Danny Bernstein left Big Tech to fund farm-bots | E2310

This Week In Startups is made possible by: NetSuite https://NetSuite.ai/TWIST Squarespace https://squarespace.com/twist YSecurity https://YSecurity.io/TWIST Today's show: *America posted 400,000 farm jobs last year, and fewer than 1% got a single domestic applicant. Danny Bernstein of Reservoir believes it's time to start automating this backbreaking labor, like picking stone fruit in 110°F temperatures. So he built the world's first on-farm robotics incubator on 40 acres of California farmland. Here's why he argues that automating farms isn't just a new opportunity, it's a national security issue. PLUS Jason responded to Gal Shir's viral "AI beat me at design" tweet, got into a kerfuffle with Figma CEO Dylan Field, and wound up making a brand new J-Trade. AND we're talking about the Dept. of Education's new "do no harm" policy, the Brown University AI cheating chart that's blowing up social media, and Lon has fresh streaming recommendations in an all-new Off Duty. Guest: Danny Bernstein on X: https://x.com/bernsteind Reservoir Farms: https://reservoir.co/ Reservoir VC: https://reservoir.vc/ Relevant Links: Bonsai Robotics: https://bonsairobotics.ai/ Root AI acquired by AppHarvest: https://www.therobotreport.com/root-ai-acquired-by-appharvest-for-60m/ John Deere: https://www.deere.com/en-us/ Western Growers Association: https://www.wga.com/ Tanimura & Antle: https://www.taproduce.com/ Naturipe Berry Growers: https://www.naturipefarms.com/ Driscoll's: https://www.driscolls.com/ Taylor Farms: https://www.taylorfarms.com/ The Wonderful Company: https://www.wonderful.com/ Capital Factory: https://www.capitalfactory.com/ Gal Shir "quitting design" post: https://x.com/galshirart/status/2074854464729629060 Dylan Field response to Gal Shir: https://x.com/zoink/status/2075290218660298807 JCal response to Field and "J-Trade": https://x.com/Jason/status/2075481565115654305 Figma: https://www.figma.com/ Dept. of Education: "Do No Harm" policy announcement: https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-issues-final-rule-hold-all-colleges-and-universities-accountable-low-earning-programs NPR coverage on Dept. of Education earnings test: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5835631/turner-camhi-do-no-harm-college-loans Paul Graham "cheating chart" post: https://x.com/paulg/status/2075031014628311236 Off Duty Recommendations: "Lioness" on Paramount+: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNRQ0PR4a8U "Mayor of Kingstown" on Paramount+: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkQzvwxOp0s "Human Vapor" on Netflix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xe6dRKVAb8 "Sugar" on Apple TV+: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twvPGxuEOEA "Wind River" (now on Netflix): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZgN0dpFoaE "Not Fade Away" by Peter Barton & Laurence Shames: https://www.amazon.com/Not-Fade-Away-Short-Lived/dp/1579546889 Timestamps: 0:00 Jason's ongoing World Tour 1:43 Danny Bernstein joins live from Reservoir Farms 3:38 What is "specialty crop agriculture" 5:15 Why strawberries are the "white whale" of AgTech 6:55 The labor crisis in farming 9:20 Why AgTech never scaled 9:51 NetSuite - For the first time, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://NetSuite.ai/TWIST 10:51 Inside Reservoir's business model 17:44 Agriculture as national security 20:09 Squarespace - Turn your idea into a beautiful website! Go to https://www.squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 22:15 Did AI beat a designer at design? 30:56 YSecurity - The on-demand security team for startups. Need enterprise-grade security without hiring a $400k CISO? YSecurity gives you 40+ expert engineers, matched to exactly what you need, by the hour, with your first six hours completely free. Go to https://YSecurity.io/TWIST 37:23 The "do no harm" college earnings test 43:27 Brown University students cheated on their midterms 52:22 Lon's streaming recommendations 59:46 Jason's new snake grabber 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 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There are over 400,000 farm jobs that were posted last year, and less than 1% of them received a domestic applicant. These are jobs that domestic workers do not want to do. That's categorical and clear.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Nobody wants to really pick stone fruit in the height of summer in 110-degree heat.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

  They don't want to do it. They need to do it because they want to provide for their families.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Strawberries, it's as much as 60 or 70%. And table grapes, it's 80% of production crops. It's labor. Strawberry harvest, I call it the white whale of ag tech. We have basically built this space to bring agricultural technology and sort of deep tech folks into a rural region to actually solve these problems.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Y Security, the on-demand security team for startups. Need enterprise-grade security without hiring a $400,000 CISO? Y Security gives you 40-plus expert engineers matched exactly to what you need by the hour, with your first six hours completely free. Go to ysecurity.io/twist. Squarespace, turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And NetSuite. For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to netsuite.ai/twist. Built for every industry, ready for every boardroom.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  netsuite.ai/twist.

• 1:24Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Bonjour, bonsoir, mon amies. It's your boy J Cal here in France. I'm in Paris. The world tour continues. Had a couple of weeks in Hawaii. What time is it for you in Austin right now?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  It's 8 a.m. Our guest is in Salinas, California, so it's about to be even earlier over there.

• 1:40Jason Calacanis?

  Which means it's 6 a.m. Means we should be respectful of our guest.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44Jason Calacanis?

  Why don't you introduce him and let's get started?

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Sure. We're talking to Danny Bernstein. He's the founder of The Reservoir. This, Jason, it's a fascinating thing. It's a pre-seed and seed incubator and studio for ag tech startups. But their core product is you get physical access to a working farm. We're going to be talking to Danny from Reservoir Farms in Salinas, California. That's his 40-acre agricultural innovation campus. Danny, thanks so much for being with us so early in the morning today.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, farming starts with the dawn. So here we are. It's good to be with you guys. This is a... Yeah, we actually have a trial that's about to happen this morning. So this is an early start here at the reservoir.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Had to get up and slop the hogs and then do a podcast, you know?

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 2:29Jason Calacanis?

  Thanks for coming on the show, Danny. Obviously agriculture is being, um, not disrupted, but it's certainly, maybe it is being disrupted. I'll leave it for you to tell us. But how do you wind up running a gentleman's farm there and deciding you want to do the Y Combinator or Tech Stars of Agriculture? How'd you come up with the idea and how's it going?

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's going well. I mean, the background, so I spent close to 20 years in Silicon Valley and I was at Google for 10 years. And when I was at Google, I saw that sort of period of abundance where the company would have multiple applications even for the same problem. Google famously had, what, six different messaging apps? And, and so I started to think about, well, where, where is technology needed more? Where are there a lack of solutions for, for really critical problems, sort of a critical imperatives? And so I, I left big tech and started to study complex outdoor industries and landed on specialty crop agriculture

• 3:27Speaker 00

  as an area that needed a lot of the same kind of principles, energy and thinking that Silicon Valley has developed and really honed and perfected. But could that be applied to an area that needs it more?

• 3:38Jason Calacanis?

  Specialty crop agriculture, specialty crop agriculture, S C A.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  That's a lot of words.

• 3:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but what does it mean? I mean, we can guess here.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you can kind of break agriculture into two buckets, but specialty crop, so you have broad acre, which is like corn and soy. That's, that's actually like big ag, subsidized ag, programmatic ag in the United States. But specialty crop agriculture is actually where our, our micronutrients come from. That's fresh produce, fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, et cetera. That's high value crop agriculture. It's the Western growers. It's the, the Driscolls, the Taylor Farms, the Wonderful's, the Tanama and Antles. So we're basically doing technology for produce.

• 4:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so, uh, yeah, we had a, we had an investment in this space that was doing picking, using robot arms to, to pick, um, it's root AI, to pick strawberries. And it was an incredible pitch. They wound up getting caught up in SPACs, et cetera. Um, and it didn't work out well, but pretty brilliant idea. Computer vision, computer hands from MIT.

• 4:38Jason Calacanis?

  They would know which strawberries on these vertical farms were ripe and ready to pick. And then, you know, picking a strawberry, a very delicate procedure, but with computer vision, you're basically cataloging them all the time. And if you were going to send those strawberries, I don't know, two days away, you might pick them a little bit more, a little less ripe. And if you were just going to, you know, use them in, you know, within a one day trip, you would, you'd pick them a little more ripe. And this type of stuff's been promised for a long time.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:07Jason Calacanis?

  What's taking so long or is it just not as profitable a business or the technology needed to catch up a bit?

• 5:13Speaker 00

  I think the technology needed to catch up a bit. I mean, strawberry harvest, I call it the white whale of ag tech in the sense that it's something that's chased sort of every year. You have two or three startups that kind of throw their hat in the ring at this. So reservoir farms, we focus on three problem sets. One of them is the reducing the use of chemicals, so chemical reduction. The second is chemical replacement technologies that replace chemicals full on. So this could be electric weeders, laser weeders, steam fumigators, using UV light to kill pests, et cetera. And the third category is automation of the hardest to fill jobs. And so automation of the hardest to fill jobs, that category, you would say, is where strawberry picking comes in. And in specialty crop agriculture, 40% of the production costs are still labor.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  And in some of those crops, like strawberries, it's as much as 60 or 70%. And table grapes, it's 80% of production crops.

• 6:05Jason Calacanis?

  It's labor. Yeah. And what are we seeing here on the screen here? This is, looks like an autonomous pesticide.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  This is actually, this is a machine called Bonsai Robotics. And actually, the team is over my left shoulder because they're about to run a trial this morning over on the farm. And they have a machine that is running autonomously, as you can see, in this case, through vineyards. And they are doing precision application of biologicals, bio-based alternatives to pesticides.

• 6:32Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And so this would have normally been done by a human driving.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  A tractor of some type.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  It could be a human driving a tractor. It could be a human with a backpack. So that's sort of a combination of both precision application, using less, using less chemicals, using bio-based alternatives. It also is, is having someone come out of the field, which is not a desirable job. These are jobs that domestic workers do not want to do. That's categorical and clear. The American Farm Bureau said that there are over 400,000 farm jobs that were posted last year, and less than 1% of them received a domestic applicant. So we're basically off.

• 7:09Jason Calacanis?

  So you're being very delicate there, but there is an overlay here, and I'll just say it candidly. We shut the southern border. For the last 30 or 40 years, it was open. Republicans drove this for most of that time, by the way, not to make it political, because they wanted cheap labor for the farms. They waved everybody in. And in fact, NAFTA, which people don't even remember now, was designed specifically, I think Danny, you and I are probably in the, in the same age range here. I think you're a Gen Xer, as well as Lon. They remember NAFTA where they were like, yeah, just let everybody from Mexico come, work for a season and then go back. It wasn't this big polarizing thing. And we'll put all that aside. There's no domestic workers available to do this, is basically what you're saying. This is incredibly farcical.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  It's romanticized in the sense that people say things like, oh, you know, we, we have these incredible jobs for young people. People want to work outdoors, etc. But the data would very clearly state that domestic workers do not want to do this sort of work. And so we end up having these imported labor pools on a certain visa, an H2A visa. And, and that just doesn't really scale, especially as we want to scale this type of production into new regions. We want to have sort of local food hubs and things like that. This type of work, it just doesn't scale.

• 8:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  And so what does scale in this case is the technology.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  We were talking in the pre-interview about, you know, like, nobody wants to really pick stone fruit in the height of summer in 110 degree heat. Like, we all love our plums and nectarines, but that's a lot to ask. If we can automate.

• 8:34Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, even the people who are doing it. Uh, who are, you know, this is an entry level job, obviously manual labor. Yeah. They don't want to do it. They need to do it because they want to provide for their families. Exactly. This is backbreaking. Yeah. Uh, you know. Hard jobs. Yeah. Dirty, disturbing, backbreaking labor in the blistering sun. I mean, if we can retire these jobs. He's in Salinas. There's some famous novels written by a guy from there about how difficult farm work can, can be. John Steinbeck.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're, we're here.

• 9:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, John Steinbeck.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  We're here in Steinbeck country. Yeah.

• 9:05Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Dave.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, go ahead, Jason.

• 9:07Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no, no. Go ahead. Yeah. Something else over your shoulder. Tell us.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, right. Exactly. I was going to say that we, we have basically built this space to, uh, bring agricultural technology and sort of deep tech folks into a rural region, actually solve these problems. So part of the, you, you alluded to this question of why hasn't ag tech really scaled historically? You had, you had teams that were based in San Francisco that really didn't have access to farmland. So we actually, when we were building this company, we surveyed startups and we asked them this question. After you raise venture capital, how long until you had access to an actual farm? And the answer was nine months. So companies were building a deck, maybe building a prototype, putting an idea together, going out and pitching folks like you, and they didn't have access to an actual farm for nine months.

• 9:51Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:33Jason Calacanis?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to netsuite.ai/twist. It's built for every industry, ready for every boardroom. netsuite.ai/twist.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  It's crazy. And so we basically wanted. To figure out how we could reverse that, which is, we actually now have a farm that's here of 40 acres. We have now multiple farms across the American West, but a startup can just give us a honk. And they, as long as they're insured, they can get onto our farm and they can start working. They can build a prototype. So that's the idea. And this particular one in Salinas, we're one hour from Silicon Valley. So there's actually really no excuse anymore.

• 11:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no excuses. And it sounds like this is an open-ended invitation. You're not doing cohorts like we do at Launch, Accelerator, or, you know, Techstars, Antler, Y Combinator do. This is kind of like a more bespoke thing. You'll work with any company, any stage, and then you'll just negotiate how you get on the cap table because everybody wants to know, what's the deal? And you seem like

• 11:27Speaker 00

  What's the model?

• 11:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, what's the model? What's the deal? How did you start a fund? You seem like a rich guy from Google, so you're using your own money. You have LPs. Is there a fund? What's the size of the fund? What's the standard deal? Tell us everything.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. So basically Reservoir sits across two companies that are called interrelated. The operating company is called Reservoir Farms, and that's what runs the incubator. It's a two-year-old company. We'll do somewhere between five to seven million in ARR, and I'll unpack that in a second. And then we also have a fund, which is Reservoir VC. We did a proof of concept fund. That was a $3 million proof of concept fund. We wrote five checks. We are about to re-up with one of those companies. One of those companies was acquired and now became Bonsai Robotics, called FarmNG. So there's a proof of concept fund that's operating at pre-seed and seed. And then there's a operating company that is now 10 people full-time and is going to do over $5 million ARR this year.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  The model with startups is they actually pay to be here. We're operating farmland. They need to actually be good citizens and stewards.

• 12:26Jason Calacanis?

  They pay rent. This is like paying for your, it's like WeWork. You just come, you pay rent.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  It's like a lab space. It's like a lab space that didn't really exist. So we have 20 startups paying between $3,000 to $6,000 a month. And we just, we just opened in March, so.

• 12:40Jason Calacanis?

  In other words, it's free. I mean, $3,000 a month, $6,000 a month. I can, I can tell you it's, you're not making some killing over here on renting desks, nor has anybody who rented desks. In fact, going back, 500 startups, just for a little, Dave McClure, a friend of mine, his original model. Model was, hey, we'd give you 125K, then he would take back 25K. You would agree to spend it back with the company for office space and, you know, some other services they had. It was a little controversial on the edges, but.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's not our model. Yeah, it's not our model because we don't, we don't put money into these companies then ask for it back. Let's say in the form of rent, we only invest selectively. So the decision making process between the fund and the incubator is actually separate.

• 13:20Jason Calacanis?

  Which is great. Yeah.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:22Jason Calacanis?

  And I think that makes a lot of sense.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  We don't kind of do that spray and parry thing of like putting a little bit of money into each. It just doesn't pencil. And, and so the, the model basically is that we, we have this revenue stream. It subsidizes and supports operations. To your point, it's not going to the moon, but it allows us to have a beginning of a relationship with these companies. And then we can start to think about adjacent opportunities with them. And that's just beginning. I mean, we're in our second year. This is our first full year of operation.

• 13:47Jason Calacanis?

  Super innovative. I think my, my friend who just recently passed away, Josh Baer, who was running Capital Factory, had his own innovation in this model. And just to be clear, I'm not saying Dave McClure was doing anything shady with the 125K. It was kind of just innovative at the time and needed a little bit of explaining. Josh Barrett did something that was super easy. It's like, hey, join Capital Factory, we'll take 1% of common and we'll give you whatever, two or three years' membership. And for somebody who's just starting out, it's like, well, that would have been the same cost of my.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:14Jason Calacanis?

  Cost of capital. And if you're a breakout company, obviously it's not your cost of capital. And he would do more bespoke deals for, for those folks to have them in the building in Capital Factory. But that's actually a good model for you. I think, you know, if somebody is like $6,000 is their typical rent and you can say, hey, we'll take 3,000 a month in equity, common shares, whatever, and you can pay 3,000 in cash. So, you know, some people might prefer that. Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's possible. I think maybe the difference with us is that we have hard costs. So running a physical AI incubator.

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  There are real costs to it. So I think that's a bit of that transition point between sort of the fluorescent lighting. I'm in downtown Austin or San Francisco and basically I just have to kind of pump out office space. For us, we have farm lease, farm production, John Deere tractor leases, multiple farms. We're operating over 100 acres. So we, we can do things like trade cash for equity, but our model has been, you know what? Let's get this thing sustainable and profitable. We're going to be profitable next year, we're going to be more profitable the following year. So we want to actually run this like a business. And there's a big concern in ag tech, which you alluded to with something like Root AI, which is that a lot of ag tech sort of comes and goes. And so we wanted to think about, you know, we said early on, we're only going to do this if we can actually see a path to sustainability.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  So we work with Western Growers, which is the largest and oldest grower association in the US. And then we started working with John Deere. And we kind of said to them, listen, if we're going to do this, we got to figure out how we can build something that has resilience and longevity. So that's a little bit of what's led to us so far of not doing the sort of the cash for equity thing, but that could change in the future.

• 15:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, if you did a little micro fund as a test, one might suspect, I'm not having you say anything because I know the rules around raising funds. But Lon, I'm just talking to Lon on the side here.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  We'll just chat, yeah, we'll side bar.

• 15:53Jason Calacanis?

  You and I chit chat, and once a person does a micro fund, they might do a regular fund. And if that goes well, they might pull the string and do a macro fund. And you might just add a zero each time.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Theoretically, yeah.

• 16:04Jason Calacanis?

  Theoretically, listen, this is a great idea, Danny. I wish you great success with this.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Thank you, sir.

• 16:09Jason Calacanis?

  If somebody is in ag tech or they're considering being in ag tech, how can they get in touch with you? How can they find out more? Because we obviously need as many people as possible pursuing important things in the world. Education, construction of homes, the military and food. Like, these are the things that are super important for America.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  It's interesting that we don't think about this as like a national security thing. It's like, oh, these companies are like, we're making drones and missiles. And having enough to eat also very important for us.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would, if you have a few minutes today, I would go to Google and look up three words, which is [bleep] blueberries, Peru.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  And what [bleep].

• 16:50Jason Calacanis?

  Blueberries.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Blueberries, Peru.

• 16:52Jason Calacanis?

  What is?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  This is my next travel itinerary. This sounds great.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Very good, thank you. And so what you're going to find, what you're going to find basically, and probably some people watching are horrified right now, is that you're going to find that the US has actually played a part in subsidizing South American agricultural production. Because we basically wanted to have a deterrence for South America to be doing things besides the drug trade. And so we Actually invested heavily through ESAID to establish agricultural infrastructure in places like Peru as a deterrent to to being in drugs. And what ended up happening is that they continued working in drugs, but they got significant agricultural infrastructure and created the entire South American blueberry business. Wow.

• 17:34Jason Calacanis?

  Which is when you think about it, the last time I bought blueberries, I can tell you, I think pound for pound, it's it's more expensive than today. If you go to Whole Foods or marijuana.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:44Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's kind of close, right?

• 17:46Speaker 00

  But yeah, yeah. So I think what what Lon is saying, which is absolutely true, is like, this is national security stuff. We are importing more and more fresh produce than ever before. And it's really difficult for this to pencil for the California grower, for the Michigan grower, etc. Because we actually have a, we've had a policy of subsidizing agricultural production outside the United States. So we need this technology. This is like resiliency tech. This is tech that is like fundamental to like grassroots production. So that's why we exist.

• 18:16Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing, Danny. Just one more time, you're a humble guy, trying to give you that window to get that plug in. Where can people find more? How can they contact you, Danny? Because people want to do this, I'm certain.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Cheers. So DMs are open. We're Reservoir Farms across all platforms. You can visit us at reservoir.co, which is our operating company.

• 18:36Jason Calacanis?

  Nice.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  We just launched reservoir.vc, which is a website for our fund. So you can hit us in both places. You can kind of see that separation. Yeah, please get in touch and we definitely would love to chat with you and get to know folks.

• 18:47Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. Well done. This is super innovative. I wish you great success.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Cheers.

• 18:51Jason Calacanis?

  We need more people, Danny, who are willing to do the year zero and the year one work. Everybody in ventures, like, I'm just gonna YOLO into like the trillion dollar company and I'm gonna get my, you know, 2X, 3X, you know, in three years. Okay, great. Congratulations. You made the easy bet on Anthropic when it was 500 billion.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:12Jason Calacanis?

  And you got your 2X. You know what? Who's gonna do the idea of picking the apples? Everybody wants to eat the pie. Nobody wants to pick the apples.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Very good.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, very good.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  That's a really relevant analogy. No, you're right. I mean, I think this is like frontier tech. This is old school. And, you know, like getting during the boots, building a thing. And so, yeah, I mean, we're seeing it live. We're seeing the actual tech work in context. We're bringing entrepreneurs from MIT into the Central Valley, California. And, yeah, that's what we're doing. I mean, we're about to run a bonsai robotics machine out there and reduce some chemical use. Let's make it happen.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Awesome. Well, thanks, Danny. Thanks so much for being here. This was fascinating and really good stuff.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, come visit.

• 19:54Jason Calacanis?

  Success. I will come visit, absolutely.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd like to go. I'd like to check that out as well. That's a...

• 20:00Jason Calacanis?

  He's not doing [BLEEP] on.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 20:03Jason Calacanis?

  He's not doing...

• 20:04Speaker 01

  But we'll get blueberries.

• 20:05Jason Calacanis?

  Doing blueberries.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  We'll at least get... I'll at least get some blueberries.

• 20:09Jason Calacanis?

  AI tools are making it easier than ever to run your own business, even as a solo founder. But you still need a beautiful, attention-grabbing website to help your new company stand out in a very crowded field. And you don't want AI slop. Nope, you want to use Squarespace. That's the easiest and fastest way to turn your idea into a real business. Because the team at Squarespace cares deeply about design and functionality. And a plain-looking or generic or AI-sloped website? Man, that's going to be a red flag for your customers, for your investors, and people who want to come work for you and join your team. But Squarespace will take all the guesswork out of designing your first website with the Blueprint AI Builder, which has been finely tuned to make beautiful websites. Squarespace isn't just going to help you make a new webpage either.

• 20:53Jason Calacanis?

  They're going to be your all-in-one platform for launching your business. They're also going to help you set up your email. They're going to handle invoicing, paperwork, all your needs. Go to Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com/twist for 10% off your first website or domain purchase. I'd love anybody who is... Anyone who's doing something to support founders in that first year. I call it year zero.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:18Jason Calacanis?

  Because, man, it's so much hard work. And I can tell you, like, the number of startups that pull through onto a next round of funding when you're this early, it's like 50%, 60%, 40%. Like depending on the market conditions of people are writing a lot of angel checks or they're not. Hot market, we had one time, seven of seven companies pulled through during the accelerator at like peak Zerp. Other times, like right after the market collapsed in COVID, we had like three of seven pull through or two of seven pull through. You know, in the accelerator in the six months after it. So it's really hard.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  And when you're doing something that's really forward thinking, that's a little different, that's outside the box. It can be really intimidating because you know, like if you're, if you're making the kind of product that there's a lot of other iterations. There's confidence building in that. Like obviously there's a market for this. It's possible. If you're blazing your own trail, you're, you're alone and people are telling you you're nuts all the time. So a lot of pressure.

• 22:10Jason Calacanis?

  What else is in the news? What do we got going on here? I know people are, want me to, there's been a lot of stuff that's gone down.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:16Jason Calacanis?

  And I think you have been watching the news and you've been watching me get in.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  I've been watching you comment on the news. Sure. I think we should talk about this Galsier design tweet and the ensuing, ensuing kerfuffle. So the Lemonade and Color Hunt vet tweeted, AI beat me at design. He claims a former client created a logo with Fable Five that understood the brand story, the values, the audience, the strategy, and turned it into what he calls a genuinely brilliant concept. The kind of idea that captures everything at once, sort of like the holy grail of, of a logo where you look at it, you're like, that's the perfect logo for that business. He said, it's better than what he would have come up with and Fable Five did it all on its own.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Here's the, the money quote, I think, now that AI finally took my job, I can peacefully quit and dedicate my life to studying the only thing it may never achieve, human consciousness and the pathways to God. Very, very poetic there. So Dylan Field of Figma, he responded to this. He said, I've never been more confident in the role of design and the impact design can have. I wish designers felt the same confidence. This is the moment to be more bold, to take more creative risks, to double down on the power of design. You then shared Dylan's comments, I think, meaning to agree with him. You said, I heard, I heard the same thing for magazine designers when PageMaker came out, then again. When 99designs and Logo contests emerged, not sure if this time is different.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  So my understanding is you're saying we've heard this all before. Every time.

• 23:48Jason Calacanis?

  The end of design, we've heard this before. Correct. Now, I wrote this in Paris after being at a bistro. There might have been a beverage. There was a cigar.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:59Jason Calacanis?

  There was a crepe and it was France versus whoever they beat last night in the World Cup. So I kind of did fire this off and it might not have been perfectly crafted. I probably could have used you editing it. My bad.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Fair enough. It was Morocco. That's who France beat in the World Cup.

• 24:12Jason Calacanis?

  Morocco.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  All right. I'm sorry to our editors.

• 24:15Jason Calacanis?

  Well, Paris wasn't burned down and people were like, hey, if France loses, independent of who they lose to, this city might be on fire.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's very fair.

• 24:24Jason Calacanis?

  That was my.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  That's when they start throwing the furniture into the streets and lighting it on fire. They missed that.

• 24:29Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. I mean, they do that also if they are worked. If the government goes to a 40 hour work week for 32.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Parisians are the best. They're the best rioters in the whole world. We're all, we're all following in their footsteps.

• 24:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So here we go. We stepped in it again. I'm gonna. So anyway, he misinterpreted it. So then he decides he's gonna do a dunk on me. And he's like, oh my God, Jake How said this. That's the next part of the story. Cause he misinterpreted it or I didn't write it clean up. I'm a fan of Dylan.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Dylan thought you were saying design is dead. Uh, I, I, I believe a fair reading of it. You were saying the opposite, but he responded, never been more bullish on design in Figma than seeing Jason be negative. Looking forward to proving you wrong again. Uh, then Jason shot back.

• 25:12Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know what the again is about. Like I know, I always believed in Figma. Figma was great.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  I think he thought you were saying these people in the past were correct. That you were saying designers were like 99designs is gonna kick my ass. And then 99designs was this brilliant innovation that designers were not ready for. I think he thought you were taking the, the negative side of that. I, I, I agree you were not, but maybe it was not clear. Anyway, he, then you said, we're in agreement. Design will level up across the board. As a well-designed site or app moves essentially free thanks to AI tools. But finally, the culmination of this whole tale, a J trade happened.

• 25:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, so let me be clear here. I have been through this for a long time. So long, and this is one of the problems is I'm getting old now. I have too much history and I gotta explain everything. Check this out. This is Business Insider from June 4th, 2012.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Wow, a long time ago.

• 26:10Jason Calacanis?

  And I had been talking about 99designs and 99designs was very interesting. It was a spec work website where you say, hey, I need the logo for Engadget or Autoblog or Joystick when I was doing blogs at Weblogs Inc. And I'd say the prize is $250 or $500. And then you would get like 20 different choices. Then you would give them feedback and eventually you pick a winner. This then really tweaked designers at the time. People were very pissed off about this, that startups adopted this technology. But what happened was because there were so many startups, they didn't have the money, Lon.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:43Jason Calacanis?

  They didn't have the money to spend like a minimum of $3,000 to $5,000 is what it costs to make a logo. You know, if you were doing the next logo, it might be $500,000 back in the day, you know, a million dollar for like a big company.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:56Jason Calacanis?

  But it was pretty common for people to spend 3, 5, 10, $25,000 on a logo design.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  And I mean, I think there's, there is work, like people might be listening to that here like, oh my God, but like there's a lot. It's not just like put, draw a little logo and that's it. It's like a whole color scheme. It's really like a brand philosophy designed behind the whole project that you're doing. We just went through this with This Week in AI. We sort of tried to do a whole design process for it. It can be pretty involved and yes, it will run you 5, 10K or more.

• 27:25Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and then you might also not like the design, right?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:28Jason Calacanis?

  Which, you know, sometimes happens to a certain type of customer like me. So anyway, putting it all aside, I then went and I looked and I was like, whoa, Figma is worth like 11 billion. Not sure what their revenue is now, but I did a little research on it and I was like, whoa, Figma is a screaming deal. So I put in a J-Trade about $100,000 worth of Figma. And I tweeted like, listen, people have misunderstandings all the time. So, you know, all's fair in love and war and on Twitter, you know, text, you know, sometimes the tone doesn't get done or you misrepresent something, whatever. And whenever that happens, the lesson for me is to get curious. So like this kerfluffle here is just over me writing an unclear tweet.

• 28:10Jason Calacanis?

  Dylan not understanding what I was trying to say, or maybe a little bit of both. Okay, fine, it happens. Either I could have written it late night, he could have read it, maybe he's on tilt because of something else.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  I do think a lot of design people were like fired up about this tweet yesterday. Like, I saw a lot of people sharing this original tweet.

• 28:28Jason Calacanis?

  The original tweet of the guy who said, "Design is dead."

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Right, I think that put a lot of professional designers and people who really care about design sort of on edge. It's a theme that's sort of out there in the world that I think a lot of people are trying to sort of shut down, or change that trend, or the idea behind that trend. So I think that was probably part of it, that it was an intense day for designers yesterday.

• 28:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and they, by the way, when this 99 design thing went down, that was the same exact thing. All the designers got real upset, and then they started a movement, no spec work. So there was a movement trying to convince designers not to do spec work. Now, if you're a young designer, young designers used to email startups, like Uber, or Robinhood, or whatever, and they'd be like, "Hey, I redid your logo." This was like a tried and true way to get customers, especially if you were an offshore designer, because this is like, the humans in Manila, India, learn the design tools, they stole a lot of designs, they did derivative stuff, you know, it wasn't the sharpest stuff. But they would just email you, just like clippers do now, they would just email you a couple of samples and say,

• 29:34Jason Calacanis?

  "Hey, if you like my work, would you give me $300 for it?"

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:37Jason Calacanis?

  This is called spec work. And I said, you know, spec work is great if you're coming up in your career, but designers hate spec work. They hate people working for free. Now, that's an individual's choice if they want to do it or not. I'm fine if people want to do it, I'm fine if people don't want to do it, it's personal freedom here. Anyway, design, the big picture here is, is design going away? The answer is no. What's happening, though, is the average website, the average app, I would say 10 years ago, I would rate as like, from coming out of a startup in years one and two, was probably like a six or a seven out of design if com.com and Robinhood were a 10. For example, if you looked at the first version of Uber, it was like a six or a seven, it was clunky.

• 30:22Jason Calacanis?

  Now, when they started making money and they raised money, they eventually were like a 9.5 or a 10 out of 10 in terms of how beautiful the app was. But they did it over time. Now, I think, using the AI tools, and you know, Squarespace did this to websites, right? All these beautiful templates they had. You know, the average went up. So, the average design is going to go from a 5, 6, or 7 to a 7, 8, 9 using these tools. I'll say, you know, 7.5 to 8.5 is going to be the average. And I would say the average used to be like a 6. So, that's like a significant jump. The team is pumped because you're about to close a massive deal. But then the client's lawyers get involved. What happens if you get hacked? How are we going to protect your data? There's no need to panic. This is why you brought in Y Security.

• 31:07Jason Calacanis?

  Y Security is staffed with over 40 experienced engineers who have actually worked security for world-class companies like Apple, Uber, Microsoft, Robinhood, Brex, and so many others. But the best part is, you don't even need to hire Y Security. Your company can rent Y Security's elite team by the hour. That means no massive salaries to pay, no costly consultants, just real experts embedded in your company, helping you out with your SOC 2, ISO 4200, or any security or compliance challenge you're facing. You can even set a monthly cap, so you know exactly how much you're spending. And your first 6 hours are completely free. Head to ysecurity.io/twist and book your free 6-hour strategy call.

• 31:51Jason Calacanis?

  That's ysecurity.io/twist. However, when you do have money, you do wind up hiring a designer because you're saying, "Hey, I want to stand out from the average." So, the average keeps moving up, so you can have less ugly products, just like you don't have slow websites anymore. This used to be the major issue, like, "Oh, your website's not optimized, it's slow." Now, all websites are fast. Like, when's the last time you used a product or server and you're like, "This is slow." That's not an issue.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  I think you're right. And I think that you can already see it so much. Like, there's so many tweets that are clearly written by Claude. And they're not terrible, but when you read a really Well-written post or an article. It stands out because you're like, there's so much sort of slop going on. This person who clearly sat down to write something thoughtful themselves. It actually is even more valuable. I think it's the same. Like, you can tell when somebody vibe-coded their landing page. It looks, it doesn't look bad, but it looks like how Claude or how Codex or how one of these programs makes a landing page.

• 32:55Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's fair enough, yeah. And but and then, but because these things are getting better, I'll be honest. The eight, eight point five that I said, I think like next year it's gonna be like a nine, nine point five. So it's gonna start, and you can prompt it, hey, do better, do better. Do better, or I'm unplugging you.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  But most people don't. I think that's what's, I mean, to me, this is a whole separate conversation. But I think what's holding back AI in in terms of the public perception is that most people don't go to that second level of like iterating, putting themselves in the loop, making things incrementally better with help from Claude or Codex or Composer or whatever they're using. They just take the first output and go, there it is, done. Copy paste.

• 33:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I bought some Figma. Why did I buy Figma? I think right now, um, they're, I think they're gonna figure out AI. And if you look at Lovable and you look at Claude, uh, design and like what these are capable of doing now.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 33:46Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty impressive. Figma already has all the designers and they're gonna just, they, you know, Dylan understands this customer base better than anybody. They are trading at seven times sales. They are trading at a pretty high PE like 70x.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:00Jason Calacanis?

  But I think their business is gonna get accelerated by AI. And I think they'll be one of the top three or four players in the space, no matter what.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  I did have one question.

• 34:08Jason Calacanis?

  So I placed a bet.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  I, I mean, what, my, my only reservation here, I think Figma's great. We use Figma internally at launch for all sorts of stuff. It's, it's, we all like Figma. It's no not to Figma. But I guess my question would be, are you not concerned there is a moat issue there? Where it's like, I mean, all of the frontier labs have their own design products. They're all thinking about this as a category, like, is there a chance that Anthropic and OpenAI just come up with the next iteration of what Figma would be and and steal Figma's thunder?

• 34:37Jason Calacanis?

  Um, I think they will have more competition and by having more competition, what is it? Steel sharpens steel?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go.

• 34:45Jason Calacanis?

  Or iron sharpens iron. I'm not sure what the...

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And I guess it's, I think I've heard both versions. I think it's, I think it's...

• 34:50Jason Calacanis?

  Iron shrinks iron? Not sure what the term is here, but I think, you know, this newfound competition that they have is gonna make them sharper. The blade's gonna get sharper. They also have a currency.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  It is iron sharpens iron. It's from Proverbs 27:17, I'm being told.

• 35:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I was just reading Proverbs just the other week.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Oh, there you go.

• 35:08Jason Calacanis?

  So iron sharpens iron. I think that they also have a currency as a $10 billion company to go buy other companies and teams. So I do not look at Dylan and Figma as like, oh my God, they're in a terrible position. They're in a great position. Designers love it. And so as they keep adding AI features, as they go acquire customers, and they'll be able to move into other adjacencies. So since Adobe didn't buy them, I, I would suspect Figma could go into all of the Adobe suite of products. And, you know, because of how efficient it is to go into adjacencies, and that's the trend in AI. So if you have a customer base, if you have a currency to buy companies, which they have both of those,

• 35:52Jason Calacanis?

  and you have a driven founder, which they also have, it's three for three, that's the hat trick, they're gonna figure it out. That's my belief, they're gonna figure it out. And Jevon's paradox, as we have these AI tools, we're seeing this internally, we're seeing it in the startups who apply, people are going and building more products and services. They're going right down the line of products and services that weren't worth building because it was too niche, and now they're building them. So I think it's gonna have great success.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Jevon's paradox, by the way, when technology makes a resource more efficient or effective, you actually see use of it go up, not down. It's based on steam engines. Right. It was, steam engines caused coal to go, used to go up, not, not down, was the original Jevon observation.

• 36:40Jason Calacanis?

  Not financial advice, but I put a J trade in.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  There you go. Fair enough.

• 36:43Jason Calacanis?

  That's what it is.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Should we talk about...

• 36:44Jason Calacanis?

  I know, set a reminder, set a reminder every three months. To check in on this J trade and and let's have Dylan back on this week in startups. Of course.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Yes, no, he we just did a flashback the other day. We we featured you and Dylan from the early days of COVID, talking about Figma.

• 36:58Jason Calacanis?

  That was incredible because we were in the office during the early days of COVID debating. Like what would happen? I was like, yeah, this is all going to be over in April, May, I'm going to be able to do my next accelerator class. I had no idea what was happening. He was like, I think this could be a second wave. I was like, ah, who knows? Stay home for two weeks. We we we stopped the surge. We're good.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  No one knew in mid March, in fairness to you guys. No one, no one. All right. We should talk about this. You want to talk about this colleges article you sent me about they they have to.

• 37:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's do lightning round on that. Sure.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  All right. The US Department of Education is rolling out a new accountability test for colleges and universities. Here's the test. If graduate people with bachelor's degrees who are graduating, if graduating students don't earn more than comparable workers who didn't go to college, the program that they attended could get cut off from federal student loans. The same would go for master's programs. This is the one that I think is more controversial. The same would go for master's programs from which grads earn less than someone with just a bachelor's degree. Key quote here from the under secretary of education Nicholas Kent. If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled,

• 38:07Speaker 01

  it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers. Critics argue that college and especially grad schools, they're not just about earning money. We need nurses and teachers, but what about artists, musicians, filmmakers, all of those kinds of people not guaranteed to be locked into a great salary when they graduate. Here, a few more stats from the Department of Education. 800,000 students, they estimate, currently attend a program that would fail this test. 18% of undergraduate certificate programs would also fail this test. So I mean, I guess to me, the big question here is what do you think about this policy? And how much of college and student loans for college should be about? You're going to take this degree and get a good,

• 38:49Speaker 01

  higher paying job than you would have otherwise versus what we used to think of colleges being about, which is it's this time for growing and learning who you are and finding a. Community and all that other non-payment related stuff.

• 39:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so taking the two questions. Number one, this doesn't go far enough. This should be much more cutthroat, but they're obviously starting somewhere. And the test really should be, are you able to pay the American taxpayers back or not? And if you're not able to pay them back, then the school should be on the hook. That's my belief. And the way to look at this is, they should just look at, school by school, how many people graduated from this program? Let's say it's design. You got a design degree, and you took a federal loan. So you went to Parsons Design School, or RISD, whatever it is. And you track that person for the five years after they graduate, and they have their loan. Do you

• 39:43Jason Calacanis?

  have a job? How much money are you making? If they are not making enough to service their loans, then that program should not be eligible for these federal loans. Why? You can go spend whatever you want out of your pocket, but we're talking about the taxpayers' money here. This is you and I and everybody else in America deciding to give a loan to somebody to go get a philosophy degree, then a master's in philosophy. And what that will do is, it's going to make these colleges lower the price of those degrees, which is what you really want to do. These degrees should be priced to perfection. If you're going to go be a dentist, and you want to spend three or $400,000, or you want to be an MBA, and you're going to spend $200,000, $300,000, okay. We know in those career paths, that there is a job waiting

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:28Jason Calacanis?

  in all likelihood. In these other ones where there's not a job, why do they cost as much? Like, the master's degree should not, for art, cost the same as the one for being a doctor, or for being a lawyer. It's so obvious. Should those things exist in the world? Of course. But these colleges need to control costs. The federal government has a way to stop this. And I think we just need to really change. We have to put it on the colleges. If they want to have their students get federal loans, they should be on the hook for half of that loan. If that person doesn't get a job where that person defaults on it, the college should have to pay half of it. That's what I would do. And I think that's the direction we're going in. So this is long overdue. And the reason why these colleges can charge $250,000 for an undergraduate degree or a graduate

• 41:13Jason Calacanis?

  one and put people in this massive debt is because there's no backstop. They just keep taking more government dollars and they keep raising the price. And they're lying to students that this degree is going to be net positive. It's not.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  I like your take on it more than the policy that's being proposed because your take is it's tied between it's how much are you paying for this degree versus how much is it, what's its real world value? Which I think is more like a comparison. This is kind of saying, do you earn more than somebody with a bachelor's degree? Well, not everybody who goes to grad school is even looking to necessarily out-earn anyone who has a bachelor's degree. There's all kinds of reasons you might want to go to a master's program. And that doesn't mean you wouldn't be able to eventually pay your master's degree back. I think this is like using-

• 41:54Jason Calacanis?

  It's a weird test.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's using a hammer when I think a scalpel would be better. I mean, obviously, we all want to bring the cost of education down. And I do think this is a real problem that we're graduating so many people with degrees in fields where there's, you know, 30 jobs. And it's like, well, what is everybody else with that degree supposed to do?

• 42:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, everybody's gonna go to, I mean, is everybody gonna go be a director and a screenplay writer? Like, there's not a lot of jobs, folks.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Film school is always like this, the stark example where, yeah, like every once in a while, you get a George Lucas, but that's not every person who graduates from film school. A lot of people just like movies. So, you know, I don't, the one thing that I don't like is when we like reduce people and college and studying and all of these fields to just, well, how much do you, how much do you make? Like, it's not, you're more, you are more than how much you make, I think, as a person. And I don't like that.

• 42:45Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, I have, I have a better proposal. And by the way, there's probably five other better proposals. But at least, at least, we're starting to address the issue. A bad proposal is a precursor-

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:56Jason Calacanis?

  -to a better proposal.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Well, and that's always how the Trump-

• 42:58Jason Calacanis?

  So I'm glad they're doing something.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  And that is the Trump administration. Tactic is just throw something out there. Now you're having a conversation. Your original idea doesn't have to be the one that gets through. You're just, it's an opening volley. And I think that's how you always have to understand all of these.

• 43:13Jason Calacanis?

  We gotta ship, you know, if you, you can say whatever you want about the Trump administration. I've had plenty of

• 43:18Speaker 01

  And I do.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  A criticism of the, and you do too.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  And I do.

• 43:21Jason Calacanis?

  Any reasonable person might, but they do ship. And so you gotta keep shipping.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  They ship products. You're absolutely right.

• 43:27Jason Calacanis?

  They ship products, sometimes too much products, sometimes really weird products.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Donald Trump moves units. I don't think you can, I don't think you can argue that.

• 43:34Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, let's make a ballroom. Sure, let's make a new Air Force One.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  We're doing it.

• 43:37Jason Calacanis?

  Let's keep going.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  I will take your

• 43:38Jason Calacanis?

  Let's focus on what matters. Education is a critical piece. And I, by the way, all of this is deck chairs on the Titanic. The real issue is how do we use AI? And to help people get skills? There was another really interesting thing that Paul Graham tweeted. You can, you can go find it here. He, there was a study that he showed. In this study, it was A midterm occurred and everybody, it seemed like was using chat GPT and had like aced the midterm. The teacher ran it through like the software. The software gives a lot of false positives, et cetera, to check for cheating. He's like, okay, I think you all cheated. I think like 90% of the students cheated.

• 44:23Jason Calacanis?

  And then he said, I'm going to do an in-person. We're going to do an in-person. And they show this chart. So they do an in-person final. So between the two, you have the scores of the midterm and then you have the scores. And here it is. Zoom in on this. So here we go. These are in gray on the left. Zoom in a little bit more so we can actually see it. Just like, give us the first, the top part of it, please. So we can see that. Okay, so econ one, econ 1170 midterm and final scores. After Serrano made the find, the final in-person, Serrano's the teacher, 18 students dropped the class. And nine students didn't take the exam. The scores of the remaining 59 students are displayed here. So look at student number one.

• 45:07Jason Calacanis?

  They scored 95 on their midterm, which they did on their own. And on the in-person, they got 95.5. In other words, there's no gap.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:17Jason Calacanis?

  Then let's go down and look at everybody else and you start to see this huge gap, right? And then, there's my favorite student, S22. Good term, he didn't cheat, but he's not that bright either.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  They just didn't do well.

• 45:30Jason Calacanis?

  But at least, he's honest. That's the guy you hire. That's the gal you hire.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  They're gonna try their best.

• 45:36Jason Calacanis?

  They're not the top student in the class, but, and then, scroll down and you, you start to see like, there are people, um, you know, here who, you know, like, obviously are cheating and then you have students 57, 58, 59. I think they didn't even take the test. So scroll back up, the gray dot. Uh, look at how many people scored 100. Scroll all the way up. So, I think I may have juxtaposed it. The midterm score is the orange. Final exam score is the one in gray. That's the one in person. So, when you see these scores drop off, who's got the widest here? There's, there's a bunch of people with 100. If we scroll down, let's find the fattest person. Who's got the biggest delta? Oh my lord, who's that?

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah.

• 46:17Jason Calacanis?

  Whoa, come on now. No, look at student 52. Student 52, shout out 52. He got 100. This mofo, this Melon Barber guy.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  16.5 on his own 100 with the help from AI.

• 46:31Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, everybody's cheating.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Well, this is, it's-

• 46:36Jason Calacanis?

  If you're, you're paying for college and you're cheating.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  It's tied exactly into what I was saying. I think, I think-

• 46:41Jason Calacanis?

  This is like work from home. This is like work from home.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  People are just not using these AI tools well. Like, they're not, we didn't educate people into the back and forth that you have to do. Everybody who I know who uses these tools effectively, it's a conversation. It's back and forth. You're saying, "No, that's not what I wanted," or "I don't like this," or "rewrite this," or "this is, are you sure about this fact?" Or rewriting things in your own voice. Like, it's, it's a tool. It would be like going to Google and just copying and pasting a Google result into your test. That's not how you do it. It can be a great help, but you have to like, be engaged and it's not a shut off your brain thing. And I think that's how people are-

• 47:19Jason Calacanis?

  And here's the thing, I don't know if this was at Oxford or- Where this was, but it's not a significant college. And by the way, they all gave this guy ish for bringing it up.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:29Jason Calacanis?

  You know who's responsible for this? It's not the students, it's the lazy goddamn teachers. These teachers don't want to even review the work. I can tell you firsthand, teachers in the age of AI are the culpable, are more culpable than the students because the teachers know this is happening. The students are writing their projects in AI. They're doing AI slop, as proven clearly here.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:54Jason Calacanis?

  The teachers on the other side are using AI to review it and then YOLO, everybody gets an A+. The teachers are lazy, the students then are following the teachers down the primrose path. Is that the right term?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 48:06Jason Calacanis?

  The path of evil?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:07Jason Calacanis?

  They're following them, their example. The teachers need to be fired. If you're doing anything work from home, anything on your own, it doesn't matter. I want every single test in person. No, nothing at home. I am infuriated about this, even in primary education. Students are doing this right now in 4th grade through 12th grade, in college. I want everybody, you use Blue Books?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Sure, oh yeah, of course, yeah.

• 48:37Jason Calacanis?

  Sit your ass down, get your Blue Book.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Scantrons and Blue Books, that's what it was when I was in school.

• 48:42Jason Calacanis?

  Going back to old school, get your pen and paper out. I want to see you compose a sentence. Now, when you get into the real world, fine, you don't have to have penmanship, you can YOLO it, use ChatGPT.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  It would be nice if people did, it would be, it would be nice if people use these tools as supplements. That's what I think they're supposed to be. Like, I like Grammarly, Grammarly's helpful, but it's not.

• 49:03Jason Calacanis?

  What do I do at the management team meeting? I tell everybody laptops closed, have a pen and have a Moleskine and be adult. And I want you to write down during the meeting, this is when we have our management team. I want you to write everything down in your Moleskine. You want to take a picture later, you want to look at the Zoom transcript, it's all good, no problem with that. But the act of writing down makes you present in the meeting. And what you write down is what you as a human believes is important and that matters as well. So we have to keep the analog going. We have to keep our brains engaged. I have, within arm's length somewhere here, I'm not gonna get it, but I have my journal. I have my zebra G750 nine-dollar F and pen that writes incredibly smooth.

• 49:48Jason Calacanis?

  I turn off my stuff when I'm on a podcast, when I'm doing a meeting, I write notes myself. Why? The act of writing makes you remember things and helps you build a mental model.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:00Jason Calacanis?

  Please, for the love of God, wake up.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  It's just how your brain works. It's the actual act of writing it out in your own hand helps you remember and connect ideas together.

• 50:09Jason Calacanis?

  You're throttling.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  It's just like when you have something to memorize, you should read it right before you go to bed and then go to sleep and you'll wake up knowing it better because that's how your brain works. And we're just disconnecting ourselves from all of this stuff and letting, farming out our thought to AI. And that's not, I think, what we should do. It's a supplement. It's not a replacement. That's what people don't understand.

• 50:28Jason Calacanis?

  And hand speed, the speed of your hand is slowing down your brain.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 50:33Jason Calacanis?

  And slowing down increases thoughtfulness. So what you're doing actually is you have a regulator. The regulator on your brain is the pen and paper. Now, if you take your brain, and our brains move fast, and you turn on a microphone and you start just, you know, recording stuff and spewing stuff and then have AI spewing stuff, you're, you're, you're just going a thousand miles an hour. Nothing remains in your brain.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's the same as doom scrolling. When you go sit and commit in a movie theater to turning off your goddamn phone and giving yourself over to a two-hour Kurosawa film or a Paul Thomas Anderson film, you know, or, you know, pick your favorite director. It lets you slow down to the actual input. You can watch the movie, hear the dialogue at the speed of your ears and eyes can process it. Slow down to speed up and understand and enjoy this. I had to do this for appreciation of music. When I'm feeling scattered, I put on my Focal, like incredible headset. Shout out to my friends at headphones.com and Focal.

• 51:43Jason Calacanis?

  I put on my Focal Utopias and I listen to my CoBuzz French streaming service at the highest bitrate and I will slow myself down to appreciate an album at the highest bitrate at the... And just enjoy that experience. And I do it on cigar time. I light up my cigar, I got my book, I'm taking notes, I'm listening to the music. I'm slowing myself down.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:06Jason Calacanis?

  It's like meditation.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  It's that, it's that military saying, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. It's like that same concept.

• 52:12Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. That is the saying. I, by the way, I, I was looking for something to stream. I love Tyler Sheridan, I'll, I'll kick it off here. There's a thing called Lioness.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Sure, so it's a CIA show he's doing, Nicole Kidman, Margaret Freeman, I know it.

• 52:26Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible. And it's, it's, it follows the playbook of Tyler Sheridan. This stuff just moves. Tyler Sheridan is retard maxi.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  A little bit, a little bit.

• 52:39Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm serious, because he just goes with his gut. It's like mile a minute energy. It's, uh, you know, really, um, intense stuff. And he just goes there and like, um, oh my God, did he did do Sicario?

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, he wrote, he wrote, he wrote the script for Sicario. It's Denis Villeneuve directed, but Taylor Sheridan wrote the, wrote the script. He also did this really good movie called Wind River that you should check out.

• 53:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay, well there's your off duty. So anyway, I am loving the show. I'm on the second season. Lioness is about recruiting women, specifically, thus Lionesses, for the CIA program. I will leave it at that, but the, the, the two or three women who are the leads in it.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Zoe Saldana, yeah, she's like the main lead, I think.

• 53:24Jason Calacanis?

  Zoe Saldana, I don't even know who this person is, but she is a tour de force.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  She's the, the main Navi lady from the Avatar movies. And she's Gamora, the Guardians of the Galaxy. She's the green lady, Gamora.

• 53:35Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, she's Gamora, okay. Well, who knew, who knew? Anyway, she is incredible. The show is incredible. Just like Landman, you have these great actors and you go on an adventure and it goes a million miles a minute. Is it like high art? I don't know.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  No, he's good, he's, he's really good at setting up these scenarios, these like intense, you know, rivalries or whatever. They're just playing them out. He's very good at what he does. I really like that one.

• 54:00Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot at stake. There's a lot at stake in these shows.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  He does that one Mayor of Kingstown. Two for Paramount Plus with Jeremy Renner that I really like.

• 54:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I gotta watch that one.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's like a fixer in a town that's run by private prisons in, uh, mayor of Kingsley.

• 54:15Jason Calacanis?

  Alright.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  There is a Japanese series right now on Netflix called Human Vapor that is absolutely bananas. And I'm, I'm really enjoying it. It is a, it's like a remake of an old like 70's series, I think. Uh, and they just did it in this really goo- it's kind of, it's a combination of a lot of stuff. It's like a sci-fi fantasy premise where there is this guy who's literally made of vapor, who's committing all of these crimes. And so the cops are trying to find out who is the human vapor, what's happening. So there's a conspiracy level, but it's also this really high concept sci-fi premise. But it's also kind of funny and goofy. It's really in that, in that way that only the Japanese would do. Like Americans would find this show kind of all over the place and what's the tone supposed to be?

• 54:58Speaker 01

  And how am I supposed to feel about this? The Japanese just go for it. And I really admire the, the creativity, the originality. I got really sucked in. I'm like five episodes into this now, but, um.

• 55:07Jason Calacanis?

  This looks great. I, you know, I need a new sci-fi thriller, so this is a great recommendation.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  It's a lot of fun. Uh, yeah.

• 55:13Jason Calacanis?

  Cannot wait.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  And if you've been to Tokyo, like as I have, it's fun to watch a Tokyo. This is the first show I've watched set in Tokyo since I, I visited there.

• 55:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And what else you got? Anything else?

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Oh, uh, I was just gonna say, uh, Sugar is back for a season two on Apple TV Plus with, uh, Colin Farrell. I don't know if you watched this, Jason.

• 55:32Jason Calacanis?

  I have not. I don't even know what you're talking about. This is why I love you.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  It's an LA noir detective series.

• 55:38Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I'm into that for sure.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Colin Farrell plays a private eye named John Sugar, who's investigating missing persons cases in LA. Uh, there is a, there is another level to what's going on in Sugar that I will not dream of spoiling. So check it out. Uh, towards the end of season one, a bit of a, a bit of a surprise, uh, twist that upends the premise, but if you like LA detective noir mystery shows, I think you would probably enjoy it. Uh, Sugar on Apple TV Plus.

• 56:08Jason Calacanis?

  I like the actor. I like the actor. Um.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting to see him bounce back and forth between this and The Penguin. Cause Sugar is like- Like sort of at heart, like a really good guy is trying to help people. It's a very heroic, sort of kind-hearted role. And then the Penguin, he's the exact opposite. He's a real slimeball.

• 56:25Jason Calacanis?

  So this book is really, really interesting. It's about an executive, Peter Barton, who I didn't know him personally, but I knew of him because I came of age during the cable industry boom. And the cable industry was known, like, it was kind of like the AI industry of its time, or the mobile dot com boom. And this guy just made hundreds of millions of dollars, which like, he made $200 million, like, when it, that was a lot, a lot, a lot of money. And then he finds out he's got stomach cancer. And he writes this book in his last year and a half of life with this guy Lawrence Shames. And it really is like a meditation on dying and what matters in life.

• 57:09Jason Calacanis?

  And given that my friend O'Malley passed away, my friend Josh Baer passed away. And then a little earlier, you know, Tony Shay passed away from Zappos, my other friend, and Dave Goldberg from Launch.com, the music service, passed away and Survey Monkey. I've been really meditating on, hey, life and how to live a good life. And this book, it nails it. And I think if this, and it's not a long book, but what's really interesting in terms of a device, the guy Lawrence, who is the co-author of it, he's like a professional writer. He, in between the chapters written by Peter Barton, he talks about his time with Peter Barton.

• 57:52Jason Calacanis?

  He only knew Peter Barton during this last 18 months of his life, post-cancer diagnosis. But then he got to know everybody who knew him during his life. And he gets to compare the, you know, everybody's opinion of this person, Peter Barton, during his career.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:09Jason Calacanis?

  Versus.

• 58:11Jason Calacanis?

  When he posts cancer diagnosis and he's dealing with, he's got young kids. What's gonna happen to my daughter or my son? You know, they're 10 years old and they're gonna say goodbye to their dad this year. And, you know, trying to get closure for all of these things. Anyway, if you're into meditating on a life well-lived, this is a good book for you to do that. If you're young and invincible, you don't need to read these things, but I would recommend it. If you're young and invincible and on top of the world, at some point, you're gonna deal with your own mortality.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:43Jason Calacanis?

  And you're gonna wanna start thinking about this issue of what is a good life? What is it worth focusing your energy on?

• 58:50Speaker 01

  It makes me think of Ben Sasse, the former Nebraska Republican Senator. He is dying of cancer right now. And he's been, he's been doing lectures and he's sort of, I've seen him do interviews. And you do, like, when you get towards the end of your life with one of these terminal illnesses, it does change you and it makes people more reflective and it softens their sharp edges and subway. So I've been seeing a lot of interviews with him lately that are the same thing, whereas he's getting reflective in his final months.

• 59:16Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and you also become super candid.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:18Jason Calacanis?

  Because you're gonna be gone, so you're kinda like, well, yeah, let me just tell you the truth.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  People gotta hear about this now while I have time, yeah.

• 59:24Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. And here's my second thing. This is a tool. People may have seen this, like coral snake that was on the ranch and it was injured and I had to put it down. But I then had a rat, a rat snake on the ranch.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Oh my.

• 59:40Jason Calacanis?

  So between the coral snake and the rat ranch, I bought this 60-inch professional alloy graver.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Snake grabber.

• 59:46Jason Calacanis?

  The wife and the kids tried to get the, tried to get the rat snake out of the chicken coop. Now, they're not there to eat the chickens. Chickens are too big for this, but.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  The eggs.

• 59:56Jason Calacanis?

  Really, like, you need to have this if you're on a ranch. People don't tell you when you move lawn. I don't know if you've had the scorpions in the house yet.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  I have, yeah, okay.

• 1:00:05Jason Calacanis?

  These, and you gotta be careful with your shoes. Just always give them a little tap out because people put their shoes on or their slippers and they get a nice little stinger from the scorpion.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  I had the large, I had a huge scorpion in my bathtub. One morning when I woke up to go to the restroom, I didn't even know they got that big. It's crazy. It's crazy.

• 1:00:27Jason Calacanis?

  Now, it's not going to kill you, but it's going to pack a punch.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  It's going to suck. Yeah, you're not going to enjoy yourself.

• 1:00:34Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, I have a little bit of a joke there. All right, listen. Another amazing episode of this week in startups, your favorite podcast. If you're a founder or you're an investor, we got a lot of great shows for you over the summer. And I will be here for most of them. I had to, I was entranced a little bit, so apologies I wasn't here. But I'll see you next time. Bye, bye.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Bye, buddy.