That's a lot. It's going to be a lot of fun.

• 17:41Jason Calacanis?

  Super chaotic. It's going to be super chaotic. The stock is crushed today. I remember I said a couple of weeks ago, I think I tweeted, I bought it like 209. I was like, this stock is cheap. Now it's down to 175. I think I have to buy more shares.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, if it's a dip, then you gotta buy the dip. I mean, if you think Nvidia is still the strongest chip company.

• 18:00Jason Calacanis?

  I think I have to buy the dip. Yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  That would be the lesson is if you think in long term, this isn't going to change things for Nvidia, they're still going to be the dominant player, then yeah, you would buy, you would buy Nvidia. Not financially.

• 18:12Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, I hope we work this out and I hope America can get a line that we have to win.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Can I ask you one more question? I'm interested.

• 18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Please.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Why do you think, because, because we know this. There was not like a front page story in the New York Times. Jensen put this out there. He sent a memo to employees over the weekend saying, I admit that this is what happened. Why do you think this moment, do you think they were trying to blackmail him? Do you think there was a story?

• 18:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I think last week, there was, there was the FT story last week that broke that it was romantic, a couple of days before. So there was that story. And then before that, there was the story that he was being targeted. So apparently there was a drip, drip, drip here.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  You're right. He, he was like the writings on the wall. People are going to figure this out.

• 18:52Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, yeah. And so, you know, I think, end of the day, we got to send Sydney Sweeney and compromise the head of Alibaba. That's a joke from Fat Don Capital. Well, thank you for my comedy writer, Fat Don 420.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  She loves America. She would do it.

• 19:11Jason Calacanis?

  She's too high profile. They would know her.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 19:13Jason Calacanis?

  What a crazy situation.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  She's just very attracted to Chinese CEOs. You never know.

• 19:19Jason Calacanis?

  CEOs.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  She can pull it up. She's a great actress.

• 19:21Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I just, I don't have like a friendship with Jensen, but I casually know him, you know, you know, we've done two, maybe three, maybe three interviews, I guess, over the last year and a half. So, man, I feel bad for his family. I feel bad for him. I feel bad for America. And I think we have to rally. I don't want to say rally behind him, but rally behind the industry to win.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:41Jason Calacanis?

  And then, you know, whatever price he has to pay, there's going to be many here. He's obviously, this is not going to get out of this unscathed, but I can tell you,

• 19:52Jason Calacanis?

  Benching him is what the Chinese want. The Chinese do not want him out there leading this company. That's why they targeted him. So I think we have to have, we have to think strategically, not vindictively. We have to think strategically for America. He's got to stay in that seat at all costs. We need to keep him in that seat. So that's just pragmatic. We need to, we need to win.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  We need Jensen at Nvidia to, to move forward.

• 20:17Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent. If we don't know Jensen, no, no super intelligence.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I feel like he must, I just thought it was the leather jacket. Like, yeah, I'm obviously a powerful guy, but ladies just can't resist the cool jacket. I'm sure that was what it was going through.

• 20:30Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I'm just, I'm trying to stay above the fray here. Keep bringing the jokes back.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Sorry. I'll, I'll move on.

• 20:35Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I listen, it's, this is just, the world we live in right now is like X and Instagram and Tik Tok that we just process everything immediately for humor. All right.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  We've said it before, if you're in AI and a like a 10 out of 10 is hitting on you at the party or whatever, have that moment, take that moment to be like, is this genuine or is this?

• 20:57Jason Calacanis?

  I had it happen to me.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  President G.

• 20:59Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not that important. But I remember many years ago, I was in Australia and a Russian woman had bought a ticket to one of our events and I had never been hit on by, you know, a six foot, you know, whatever Russian model to this extent. It was incredibly forward. She like literally multiple times asked me to have a nightcap with her and asked me explicitly what hotel I was staying at. And I was like, I'm at this hotel with my wife and my daughter. And yeah, no, I didn't tell the name of the hotel, but I was like, yeah, no, I'm staying with my wife and daughter, you know, and she, she still didn't get it. She was still like, so I give it like a 1% chance she was in any way

• 21:42Jason Calacanis?

  interested in me, like maybe a 0.1% chance and a 99.9% that this was a Russian just trying to get information, perhaps on Uber, perhaps on Robinhood, perhaps on Sequoia, perhaps on, any number of people I'm affiliated with who are high profile. And so I just ignore these people when they come in.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Just be skeptical.

• 22:04Jason Calacanis?

  Terrible situation.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  If you've got classified information in your noggin, just be skeptical.

• 22:08Jason Calacanis?

  I don't. I don't. But who knows what, I, I think I would be in the category of, you know, the person one step removed from somebody who they try to compromise this person.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  To get to the next person.

• 22:18Jason Calacanis?

  To get to the other person. So that, you know, they get to me, then they can get to somebody at Sequoia who can get to somebody there. They get to me, they get to somebody at Uber and can get to somebody at something, you know, whatever.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  It's just, it's like the cut, it's like the wire. You flip the low guy and then you keep flipping people until you get to.

• 22:32Jason Calacanis?

  I'm like some mid, I'm some mid in the capital stack.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  On their way to getting Avon.

• 22:35Jason Calacanis?

  And they're going after, they're probably just going after the 20 people who are investors on a cap table, just systematically knocking on doors, seeing who they can compromise. That's why they go after tech people too.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:46Jason Calacanis?

  You know, like they try to get some IT, an IT person is like the best person you can get. Get an IT person. Oh, they got keys to the kingdom. Okay. So let's do the second story here. I know a lot of you out there listening are wanting to start your own company. So if it's finally time for you to make your dream into a reality, you can't find a better partner than our pals over at Northwest Registered Agent. Northwest Registered Agent is now offering free identity services. That means a free domain name, open source web hosting, a business email and phone number and everything else that's going to make your new startup look and feel like a professional company, all with no purchase required. And this is free done right. They're not passing your data along to any third party vendors and they're never going to sell it. So

• 23:30Jason Calacanis?

  if you have an idea you can't get out of your head, or if you're already building something amazing, get started with Northwest for free and upgrade as you grow. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  All right. Sequoia Capital announced big changes this past week. They are closing their London office, they're merging early stage and growth teams, and they're ending their infamous scouts program. Scout number one, Jason Calacan is right here with us. The Financial Times now reports the moves are an attempt to undo the legacy of Roloff Botha, friend of the pod, who stepped down as Sequoia's steward last year. According to FT, the break between Botha and the firm deepened after he joined SpaceX's board this summer. A source told the FT that Sequoia's partners were blindsided. Botha didn't go to compliance or get sign off from the partnership. The FT source further says Botha's board seat could complicate Sequoia's ability to trade its

• 24:26Speaker 01

  $20 billion SpaceX stake. A Sequoia spokesperson said the firm continues to, and I'm quoting, collaborate closely with Botha. So Jason, you're, you're in the middle of all this. Is this overreach, this idea that it's, we gotta wipe the slate clean of Botha now that he's on the SpaceX board? Like, how do you explain this? Unpack this for us.

• 24:47Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So this kind of goes back to journalism and, you know, I spent many years in journalism, basically as an editor, as a publisher, as a creator of publications. I wasn't classically trained, but I hired classically trained journalists. They collect a bunch of facts. They ask a bunch of questions. They try to paint a picture, tell a story as best they can. In later years, when clickbait happened, they tried to, journalists are incentivized to create a storyline to go with the facts that is as spicy as possible. They've always had stewards of Sequoia, at Sequoia, Don Valentine and Michael Moritz and Doug Leoni and Alfred Lin and Ruloff,

• 25:29Jason Calacanis?

  et cetera, down the line. And it was always a very, it was a very, what the story gets right is it was a very process oriented place. The Monday morning meeting, in-person culture, you know, the collaboration between people that had a high standard. And I think a lot of folks came there and they maybe didn't like Ruloff's, you know, tradition to the standard. Like maybe the world's different now. Maybe instead of making decisions at the Monday meeting and everybody has to be at the Monday meeting, you gotta get whoever gets it early, this in-office coach. Or maybe there were like younger people there who were partners who didn't want that process, right? They wanted to be worked from home. They wanted to just close deals on a Saturday afternoon or Tuesday night. Like, why do I need to do this formal process and make a founder wait until

• 26:12Jason Calacanis?

  the next Monday when the partnership makes its formal decision? Okay. So that's just a stylistic thing and they seem to have changed that. I buy that. I buy that. That seems like maybe that style of process is outdated, or maybe the young people there or the next generation doesn't want that process. Or maybe the market has changed. Okay. Fair enough. The scouts program, the Heritage Fund and the Sequoia ARC, their experiments, or these would be experiments and new things that Ruloff did create. You can find all the stories online. The scouts program famously, he asked me and Sam Altman to be the first two scouts. And I did Uber, Sam did Stripe. That was one of the highest performing things. That program has been copied by every venture firm, but that

• 26:56Jason Calacanis?

  program is large, probably a distraction for the current partners. The scouts are meeting people, then the partners have to meet them. And does it actually work to get to downstream, to get to investments faster? There are plenty of examples of it working, but maybe they just wanted to simplify. And there was nobody there who wanted to run it. Then you have the ARC program, their summer incubator. And they probably just said, yeah, we don't have the, you know, Ruloff isn't here. He's not, doesn't want to champion. You don't have somebody with energy with the original vision. It's like losing the founder. So founder leaves big company, some of their pet projects or things that they were enthusiastic as experiments are shuttered. That's all, that's

• 27:36Jason Calacanis?

  what's happening here. I don't think it's like super, I wouldn't interpret it as like they're trying to punish Ruloff and kill his legacy. Those were experiments there. They weren't the core business. They were experiments. So boom. Now on the SpaceX seat, that one is probably a major issue. Why is it a major issue? Because there is nothing more prestigious than being on the SpaceX board. Nothing. I don't think there, I mean, I don't even think being on Anthropic or OpenAI, being in the room with Elon Musk, the number one entrepreneur in the world, having him explicitly pick you. Elon gets to pick and the other board members get to pick. This is like

• 28:15Jason Calacanis?

  a very specific choice Elon made. Elon wanted Ruloff, didn't want somebody else at Sequoia. He knows Sequoia. Sequoia was a backer of PayPal. He picked and as is his right. Now, that might be on an ego basis or on a bummed out basis, like Sequoia's like, that's our board seat. It's not Sequoia's board seat. I'm sorry. They own a small, it's a major investment for them. Congratulations on doing it. But nobody at Sequoia has the relationship Ruloff has with Elon. Just, you don't need to be me and be, you know, very close friends with both these individuals to know that. And I don't have any inside information. I've never talked to Elon about

• 28:56Jason Calacanis?

  it. Elon and Ruloff have been friends since PayPal. They worked at PayPal together. This like predates everything and Elon has trusted partners. It could, I could see it being tweaking. If I was running the firm and I, you know, or I did the original SpaceX investment at the firm, or I was the top dog at the firm.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 29:17Jason Calacanis?

  It might tweak me that Elon didn't pick me. It's like an anointment.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:20Jason Calacanis?

  Ruloff is the GOAT.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:22Jason Calacanis?

  Doug Leoni is a GOAT. Like, these are like talking about Michael Jordan, talking about LeBron James.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  It goes back to, it's like middle school. It's like who picked you to be on their team? Like you want to be the first guy picked. It's just one of the most basic competitive. And all of these people are inherently competitive people. So, you know, I think you're going to want to be picked first. You're going to be a little, you know, sour grapes if somebody else gets picked ahead of you.

• 29:47Jason Calacanis?

  So I think that's it. And then, you know, you look at these publications, this is, all this stuff went down a while ago. They still have to collaborate, obviously, because Ruloff. You know, hired a lot of people and you know, has a lot of the board seats and et cetera. So this will all blow over. It's it's it goes under palace intrigue and you could have any number of people. The way these stories tend to happen is somebody is friends with one of the principals, or they overheard a conversation with somebody who's friends with the principals. You get a little telephone going. Somebody says, yeah, you know, I was at the bar at this conference. This person said that this person told him or her that there was like a SpaceX board seat was a big thing,

• 30:31Jason Calacanis?

  or the, oh, the scouts program. They wanted to, you know, kill his legacy. And it just, in the game of phone tag, the telephone game just gets watered down and warped. The journalists put it out there. It's it's cap.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  I mean, this is, I was saying before the show, I did not go to J school specifically, but I took a lot of journalism courses and this is kind of what they teach you to do. You're conversing with people, you're talking with people inside the room. They're kind of giving you their perspective and you arrange them into a narrative. And like you're telling a story and this is the story that the people who talked to this journalist were kind of telling. And the journalists put them together. Is that actually what happened moment to moment? And was that everybody's motivations? There's no way a journalist can look into their brain. They're just going with what they were told and what sounds plausible.

• 31:21Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, this $20 billion, like, oh, my God, it could complicate the sale of the $20 billion that Sequoia owns. No, Sequoia is going to distribute that to their LPs. They're going to distribute the shares to their LPs. Like, they probably always do. So there you have it, you know, like.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  There you have it.

• 31:36Jason Calacanis?

  You know, they, it's only 1% of the value of SpaceX. Why would it complicate it? They're going to distribute the shares. There's a schedule in which they can distribute them. They've been distributing them. Some people are selling them. Some people are buying them. It's, there's nothing complicated about it. Sequoia's choice what to do with their shares. I mean, if it was, if they own 20% of it, oh, my God, they got a $400 billion position. Yeah, that could impact the stock because if you sold it all, would there be enough buyers? And could it tank the stock or be a vote of non-confidence? I mean, everybody is distributing their shares who had venture funds there. And then it's up to the LPs to decide what to do. One thing you should do is if you need a great domain, you should use what I use. GoDaddy.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 32:21Jason Calacanis?

  GoDaddy.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Best place, best place for.

• 32:24Jason Calacanis?

  It's the greatest.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  For whatever your domain needs. And if you want a domain that somebody else is sitting on, or that you might, it's a, it's a tough domain to get, but it's important for your company. They're going to help you broker the deal to get your ideal domain without you having to go back and forth and do the whole legal haranguing thing with somebody else. So highly recommended if you want a great domain named Godaddy.com. That's where to go, Jason.

• 32:47Jason Calacanis?

  I got a great domain for you.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  For me?

• 32:50Jason Calacanis?

  For you.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Do tell.

• 32:52Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to cost you two dimes. Somebody's, uh.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I'm sure.

• 32:55Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody's already bought it. Here it is.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Lawnbot. That's yes. I'm using, uh, I'm using my lawn bots every day. Well, we created.

• 33:03Jason Calacanis?

  But look, if you, if you can't get the dot com, you can get the dot net, the dot org, the dot AI.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Look at that.

• 33:10Jason Calacanis?

  Lawnbot AI.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Lawnbot AI for just.

• 33:11Jason Calacanis?

  Lawn dot bot 170. Oh, I didn't know there's a dot. See, this is the best thing. It tells you best in class is lawnbot.ai. But look, the second one.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Oh, lawn.

• 33:21Jason Calacanis?

  I didn't know there was a dot bot sub.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  I think that's what Grokbot uses when it posts its own URLs. It's at, it's at grok dot bot.

• 33:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:32Jason Calacanis?

  Love it. So anyway, I think you need to get, I think you should shoot the lock off your wallet and then get the dot net or get whatever you want. But you should have a lawn.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  We have, there's lawn bot, the AI that reads news stories in my voice, but is not me, which is creepy. And then there's all my lawn bots, my grok bots that are doing all of this work for me, helping us prep these shows, writing the dockets themselves. At this point, half of it is automated. So, uh, yeah, Godaddy.com if you want your, your ideal domain.

• 34:02Jason Calacanis?

  GoDaddy.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  GoDaddy.

• 34:04Jason Calacanis?

  Look at that. Only a penny for your first year. Save $23 when you lock in a three-year term. That's what I always do. I always buy it for three years. I don't have to worry about it.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  You don't want to have to constantly re-up. You're going to want your domain. You're building something great there. We just found out the deal with Cold Outreach, but I want to talk to you about the deal with DEAL. D E A E L. The fastest way to set up payroll for any country you're hiring in, any freelancers you're hoping to bring in, in just minutes. So you can hire anyone, anywhere, and the paperwork gets handled fast. You can get back to building, Jason.

• 34:36Jason Calacanis?

  This is critically important. What people don't realize is freelancers have moved all over the world. Some of the best people and the most motivated people are in other countries. Now, if you hire somebody in another country, you could create a nexus, a nexus for taxes, for regulations. I've been through this. Now, you then need to have an HR person, an accounting person, and a legal person. Three different people who are expensive tell you, oh, yeah, you hired somebody in Portugal. Now you're responsible for their unemployment. Now you're responsible for this. Now you're responsible for that. It can become, I mean, forget about the amount of work you need to do to set it up. If you get dinged and you get in the penalty box, you got some people in Uruguay, you got somebody in Portugal,

• 35:19Jason Calacanis?

  you got three people in Manila, who knows what issues you have triggered? Now DEAL, D E E L, D E L, DEAL. It's D E E L.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Two E's.

• 35:31Jason Calacanis?

  Not, two E's. Everybody says DEAL and they just think it's D E A L. That's why I make sure it's DEAL. D E L dot com. They will also allow, I believe this is like one of the most important things. In other territories, you might want to pay people with the bank transfer, PayPal. Uh, or they may want to get paid with crypto. Uh, they can get a DEAL virtual card. They can get PayPal. I know this because I've used the product. A lot of my startups use the product. So payroll administration, pain in the neck. Contractors want flexibility. They want to be able to get their money. They may want it in crypto. Some places may let you pay them in crypto.

• 36:13Jason Calacanis?

  Some PayPal is all over the world. So they may want to get paid in PayPal. Or getting a credit card. So they do, let's say you hired some freelancers to, uh, you know, do, uh, lead gen, like, uh, you know, get some leads for your sales department. You're paying them like a $10 per lead and you owe them a thousand bucks. Maybe they just want to get a credit card from DEAL. So get the virtual card and then they can spend it on their life. Many different ways to pay people. You want to have a great partner. DEAL is a great partner. I know this because all my startups use it.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  So, uh, yeah, if you want to check it out yourself to find out more, you just visit DEAL, D E E L dot com slash twist. DEAL dot com slash twist. Thanks to our friends at DEAL.

• 36:55Jason Calacanis?

  You gotta do the, the slash twist, um, so that you, uh, get the startup kind of, um, treatment. Because they, you know, people are better to startups.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:06Jason Calacanis?

  They give you a better deal.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  They know, they know that founders.

• 37:09Jason Calacanis?

  Three months free.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  They know founders are coming in from, uh, from the twist link. So.

• 37:13Jason Calacanis?

  Uber, I remember Uber used to use DEAL. Reddit uses DEAL. Coinbase uses DEAL. Ramp uses DEAL. Even Anthropic uses DEAL. So many great partners, uh, use this product. It's a great product. That's it. I don't want to oversell.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm, I'm on DEAL still because if you were freelancing the tech world, you're absolutely going to have to sign up for DEAL soon enough. So I'm a long time.

• 37:35Jason Calacanis?

  They'll also do, um, they'll also set up the laptops and manage all that.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:39Jason Calacanis?

  And then recover the devices. So if you, like, let's say somebody's a great writer, a great designer, a great developer, UX front end, you want to send them a laptop and, you know, keep them cooking and have them on your, you know, secure laptop. They'll manage all that for you.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Make it easy.

• 37:53Jason Calacanis?

  So you get the laptop too. IT on autopilot. Great job DEAL.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Thanks to DEAL. All right.

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  I know the deal with DEAL.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  That's the deal with DEAL.

• 38:01Jason Calacanis?

  That's the deal with DEAL.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  All right. Moving on. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple CEO John Ternus is pressing software chief Craig Federighi to take a more ambitious approach to AI. In a closed-door meeting, Ternus reportedly pushed Federighi to speed up Apple's AI roadmap, move beyond simple Siri improvements. The goal here is apparently to turn Siri into a true agent à la ChatGPT dots, Meta's Muse, Grokbot, all the ones we talk about all the time, which can take ongoing tasks and keep working between conversations. Uh, Gurman believes Apple could make Siri more agent-like as early as next year. Also, Gurman's reporting that Mike Rockwell, who has led development of the new Siri to date,

• 38:47Speaker 01

  is considering stepping down next year. So we may get a new direction for Siri. What, what do you think they should be doing with Siri? Is the answer to make Siri Grokbot on your phone?

• 38:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. They are handing over something they worked on for a decade to everybody else. It's idiotic. It's pathetic. It's disgrazia. Same thing with the Alexa. Alexa and Siri got there first. How could they not get it right? Fire everybody on the team, start over, make a Siri 2.0 and start over. What they should do is here's Siri. They should make new Siri, new team, do what, uh, Steve Jobs did with Mobile Me and eventually became iCloud, where he came in and said, what should a Mobile Me do? People described it says, does it do that? And they said, no. They said, okay, you guys are fired. And then they gave it to somebody else. He's got a, John Turner's got a channel, the Steve Jobs Mobile Me moment.

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  You guys can look it up. Just be cut and dry. It needs to be exactly what Grokbot and Muse are. They don't need to get fancy here. Uh, start with things like your photos. Start with things like your calendar and your email. Have it run locally. Have it run securely. And then they can use that security like, hey, we're not training a large language model. We're using this open source product. The open source product is running on your phone and your desktop computer. So when you say, what's on my calendar this week, it runs a local model. It runs a local model, or it gives the job encrypted to their model, their open source model. It gives the answer back, puts it on your phone. Your phone de-encodes it, right?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:26Jason Calacanis?

  Unencrypts it, gives you the answer. Apple stores nothing. They don't train anything. They could make that promise. And what's happening now is, uh, these bots are tipping over from.

• 40:38Jason Calacanis?

  Commercial use, probably five, maybe, I don't know, 1, 2, 3% of people have businesses are using these. And I think they're going to be used by moms and dads and aunts and uncles and, you know, independent contractors much more than they are by businesses. I think the consumer market is going to grow faster and get more value from this, these tools than the businesses. Why the businesses are going to hand ring about who gets it, who's allowed to have it, what, are you going to connect it to your email? No. Connect it to your calendar? Maybe. It's just going to be a lot of hand wringing.

• 41:18Jason Calacanis?

  Today, I told my team, officially, the CTO takes over the Grok bot account from U-Lon.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:25Jason Calacanis?

  They become admin and I want to give everybody the, whatever, $20, $30 a month account and get everybody on it.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Forty's a bit.

• 41:31Jason Calacanis?

  So now we're going to be paying for, okay, so we're going to be paying now 500, it would be $10,000 to Grok, starting today. And we're spending the similar amount, I think 20 a month to Anthropic. So when I talked earlier about how, when I did that tweet about how much value we're getting, I'm just like, spend another $500 a year per person on AI. The Grok bot gets so much done and you don't have to Grok it, it just does it.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:54Jason Calacanis?

  So I got to get everybody on it.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, Grok bots.

• 41:56Jason Calacanis?

  I hope they have the tools for us to manage it from a top level, like administrative tools, but I'm willing to take the risk. It's just too powerful.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I just, I mean, it's, it's, I, I just got a new Apple desktop for, for my, for my apartment and even like, you set up.

• 42:12Jason Calacanis?

  What did you buy?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Uh, I got a, it's the, it's the iMac, it's 24 gigs of memory. I don't remember the exact.

• 42:18Jason Calacanis?

  You got the new iMac?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  I got a new iMac, yeah, yeah, like the, the.

• 42:21Jason Calacanis?

  Look at you.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  The current.

• 42:22Jason Calacanis?

  You bought your own.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  The current generation, I bought my own, I'm, because it's for my house, it's not for work stuff. I got my laptops, whatever.

• 42:28Jason Calacanis?

  But I, I gave you a beautiful laptop. Why do you need this? Look at you, you got money to burn.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Oh, I always have a desktop at home in addition. I don't like to run my everything off a laptop.

• 42:36Jason Calacanis?

  What'd you spend, two dimes on it?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a little, little bit under, but like, like 1,900 something when we were all, when we were all standing down. It's a really, it's very nice.

• 42:45Jason Calacanis?

  What color?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And, uh, it's just like, I like the silver, it's like the, the she, the silver gray. There you go, there you go. It's, it's, I think it's that exact, it's that exact one you had just pulled up. Uh, very nice machine.

• 42:57Jason Calacanis?

  Look at that.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  And, and with 24 gigs, uh, I can run some local AI models on it. Like I've already tried experimenting. It's, you know, not, you can't run huge ones, but you can run like, you know, a llama or a Gemma or some of those other sort of smaller open source ones. And, and so I, I was like, at this point, there is no excuse for me to have to keep going into like, the settings on my iMac and like, oh, I like it when the windows and the tabs do this. I should be at the point of just being able to tell it how I want it to be set up. Like, it's crazy to me that I still have to spend 30, 45 minutes in the settings, going to each one, like, I like it when the trackpad goes this way, not that way. I like it, I don't want to drag a, a window here that it opens fullscreen, I want to keep it.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  And it, it, you know, like little stuff like that, I just feel like, how have they not figured this out yet?

• 43:46Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. Um, I'm trying to figure out what I'm spending here on this, uh, blowing it out with every single thing, no trade in.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I did not go top of the, there, there were, I think there was a, like a, there was a more powerful one I could have used if I wanted to run more AI from my machine, but I don't really need to be running like huge.

• 44:07Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, the most you can spend on it is 3,400.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, I did not go that, that.

• 44:13Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty great.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  That's not, that's not that bad.

• 44:15Jason Calacanis?

  But you can only get 32 gig.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, I'm not making like videos, like I can run that stuff in the cloud. It was really just, I wanted to get one.

• 44:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's nice to have a nice, beautiful desktop, you know?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 44:25Jason Calacanis?

  This is the life of Lon Harris.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  That's, hey, listen, I, I, I'm on the computer a lot, I like to have a nice computer. What can I say?

• 44:31Jason Calacanis?

  And now, you know, with this new Mac, to games, they're porting all your popular games to, um, you can get games now on your desktop. And then Nvidia, speaking of Nvidia, they have this GeoForce thing.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 44:44Jason Calacanis?

  Which I pay 200 bucks a year for. If I want to play Age of Empires, the one thing I play, uh, you know, like when I'm listening to a podcast I got to listen to for prep, sometimes I'll throw on a game because when I'm not doing some flow exercise thing, I wind up, start reading Slack, I start reading the new, and then I'm, I stop listening.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:03Jason Calacanis?

  So to force myself to listen, I put the podcast on, I put the headphones on, my beautiful focal $5,000 headphones, I'm in that podcast or that, you know, audiobook or whatever it is I have to consume, and I just play a game. And because the game just makes me zone out like skiing, it's a flow thing. Uh, but you can use that GeoForce for 100, 200 bucks a month and you can just stream a game.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 45:25Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty wild.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 45:26Jason Calacanis?

  You don't, and then you don't ever, so I, I, I had like a PC and a thing and I'm just moving to one computer.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't need.

• 45:34Jason Calacanis?

  There you go. Hope I don't lose it.

• 45:37Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's keep going. What else do we have in the news? Let's do a couple more news stories, then we can bank the TNP.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:42Jason Calacanis?

  And we got more banked for Thanksgiving.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Agreed. Hiring freelancers can be a great way for your startup to keep your headcount low while accessing the specific expertise that your team needs. But let's be honest, it takes so much time to source and vet these new hires, even if they're super talented. And then you've got to track their work, pay their invoices, it's a full-time job. Thankfully, I've got the answer for you. It's called Upwork. I've used it countless times to help my businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals to do really specialized work. Obviously, software development, but AI implementation, marketing, design, anything you can think of, you can cut down on all the hassles by handling the contracts and

• 46:27Speaker 01

  the payments inside their platforms you don't need to become a full-time HR department. They've got over 170,000 freelancers holding that coveted five-star rating. And that's why you can hire with complete confidence from Upwork. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent, ready to help your business grow. That's U.P.W.O.R.K. dot com, upwork.com. Uh, so we could do, there's these, uh, we got two new, uh, models that dropped this week. They're both, but they're interesting stories, they're both from labs outside the big frontier players, I thought it's worth exploring.

• 47:06Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  On Thursday, Mira Marathi's Thinking Machines lab released Inkling 2 Small, a mixture of experts' model, 594 billion parameters, but only 17 billion active. It's available now on the company's Tinker platform and Thinking Machine says it will release the weights under an Apache 2.0 license next week, following external safety testing. I wonder if I could run this one on my machine, maybe. Artificial analysis says that would make it the highest-scoring open weight model developed outside China.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Business Insider reports Thinking Machines closing a $5 billion round on a $40 billion pre-money valuation led by Excel. That could happen as soon as this week. So that's Thinking Machines. Meanwhile, News Research, the company behind Hermes Agent, they released Arete 27B. It's built on Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 227B, post-trained to strip out, and this is what's interesting about this one, they post-trained it to strip out Chinese state-aligned answers. So News says that this now reinforces and reflects Western values, even though it's built atop a Chinese model. Uh, on News's own eval, answers containing propaganda fell from 22% to about 1%.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  And, uh, the teacher model it actually learned from was Thinking Machine's first inkling. So an interesting connection to these two stories, Jason. So, oh, go ahead.

• 48:32Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I was just gonna, I was just gonna ask you, uh, what do you think about the idea of post-training open weight models to be less Chinese propaganda? How do you think they did that? How effective do you think that is? And is that important? Is that something that my, uh, American labs need to be doing?

• 48:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, you can, because these are open source, you can kind of rip down the framing and build it back up.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:55Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, you can have obliterated models where you take out everything and just, you know, let the weights be run by the person. So it's a little above my pay grade on how they did it, but, you know, I, I've done this many times where I've asked it like, tell me all about Tiananmen Square. And it starts like doing the human rights thing because they, you know, um, it trained it on everything on the open web.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:19Jason Calacanis?

  And then all of a sudden, it closes. Remember we just like flash closed and be like?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  You start answers and then.

• 49:24Jason Calacanis?

  I can't answer that question. Or you'd be like, Tiananmen Square is a beautiful square in the north of the prefecture, whatever. And they have a beautiful May Day flower thing and in the spring they have this, uh, dumpling festival and you're like. Are you leaving anything out?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  It's not the thing.

• 49:38Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, who cares? Like, the great thing that's happening right now is so many providers are providing open source options. You're experimenting on your desktop. I think bots are the answer. And if we look at what bots are doing, I think what bots are doing is they're firing up a lot of, a lot of threads for you to get a lot done in a short period of time, right? So you're learning, hey, you know, I gotta find every time J Cal talked about ICE on All In.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:12Jason Calacanis?

  Because he's gonna be taking his victory lap, like I did this last week. And Donald Trump came out on 60 Minutes and said, um, yeah, we probably were too rough. I don't, did you see the Donald Trump interview?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Yes, he, he now concedes that the immigration enforcement was probably too tough and that's part of how he lost the trust of the American people.

• 50:32Jason Calacanis?

  Which I said on All In this week, Dave, was like, they had nothing to do with that. Now Trump's saying, well, actually it did.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:37Jason Calacanis?

  So I'll take it from President Trump, um, that he's accurate. And then, but I brought up the ICE thing because it was a passion project, a passion issue for me because I have high empathy and I care about human rights and I care about justice. So when all that started coming up, I was like, I don't care about, I'm not loyal to President Trump or President Biden. I'm, I'm loyal to democracy.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  To mass thugs not beating people. To democracy. That's the Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan life.

• 51:09Jason Calacanis?

  I'm Obi-Wan in this, all of this. To the Republican democracy. I just, he says it so perfectly. So what did I do today? I just told the Grok bot, hey, go find this. I want to find the things where we had this like, uh, you know, pretty heated debate. And the other guys were defending it. And I'm like, there's no defense of this. Like, it's pretty straightforward, guys. You cannot have, have masked agents without cameras, without, you know, their badge numbers beating people. I'm like, well, we have to protect them. I'm like, protect them from what?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:40Jason Calacanis?

  Jose, Jose the gardener, uh, the example that, um, you know, or Conswell of the maid, those are the two examples that, uh, Trump made. Like, you, you literally have to defend yourself against the gardener. You don't.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:54Jason Calacanis?

  So my point with all these bots is, these bots are able to do a lot of jobs right now. I, I, you know, very quickly because they spread it across, you know, maybe 10.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:05Jason Calacanis?

  Or 100 GPUs at once for you and then snap it back together. But when you get your own models running and, you know, maybe two more, one or two more turns of hardware and your $2,500 machine, you know, you're willing to pay $5,000 for it because you're getting so much value and who cares? It's 50 bucks a month versus 25.

• 52:25Jason Calacanis?

  And I get my, finally get my $12,000 Mac Studio, like, if, if it's true that the agentic versions are the most powerful ones, I'm gonna tell my Grok desktop at, or my Perplexity, or my Claude, just start with my local computer. If it doesn't get done in this time, then go to an open source model, an open router or Perplexity, then go to a frontier model.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  I think this is the feud. Like, I'm, I'm sort of already like, the way it's gonna work for average people. Because I think we keep hearing about this stuff from the people who are writing elaborate code, building software, doing math problems. Like, we keep hearing a lot of this stuff from people who are, really do need frontier models at their most powerful. I, I do not. No, almost none of the work I'm doing. Like, I'm a Sonnet 5 guy all the way. Like, Sonnet's more than I need. And even, I've got a Quen model now running at home on my home machine. It's fine for like, most stuff. I'm doing organizational things. I'm moving things around. I'm building very, very simple applications. These models are good enough.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  It would be rare for me to have to be like, oh, okay, I gotta send that job into the cloud.

• 53:36Jason Calacanis?

  And this is the worst it's ever gonna be.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:38Jason Calacanis?

  So just keep that in mind. And, you know, I'm gonna keep hammering this home. This is another instance of nostricannus. J Cal was right about, this is what they're saying. They're saying J Cal was right about everything.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Many people are saying this, yes.

• 53:51Jason Calacanis?

  Many people. It is pretty crazy how correct I was on a number of positions. It's getting a little bit.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  The open source one, because when I, it's been two years now since I've been like, working with you and working and helping out with all the podcasts. From the very, very, very start, two years ago, you were saying open weights could win this whole thing and they're only gonna get more powerful. Everybody's gonna wanna have on-prem, local AI. And all the others, like, the other hollies are kinda poo-pooing it. Companies need, you know, the, the best, their, oh, enterprises are always gonna wanna run the very, very top model. They won't accept anything else. And it's like.

• 54:27Jason Calacanis?

  Well, then also when it comes to jobs, you know, and like, at different points in time, you can find evidence of each trend.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 54:36Jason Calacanis?

  That's normal. And if we're debating it on a podcast or, or intelligent people are debating it, it's probably because it could go either way. So when it comes to job displacement, it could go either way. And I think the either way it's going with self-driving and delivery is gonna be, in my camp, which is those jobs will be displaced. I think for knowledge workers, it probably will be in Saxis camp. He was like, hey, you know, just, there's always more work to be done. I think in that case, correct, until we hit superintelligence. And then I do wonder if the static team size we're seeing becomes, just cut 5% a year. Just keep cutting 5% a year.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:14Jason Calacanis?

  So I, you know, you could be wrong in the short term, right in the long term, or you, it could be a jump ball until the middle term, which I think we'll see, and I think we're gonna see in self-driving. The biggest, um, outcome of this midterm election is not data centers. I don't think it's data centers for tech. I think it's autonomy.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Ah, thank you.

• 55:35Jason Calacanis?

  I think they're gonna block autonomy. I think that the, yeah, because the, what's happening is in regions like the five big markets where you have a lot of Waymos, the, uh, number, driver pay is still okay, but the number of rides they're getting is slightly down. And it's very early data, so it's noisy. But what they're finding is, is that, you know, the number of rides per hour, per shift, whatever, per quarter, per month, that humans are getting is going down a bit. Which makes sense directionally. The pie could be growing, the number of rides, but each individual driver might not be getting as much of the pie.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:16Jason Calacanis?

  And so, you know, you, you start getting into the habit of taking Waymos or robot taxis, maybe you're like, I like being alone better. And I think probably the majority of people do.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:25Jason Calacanis?

  So if it's available, if it's the same price, if it's within 10 minutes, I'll probably just take it. I'll probably just take the Waymo robot taxi.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Every time, 10 out of 10. If a Waymo's available, I'm taking the Waymo.

• 56:37Jason Calacanis?

  How often is the Waymo available is the question, right?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:40Jason Calacanis?

  And you, but you're using Uber in Austin, it goes to the Uber. Those are being utilized in high twenties. In markets where they don't use Uber's network, they're in the high teens. So, and that could change over time, but they get more utilization there. But I think you're gonna see, the same way people are blocking data centers or attempting to block data centers, you know, the new mayor of Austin, people don't know, the new mayor of Texas, she signed a document, Gina, she signed a document saying, I don't want self-driving cars on the road without, um, uh, safety drivers in them. And she was part of like, seven people here. The other people, you know, you had Abbott, you had other people who were in favor, and this is like, ground zero for self-driving.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 57:23Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's gonna change. It's gonna be hard to put back in the box, but they might just say, you know what? Here's your new cap. You can have like, 300 in each city and you can be in this area. And if there are any accidents, we're gonna take you out of commission, you can't do the highway. It's gonna go from self-certification to regulation, very quickly.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Now, do you think that's?

• 57:43Jason Calacanis?

  Like it is in other places.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Do you think that's just gonna be self-driving cars? Or when you say autonomy, do you think Dems are gonna hold up robots in factories, robots building homes, robots on the work site?

• 57:55Jason Calacanis?

  Anywhere they displace, anywhere they displace, human work.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:59Jason Calacanis?

  They're gonna look at it and just say, listen, just like the right and the populace say, no H1B visas until you've hired all the Americans and there's 8% unemployment or 9% unemployment with reaching, recent graduates? Get that to 4% and then you can automate this, right?

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:18Jason Calacanis?

  So, uh, and, and that, that's what it's gonna, we're gonna literally come up with a number, I think. Like, if, for, for these age groups, you gotta keep unemployment under 4% and you can add these. If you don't, so you have to prove there's no humans to do this at a living wage. 25 bucks an hour, you can't find people. If you can find people at 25 bucks an hour, you gotta hire them until there's no more.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Would this impact your investment thesis in stuff like Figure or any of these other companies that are very focused on?

• 58:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Factory, worksite, droid sort of manufacturing?

• 58:54Jason Calacanis?

  As a 10-year average hold for me, for stocks, public and private, I would, um,

• 59:03Jason Calacanis?

  anticipate that it will take longer and the companies might not have as big of an outcome.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm in that.

• 59:08Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, the deployment will be slowed.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  I'm in that Arc Invest Robotics ETF. Now I'm worried.

• 59:14Jason Calacanis?

  I, uh, no, no, I think the trend is right. The trend is right. The issue is going to be the valuations of the, if that legislation comes out, the valuation of those companies gets cut in half. That's all. And what if they say to them, you can do it, but we, you have to have a license and you have to pay $10,000 per year in tax for each robot you put in a factory.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  There was a proposal like that, like an extra tax on every time you automate a human's job, you pay a little bit extra to offset.

• 59:42Jason Calacanis?

  Going to be complete, that concept is going to be overwhelmingly adopted by the voting populace. I'm not saying I'm for it. People get mixed up sometimes when I predict stuff that it's like what I want because they're dumb or they're like disingenuous and they're trying to, you know, they're not having a good faith argument. If we had Republicans had swept, I would say all in like,

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:05Jason Calacanis?

  Republicans are absolutely cutthroat about efficiency in capitalism. Those jobs get burned. We'll find other jobs. That's their philosophy. The other side is protect, protect, protect.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:17Jason Calacanis?

  And you do have some protectionism from the Republicans. They did it for coal workers. They'll do it for farmers.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  They like to say, you know, select. Bring the manufacturing and all those hard working jobs back. But yeah, I don't, I don't know if they're going to do it at the expense of robots.

• 1:00:33Jason Calacanis?

  Just that, that's the great disparity in all this. And I think the actual answer is keep bringing, keep onshoring stuff and have a 10 to one ratio of human to robots. That's actually the middle ground, which is every 10 robots, you need to have a hundred thousand dollar supervisor to manage the 10 robots or something. And they'll just give them a ratio. I know it sounds stupid, but then build more factories. So let's make medicine here. Let's make.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Right. And human in the loop is not the worst thing in the world. The strawberry picking robots we, we looked at, they still need a human guy there. And the solar panel ones too, they still need a human guy there.

• 1:01:09Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to basically, everybody's going to move to management. So the idea that you were actually picking the corn in the field, you got replaced by a tractor, right?

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:19Jason Calacanis?

  But the tractor had one person in it doing the work of 100. So now it's going to be, there'll be, there'll be 100 tractors with one remote operator watching all 100.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:30Jason Calacanis?

  So it just keeps making efficiency, the March efficiency goes on. Uh, but it's definitely going to be headwinds. I think it's going to be very interesting to see which regulations they choose to put in. I think data centers will not, there'll always be a state that is suffering and wants it. Like what's the poorest state?

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, New Mexico is a good indicator. Yeah. Like Mississippi, Louisiana, they're struggling.

• 1:01:54Jason Calacanis?

  There'll be places that are struggling that want the tax revenue. There'll be places that have, that are so, that lack populations that are wanted. I was just thinking about Australia is the least populous place on the planet, I believe.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Well, the whole center, everybody lives around the edges and then in the middle, it's just like mad mess.

• 1:02:08Jason Calacanis?

  And they live on the south and the east edge, the west edge is very hard to live on.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:02:14Jason Calacanis?

  Very hard to live on. The beaches are unforgiving. It's, you don't want to be in that, those waters, not just sharks.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  At a population map, it's like, it's like where Perth is and then Melbourne and Brisbane and Sydney and then you get, yeah.

• 1:02:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. The coast, uh, the Gold Coast.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Kenwood, but there's not, there's not in the middle.

• 1:02:31Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. But if they have unlimited minerals there, they have unlimited space, especially if you go west, it is just, looks like Tatooine. The west, the, like two thirds of the country heading west is all open land and they have solar. You get, you put on, you, you build robotics and solar there and you can literally just put a strip of data centers that nobody would ever even know are there with solar panels on the roof. And that could be all the data centers for the entire world could just be in Australia. It would take 10% of the land probably. You could put it all in Australia and then run Starlinks and fiber cables to every country from Australia, which they already have fiber coming into Australia. I understand and work.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  If you've ever driven, as I have from Los Angeles to Austin, once you pass like Tucson, Arizona, you don't hit anything else until El Paso, Texas. And then once you hit El Paso, Texas, you don't hit anything else for like three, four hours through west Texas. And so when I was driving through there, it does feel like we should be able to put some data centers here. Like there, there's nobody around that this is going to bother. There's no local grid. The local grid is three guys. Like we'll figure out their power, but uh, it seems like unthinkable. We can't put a few of them there.

• 1:03:53Jason Calacanis?

  Reliable power. That's it. You know, you put a couple of nukes on the west side of.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  There. I mean, there is not.

• 1:03:59Jason Calacanis?

  Nukes. There's nobody near the nuclear power. So just put a ton of nuclear power there. The only constraint would be, I guess, water. Um, but you could do desal plants if you have nuclear. Easy breezy lemon squeezy. It's all desert. It's empty.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  I mean, that's the badlands of New Mexico. It's right there in the name, but like there is, people think of New Mexico, they think of the beautiful northern, like Santa Fe, where all that stuff is. But the southern part where you drive through, when you're driving to Texas is just like, there is flat and there's nothing. There's just literally nothing there. I'm sorry, Les Cruz.

• 1:04:35Jason Calacanis?

  They just need to put nuclear in, but you know, this, Australia's super woke these days. And so that like pirate, you know, penal colony rebel stuff is, that's long over folks.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a long time.

• 1:04:48Jason Calacanis?

  Long over. They are woke. They, during COVID, you couldn't leave your house but for one hour a day. Somebody can fact check me here. And you had to stay within three miles of your house or five miles of your house. So they were going around following people, putting a stopwatch on and they would watch you go for your walk to the cafe. And that's minute 61, they would arrest you. They would.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Throw the boomerang at you.

• 1:05:11Jason Calacanis?

  Basically put another shrimp on the bar. I don't know. This, it was crazy what they were doing during COVID there. You give people a little bit of power, poof, they went crazy. And then Australia is like, again, it was not populous and it wasn't spreading. So they could have like just spread out. They were, it was nuts.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  People were very afraid. It was very scary.

• 1:05:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Uh, Cybertruck, no more Cybertruck.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Oh, should we do, you want to do Cybertruck next? We'll talk about that.

• 1:05:36Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, I mean, it is what it is, right?

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Elon says Tesla's going to stop making the Cybertruck next year. Musk said on X that Tesla will use the factory space to build more two-seat Cybercab robo taxis. When the first Cybertrucks were delivered in late 2023, Musk had originally predicted about 250,000 sales a year. Instead, TechCrunch says Tesla has sold just tens of thousands in total over the first three years. This is the third vehicle Tesla discontinued this year after it ended the Model S and the Model X. They're focusing more on Optimus Robots with those, uh, that production facility. So here it is. R I P Cybertruck. Here's what I was thinking, Jason. I want to, I want to hear your thoughts.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Do you think this makes the Cybertruck the new like DeLorean? Like when DeLoreans came out, people were really down on them. It was made fun of. But today, if you drive around with a DeLorean, I mean, obviously there's Back to the Future, but it's like a cool, rare, like historical artifact now because so few of them were made that it's actually become like really cool now to have a DeLorean. Do you think that happens with the Cybertruck in like 20 years? If you drive a Cybertruck around, people are going to be like, oh my God, it's one of those rare artifact cars. What, what do you think?

• 1:06:49Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, you're a hundred percent correct. It will become a collector's edition. Uh, there's a really cool website, Bring a Trailer that I, uh, spend a little time on because I want to buy some, uh, old Corvettes. I want to get like a 70 to 68 and a 73, like that kind of range I like.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:06Jason Calacanis?

  And as you can see, like, uh, DeLoreans typically go for, I would say, looks like most often 50 to 75K.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Jason Calacanis?

  They're fun cars. They look gorgeous. Obviously Back to the Future made him super iconic and they too were stainless steel, right?

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Right. That's, I was, very specifically, as soon as I saw this, I was like, oh, it's like, it's our DeLorean.

• 1:07:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. It's our DeLorean. Um, you know, the, there's a couple of things here. The car, if it had been $50,000, $60,000, it would have been a different story. I think people would have bought these en masse. They were like over a hundred thousand, then like maybe 80 or 90,000. If they had delivered this and they had kept going and got it to 50,000, like they did with the Model Ys and the Model 3s, which are so affordable, it's ridiculous. This would have been a huge hit, but they also landed in the middle of the Trump era during, and they became a totem.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:58Jason Calacanis?

  For the left and people I know who had them have a friend in LA who has them. It's just like, I get flipped the bird 10 times a day.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Jason Calacanis?

  People yell at me from the street that I'm MAGA. So it became the symbol of MAGA.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:08:13Jason Calacanis?

  But every other Tesla didn't. Nobody was yelling at a Model Y or a Model 3.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  That was, it was.

• 1:08:19Jason Calacanis?

  They were yelling from Model Ys and Model 3s at Cybertrucks.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:22Jason Calacanis?

  So what does that make sense?

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  That was the Tesla journey was in the early days. It was, yeah, like people living out were buying Teslas because they were like, energy and green and climate change. We're saving the world. So yeah, it had a real, as Elon shifted his public persona.

• 1:08:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Tesla.

• 1:08:40Jason Calacanis?

  He picked a side. Yeah.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, shifted with it. And I think, yeah, you're absolutely right. 2023, when the cyber, it was, it was at the peak moment of Elon aligning himself with, you know, those kinds of causes.

• 1:08:52Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. And they're very identifiable. And so I think the car got a bad rap. The people I know who have them are absolutely over the moon with them.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Jason Calacanis?

  This drive by wire, inside is plush, it's iconic, but it became iconic in a bad way. I guarantee these things will be worth, you know, a hundred thousand dollars in 10 years.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12Jason Calacanis?

  20 years, they'll be, you know, like in today's dollars, like they'll be real collector's editions.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying. I think, mark my word, there's no chance that it like, when my little nephew is in his twenties and somebody drives up in a Cybertruck, they're all going to be like, oh my God, that's so cool. It's one of those Cybertrucks that we've all heard of and never seen.

• 1:09:30Jason Calacanis?

  And the design, yeah, the design lives on with the Robo Taxi, but you know, Elon was on All In at one point and he said, like, I was like, you know, I would buy like two of these Robo Taxis if it had a steering wheel. He's like, nobody wants to drive. And I was like, I want to drive and I want to have it and I want to have a steering wheel and I would like, I would totally buy those. I'd love to have a two seater. And he's like, yeah, no, that's the trend. Nobody wants to drive. You're like unique, you're an old guy, whatever, which is, I think, correct. I don't think people are going to want to have driver's licenses. I don't think they want to lease cars.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's like, we're the, probably the last generation that.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  I think we are.

• 1:10:05Jason Calacanis?

  Has any kind of affinity for cars. Like, did you ever covet having a car growing up in Los Angeles?

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  I was never like a huge car guy, but I was very aware of car guys and lots of people in like my high school and college were gearheads and like, that would be their hobby. It would be like, buy an old junker and then fix it up yourself and make it into like a cool car. Yeah, I feel like we're the last generation for like that gearhead, love to drive, obsessed about cars as a lifestyle choice. And I mean, you can't even, like, I guess a few cars, you could still get manual transmission, but nobody, you know, knows how to drive stick anymore. That whole like loving to be a driver and I think, I think that is, I think that is dying.

• 1:10:51Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, right now, a lot of boomers are dying.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:56Jason Calacanis?

  And they collected cars from the 30s, 40s and 50s.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:00Jason Calacanis?

  And they have widows. The widows have these cars. These cars were going for a hundred thousand dollars, two hundred thousand dollars. They were antiques, not classics. Classics is over 30 years and I think, and antiques was like, when I was growing up, I think it was 30 and 40 or something.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Jason Calacanis?

  Now they kind of moved that a bit. But anyway, the cars from the 30s, 40s and 50s, the Model Ts and all those like, you know.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Those crazy long boat type cars they used to buy in the 50s. Yeah, the American graffiti stuff.

• 1:11:28Jason Calacanis?

  American graffiti, exactly. The George Lucas movie. Those have plummeted in price. Why? My generation of Gen Xers want muscle cars. Like I just said, I want Corvettes from, you know, late 60s to this, into the 70s, or people want the DeLorens from the 80s. They are buying the Mercedes and BMWs from the 90s that were convertible.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Mustangs and Dodge Challengers.

• 1:11:50Jason Calacanis?

  Mustangs, yeah. All that kind of good stuff. So you can actually buy those old ones. They've all plummeted in price and they're flooding the market as these boomers die. There's three of them in the garage.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:12:01Jason Calacanis?

  They, you know, people when they retired bought them, would take them out on Sundays and take their grandkids in them. They can't sell them. There's, nobody has garage space. People are not going to have driver's licenses. These things are going to plummet in value.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to be very interesting, uh, what we do with all those old cars. And they don't have self-driving in them. So it's like.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  They're going to be in the Peterson automotive.

• 1:12:22Jason Calacanis?

  I really want to buy, that's where they're going to be. They're going to need to have like a Peterson City for all they need. So they'll be, no, no, there'll literally be 10,000 of each car that have been restored. And nobody wants them. I desperately want to buy the new Corvette, the Grand Sport X, but I don't have self-driving. And I'm like, but there's going to be times I'm tired or I'm going on a long haul and I want to have self-driving. This is why I think somebody, I think Neuro is going to do it. I think Waymo is going to do it.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Jason Calacanis?

  There's a couple of other people who make the software. I think they're going to just sell it to every OEM and Corvette will just have Tesla's FSD in it and you'll just get the benefit. I'm talking about five years from now.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  I would want, I'm not, I'm not a car collector, but my uncle in the 80s had an IROC-Z. You remember the IROC-Z?

• 1:13:06Jason Calacanis?

  Of course. Two seat.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08Jason Calacanis?

  Two door.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:09Jason Calacanis?

  Two benches.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Yes. And as a kid, I thought that was the coolest, that was the coolest car in the world. So I could see wanting to get an IROC-Z one day, baby.

• 1:13:19Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, bring a trailer, IROC-Z. Let's take a look here.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's take, this was.

• 1:13:26Jason Calacanis?

  Dreams are going to come true.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  I mean, my uncle must have had an 86 IROC, 87, something like that. Uncle Brandon driving around the Atlantic City, the Jersey Shore in his IROC-Z. It's a Keystone.

• 1:13:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's a Camaro.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's a Chevy Camaro variation called the IROC-Z. It was mid, I think, yeah, 84, 85 started. Yeah.

• 1:13:50Jason Calacanis?

  The killer looking car. I mean, it was kind of like a muscle car.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  It was. Yeah, it was like.

• 1:13:54Jason Calacanis?

  There's a 1985.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  I mean, this might have been, he had it in black, but this might have been his car. It looks exactly like that.

• 1:14:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. People are getting into this analog stuff again, too.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:04Jason Calacanis?

  Because everything's digital. But yeah, they were, these were sharp looking cars.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  It was a cool, it was a very, to me as a kid, this was like the cool, the cool car, the cool guy car. I thought when I would grow up, I'd want one of those, but I got, I have a Toyota Prius-Z. It's a little different.

• 1:14:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there's a lot of different Camaros here.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:14:24Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you can get a convertible one. Look at that.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  That's, that's, yeah, that's pretty slick looking.

• 1:14:28Jason Calacanis?

  Only 13,000.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, current bid is 13,000. That means it's probably going to go for a little more. Probably go for 25K. I mean.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  It's cool. Looks cool.

• 1:14:37Jason Calacanis?

  Kind of sick to drive around in that, if I'm being honest.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  And I don't, I just don't think younger people, it's just that car culture is just not, not the same.

• 1:14:47Jason Calacanis?

  There's like the Corvette 77. I'm a big fan of the Corvette, the Gen 3.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  Because even like in movies and TV.

• 1:14:57Jason Calacanis?

  Which is C3.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  When we were younger, like that was like a defining thing about characters was like, they all had like a distinctive, like they drive this car and that was always like part of the bit. And I just don't feel like that, even that in pop culture anymore. Like who cares what car everybody?

• 1:15:14Jason Calacanis?

  This is what I want. I want the yellow, 69 Corvette coupe stingrays, designed to look like a shark, has the pop-up lights, has the fins, the gills on the side. Look at this.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  That's, yeah, that's a very, that's, that looks, it's very 60s, that car.

• 1:15:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. This is like Cliff Booth would have one of these.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:15:35Jason Calacanis?

  The woman who wrote Something to Bethlehem, who's the famous.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Oh, slouching toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion.

• 1:15:41Jason Calacanis?

  Slouching. Joan Didion had one. She was known for having a Corvette that she loved and she was, Joan Didion Corvette. She was known for taking a bunch of pictures with the stingray.

• 1:15:58Jason Calacanis?

  And it was like, uh, kind of a big deal that she was into this car and she made it very popular amongst intellectuals, I believe.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  OpenAI and Anthropic each say their AI models have disproved the exponential time hypothesis, a nearly 30-year-old assumption in theoretical computer science. The hypothesis is a classic logic puzzle called 3SAT. Can't be solved much faster than brute force, where every added variable roughly doubles the work. Both labs independently found essentially the same faster method. Both say they found the core idea on the same day, Jason, October 16th. Two of the hypothesis's original authors, along with the, a guy from MIT, they're right now leading the review of the AI's work. Researchers have relied on this hypothesis in hundreds of papers and in practice, nothing has yet changed. New algorithms

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  can apparently only beat brute force on astronomically large inputs. So, I mean, again, I think this brings up the question we keep, we keep talking about, does it, does it matter that AI can solve these like theoretical equations? And what do you think this means for the people who work in these fields? Theoretical math, theoretical computer science? Are they more valuable now that they can check the AI's work? Or is AI just about to take over what they do and there's no?

• 1:17:20Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I think this is where you have to be humble enough and we sort of start dipping into the potentiality of superintelligence or unlimited, unmetered, artificial general intelligence, right?

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:33Jason Calacanis?

  So if you have unlimited or seemingly unlimited and unmetered, in other words, you don't have to worry about the price tag, to put at a problem, in some ways that is superintelligence. It's not thinking smarter than us, but in aggregate, it's trying so much.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:49Jason Calacanis?

  I.e. brute force. So in, in a way, it's paralleling the debate between AGI and superintelligence. So if you can solve this with brute force, because you have so many resources in a computer, okay, great. The brute force solves it as quickly, the tic-tac-toe, as like some novel new way of.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:09Jason Calacanis?

  Understanding the heuristics of this. Well, we might get to the point where the job of mathematicians goes from being able to have this like brute force power in their head and the ability to focus on things for a long time and meditate on them and try to do unique things to be orchestrating a thousand mathematicians and a thousand brute force lunatics in this virtual world of mathematicians. And you just literally create an army, a swarm to solve these problems. Maybe there's enough edge problems for them to solve? Or is it finite? We don't understand these things because the universe is so complex.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:50Jason Calacanis?

  So I think you'd have to be somewhat, um, there'll be a lot of, I think there's going to be a lot of hubris and a lot of ego that's going to get deflated. And people are going to have to come to this reckoning, like, just because we couldn't figure it out, doesn't mean it wasn't solvable.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Right. If we had, I mean, we, we're, we're, as humans, we are limited by one thing more than anything else, which is just our lifespan. Like, it takes 20, 25 years to get incredibly good at math or computer science. And then you've got, you know, a ticking clock of 40, 50 years to work on everything you're going to work on. And then you're, you're going to drop. And so like, computers can crunch so much more of their time and they don't have that limitation. It does seem inevitable. They're going to be able to take over a lot of these problems for us.

• 1:19:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, absolutely. All right. Another great episode is in the cam. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  Bye, everybody.