What we'll learn from Anthropic's $2-$3T IPO | E2325

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PayPal Open https://paypal.launch.co CLA https://claconnect.com/withyou Odoo https://Odoo.com/twist Today's show: *Anthropic is likely headed for the largest IPO in history. A reported 2-3 trillion October debut would blow past SpaceX's recent record. Jason breaks down why the. numbers matter less than what they'll reveal about the entire AI economy. Then, chats with a pair of founders: one who's selling subscription water filtration systems that will keep microplastics out of your brain (and other body parts), and another who's building the AI software that powers automated solar panel installation. Guests Sami Khoreibi: https://x.com/samikhoreibi Wisewell: https://www.wisewell.com/ Puneet Puri: https://x.com/puneetp Gritt Robotics: https://www.gritt.ai/ Relevant Links Fortune: Anthropic reportedly plans $2T IPO in October: https://fortune.com/2026/08/13/anthropic-ipo-2-trillion-october-largest-ever-spacex/ Ramp AI Index: August update: https://ramp.com/data/ai-index-august-2026 Decart: https://decart.ai/ Bloomberg: Anthropic in talks to buy Decart: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/anthropic-said-in-talks-to-buy-ai-startup-decart-for-6-billion Nat Geo: Profile of water sommelier Martin Riese: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/water-sommelier-martin-riese Mailman School of Public Health: Nanoplastics study: https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/bottled-water-can-contain-hundreds-thousands-nanoplastics Bryan Johnson microplastics post: https://x.com/bryan_johnson/status/1937194358027190637?lang=en Topo Chico: https://www.coca-cola.com/us/en/brands/topo-chico San Pellegrino: https://www.sanpellegrino.com/ Acqua Panna: https://www.acquapanna.com/intl/ Evian: https://www.evian.com/ Mountain Valley Spring Water: https://mountainvalleyspring.com Fiji Water: https://www.fijiwater.com/ TechCrunch: Gritt exits stealth: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/gritt-exits-stealth-with-34-million-for-robots-to-build-solar-plants-then-everything-else/ Our World in Data: Solar panel prices: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices Our World in Data: Solar module prices vs. cumulative capacity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices-vs-cumulative-capacity NYT: Do your emojis make you look old? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/12/upshot/emoji-generations.html DJI Mic 3: https://www.dji.com/mic-3 Ted Lasso S4 trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk1KdTMhFs8 Lanterns trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UIBOsuUwc4 Furious trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBSqPDxmNZs The Shards trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpm9HUOrZIc Sporked: What are Tim Tams? https://sporked.com/article/what-are-tim-tams/ Timestamps: 0:00 New Segment: "Enough Already!" 3:36 Anthropic's record-breaking IPO plans 9:59 Why it's "Springtime for Trump and M&A" 10:39 PayPal - Built for payments, growth, and agentic. Paypal Open, built for all business. Visit https://paypalopen.com to get started 16:00 Sami Khoreibi of Wisewell joins 17:30 Hiring a water sommelier 20:23 CLA - Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://www.claconnect.com/withyou 29:00 The problems with tap and bottled water 30:34 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at https://Odoo.com/twist 49:58 Puneet Puri of Gritt Robotics joins 54:35 Solar's version of "Moore's Law" 1:05:08 Are you using the Boomer emojis? 1:09:02 Why Jason loves the DJI Mic 3 1:11:36 Jason & Lon's streaming recommendations 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 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  All right, everybody, it's Twist. It's Friday, August 14th. Lon Harris is here. Follow him at L O N S on Twitter. Hear his media recommendations and Trump derangement syndrome.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Just plenty of stuff there for you. And you can follow me on at Jason. You can hear me intelligently dunking on Trump delightful syndrome. No, Trump dedication syndrome. It's not a political show. But you know, I gotta tell you, Lon. I got a couple of things. It's enough already.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Somebody in the audience, make a jingle. If you make a great jingle or a great interesting show with Jake, I'll thank enough already or it's enough already. I'll send you like 100, 200 bucks in X money. Make a jingle, share it on Twitter X, at mention us. Because it's enough already. It's enough already with two things. I've had enough with transcribing everything. I was just on a board call. I had to go around the horn, six people on a call. Please certify that you're not using granola, Zoom notes, recording, Notion recording, any of it. It's enough already with the transcripts.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  With the AI note taker. Every meeting you have now, you've got eight AI note takers. It feels weird. It feels like you've got an audience, even when you're alone in the Zoom.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Enough already, enough already with the note taker. Second enough already. This is a back to back enough already.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  We've, you've, you're.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Cause I like Claude. I got enough of Claude. But I opened up Zoom today. Zoom, you're doing too much.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  This is what my mom said to me when I was running marathons. I'm going to school at night. I'm working three jobs and you're doing too much. I had an Irish Jewish mother.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  You're doing too much. Look at this. Pop it up on the screen. I just shared it in the Zoom chat. This is my message to Zoom. You're doing too much. I don't need Slack and Zoom. I'm trying to get on a goddamn call Zoom. I don't want to describe the agent I want to build.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  What are we doing here? Peting with my agents on, you know, Claude, Hermes, Open Claw. Everybody wants an agent. Benioff wants me to use his agents in Slack. It's too much already.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Where we just talked about this.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Enough already.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  That like, everybody wants to be Notion now. You've got a Notion and a Slack inside literally everything. Like you go to.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Black added Notion.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you go, right. You go to like buy hot sauce and it's like, why is there a Notion and a Slack inside this hot sauce store?

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Literally, I was at In-N-Out Burger and after they gave me my number and it was like, would you like to create an agent and transcribe this? And I'm like, no, I just wanted, I just wanted animal style double double. That's all I want.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  This week in startups is brought to you by Odoo, the all in one business platform. Your first app is free. Get started today at O D O O dot com slash twist. C L A. Innovation takes balance. C L A's CPAs, consultants and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at C L A connect dot com slash with you and PayPal. Pay zero processing fees on your first $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at PayPal dot launch dot co.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  So we got a full show.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, we got more, more shows than we got time for.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Doing too much and enough already. But there's a lot of news. Sometimes we like to start with whatever the biggest news story of the day is. What's the biggest news story of the day here on a Friday?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  I gotta tell you, I think it is Anthropic. Anthropic's plans for their IPO, according to Financial Times, who spoke with a number of insiders. Anthropic plans to seek a valuation of two to three trillion dollars for their October IPO. That would top the 1.7 trillion dollar record set by SpaceX just a few short months ago. Only five companies in history have ever actually touched the $3 trillion valuation mark. Investors are expecting Anthropic's ARR to hit 100 to 120 billion by the end of this year. Forty three point five percent, Jason, of US businesses currently paid Anthropic for subscriptions or tokens in the last month.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  According to new data we got in from Ramp, 39.7% for OpenAI and just 6.2% for Google's suite of AI. Tools. So that's, we've got some more anthropic news, but I feel like that's the big headline people want to hear you react to.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Okay. Yeah. So it's going to go out at three trillion. They're sandbagging with the two trillion. It's going to go out at 30 times top line revenue. It's going to be awesome to look at the books because we're going to understand their revenue ramp. The composure of their revenue, hopefully they might tell us like which are the biggest customers or something along that lines. But we'll also get an idea of cost and profitability.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  They're going to be able to abstract some of that, but it would be interesting to understand, like, what do they spend on salaries, stock based comp? As a percentage of that 100, just make it 100 billion by the time this thing goes out. What do they spend on compute to do 100 billion in revenue? What is the depreciation and how are they depreciating data centers if they're building them, renting them or otherwise?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Well, and even chips. I mean, that's, we've been discussing how fast do these chips depreciate is like a huge story as well.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Who knows if they're going to have that data in there or if they're just going to tell us, hey, we're renting this stuff. We don't have that. But it will also let us know, impact is that on Amazon Web Services, Elon Web Services, where are they buying Crusoe Cloud? Core Weave, where is that money going? And we'll just uncover, like in poker. I kind of feel like we know our whole cards right now. People are using AI. It's incredibly effective. That's our whole cards. And then in OpenAI, that will unlock, you know, something slightly different than the enterprise driven compute renting Anthropic. OpenAI is building data centers. They're making massive commitments. They didn't say, we're going to rent from people, right Lon?

• 5:56Speaker 00

  So then we'll see what a builder, because they're kind of like a core re-weave plus Crusoe Cloud plus Elon Web Services. And a consumer AI business. So we're going to understand what the consumer is driving. They have a billion people, I guess, using OpenAI Chat GPT.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Some number of those pay 20 bucks a month, 250 dollars a year. How many? Do they have 10 million subscribers, 20 million or 5 million? If they've got 20 million paid subscribers, times $20 a month, and they're making 400 a million a month from consumers, which is $5 billion a year, that's nice. It's nice. But that's 5% of the enterprise based business that Claude has, right? And we were sitting here 18 months ago and people were like, what's Claude? And boom, it went racing past it.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  I will say on IPOs.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Chat GPT was the iconic, like that's the one everybody got introduced to AI as a technology from. And so it's been an amazing shift over the last, I guess, 12, 18 months or so to see, you know, now Claude is synonymous and Chat GPT is sort of the stepchild.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Correct. So here we are, folks. Absolutely amazing to see these three cards. Your flop is SpaceX, Anthropic in Q4. As soon as October, it's like eight weeks away, 10 weeks away. And they'll have the road show, so information will leak. It's a $3 billion IPO. Do I suggest you buy shares at the IPO? I don't suggest you buy any IPO shares. I think, I mean, if you want to get a little tasty poo, but wait, because in all cases, the bankers and the CEOs price IPOs to perfection and typically they get a premium in a hot market. So whether it's Figma, whether it was Instacart, Reddit, SpaceX, pick the company.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  The pop happens and then very quickly it comes back down to reality when institutions start buying. And so, you know, you could have bought SpaceX at 200 or Figma at some crazy valuation, 50, 60 billion. And then it comes back down to 30 billion, whatever it is, same thing with, I think Instacart, Maple Bear, that one went up and done down. So my best advice is own things for a 10 year window, slowly build a position. And I don't think in today's day and age, you need to race into IPOs. Just my personal observation. I think the data is with me.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  You're waiting to get a good deal because you're trying to lock it in long term. You're not, we're not day trading here. It's like, if you want to own it in 10 years.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  We're day trading.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  We're day trading. Exactly. Do you want to hear some more anthropic news before we get to our first guest?

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Lightning round.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  So in other news, Anthropic is also in talks to acquire Israeli startup Descartes AI for around 6 billion. This would be their largest acquisition to date. Descartes makes software that helps chips run more efficiently. So it would allow Anthropic's infrastructure to absorb more demand. By some accounts, they boost throughput by up to eight X, according to some of their literature, and it works across Nvidia chips, Amazon's Tranium, Google's TPUs and so forth. They also make Lucy a real time video generation and transformation model and Oasis, a world model for physics accurate simulations. The price, 6 billion represents a 50% premium over Descartes prior valuation.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  So your thoughts on this deal and is this purely about improving Anthropic's margins ahead of this big IPO?

• 9:20Speaker 00

  All right. 1% of $3 trillion, I believe would be $30 billion. They're buying this for 6 billion.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  You know, so it's literally like 25 basis points of the company. One of the great things about having a public currency and one of the reasons in fact to go public is so you have that currency in order to acquire customers and. President Donald J. Trump has done an exceptional job. As you bring up casually and frequently in our group chat.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  He's my favorite president, yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yes, and he's done an amazing job with M&A. M&A is back on the menu. You can buy things again, and these are ticky tacky acquisitions. Any acquisition under 250 billion, under 100 billion. It's kind of ticky tacky in the age of trillion dollar companies. So this is a great sign for liquidity, for venture capital. Venture capital went through four or five years in the wilderness. You know, it was like the winter and now it's springtime for Trump and M&A. Springtime for Trump and M&A.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  One other famous world leader has springtime for him, but it's like.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Springtime for Trump and M&A. It's so great. It's great. Founders, we've got a huge offer for you today from my firm Launch and our friends at PayPal. Eligible startups will pay zero PayPal processing fees on their first $100,000 in payment volume. That's right, $0 in fees. PayPal is, of course, an iconic brand. We all know that, we use it, we love it. But there is so much more than just that yellow button. They've built a global payment infrastructure that's designed to scale along with your company. And if you're an AI and SaaS startup, PayPal is already set up for the way you monetize. That means seats, subscriptions, credits, token usage, API consumption, and usage-based pricing.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  PayPal already works with all the leading billing platforms and they offer complete flexibility. So you can evolve your business model over time without constantly tearing apart your entire revenue stack. So if you're just starting to build or you're already scaling up, pay zero processing fees on your first $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. To find out more, go to paypal-launch.com. See how thrilled I am. Why? Because I was like, oh, my God, I'm a venture capitalist in an era of no exits. Here we go, baby. Cursor got bought by Elon for 60 billion. This is getting more for 6 billion. OpenAI is buying like Johnny Ive's company. That's like a design studio for 5, 10 billion.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  They're buying podcasts, they're not even thinking about it.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  They're buying a $200 million podcast with, you know, 20,000 listeners. I mean, it's incredible what's going on here. So let the good times roll. Let the acquisitions happen. Only one in 10 acquisitions has to work. So when you see these acquisitions happen, just keep in your mind, like a venture portfolio. If one in 10 becomes Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Android, these were all purchased companies. Or back in the day, PowerPoint and I think Excel were both purchased and Word was built in-house for Microsoft. Any of these things can become super accretive to shareholders and nine out of 10 can be write-off. So great job to Anthropic. Let's go to our first guest.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  All right.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Oh, and do I have to do a quick pause for the cost?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Let's talk about ro.co. Why not? Let's talk about ro.co.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  A little ro.co. I am, today I saw 169 on my scale.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  At my peak caloric degeneracy, I saw 213. Between those two numbers is about 43, 44 pounds.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  I feel great. And it's thanks to GLPs. You can get on a GLP and check if you can get your insurance to pick it up at ro.co/twist. They got an insurance checker. Amazing. ro.co/twist. But something has happened. I have three or four people in my life who didn't like the concept of a shot. You know, I'm a tough guy. You know that, Juan, big tough guy.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Doesn't bother you.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  I'll take a shot. Yeah, give me the thickest needle gauge. I don't care. And so this, you know, even the Ozempic and Manjaro, it was like the tiniest little thin needle, but it still freaked some people out.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I'm not, I didn't like the idea of giving myself a shot every day. You know, it's all those after-school specials. That's what it did. When I was growing up, that was like the steroid kids were the ones giving himself shots in the locker room. I just, I don't know. It made me, it made me feel a little uncomfortable, but.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  But you want to make the big announcement here. My brother Jamie lost 20 pounds. He started taking a pill that he got from ro.co/twist. ro.co/twist is where they're going to do the insurance checker and you can get this pill, which is, what, once a day you take a pill?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  You wake up, you wake up in the morning, you take, it's a tiny little pill. You take a pill. The only real rule, like the only like you can't, is you have to wait a half hour before you drink or eat anything, even water. They're like, don't drink too much water with the pill or it makes the pill not work. It's got to go into like an empty stomach. So you wake up, so you wake up, you take the pill, you like shower, you start making coffee, you take the dog out, whatever, 30 minutes, you can have your coffee or whatever. And then you live the rest of the day and that's it.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Okay, now I put a contest here. I offered you and Jamie, my brother, who works here at Launch and the podcast, $5,000 for each of three milestones. He had set 20 pounds as his first and he hit it.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  I shipped him five dimes.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Very quickly.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  And we'll see if he hits his second and third. And everybody opted into this. There was no coercion except for $15,000. That was the only coercive mechanism here.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Which Juan doesn't need. He's a trust fund baby, but tell us Nepo, baby.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Not true.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Not true, not true. You started taking it last week.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I did.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Where are you at?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I'm down, I've taken it for six days. I started last Saturday. It is now Friday as we're recording this. So not even a full week. I'm down eight pounds so far, which is incredible.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  That's ridiculous.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Look, this is a real photo from this morning. I took it on the way to the studio.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  We did ask you to put a shirt on for the show.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Please, it's indecent, but you know, I look good. I look good. I want to show. But no, I.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  It looks like you feel good, too.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  I had not even, I didn't even want to weigh myself yet. I thought I would be discouraged if I weigh myself in the first week. You know, I won't have lost that much. But my friend who's also done GLP-1 says you lost, you lose a lot of weight sort of right away. And so I was amazed to take a look and see that I'm down eight pounds already.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  What's your first?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  15.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  What's your first milestone?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  15 is my first tier, so look out. I didn't know it would be this quick. I didn't know.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  We're on an honor system here, so be honorable.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  I took photos of the scale, so we.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  All right.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I can demonstrate it with evidence.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  I don't want any wide shots of you on the share, on the scale buck. So you want to zoom in it in?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  No, I'm zooming into just the digital readout, just the digital readout.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  You can have all kinds of things happen if you're on a wide shot.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  I'm very shy.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Enough already. All right, there you go. So thank you to Ro.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Check it out, ro.co/twist to get your free insurance check and see if it's right for you. It is very easy, by the way. You go and in 10 minutes, they're sending you your pills. It's not, it's a, it's a low, low impact signup procedure. So ro.co/twist, check it out. All right, let's bring in our very first guest. He is the CEO and co-founder of WiseWell. They make a countertop water purification device. We will turn the camera. I have one right here with me in the studio so we can take a look.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Fantastic. Sammy.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  He's Sammy Harabi. Thanks for being here, Sammy.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Gentlemen, great to be here.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Sammy's a friend of mine from the region. So when I go to the region, which is the Middle East, Sammy and I have dinner and we're friends. And he told me about this great idea, which was, everybody loves filtered water. People drink a lot of water. They got to drink more water, yada, yada. And I've been looking for a water system because I use one of the pitchers. And it's a pain in the ass, but I have a pitcher-based system. Sammy, you created something new. Explain to us what you built and why.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you, Jason. Started WiseWell a few years ago because people in the US and around the world have actually lost their faith in tap water. Rightfully so.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  The average age of a pipe in the US is around 78 years old. And, you know, we don't expect them to get upgraded in our lifetime. So there's been huge growth in bottled water. Also a choice that with the discoveries of microplastics and nanoplastics, have serious health implications and of course, cost and sustainability issues as well. So started WiseWell to really try to create something which gets people comfortable with water purification, really leading to distributed water infrastructure and drinking water infrastructure. And so we've developed a set of products now that are taking tap water and converting it into premium mineralized water, but letting you know how it's working

• 18:47Speaker 03

  and leveraging design that is a lot more aligned with the expectations of today's customer.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's beautiful. We can see the system there to the right of Juan. It has an app. And you know, it's got some science behind it. Explain to us what gets taken out, say, in America, an American water system? And then what gets put back in? Because you mentioned minerals and everybody likes a little bit of bubbles in their water. And I, when I moved to Texas, started doing this Topo Chica. So delicious, lots of bubbles. And then everybody's got to break my heart and be like, yeah, don't use Topo Chica. It's got these chemicals in it or whatever minerals. It's no bueno. So I, I'm always like, I need somebody to solve this problem for me. Tell me the science and how you solve this problem and how you know you solved it.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you know, Jason, what we've done is we've, we've taken what you see in some of the really sophisticated, large scale purification plants and condensed it into something that could fit on your countertop or as a floor standing unit. So we put a carbon filter, which is what you probably find in your pitcher, which gets rid of sediment, some of the chlorine smells and basically a little bit of dirt that's in the water, but doesn't clean it all the way. Because what we're seeing in most taps today are PFAs, forever chemicals. And those require something as robust as reverse osmosis, which is our next step of filtration. That strips the water of everything, makes it perfectly clean, but makes it flat, getting

• 20:17Speaker 03

  rid of, you know, the flavor and texture that we're used to with a lot of those delicious waters that you mentioned before.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, one of the themes we talk about over and over again on this week in startups is making sure you do your chores. I'm no expert on these things. I have some experience. Stephen Estes from CLA is an expert. Let's talk about being cash efficient. Tell us about efficiency and what you see in the, in the top tier startups in your practice.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  We're seeing kind of an interesting trend out there where companies aren't needing to raise quite as much as they had in the past. You really have to be careful as a founder to only take on as much money as you really need. You've got to do the forecast and you've got to do the modeling and you've got to dial it in and get it right. Otherwise, you're going to end up either not raising enough capital to get to where you're going and you're going to have to go get venture debt or go back, have an extender to the round, or you're going to give up too much of the company because you just didn't recognize how much money you actually needed.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, very important to get this stuff right, folks. And that's really a bummer when startups don't do things in a button up way. Always have a great partner, a good partner to have on this adventure while things change. My friend Stephen over at CLA. So if you want a trusted advisor by your side who will navigate you through taxes, accounting and everything in between, it's time to take action. Visit CLAconnect.com/withyou. And don't forget to drop a mention that your boy Jake Al sent you. That's CLAconnect.com/withyou. Start today.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  And so the last step, and this one was quite interesting because we worked with a water sommelier who's on our team. There's, there's 250 of them in the world. And we, we really were trying to find the best way in a sustainable and distributed manner to put the minerals back into the water that would be aligned with the expectations of the top flavors and textures of a premium water. And so we use a natural stone filter that actually distributes sodium, calcium, potassium evenly back into the water, bringing it back to life, bringing the pH back up, all kind of on your countertop, which is, which is the, the exciting part. Now, that in itself, in terms of the filtration is, is great, but we thought that's not enough

• 22:27Speaker 03

  because we want to get people fully over the line to switch and understand what a brand-led and a design-led company focused on purification would look like. And that's, that was really the ethos behind WiseWell. So we spent a lot of time ensuring that we've got the right industrial design, something that you don't want to hide, you kind of want to point at. Took inspiration from Dyson, what he did with the vacuum and it, and the blow dryer. We took inspiration from, and of course, the fan, which you typically hide until you got one that had no blade on it. And then we took a lot of inspiration from Tesla because the electric car was a boring sustainability thing up until the Tesla came out. It was faster. It was at a much better cost than the alternatives that had the same kind of performance.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  And it was something that you wanted to kind of explain and show to your friends or anyone who kind of passes by in the early days. And we think that water was ready for that because it's a huge problem, whether in the US or globally. And we're, we're really focused on taking that on.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  This water sommelier, I can't let you get by without mentioning that this is not a joke. Here's a story from National Geographic in 2010. Martin Reese was, I think, the oldest one in our LLM research, who became one of these experts. And people really, as you know, people get off of alcohol as like their primary beverage, go into mocktails. This has become actually a thing where there's different waters that you can taste the difference from. I am able to taste the difference, I think, in multiple types of water. So I don't know if WiseWell does this, but is there a way to dial in a certain profile that would be like Fiji or Evian or Pellegrino?

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Some people like, and, and do you do bubbles too? And how does that work?

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we just actually, you gentlemen are going to be trying the first, Lon is right behind it, our first sparkling product released in, in the US. And with that one, we did take a lot of different profiles of sparkling water. So what are the most popular brands of premium water globally? And in our research, what we, what we wanted to do is really recreate the flavor and texture profile or bubble profile, as, as you'll see with the, with the sparkling option of the most popular ones universally. So in the, the still water world, you would see that the, the Aquapana as a premium water,

• 24:57Speaker 03

  the Tuscan spring water is probably the most popular, um, universal version of it. A lot of people love Evian, but a lot of people don't. So what we wanted to do was-

• 25:08Speaker 00

  What's the flavor profile there? What's the difference? What are they getting? Is it that Evian feels too minerally, it's like you got a couple of rocks in your mouth?

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's it, right? So it's, it's too minerally. It's, it's a very high TDS water. And, and that means there's lots of minerals floating around in there. And you taste them, you feel them in your mouth, right?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  And, and so Aquapana is actually a low TDS water, but if you give it to a hundred people, even those who like Evian will like Aquapana, but vice versa, wouldn't, you wouldn't see as much. So we, we were really, really focused in the first couple of years on flavor, texture, and then if we zoom out a bit, the technology behind it. Because we know exactly what's going on with each of our customers' water. So we, we've designed, we manufacture, and now we distribute the product as a, as a subscription model because we really want to be in charge of everything going on with our customers' water. We don't just want to sell them a unit and hope they change their filters. We want to ensure that it changed exactly when they need to be, that if anything is

• 26:09Speaker 03

  happening with their tap water, it gets detected, we flag it to them. So we've got, machines are all sent, are all connected to the internet or via Bluetooth. As you mentioned, there's an app, but I, like, I'm sure many other people are getting annoyed with having another app for something that I'm-

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  So we've now taken it on screen with the, with the sparkle. So everything that you need can get messages over there, updates, again, inspired from the Teslas of this world. So you know, my, my water purifier can now get more features, more functions over the air in terms of the different things that we're doing in the context of detection of different elements. But most importantly, ensuring that the water is always, most premium, the filters are, are, are robust. And as soon as you need, we automatically send you your next set of filters. With the sparkling, once you've done your first 180 liters of water, sparkling water will ship you the next two canisters. So-

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Love it. So it's a blade-based system, you're going to subscribe. That's the business model, I think. And I got to tell you, Lon, I started out as a San Pellegrino guy. I was a Pellegrino guy. I would just drink a glass bottle of it straight. It's very good. Very easy, smooth bubbles. Yeah. But as time went on and my addiction to sparkling water grew, I got more aggressive. And then when I made it to Texas, that thick, ice cold Coca-Cola style bottle of Topo Chica. Topo Chica, yeah. That's aggressive bubbles. Yes. These are aggressive bubbles. I want to give a fair warning with love. This is delivered with peace and love. If you're going to do Topo Chica, like you're going to have a, you know, the wet part of

• 27:47Speaker 00

  the brisket, you and I go get that fatty brisket or we have that fatty beef rib. It's very black, so we go to Salt Lake. You need something to cut through the fat and that's where Topo Chica comes in.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  That rips through your teeth like a Diet Coke.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  It's very crisp.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Old school Diet Coke.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  It's gonna rip that oil out, all that grease.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  So, we've got, we've got the hard bubble setting for you and that, that'll give you that, that same kind of, you know, business amount of, definitely break up, break up whatever fat you have in, in the barbecue.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Where it gets in your nose. It's when you bring the, when you bring the glass up and you can, it hits your nose. That's how you know it's got those,

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  It's got those heavy.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  It's true addiction.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  It's got those heavy bubbles. Yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Okay. So I was talking to you about this. This is a great business to be in. Um, cause I'm, I'm full disclosure, I'm negotiating a little slice for J Cal here. I'm gonna, I'm gonna place a little bet here on this company. Cause Sammy pitched me on it. I have machine number one. I told Sammy, I'm gonna pay for, if you're gonna bring this to America, if this comes to America, I want, I want in. I need a taste.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Gotta wet, you gotta literally wet your beak on this one.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Jason, what we're doing is we're taking profitable consumer subscription business models, but having the same kind of retention rates as, as utilities. So if we take a look at our business, we're, we're actually around a 2% attrition rate on our tens of thousands of users already. Um, and that's constantly getting better as we improve our product from container to container. And so what we really wanted to do was give that ease and that sense of a consumer business. But what we're doing is distributed drinking water infrastructure at the end of the day. Um, so our average, you sign up to a two-year, uh, uh, subscription. That's the commitment.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  We manage a machine. Anything happens, we're on top of it. And actually we, we get to see things well in advance. Very importantly, we're also seeing how our customer is, uh, reacting to the machine, right? Are, are they, did they suddenly drop off in usage? Is there any real spike in their tap water quality? Or in their spike in their tap water, uh, TDS, which means the quality has gone down.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Input is, and by the way, here in hill country where I live, in the hill country and outside of Austin, and in Austin, the water, you know, we don't have state taxes. Water is, can be challenging at times, man. You smell the minerals sometimes coming out of this water.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  People do not drink from the tap in Austin. In Brooklyn, man, Brooklyn water, mm, chef's kiss. It's got fluoride, a little fluoride in it, but Brooklyn water is like the best tap water. You, you wouldn't order a bottle of water in Brooklyn. You just order from there.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Well, that's what they say about the bread. Why you're, you're, you're Philly, you need your Philly cheese steaks and your New York, uh, subs.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Or Brooklyn pizza.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Right. Cause it's the, it's the bread.

• 30:33Speaker 00

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• 31:15Speaker 00

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• 31:36Speaker 03

  I gotta tell you something about Brooklyn water and Toronto water where I grew up. Uh, one issue is actually unfortunate that the, the amount of chlorine they're putting in to keep it clean through the distribution networks. As I mentioned, the average pipe is 78 years old, uh, is really, really high. So we actually do a really interesting test and I think everyone trusts their dog. Um, we pour tap water. We've done it in Toronto. We've done it in Brooklyn. Uh, and we pour WiseWell water and 10 times out of 10, your dog will go to the WiseWell water.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  I'm testing this.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Reason being is. Yeah, tested out.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  See what's next.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  They, they can smell the chlorine. Uh, they're a lot more sensitive than we are. And so, you know, a lot of the things that have been, uh, put into the water to keep it as clean as possible during distribution are what we're taking out. Uh, and that's, that's kind of the key. And we're not just taking it out and hoping that we know when to change a filter next. We're on top of it for you as a customer. Um, and now with the sparkling water, we've actually seen, you know, incredible reaction because water in itself is something which is absolutely essential, but sparkling is a luxury and a costly one for those who get hooked on it. So from, from a savings perspective, um, we provide huge savings to, to all of our subscribers from day one.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  What I try to explain, I, you know, like literally, you know, I got people who work at the ranch and they show up with a bottle of, you know, giant water that they bought on the way to work or they got a Starbucks. I say, whoa, whoa, timeout. I got double filtered water. I got my WiseWell. I make a fresh coffee, pot of coffee every morning. Please stop spending four or five or six bucks on your latte in the morning. Stop buying a three, four, five dollar bottle of water. It's 10 bucks a day. You're spending $4,000 in post-tax on beverages. That's D-U-M-B dumb. You need to dial in your coffee, your tea, your cold brew.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  And you know what the common denominator, Lon, is in terms of flavor is the quality of the water.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  It's a good one.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  You make cold brew, you make express, you make a tea, whatever you're down with, you gotta get the water proper. It's gotta be correct. So I'm super excited about all this. I need to ask you, it's a super important question here, Sammy. Alex Jones, who's always way ahead of the curve. You know who Alex Jones is?

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  He's the guy who talks like this on Infomercials. He's always ahead of the curve. I found the Bohemian Club and, and, uh, you know, we're gonna release the Bohemian Files. Um, he said that the water is making frogs gay.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, the tap water.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Can you, can tap water is making frogs gay, Sammy? Is there any, have you determined if this is true? And then how do you ensure that WiseWell does not make me gay from the water? I'm joking, half joking, but.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  We, we've, we've done a lot of research on it. We, we were doing, we were focusing on the frogs, but actually we, we, we learned about humans. So we all have, if you drink bottled water, a teaspoon, so seven grams, like a natural physical plastic teaspoon worth of plastic in our brains. And cadavers with dementia are 10x that. So that's, that's, that's a scary thing.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  The microplastics. You're talking about the microplastics. Yes.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  And just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with being gay. There's nothing wrong with gay frogs or any amphibians as far as we're concerned here.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Let the frogs live their life, Jason. I don't know.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Let them live. I got any gay frog friends on my ranch. Frog love is frog love. Period, full stop.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  This took a real turn.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  It did. But no, no, this is the point. There's a lot of conspiracy theories, whatever around water.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Fluoride in the water.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  I, RFK has gotten into this a bit. I thought, okay, that's a good idea. Another guy who's got this voice. Another guy who talks like that.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Why? What is it with guys not trusting water who talk like they, they need more water?

• 35:29Speaker 00

  They do. They seem parched.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  They need a wipeout.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  I mean, I didn't know that there were so many jokes in water.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  We're doing all right.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  We're doing okay.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  We got there.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  But I.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Lu or conversation.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  But, but what is the story with microplastics? Cause I was talking to my friend, Brian Johnson. He said his balls were filled, not just, you're telling me your brain, but he was telling me his testicles were filled with microplastics. Now listen, I'm past having kids, um, but I just don't like the idea of having, you know, testicular microplastics. This is, that's actually true. This is actually true that microplastics are in the water supply. Also, I understand that in major cities in America where like a third of the population in some cases are on pharmaceuticals, SSRIs, et cetera, that this, that gets into the water too. And that we now, and this, Lon, this is a true statement.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  I believe it. I've never heard that. Why am I still so depressed?

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Sammy, Sammy of the wise man of water, our wise man of water, tell us birth control in the water, SSRIs in the water, is any of this true? We know plastics is true, but explain to us what's in our water supply.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  It, it is, it is very true. And actually one of the first, uh, times I heard about it in the big public forum was on All In. Uh, when, uh, when it was a, uh, you had a science corner and Freeburg was talking about the study about nanoplastics.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  I remember this. Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  And it went from the assumption that there's 10,000 units of nanoplastic per liter of, uh, bottled water to 240,000, uh, micro, sorry, microplastics to nanoplastics. And that increase in number was not just learning in the context of more, but being there. It's the size of them because they can cross a blood brain barrier. As I mentioned, it actually gets into your brain. Our plaque buildup and in, in, in our, in our balls and reproductive organs, we're seeing a huge amount of, uh, of, of instances where men with measurable amounts of plastic in, in their balls are much more likely to be infertile. And so male fertility has declined by around 30%.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  And if you take a linear scale of plastic consumption, almost identical. So the signals are there. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a surgeon general's warning on a plastic bottle in the next decade. The first-class action acts have gone out against bottled water companies.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Crazy. Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  And we're just, we're just seeing it happen.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Fiji, I believe.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  That's, yeah, that's right. Fiji's one of, and, and we believe that there's gonna be a lot more, uh, over the coming decade as those signals, uh, become scientific studies that have actual outcomes.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  And just to be clear, they are finding all kinds of, you know, trace amounts in wastewater. Uh, so here, you know, many studies you can find online, antidepressants emerging, uh, contaminants occurrence in wastewater treatment plants and surface waters in China. It's happening here in the US. However.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Quote, if you were to drink two liters of water a day for 70 years, at the end of those 70 years, you would have taken 1% of the normal daily dose of someone has taken a prescribed medication.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  So it's a very minor.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  It's a very, you're not, you still need your Zoloft, you're still gonna need whatever you're taking, folks.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  I say, I'm drinking all this tap water, I'm still miserable.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could have told you that. I could have told you that. Lon's like, I'm on my 10th liter today and I'm still sad. So that one's not bad, but the plastics are.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Plastics are there for sure, and the PFAs. Yeah. So you've got a lot of stuff there.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  I think this is great. What is it gonna cost here in the US? Tell us what this two-year commitment is, because I could tell you, like, you know, I was spending, I don't know, Topo Chica was like $2, $1.52 a bottle, even when I'm buying like the six or 12 pack, it was still like a buck, $52 bucks per sparkling, probably because I like glass bottles of that Mountain. What's the Mountain one? That's a flat water. I was getting that for a little while, Mountain Springs something, I don't know. That was also like $3 a liter. I mean, I was spending a hundred dollars a month, thousands of dollars a year.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Oh, Mountain Valley, I believe.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Mountain Valley.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Mountain Valley, yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  People say Mountain Valley's very good, you know, certainly good to the taste, but what's this gonna cost versus, you know, a lunatic like me with, you know, three daughters who grab a Topo Chica and drink three sips and then I find all the 50% open bottles in my house, which makes this damn go crazy.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  So, we've got three product lines, and the Nano, which is a small one, smaller households, is $29 a month, unlimited water, Ron Topier filters, we just, we take care of everything.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Dollar a day?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Our, that is, that is a month. And then actually, the one that's behind Lon, which is a Sparkle, that's our flagship product, which even has wearable integration as well, we're going to Apple and Google Health and, and if, yeah, there's NFC technology in there, that goes for $89 a month for unlimited water, which comes hot, cold, room temperature, and you can select the amount you want. If you like green tea?

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  You can have, you could exactly set your green tea level, or if you like your water freezing, we could do the same. That goes for $89 a month with unlimited sparkling water.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  So three bucks a day, easy breezy.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, you know, we're trying to keep it as simple as possible.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  I'm gonna be able to take my Whoop at NFC Tap it that I drank my water is the goal?

• 41:00Speaker 03

  So actually, we're integrated into Apple and Google Health, so we will be able to, you're in, we're actually the first example where you've got an input as opposed to just, you know, your body sending signals, because it is a really important thing. Our average WiseWell is, is used 25 times, sorry, it's used 15 times a day by our subscribers, which makes us the second most used device to the iPhone in the household. So, you know, that, that screen becomes a very interesting place to learn maybe about new products, about partnerships, or even about your health and wellness from water.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, see, this is critically important, because if you can measure it, you can manage it, and one of the things that was a big health breakthrough, Lon, you gotta get in on a Whoop or an Aura or an Apple Watch, is, you know, I can take this, I like, if I do a meditation in a meditation app like Calm or Waking Up, it automatically puts it into my Whoop via Apple Health, and then I wanna record my water, but I forget to do that, and if it was a little simpler, because I am like a camel, I forget to drink water, and then I don't sleep well, and then if I drink like an extra, you know, I don't know how many ounces, like 30 ounces a day, my sleep scores and my recovery go up the next day. How do I know that? I started recording in my Whoop, it's not a commercial for Whoop, but it has a journal,

• 42:16Speaker 00

  and when I put in my journal that I had electrolytes or creatine, or I slept with a dog, or I slept with an eye mask, or I took a flight, it then tells you how that affects your recovery. Turns out like, if I do a long walk, like a certain number of steps, if I drink my electrolyte drink, if I drink enough water, and if I use an eye mask, all of these things and warm bath, these are like plus four to plus 10% on my sleep and recovery scores. That's, this is the future, folks, you're gonna be able to understand this as well as with your blood work. Where can people learn more, and is it available in the US yet or not?

• 42:54Speaker 03

  So, the, the Sparkle just came out for pre-sale, so available in a very limited run, full run is coming out in October, we also have our Nano and Model 1, which are the floor-standing and smaller unit, already available for sale, and we're, we're just very excited to be taking on this problem in the US as well as the region.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  In the region. Wisewell.com, wisewell.com, no promo code, and I don't want a freebie, you can give Lon a freebie, it's okay.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  I'm taking this one with me.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  But I don't want a freebie.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  He's at.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you keep it at the office, you can do whatever you wanna do, Lon.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  No, he's coming home with me.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  I like you, get, I like your, I like your new health thing. All right, Sammy, great job, appreciate you, and everybody check out Wisewell, I'm not an investor yet, but you'll know I'm an investor if you see me drinking out of this on All In and here on This Week in Startups, you see me drinking out of this bad boy?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Oh, this, my WiseWell? Oh.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  If I'm drinking out of a WiseWell, then you know I'm on the cap table. If you see me drinking out of this.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  I'm the only one with a cap.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  There you go. If I'm drinking out of it This Week in Startups Tumblr, I'm not an investor, so that'll be your tell. No, I always tell people if I'm doing it, Sammy, great to see you, and I will see you when I'm in the region.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Thanks, Lon. Jason, thank you so much.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  All right, take care, my brother. You know, it's like I collect people, Lon, you know, get to meet a lot of people in my life.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  And I'm very good now at putting people into buckets of like, this person is like using me, or has something they wanna get from me.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  This person is a flake, this is just a good person, and then like, there's like really good people who like, you wanna hang with, like Sammy very quickly went from like an acquaintance to, hey, if I'm in the region, I'm having dinner with Sammy, he's gonna introduce me to a couple of interesting people, we're gonna hang, you know, it's just like, he's a good hang, like you're a good hang.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  That's a thing I've heard too, that in America, it's like you meet people and it's like, we should do business together, and then you become friendly. You're like, oh, you know what, this is a good guy, I like hanging out with him, we should go see a movie. In the region, they say you become friends first, and then it's like, you know what, you're such a good friend, we should figure out a way to do business together.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  And what happened in the region, I learned this, is everybody from America came with the American attitude, and they're like, I'm gonna go to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh and Qatar, and I'm gonna come back with like a couple of LPs.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, make some deals.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll see you in year three.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  You know, like, you literally gotta go to the region, like, you know, five, six, seven times.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, hang out, get some shawarma, you know, you gotta do, shake some hands, you know?

• 45:25Speaker 00

  You, you haven't come with me, I took you to Tokyo for the first time, but I will take you for Mama Nora.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Mama Nora. Man, this Mama Nora in Saudi, my Greek brother, you're gonna love it.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Ismail was not impressed, but I'm gonna, I wanna go check it.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  He had a different shawarma place, he's got like shawarma kings, I think he likes. It's kinda like going into burger culture or like brisket culture here.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  All right.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  All right, we gotta do a real quick interview.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yes, we, well, one thing, I wanted to give a quick shout out to our friends at Harmonic, because they're so helpful in prepping for that last segment with Sammy, I actually looked up the total addressable market for home water filters, and I got a whole lot of really compelling information, I'll, I'll pull it up here very quickly so you can see.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Now, people who don't know, Harmonic is like this great database of everything, but then, you know, of every transaction, every company in the world, and we use this for our research, and then we did a partnership with them, because I was like, listen, I need my investment team to have access to Harmonic, this is saving, let me just say this, we have like 20,000 applications for funding, this is saving us one hour, one hour, not on the 20,000 people who apply, because a lot of those aren't like candidates, but of those, we meet with the top 10%, top 20%, so like 2, 3, 4,000 startups per year we're meeting with, like, some weeks we've done 140 meetings, because it's like that many good companies, some weeks we do 30.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  This is saving one hour of researcher time. I don't even wanna tell Harmonic that they're saving me $3,000 or $4,000 a year at $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year, because they're gonna benchmark the savings and then whatever, but you did a quick one on the TAM of home water filters. Can you close the left-hand bar so I don't see all your weird searches there? I don't wanna.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  All my weird, all my weird Harmonic searches.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  I don't wanna know what you're searching on Harmonic.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  It's dark, man.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  But here it is.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, I just.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  What did you, what did you ask it?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Well, we, yeah, we, we didn't get, yeah, we don't talk about water filtration companies that much on the show, so I just wanted to get some quick background, so you can see I asked, what are the most popular water filters and filtration systems on the market, and then what's the TAM on home water filters? And I mean, it gave me some, you know, here's a breakdown of the industry, here are the most, countertop, pitchers, undersea, gravity fed, you know, there's all these different kinds of water filters.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Oh, there's a gravity fed, okay.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  So, yeah, they're like a whole house systems to get set up, and it gives you, and I.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  I knew about that.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  How, how large all of these markets are, what are the biggest companies doing each of these different kinds, like obviously if you wanna pitcher, Brita is sort of the market leader, and then I went down here and looked at me, a whole grid, the total addressable market by these different kinds of.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Water filter systems, or how you're choosing to do it, water treatment systems versus just point of use systems, and then it also gave me like a bunch of just interesting facts, like the Asia-Pacific region dominates 60% of the total point of use water filtration market, which when you think about it, it makes sense because of water quality concerns in places like rural India, China, Southeast Asia, those are the hottest places on the planet for, you know, people worrying about water filtration, so just even a niche topic like that, so much interesting information, try it yourself at harmonic.ai.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  And this, just to give a shout out to Harmonic, they have like the database, they have their own proprietary data, then they have their own proprietary LLM, you put that together, that research is not possible on like, you know, frontier models, whatever.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  No, if you ask Claude that, it would guess, but it wouldn't nail it like that.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Exactly, and this is where they really come in handy, I would say, actually, that research was beyond, I was just thinking we're gonna get like, here are the startups, and here's what they're doing, this really gave you the TAM TAM TAM TAM.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  This was like TAM TAMs.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, big, big job, so hey, listen, if you're, if you love TAM TAMs, those are the cookies in.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  They're, they're very good.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Australia.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  They're so good.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  They're really tasty.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Do you know about TAM TAMs?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  I've had them, sure, they, they sell them in like, there are those novelty, like, you know, candy cookie from around the world.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  Here's the secret about TAM TAMs, this is what kids do with TAM TAMs in Australia, I learned this in my time in Sydney, you bite off both ends.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Then you put it in the glass of milk or coffee, whatever you're drinking, and you use it as a straw.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, so delicious. All right, let's keep moving. I got another interview.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yes, we got, we got, we got to jump. Before we go, we got a, we want one more interview where we're going to talk to Puneet Puri from Grit Robotics. They are, we talked about Grit a few weeks ago, you may recall. They have created AI infrastructure that automates the installation of solar panels with robot arms. As you'll recall, we watched that.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  I pointed this out to you. This was my find.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  This was your find, this viral video you found of that. They don't produce, they, these are off-the-shelf robotic arms. The team at Grit, they're making the AI software that you use to teach the robots how to do all of this specific work in the, in the field. So Puneet, thanks so much for being here.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Now, Puneet, hold on a second. I saw this and I said, okay, this is AI slop. Somebody is showing us. I'm dead serious. When I sent it to Lon, I was like, is this AI slop? Like, because this is what Elon's been talking about. Other people have been talking about for a long time, which is we're going to build solar farms like in an industrial way that, you know, out of the back of the factory and we just go on forever. Now, I'm looking at this. This is a very large solar farm. This is a real installation that you're doing at your company?

• 50:59Speaker 05

  That is correct. Yes, yes. And we actually have robots right now in Nevada too, who are actually installing at this time.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  All right. So what we're, explain to us what we're seeing on the screen here, because this literally does not look real. What are, describe what we're seeing here.

• 51:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I, I think what's happening in the solar industry, they, they've realized there's a huge labor shortage, right? It's 70% attrition, 30% people can't even pass a drug test. And a huge amount of these have to be built in, in, you know, in a record amount of time. And another shocking statistic which I came across when we were starting the company was agriculture, retail, manufacturing has seen a thousand percent productivity boost since 1965. Construction as a whole has seen a 30, 46% decline since then.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  In other words, the craftspeople are high and they're aren't, they aren't trained and they quit, according to what you just told us.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  And, and skilled workforce, it's a 41% of US skilled workforce will retire by 2031 in construction.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  This is crazy. And so what we're seeing there for people who are listening is there's like a tractor with an arm. It's picking up a solar panel with what looks like a suction or something. And it then places it on a rail. Then the rail, this other robot or another arm comes in. It's got all kinds of lasers and whatever it has, and it's bolting it on to the framing. And there's a couple of people watching it work and they're doing a little work alongside it. So there is a human in the loop here. And it's on a little bit of a fast pace, but it looks like it's installing a panel, I'm going to guess in 15 minutes?

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Per panel installed? What, what is the pace that it's doing at? Because there's thousands of panels in this video.

• 52:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. So there's, there's actually a, this video has a collection of a bunch of robotics companies installing, not just ours, right? So Grit Robotics is our company. I can, I can talk a little bit more about that. Yeah. So typically what we are seeing, I can talk about numbers in the field right now. Typically a crew of eight would do 800 panels a day, right? A good group. So you're doing, one person is doing 100 panels a day if you're really solid. If you're like a weak crew, do 50 panels a day. What we are saying is once you, once you let AI come into the field and actually boost the productivity, you could see almost 3,000 to 4,000 of these panels being installed by the same crew of eight, right? And that's what you really need because, so in our case, I think we can cycle time close to 19 seconds,

• 53:37Speaker 05

  18 to 19 seconds, panel to panel to panel to panel, which is pretty fast at this time. And then it's also, solar site has a lot of other steps. You need to clear the site, you need poles on, you need to put the tractors on, you need to put the panels on, you do electrical, then you do, you know, in the end, you, you commission the plant. So there are a lot of steps. In general, it's like 20% goes into labor, right? 8% is mechanical labor. We are saying, hey, let's just go for that 8% of the mechanical labor first. And then from there on, we can even encroach into electrical labor and then start, start creating an impact.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Great. How long have you been doing this? How many solar installations are you up to now? And then what will it look like next year? Cause there's a lot of data center demand. There's a lot of solar demand. Local communities are getting into it and here in the great state of Texas. Despite what people might think, we're the largest install base of solar. We're the biggest proponents of solar in America, great state of Texas.

• 54:38Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. I think one thing people don't realize is that every time we double the production of solar panels, the price of them comes down by 48%. And it's happening every 18 months. It's almost following something like a Moore's law. Because it's kind of based on silicon, there's, there's a lot of those, you know, synergies there. And the biggest cost is the cost of installation, the people, right? So if you can actually speed that up, suddenly now we as a civilization can print solar panels like a newspaper. There's a giant fusion reactor in the middle of the solar system. It never stops. And then we have plenty of land, right? It's an obvious, it's an obvious energy source which we need to be tapping into.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  And the challenge is can, can we do this work using automation in deserts of New Mexico? In the winter of Maine, in paddy fields of Texas, when it has rained last night and it's eight inches of water, your vehicle is literally sinking as you're installing, right? So what kind of intelligence do you need which can understand these outdoor settings, construction settings? And can work safely alongside people, right? And that's what at least we are focusing on. We are saying, hey, let's learn the representation of construction world. We say, hey, everyone wears a hard hat, people wear vests, material comes in pallets, trenches are open. Can our model learn the representation of construction world, right? And then these representations go across different construction verticals. They're not just limited to solar, right? And then solar is like a first starting point for us.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  As far as installations goes, we've done like seven sites until now. It's like 35,000 panels. But you're supposed to install close to 6 million panels in the coming 18 to two years. It's, it's, yeah, it's almost close to 2.8 gigawatts. That's the contract size we are on right now. And it's, it's, the demand is crazy. Like, I'll give you an example. One of our customers, there's a big bank, I won't name, but they came to a customer saying, hey, by the way, I want you to build a 900 megawatt power plant. They said, how long will you take? And these guys have been building power plants in US for the longest time. They're probably one of the largest solar construction companies. They're like, oh, you know, 300 megawatt plant takes a year and a half, 900, probably four years. Those guys are like, no, I want it done in 18 months because I have a data center to power.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  And then these guys are panicking. And then they said, okay, fine. Now I want you to build 1.8 gigawatts. My requirements went up because I would need to now build bigger data centers and can you do it in half the time? So it's like, I think there are no people, we had to build all this infrastructure. And if he, if he cannot have automation help us, like it helped us in manufacturing, it's going to be a struggle.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Here's solar photovoltaic module prices versus cumulative capacity from our friends at Our World and Data, great website. And yeah, it's over time, just plummeted from a hundred dollars all the way down. And you can find many of these charts. Here's solar panel prices from 100. What is this one? In 1975, it was $128 per watt. Here we are, 2024.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  When I was a kid.

• 57:39Speaker 05

  It's not even 26. Yeah, go ahead Lon.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  When I was a kid, having solar panels on your roof was like a high status, like, oh, those are the rich people. They're going to try to use solar for part of their power. It was like, yeah, because it was very, very expensive. That's just like why you always thought about using solar power. It's like, well, it's great, but it's going to, it's going to cost you.

• 57:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. So utility scale solar, in the end, once you're done, you're close to like 80 or 90 cents a watt, like fully built plant at your home is typically two to three bucks. But just the panel prices now, the new panels coming out, especially if you don't have like tariffs on them. In Australia, you could get it probably for 0.18, 18 cents. Like in US, we're getting it at 26 cents, 25 cents. Also, there's going to be a little bit of a revolution on how we install solar. Again, this is like, at least our thesis, and we might be wrong, is we right now put solar panels on single axis tracker. So we're tracking the sun, right? And we leave a lot of empty space in, in these sites. You would have seen the videos also. There's like, you know, why is there like land exposed when there's like sunlight falling, right? And the reason is because they're trying to extract the most amount of energy in the day and the nighttime where the sun is at a high inclination.

• 58:44Speaker 05

  And that's where the power is most expensive. So that's how you build the plants. But once you have like a good amount of storage, you don't care. You get power in the day, you want to absorb the maximum out of it. So last time you'll go by these mechanical assemblies on which you're tracking. Hopefully it will go down and you'll have like fixed tilt, panels become so cheap. Like the single axis tracker, I think they're at 12 cents a watt, just the mechanical structure. The panel is 26 cents a watt. The, the, the new panels coming out of China, I think they're like 14 cents a watt. And if you go fixed tilt, that's like 0.2 cents of a watt. So imagine like from where you've gone so less, so you're like, I can just paint the floor with solar panels with like some small piles. And robots can do that really well. And then now you can have crazy amount of energy all day long.

• 59:26Speaker 05

  And hopefully we get to a dream where energy is too cheap to meter, right? With the right amount of storage.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Lon, I'm going to give you the last question here, Lon, because I know you care deeply about solar.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  I'll take it. Well, I'm interested in this case, in the, the training. You're, you're combining, you know, real footage, the robots are watching, other robots are, you know, put together these solar panels. And you're also using world model, like simulated data. Can you tell us about how those two work together? And like what, you know, what each version of what each kind of data is good for?

• 59:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, so we've spent a lot of effort creating huge AI simulation data pipelines at the back. We will, we will look at a real site, include it into our simulation and then inject like synthetic SKUs onto them. And then from there on, we can start training them. We can actually have like reflections, heat, like, sorry, rain, mold, like bunch of stuff which can happen on a site. And then you train all that. There is a little bit more to it. It's also the representation of the construction world. And if I can actually share like a, a quick thing, if you guys are open to that. Let me see. Let me see. So.

• 1:00:30Speaker 05

  What we're saying is, look, there is, there is a lot of common elements on these sites. Workers always wear vests and come in a hard hat. Construction environments will get hammered with rain, snow, dust. Right? You're picking up some SKU. It could be cinder block. It could be solar panel. And you have some tool, big robot, small robot, right? What you're saying is, let's learn the representation of this construction world and create task specific models which can do different tasks. You could do, put rails on, you could be putting like, you know, uh, using the same construction tech to eventually tie rebars. And then, uh, on the cinder block, there's huge sound barrier walls to be built alongside, you know, highways. So, uh, like essentially you learn the representation, the chaos of an outdoor environment and then you translate it to different construction verticals, right? And that's, that's what allows you to eventually do it.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  Uh, um, like, you know, we trained a robot to like, uh, do rebar tying. We could just get it done up, literally like two days is all it took us to get this robot to train on tying a rebar. We asked you to tie, uh, play cinder blocks, it could get it done in a day, day's time.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  So what we're seeing, we're seeing, yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  And that's because we have the training.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  This actual footage of the robot arm going in and tying together these, these pieces of rebar before concrete is poured. It's, it's fascinating.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  Absolutely fantastic.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  Um, what you're doing is extraordinary. Um, this company is a series A, series B company. How much have you raised? Where are you based?

• 1:01:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, we based out of, uh, South San Francisco. Uh, we, we, uh,

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Millbrae, you're in the Millbrae, you're in the, uh, armpit of, uh, the peninsula, like between the city and Millsboro at San Mateo.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  Uh, your Saturday joke is worse than our, but we're on the South San Francisco industrial city hardcore.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  On the east side where the Forty Niners stadium was?

• 1:02:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's, there's like a concrete plant right behind the facility at this side. So, yeah, it's like, yeah, so.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  I'm always fascinated by that area. Like you have these incredible places, you know, from San Mateo down to Redwood City, down to Atherton and Palo Alto. You have San Francisco down to Noe Valley, all incredible. Then there's this chunk of the city, which is this industrial part, which nobody can seem to figure out, like this area. And the reason is because all the airplanes coming out of SFO fly over it. So if you have a home there, it shakes. Right? It's a little bit of a problem for people, but that's where you're based.

• 1:02:46Speaker 05

  For us, it's awesome.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. How much have you raised?

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  For us, it's awesome. We, we can, uh, so, yeah, we, uh, we, uh, we recently closed our series there on, uh, twenty six million. Our viewers, thirty two million, uh, until now, we're eighteen months old, a pretty young company.

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 1:02:58Speaker 05

  Um, so.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Well, I am enamored with what you're doing. Thank you so much for sharing it. I think you're hiring probably people in robotics. So where, if people want to come work on this brilliant vision of yours, where can they go to find out about careers?

• 1:03:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, uh, just go to gritt.ai. You know, we have a G R I double T dot A I. You go there, you'll see the job openings, um, and, uh, we have a phenomenal team. We, the hardware team is all MIT. We joke around and call them the MIT mafia. Uh, the robotics team, the robotics, robotics team is all Carnegie Mellon trained roboticist. Uh, they're all part of the PhD program.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Those are the two big ones. Rodney Brooks over at MIT.

• 1:03:33Speaker 05

  And then another, and then our field team is also kick ass because they, these guys, the guys are ex-marines. They deployed robots in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so they've, they've, they're like first hands. So they are helping deploy a robot on the solar construction side and other construction verticals.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Grit Robotics, folks, get in there, work. And if you were, if you're optimizing an ad network to get ten basis points more clicks on nonsensical ad networks, I don't want to name out any specific companies, just go north, go work in this industrial area and do something incredible for humanity. Puneet, thank you for sharing and I wish you great success because it's going to be the success of, uh, humanity if we can make this work. Good job.

• 1:04:17Speaker 05

  Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. Yeah. Take care.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  I mean, it's just amazing. Two great founders, back to back, just tackling big issues and Adams in the world. Shout out to my guy Travis TK with Adams. People are doing hard stuff with moats. Okay, I pushed my other interview back ten minutes, just so you know. Uh, and so where do we want to go from here? Do you want to do the annotated update? Uh, ladies choice here, Lon. Ladies' choice.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Let's, oh, how dare you.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  Go off duty, you can go news. How dare you? And listen, you're getting so slim and you're, you're working on your health.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  I am.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  You've got your look going.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Uh, we, we should go off duty, I think, because there, there was, there were a few things here I wanted to run by. Specifically, did you see, did you see this, uh, this New York Times article about, uh, emojis and how all of our emojis are making us look like boomers?

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  So I didn't, but I'm a little concerned here because I see in the notes that the one I use most often, which is the crying laughing.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Crying laughing, yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  That is mine.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  They, they got a bunch of, Google, Google sent them a bunch of data from Android phones. So this is not including iOS. This is all data taken from Android phones in twenty twenty five. But what they found is the number one most used emoji now is the crying face, not the laugh crying, just the, uh, like a crying face, tears pouring down. And that is because they talked to, they had a whole team of New York Times analysts, emoji analysts break this down. Gen Z considers the crying laughing emoji overused. It's for boomers. They don't use it anymore. They've switched up entirely to the tears stained with, uh, with tears, uh, cheek stained with tears version.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  That's then, as you can see here, it's, those are declining in popularity. Some other interesting insights from this article, uh, the skull, meaning I'm dead, had a brief moment, had, it had a brief moment in twenty twenty three, but it's now rapidly declined. Instead, the kids are using the tears instead to mean I'm dead.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  I know this because producer Nick, uh, who worked here at Twist and then All In, and now he's already the All In Corporation, now I'll say, um, he was using dead and then he went to full on crying. So when something spicy, so this is incredibly important for me because, um, people have called me out rightfully for using the crying emoji, uh, but I use the one where the two tears are coming off either side of the eye.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  That's the dated one they're saying. Laugh crying.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  That's the dated one. But I did that because I'm, my tweets are primarily non-serious laughing ones. And then somebody's like, you know, you, what that means is you laugh at your own jokes. And I was like, I'm trying to signal to people, this is satire, don't take life so seriously.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  Um, and, okay, so is there, is there an emoji listed here? Or is there emoji advice that you can give me and other unks? Cause now I'm in my unk phase.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  Uh, unk J cow, unk cow, unk cow. Um, what should I be using now?

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  You know, I think, uh, I don't think you should try to follow what everyone else is doing. And there, I think there are some emojis to avoid, obviously, that are going to tag you as a boomer. For example, they're saying teens prefer the fire emoji, whereas older people use the one hundred. So don't use that. I think it's more what to avoid. Teens prefer prayer hands instead of thumbs up. So I think it's more about it's, use whichever ones you feel best about, but avoiding the, the minefield of the ones that have been outlined for boomers. Like, I'll give you an example. Since moving to Texas, I really like the guy with the cowboy hat emoji. And I use that.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Yee-haw.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Yee-haw. I use that in place of like thumbs up or fire, anything I approve of, I'll just put cowboy guy on there. He's smiling. It communicates the same thing. And I also like, uh, eyes, like the eyes looking in one direction, like look at this.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Like I'm taking note, I'm taking note.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Right. Noting that Oliver, I think, is who got me started on that one. Uh, but I think that one's good too. As long as you're avoiding the pitfall, this one makes you look like a boomer one, I think you're, I think you're safe.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  I'm a salute guy. I'm a salute guy. Everybody knows that because I'm a Yes Chef salute guy, you know, from the great state of Texas. And people didn't know what the salute was. I just felt it was elegant and it was in my vibe. So take from that what you will. I had a little something here that I'll share. Uh, you know, I love dictation.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Um, but, and I, you know, I have studio mics like this one that I use. But sometimes I'm in the car, sometimes I'm in a meeting and I'm finding the fidelity when I'm whispering and I'm at this level is not good enough to get picked up by dictation software. I, I like Whisper, Grammarly's got dictation, all of the L L M's have a dictation mode now built into them. The dictation is how you take your instructions, your agents, you know, your interactions with large language models to the next level, because you can just talk and talk and talk and explain what you want. If you're writing one or two sentences per prompt, you're getting it wrong.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  What you want to do is spill your guts out and you want to talk for two minutes, three minutes, and that's something you wouldn't bother typing out. And you can just go total stream of consciousness. When you say it to the L L M, you're using like Claude coworker, you know, perplexity computer, which I talk about, Hermes, Hermes, uh, agent.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Hermes.

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  I call it Hermes.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  You do, I know, but it's Hermes.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Uh, it's, well, it's like the Prada agent I use as well, um, from, from Apple.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  Anyway, it, it just does better. It does better. And so I was sort of researching microphones and D G I, D G I. Uh, you can see here, I just bought this one with two microphones that clip on. They have magnetic clip-ons, they have a standard clip-on. I clip this thing on, it lasts for hours, it's over Bluetooth. Pull it up on the screen, guys. I think I shared it with you.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I will, give me one moment.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  All right. Well, this is Jacob, should be pulling this stuff up so we can keep you in the moment.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  I fully agree, but here we go.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  Yes. So this one has a pack, uh, as you can see, but what you can also do is if you just want to get the D G I mic three transmitter for eighty four bucks, it's the third one over in those chicklet squares under the price. Um, you could just buy a solo dolo one here, Lon, for like eighty bucks. The thing's the size of a quarter and it connects over Bluetooth. The fidelity is unbelievable.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  And you do have to on your mobile phone, kind of tweak it a bit because it's only a microphone. It's not a speaker and like getting that to work with individual software. You're going to have to get into the settings to make it work. But once you do, it's well worth the price you pay. DJ is not a sponsor. This is off duty where we just.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're just talking about stuff we like. Yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  It's interesting. DJI used to be like the influencer. When I was first doing like digital media, everybody had their little DJI. That was like the go to like, I'm going to go to an event and film myself and make a vlog out of it later. So look at the shout out to DJI, they're staying in the game.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  Yes, um, I have one other recommendation.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Ted Lasso is back for season four.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  It is on Apple TV.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  Amazing. It's on Apple and um, I think the first two episodes are out now. And it's absolutely fantastic. Very basic premise, you know, um, if you watch season three, no spoilers here, but just generally you'll get this off of like the first five minutes of it. Ted Lasso has gone home to take care of his kid. And then there's a big question. They want him to come and they want him to coach now the women's team and go back to England to coach the women's team.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  That's all I'll tell you.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Mixing it up for season four.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  I was like, what are they going to do here? And they nailed it. The first two episodes are dynamite.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  This has been a long time coming and after season three, Sidakis and the creators were like, you know what? We're good. We're done. Great run. We, we did everything we wanted to do. This is it for Ted Lasso. And it was really like, the fans were just so like, people didn't want to say goodbye to these characters in this world. So they sort of got cajoled into bringing it back for season four.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  It's just charming and lovely and the actors are fantastic. Finally, Lanterns is coming to HBO.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  This Sunday.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Critics have seen the first six or so. I've heard a lot of good buzz from LA people I used to do videos with.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  Now, this is critically important because they went to the guy who was doing all the DC stuff. Uh, with Batman, what's his name? Uh, the Snyder cut or whatever. Um, I think they went to Snyder to do this originally. He had his own vision for it. Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  And which I would have loved to seen, but that was going to be hardcore. Um, you know, like superhero.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Yes. His vision was very comic booky. He's that's, that's the Zack Snyder thing.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  Which is great, which is great.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Make it look like the original, you know, make it like a comic book. Yeah.

• 1:13:39Speaker 00

  But here's the thing, it has now been shifted because they wanted something a little different. They wanted a series that could go on for a little bit. People don't know this Green Lantern, one of my favorite characters. I think my favorite character in the DC universe is Green Lantern and the Lanterns. On the other side, you know, I'm team X-Men. I always loved that. Lanterns now is being done by the writers from Ozark, True Detective. Um, and the showrunner is Lindoff.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  David Lindelof, who did, David Lindelof, who did, I mean, Watchmen, The Leftovers.

• 1:14:13Speaker 00

  I love both of those.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  Lost, he and Carlton Cues were the co-creators of Lost. A, a, a big, a big name in TV. Uh, it's also good. They got Tom King working on it, who is a very well regarded, uh, comic book writer. Like he, he, he wrote the comic book that that new Supergirl movie was based on, The Woman of Tomorrow.

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  Yes, I didn't see that yet, but all I want to say is this is looking very promising.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  You know what it looks like to me? And I mean this in a good way. I mean this in the best way. People have been saying that and I, I, I see why they're saying that. To me, it looks like Taylor Sheridan. It looks like what if you took the, what if you took the landman? What if you took the mayor of Kingstown, the lioness vibe, but in a DC world with the Green Lanterns? That's what it looks like to me. And I, I say, I'm all for it. Let's do it.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. Fantastic. Anything else you want to add here as we wrap?

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, there's one more show I will point people to very quickly because I know you've got to go. It's on, uh, it's on Hulu. You can also watch it on Disney plus because that's how they do it now. It's called Furious. Uh, it is loosely, loosely, it's loosely based on that eighties movie, Black Widow. The basic setup is, uh, you're following two stories simultaneously. One is it's a woman who was formerly human trafficked and she is now a serial killer who is taking revenge. And then there is a, a different woman who is a young or a rookie FBI agent who is sort of on her trail. And you're following both of those stories, sort of a Killing Eve kind of vibe to it. But man, they are, they are very interesting characters. These are really, really good leap performances.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Emmy Rossum from Shameless plays the FBI agent. Lola Pettit Crew, you saw her right there, is the serial killer. It's a really interesting cat and mouse thing where you're following this investigation. That's Scoot McNary is her, her, the cop.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  All right. I'll see your furious and I will raise you. I'm going to see your furious and I'm going to raise you a, the shards. I am a huge Bret Easton Ellis podcast fan and a fan of his books.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  Psycho, uh, and, um, uh, uh.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Luna Park, I really liked that one.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  All this great stuff. And, and, uh, he decided four or five years ago during COVID to serialize a, a novel, which is got his character himself. As the protagonist, as you see there, this incredible actor. And it's kind of got euphoria vibes. Um, it was going to be done on HBO. HBO fumbled. The guy who did Love Story.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Brian Murphy.

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  Brian Murphy, who's great, has spent millions of dollars on these first two episodes to make it an homage to the eighties. And it is unbelievable what's on the screen. There's two episodes out. I've only watched the first and I was blown away because, um, the first, I, I listened to the serialized version. He just did it on his podcast as like 20 minutes at the opening of each podcast, 30 minutes. He serialized the book and then his agent was like, hey dumbass, I'm your book agent. You're Brett F-ing Easton Ellis. You're an author. What are you doing giving this away for free? It's fantastic. So then they produced it as a book. HBO bought it. They fumbled.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  Now AMC did it. It's five years later. This is going to be, I think, like euphoria level hit if they don't fumble it.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  Hmm. He did, there was that movie Rules of Attraction too, that was a Bret Easton Ellis book. It looks like it's a kind of similar world of like debauched teens and twenty somethings. Yeah.

• 1:17:51Speaker 00

  That, nobody captures like the debauchery and the aesthetics. This is what I love about Bret, Bret Easton Ellis. He is a fan of aesthetics and he will make something beautiful aesthetically. And use everything from the cars to the clothes, to the food, to the mall, the Galleria. You know, there, there, there's a Corvette in this, like just driving up PCH. It's just an amazing, bring you to the eighties. And the guy from Love Story, I saw that Love Story with our JFK Junior.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:33Speaker 00

  I was in New York at that time and I was enthralled at Love Story. My wife and I watched it. We both loved it because it's romantic and tragic and celebrity. But I was like, oh, that's walkers. Oh, that's this place. Oh, that's the odeon.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  He's always very good at that. That American crime story when they did with OJ Simpson, where they recreated LA in the mid nineties. I was already, I, I was living around LA at that time and it is like, it brings you right back. Like I don't, and in LA, it's impossible to do that. Nothing looks like it looked in the 1990s anymore. It's a totally different city.

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  You're going to love the first episode of The Shards because he goes to Westwood to go see The Shining.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  And like Westwood looks nothing today like it did when The Shining came out, nothing.

• 1:19:17Speaker 00

  And he goes to those two theaters on the Caddy Corners that was across from Stan's.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  It's the Bruin, it's the Fox and the Bruin is, is, yeah, they're on opposite.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  He pulls up in his dad's convertible Mercedes, like iconic, parks outside of their atom meter, walks up to buy a ticket. And then on the display, it's got the, uh, the Kurosawa film, Kurosaga or whatever, um, from 1980s.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Kagamusha.

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  Kagamusha as like coming soon. And I'm like, the detail level here on this show is just like, it's Easter eggs in the same way comic book ones do that. Another amazing episode here of Twist. This is off duty on Fridays. We like to go off duty. We like to prepare you for the weekend. These are the great, these are the great suggestions, whether it's a product, whether it's a movie, whether it's a service. You just got to get in there on Fridays for off duty with Lon Harris and your boy Jake Howe. We'll see you next time. Bye, bye.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Bye, everybody.