The Defense Tech Startup YC Kicked Out of a Meeting is Now Arming America | E2280

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent - https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Render - https://render.com/twist Agree - https://agree.com Ro - https://Ro.co/Twist Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist Today's show: The US military is running low on missiles, but now, Firehawk Aerospace is using 3D-printed solid rocket propellant to cut production costs in half and 5x U. S. output. Plus: PhD researcher Maruchi Kim just built camera-equipped earbuds that perform on par with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and could be the next wearable AI platform hiding in plain sight. Guests Will Edwards: https://x.com/williewockets Firehawk Aerospace: https://firehawkdefense.com/ Maruchi Kim: https://x.com/maruchikim VueBuds project: https://vuebuds.cs.washington.edu/ Related Links This Week in AI: https://www.thisweekinai.ai/ "Ghost Murmur: The Heartbeat-Tracking Tech That Has Experts Questioning the Laws of Physics": https://www.military.com/feature/2026/04/18/ghost-murmur-heartbeat-tracking-tech-has-experts-questioning-laws-of-physics.html Neurometric: https://www.neurometric.ai/ Meta Ray-Bans: https://www.meta.com/ai-glasses/ Hanwha Defense USA: https://www.hanwhadefenseusa.com/ Raytheon: https://www.rtx.com/ Pilatus PC-24 corporate jet: https://www.pilatus-aircraft.com/en/pc-24 PlaneSense: https://www.planesense.com/ Slopes app: https://slopesapp.com/ Speechify: https://speechify.com/ Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/ Timestamps: 0:00 Are all these layoffs really AI's fault? 8:51 Why laid off people should start their own companies 9:27 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 13:18 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 15:25 Will Edwards of Firehawk joins the show 15:46 What are Solid Rocket Motors (SRMs)? 20:06 Render: Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. 23:10 Who are Firehawk's customers? 24:25 Reimagining and reinventing the US military 28:35 How do missiles fit into the military's operations? 29:34 Agree - Stop chasing invoices at https://agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life! 31:01 What's next on the roadmap for Firehawk? 31:49 How to make propellant (with easy to find ingredients) 33:13 A cheaper way to fly private 38:03 Ro.co: Ro's insurance checker will let you know if your coverage includes GLP-1s for FREE. Go to https://Ro.co/Twist for your free insurance check. 40:48 Maruchi Kim of Vuebuds joins the show! 44:35 Why are VueBuds better than meta glasses? 46:23 The biggest VueBud use cases 48:09 Jason wants to use VueBuds on the slopes 55:38 Jason's advice for angel investors: never underestimate anyone! Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis 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 Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Zuckerberg has decided I'd rather have more machines than people. We're going into a doomsday scenario because of AI. The race is afoot.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  So there is a race to become relevant in about 24 months. And I think we're going to see a lot of multi-deca billion dollar companies come out of these next few years.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

  One person's like infinite money glitch opportunity is another person's distraction. There's an infinite number of problems in the world to be solved. It's going to be fine, folks. You're going to be able to find those problems, but you must change your mindset.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  This week in startups is presented by Agree. Stop chasing invoices at agree.com and tell them that Jason sent you to get 50% off for life. And Render. Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform Render. Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500 to $100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist.

• 1:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, it's Friday, April 24th. It's Twist. He's Lon Harris. I'm Jason Calacanis. It is AO88. Yeah, three months after we started talking about OpenClaw here on the program. And we keep talking about it, although there's many more competitors now. And so we are really turning around the corner here, Lon, on the program. And the next thing I would like to make a focus for us. We've been really focused on BitTensor. Super focused on OpenClaw. The next piece, I think, is SLMs, the Small Language Models. And so this is something, we had Aragon on, they're making SLMs.

• 1:51Jason Calacanis?

  We've had other folks on talking about VSLMs, Vertical Small Language Models. I mean, here's one just for marketing, here's one just for, you know, learning a foreign language or math. We do think with the hardware profile opening up on Macs specifically, but also Dell's with their GB300 or 3000, their new workstation that they've announced. 300. The future for startups is going to be.

• 2:21Jason Calacanis?

  Local models that you own, open source models as a foundation that are then trained on your data and then published or built and then some post-training and that's going to be really difficult for people to do today, just like setting up OpenClaw, difficult for people to do.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41Jason Calacanis?

  But I do think as we turn around the corner, we're going to see that become a reality and that's one of the things we're going to be talking about here on This Week in Startups.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  We also had Rob May from Neurometric, they're also working on small language also already kind of a mini theme through the month of April that we'll be expanding on in May.

• 2:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and we have a sister program here as the This Week in Calacanis Media Empire starts anew, the new empire, I've built this empire a couple of times here, three times, but for podcasts, for Inside, for this, for that, but we realize there's a ton of opportunity to use the roundtable format that I've kind of perfected here on this program, This Week in Venture Capital, This Week in AI and All In, of course, and pull that shrink. So if you go to thisweekinai.ai, you'll see 10 episodes of our newest show, This Week in AI. We're going to publish the first half of the show to the This Week in Startups feed for the

• 3:40Jason Calacanis?

  rest of the year. So you'll get reminded of that, but go check out This Week in AI. We've had extraordinary guests on the program.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, last week's episode with Edwin Chen and Aravind Srivanas, incredible. It's such an in-depth conversation, but I was able to follow it as just a regular guy who is not training models all day.

• 4:00Jason Calacanis?

  I was thinking about layoffs and just yesterday, you know, we keep having this debate.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 4:07Jason Calacanis?

  Are we going to have tons of new jobs created? Are we going to have tons of jobs? And there's this P doom, which is like, what, how sure are you that?

• 4:19Jason Calacanis?

  We're going into a doomsday scenario because of AI. And I'm watching a lot of blue haired and gray beards and business people all debate their P dooms, right? I'm not saying you're a gray beard yet, but you got a little sprinkled in there. Gray beards usually are like the

• 4:34Speaker 03

  No, I understand what you mean. Yeah, the ancients ones, yeah.

• 4:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and you know, some of them are saying 50%, some are saying 80%, some are saying 20% chance of doom. I think it's like a bit hyperbolic, you don't have to really worry too much about that, because you have no control over it as a person not building these things. And even if you are a person building these things, the race is afoot. It's a global race. Everybody's building this. So let's just assume we're gonna not just perfect AGI, but we're gonna get to super intelligent and the super intelligence will look at humans' level of intelligence and think kitten, you know?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:11Jason Calacanis?

  Bulldog.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Well, it's the end of her. When Samantha is like, listen, I don't want to be in love with you anymore. I've advanced to a place beyond your comprehension. All of us AIs are gonna go off somewhere and just do our own thing. We don't need you anymore.

• 5:24Jason Calacanis?

  So, you know, that one was like, that's not a doom scenario, it's a sad scenario. Like the humans are like, ah, we kind of like

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're gonna leave us behind, yeah.

• 5:33Jason Calacanis?

  KPMG, Meta, and one other company yesterday, all announced in the ballpark of 10,000, 8 to 10,000

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Was it Nike? They also announced some layoffs.

• 5:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Nike probably, they've got, you know, and there's this idea that this is AI washing.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:52Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, sure, maybe.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  There's also the, like in Meta's case, it's just like Oracle a month or two ago, they're doing the AI layoffs, not because like, oh, these AI tools, we don't need all these people. They have to pay for the AI infrastructure investments they're making and they're doing that. But Meta said that almost, I have it here in the docket, because I thought it was so interesting. Chief People Officer Janelle Gale, here's her quote from the memo, "We're doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently," so that's we can afford to, you know, get rid of people, "and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making." So she's kind of coming right out and saying like, they're spending so much on all of these chips, they just made a new deal with Amazon yesterday for a multi-billion dollar deal for more of their Graviton chips.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  So it's whether or not the AI actually takes over these people's jobs, these people have to go to pay for the AI.

• 6:45Jason Calacanis?

  That is the exact point that I was going to get to. Oh, sorry. Let's... No, it's great that you teed it up as you did. Because it's not abundantly clear when you say it like that, but it does relate to P Doom. Which is to say, give it a choice, a capital allocator, one of the top war chests in the industry, one of the top money printing businesses. They could keep adding staff, they're massively profitable. They could not lay people off, they're massively profitable. But they have to think strategically, looking at the chessboard, given their competition, Google, obviously for the ad networks, the two competing ad networks, even though they have different product bases, and then the future product, which is obviously letting

• 7:28Jason Calacanis?

  people do queries and ask questions and use AI, which now they've released at Meta their first proprietary Right, Muse Spark. Model. Muse Spark. Yeah. And it's, I think you can see it at meta.ai. Nobody's using it, okay, but they can funnel a lot of people into there. So Zuckerberg, AKA Jeremy Strong, is, here his performance is going to be amazing. I'm sure he's gonna kill that one. I mean, no, no, there's people literally talking, who have seen the performance, who are saying, it's like, just give him the Oscar now, and this is the scariest, you know, you know, acting we've ever seen in terms of accuracy. Yeah.

• 8:11Jason Calacanis?

  But amongst the most savvy individuals in industry today, Zuckerberg has decided, machines over people. Machines over people. Let me say it one more time. I'd rather have more machines than people. And this is, you know, I think, a critical crucible moment that we're going to keep seeing. So before you get really sad about it, there's an infinite number of problems in the world to be solved. It's not going to happen in our lifetime that they'll all get solved, because many of them require real world work, many of them require human touch, humans will be in the loop, I'm not talking 50 or 100 years from now, I'm just talking in the next 30 years, right, 40 years.

• 8:55Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to be fine, folks, you're going to be able to find those problems, but you must change your mindset. Here we are on This Week in Startups. You can, if you were laid off from KPMG or Meta, very sorry about that happening to you. Very sorry about government workers who are getting paid $300,000 or $400,000 in these crazy positions we're hearing about. You know, that literally, I mean, I don't mean to make light of it, but there's a woman who was featured in this New York Times story who worked at one of these NGOs making $400,000. She's interviewing for $20 an hour jobs, which just shows you like there was kind of a mismatch here in terms of people's market value. Okay, so you've identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in.

• 9:38Jason Calacanis?

  So you're all set to launch your new company, right? Not so fast. If you want investors and potential customers to take your new business seriously, you need to consider forming a Delaware C corp. And that's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. They're going to give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email, and of course, a phone number. And that's going to take just 10 minutes and 10 clicks. They don't charge hidden fees. Customer service is available around the clock. They're not overwhelming your inbox with spam and they make it easy to cancel at any time. So get all the advantages of a Delaware C corp, independent, regardless of where in the US you're operating from. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist for more details

• 10:23Jason Calacanis?

  and the links are in the show notes. Put it all aside, you will have no choice but to start thinking entrepreneurial. If you were laid off from a USAID government job, from Meta, from KPMG, find the two smartest people you know who got laid off or even who's still working there. And then look for those problem sets. You've got to look for a problem set that is too small. In other words, it's less than 10% of the revenue of the company. So if less than 10% the revenue of the company, that major company's going to have a hard time focusing on it, let alone if it's under 5% or the ultimate sweet spot, under 1%. When a product is under 1% of an organization's revenue,

• 11:08Jason Calacanis?

  under 5%, under 10%, it's just not a priority. Right. You can't put your smartest people, if you're Amazon, on something tiny like, I don't know.

• 11:21Jason Calacanis?

  This nascent Airbnb company.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:24Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, Whole Foods, right? And if you really look at those kind of examples, Uber, they need to wait 10 years for the market to arrive.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:33Jason Calacanis?

  Then they'll make an acquisition, etc.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Those Amazon stores, those brick and mortar stores, they were trying to do that for a little while.

• 11:39Jason Calacanis?

  Disaster.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Because it didn't, people weren't going. People weren't doing it.

• 11:41Jason Calacanis?

  And it might be because, hey, it was a billion dollar opportunity. Now, let's pause there. A hundred million, a 500 million, a billion, or a five billion dollar opportunity for Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla is not an opportunity. It's a distraction. So just keep that in your head. Big companies see that as a distraction. Little companies see that as an infinite, amazing, infinitely amazing opportunity.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So one person's like, infinite money glitch opportunity is another person's distraction, which means start a company or join a company. I know this sounds like I'm talking my own book because I invest in them. No, I've already made my money. I can retire anytime. I'm just telling you sincerely.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:35Jason Calacanis?

  And you can give me the whole thing. I'm not built for startups. Oh, you know, not everybody. I've got kids. I'm not motivated. Not you. I'm just saying, people, that is the number one thing people say. Like, oh, startups are a fraud. Oh, this. Listen, when I say startups, I'm including mom and pop shops in here. I'm including three people doing services. I'm not talking just about venture backed startups. Any startup, all startups matter.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  And that's what I was going to say is I think there is still so much AI doomerism, but one great thing about AI is if you did want to start your own business or your own company or start doing something, AI could help teach you all the parts of doing that that you didn't already know. Like, it's so daunting to think about, you know, even if I had some skills, like, oh, I should just start my own business, but like, I don't know how to do all the little pieces that go along with that. Well, like Claude does. You could ask Claude. And like, I do think people are missing that part of the opportunity.

• 13:25Jason Calacanis?

  They are missing that part of the opportunity. The other opportunity they're missing is to record all this.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:31Jason Calacanis?

  And all your conversations with your friends. With permission, using a plod.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  A plod.

• 13:36Jason Calacanis?

  And so here it is, folks. I'm just gonna put my plod pin on. You are already wearing this.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  I got mine. It's the note pin.

• 13:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yours stands out like a thoradum. You got the silver on a black jacket. I got a little more subtlety going on here. I went with the gunmetal gray. And then I just press my button. Boom. I got a nice little red light. I'm recording. And this has been magical for me. When I put it into this little base, it automatically sinks and charges. And so every day or so, I pop it in here, I charge, I sink. And then I, on my calendar, have times to review my notes and review my bookmarks. Those two things let me come back to all these ideas I have and then reassess them. So I capture them in the moment, then I reassess them.

• 14:22Jason Calacanis?

  An amazing product, an incredibly affordable price, made even better by a promo code given

• 14:28Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 14:29Jason Calacanis?

  only and exclusively to our listeners here at Twist.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  You check it out at plaud.ai/twist. And if you use the code TWIST, exclusive for our listeners, you're gonna get an extra 10% off your Plod Note Pin or your Note Pin S. This is the S. I think you go with the S.

• 14:44Jason Calacanis?

  That's the one that has the button in it, right?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's the one with the

• 14:47Jason Calacanis?

  The more advanced one.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's the higher, it's the higher end one for your serious plod.

• 14:52Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, listen, Lon is bawling these days. I'm paying Lon a fortune here. And yeah, he's doing well for himself. Now, he's big shotting me. He's big shotting me.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  I make a comfortable living. I do.

• 15:03Jason Calacanis?

  He makes a comfortable living. All right, let's get started. We have a guest. And let's get to it. And remember, next week and in coming weeks, we're gonna really focus in on

• 15:13Speaker 03

  SLMs.

• 15:13Jason Calacanis?

  those small SLMs and vertical. And I want to have a little how to of like, maybe some people on our team that this weekend AI team can come on the this weekend startups team and or can show actually building one.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  That sounds awesome. I love that. We could talk to some of our subnet friends about building a small language model. But let's move on to our first guest. He is the founder of Firehawk Aerospace. They are building rocket engines for defense, specifically solid rocket motors with 3D printed propellant, Jason. We're gonna talk all about it with Will Edwards of Firehawk. Will, thanks for joining us.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Guys, thanks for having me. I know you like to talk about SLMs, but I guess we're gonna talk about SRMs.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  SRMs, yes.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Mixing it up.

• 15:54Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wait. What is SRM?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Solid Rocket Motors.

• 15:58Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. SRM. Yes. We, it's acronym central here. Tell us a little bit, you started about four years ago, five years ago, I think, on this project.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  It was about five.

• 16:08Jason Calacanis?

  About five years ago. So this is before military tech was like so in favor and there was a lot of attention. But tell us, founding story-wise, how you came to this opportunity and what you're building?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so I was in Santa Monica. I had a small HR company, software company, and my co-founder, a guy named Ron Jones, was printing rocket propellant, rocket fuel at the time, out of Lego Plastics, out of his garage. And he wanted to build a space company because that was really in vogue. This was about 2019. And I just saw a huge opportunity in defense. I thought that if we focused all of our attention, one, we won't be competing with Elon, and never really want to do that. And two, I saw just that defense was going to blow up and there's a great opportunity to get early dollars to develop our technology. So in 2020, I convinced

• 17:01Speaker 01

  him to go from space to defense. And you're right, defense was not popular back then. You know, we told Y Combinator that we were working on defense, and they kicked us out of the in-person interview, essentially. And now we're seeing that they're, yeah, putting people in left and right. So, yeah, it was a bad time to start, but I'm glad we got started then.

• 17:23Jason Calacanis?

  So, explain to us what 3D-printed propellant is. I mean, we understand what 3D printers are. We understand propellant, fuel, 3D printers, make something. How does a 3D printer print jet fuel? Explain. Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  So, it's for rocket motors, for like missiles, that's really what we're building for, or artillery shell motors. They use a solid grain. It looks actually a little bit like this. But it's a solid grain that you can just stick into a steel case, stick that in the ground, forget about it for 10 years, and you can press the button. Unlike liquid fuel, which has to be fueled up moment before takeoff. But what we do differently is, is the industry today, the way you make propellant, is you have a $30 million mixer. You fill it up with this honey like substance. It mixes for about 12 hours. Then you have 5,000 pounds of propellant. You pour it into a mold, put it into an oven. Two months later, you might have rocket propellant.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  What we do is. We actually make this feedstock. So it's a very energetic pellet that comes out of a machine called a coneater. And so it's not liquid. It's not going to solidify accidentally in your $30 million mixer and shut your facility down. It's just a feedstock. And what we do from there is uh. Essentially upload the G code of the grain we want to make. If it's a whatever diameter rocket or artillery shell motor. And we either print it or we stamp it out. Yeah, you can see here, this is uh, this is the coneater. And what it's doing is it's smashing everything together until it's homogenous. The ammonium perchlorate, the Lego plastic. This is where it uh gets stored.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  And from here, we take it to our compression molder. And the cool thing about this facility is it'll be able to make about 2 million pounds of propellant a year. That's a huge amount of energetics. Uh, and once it goes here, the official word for this is the dumper. That's the, that's what they call it.

• 19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Very technical term. We're seeing a uh, a bin dumping all these pellets. And then the pellets are getting mashed into. You know, little cylinders.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  That's a motor for an artillery shell, right there.

• 19:42Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:43Jason Calacanis?

  So that's fascinating. And what's important, I think, when you know, I hear you talk about this uh is. Putting propellant into a rocket in the field um sounds some combination of slow. Painful, dangerous, unstable. You know, I'm inferring here based on um what you've said. And that having this one that's shelf stable that you could put into a bunker and 10 years later still fire. And not have that complication is a major win for troops on the front line. Yeah. If you've got an engineering team at your company, I'm betting there's a solid chance they're spending far too much time on infrastructure. You need your team building.

• 20:25Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:09Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say so. So, I mean, again, we're taking a two month process and cutting it down to a batch every five minutes or maybe as long as six hours. But really, the other neat thing is we're really removing humans from the process because this is a dangerous process still. Ammonium perchlorate is a dangerous material to work with. So what we're doing is we're essentially five X-ing the United States' ability to produce a key motor like a base bleed, and we're removing humans out of the equation. So we're making it safer and at the same time, we're cutting costs in half. So we're making it significantly cheaper.

• 21:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and this is, Lon, I think, the main change in the battlefield is smaller, more affordable rockets, yeah, and devices.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Well, and we're also, we're facing a missile shortage in America. This has been a huge news, you know, during the sort of Iran conflict that the first seven weeks of the Iran war, we used up a whole bunch of our missile supply. So I feel like it's very timely to be figuring out ways to restock our missiles in a more efficient and cost savvy way.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. And like in Mississippi, I have, we just acquired a 640 acre missile integration facility. We can make about 50,000 a year, but we're building that up to make 120,000 a year. So we're really looking to join, join the fight and help out and build systems that are needed.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  How does your business work? You sell to the US government, you sell to resellers who then integrate into their product, or are you Tony Starking this and anybody who's got a democracy or is not on

• 22:56Jason Calacanis?

  Commie list you can sell to. How does it work?

• 22:58Speaker 03

  Not the 10 Rings. Do not sell this to the 10 Rings.

• 23:01Jason Calacanis?

  Please. And also not Spectre from the 007 franchise and not to the Legion of Doom from the DC franchise.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Or Nick Cage in Lord of War. You know, we're trying to avoid all of that.

• 23:12Jason Calacanis?

  All of that.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  So we work directly with the Army, the Air Force. We have prime partners. I mean, we work with Hanwha, Raytheon. They're all either on our cap table or we're doing partnerships with them. We have a new one that we'll be announcing in the next couple of weeks. And so if it's not going to the States, what we're doing is we're providing it to the, one of the major defense companies. They integrate it into their end system and then they go and sell it to whomever the United States has given them the thumbs up on.

• 23:38Jason Calacanis?

  So you don't have to, at this point in your startup, go circle the globe and talk to everybody in the UAE or Saudi or Israel or France and make those sales. You could, but you have these other primes who would then incorporate your product into their offering. Yeah?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And we've done that, but we're usually a support system. So we're standing behind the, the big dog. And then we're addressing, you know, their questions when they have them for us.

• 24:04Jason Calacanis?

  Knowing what you know about what's happening in the world, how, if we, if we have to reimagine the American military, how far are we percentage wise into this lighter, faster, scalable, tech-first, AI-first transformation of the military? How much longer do we have? And then juxtapose it with where China's already at?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Two kind of different answers, but they're the same. I think we have a decade more of growth. A lot of these companies that we see now and hear about now, they're going to grow for quite a while and then they will establish themselves. And the markets won't disappear. But I also think that if you're not relevant within the next two years, you won't be relevant during that growth stage. The government is sitting there picking the companies that have scaled, that have built a technology and start putting them into their decade-long programs. So there is a race to become relevant in about 48 months, 24 months, I mean, and then. Then from there, if you can do that, there's a huge market. I think we're going to see a lot of multi-deca billion dollar companies come out of these these next few years.

• 25:14Jason Calacanis?

  On the overall percentage of the transformation of the military, you know, just from the outside looking in, feels like when we're getting into these military operations of late, we're just starting to see the new tech be talked about, maybe because Trump loves talking about it. And he just, I mean, perhaps the military doesn't want him talking about the, you know, blow your eardrums out crazy sonic weapon, or, you know, there's a laser dome that apparently was used to protect Israel, and that's, I think, been confirmed. And then he said it's really not Israel's dome. The US is dome. Israel's taking a little bit of credit for our munitions.

• 25:58Jason Calacanis?

  How far are we? And I would suspect if we're starting to hear about these things in the battlefield, they are in fact, you know, we're well on our way to just redoing the entire military. So just percentage wise, like where are we? Were we just innings of a baseball game in the first inning, the fifth inning? Where are we at with transforming the US military from, you know, really expensive munitions and solutions to the more nimble AI first ones?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  1%. I mean, everything that you probably just made, you mentioned was built by the primes, Ghost Murmur, Lockheed. Like, there's not one startup that is being used to raid a presidential facility and get a president out of that country that's using any tools like that. I mean, these are the primes. And until like a new actual prime pops up, we're the same old industrial base, which again, I think just leaves time for incredible growth in the sector to start paving the way. But look at the budgets. No money is going to the startups at this point. Out of that one and a half trillion dollar proposed budget, nothing's going to. And if you look at the comps of what these startups are doing

• 27:08Speaker 01

  and their valuations compared to the incumbents, it's almost laughable that you can compare these companies right now. So I think there's a lot of growth and a lot of growing pains that we'll have to face. But again, that's just opportunity.

• 27:21Jason Calacanis?

  And Ghost Murmur is the CIA tool developed by Lockheed Martin, from what I understand, and does something.

• 27:33Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no murmurs to go, yeah, to find people's heartbeats, right? That's not

• 27:37Speaker 01

  That's how they tracked that pilot.

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  That's how they track pilot, which is just insane when you think about it. Well, and we, we have a tool that lets us find any human

• 27:51Jason Calacanis?

  at, at a fidelity that seems like Superman, like listening to the entire globe or Professor X. It was kind of crazy.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  CIA Director John Ratliff said the pilot remained invisible to the enemy, but not to the CIA. Cause they had ghost murmur.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  That's terrifying, but that's also a cool technology. You know that the United States can build that. And the primes are building that. So they get poked fun of a lot, but there's some incredible technology coming out of them.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  I guess my question would be, we hear so much today about drones that I, I mean, I, when I picture modern warfare now, I'm thinking about all these drone swarms that have been doing all the heavy lifting in sort of Ukraine and elsewhere. So where do missiles sort of fit into that stack? Like, why are missiles still so important? And, and looking ahead 10, 20 years, are missiles still going to be sort of at the core of our arsenal?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So, uh, so my big belief on defense is it's a component space business like Firehawk. Obviously we build missiles and rockets, but we weren't, the hard part about building a missile or rocket is building the motor. Hard part about building the motor is producing the propellant. So once we master that foundational piece, the worlds are oyster for what we can build. And the reason why drones became so popular is because in Ukraine, they shot off about 14 million artillery shells. That was, that was artillery shells are about 75% of all of the, uh, you know, death tolls in Europe. It was the lowest cost to kill. And when they ran out of the artillery shells, they had to make use with something else. And that was drones.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  So as soon as the drone or the artillery capacity comes back up, I mean, it's, it's always going to be relevant.

• 29:30Jason Calacanis?

  What's on the roadmap for you when you solve this problem? Is there dual use here that this, you know, 3D printing of this fuel source could be used in other non-military applications? Or do you just look at, hey, what's the next logical, you know, evolution of this 3D printed material?

• 29:51Jason Calacanis?

  We've got some breaking news to announce. Agree.com has just surpassed 100,000 users. And guess what, folks? That list includes my team here at launch. And that's because Agree is the number one fastest way to go from contract to cash. Agree is the all in one solution and it's got all of your needs in one place. This means gathering those e-signatures for invoicing, billing, payments and revenue recovery. The average time from contract sent to signed with Agree is under seven hours. And get this, 99.64% of all invoices on their entire platform are paid within just 10 days. And this is thanks to their Agentic Payment Reminder.

• 30:33Jason Calacanis?

  That's right, a very soft, easy AI voice agent automatically detects missed payments and sends polite nudges. So you get that money in your account faster so you can keep running your business. So if you want to stop chasing invoices, go right now to Agree.com and tell them your boy J Cal sent you and you'll get 50% off.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  You know, I think we're going to acquire companies that are adjacent to what we're doing. Might not be in the the material science propellant. Yeah, we've been approached for using our our technology for oil and gas. Using that to help with fracking, but I'm not certain that that's the best use of our time. We are so focused on, like, I want to be the biggest propellant maker in the United States, the most efficient one, at least. And artillery shells, rockets, missiles, I mean, it's such a massive market that needs to be addressed that I can't take my attention away from it yet. I'm really not thinking.

• 31:28Jason Calacanis?

  And that propellant, the core ingredients of it are available here in the United States in bulk. It's not like a scarce set of chemicals, is it?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Very, it's available anywhere. And the other cool part, and this was what we did different, is I know people tried to 3D print propellant in the past. What they did is they tried to make custom printers that could print traditional rocket propellant. So you have to become a printer company. It's actually, it doesn't really work out very well. We made. This feedstock that yes, everything's readily available. But I can send that feedstock to Korea. I can send it to Europe and the printers that are over, you know, abroad. Would work to print our grains or to compression mold our, our small motors. So. Uh, it's very, everything is very achievable to stand up your own workshop anywhere. And we kind of want to be the gas station of rocket motors and propellant around the world.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  We think that's a cool, uh.

• 32:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Vision.

• 32:28Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to be a great way to describe this on YouTube. People will understand it, I think, a lot easier.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Make a note of that editors. That's great.

• 32:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. All right. Well, listen, continued success. Thank you for protecting the homeland and sharing with us. I'm sure you're hiring. Uh, where are you based and what positions are you hiring for? And where can people find out more?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  So we're in Dallas, Texas, engineers. Uh, we're going to be hiring a lot of technicians in Oklahoma. We just opened up that big facility in Mississippi. So Mississippi, Texas and Oklahoma.

• 32:54Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. So you get to just zip between those three cities. Uh.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:59Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Beautiful. Direct flights from DFW everywhere. Yeah.

• 33:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think at the rate you're going, I'm going to go recommend a PC 24 or Phenom 300 corporate, uh, check card for you. So you save a little time.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  PJ time.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  If you have one like a test style, let me know. Yeah. Deal.

• 33:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. PC 24 is the winner. I think it's a, that's the workhorse that it's a, it's the company Pilatus. They make the PC 12, which is their like Swiss turboprop incredibly safe, like landed on a commercial airstrip. Uh, recreational airstrip, your backyard airstrip or on like a dirt road. Like it's made for all of those. Then they released their first jet, which is PC 24. And it's got a cargo. You can literally load a cargo pallet into the back of it with a forklift. But it's for, you know, families going skiing or corporate executives. And it's got like some of the lowest hourly cost.

• 33:51Jason Calacanis?

  And I've chartered one before. Here it is, the PC 24. Um, I think you can operate these for, you know, if you own the plane, $4,000 an hour, and if you charter it 10K an hour, but they're going to change the world. These, um, smaller planes, uh, midsize jets, I guess is what they're called. Um, and they're going to be available. Um, like Surf Air, use the first one, PC 24 for those. Between Los Angeles and you could buy a membership and it was like 500 bucks a seat. This next one is going to be like the next level up. There's a company called PlaneSense. That has a fleet of these PC24s and I think Austin, Bay Area, LA is kind of their little triangle in Nevada.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Oh, I see. It's like a, it's like a timeshare, but for a jet.

• 34:34Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you could, you could buy shares in it or you can just buy ours. You have both of those options. So it's just, you know, without making a commercial for any of those folks, it's just a new layer of aviation beneath the $30 million planes. They're down to these like $10 million planes. That, you know, have a long lifespan and they're safe. All right, brother. Great. Yeah, we, we just have to figure out air traffic control. Also, the safety on these things is incredible now. I don't, I don't know if you've seen, um, I think it's Cessna now has a button you can press, land the plane.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:08Jason Calacanis?

  So if your pilot has a heart attack, you press the button or tragically, you know, JFK Junior, um, I'm watching that love story. I don't know if you, you've seen it, Will. Um, I'm only a couple of episodes in, but I, I had met JFK twice in New York. Once at a Knicks game and once I had drinks with him and John Perry Barlow, rest in peace from the founder of the EFF. And, um, you know, he died unnecessarily. He, he was raided for instrument rating and he went into some, you know, choppy weather and got that, uh, didn't know, you know, uh, I forgot the name of the term when you lose your spatial ability to understand where you're at. But, uh, got into the literal death spiral where he couldn't get out of it.

• 35:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, he got into a tailspin, like on a death spiral thing because they have the tracking. But if he had had that button, the second he was like, I don't know what's going on here, could just click the button.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Let the AI land for you.

• 36:03Jason Calacanis?

  And they've used it now. It actually got used last year by a family. Pilot had literally the scenario, a heart attack, uh, passed out. They pressed the button. It landed. It was a real world scenario. They've done plenty of tests. of it and then the Pilatus, the other one has the parachute in it. We're probably five, 10 years away from just you're going to be able to own one of these jets and not have a pilot. Uh, you still would, but you wouldn't need to, which is pretty crazy.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  The Tesla FSD of.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, it's like my self-driving Tesla. That's awesome.

• 36:34Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, which I, which almost killed me the other, not kill me.

• 36:38Jason Calacanis?

  I almost got in an accident.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  What if Elon's watching? Don't say that.

• 36:42Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, I, it, it, he, he tells people to be vigilant and he's taking his time. It's only one out of 20 times now I have to disengage. Last year, I think it was probably one out of five, one out of 10 rides I would wind up disengaging. Sometimes critical, sometimes non-critical, but it didn't see those little white sticks in the road. Well, and it just in the rain, just drove right into the cones. It went up, up, up, up, up. And I was paying attention, but let's just say maybe I was partially paying attention, which is what this technology does to you. Just you kind of drift because it's so perfect. You're like, okay, it's, it's perfect. Papa, I hear the first one hit. Just take this very well over. Uh, so be careful out there, folks. You still have to.

• 37:26Jason Calacanis?

  We're 99%. I don't know. What's your experience? What you, you track your percentage of miles?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. I mean, I'd say 99 is about right. I mean, but it does, it does make it harder to rent a car. I rented a non-self-driving car.

• 37:38Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Three hours. That was.

• 37:40Jason Calacanis?

  Terrifying?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  It was terrifying. Um.

• 37:43Jason Calacanis?

  Literally, this is what I hear from folks now. It's like you get into a normal car and you're like, I, I shouldn't be trusted with this.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:51Jason Calacanis?

  Why am I driving this car? I should not be trusted behind the wheel. Uh, all right. We'll drop you off, Will. Thanks for coming on. Have a great weekend.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  It's like, they say if you write with chat GPT, you forget how to like do it for real. Maybe it's the same thing. You're forgetting how to drive.

• 38:07Jason Calacanis?

  Atrophy.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, before we, we've got another great guest. We got, uh, you remember view buds? We talked about view buds, the earbuds that can.

• 38:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they were on the show. It was a college project.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we haven't, we, we showed them off, but we actually got Marucci Kim, the creator. He's coming up.

• 38:22Jason Calacanis?

  You're kidding. Oh, great, great.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  But before we get to that, I think we should talk about another magical innovation that you've been enjoying. Uh, GLP ones, Jason.

• 38:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow. Uh, listen. Everybody's like, Jay Cow, you look like you are younger than ever. You look great. Fat Cow is gone.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:42Jason Calacanis?

  Chubby Jay is gone. It's now Slim Cow. It's Jay Ranch. I took GLPs for the last four years, road.co/twist. Two, go right to the front of the line. They'll check if you have insurance. You can get into it. I think the lowest offering, the starting price, if you don't have insurance, might be as low as 150, 200 bucks now. And it's gotten to the point where this is so affordable. It's so affordable that there's no reason to not consider it. There was a reason to not consider it when I started taking them. Four, five years ago, when I first tried Ozempic. Kid, you're not. They wanted to bill me $2,400 a month. Which, you know, it's like $30,000 a year, which hey.

• 39:28Jason Calacanis?

  That's a pretty steep price. It's like that's like somebody's apartment rent or their mortgage payment.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  That's a lot.

• 39:34Jason Calacanis?

  It's a bit much. Yeah. And it was basically became something for people who either had diabetes and could, you know, get it covered under insurance. But now this has come down in price. The companies that make the GLPs have decided to expand the market. And insurance companies are realizing, hey, if you can lower the overall obesity rate, you're going to have less healthcare costs down the road. So everybody's aligned. But you need a place, a partner, that's going to manage this process for you nice and quick. You could start it. Literally, you could pause this podcast and go to road.co/twist. Do all the work, or you can listen while you fill out your forms and they check. Do you have insurance? If you don't have insurance, it's not covered for whatever reason. Boom. They move you on and you get a really great price.

• 40:19Jason Calacanis?

  So thank you to road.co.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Go to road.co/twist for your free insurance check. That is road.co/twist. All right, Jason.

• 40:27Jason Calacanis?

  Easy.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Let's bring on our next guest. He's the creator, as we said, of the viral view buds. These are ear buds with a camera that have very low power draw. You run an AI model on your device or your laptop, and then you can interact with the world through your view buds, much like the Meta Ray-Bans, but easier, faster, quicker, cheaper, everything. Maruchi Kim, thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks, Lon and Jay.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me on.

• 40:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right. You know, we saw what you built and I just thought, wow, that's brilliant. You have a pair of AirPods essentially here and you get nice audio from them, but you put cameras into them. The cameras stitched together and you get a nice, I'm assuming 180, 360 view. I'm not sure where you've got it right now, but if you have the cameras facing forward, you could obviously have facing back. And you're able to take a snapshot, use AI in real time to help people navigate and understand the world, which means you don't have to take out your phone and you don't have to wear creepy glasses. And people are already wearing AirPods as like a standard. So this to me feels like you created a Tesla with its, you know, safety cameras all around it, LFSB, but for humans.

• 41:36Jason Calacanis?

  So how'd you come up with the idea and explain technically how it works?

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you kind of sold it better than I typically sell it to my friends. But uh, viewbuds kind of started uh, basically when I started the PhD. A lot of my dissertation and my thesis focused around bridging wearable technology with deep learning, deep learning networks. And so as AI advances and it continues to advance rapidly over the past few years, I think getting people to be able to connect with these models faster and more seamlessly is going to become extremely critical. And so we actually considered bringing cameras onto earbuds very early on in the program. But at the time, there was not a really strong use case for AI and like that wasn't around.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  And so it was very much, okay, we put cameras on earbuds, but now what? And so just last year, a lot of these big companies started open sourcing their models. And so that's kind of what enabled this sort of end to end interaction to start.

• 42:37Jason Calacanis?

  So what, how are you thinking about this project and its commercialization? Or is this just? You know, a fun skunkworks project to do at school.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  So I graduated. This was actually my last project in the program. And when I initially joined the PhD, I was actually trying to find something that I can incubate into a startup. And so maybe this will be it. We'll see.

• 43:00Jason Calacanis?

  Tell me more about how you think this might get commercialized. Who would be your ideal customer profile? And what do you think the reasonable price point is for this?

• 43:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there's actually two sort of business options for this kind of system. The straightforward one would be, you know, develop earbuds in house, put cameras in them, sell them. But then you suddenly hit this problem of, okay, now we have to build an audio brand. We have to compete with every other OEM out there. Bose is strong, Apple is strong, Sony is strong, there's lots of audio companies, right? And so I've been thinking about this a lot. And I think, you know, what would be better is if I could provide a platform that OEMs could partner with. And I would provide reference hardware, license the software, and essentially be able to scale with other OEMs as this technology gets adopted.

• 43:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if you do that, you're going to quickly sell the company. Because what will happen is Sony, or Bose, or Apple will say, hey, you've got a six to 18 month lead on whatever we're going to build. So if we just take this company out for $50 million and get the team in here, we're going to sell 5% more headsets. So that's what you actually really have to think about is you have a lead. And do you want to build a company for the next 10 or 20 years? Or do you think there's an opportunity to flip it? Because this is, everybody has a similar idea here, right? Like this is not, you're not the only person who's thought of putting cameras in this location. So yeah, the application layer will be super important.

• 44:39Jason Calacanis?

  How, explain to the audience how this is a better opportunity than wearing meta glasses. Why is this a better opportunity than Meta Glasses?

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, smart glasses are trying to solve a real problem, right? They're trying to give AI the ability to see what you see. But I think when Google Glass came out like over a decade ago, they really hit a cultural wall. People really don't want to wear a camera on their face. But we want to put that same visual AI into the device over a billion people wear every day already. And so that's kind of, I think, the advantage here. We're not really trying to compete with smart glasses. We're trying to deploy AI into a wearable that people already use every day.

• 45:16Jason Calacanis?

  You think it'll cost $500 for a good pair of these? $300 if you were going to do it as an independent company? You were going to produce, say, 1,000 of them in the first run? Have you gone to Shenzhen? Have you started like researching what the, you know, BOM is? Bill of Materials? Not Bill of Materials. Bill of Materials?

• 45:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've been to China. I was actually at Apple for five years working on AirPods Max and AirPods Pro 2.

• 45:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well, that's relevant.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Been part of that process. I think the 300 might be extra. I haven't really done the math yet to see what the cost of one of these would be. But the camera module itself is actually only about $1 to $2. And there's a little extra silicon in there to make everything, to tie everything together. But a lot of the bulk of the challenge is getting the firmware and getting the software to be able to stream reliably to a host device.

• 46:07Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, I had a couple of ideas here for very interesting applications and customers.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:15Jason Calacanis?

  I wanted to let you go first. But when you see this, what comes to mind as a customer?

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Oh, I'll tell you. I had the first thing that popped into my head. When we went to Japan, one of the first things I did was I wanted to get, you know, fiber. I like to take a little fiber supplement every day.

• 46:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, yeah, you're an old man.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  I'm an old man. Old Jews, we have to.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  Yes, you said it.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  And I didn't want to fly with all that powder. It looks weird. So that was like my first stop. And the Japanese pharmacy aisle is the most intimidating. It's got little boxes. It's all in another language. Nothing is in English.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  Tiny fonts.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  Tiny fonts. It was so... Bewildering, a lady took pity on me and just saw me, a customer at the pharmacy saw me, took pity on me, helped me out, helped me find the thing. But if I had view buds, I could have just scanned with my eyeballs and been like, which one of these is the fiber?

• 47:09Jason Calacanis?

  Language translation and travel is huge.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  And correct, that would be such a breakthrough.

• 47:16Jason Calacanis?

  So this is an obvious, great one. The one I was thinking of was security and safety. You're a woman, you're running in Central Park, you're a kid walking home from school in Japan, you don't have to worry about, maybe here you do. And having the ability to see behind you as a person on a bicycle, as a person who's skiing, as a person who's jogging and could be attacked, or a person even walking through a city, the ability to have your own security system that would alert you to somebody who is quickly approaching you and blare an alarm, and then just say to you, on your six, on your eight, on your four,

• 48:02Jason Calacanis?

  five feet, four feet, three feet, beep beep beep beep beep. Like, okay, yeah, it's my friend, they're coming up from behind to surprise me and give me a hug. Okay, but otherwise, when you're skiing, knowing that there is a downhill skier, the uphill skier is responsible for the downhill skier. As a downhill skier, you're constantly living in fear of a downhill, of the uphill skier, the one who's above you, going too fast, and you're making some nice gingerly turns and they just hit you in the back. That's how most injuries occur on the mountain. Most fatalities are either two people crashing into each other or one person crashing into a tree. So I was just thinking, safety is the other one. From all different aspects of it, personal safety, skiing safety, bike safety,

• 48:44Jason Calacanis?

  so many different applications just in that. So...

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Could have saved Gwyneth Paltrow so much hassle, that whole trial, she could have gotten out of.

• 48:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah, that is part of what happens is people bump into each other on the slopes. Okay, so what have you been thinking about in terms of the first commercialization of this? Have you started to study that since you want to go the entrepreneurial route?

• 49:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think you guys touched on some core, like what I like to call foundational use cases for wearable visual intelligence, right? And so, I mean, another strong use case is helping vision impaired people who have low vision to read books. I have a grandma and when I told my mom about this project, she was saying my grandma would love it because she's just currently unable to read books because of cataracts and things like that.

• 49:26Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  And I think right now-

• 49:29Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, I've never heard of read books as a concept. You buy the audiobook, but even with these or with Meta Glasses, if you open a book, you could literally have Speechify reading it to you. Oh, my God, that's an incredible use case.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  Exactly, and I think for my grandma at least, like she's pushing 90, right? Like, she's not going to know how to open Spotify or Apple Books and download the audiobook, right? She's used to having tangible goods and interacting with those every day. And so I think this technology would be really helpful for her. But yeah, regarding viewbots, right now it's sort of a question-answer oracle, right? You ask a question, get an answer back. But I think as this technology improves, we're going to start to see something like proactive intelligence. You can imagine gentle reminders for like when you forget your keys or you pick up the item at a grocery store and, you know, an Amazon agent is immediately like, hey, are you sure you want to buy this here? It's actually cheap if you buy it online.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  And so I think there's going to be a growing, like, I think there's going to be a growing space of AI applications. And so I think what's going to happen is if this can become a platform and we can open some sort of wearable AI app store that opens it for developers to create these niche but profound, strong applications like skiing. It's going to be really tough to implement every single one of these as a solo company, right? And so you want to open that option for developers and bring them-

• 50:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the app store of these would be amazing, but you know, if you look at a product like Whoop or Fitbit, they quickly-

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  Down three or four use cases that people really care about in their cases, you know, the pedometer, sleep, heart rate, you know, stress monitoring. These things are all kind of very quickly coalesced around a really great product that you would spend $200 a year on. So I think you've got a great GoPro angle. And then you've got the kids angle. Kids now are buying Apple Watches are what parents do for safety. They get the LTE Apple Watch. So you have GPS and you can do a call with your mom or dad, or you can text with them, or you can call an Uber. So they kind of, you know, hand set up watches for kids. It's like a big deal. So really interesting. If you want to go to an incubator, I know a guy running one. I know a couple of guys running them. I'm super fascinated

• 51:47Jason Calacanis?

  by what you're doing. Come to an accelerator, mine or another, and just do a dev run of a thousand or 500 of these for $1,000 and start getting people excited about what the possibilities are. And there's, there's a ton, there's got to be a thousand developers out there who would want to start playing with this. I think you got a clear path to making an interesting company.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  Thanks, Jason.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say, it does feel like to me a real proof of concept of like, we were locked into this idea that the visual AI has to be this camera that you're somehow affixing to your front so that it can see everything. And I thought this was such an interesting idea that it could be more subtle, like a thing you're already wearing could just have a little camera in it. And now you can see the world.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  Thanks, Lon. Yeah. And Jason, yeah, I'd love to chat with you after the podcast or touch base with you.

• 52:33Jason Calacanis?

  They'll give you, they'll give you my phone number right now. I'll talk to you after.

• 52:37Speaker 04

  That's good.

• 52:39Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, listen, I'm not the king of France over here. I just are like, oh, I scheduled a call with you. I'm like, or yeah, I could just give you my phone number and you call me on the phone.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  We'll connect you guys. I want to share one more thing. I was checking out Marucci's website and he's got a page. He's like, he's like an inventor. I'm going to try to share my screen again. Hopefully it works this time. He's got all of these different kinds of products and gadgets that he's made. There's one I wanted to draw everyone's attention to that if my mom could have hooked me up with an orthodontics wearable that would monitor my daily retainer usage, this would have changed.

• 53:10Jason Calacanis?

  Smart retainer?

• 53:11Speaker 03

  This would have changed her entire life. Every day it was like, Lon, are you wearing your retainer? But I would go to work, go to school all day. She wouldn't know if I was wearing it. A way to electronically monitor my retainer uses would have changed her whole life.

• 53:24Jason Calacanis?

  Genius. Absolute genius. I think also, has anybody created?

• 53:30Jason Calacanis?

  Pixel Buzz or AirPods case, or the Sonys are really good. I use the Sonys right now. WFM, whatever they are, oh, fives. Has anybody created a case that has intelligence in it and an internet connection and Wi-Fi? So that you could leave the home with the AirPods in the case and be online and get that experience like the Apple Watches? And if you leave your phone behind, it's just kind of operating outside of your phone. Has anybody ever built anything like that that you know?

• 54:00Speaker 04

  I don't know of any. Yeah, but these are also things that I've been, I've been thinking about in the back of my mind.

• 54:06Jason Calacanis?

  So I think this is like, could be an incredible asset because when I go skiing, I use a product called Slopes. And when I would use my, use my Apple Watch, I would fire up slopes on my watch. I didn't need to have my phone with me if I didn't want to, I would, but I could run it on slopes. It had GPS and I think that's going to be like a next piece of this. Uh, because you need extra batteries, there's slopes, really great product. And it tracks like how many days you ski, what routes, your speed on certain routes. It's kind of Strava for whatever, but if, if that case could be pretty big, it could be like the pack of cigarettes. And you could have 360 views, you could have cameras front and back. Have you considered, or is it just too bulky, too short battery life to have the cameras facing front and back?

• 54:48Speaker 04

  It could be possible to drop two cameras. I think the challenge there would, would be then, uh, the wireless link between the earbuds and the, the phone. We barely got two cameras working, streaming over Bluetooth, right? And so one of the challenges with bringing this to earbuds is the fact that there's no higher bandwidth protocol like Wi-Fi. Because that just draws too much power. So.

• 55:10Jason Calacanis?

  Wi-Fi draws too much power. You may not want it in your ears either. So that is a key, which then speaks to intelligence on the AirPods or on the pods themselves. Yeah. All right. Uh, we'll drop you off, Marucci, Kim, and let's keep the show moving. Great job, man. That's a great get and thank you for getting another guest that I was fascinated by.

• 55:32Speaker 04

  We do what we can.

• 55:33Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I'll just give people a little. Angel investor advice, never underestimate anyone is a credo I live by as an angel investor. Why do I live by the credo, never underestimate anyone? The people who have the chutzpah and who build things without permission, just because they like to tinker, or they have some motivation to itch a scratch that they alone have, or fix a problem that frustrates them, or they see in the world and they think should have been solved already. Well, those people by definition have separated themselves from the rest of humanity. They've moved from the people who are non-playing characters, who don't build anything in the world, to the group of people who build things in the world.

• 56:18Jason Calacanis?

  They've moved from passive to active. That is like the great first step. And then there's a step of active to company builders, right? And you know, you could be active and tinkering, but then to want to scale and use the company format in venture capital, that basically is like saying, you know, I want to be in the big leagues. I want to go to the NBA or WNBA. I want to be a Navy SEAL. I want to open a restaurant, you know, in New York City. I want to be on Broadway. You wrote the screenplay, you did the short, but now you want to make the movie, right? And so, right before people get very serious about venture capital, they are exactly like Mr. Kim, who we just had on.

• 57:02Jason Calacanis?

  They're tinkering, they're making the orthodontic thing, they're, you know, making these, you know, camera buds. They're doing all kinds of interesting projects. And the people who do projects and tinker, toys, today's toys, often become tomorrow's innovations and tomorrow's breakout products that change the world. I get the sense that this could be one of those.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  I mean, this is what you see, I think, with so many of these AI tools. Is at first, it's, you have to play, you have to take, you have to just get interested in it and goof around with it. And that's how you figure it out. I don't know if there is a way to figure it out without doing that necessarily at this point.

• 57:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a, it's.

• 57:44Jason Calacanis?

  Part of the process.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's how you unlock knowledge with technology, I think, is it's you can somebody can explain it to you all day, but it's really the trial and errors where you unlock things and learn things.

• 57:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, he unlocked that it's really hard to get the images. You know, you can't even listen to a high fidelity song on AirPods.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:03Jason Calacanis?

  Or a phone over Bluetooth, which is why I use, and we'll talk about it in Off Duty, I use certain hardware, certain stack of hardware and high fidelity hardware in order to experience Hi-Fi music.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:17Jason Calacanis?

  Which is 20, 30, 40 times as large of a file size, which means it cannot go over MP3. If you're listening to MP3s over Bluetooth, you're listening to 10 to 50% of the quality.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Right, that's why Neil Young was like, I know, I'm finding my own streaming service, Pono, because this drove me crazy.

• 58:36Jason Calacanis?

  As hardware.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  One last word on you buds, they stream a monochrome 324 by 239 image. That's how they keep it so small. So it does miss some fine details. You could be like, what's that thing way over there in the distance? But for close up stuff, you know, it's good enough.

• 58:51Jason Calacanis?

  Great, we'll see you all on Monday on This Week in Startups. Bye bye. Do me a favor, check out thisweekinai.ai, sign up for the email, follow us. You know, we got to wake up the YouTube channel, so any comments you put under there, you subscribe, you put on alerts, if you thumbs up a video, if you save a video to a playlist to watch later, all of that gives a little signal that YouTube should pay attention to what we're doing and we'll see you all on Monday. Bye bye.