Breaking down Nvidia's Hugging Face and Poolside bets | E2331

This Week In Startups is made possible by: DigitalOcean https://do.co/twist Every.io https://every.io PayPal https://paypal.launch.co Today's show: *Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, just days after quietly licensing Poolside's coding model for $6 billion+. On TWiST, Jason lays out why this is actually the biggest AI story of the year. Nvidia plans to offer enterprises unmetered, unlimited on-prem compute, pulling them away from reliance on Anthropic and OpenAI's frontier models and products. PLUS we're chatting with Halter founder & CEO Craig Piggott about how his company helps farmers optimize their land use via solar-powered AI-driven cattle collars. AND Hop Aero CEO and co-founder Matija Milenovic shows us Rook, his autonomous hypersonic cargo rocket that can launch from a shipping container and deliver cargo up to 450 miles away in about 15 minutes. Finally, Jason and Lon explain why you never post Slop on the timeline. Guests: Craig Piggott on X: https://x.com/craig_piggott Halter: https://www.halterhq.com/ Matija Milenovic on X: https://x.com/mat_milenovic Hop Aero: https://hopaero.com/ Relevant Links: OpenAI Open Letter: https://openai.com/collective-cyberdefense/ OpenAI Hugging Face report: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/ OpenAI Jalapeño report: https://openai.com/index/jalapeno-first-results/ Dario Amodei-Gavin Baker tweet thread: https://x.com/DarioAmodei/status/2088758816376807762 TechCrunch: Nvidia-Hugging Face deal: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/nvidia-closes-in-on-hugging-face-acquisition/ TechCrunch coverage of Halter: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/04/unpacking-peter-thiels-big-bet-on-solar-powered-cow-collars/ Dealroom: Sir Peter Back on Rocket Lab: https://app.dealroom.co/news/note/sir-peter-beck-on-rocket-lab-s-no-money-so-we-have-to-think-playbook-from-a-60k-new-zealand-start-up-to-an-end-to-end-space-company WSJ: Druckenmiller op-ed: "Let the Bond Market Speak": https://www.wsj.com/opinion/let-the-bond-market-speak-81529d74 NOTUS: Druckenmiller's WSJ op-ed was written with AI: https://www.notus.org/media/stanley-druckenmillers-wsj-op-ed-bessent-ai WaPo: Wall Street Journal defends Druckenmiller op-ed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/08/25/wall-street-journal-says-ai-generated-op-ed-didnt-breach-its-standards/ Photon Matrix Laser Mosquito Killer: https://photonmatrixlab.com/ "The Wizard of the Kremlin" trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7ctYp3zQVA "King & Conqueror" trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anS9xQEPTsU "Lanterns" trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UIBOsuUwc4 "Rebel Ridge" trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF3gZicntIw Alpaka Bravo Sling Max 2 bag: https://alpakagear.com/products/bravo-sling-max-v2 No Agenda podcast: https://www.noagendashow.net/ THR: John C. Dvorak obit: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/john-dvorak-dead-tech-journalist-no-agenda-inside-track-1236657317/ Timestamps: 0:00 The 100+ company open letter on cyberdefense 9:48 DigitalOcean - Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. 16:46 Why some models are "unsafe at any latency" 19:44 Craig Piggott of Halter joins the show 21:03 Every.io - For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io 26:09 How do you add cows to Starlink? 31:26 PayPal - Pay zero processing fees on your first $100K in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at https://paypal.launch.co 47:52 Founder-led hyper-local sales motion 53:15 Remember John C. Dvorak 58:27 Matija Milenovic of Hop Aero joins 59:53 Sending out autonomous swarms in the Indo-Pacific 1:11:26 Nvidia's mega-Hugging Face deal 1:16:32 Nvidia's "unmetered" play against Anthropic and OpenAI 1:29:47 How letting AI write for you is like lip syncing 1:33:44 Laser-guided mosquito defense system 1:36:32 Lon's streaming picks 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

  This is the biggest story of the year.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Nvidia taking over all of open source. They've agreed to acquire Hugging Face for 12.9 billion.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  US open source equals Nvidia. Chinese open source equals Kimi. Now we have our US champion. If you want to know how Anthropic is hitting 50 billion. If you want to know how OpenAI is hitting whatever it is, 30, 40 billion. Customers like Uber. Unmet is the word we're going to be talking about in 2027. That means that you could see Nvidia add a third of the market cap of the top two frontier models. One third of their revenue moving over to Nvidia. If it works. This is the biggest news ever.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  This week in startups is brought to you by PayPal. Pay zero processing fees on your first $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at paypal-launch.co. Every for all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io, Digital Ocean. Want to see what building on a true AI native platform looks like? Head to do.co/twist to start building on Digital Ocean's AI native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  All right, everybody, welcome back to Twist. It's Friday, August 28th. Summer's over, lots on the docket. Sam Altman talking about cyber threats again, scaring the bejesus out of everybody. Saying, hey, we're going to need to have a coordinated effort here. Nvidia bought Hugging Face and we got some great guests. We want to start with a story or go right to a guest? What's the ladies' choice, Lon? What do you want to do here?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, misgendering me again. How dare you? No, I think we should start with this. I think we've got a top story. AI's Oppenheimer moment.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  It was the beard that made me misgender you.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  That's right, bearded lady. It's one of my old circus career. We might be in AI's Oppenheimer moment, Jason. OpenAI, Anthropic, some of the other companies have issued a warning about coming cyber threats. Yesterday, over 100 companies signed an open letter warning that we only have months to prepare for AI-enabled cyber attacks. It includes OpenAI, it includes Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, all the usual suspects. They're warning hospitals, water systems, critical infrastructure, all under threat. They want security standards raised, including shared threat intel. And they want this defense funded at every level. All that said, the letter doesn't have any actual commitments. There's no deadlines, there's no mandated funding.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  It's just sort of floating, floating the suggestion. So, you know, I mean, in your perspective, what do you think the best way for us to actually? I think everybody would agree we should do this. What do you think the best way to organize this effort might be?

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Okay, we did an open letter. This is an open letter.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Written by people like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, et cetera. They passed around and said, hey, we're entering dangerous territory and we need a coordinated effort.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Essentially, yeah, 100 companies signed on to this open letter. The hyperscalers obviously sort of leading the pack.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Why now is always the question? Why now? And you have to deconstruct people's behavior. So let's pause for a second and say, why would the top 100 folks take this time now to write a coordinated letter? And the letter is addressed to who? Who is the letter addressed to? And let's pull the letter up here on the screen. These are important things when an open letter happens.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  It's called a call for collective action on cyber defense. It's not, it's not directed at any one person, but I think it's the public. It's PR on one level and it's aimed at sort of politicians.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Well, it exists on the OpenAI website as we're showing it. It says, "An open letter for a global surge in cyber defense." So it's very important to first principles. Anytime there's an open letter or somebody makes a statement, to slow down and say, why now? First question, why is this happening now? And then, look, who's driving this? So who's driving this is pretty obvious. There's a bunch of signatories on the left. We assume that they're driving it. It was released on all of their websites or it was released on OpenAI's websites? OpenAI is the leader of this pack? Who, is it like every single person releases at the same time? Or do we not know?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  I, I don't know. I'm looking it up. I mean, when you Google this title, it does come up on several different sites. So I don't think, I think OpenAI, again, leading the charge. That's the number one link when you look it up. But I think other, other companies have also posted it.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  That could be just SEO. So every company is, so the translation here from first principles. I'm trying to get to first principles always when we have these kind of announcements. Cause you want to be able to media deconstruct. I'm going to help you media deconstructor. Every company is releasing this. The top SEO, based on what you're telling me, went to OpenAI. Okay, fine. And I saw Sam quoted it. So then if Microsoft did this, did Satya Nadella

• 4:52Speaker 00

  write about this? And then did Dario or somebody from Anthropic, like a leader, actually tweet about it? So those are the things you want to know. Cause we want to understand who's really behind this? Or if this is when you have 100 people or 50 people write these things? That's the other thing you want to find out is like, I get asked to sign these things sometimes. So let's take a look at Dario's account. Is he talking about, let's take a look at Satya Nadella's. Is he talking about it? And let's pull up Sam's and how Sam is framing this. And then we have to ask ourselves, why is this happening now? So we'll pull up those three individuals Twitter. We'll see if they're even talking about it. I know Sam is talking about it.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Satya has not tweeted since August 21st. He's not talking about this today.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  Microsoft signed it. He's not talking about it. Now we go to Dario and maybe the Anthropic official account. Let's check that. And this is the way you do proper media deconstruction is you go figure out who's talking about this and who talked about it when. So here, August 27th, yesterday, Sam Altman writes, "This is a critically important moment for cyber defense with AI. There is not much time to act." Okay, this is like a very charged statement. "We are happy if you want to work with us or any of our competitors or partners, but please take this moment seriously." Again, he's being very dramatic here and we'll read into that in a moment. "Only an urgent and intense collective response will work." So this is critical.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  He is coming out very hard about this. Did Dario talk about it?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  No, I'm looking at Dario's page right now. He actually hasn't tweeted since the Gavin Baker kerfuffle of last week.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  And then here's OpenAI's tweet from August 26th. "We have conducted a thorough investigation into Hugging Face incident." Into the Hugging Face incident. That's when their AI bot went and tried to steal credentials on Hugging Face's site and kind of hacked their site to accomplish goals. "We are releasing a technical report and accompanying blog posts that reconstructs the agent's activities." That's OpenAI's agent that hacked Hugging Face. "Explain why existing safeguards failed and detail how we're preventing reoccurrence." So here we go. Sam is leaning into this. OpenAI has egg on their face or they have liability potentially from having hacked Hugging Face's site.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  If Hugging Face's site was hacked, then you have to ask yourself, is OpenAI's, are OpenAI's other agents during the building of models hacking other people's sites? That's what I think is happening here. I think this is coming out today, always when these letters come out, always when people make statements. There's usually an incident that people know about.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Which is the Hugging Face one. There's also sometimes other incidents to come and they are doing, Lon, what we call getting ahead of it.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  So somebody says, let's get ahead of this. I think what's happened is there's probably two or three hacks that have occurred that are acute. Acute is a fancy word for important, intense. And we might have a hack that's occurred already that the government is aware of, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, et cetera, aware of, that could be of the nature of major hacks we talked about previously on the program, the Ashley Madison hack.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  There was an iCloud hack. There might be one of those that's going to drop in the next couple of days. It's Friday, this is coming out Thursday, Friday. Over the weekend, just predicting here, you might hear about a significant hack of our government or of your sensitive information. They are prepping us the same way last week I told you, or maybe earlier this week and it went viral, that the Chinese are doing a psyops on America and their own country to make their people accept robotic overlords that will be taking their jobs, that will be integrated into society, that will be observing and recording their citizens to control them. That's what they do in China.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  They are prepping them to accept robotic companions, robotic workers, robotics, you know, in their lives. That's their PR campaign right there. We are doing some other campaign right now, which is, hey, your, your privacy is over. You're going to get hacked. It's not our fault. And maybe trying to spread the blame around here. So there are psyops happening everywhere, folks. That's what I think this is. This is a prep for a coming hack that they know about or that they know is imminent.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had Uga Demore from Expo on This Week in AI this week. And he said, it's been a year. He's like, for a year, the West has been totally vulnerable to this. We're getting hacked all the time. People might not realize it. It's not life and death for most people, but it's already, we're already in the danger zone and we have been for some time. That was a, I didn't realize that, I think, as clearly as he stated it.

• 9:48Speaker 00

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• 10:32Speaker 00

  And they cut their cost per token in half while doing so. So here's your call to action. If you want to understand what building on a true AI native platform looks like, go to do.co/twist. Start building on the Digital Ocean AI native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. That's do.co/twist. What is at the core of this is that if you build a great model for writing code.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  And you are incredible at incentivizing AI to do recursive, I'm sorry, doing reinforcement learning or creating loops. You are then, by definition, allowing for or enabling hacking at a scale that is essentially infinite and unconstrained. So let's just say this clearly. The frontier models have enabled inadvertently by making incredible tools to vibe code whatever you want. The counter to that is making a tool that can infinitely, depending on how

• 11:46Speaker 00

  much compute you have access to, is infinitely better at hacking than the white hats and is relentless and has an unlimited amount of time and effort and intelligence to pair hacks together that humans simply do not have the time. There's no one human who can put all of GitHub, every open source code into their brain at once.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  And then say, here is the history of every hack done since 1970. Here's all code that's being used sorted by the last update to its code and how often it's updated and how many people are using it, the stars, the impact of it. And then it can put those things together and say, what hasn't been updated? What's not being vetted and cleaned up and tightened up? Which projects, which software is not tight, is not updated regularly? And what are the latest hacks? What's the history of hacks? And it can just figure out brilliantly in the magic AI box, it can, just like it can guess your next word, it can guess the next hack.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Can guess the next big hack. Now.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  I wanted to talk about this, Jason. Do you remember this earlier this week? It's also, it's not just the availability of this intelligence, it's getting cheaper. So hackers are budget constrained. They can't just run Fable 5 all day and do all the things you're saying, but they can now afford to use DeepSeek. And as those models get not just cheaper, but much more powerful, we're going to see this just continue to explode. Or people can just run exactly what you're saying overnight for weeks at a time and find every vulnerability there is.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  And so this is going to be a boom for Palo Alto Networks. It's going to be incredible for CrowdStrike. Those are the two leaders. I might put a J trade on this weekend for those two stocks. I'm going to have to do an analysis of them. I don't have time to do it right now on the air. We got a big docket. But I think that those firms are now going to be fully, fully engaged with by the frontier models who are going to go to Palo Alto Networks. They're going to go to CrowdStrike and others and say, let's build. As you build frontier models, we're going to need access to them early. We're going to build, need to build the sure it up tools, you know, like check the locks.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  And somebody is going to just have to go check the locks, check the alarm system, check the perimeter of every piece of software. And I think we're going to see a hack before the end of the year. I think it's possible we'll see a hack that will make the public distrust AI even more. A cataclysmic hack of people's banking information or crypto wallets or personal, you know, iMessages, Signal, WhatsApp. One of those gets hacked and AI dumps it. People start getting extorted. The extortion by Russian, North Korean hackers, et cetera, Chinese hackers, or some big dump, or the stealing of crypto, this is going

• 14:53Speaker 00

  to make people hate AI much more than they hate data centers, or they hate writing AI slop and passing it off as your words in the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Shout out Wall Street Journal editorial page for phoning it in. Those things are going to be minor compared with losing your Bitcoin or having your iMessages dumped. It's going to be really an interesting moment in time. And I think that's what the industry is trying to get ahead of. They're warming us up to the fact that we've already probably been hacked by AI.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  And they are. I think you're absolutely correct. It is a little, it is a little blame shifty. It's like, hey, man, this is all of our problem. It's like, is it all of our problem or is this your problem?

• 15:38Speaker 00

  I think what you'll see is the majority of the hacks will be done by the frontier models. So the frontier models then who create these, it's going to be essentially like producing a car without three-point seatbelts, producing a car without airbags, you know, selling cigarettes without, and saying nicotine is not an addictive drug. Have you ever seen the congressional hearing? I'll have one of the team pull it up. There's a congressional hearing where they go down the line and ask everybody working at Big Tedaco.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Who thinks, yeah, nicotine is addictive. Right. Yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  And the audacity of them is while they were architecting cigarettes to be more addictive through any number of chemical sequences and, you know, product innovations to have the audacity to say not addictive. This is going to be, I think, what happens to the frontier models, which is you made something that you knew could hack everything and you released it knowing that. Oh, congratulations. You wrote a letter, but you gave people a car, you left out the airbags and the three-point seatbelts, and you made it go over 150 miles an hour and you made it, you know, watch this to just understand. This is what we're

• 16:55Speaker 00

  going to see in about 18 months when the world gets hacked and people lose their Bitcoin.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Unsafe at any latency, we'll call it.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  To begin my questioning on the matter of whether or not nicotine is addictive. Let me ask you first, and I'd like to just go down the row, whether each of you believes that nicotine is not addictive. I heard virtually all of you touch on it and just yes or no. Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?

• 17:21Speaker 04

  I believe nicotine is not addictive. Yes.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Mr. Johnston?

• 17:25Speaker 04

  Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. There is no intoxication.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  We'll take that as a no.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Wow. Wow. Unbelievable. Shout out to Michael Mann's classic 1999 film, The Insider, which is about.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  If you haven't seen it, please watch it.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Incredible movie.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  I'm just giving you a highlight. This is literally what's going to happen in under 18 months. Clip it now. Bookmark it. J Cal was right about everything. Here's your clip, folks.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the clip, Grock, get on this.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Sam and Dario are going to be on a stand there and they're going to say, did you release this? And then everybody's cryptocurrency wallet got hacked, everybody's Signal, whatever cryptid thing got hacked. That might not be that they, you know, hack encryption. That will probably be quantum computing's legacy, but it could be that somebody programs a way to build a backdoor into everybody's phones, get them to download some, you know, exploit as the next, you know, phishing attack, let's say, and an at-scale phishing attack that is just so good that 2% of society falls for it, and then it expands and 10% of society falls for it. And now you got 10% of people, you know, having their Bitcoin

• 18:46Speaker 00

  sucked out of their wallet. This is like a completely possible thing to do.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Amongst many things. And that's, and that's just a human engineering device, right? There could be other things. And now everybody can create those things. It used to be if you wanted to learn how to do a phishing attack, you had to get into some dark web stuff. You had to go trade some wares.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  You're spoofing somebody else's domain. There's, there are technical elements to it.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  To get those, you had to get into a community with other hackers. You had to have somebody send you the code. It wasn't like freely available inside a large language model.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  And when you take the rails off of these and you have an open source one, oh my Lord. This is going to get spicy. There's your media deconstruction for the day.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  We should bring in our first guest, I think. Let's get started.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  So we've got Craig Piggott. He's the founder and CEO of Halter, Jason. They're a livestock management technology company centered around virtual fencing systems. Craig, thanks for being here.

• 19:44Speaker 05

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. So tell us or show us what you're building and why you built it.

• 19:50Speaker 05

  Cool. We built a, it's like a tech platform for ranchers, ranchers and farmers. At the center of that is a collar. Collar goes on a cow, goes on cattle. And yeah, we use that collar to train animals to respond to cues. And what that means for ranchers is that they're able to virtually fence and shift those cattle around their land. That means the land's more productive. They can run more cattle. We do a bunch of other stuff as well. We monitor health, fertility, calving, we measure grass. It's like an operating system.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  And here it is. If you're watching, you can see the collar there. It looks like a Fitbit with solar panels for cattle. This goes over their neck like a harness of some type, like I have on my wrist here from my whoop. Solar powered, GPS.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  I'm assuming it has accelerometers, heat sensors, heart rate. What else is in the sensor pack here? And how much does it cost to build something like that? Like, what does it cost per cow to make one of those? And then how do you you charge for it? I'm very curious about the business model, but let's start with what sensors did you choose to put in there for cattle owners? Starting a company is hard enough. You need to focus on running your business and building a great product. And you need to clear all that back office work, all those chores off of your plate. And that's why EVRY exists. E V E R Y is the all in one platform for incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, taxes, basically your entire back office.

• 21:26Speaker 00

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• 22:05Speaker 05

  Yes, the core sensor that powers a lot of the analytics is the IMU. So axillary magnetometer. We do track temperature and humidity and other things, but you can infer most health related things and fertility and carving from behaviors, which is what you we run models to kind of understand what's happening from the IMU. So that's kind of the core sensor. In terms of the model, it's a subscription. So you pay per cow per month. There's multiple tiers and packages that kind of depends on on your operation. And you don't buy the hardware. We give the hardware away for free. You just pay the subscription.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  So we've got about one and a half million collars out there across New Zealand, Australia, US, Canada, etc.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  Awesome. Now, there is an audio cue as the fence. Explain how you train cattle to, I don't know, go to the left, go to the right, don't go forward. How does that work? You're not shocking them? You're giving them a vibration? Explain what's going on here.

• 23:08Speaker 05

  The best analogy is when you're parking your car, you have the audio feedback from the sensors as you like approach walls and other cars. So it beeps at you. Very similar concept, left and right. So animals know if they're approaching a virtual fence based on that audio cue. We also use a vibrationary cue. We do train them with a very low energy pulse, which gives that sound meaning. Most cows or cattle today are trained to an electric fence and the primary cue is vision. And we just turn that into audio. So once they're trained, runs on a sound and vibration.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  What does it cost per cow per month? What's the what's my per seat, per steak? What's my per steak cost here?

• 23:48Speaker 05

  The like base starting tier is around $9 per cow a month, but it depends on all the packages and things.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  So you can spend 200 bucks a year per cow. They're paying $200 a year. How many years does the cow wear the collar for before it is processed?

• 24:03Speaker 05

  So the collar, imagine it kind of like a seat. You can scan it with your phone and tag it on or change any animal that it's on. So the collar will sometimes go on many cows, but most cattle in terms of the cows will be, say, 10 years. If you're a dairy cow, sometimes it's longer than that. If you're a beef cow, it's often we collar them the mums, like the calves that you raise often for like the end product. You want them to kind of creep grows ahead and so we don't collar them. So we collar the cows most of the time.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  So what is the number one reason people use this? What is the selling point? When you come in, they say, hey, this feature is why we're buying this. Because obviously it's got a range of features, but what is the number one to to keep the cattle in a certain location? Is that the number one goal?

• 24:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, fences have lifted the have given ranchers control of their land for hundreds of years, but they're really expensive. You can't shift them around, things like that. So the virtual fencing part of the product enables our customers to run more cattle, to actually utilize their land properly. So they can they can rest the land when they need to, they can graze in the spots that the cowboys don't go to. So we've got some customers that are running twice as many cattle on the same piece of land because they're able to actually control it, not waste any grass, things like that. So that's the big value prop. But every customer is obviously different. Some of them are chasing genetics and metrics and things like that. So it kind of changes.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Okay, so I can more efficiently work my land, which means I can have twice as many cattle on my land. So this is enabling folks to go much bigger in terms of production. So talk to me just, and I'm sure Lon's got a couple of questions here, but how does this work? You know, when we're out in ranchland here, we don't have internet, nor do we have power. So obviously it's got solar on it, but nor do we have like 5G. So, you know, if you're in ranch country, there's no way to get these. Are you hooked up to Starlink? Or do people have to put repeaters on their property? How does this actually reach and deal with that connectivity issue?

• 26:17Speaker 05

  Exactly, in terms of the Starlink, the selling point. So it used to be base station or tower based. And that was all right on some of the less mountainous country. But and like you say, through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado mountains, like the the more kind of off grid you get, the more you need that direct connection with Starlink. So yes, each collar now can talk to Starlink. They also talk to each other, so they kind of coordinate a mesh. They elect the best leader to then talk to Starlink. That kind of saves power and costs and things like that.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Fascinating. And now it's obviously doesn't have a dish or you didn't put a Starlink mini on the back of like the leader of the pack here. But how does, you know, a device that is the size of, it looks like a bread box or a loaf of bread? How does a device the size of a loaf of bread actually hit the Starlink? What is the technology there? Because it's much bigger than a smartphone, but it's looks like it's much smaller than a satellite dish.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  It's it's about the the same size as a smartphone on on each side of the of the cow. And it's exactly the same technology. So your phone can obviously talk to Starlink. And so, well, some of them can, depending who you work with. But so it's the same technology that it's like the direct to cell technology. So yeah, wherever you take a collar.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  What's the speed of the direct to cell now? What is it at right now? How much throughput do you get? Obviously, you can store the information. And then when it gets a good line of sight, I guess it has better throughput like you do when you're doing direct to satellite. But these are like, aren't these still like a little drip drip kind of situation, like dial up modems?

• 27:54Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Or am I wrong?

• 27:55Speaker 05

  No, they are. They are for sure.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  It kind of depends. When we coordinate all the information between them and compress it and send it, and it takes like a few seconds every minute to transfer that that data. We do run a lot of machine learning models on the device itself. So when we need like 100 hertz access to certain sensors, we actually run those models on the collar. We train them offline and then we put them onto the collar. That gives it obviously, you don't have a bandwidth problem.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  I'm curious. I mean, the I in the pre interview, I was calling this collar essentially like whoop for cows because you're you're monitoring so much about each animal aside from just where it is. Can you give us a little insight? What are the most useful pieces of data a farmer needs? Like when they pull up their cow on the tablet? What are the what are the metrics they're looking at?

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the whoop or thipper for an animal is is a small part of the equation. That's just the monitoring side compared to say the fencing and shifting. But on the on that side, obviously, they care about animal health. They care about are they fertile? Are they is this cow and calf? Is she carving? Is she in trouble? Do I need to go help? A lot of these animals are sometimes hours away and they get on a horseback and they spend four hours trying to trying to find them. And so being able to know wherever you are, hey, this animal is healthy and, you know, behaving normally is is a really big unlock. We're working on some other cool stuff like measuring intake through the collar by counting bites and profiling bites. And then you can rank cows on efficiency and things like that.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  So you could literally know their jaw speed, how much they're eating by the tilting of the head, etc. What about cameras on this? Do you have cameras on it? Because I, you know, that's one of the things when you lose a cattle. We on my ranch here, my neighbors got cattle. He rents his ranch out for cattle and had a fence go down. We had two cattle show up lawn. Wife says to me, those are ours now, right? And I said, babe, let me explain to you one thing about Texas and how cattle works. Stealing cattle means they can murder you. That's like the one thing you don't do. They're literally branded and they got an ear tag for a reason. People take cattle rustling. Yeah, cattle rustling.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  That's what John Wayne would have called it. Like he'll come after you. That's like the number one no, no. We don't get to keep the cows. We do get to walk them over the fence and then we get to rebuild the fence with our neighbor. And that's how ranches work. You rebuild the fence together. That's like when you and your neighbor get together. But what about cameras, video, et cetera? Like, is there a case for that? And then, because you could actually see what they're eating and you could process that. And then you could then look at the output. Hey, what's the marbling on this cow? I'm just thinking from a selfish perspective on my wagyu. But that is the other concern that ranchers have is how do I get the best product?

• 30:48Speaker 05

  Totally, totally. We measure what they're eating, how much grass there is, like all of that information through using satellites. So we pull data off satellites. We then combine it with weather stations and data off the collar as well. We have a model that tells ranchers or farmers that information. So we don't have cameras on the device. Obviously your cattle aren't, they're always in like one place on your ranch. So if you want to know, hey, should I shift them over here? And they're not there, then you wouldn't have that information. So we get asked about it a lot, though. Um, you also, in the Holter app, you can take photos of your land and it'll tell you everything you need to know. So, um, yeah, no cameras on the collars yet, at least.

• 31:27Speaker 00

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• 32:11Speaker 00

  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.co. And how is the startup doing? And I realize you've raised a decent amount of money. You got over a million harnesses out there, a million collars out there, you said?

• 32:39Speaker 05

  Collars. Yes, yeah, um, it's good. We're about 600 people. Growth is really strong. We launched the US market about two years ago. We're about to go down to South America. We're hiring in all the markets at the moment.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  How many cattle are there in the world? And if you have a million collars, what percentage of the TAM do you have?

• 32:59Speaker 05

  There is about 1.5 billion cattle in the world. So it's a very depressingly small percentage of penetration, but.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  That's actually called an opportunity in my business. The founder looks at it as, oh my God, we've done so little. The investor looks at it and says, yum, yum. Not for the steak, but for the market opportunity. So there's 1.5 billion cattle. You have 1.5, 1% would be 15. So you're at 10 basis points of cattle in harnesses to date. You literally can go 1,000x from here.

• 33:33Speaker 05

  Totally. And obviously not all those cattle are going to be, you know, in the sweet spot for TAM. But you get an idea for the size of the market. And I think we view ourselves more as like also a tech platform for this industry. Like we, a lot of the product now that our customers buy is almost separate to, you know, the satellite product that I talked about or using agents to help them run farms. These are kind of separate to the collars themselves. And so we're obviously trying to grow the product and expand globally at the same time. So, um, but no, business is good. We are, you know, heads down trying to scale.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it sounds like scaling, this is the easiest thing in the world. If my competitor, if a competing ranch has this product and you go and sell it, because are you doing founder-led sales still or just a sales motion now? Tell me about your sales motion. Still founder-led sales? You go meet the ranchers or do you have a sales team yet? And how many people in the sales team? And then how did you instruct them? Like this is this week in startups. Explain the sales motion here so other founders can learn, please.

• 34:36Speaker 05

  Totally. The sales motion is outbound, field-based, hyper-local. So we put reps in every like community on the ground and their job is to literally like face-to-face, like, um, know every vet consultant and every rancher in their community and like build that community. So they're a territory manager effectively.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  So you broke it up by geo.

• 34:59Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  And you also learned critically important that this is not an enterprise sale where you DM somebody like a login. This is salt of the earth, ranchers, farmers, vets. You have to build relationships. They have to trust you and it's not going to be, you know, two 20-minute Zoom calls and you got a customer.

• 35:21Speaker 05

  Yes, we, it took us a while to find this model. Like we, we tried lots of different things, like how do you sell to, you know, ranchers and farmers? And I think Toast became our inspiration. Like they run an outbound, hyper-local. There's a lot of parallels, right? Like people running restaurants aren't thinking about point of sale all the time. People running ranches aren't thinking about collars. Like you kind of have to get in front of them and show them. But word of mouth is, it's the primary driver. Like the product is good, it does what it says on the tin. Our customers love it and then they tell their neighbors and that's kind of how it, how it expands. So, um, but yeah, local reps. So we probably have 200 or 250 reps.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  This is a critically important one. 600 people at the company, a third of them are doing the go-to market. So once you get product-market fit, which probably took you a year or two, I would assume, yeah, Craig?

• 36:10Speaker 05

  Longer, yep.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  Two or three years, okay. Was it because you didn't know what they needed or was it because the tech wasn't ready and you didn't have Starlink, et cetera?

• 36:18Speaker 05

  Tech, yeah. We, so before Holter, I was working at Rocket Lab, grew up running cattle. And was probably quite naive when we started the business. And so we spent, I'd say a good part of five years.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  Deeply technical, working out how to keep the collars alive in winter, how to talk to them, how to build the hardware, how to train cattle. Um, like that was a tough, tough.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Five years in the laboratory, wow.

• 36:42Speaker 05

  Yep. And so on my, on my parents' ranch, effectively, like we were just, we were testing in field the whole time, which was a big, very helpful.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Oh, so you had an unfair advantage that you grew up on a ranch?

• 36:55Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Tell us about that. What did your parents think when you told them the idea? Were they, because a lot of times when you have an innovative idea, the market resists. And then this is the standard issue Lon founders have. They have a vision, but the closer you are to the problem, the more resistance because it's a paradigm shift. And they say, this is never going to work. We know better, but now here you are, son of cattle ranchers. You're the bridge between the paradigm. So what was the initial reaction your parents had to your vision?

• 37:28Speaker 05

  Uh, they've always been supportive, but they definitely didn't believe, well, you know, they were skeptical of why and, you know. So I think it took a while for them to be like, oh, this actually just looks like it's working. And, um, so love my parents, like they've helped us so much by just giving us free rein of their, you know, their land and their cattle. We've been buying and selling, trying to work out how to train different breeds and things like that. So, but yeah, initially they would have been like, oh, Craig's just doing a fun little thing, you know, good on him.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  This is critical, I think, just as we pause here for a moment. Every founder, and it just, and also being successful in life, you will face resistance. Nothing to do, as you said, your parents are great people, industry filled with great people. I know a lot of them now that I have a ranch. But change is hard for people. And the more you, more time you've spent in a vertical, the more codified your belief system becomes. And this is why outsiders typically do a better job reinventing the hotel industry or say the livery industry, Airbnb and obviously Uber or stock market and the, you know, and how to buy and sell stocks, Robinhood.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  You will face resistance even from good people because they have codified their belief system and they have firsthand experience of it working. But then some new technology comes out, they're not aware of that. And that is the job of the founder, Craig, is to walk them step by step through the vision. And it seems like it took you a couple of years to do that, yeah?

• 39:03Speaker 05

  Totally. And I think the, I was lucky because I, you know, went off to school to study engineering and then worked at Rocket Lab. And so I kind of, I guess, learnt about startups and tech and chasing a mission in a different industry and then came back to farming and ranching. So I do think that was important. But I, I don't know, I think you just try to build the best product, right? If you build a product that's so good, they can't ignore it. It's fun to use, has impact. Like, I think that's what we keep coming back to.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. And show us the app here. This is, I think, where things get super interesting, Craig. You know, you start checking off use cases, but we know apps are addicting. And we know that data leads to better decision-making, right? So you had to lead the industry to adopt this technology. Great, you got some firsthand experience at Rocket Lab. That's a rocket company out of New Zealand, yeah? With a very, very famous founder, by the way. What's his name, Sir?

• 40:06Speaker 05

  Peter Beck.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's a sir. Peter, is Peter a sir in New Zealand or a sir in the UK?

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Uh, we're part of the Commonwealth.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're the same, it's the same sir.

• 40:16Speaker 05

  I think all of the above, yeah.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Same sir. So people in New Zealand can become sirs. Same with Canada.

• 40:22Speaker 05

  We haven't had, we haven't had our independence moment, so we're still part of the Commonwealth.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Incredible that you can get that. That's, that's very nice. So, but then something happens in the next phase of a startup. Once you have some adoption and you've hit that, then your customers go all in. And they go from being resistance to being all in. And then their product suggestions happen because they're in that app. So show us the app and then tell us what two or three things have your customers demanded of your product that you didn't think of? Or that they, you didn't think maybe that was the top of the priority list? So let's take a look at the app, get a description of the app and then tell us what the market is pulling you to do next.

• 41:03Speaker 05

  I'd say, I'll just talk for a second first. So most of the products we've built have been demanded from our, from our customers. So. Because they they live in this product, they use it every single day of the year. They're logging fifty times a day.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Fifty times a day.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  It is how they run their operations. So they care so much about like, hey, this isn't right. I want this feature. Can you add this to it? And so our philosophy at Holter is to try and have the best engineering team and the best data scientists and designers, and then listen to our customers and let them really drive a lot of the feedback. So the features I talked about before where we are like measuring grass and telling them how it's growing and how to graze it. That was, you know, lots of our customers have kind of were asking us for that. Like, hey, I've got this tool. I can graze anywhere. Where should I graze? Help me decide where to graze. Same with animal health. Like, we have GPS on every animal. We're looking at all this data. We needed to know that to train these animals well.

• 42:04Speaker 05

  And then you could see in the data, hey, she's clearly sick. She's grazing less. She's walking less. How come you aren't telling us this? Build an alert to tell us that she's sick. And so some of this, we we have our own, you know, we have our own theories and run our own tests. But a lot of it has been market led.

• 42:22Speaker 05

  And so then they feel like the part of the journey, they ask for something, we ship it, we can update the the devices when they're on. Like, we do that every couple of weeks. Obviously, you can update an app. So the whole platform's evolving all the time. And that's ranchers and farmers have never had that. They've never had this like, I complain about something and then the product gets better two weeks later.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, their product is a horse and a fence.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  And not, and maybe, maybe some webcams, but like, it's, there isn't like, there's a technology stack in this industry. You're the first technology stack, which is awesome. And, you know, it's very interesting. When I got the Whoop and I started playing with it, I've played with all the platforms. They're all great and have different pros and minuses. But I got two alerts in the last, like, two years of wearing this. And both times it was skin temperature related. Now, you get like your sleep is off. So I was getting some sleep is off for a couple of days. And then I got this morning, your skin temperature is two degrees warmer than normal. How are you feeling? And they added an AI assistant to Whoop. Sure enough, both times, it was a precursor to a cold. And now I'm like, wait a second, if I know it knows I'm in the early stages of a cold.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  If everybody had Whoop during the pandemic, you would have been able to tell people forty eight hours earlier that they had COVID. You wouldn't need a COVID test, I don't think. You would just say you have these conditions. Your skin temperature is up, your respiration is down. That is indicative of this. And then that Paxlovid or whatever you had to take, like in the first forty eight hours for it to be effective, people would take it. Versus twenty four. That, to me, is you, you might save cattle that are on the brink of getting a disease. And then that's super powerful, because each of those cats, what is a cattle worth?

• 44:07Speaker 05

  You know, Uh, like three and a half grand at the moment.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Wow. So you save one or two per year. That's the same as like twenty of these collars. Like, you pay for itself.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  A lot of these ranchers are running on public lands, like Forest Service land. And they'll turn out five hundred cattle and they go to gather them. And they spend three weeks up there with ten cowboys and they come back with, you know, four hundred and eighty. Like, they're like, we're missing thirty. We don't know where they are. They look for them for three weeks. So even just finding them can be a challenge, but definitely.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, we, Lon and I saw Brokeback Mountain. We went to the premiere. So we saw that. It was romantic. We had a long evening discussing the nuances of the film, but yes, some cattle gets lost.

• 44:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Lon has a spicy question. Okay, Craig, finish with that and then we'll go to spicy question. Go ahead.

• 44:52Speaker 05

  No, no, you go Lon.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Oh, it's not very spicy. What I, I, it is sort of a break off from our, uh, blue sky is falling. We'll do Reddit is falling. Anytime your company comes up on Reddit, I noticed that there's a theme in the comments, which is, people are very worried you're going to put them in the collars. This is to be used on humans. Cattle to be fed still. Here's, here's Wild, Wild West, where you can see them in the elaborate collars. Is he planning to use this on humans? So I'm giving you your opportunity right now to assure us, there's no plans to put this on any human. There, there's.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Actually, well, no, actually, I talked to Craig before we got on air and I'd be like, Lon's performance is a little low. And he's been grazing a lot. And I need to keep him slim for the road.co slash twist partnership.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Just give me a little buzz.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  So Lon, this is, this is on your desk when you get off the show.

• 45:41Speaker 05

  We get, we get asked almost daily about like, when are you doing goats? When are you doing sheep? When are you doing horses? And we were saying, there's so many cattle in the world, like, we, we're barely getting started on cattle. We're doing nothing but cattle for a long, long time. And obviously, we never do any hits, but no, it's, uh, those, some of those, um, stories weren't helped when we closed our founders fund.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:04Speaker 05

  Round, uh, recently as well. There was, there was a lot of crazy conspiracies floating around.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  It is conspiracy corner.

• 46:12Speaker 05

  It is.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  For any time in the Peter Thiel universe, the Thiel verse just brings the conspiracy.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  It's, it's his name alone. Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  I think what you're doing is amazing because, um, number one, I like premium meat. But number two, um, being able to be more efficient with the food supply and to reduce, uh, disease and to be more efficient in the land, not to be a hippie here, but it's important conservation. And when you get a ranch, you really start thinking about conservation and how to work the land properly. I don't have cattle, but I probably will rent to some cattle ranchers portion of my ranch. And it's, I think it's very important that we, we, we apply some science here. Yeah. And so I applaud it, but you were going to say something.

• 46:55Speaker 05

  No, I was gonna say, it's, yeah, it's one of our oldest industries and I think it's been underserved by technology for a long, long time. And so, yeah, it's been a really worthy and exciting mission. It's easy to get out, easy to get out of bed every morning when your customers love the product. It's in the real world. It makes a big difference. Whenever we're hiring, we say to engineers, like, come work on something that's actually in the real world. Like, go meet some of our customers and they, some of them will cry, like, in a salesman about the potential, you know, how desperate they are for, for like gains in efficiency and productivity, because they just haven't had any tools. So.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  That's fantastic.

• 47:30Speaker 05

  It's been a really, really fun journey.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  There's also one little tactical, practical thing. You know, every time I talk to a founder, there's, there's so many lessons to learn. And you're right, and a very important lesson that a lot of founders have. Founders sometimes are ADHD, ADD, you know, I don't necessarily believe in these diseases, the quote unquote diseases. I think it's all a little bit of BS. But putting that aside, the condition of being excited about new ideas and floating like a butterfly around is something that founders do because they're like, oh, I started this cattle company and, oh, yeah, I could put this on horses. And what's critically important for founders is that when they strike oil, that they keep drilling. And they keep drilling down in the same spot and then they go adjacent.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  These are the two strategies. And I just want to make it very clear, because I don't know if I have a clip of this to send to the hundred founders we invest in. Stay focused. Step one, when you hit oil, is to keep going straight down. Okay? That means kata, straight down, kata. You've got cattle in New Zealand, you've got cattle in Australia. Keep going in Australia and New Zealand, because the adjacent, the adjacency of going to horses means you're starting over. People who have horses are completely different. They don't slaughter the horses. They're not food. The horses are pets. And they have incredibly high values, but people have a very small number of them. People don't have a thousand horses on their ranch. They have three, completely different markets. So if you're going to go adjacent, make sure you've drilled straight down first.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  That's what Uber did. And that's why Travis succeeded. Everybody was telling him, you should do Uber for boats. You should do Uber for planes. You'll start an airline. Start this, start that. And he was like, you know what I'm going to start? Vegas, London, Australia. We're going to take China. Same product, keep drilling straight down. When you drill straight down and, you know, it's pumping and they're, they're, you know, you're, you're, you got every single ounce you can get and it's pumping regularly. Yeah, maybe you can do an adjacency Uber Eats. If it relates to the first one, it still has to be drilling. It can't be like, I'm going to build a farm or I'm going to build a hotel next to my oil rig. Still has to be the same concept, drilling. Okay.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  Great job, Craig. I just want to, does that resonate with you, Craig? And do you have people in the company now trying to distract you to do the second vertical?

• 49:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think focus is important. I think you want to do things in series, not parallel when you can. Um, we were exclusively in New Zealand, commercial, growing three X year on year for many years before we even thought about Australia, before we then thought about the US. So totally, I, I think that's, there's ten million cattle in New Zealand. You know, maybe we're on, I don't know, five percent of them, like, long way to run. So even as we do geographic expansion, expansion within the same product, we try to be very, very focused.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  And you got to write that playbook. That was the other thing Travis did really well. He had Josh doing the playbook in New York. He had William doing the playbook on, in California. Then they compare playbooks and it was like, wait, uh, these things are the same. Recruiting drivers are the same. Oh, okay. But recruiting the, the DoorDashers and the Uber Eats folks completely different in New York. Because in New York, they're on bikes. And in California, they're in cars and none of them are on bikes. Two different groups of people, two completely different strategies. Okay, now you're going to Singapore. Okay, how do these lessons apply to another geography? It's going to be different. It's always going to be different. Like, and when you come to the US, they're going to be much bigger, I would suspect, ranches.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  And there are like three or four that probably represents some large percentage of cattle in the US, Craig?

• 51:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, these, uh, these definitely the big, like, some of our biggest customers are on hundreds of thousands a week, especially now with the Starlink product, like, um, some of them are probably bigger than half of New Zealand as a country. Um, so totally, like, the scale is, is huge.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  All right, listen, continued success. Sorry, I missed this investment. When you do your next round, maybe save a slice for J Cal and the Syndicate dot com. Uh, all right, Craig, great job. I hope, if you ever make it to Austin, I'll take you for a West Home. Uh, West Home.

• 51:40Speaker 05

  All right.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  Is the greatest New York trip out of Australia. West Home. That's my favorite.

• 51:45Speaker 05

  All right. I'm in, I'm in Texas quite a lot, as you can probably guess.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Just, um, every Thursday, I have a little supper club we do. I have a little steak and, uh, we'll, we'll invite you out and we'll, we'll compare some notes here.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Thanks, Jason.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Thanks, Craig.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Thanks, Greg.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Wow, what a, man, that's an incredible investment. Can you imagine?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Especially once this

• 52:04Speaker 00

  This is the problem with being an investor.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Once, once every protester in Hong Kong has one, imagine the TAM on that. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. They're never gonna

• 52:13Speaker 00

  No, they, to be honest, you don't need to put a collar. Everybody has a smartphone and they've opted in to their own

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Surveillance.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Surveillance, you know, like we, we, we are opting in and I'm, I've been looking at, there's a version of Android that you can get. It's an open source Android that is not, it's like, um, privacy first.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  And I've just been thinking like, I gotta get this set up when I travel internationally. Like I'm a target, you know, for information about the startups we invest in, like there's, there's literally corporate espionage that occurs in our industry in a major way.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  We don't really talk about it too much publicly, but I'm thinking about building a new stack that is really resistant to the existing ecosystems. And Android has this one, I was talking to Adam Curry. I'm gonna guest host, uh, No Agenda on Sunday, uh, which I think is live at 12:30 Texas time, which would be 10:30 California, 1:30. So if you're a fan of No Agenda, um, a great inspiration for me, John C. Dvorak, who, when I was coming up in the industry, was this curmudgeon, insightful, amazing commentator. And when I would get PC Magazine at the age of 13, 14, 15, 16 years old, I would race to rip it open and go to John C. Dvorak's.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  He passed away two, a month ago.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, not long ago.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  And, um, it's very sad for me and a lot of folks. He was on, um, This Week in Tech. He was one of the anchors there in the early days with Leo Laporte, which was the big inspiration, literally the inspiration for This Week in Startups, was both. And I just like to give credit to my big brothers in this industry. I'm 55, Adam's like 61, I think John made it to 75, rest in peace. John, uh, was my inspiration as like a personality. Howard Stern on one side I was listening to on the radio and John C. Dvorak's columns. I, I would eat them up, I would earmark them, I would underline them and say, someday, I would love to get paid to write about computers.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  I literally had this dream when I was 13, 14, 15, and I got my PC Junior. Man, someday I could be like John Dvorak. Then they all did CNET and all these incredible things. I did Silicon Valley Reporter, Cyber Surfer, my magazines. I, my dream came true. It was really inspired by John C. Dvorak. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to have an opinion that was spicy, like Howard Stern, like him, that people would pay attention to. And here we are, you know, X number of years later. But to give Adam Curry his due and Dave Weiner, Dave Weiner created RSS. I started getting into blogging because my employees had left Silicon Valley Reporter. Rafat Ali created paid content and then Skift, I'm an investor in Skift. Shenny Jardin went to Boing Boing. And I was watching this RSS movement.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  You could have this like open standard of RSS, really simple syndication. And it was like, wait, you don't have to have people come to your website. They can subscribe to this RSS feed and then the news winds up on their desktop. So I was so impressed by this, I started Weblogs Inc. I called Brian Alvey, I said, we have to get in on this. We have to make 100 blogs. Now, at the time, nobody had more than one blog except for one guy. Nick Denton had three. Gawker, Gizmodo, no, he had two, Gawker and Gizmodo.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, at first.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  And I was like, he has two. I'm gonna make 100 blogs.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  And that was

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  The, the Dave Weiner influence.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  It's hard to explain how revolutionary RSS was to people today because now so much media is decentralized. Anybody could start a Medium or a Substack in their publishing. Back then you had to go through, it was like, if the New York Times didn't want to publish you, that was it. You don't get published. And suddenly there was this way to publish yourself and send it out to anybody who has this link and they can just grab it. It was, it really changed everything.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  So John C. Dvorak, an incredible inspiration. Then Leo Laporte, oh, then Adam Curry says to Dave Weiner, now I owe a lot to Dave Weiner, who is, um, an incredibly, um, just an incredible innovator. He created HyperCard, he created, uh, RSS and OPML. And then eventually Adam Curry said, can you add to the RSS feed and attachment and enclosure? And he said, yes, it's built. Just that easy, because he was running the RSS standard. Then Adam Curry started taking MP3 files and attaching them to, Adam Curry, the famous, uh, MTV VJ.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  He was one of the early VJs, yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Yes, and he was another inspiration for me because he started buying domains. And I was like, wow, this guy bought MTV.com. I'm gonna start buying some domains. That's how I got into some premium domains because of Adam Curry. Then podcasting started happening. I said, we have to do podcasts at Weblogs Inc. So John C. Dvorak, Adam Curry, Dave Weiner, then Leo Laporte started This Week in Tech as a web show and then as a podcast and I was, uh, would be a guest on that. And sometimes I'd be on with John C. Dvorak, which was like, whoa, I'm on with the Howard Stern, the, the curmudgeon, the, the Roger Ebert of technology. I'm sitting next to them. Leo Laporte and John C. Dvorak, this is mind blowing for me 20 years ago. And I said to Leo, hey, you know, I'm doing startups.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Would you be okay with me doing This Week in Startups? He said, yes, go, go for it. Um, I don't own the This Week in Branding, that was This Week in Baseball. Anybody can have that. We have This Week in Law done by this person. Everybody's doing This Week in Photography, go for it. So I have those four people to thank for a large portion of my career. And Sunday I get to be on No Agenda and just, I want to be able to say that to Adam and then thank John C. Dvorak, uh, you know, in memoriam. Uh, and so it's gonna be quite exciting to be on the pod. I'm gonna need to work with you on Sunday morning, Lon, and I know you don't work Sundays, but I need some MP3 clips because the way he does his show is audio only. And then he queues up all the interesting audio clips, like we just did for the tobacco one, and they just play clips and respond, play clips and respond.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, I'll pitch it.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  Do a search for No Agenda, folks. We'll put a link in the show notes.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  So, Mateja Milanovic from, uh, Hop Arrow. He's the founder and CEO of Hop Arrow. They are a defense tech startup. They're developing Rook, Jason. It's an autonomous hypersonic cargo rocket. Can't wait to hear more about that. Uh, Mateja, thanks so much for being here.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Cargo rocket.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Cargo rocket.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  I've heard my friend Elon talk a little bit about this. Um, because he was saying someday you could take one of his rockets, land them on the other side of the planet, um, but for transportation. And he was like, we can get to Japan in like two hours. I was like, we can go to Japan for ramen and come back. He's like, yeah, it's cost a hundred and $50,000 round trip, but sure. And it's gotta be safe.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Ramen's delicious.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  But what, yeah, tell us a bit about Hop Arrow and where you're at with this. Welcome to the show.

• 58:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, firstly, thank you guys for, for having me. Really excited to be here. So yeah, we're, we're Hop Arrow. We're building cargo rockets that basically deliver time sensitive or, or high critical, um, assets pretty much anywhere on Earth in minutes. Um, we're starting with Rook, which is our first vehicle that has a range of, on the order of hundreds of miles, um, that can do that in about 15 minutes. And so our goal is to expand from there and go to larger vehicles that have more range and that are able to carry more payload.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  How big is Rook? How big is it, uh, in terms of height and capacity? What could I put in there? Obviously can't put a tank, but I could put a bunch of guns and ammunition, I'm guessing?

• 59:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we're not publicly disclosing the exact dimensions of Rook, but very roughly 20 foot long. And so inside of that, we're planning on having a payload capacity of about 550 pounds.

• 59:48Speaker 06

  So the, the biggest use case, the one that we advertise publicly is being able to deploy autonomous systems. So being able to go from one place in the Indo-Pacific to another place in the Indo-Pacific in 15 minutes that's about 450 miles away, um, and deploy swarms of autonomous drones or counter UAVs, so counter drones, deploying electronic warfare, uh, systems, so like spectrum jamming effectively, um, deploying local compute, local power, um, things like that.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Amazing. So if I'm envisioning a scenario, I don't know, a random one in the Pacific Ocean, maybe there's an island, maybe that island's a couple of hundred miles away from another island, maybe that island needs some defense and we could send some defensive droids, clankers, you, you know, drones, pick what you want, on one side of the island. And then, hey, maybe there's something going on the other side of this, you know, um, theoretical island that could use a little more defense, yeah?

• 1:00:47Speaker 06

  Exactly. I mean, if you look at how this has been done since the beginning of time, it's been, we've, we've sent out 18 year old boys into, into the frontline. Um, initially we had spears thrown at them, then we had, you know, bullets shot at them and now increasingly other, other things. And so where warfare is clearly trending towards is getting these 18 year old boys out of harm's way and ultimately the warfighter. And so the way we see it, obviously it's, it's been shown in Ukraine in a kind of small scale, it's sort of like a lab experiment, but the way that it's clearly trending is, um, whoever is able to deploy autonomous capacity at range and at, at, at scale is ultimately going to be able to deter, um, the, the next major conflict.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  And you've been working on this for three or four years now, I believe? And

• 1:01:29Speaker 06

  Uh, no, just under two years.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Just under two. Okay, so you're under two years. Um, how does one go from fantastical idea? But, you know, Elon did lay some groundwork here, I think, in terms of, you know, investors getting comfortable with it. But you go, you go to Y Combinator, I understand, and then you gotta pitch investors on this. If you were pitching it 10 years ago, it would've been a no go. But last two years, we've seen some great, uh, you know, military tech companies and some great space companies. So the, the lane is there, you know who to pitch as an investment. How much do you need to raise to get from concept to reality? How much did you raise and how close are you to reality?

• 1:02:11Speaker 06

  You made a really good point. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We would not be here without SpaceX, without all of the kind of amazing defense tech companies like Anduril and so on.

• 1:02:21Speaker 06

  So we haven't, we've already raised a bunch of money. We haven't disclosed that publicly yet. We're still in the current YC batch, so we're, we're not done yet. That's, that's all I'll leave it with. But obviously this is a capital intensive business. That being said, one of the coolest, like you talked about the why now in the previous conversation with Craig. A lot of the why now is that AI is able to augment a lot of the engineering development. So it's, it's seeping into hardware development, not just software development. And so we're a very small team of, of seven, and we've been able to move at the speed and ferociousness of a team of probably 50 or 70.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:02:53Speaker 06

  And so this is, this is a really great time to be building at the intersection of hypersonics and defense.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the, the landing, and I'll tell you what, you, you need $30 million in this like series A if you're doing it. Like probably 20, $30 million is the bogey here in my mind. $200 million valuation, $100 million valuation, whatever it is, dilute 15%. That would be what advisors would say to do here, just taking a guess, broad strokes. But the opportunity is you get a contract with Emil Michael and the Department of Defense slash War. I prefer defense. I love the war thing was a little too aggressive. I don't, it's like, kind of like you're trying to pick a fight, just.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Defense is the perfect name for that.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  Department of Defense is so much better. Like, we don't want to be threatening people and provoking wars. Department of Defense was so much of a better branding, but let's put that aside. We'll probably change it in two years. That's just one man's belief. I'm a Jedi, not a.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Criticize Pete Hegseth for us. Like, really unload for us a little bit.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  I'm not gonna do that with our.

• 1:04:00Speaker 06

  My face while you guys are doing that.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  With our guest here, he's got to close the deal. Point is, you get the 30 million to build the prototype, but then the next step obviously is to get the government. What have you learned about getting that government experimental contract? Because say what you will about switching to Department of War, we could have, you know, philosophical debates on that. But this administration, for the first time, has said startups, startups, startups, lower our costs. And we're going to support startups with early contracts. So how do you get in on the early contracts? How does that work today? Game on the field for startups in your space.

• 1:04:35Speaker 06

  One of the biggest things that we've seen is that renders and PowerPoints and all of that kind of takes you so far. But actually having hardware, having, you know, demonstrating that you can hot fire your engine that you built from scratch in, in a couple of weeks. That speaks volumes compared to any other thing that you can do. And so that's, that's been the biggest thing that we've seen, that prototypes only get you so far. It's actually showing clear tangible progress. A lot of our conversations do start off with, again, like what, how do you see this thing being? Like you, you talk about an O V one in, in the military, you look at how do you envision this fitting in? And that's great. That'll kind of warm up the conversation, but at some point you, you just got to whip out the iPad and start showing actual footage. Or better yet, you show up to an event or a conference before you bring them out to your test site and you.

• 1:05:18Speaker 06

  We've had guests that we, we hosted live hot fires for. It's, it's so much better than anything else you can show on, on a, on a Zoom call or whatever.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  I will put this piece of advice, we always have tactical practical advice here and we'll highlight this in the notes as make it real. What we're trying to do as entrepreneurs, when we do companies or investors putting in there is you're trying to take the story and the pitch and make it credible. How do you move from, I'm just a pitch deck, I'm just a guy with an idea or a gal with an idea, seven people with an idea? To, we actually have credibility and we're all in a credibility race in life. The credibility comes from a fire test. The credibility comes from the team. The team can, you know, if you get past the pitch deck, anybody can make a pitch deck. But getting a team together, that builds credibility.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  But as you're saying here, getting to real world, make it real. You have to make it real for people and just firing off an engine and saying, hey, I can fire off an engine without blowing myself up. That's like zero to one in terms of pitch deck to real world capabilities. That's, that's what you're saying here. Yep.

• 1:06:30Speaker 06

  Definitely. Yeah.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  All right. Listen, I wish you great success in this. There are a couple of hotspots in the world, but this is going to be applicable. And it, is it dual use? Do you have a dual use where a rich person is going to be like, hey, can I get one of these? Cause I got an island over here and I got a house in Palm Beach and I want, maybe the wrong metaphor for islands and houses. But I got, I live in Long Island and I got a place, I got a place in the Hamptons and a place up in Albany. I want to move a bunch of stuff. I don't know what circumstance that is, but is there a dual use here eventually?

• 1:07:04Speaker 06

  Well, not for that exact use. And I, if I can guess what you're, what you're getting at, but there is definitely a commercial use for this. So we, we already have companies that we're talking to and actually companies that we've signed on as early kind of pilot customers. Ranging from manufacturing to cold chain, transportation, automotive, other industries like that, where it's not necessarily the, the value of the part itself is almost irrelevant. It's what's the cost of not having it? And so those industries usually have very high costs of downtime. And so that has been an amazing wedge for us. That being said, we've had far more pull from the Department of Defense or Department of War, whichever your, your, your choosing is. And so we, we've, we've just focused a lot of our energy on that.

• 1:07:48Speaker 06

  That being said, yeah, there's a, there's a huge opportunity for us on the commercial side.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  Unbelievable. Really appreciate you coming on the site. Where can people learn more? I'm sure you're hiring and whenever this funding announcement happens, hopefully my, my name is on there. But I gotta get in on this one. I don't want to miss this one. I missed the, I missed the cattle callers. I feel like I need to get in on this one. Brilliant idea. Looks like great execution to date, but who are you hiring for and where can people learn more?

• 1:08:13Speaker 06

  So we'll be announcing roles, most engineering roles. We, we need, we have a great engineering team so far. That's been our core team. We're looking, we're very picky when it comes to our people, but we're going to be hiring across GNC, aero thermal, structural, assembly and so on. So everything's going to be on our, on our LinkedIn. It's going to be on our website. So keep, keep an eye out.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  Okay. And the website is H O P A E R O dot com. Hop Arrow. Going to change the world with this one. Thanks, Mattia. Did I pronounce it correct?

• 1:08:41Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me. Mattia. Yeah. Appreciate you having me.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  Just great. And if you ever make it to Texas or if you're based here, let's have a steak. Like I, two of you guys together. Yeah. Thursday nights supper club.

• 1:08:53Speaker 06

  Love to.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  We'll get a steak. All right. Talk to you soon, brother. Congratulations.

• 1:08:56Speaker 06

  Sounds good. Thank you for having me.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  What a, what a banger episode here.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Two for two. We went two for two today on founders.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  Two for two. I mean, you know, what makes a great episode of this week in startups? Little bit of news, some great founders and some great founder lessons there. And of course, maybe a little more news and even going off duty. What do you got left for us, Lon? Is there another news story that the audience is demanding I comment on?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  I, I think we should talk about Nvidia taking over all of open source potentially. They've agreed to acquire Hugging Face for 12.9 billion. That Hugging Face, of course, the public marketplace for open source AI models, data sets, the GitHub of machine learning, it's sometimes called. So Nvidia tried to buy it in late 2025, but they were turned down. Meanwhile, Nvidia's earnings reports show another monster quarter forecast, 70% 2028 revenue growth, while analysts were expecting just 44%. So Jason, I, I know you were talking about this. We've been talking about this for the last few days. Can you unpack for us what you see as Jensen's sort of play here? He's, he's open maxing as you were, as you were putting it the other day.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this will be the big number one story on All In, which will drop Saturday morning in all likelihood, maybe late Friday.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Jensen had a great open source Nematron project. He has a great project internally doing open source for self-driving in partnership with Uber and other folks, building the open source stack. He in his heart believes in open source. However, his customer base was largely frontier models. Who needs the most compute? OpenAI needs compute. Anthropic needs compute. These guys are, or were a year ago, 90% of the token usage, 90% of consumption, consumer, et cetera. Obviously, friends at Google with Gemini also have a billion users using AI across their products. They may not be going there saying, I'm going to use AI, but they wind up using AI.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  So he, with those three specific frontier model companies and of course SpaceX, I, they are big consumers of this, big customers of his. This record blowout quarter is directly because of those, let's say four or five entities. You probably put Microsoft in there as well. However, open source is surging. And he is looking at it going, wait a second, there's no open source champion in America. Who's the open source champion in America that comes to mind, Lon? I say open source in America, you say?

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it was Meta for a while. Well, right, sure. That was why I was having a struggling.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  You say nobody. It's a trick question. There is nobody in the lead. You, you stumbled on one. Yeah. Hey, Meta has something maybe, but we don't hear about it that often. Maybe Apple did something in images and, you know, we, we talked about it here. There's no champion. There's no anthropic of open source yet. I'll tell you who the open source competitor is. It's Nvidia. Nvidia, when you say US open source, you will say Nvidia.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  US open source equals Nvidia. Chinese open source equals Kimi, you know, XAI.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  ZAI. Deep Seek, yeah. Moonshot, the big, the big labs over there.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  All those.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Alibaba.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Now we have our US champion. While the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown. This is Nvidia's big play. Sam Altman, if you remember, did big deals with Nvidia.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  Sam and Jensen were super involved, remember?

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  But you might be able to find in my notes, uh, the history of these two, and you could tee it up for us here, Lon. I don't have it off the top of my head, but broad strokes, there was a major commitment. I think it's like a hundred billion dollar commitment between OpenAI.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  And Nvidia. Yeah, and, and that hundred billion dollar, um, commitment was the first time we started having this discussion about circular revenue.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  It was, uh, it was in September 22nd, 2025. Uh, Altman did a huge hundred billion dollar deal with Nvidia for, you know, they were chips, compute, all of that. Then just 14 days later, Altman announced a major equity agreement with AMD. Uh, they're giving them warrants to buy up to 10% of OpenAI. Another one of these big circular deals. This was part of what set off that whole worry about circular deals. Uh, Jensen clearly was not sort of happy about this. By January, just a few months later, he was already, uh, telling, uh, industry colleagues, this is according to the Wall Street Journal. He was already telling industry colleagues that his letter of intent with OpenAI is non-binding. Sort of already talking about maybe walking back that deal.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  And he was reportedly criticizing a, and I'm quoting, "lack of discipline in Altman and OpenAI's approach." In response to this, Altman then brought in Google Vet Richard Ho. That was when they started working on their own inference chip now called jalapeno.

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  Right, so things got chippy. The relationship went from a hundred billion dollars in commitments to, I want an open relationship. Sam Altman said to Jensen, or didn't even say to Jensen, he just went into the AMD deal, went and hired this person to create the jalapeno chip, which is supposedly spectacular and is a really great inference chip. Of course, Jensen buys Brock, gets his own inference chip, Cerebrus goes public with their amazing inference chip.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  Now Jensen has to say, wait a second. All, if we're going to have an open relationship, that means I can see other people too.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  I'm straying, I'm straining with this poly cube here.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  The one, uh, the one element we have not discussed yet is Poolside. Also this week, Nvidia made this huge deal, a sort of an aqua hire. They're going to take like a hundred engineers from Poolside. Six billion dollars plus a billion dollar or, or one billion dollar deal plus a licensing fee of six billion dollars. So they're basically taking over one of the largest coding AI labs left that was independent, uh, as well this week.

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  Poolside makes their own version of Cursor.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  They make their own version of Codex, Open, OpenAI's coding or Claude code. Uh, I think it's called.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Laguna, I believe.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  Laguna.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  As in the great hippie town.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  Uh, uh, in Southern California.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, Orange County.

• 1:15:20Speaker 00

  Orange County, Laguna is a very weird place. Um, I always was enamored with it, but you probably don't want to stay for, don't stay for more than 48 hours. Gets a little weird. Um, but Laguna is a beautiful town. If you're going to go drive to San Diego, stop for a night in Laguna.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Irvine's not far from Laguna.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  I, what's the story with Laguna is like a little beach? Everybody's a little bit weird there, right? Okay, I get weird vibes. Is it like rich surfer dudes? What is it?

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  I, I, it used to be like in the 60s, 70s, it was very bohemian. It was like an artist colony. And so it has that like, like in the Keep Austin Weird, there was like a funky Laguna vibe that was different from the rest of like Nixon land, conservative Orange County. I feel like less so today. It's become gentrified like everywhere else in that part of Orange County. And today it would remind you of Huntington Beach or Newport Beach or any of those other communities.

• 1:16:07Speaker 00

  Kind of like what happened with Venice. Venice was like a weird art community. Now it's like a yuppie community.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  So yuppie, I find.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  All these things get, because it's so expensive to live in any of these places now, the hippies and the bohemians kind of got kicked out.

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  So here's what I'll say Jensen's doing. Jensen is going to take open source. He's going to roll a rack into companies. He's going to roll a rack into the same companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, his top two customers, I believe. And he's going to go to the same customers Dario and Sam are meeting with. And he's going to say, oh, you're doing a bunch of frontier stuff with them? That's great. We power 72% of what they do. That's fantastic. Might I interest you in a rack that has a Codex competitor that is un-metered? So he'll, he's going to go to Uber. And remember Uber, uh, Andrew and the CFO and Dara were talking about their token usage?

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Now imagine Jensen says, hey, would love to stop by. He's a great sales guy. Just love to stop by, Dara. Um, maybe we take a couple of pictures, have a little lunch. We'd, we'd talk about AI with your team. Have all your developers come. Okay, great. And he says, my, how much are you spending on Claude code? Was it Claude code spend? Was it OpenAI spend? How, you expect 400 million? I've got an idea for you. You're spending 400 million on tokens. I think that's probably what they're spending, like literally a half a billion. Half a billion dollars going into frontier models, 500 million. If you want to know how Anthropic is hitting 50 billion, if you want to know how OpenAI is hitting whatever it is, 30, 40 billion, you want to know how they're hitting that? Customers like Uber.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  And he slides in and says, by the way, um, I got this Laguna and, uh, you're using this. You're spending 500 billion. Can we get like maybe a hundred billion of that? We'll slide in some racks. Slide in some racks. They'll be here tomorrow and nothing you're doing goes up to the frontier model. Everything stays on prem. You got the AI sovereignty and, um, it's un-metered. And they say, oh, what do you mean un-metered? There, there's, there's no shocking bill at the end of the month. And the CFO goes, wait a second. You're telling me I could set up a rack here and my developers can go to town? And I don't have to get in the middle of an argument between Dara, Andrew, the CTO, this person on our AI spend, because we know it's 100 million capped.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  We know it's 100 million. It's a hundred, 100 million in servers and electricity. We put that in and depending on how many tokens we can squeeze out of it. And you're telling me your open source product's getting 30% better every six months? And it's going to get 50% better? Oh, and, uh, you're optimizing the hardware and that's going to get 50% better every 18 months? And I'm un-metered. Un-metered is the word we're going to be talking about in 2027. It's not going to be token maxing. It's going to be un-metered. Two ways to be un-metered. You're going to buy a rack from Jensen and that means massive headwinds for Anthropic and their coding products. And the coding products are toast.

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  The, the frontier model coding products are going to have a really hard time competing with an un-metered option.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:19:20Speaker 00

  This is going to be in the S1 for Anthropic and for OpenAI as their number one risk factor. The number one risk factor is not data centers getting shut down. It's not cybersecurity. It's Jensen providing Laguna on an Nvidia rack and them losing the developer customers, which are the tip of the spear. That's why he bought Hugging Face. That's where the developers hang out. That's why he bought Poolside. That's why he has those hundred engineers and that's why he has Laguna. He can now go after the two most profitable parts of OpenAI and Anthropic.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  There you go. Think they're going to keep calling it Laguna or Nematron? Which, which brand is going to win out?

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  Laguna is going to stick. Uh, they'll keep with that. Um, but it's going to be Nvidia's Laguna, which means Poolside Laguna? Okay, sounds a little hippie dippy. Will it be here in three years? Will it be here in three years? So if Poolside comes and says, hey, we want to roll in a rack with Laguna, they say, okay, you got to get the rack. We'll put the software on. It's not one product. It's two, now you've got two vendors, three vendors. It's going to be one vendor coming in.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  Boom, whole stack with it. And it's Nvidia's Laguna, which means instead of having a hundred developers on it, it's going to have a thousand developers on it. And instead of you wondering, will it exist in two years? And am I investing in a startup that maybe doesn't exist in two years? You're going to say, oh, the largest company in the world.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  The largest company in the world with $5 trillion has made a $20 billion commitment to open source. Yes, I'm going with that. That will be the discussion of 2027. That means that you could see Nvidia add.

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  A third of the market cap of the top two frontier models.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  So if those two companies are worth five trillion, they have a right to 30% of it. That's 1.5 trillion dollars in additional market cap moving from Anthropic. If it works, moving from Anthropic and OpenAI, one third of their revenue moving over to Nvidia. If it works, this is the biggest news ever. This is the news of the week, not Nvidia's blowout quarter. It's Jensen going all in on open source, open weight coding tools is the biggest story of the year. This is the biggest story of the year.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:21:44Speaker 00

  And nobody's talking about it.

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  Except you, except you are, and now we will be across our social media channels.

• 1:21:50Speaker 00

  We have to make a clip out of it, I guess. Anything else in the news that I have to comment on?

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  Well, do you want to talk about, as long as we're talking about the massive amount of AI compute heading our way? Should we talk about the slop that this AI compute is going to make? We had already touched on this Stan Druckenmiller AI slop in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if you want to, you want to go back into it.

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I'm curious, you're an artist, a writer, a creative.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  When you go to the editorial page of your favorite publication, and I'm sure you read the New York Times editorial from time to time, or Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal, you wind up on the editorial page. Explain what your belief is and your expectation of an editorial page at a premier publication.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Speaker 00

  And there is, Wall Street Journal is the number one premier publication in finance, the number two in news in the United States. What is your expectation, Lon Harris, when you go in there?

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's important to make the distinction, there are a million ways to communicate, especially if you are a prominent or notable figure in the world like billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller. There's, there are so many avenues, you could call a reporter, you could have a press conference, you could post a tweet, you could make a little video of yourself, do a podcast, there's a million ways to get your message out. If you're going to go to a newspaper, one of the most respected newspapers in the country and say, I want to write an op ed for you. To me, that's setting the expectation that this is going to be a piece of writing. I, I want to not only share my insight, I want to make an argument, build an argument that I think is going to be important for the national conversation.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  I, I want to steer our national discourse because I think I have something so important to say. I have an argument that's so important to make that I want to share it. And it's not different from if you think of the founding fathers, if you think of the early days of America, where they were writing pamphlets all the time, Alexander Hamilton sharing his pamphlets with their, that's the idea. Or Thomas Paine with Common Sense, it was like, this conversation is happening, I need to be part of it. People need to hear my take and I'm going to build that argument in a piece of writing. To me, that's a promise to your reader that that writing is your own, that it's your argument, that you've thought it out, that you're advancing it carefully, and that every word, every sentence, every line of that is your own original work.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Any piece of writing that you publish, I think that's the promise you're making. In fact, at launch, where, you know, I sort of oversee a lot of the editorial, we don't.

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  You are the editorial director.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  I am, in fact.

• 1:24:22Speaker 00

  All of it, you oversee, yes.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  We don't publish anything front facing that is just written by AI. We use AI constantly, we use AI for everything. Most pieces of writing that I do for the company, I've at least consulted with an AI or multiple AI bots on it.

• 1:24:40Speaker 00

  For research or proofing?

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  Every, everything you could think of, from what should I write about to what, you know, like, what are, what would be the good?

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  Ideation?

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Ideation, research, and then helping me. I think the hardest thing about writing personally is the blank page, starting from nothing, and you have to get words out, it's much easier to edit than to write. And, and so that's where I think AI can be such a crucial time saver is get something down on paper. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be relatively accurate and mostly what I want. And then I'll go through and I'll fix it. And that's the essential part of the entire process to me is the AI produced this. I'm going to tweak it and edit it and change it so that it reflects my own work. And that's also when you learn about it and think more deeply about what you're writing.

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  Two out of three, Lon, of my followers, did you know I have 1.7 million followers on X now?

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you blew, you blew it up.

• 1:25:37Speaker 00

  I didn't know that, I thought I just broke a million. I, I gotta look at my chart of followers, I went from like a million to 1.7 million in like a year.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  2026, I think, like you started 2026 with like 1.2, I think I want to say, something like that.

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  What are you, why are your people following me? Is it because I'm spicy or is it, maybe it's my membership thing?

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  I don't know what's causing the growth. I think it's just somebody's doing some amazing editorial direction.

• 1:26:00Speaker 00

  I think you gotta do some more direction here. I gotta, I gotta start writing again on my Substack. So if Druckenmiller did not have the time to write a piece of 800 words or so, I think it's probably 800 word piece, 1000 word piece.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there, thereabouts.

• 1:26:14Speaker 00

  If you don't have the time to write a thousand word piece, then the proper venue is to jump on CNBC or All In Podcast or whatever it is, and then just discuss your position in your own words. But you don't believe an editorial page should have AI written copy on it. Because if I'm interpreting correctly, in that venue, there is an expectation that you took the time to construct your argument in the prose. And, and that's exactly how I feel. I feel if you're going to write something with AI, it should be labeled as such in the first sentence upfront. Just like if you make an AI video of a shark attack and it's a recreation of it,

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  in a documentary, people would make recreations, a reenactment, and they say, a reenactment.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Or you see artist interpretation or artist rendering, yeah.

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  Correct. So why in documentaries did people start putting, this is a recreation and then this is actual footage? Why? Because the expectation of the audience was if you're going to put some video in there, it's real video. This is a documentary. It's very simple. I think the documentary analogy, which I didn't get to on All In, we had a pretty vibrant debate about it. The, the best analogy I've come up with, I was kind of thinking this is kind of like Milli Vanilli lip syncing. I was saying it's some plagiarism feeling to this, you're plagiarizing from the AI. But at the end of the day, I think this is the expectation of the user, similar to a documentary. If you're going to do a reenactment, if you're going to do an interpretation, you're obligated, you are super obligated.

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  And the mistake that the Wall Street Journal made, and then subsequently Druckenmiller made, this combination of not checking the work and not disclosing to the reader is why there's such a strong reaction to this. Now, there's a group of people who are not good writers, and the people who are not good writers say, well, I should be able to use a tool to make my writing better. Of course you should, but you shouldn't say, here's my ideas, write me a piece, publish it and not disclose it. If we're going to do slop, I want, and I, and I will call it slop because I don't think it comes out that good, even if it is the best ideas. If you're going to deceive me, I'm, I'm all out. I feel like you've broken the trust here, just like Milli Vanilli broke the trust, just like some documentaries broke the trust.

• 1:28:38Speaker 00

  There was a documentary my friend was in recently, they used 11 labs to put in a sentence he didn't say because they wanted him to say a certain sentence. This is the kind of stuff that erodes trust. If you've eroded the trust of the reader, the consumer of the information, you failed at your job, Wall Street Journal failed at their job, Druckenmiller failed at his job, they could have solved this by just putting written with AI at the top.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  That's what I was going to say is Jacob, if you pull up the original Wall Street Journal piece that Druckenmiller posted, there's a byline, I mean, it couldn't be any clearer. There's a byline that says, written by Stan Druckenmiller, right there at the top. That's a lie, that's not, he didn't write it, he wrote it with, if, if he and I wrote it together, it would say Stanley F. Druckenmiller and Lon Harris, and if it didn't.

• 1:29:22Speaker 00

  With Lon Harris.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Right, and if it didn't, I would write in the Wall Street Journal and be like, what the hell? Why wasn't I credited on my brilliant op ed this morning with my Ben, my friend Stan?

• 1:29:29Speaker 00

  Does this piece have a disclosure now after this whole brouhaha on the commentary? Is there any disclosure in the first sentence or two?

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  I revisited it this morning and did not see one, I don't believe.

• 1:29:39Speaker 00

  At the end of the piece, is there a, no?

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Nothing, nothing. They're, they seem to be.

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  Still nothing, and the Wall Street Journal is holding on to, this is a fine thing to do, correct?

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Their, their response is basically this represents Stanley Druckenmiller's point of view. He approved it for publication, so it's, it's fair game, it's fine, you're allowed to use. And I, and I think that's what the, some of the other besties on All In are probably arguing as well, that the idea is, you know, well, you would use Google to write, you could use Grammarly to fix your, we don't, we wouldn't disclose every other tool that we use. But I think the fundamental difference is that those other tools are doing the writing for you. They're fixing or adapting your writing. And Claude or GPT or whatever model he used to compose this is actually doing it for him. And you don't.

• 1:30:29Speaker 00

  I'll tell you, people are going to change their position on this based upon what story was written.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  And the author.

• 1:30:38Speaker 00

  In addition to this story, yes, and the author. So the editorial page will sometimes, you know, be a little spicy with politicians. And here, if you look at this URL, if you pull it up, Andrew Serbain, I'm not sure who that is. This is a Republican strategist with 97.

• 1:30:59Speaker 00

  Thousand followers. His avatar is the famous wrestler from the film They Live.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Oh, that's Roddy Piper, Rowdy Roddy Piper.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  From They Live, which is a very interesting avatar to have, given the context. And he says, "It appears the most recent screed from the pro amnesty Wall Street Journal editorial page attacking J D Vance was 100% written by him."

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:31:24Speaker 00

  So now we are going to be in the awkward position of using Panogram to go through every single editorial from the last year. And we're going to find out who's not wearing shorts because the tide's about to go out.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  I think this is people being deliberately up to. I feel like it's very obvious. It's easy to understand the distinction between no human in the loop and human in the loop. If there's a human in the loop.

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  That's fine. You're just using a tool. It's making you better, faster, more efficient. Nobody has a problem with that. I don't have a problem with that. It's letting the tool do the work for you and then being like, job well done. There you go, Washington, Wall Street Journal, publish away.

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  And you know, New Kids on the Block, I think there was a lawsuit about them. I'm trying to remember.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Did they lip sync the New Kids? No.

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  New Kids on the Block. There were a couple of these lawsuits, if I remember correctly, from the 90s or 2000s. And I don't know how they actually worked out. But if you were paying for concert tickets, here it is. Yes, I'm correct. Chicago Tribune, link sync suits forcing courts to face the music. A lot of disgruntled pop music fans seem to be showing up these days in Cook County Circuit Court. Aided by willing attorneys, fans of such groups as New Kids on the Block are turning grievances, real or perceived, into class action lawsuits in what some experts say is an abuse of an otherwise valuable legal remedy for large scale consumer fraud.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  Not the New Kids.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  And not, it is the New Kids. It's June 7, 1992. I was 21 years old when this happened. And I can't believe I even remember this, but there it is. I don't think this requires a lawsuit here, but that is, I wonder if there needs to be disclosure for lip syncing when you go to a concert? Is that a thing?

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  I mean, the presumption is that's not happening on a wide scale. That's what got Billy Vanilli in all that trouble.

• 1:33:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. All right. Let's go off duty. Anything in off duty that people should, should be aware of?

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Well, here in Austin, the mosquitoes are an issue. I have to go out like fully covered, head to toe, when I take Barry outside or else I get stung. It's impossible. So you tweeted that you want one of these blue laser mosquito air defense systems, essentially Israel's Iron Dome, but to keep insects out of your backyard. It uses sensors to find mosquitoes midair and zap them. It scans a 20 foot, 90 degree field with LiDAR radar and AI vision. It can target insects as small as two millimeters, runs for four or five hours on one charge. And as you can see, you actually get to pleasantly watch the blue laser flash when it has spotted and is taking out one of your insect rivals.

• 1:34:10Speaker 00

  I want to invest in this company. I want to buy this product for my off duty selection this week. I'll show you how I solve the problem at my ranch. Go ahead and pull up what I just sent you. This is a $250 device meant for like barns and places where you have animals that get harangued by this, but humans as well. And we had a big ethical discussion about killing mosquitoes and bugs on the ranch. And then what happened was the entire family got taken out by mosquitoes inside the house, outside the house. You live on a ranch, you live in Austin, there's like three or four months where it is acute and insane.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  They're everywhere.

• 1:34:49Speaker 00

  I have two of these in the backyard. These things supposedly do two acres. I put two of them just in the backyard. And we went from having, you know, everybody getting five, 10 mosquito bites a week to, you know, nobody getting mosquito bites anymore. We have little ones inside. We have these two big ones outside. We put these two big ones outside. I highly recommend you get one of these for your backyard and just plug it in permanently.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm doing it. I'm tired of this.

• 1:35:16Speaker 00

  Well, here's the other thing that happens. You get skin infections, and this happened to me. I all of a sudden had like five bites. I scratched them. The natural bacteria you have on your skin or on your nails, if you scratch, goes into the exposed bite.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Correct, yes.

• 1:35:35Speaker 00

  And then you get a rash. So everybody, and this is a new thing for me as a Texan and for you as well, never got this many mosquito bites, 10 in a week.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Not, not in California.

• 1:35:46Speaker 00

  I got three or four of them on my legs. Then I got an infection. I had to get Muprysin from an emergency care clinic. I had to literally go there and put this cream on my legs to kill the bacteria so I wouldn't get this crazy infection.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  It's a nightmare.

• 1:35:58Speaker 00

  It was so fricking painful to want to scratch my legs 24 hours a day that I start wearing long pants. I get these two things. And now I've got it under control. Kill all mosquitoes around your house. There's another, there's dozens of other acres for them to exist on, but no more around our house.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  Couldn't agree more.

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  Enough.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  It's a nightmare.

• 1:36:20Speaker 00

  Anything else? And that's my off duty take. Make sure you put the link in there. People love when we go off duty on Fridays.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  I want to, I have a couple of very quick streaming recommendations. I haven't done one of these in a while. I watched a real, I thought this was a really great movie. I didn't see a lot of other people talk about it. It's The Wizard of the Kremlin, it's called. It is, it's a true story. It's a film about the rise to power of Putin. Jude Law stars as Putin. Paul Dano plays his propaganda minister. Vadim Baranov orchestrated his rise from, you know, head of the KGB, basically government bureaucrat. How did he become the, not only the like leader of Russia, but this autocratic, extremely powerful, dug in? It's a really fascinating story. It's a, it's a long movie that kind of takes you through the entire like how the rise of Putin happened. Obviously fictionalized. It's not

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  the exact, it's not a documentary, but it's very compelling. Great performances from Jude Law and Paul Dano. That's on Hulu and Disney Plus right now. And then actually it's Oliver Asayis, I don't know how exactly to pronounce his name, is the same director as Carlos. We've talked about how much we like that Carlos the Jackal movie.

• 1:37:27Speaker 00

  Oh, this is the same guy?

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  Same director as Carlos.

• 1:37:30Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm watching this this weekend.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  Asayis or Asayis. I'll look up how to pronounce.

• 1:37:34Speaker 00

  If you can get Carlos the Jackal, Carlos the Jackal is a five, six, seven hour mini series, but there's like a three hour version as a movie. If you can get the mini series somehow on one of these services, that is just prime.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  I believe it's on Criterion Channel. I believe they have the full three part Carlos mini series that you did. They did also condense it. Olivier Asayis.

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

  Tell us the name of this one more time.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  This is called The Wizard of the Kremlin. And it's just a movie. It's not a series. It's like a little over two hours. But it's, it's very good. It's really well done. And it's, it's like a lot of details that I'd never even heard before. You know, you know, the outlines, he was KGB, and then he sort of, he's always had this obsession about reuniting the old Russia. Really, really interesting. The other one I wanted to quickly mention, another historical period drama. This one's a series. It's from the UK. It's on Prime Video. It's called King and Conqueror. And it's about the events leading up to the Norman invasion of England in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Nicholas Costa Waldou, who was Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones, and then James Norton, who was just on this season

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  of House of the Dragon, he was Orman Ty Tower. They play Harold II and William the Conqueror. And it's about they, they were friends and then rivals. And then it ends up being this big battle for who gets to be king of England.

• 1:38:54Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Very good. Well done show. I'm, I'm really into it.

• 1:38:57Speaker 00

  Awesome. Are you watching Lanterns, two episodes in?

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  I am watching Lanterns. I'm all caught up with Lanterns.

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  What's your take on Lanterns, two episodes in?

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  I'm really enjoying it. I think it's a nice balance. It feels like it gets the comic book. You're getting references. It doesn't feel totally alien from, no, no, but it's from the DC Comics, but it is its own thing. And that's what I really like. Like Andor, like The Penguin, when it can feel like its own TV show with its own vibe that is also faithful to the source material. I feel like that's the perfect balance. And Aaron Pierre, it's so good as Jon Stewart. I loved him in that, that movie that now I'm blanking on the name of.

• 1:39:35Speaker 00

  Oh, it's like the Rambo movie where he's like.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  I'll look up, I'll look up what it's called.

• 1:39:39Speaker 00

  There is a Rambo sendout that the person playing Hal Jordan.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Rebel Ridge. It's on Netflix right now. Look up that movie.

• 1:39:46Speaker 00

  Rebel Ridge is a great popcorn movie. Like just starts out, it's like, it literally is like Rambo, where like oppressed individualist.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a vet.

• 1:39:57Speaker 00

  Has to like manage.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Gets in this battle with this local sheriff, Don Johnson. It's really, it's really well done. He's a great actor and he's also a perfect Jon Stewart. So yeah, the Jon Stewart, Hal Jordan vibe in this is a lot of fun and I recommend it.

• 1:40:11Speaker 00

  I love this actor. I would say for this Lantern series, it's a slow burn. It's a slow burn. It's very evocative of Ozark, which was a great series. Slow, methodical. The aesthetics of the show are unique, like True Detective or Ozark. It has an aesthetic that is not comic book aesthetic necessarily.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  I was saying, it's like, it reminds me a little bit of Taylor Sheridan. Like it reminds me of like Landman vibes almost, or something like that.

• 1:40:42Speaker 00

  I'd say True Detective or Ozark, because these, the people who are involved in it were involved in those series, I understand. Anyway, I don't think you have to watch it episode by episode because it's incredibly frustrating because it moves so slow as a detective kind of thing. I think I want to just wait till it's over and watch it like in, you know, four or five days. I want to give an update. I, I love my man bags. I had talked about this Alpaca Bravo Sling Max 8L RFID blocking sling laptop bag I bought for 160 bucks. I love this thing. It's constructed incredibly well. I like to take it with me because it fits my MacBook Pro 14 inch. 160 bucks. I thought, I'm a genius. 160 bucks.

• 1:41:26Speaker 00

  I love it. That's not an expensive price. That's a reasonable price for a bag.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:41:31Speaker 00

  So I think I'm a genius, right? This thing's got all these great features. Then I'm at the Uniqlo store with my daughter in Japan, and I'm buying stuff up. I'm loving Uniqlo.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  You're a big fan, yeah.

• 1:41:42Speaker 00

  Huge fan. This is the, I don't want to join any more boards. I want to be on the board of Uniqlo to learn. So I'm putting that out there in the universe. If somebody, like if Uniqlo needs a board member.

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  You know a Uniqlo board member.

• 1:41:52Speaker 00

  I know Kat, I think was on the board. If they, if somebody, if they eventually need an American to like, you know, maybe I can be of value in some way. I'd like to join that board. It'd give me another excuse to go to Japan. I go to the Uniqlo store. I'm walking out, about to leave, and I see they have messenger bags.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:42:13Speaker 00

  I buy this one. I'm gonna buy this one for you, Luke. I'm gonna send you this.

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  I love a messenger bag. Mine's a little old now. I need a new one.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  All right. So, uh, can you get somebody here? Just, I order like, I wanna order like, uh, three of these for my podcasting team doing a great job. Well, one for Jacob, one for Salah, one for Jordan, one for Zach, one for Niels, and one for Lon. I need six of these ordered stacked.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  We'll let Heidi know. We'll let Heidi know.

• 1:42:35Speaker 00

  I'll let Heidi know I want six of these ordered to my office. Look at this. Six for the price of, five for the price of one. Here's my Uniqlo bag that I bought in Japan for $19.

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  $19.

• 1:42:46Speaker 00

  Available. Available here. I sent you the link. Uh, guys, timing, please. Let's, I try to keep your finger over that. Unisex Unity Shoulder Bag is the link. In the United States, you can, it's in the Slack room.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  I see it.

• 1:43:02Speaker 00

  My Lord, slow on the trigger, boys. Come on now. Here we go. This bag is essentially the same bag. I like each bag individually. They make it in black. They make it in green. So I bought it in green. So I have the other one in black. I find myself equally reaching for both. The Uniqlo one's a little bit lighter, but it has all, essentially all the same features. It doesn't have a Faraday bag and it doesn't have a pass-through USB charger, but it's essentially the same bag. It fits my number one thing, which is I wanna take my 14-inch, uh, 48 gigs of RAM MacBook Pro with me when I go on a hike. In case I get inspired, I wanna write some stuff. Um, 29 bucks in the US.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:43:43Speaker 00

  19 bucks in Japan.

• 1:43:46Speaker 00

  Unbelievable value. If you don't know Uniqlo, ah, man, I, I listen, and you guys know, I got a little bit of chatter here on the side. I made a little bit of cash, a little bit on, you know, I don't want to talk about it too much. I'm doing okay. I get a couple of speaking gigs here now and again. I'm doing, J Cal doing just fine.

• 1:44:03Speaker 00

  I love value. And when I find something that one-ups the value, oh, yum yum for J Cal. I'm like, oh my God, I got this for $19 in Tokyo. That paid for my business class ticket there, in my mind, in my crazy, deranged mind.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  It's expensive.

• 1:44:19Speaker 00

  That was what happened. All right, listen, uh, another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. This Week in Venture Capital is what we do every Wednesday here on the show. Uh, we also released This Week in AI. And I had instructed, uh, my, my editorial director here to set up This Week in VC.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  Yes, I have not done it yet, but it will, it will be done soon.

• 1:44:43Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. So, uh, but we have This Week in AI, This Week in AI.ai exists. Go sign up for it. It's got 8,000 subs. Uh, Lon has been given the directive to make This Week in Startups, This Week in AI, and This Week in VC, Substacks. This is my instruction to you, and this is important. The reason I'm putting this in the show is I'm teaching entrepreneurs constantly. I think Substack is its own unique ecosystem. You told me we're not paying enough attention to it. I said, okay. I took Lon off a bunch of other work. I said, Jacob, you take that. I just want you solely focused on optimizing this until we get a growth strategy going.

• 1:45:21Speaker 00

  And then what is the least amount of work we can do on these newsletters that provides the maximum amount of value? That's the game we're playing. You made a great short for me on, uh, for This Week in AI. I don't think we emailed it to the list yet, but please email it to them with a link to it.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  This Week's This Week in AI newsletter, right after we record this, it will, it will be in there.

• 1:45:45Speaker 00

  I want you to just do, uh, one that says, we're now doing shorts on how to, and demos. Here's our first one. You can find these on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube, whatever, uh, and X. Here's all the places. And then tell me how many people then subscribe to those, but a dedicated email with just that video, and then ask them which other how-tos would you like us to do? My belief is sending, we had a, a website called Hackaday that we created. I, I came up with the name. And Hackaday became our most profitable, best, um, blog at Weblogs, Inc. Why?

• 1:46:27Speaker 00

  It did one thing every day. We featured somebody else's hack with one sentence describing the hack and a link to it. This thing took, I don't know, a couple of hours to find the best hack and 10 minutes to write the one sentence. So it was really the curation of it. And I wound up not selling Hackaday to AOL. It's an interesting story, Lon. When I sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL, the legal department said, hey, um, and it was Time Warner AOL at the time. They said, uh, yeah, we need you to take down these 17 stories on Hackaday because you're teaching people how to hack the Time Warner.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:01Speaker 00

  These lunatics had a link to hacking Time Warner set-top boxes and everything. I said, uh, to the counsel, this thing makes like $300,000. This, this thing's making like $1,000, $2,000 a week. It's costing us $500 a week. It is de minimis. Can we take it out? You can take $300,000 off of the purchase price and let me own it. I will personally buy it. I took some of my proceeds from the, the deal and I bought it. Then I wound up selling it for a million dollars or so. I think 500K or a million dollars. I made like a couple hundred grand selling it to somebody because I didn't wanna manage it. I should've never done that.

• 1:47:38Speaker 00

  But anyway, Hackaday was this perfect combination, providing massive value with a very small amount of work, but you had no choice but to open it every day. That's my goal for you with This Week in VC, This Week in AI, and This Week in Startups newsletters. I want you to report back here on your plans for those and how it's going so we can teach people my editorial trick.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  We'll do it next Friday. We'll do it next Friday.

• 1:48:01Speaker 00

  Okay. Most value for the least amount of work. That's the exercise I want you, Lon Harris, editorial director, Jason Calacanis, to do. You're on it.

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  I'm on it.

• 1:48:11Speaker 00

  See y'all next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  Bye, everybody.