Lina Khan's Figma victory lap, Meta's Superintelligence Team, BYD mega car-carrier video & MORE | E2160

Today's show: Jason and Alex are running down the biggest tech, startup, and business stories of the day on a brand-new Monday TWIST. Which countries are leading the AI race, based on academic papers? Why Jason thinks covert agencies are spying on Meta's superintelligence team. Lina Khan's taking a victory lap on the Figma IPO but what did she REALLY accomplish during her Biden administration tenure? PLUS, why we're bringing Founder University to the MENA region. All that and MORE on a packed episode! Find out why we're the #1 podcast for startups and founders. Timestamps: (0:00) Why Jason is attending more TV poker tournaments (4:02) Did you know Founder University is headed to MENA? Calling all Riyadh founders. (10:01) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (11:27) Show Continues… (19:52) Oracle - Try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠ (21:01) Why Jason doesn't think Lina Khan deserves her Figma IPO victory lap. (23:17) Jason thinks Figma is overpriced: how quickly could a rival build a competitor? (27:53) For an investor, there's a huge difference between a home run and a GRAND SLAM. (30:42) Monarch Money - Get 50% Off Monarch Money, the all-in-one financial tool at www.monarchmoney.com/TWIST (31:55) Show Continues… (40:59) Why Jason thinks covert agencies are spying on Meta's global Superintelligence Team… (50:43) Which countries are leading the AI race in terms of research? Producer Claude helps with the answer. (57:12) Fact-checking the viral BYD TikTok: can their self-driving cars really drive themselves off the ship? (59:52) Jason and Alex check out some of their dream cars Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: 10:01) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (19:52) Oracle - Try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠ (30:42) Monarch Money - Get 50% Off Monarch Money, the all-in-one financial tool at www.monarchmoney.com/TWIST 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 Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  The goal of consumers getting more for less has been achieved so greatly by these companies that to go and invest in a competitor, sometimes this doesn't make sense. Gmail being free is a really hard price for the industry to compete with. The browsers being free is an incredibly hard price. That's where the software eventually winds up. A gigabyte, a terabyte, you know, just massive amounts of free storage for photos. We have gotten to the point where the market has made everything free and cheap for consumers, with the exception of the industries where our government is running them and regulating, over-regulating them.

• 0:44Jason Calacanis?

  Housing, healthcare, and education. If we really want to point the gun of regulations somewhere, for the love of God, crack the monopolies that these colleges have with accreditation. Crack the monopoly on healthcare and insurance and pharma. And crack the crazy regulations that, and these companies buying tons of homes and on housing. That's where we need it. You don't need it in our industry.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Oracle. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Save up to 50% on your cloud bill at oracle.com/twist. And Monarch Money. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Visit monarchmoney.com/twist for half off on your first year.

• 1:56Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Alex, how was your weekend?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Uh, mine was good. I played some poker online when the kids were down, but I think, I think you were actually somewhere else playing cards.

• 2:06Jason Calacanis?

  I was in Vegas this weekend for... The National Heads Up Tournament, this is like a very famous poker series that kind of went away for a little bit and now it's back, I understand, PokerGo, Peacock, you know, NBC, and I can't tell you any details, but it was a blast. And I can tell you, it's great to be a celebrity, now that I am a minor celebrity. There was football players from the NFL, there were, you know, podcasters, chefs, you know, all kinds of interesting actors, and me.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Wait a minute, I've seen, back in the day, the old Heads Up tournaments, right? And in my experience, it was always like a couple of pros staring over, you know, the table at each other. This sounds much more like, was this a pro-am event?

• 2:53Jason Calacanis?

  Basically pro-am. They have, the pros can buy in for 25K, then they have celebrities who come, so just a lot of fun, met a lot of interesting people, and that'll be coming in a couple of weeks on TV. I'm gonna do a little more TV poker, because I noticed, you know, as much as you want to think, like, the work you do here on the podcasts, the investment work, writing books, Substacks emails, whatever, like, these are the important things. What I've learned is, when people see me courtside at a game, or in, on poker, that has more, more cachet, and drives more applications for our fund, and people applying

• 3:38Jason Calacanis?

  for investment, which you can do at launch.co/apply, launch.co/apply, than maybe doing podcasts, I don't know. So I'm just, and also selfishly, I like sitting courtside at NBA games, and I like, I like playing cards. So a little more, you know, invite me to your online TV poker, I'll go, maybe, if I have time.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Uh, Jason, on that note, do you want to start with the Halina Khan Victory Lab?

• 4:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, before I do that, I just want to also make a quick announcement. Founder University has been this incredible program we created. We just finished 10 cohorts of it. It's a 12-week course. They meet twice a week. Monday, you get some content, a speaker. Thursdays, you meet in a pod of 30 other founders and you talk about what you got done that week. Every Monday, you give us like an update on your company. You fill out a form. Here's what we got. And then, you know, whoever from my team is your pod leader will then, you know, feature you in that Thursday session. It's all on Zoom. We do some in-person stuff. And boy, it's been amazing. It just keeps growing. I think we had 350 teams and we wind up investing in the top 10% of them. It has not gone unnoticed around the world, this program, because it's a pre-accelerator.

• 4:47Jason Calacanis?

  And probably one of the most difficult things that our industry has is this nebulous period between really qualified people with an idea and incorporation, cap table being formed. In other words, the foundation of a startup. Now, when people get their 125K check from Techstars or R Accelerator or Y Combinator, all that has to get done, right? Because the check has to be received and put into a bank account. But most of the time, what I see, you know, in the, in the field and the industry sees is a bunch of people working on a project on weekends while they're still working at Google or Facebook. And if you do that, use your own computer and make sure you keep some clean lines there. Don't do it on like- Because they're going to take it from you.

• 5:30Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they will have a claim if, you know, and rightfully so, if you're doing it during work hours or you're doing it on their equipment or using their resources. So just be thoughtful, folks, about that. Anyway, you also know I've been spending time in MENA, Middle East, North Africa region. And people kept asking me over in Oregon. Hey, when are you bringing this weekend startups? And when are you bringing Founder University or your accelerator to the region? And after much discussion, one group, you know, really wanted us to do this. And that was Sinalbl from the PIF in Saudi. And so we're going to be bringing this fall. I can't believe this is actually happening, folks. It's incredible.

• 6:12Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to be bringing Founder University to MENA. So, this is a big deal for us. It's the first time I've done anything outside the United States. First time I've done anything in the region. So, what are you going to learn at this thing? Well, I'll be on the ground for like the first week and I'll probably come to graduation as well. So I'll be there a week or two a year. And we're going to try to find ambitious founders in the region that want to build great companies. You need two or three people on your team. You need to have, you know, a product person, hopefully, who can write the code and actually build it. I mean, maybe if somebody's really good at vibe coding, we've been in it. So, anyone can apply from anywhere in the world if you commit to in-person sessions in Riyadh, which is really fun and an interesting place to go visit.

• 6:57Jason Calacanis?

  So if you're an early-stage founder, really what we do this based on is the team. So you can go to MENA, M-E-N-A dot Founder dot University. MENA dot Founder dot University. You can pull up the website if you don't mind. And you're going to learn a lot of important stuff like, you know, cap tables, product market fit, you know, having world-class design and what that actually means because it does make a difference. Landing your first customer, landing your first 10 customers. And so, here it is, folks. We're doing it. And I couldn't be more excited. I think the future of technology and business is going to be driven by three regions.

• 7:38Jason Calacanis?

  The United States, MENA, and Asia. And so if we look at those three regions, obviously, we're very big players here in the United States. And we are neophytes in MENA, but we will not be in two years when we have run four of these sessions. So we're going to do, I think, six sessions to a year for the next three years. And then we'll make an announcement at some point about Asia if we choose to do that.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  I've got a question.

• 8:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, please.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  So you mentioned in the American version of this, you fund about the top 10%.

• 8:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Is that going to be the same ratio over in MENA?

• 8:15Jason Calacanis?

  No, we do not have a vehicle set up for investing in these companies. However, if they are Delaware companies and they're addressing the US market, Launch Fund 4, when we raised money from our LPs, we told them that was the focus of that fund. So this is an interesting question. Very well done. Your journalism paying off. We don't have as the mandate for that fund to invest outside this region, North America. So therefore, you can't bait and switch your LPs essentially, or change the mandate without going to them and getting a bunch of paperwork done, which is impossible. So if there are shining stars there, we're definitely going to invest in them from Launch Fund 4.

• 8:56Jason Calacanis?

  If not, I'm considering starting Launch Mina, a fund for specifically companies in that region, so that our LPs can do that. So I might set up a $10 or $25 million fund at some point, just for the region. And my goal in this third chapter of my life is to really go international. My third act, unless we get this technology dialed in and we have four acts, my third act is going to be this sort of global network of founding universities. So I want to see, I was in Singapore, so Singapore and Japan are other candidates. Singapore, Japan, Australia.

• 9:36Jason Calacanis?

  I've got friends and partners in Sydney and Melbourne, Perth, a bunch of places. So my goal, and I think I'll skip Europe, unless there's like a really great reason to do it. If there's some amazing country that really wants it in Europe, I would consider it certainly. But there is a big ecosystem already built up there. So outposts for founding university in each of the major markets, and we go from there.

• 10:04Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:45Jason Calacanis?

  They are obsessed with their customers. Their editor is incredibly fast and intuitive. Anybody can learn to use it. And it even works on your favorite mobile device. Plus they've got this new AI powered feature. It's called Blueprint. And it makes it easier than ever before to customize your web design and make it pop. Okay. Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com/twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. That's Squarespace.com/twist. Hey, and after you make it, show me your Squarespace on Twitter. And maybe I'll give you a little reply, a like, maybe I'll even retweet your new beautiful Squarespace website.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  So it's really interesting. We were talking the other day with a couple of investors here on Twist. I think it was the last Wednesday panel. And we were talking about how everyone invests early and everyone wants to find these founders early on. And we've talked previously about the price sensitivity of early stage investors and et cetera, et cetera. And people want to get as early as they can. I don't think you can get earlier than Founder University, right? I think this is as early. So I think you should take it everywhere, man. Because it just seems like the cheapest, best way to find the next best people.

• 11:54Jason Calacanis?

  The issue with this is it's not the best way to make money. I believe it's the best way to make impact, but it's not the best way to make money. If I was strictly optimizing for returns, I could have a very simple life. I was offered at one point to be in a growth fund with like a seven figure salary and the only goal was to use my influence and name to get maybe one or two deals a year. So get an allocation in Neuralink, SpaceX, Stripe, Andro, whatever.

• 12:22Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe that last one would be kind of hard. Anyway, get allocations in, you know, the next big thing when it's that Series C or something. And most people would be like, you know, I think probably three out of four times, people are like, oh yeah, I'd like to have J. Cal on the cap table, you know, he'll make a big deal out of it on his social media, on his podcast. So that would be for if I was optimizing for money. I'm optimizing for the journey and my joy. And my great joy is when I meet with a founder before they're incorporated or as they're getting incorporated and I get to be the first, second, third investor. And so I've just decided to optimize for that. I mean, what's the point of being, what's the point of having FU money? I'll just end with this, Alex. If you don't get to pick the world you live in, I pick the

• 13:04Jason Calacanis?

  world I live in. And this is like a really good thing for people to understand who are listening, especially young people who aren't going to have the same job prospects. We'll get into that a little bit today, I'm sure. Or might not have the same job prospects. You're on your own. And here's the reward for being on your own. You work twice as hard, you stare at the ceiling, you have a pit of acid in the bottom of your stomach, you gotta have some Greek yogurt to get over it. And then at one point, you do cross over, and then you realize, I can do whatever I want. I'm dangerous. I can find the world I live in. You, when I offered you to come here, which I did for three years, and I think in whatever, the second or third year, you were like,

• 13:46Jason Calacanis?

  you know, it's time for me. Yeah. At a certain point, I watched it flip and you were like, I could work for private equity folks and be yanked on their chain, or I can start the road towards independence. And I think you're probably either there or well on your way. So I give you a lot of credit for that.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I want to just add a caveat or an addition. So Jason mentioned FU money. And I don't think there's enough money in the world, Jason, for everyone to have as much as you. But I do think that what young people can do, and this is, I mean this from the bottom of my heart, I tell a lot of young people that who ask me about financial advice is, if you start your savings journey early, you'll have more flexibility and independence, and therefore you're more dangerous. So if you want to give yourself a shot, when you're in your early twenties, save more and bank it and invest it. Just buy some index funds and you will be such in a better place when you're thirty.

• 14:32Jason Calacanis?

  So great you say this. I literally was playing, my first heads up match was against a 23 year old poker player who had made a million dollars and had a deep run in the main event. Really, really, really nice kid. And

• 14:46Jason Calacanis?

  He was asking me a bit of advice at the table. We were getting into a little table talk. It was pretty spicy for a bit there, but then I wound up loving the kid. And I wouldn't say anything else because I don't want to spoil surprises. He, I told him, you know, as you win this money, figure out what your 401K, your IRA, and all these acronyms are, and max them out every year. 25K, 10K, whatever you got, and never touch it, never look at it, never alter it. Put it in low fee index funds, and every year when they compound, you're going to have more and more freedom. Let's get to the docket. There's a lot going on. So anyway, I'm really excited. I'll be on the ground in Saudi the first

• 15:27Jason Calacanis?

  week in November. I might go out the week before for FII and speak there. That's the big conference that the Saudis do, run by the PIF, Yasser, and all the great team over there. I spoke at it two years ago, I think, or maybe it was last year. Anyway, I really am excited about this because I think I'm in a unique position right now to build a bridge between these two regions. I've said this before, I think probably the most important region in the next 20 years is going to be not China, but the Middle East. Why? Because they have so much capital, and they're so smart, and they've been educated

• 16:08Jason Calacanis?

  in the West, and they're so ambitious. They're kind of like the new America. They're the upstart now, and they've been explicit in multiple conversations across multiple countries. Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, or Qatar, Saudi, the Kingdom. Always the same story. We've got 30 years of this petro economy, and we're going to take all that money and invest it in. Real estate, technology, private equity, venture capital, sustainable energy, nuclear, science, AI. And they're bold. They place big bets, and their bets will pay off. Not

• 16:51Jason Calacanis?

  all of them, but the ones that do hit are going to change the world. So it's really important that the alignment, based on people I've talked to in our government and around it, it's critically important that Americans take seriously this region.

• 17:07Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, there's obviously business benefits, but I have plenty of deal flow here in the United States. I don't need to do this. This is really, I'm doing this for, and this is not to be like, maybe delusional, but I do think if these, if the fabric of these two regions gets more intertwined, it's going to be better for humanity ultimately. And you can see what happens when it unwinds with our relationship with China. I'll leave it at that.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I just want to, the thing I was gonna say is, Jason, Saudi Arabia's population, just to stick with the Riyadh example, is incredibly young. And that's why, to me, it makes a lot of sense, because, you know, yeah, right?

• 17:42Jason Calacanis?

  That is, I'm gonna explain that, yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  This is the population pyramid. And so what it shows is the number of people at different age bands. And what you want to see, if you're a healthy country, is lots of young people, lots of people in middle age, and then people tail off as they pass away. Population charts that are less healthy are smaller at the bottom, fewer babies, and they bulge out in the middle. The Saudi Arabian pyramid is a pyramid. It's literally like, there's so many more young people than old people, which means that incoming generations, there'll be lots of folks to do work. It's kind of the inverse Italy, if you will.

• 18:13Jason Calacanis?

  Or the inverse of Japan would be the other striking one is, you know. And what that also means is, young people who are super tech savvy, super worldly, and these societies, having seen it up close and personal, have been evolving very rapidly, very rapidly. And so when you go to Dubai, as an example, or, you know, Doha, or Abu Dhabi, and now when you go to Saudi, and you go to Riyadh, it's starting to feel to me like New York in the 80s and 90s. That's the vibe you get. It's becoming really cosmopolitan. Most

• 18:57Jason Calacanis?

  of the people I've been doing business with, I would say like, a third are women who have been educated in the West. So a lot of the, you know, I think a lot of collectively people in the West's vision of what's going on in the Middle East is probably stuck to 10, 20 years ago. And now it's really different. And the pace of change there is dramatic. So I'm super excited to spend more time there and be part of this incredible journey. Lina Khan.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Lina Khan.

• 19:29Jason Calacanis?

  You know.

• 19:31Jason Calacanis?

  It really is interesting to me how high profile people who cause damage to like the ecosystem then come out and like try to take a victory lap. And last week Lena Contra tried to take a victory lap and she was absolutely demolished by everybody in the industry immediately. Maybe you could just cue this up for us.

• 19:54Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:37Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so everyone can recall that there was a company called Figma. It was a little startup back in the day. Then back in 2022, Adobe wanted to buy it for $20 billion with a $1 billion breakup fee. And then over the next year, the deal was stalled and then never got done. So Figma walked away with a billion dollars. Adobe walked away with a bruised face. And basically people have pointed a finger at that era of the FTC as being too punitive towards mergers and acquisitions. And today, the counterpoint is that Figma has gone public. It priced at around $20 billion in its IPO and then immediately shot higher. It was $47, $50 billion at the peak. And so, Lina Khan came, as you can see on your screen, and said this was a great reminder that letting startups grow into independently successful businesses,

• 21:47Speaker 01

  rather than be bought up by existing giants, can generate enormous values. She calls the Figma IPO and its resulting pop a win for employees, investors, innovation, and the public. And then, Jason, there's this guy named Jason, who didn't agree, shockingly enough. Talk me through this.

• 22:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know, I really think that her philosophy of being able to predict future competition and then putting her thumb on the scale of different transactions is not how business should be run. It should be up to the leaders of these businesses, their employees, their investors, to make these decisions as to what's right for them. So, we can sit here and do revisionist history. Okay, this thing had a big pop. You know, of course, check with me in two years, because this pop, I think, in a lot of these recent IPO pops, just my signaling is, you know, it could be a situation where they're trading at the same price three years from now. And we have seen some companies with that, where they just came out too hot and they had to grow back into that valuation.

• 22:48Jason Calacanis?

  She believes that a company that charges $10 or $20 a month for their product, being bought by another company that charges $15 or $20 a month for their product, are in some way going to cause there to be less competition in 10 years or 20 years. It is the most farcical, ridiculous argument ever. This is niche software in the age of vibe coding and an acceleration and SaaS being absolutely challenged by these new technologies. And this happens every single time the government intervenes, which is the market takes care of it. There are 1,000 startup teams that could replicate any piece of Adobe or Figma's software

• 23:32Jason Calacanis?

  in less than a year and create a viable co-exist or an eventual competitor, and they could do that for under $10 million. People don't choose to do that, in some cases, because the products that are out there are so cheap, they're so affordable, that you would be tilting at a windmill, which is to say, the goal of consumers getting more for less has been achieved so greatly by these companies, that to go and invest in a competitor, sometimes this doesn't make sense. Gmail being free. Is a really hard price for the industry to compete with. The browsers being free is an incredibly hard price. That's where the software eventually winds up.

• 24:17Jason Calacanis?

  A gigabyte, a terabyte, you know, just massive amounts of free storage for photos.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:23Jason Calacanis?

  We have gotten to the point where the market has made everything free and cheap for consumers with the exception of the industries where our government is running them and regulating over regulating them. Housing, healthcare and education. If we really want to point the gun of regulations somewhere, for the love of God, crack the monopolies that these colleges have with accreditation. Crack the monopoly on healthcare and insurance and pharma and crack the crazy regulations that and these companies buying tons of homes and on housing. That's where we need it. You don't need it in our industry.

• 25:07Jason Calacanis?

  The fact that we have a race to figure out how cheaply we can move people and services around that's at a buck 50 a mile, $2 a mile and going down to a buck and then going down to 50 cents tells you everything you need to know. So it's important for all of us to recognize when the government is overreaching either way and the government isn't doing enough to crack the three monopolies I just talked about, healthcare, education and housing because they're captured by special interests.

• 25:43Jason Calacanis?

  And they're doing too much to get involved in tinker with tiny insignificant M and A. That's the odd. I'm done.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  All right. So taking a couple of those points, um, wanted to let you finish your thought. The argument that people don't go into competition when price points are low is an argument against founding Figma in the shadow of Adobe. So I would quibble with that one a little bit, but what I thought I would do just-

• 26:10Jason Calacanis?

  But yet they did.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Right, so that's my point.

• 26:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, sometime, I'm just saying, overall, the reason why you don't see Google and Microsoft competing with Adobe is they think, not a big, not a big prize there. It's a minor prize, right? That should give you an indication. Now, why does everybody seemingly be, seems to be building a search engine and a browser?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Because it's a market big enough to go after.

• 26:34Jason Calacanis?

  Market big enough to go after. So, you know, it just kind of proves my point. And, you know, there's also open source. People forget that. If you want a free version of Photoshop, there's a free version of it. If you want a free operating system, there's Chrome OS. If you want a free, I mean, there's, what's the free Microsoft Office competitor? There's a free open source.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Libra Office.

• 26:56Jason Calacanis?

  Is that the one? The open source Microsoft Office competitor?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:00Jason Calacanis?

  And, and some people use that, right?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Some people.

• 27:04Jason Calacanis?

  Libra Office, L I B R E Office. I think there's more than one of those.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  There's Open Office as well. There's several of these out there that people don't use, much like Linux. So, I knew we were going to end up right here of Jason's views, Alex's views, so I ran some math, just to get some numbers for us. So, I went back in time to the earliest time we could find Figma's valuation, which was its series, it's going to raise $40 million at a 440 post, pretty sure that was the Series C. So, IRR to September 2022 at the $20 billion exit price would have been 187%. That number is too high, because it wouldn't have closed at that point. It would have closed actually about a year later, but I wanted to make the most positive case for, for that. Then, I ran it at today's market cap this morning, so 48.8 billion, not the peak that it reached on Friday, just trying

• 27:52Speaker 01

  to be fair here. And that was IRR with the additional time of 106%. So, in IRR terms, investors didn't do better if they bought it at the Series C and sold at the IPO than they would have at the Figma, sorry, at the Adobe price, but their total return was larger because it eventually became worth more money. So, in case you were curious about that, that's kind of the way it shakes out.

• 28:15Jason Calacanis?

  IRR is the internal rate of return. This means, what percentage did you gain every year on your investment? This is the pure way to look at an investment, because if you were to double your money in one year versus... Trippling your money in 10, the IRR is going to be quite different. One's going to be 7%, one's going to be 100%. In other words, what did you make each year? This is why venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, private equity, all of that looks at IRR. Now, you can look at cash on cash, I like to do that as well. But if, you know, this is the obvious reality that people are ignoring here, and for good reason. You never want to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  So.

• 29:01Jason Calacanis?

  So that was actually a great get by you, by the way, very nicely done. Because I was going to ask you about that, because I actually didn't know. And you did it from Series B or C?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  I did it from Series C.

• 29:11Jason Calacanis?

  If you did it from the seed round or Series A, I think this would be even more dramatic, the IRR, for those people, obviously, but you did, you split the baby, you went right for the middle.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Well, I went for the first valuation that I could be confident about. I started at the seed round, but I couldn't figure out exactly what their seed. And also, by that point, there was only a handful of investors, and we're talking about the majority case. There's no crying in the casino, there's no crying in the club, everyone did very well here. I just think that, I think, I think Lina Khan's getting kind of a bad stick. Because deal making, under the new administration, has been tanking. And if you compare growth rates in deal making in the 2003, 2004 range, it was going up. And now, I have the chart here from S&P, I'll just show you, Jason. It's going down. And so, there was all this complaint from folks like yourself, who had a reasonable contention

• 30:04Speaker 01

  with the Khan FTC, I'm not dismissing what you're saying. But, under the new administration, I'm hearing no complaint about meddling from the White House and trade policies that are damaging and dampening deal making. So, I guess, Jason, I'll accept all the Lina Khan criticism if there's some consistency in condemnation of the Trump administration for scuttling what was supposed to be a strong year for M&A in North America. And as you can see from this chart from S&P Global, it's not.

• 30:30Jason Calacanis?

  For our industry, it's massive. This is probably the overall industry, so I.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is total M&A.

• 30:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I can't speak to it, because I don't know what's going on in other pockets of the economy and why.

• 30:44Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:26Jason Calacanis?

  Well, with Monarch Money, I can track exactly how much cash I've spread around to local servers and waitstaff. You know me, I'm splashy cashy, so I don't have to go too overboard and get in trouble with my accountant, my people, huh? So get control of your overall finances today. Visit monarchmoney.com/twist for half off your first year. Please use that URL. Please tell them you heard about us here on This Week in Startups. That's 50% off your first year at monarchmoney.com/twist. I do know in our industry, we're seeing an incredible velocity. When we look at those other charts that show M&A specifically to tech, and we've had them here, it shows it rebounding this year.

• 32:08Jason Calacanis?

  And we've been tracking it ourselves, the number of IPOs, number of M&A transactions. We also have to look at the size of them. This is the other issue too with these numbers and fun wit numbers, is we're going to have to look at, you know, maybe two-year increments if we bucketed them, and then by the size of the acquisition in our industry. Because the exits aren't all equal, and what we want to see is a good number of singles and doubles, I'll call those under... Five billion dollar transactions and then we want to see the home runs and grand slams, which would be five to 25 billion would be the home runs and then 25 billion to 100 billion be the grand slam category. Whiz is a grand slam. And then some of these other ones are,

• 32:53Jason Calacanis?

  you know, home runs, you know, even Instacart where the last set of investors got rocked, but everybody else did, or the early investors did well, the late investors did poorly. Still a home run for the early investors and it's kind of like getting hit by the ball and getting on the first pace for everybody else.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  How's your day? It hurts. It hurts.

• 33:11Jason Calacanis?

  But it hurts. It's painful. You got a lot of makeup. Okay.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Well, actually, no, we can extend the analogy. All the investors who got hit by the Instacart baseball, then went out and backed Trump, which was a bench clearing dugout clearing moment. And then we all had a big scrap in the middle of the baseball field and home plate is democracy or something.

• 33:27Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Um, anyways, Lena Con took a lap and Jason does not agree. All right.

• 33:32Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's not just me, by the way. Vinod Khosla. I mean, everybody was like, and you know, you got to ask, she wants to be that she has that main character energy that I talk about. And I put producer Oliver on a new project, which is to just get us the main character every day. And when we, every day at two o'clock in our docket Slack room, he's going to talk about the main character because we can be up on this. She has that main character energy. So I think she's looking for a job where she's going to run for office. And when you run for office, you want to make sure you try to recontextualize your tenure. And I am not going to allow her to do that. I am going to ride her every time she slings this bullshit and correct the record.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  As long as you bring the same microscopic analysis and nicknames to the Trump administration.

• 34:21Jason Calacanis?

  I have. I mean, I'm bulls and strikes. Come on, man. I mean, I literally, the whole administration is like, and even Jay Ching Aliad is like, their position on me is like, oh, my God, we have to pay attention to this guy.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Well, no, I don't. I mean, no offense to the White House team.

• 34:36Jason Calacanis?

  You know, when you're hitting the right note in my mind, as a moderate independent, when both sides are equally contemptuous of you. I think of anybody in public life, is there somebody in public life, Alex, right now as a voice, and I'll just characterize myself as a minor one, who both sides hate? Is there somebody both sides hate more right now?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Bob Villen? The, the UK rap punk group that everyone crapped on for a while there?

• 35:13Jason Calacanis?

  That's such a deep hole. None of us know it. Is there somebody of note? Of note, like a commentator, Joe Rogan, Megan Kelly?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Well, no.

• 35:21Jason Calacanis?

  Besties. I mean, pick somebody who is, is there anybody who's moderate anyway? The bulwark guy, Tim Miller, is he moderate? I don't know.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  I mean, he's very moderate for the current era. And I would say the Trump people hate him.

• 35:33Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. I think he seems to be loved by the left.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  He's too, he's too, well, he's nice. He's well spoken. So I don't think the left has any beef with people. I, I feel like you're, it's, it's an impossible question to answer because it depends on what you consider to be people, things people are mad at. But I think the only examples in the New York Times, which everyone hates.

• 35:50Jason Calacanis?

  I think you're right because the New York Times now and CNN are both trying to get closer to the middle. Yeah. If you watch CNN, they added that guy who's like the full right wing guy who just demolishes everybody who's like a socialist every time they come on. I forgot his name.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't watch TV, so I don't know who that is.

• 36:08Jason Calacanis?

  Clips on Twitter, but there's a guy on CNN who is kind of famous for dunking. One of our producer, we'll ask producer Claude to pull this up for us, but there is a.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Anyways, I think the Times is a good example of someone that everyone's mad about, mad at all the time. Because my, in my feed, people on the left are accusing the Times of.

• 36:29Jason Calacanis?

  Situation, I guess.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Well, they tend to write headlines that they on the left think minimizes from whence the bullets come. And people on the right accuse them of being too coddling towards Palestinians. So you end up there. Anyways, let's keep moving on.

• 36:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Do you want to talk about meta or the end of the early career job market?

• 36:50Jason Calacanis?

  Um, hmm.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  So why don't we do meta first? Cause I think, I think people are.

• 36:56Jason Calacanis?

  Kind of interesting because there was that viral screenshot. That I sent you over the weekend and I asked you to use producer Claude and your own abilities and strategies to just make sure that this wasn't cap, as the young folks would say, that this is legit. So pull up that chart and just walk us through and tell us what's going on here.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is a chart, a table, actually, that shows a lot of information about the purported new Meta super intelligence team. This was shared, I saw it from DeeDee Das from Menlo VC. DeeDee is becoming one of the more prolific venture posters, I think we could say, Jason.

• 37:35Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  He's leaning into sharing things that get attention to him and his firm, totally fine. But when you see a chart like this, a table like this-

• 37:42Jason Calacanis?

  The firm is Menlo.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Menlo, yeah. When you see a table like this, you want to go and look at the information behind it and not just take it whole cloth. So Oliver and I, along with our dear friends at the AI model companies, did some work, and we found some names from the list that we had made that were not on this list and vice versa. So the actual answer is going to be somewhere between, but we did find a total of 51 people that are now working at Meta's ASI team. And Jason, it's too many names to go through, so we did some aggregate data analysis here.

• 38:11Jason Calacanis?

  Before we do that, let's just explain the table for people listening. You have the name, you have where they're from, America, Israel, French, France, I guess they're not using, oh yeah. Okay, American, Chinese, Brazilian, and what you'll see in that third column, that's the spicy part, is the absolute extraordinary number of people who are Chinese, I guess in ethnicity or nationality, two different things, right? You could have people who are Chinese-American, in other words, they're born in America, they're American citizens, but they're of Chinese origin, or you could have they're Chinese and they're citizens of China who are here on some sort of work visa.

• 38:52Jason Calacanis?

  Then you have their tenure in days, which is crazy. Y O E, years of experience, I guess that's what that means. Current job, prior roles, expertise, advanced degree, undergrad degree. And when you look at the advanced degree, almost all of them have PhDs, which is in purple. That's what makes this chart super interesting. So let's keep going.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So we bucketed these people that we could find and fact check. So China, you're right, does lead with 23 of the 51 that we could find. Following in number of frequency, it's USA with 14 and then Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa with two. And then other nations with people that made it to the meta ASI team include France, Israel, Australia, South Korea, Germany, and the UK. Now you mentioned PhDs, so what fraction hold an advanced degree? It's 80.3%. Now that I think this is both masters and PhDs, but the gist is these are highly educated people who went through traditional educational channels. The only person we could find who didn't go to college at all was Daniel Gross and Alexander

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Wang, previously of Scale AI, dropped out of MIT.

• 40:08Jason Calacanis?

  And they are both incredibly young. They're in their twenties, makes sense. Daniel Gross is more of an entrepreneur than a computer scientist. So he's a wild card on this list. He's the Joker's wild here. And I mean that in the best possible way. And then you have people who are dropouts kind of thing. 75% have PhDs, 50% or so from China. 75% are first generation immigrants. So this is super important, I think, when we think about policy and recruitment, which I keep bringing up, had an interesting discussion with J D Vance on stage just two weeks ago. There's two ways to look at this data. Should we be concerned? And I'm sure there are people in the State Department who are, that you have our adversaries,

• 40:53Jason Calacanis?

  our rivals in China, making up 50% of this list. Of that group, how many are spies? Just to say it bluntly, how many are compromised and are spies? Now, this sounds like xenophobic and dramatic. There are people in our State Department CIA who are monitoring the communications and tracking these people. I can guarantee you that. Not all of them, but some of them. And in fact, these companies are probably tracking them. And if you think that this is crazy, just look at the history of Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, finding spies within their ranks. It happens all the time.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Saudi Arabia, for example, got some people into Twitter back in the day famously.

• 41:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  North Korea has been placing, well, actually not spies, but workers in a number of companies as well.

• 41:42Jason Calacanis?

  Which I think they were doing just for the salaries because...

• 41:45Speaker 01

  They literally need hard currency. Yeah.

• 41:47Jason Calacanis?

  They need money. So, but here it's like a very nuanced point because also what the Chinese government does, according to reports I've read, is they compromise these folks by going to their family members who are still in China. And they put screws up now. Lest we pretend that the United States are angels in any of this, or Israel is, or Germany is, or France, we all do this. We're all compromising people and planting people. We've got plants in China, Russia, everywhere. So, this isn't like a one-way thing. Everybody's planting people everywhere. Everybody's spying on everybody. But you do have to think, wow, the majority of the team at...

• 42:29Jason Calacanis?

  The majority of the team in Meta's AI group, the superintelligence group, is either from China or of Chinese origin. This means two things. One, what's going on with our education system? Two, if we are in competition, who is the loyalty for each of these people to? And knowing how aggressive the Chinese are in these matters, this is a massive red flag. And I'm not saying that in any xenophobic way. I know some people might take it that way. It's just the game on the field. The two rivals happen to be Chinese and American. That's it. I'm not bringing up the other folks on this list from Brazil or wherever, because there's like one from each country.

• 43:13Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Russia would be the other one I would be concerned about because they are rivals. And obviously... You know, we don't have a rivalry with Brazil and Australia at the moment. We do with Russia and China. How many Russians were on the list? Any?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Two, two.

• 43:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Two, two, according to Oliver.

• 43:30Jason Calacanis?

  Two, four percent.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  I just love, I love DeeDee, the VC who shows on Twitter. He did a follow up tweet and he says, "Source: anonymous Meta employee." Yeah, I love it.

• 43:39Jason Calacanis?

  The source for what?

• 43:40Speaker 01

  The chart they were talking about that we tried to verify. So, on the, on the point about China, though, we do have a little bit of information that makes it clear where these people did their education. So, for example, the most common university that we found was the Shanghai Jiaotong University. And I'm so sorry to everyone who speaks Mandarin, I'm going to ruin this, but it's the

• 44:00Jason Calacanis?

  Take your best shot.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Tsinghua University in Beijing. These are all words that I've read in my head 48,000 times that I've never had to say live on a podcast. MIT 3, and then we have Nanjing and Nankai Universities coming in basically fourth and fifth. So, it really does seem that Chinese universities are generating a simply amazing number of high caliber AI talent. Now, your point about should we worry that it's half? Eh, I actually, I'm not worried in this case because there's a lot of folks that Meta tried to go out and get and couldn't. So, this is not saying that 50% of the world's best AI talent is, you know, being born and trained in China versus the United States, for example. It's that 50% of the people that Meta managed to hire for this team do have a Chinese background.

• 44:44Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know, and every time we find a spicy topic like this, my mind immediately goes to new products and services based on the insights, right? And so, based on my insights here, I think the most interesting thing you could do is figure out what is the shortest period of time you could make somebody into a superintelligence qualified person? Going to a research lab and one of these universities, you get your PhD as one path, that's a seven year, eight year path.

• 45:16Jason Calacanis?

  Can we do it in two? And if we did it in two, how? And so, this dovetails with some of the discussions we're going to have about mentorship in the end, and that was in my Nostracanis presentation I did last week, which was the end of apprenticeships. And somebody could pull up that slide. The end of apprenticeships is a really interesting moment in time. And generation tool belt, which we've talked about here countless times. Who's going to mentor people to this level of excellence? And then my second point is, if you did make that university...

• 45:48Jason Calacanis?

  I wonder if you made that university, Oliver, you can bring that up if you want that slide. Although we don't have to even show it, it's just a very basic slide.

• 45:58Jason Calacanis?

  If you do produce that level of talent, you have a pipeline for it.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:03Jason Calacanis?

  Is AI going to become super intelligent by that time and all these people are going to be worth like a nickel?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Well, I guess you could say that the race to ASI could be very expensive in terms of human capital. But then the race to ASI at the end, once we reach the finish line, will take all that human capital and render it useless.

• 46:18Jason Calacanis?

  So that well said, that's kind of what I'm getting at is that you could just literally, if these folks do their job, the reward is a pink slip.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:29Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Here's the, here's your slide, Jason, and then I have a chart for everyone, but here's what you had in your latest KPMG Nostrakonis presentation.

• 46:38Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's a sigh, Nostrakonis. And I'm sounding like Dracula, I gotta work on this. It's a sigh, Nostrakonis.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  That's much better, less, less vampire vibes.

• 46:50Jason Calacanis?

  But yeah, I said AI could be in the end of entry level junior associate jobs. A partner at a promising law firm told me, this is Andrew Yang, former presidential candidate. AI is now doing work that used to be done by first and third year associates.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:03Jason Calacanis?

  AI can generate motion, a motion in an hour that might take an associate a week and the work is better. Someone should tell the folks applying to law school right now. And I actually was, my KPMG speaking gig, I was talking with somebody who worked at a university, which is the lowest cost law degree you can get at 13,000 a year. And I challenged him to say, and I don't know, is law school three years, I guess?

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Law school's three, yeah. Although people say it doesn't need to be.

• 47:30Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So that's 36K. I was just challenging the person and other people in the room. Can we do it for 10% of that cost? Could you with AI train somebody to be a lawyer? For 13K. So if you are out there and you want to build this product, I will give you your first 125K if it's just you and you get three founders together, all of you can code or design, three people who build, maybe one of you has a law degree and some domain expertise, but you don't need to have it, actually, you can just get that from advisors. If somebody presents me with those three people and you have a plan or an experiment to get a law degree to a person for $13,000, I will back that experiment, knowing how insane

• 48:14Jason Calacanis?

  and how much the system will fight it and the odds are only 10% that we'll ever make this work. Because God knows those accredited universities are going to try and stop you. But basically, what you want to be able to do is have that $13,000, prepare somebody, a $13,000 education, prepare somebody to take the bar and pass the bar in under, I want it to be done in two years. So in one year or less, for 10% of the price.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Do you want to have-

• 48:50Jason Calacanis?

  Or actually, half price. How about half price? I wouldn't even go to 10%. Half price, which would be 36 divided by 2, so like, let's just say 15K.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:59Jason Calacanis?

  For 15K and two years, you pass the bar. Build that product or service.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  One of my, one of my best friends is a startup lawyer, and he's based here in Rhode Island and he, I think, co-owns the practice. Do you want me to drag him on to explain to us how hard that would be?

• 49:14Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:16Jason Calacanis?

  I want to bring the person who can tell me how to get it done. Everybody's going to fight this, especially people who are part of the machine. They always want to fight this. They're, you know, like, they're going to be the, the red cells, where's the white blood cells? What takes the infection?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  White blood cells kills things. Yeah.

• 49:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. They're the white blood cells that will try to kill this idea. I need somebody who's a lunatic who thinks it's possible.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Oh, that's why I, that's why I was thinking of my friend, because I think he'd be, I think he'd love this.

• 49:45Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, he would? Okay, we'd run it by him and then maybe we'll bring one. Okay. If he, if he's going to tell me why it can't be done, I know why. I know all those arguments.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Jason, I know you well enough to not pitch someone coming on to tell you no. Because that would be boring. Also, anyways, this is, this is the chart that I wanted. Yeah, this is the number of AI publications by year by country, and China's had a bit of a lead for a while. And then-

• 50:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let me think about that.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  The US is growing and India is also seeing a pretty good uptick. I think that what this shows is that some of the public metrics that are associated with intellectual progress aren't so good. And an example of this is who has always had the most patents, Jason? It's IBM. How pertinent is IBM to this? Also, I used to work for a guy who worked at Salesforce and he described for me how that company goes about getting patents and I lost all respect for that process. So I think that-

• 50:37Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here's what else. Go ahead, finish with audio.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Oh, just proof's in the pudding. I mean, right now, we are in a two and a half horse race. The US is the absolute lead in closed source AI. China is the absolute lead in open source AI. And then Mistral in France is doing both.

• 50:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Now, if we pull this chart up again.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:54Jason Calacanis?

  Dump that chart into producer Claude and ask producer Claude to get the data for this and put it against population, which is to say, the number of AI publications by year by country by population.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  You want the per capita.

• 51:13Jason Calacanis?

  Per cap.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  AI papers per year by country.

• 51:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, because India has three times the population of the US at 1.44. China is at 1.4 billion people. They have three times the population of the US and they have, let's see, we're at 30 and they're at 80. So they have about three times as much. India has less, right? So this is a hard one for an LLM to do right now, but if we could get that final years, what I would like to see is the final year, 2024, the final year's data, if we can source it, against per capita. That actually would speed volumes. Then we would know on a per capita basis, how many of these elite pursuits we have. And then you, this is what I, this is why I always like when we look at Europe, to do

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  the statistics of unicorns by country by capita. It's really interesting. Per capita unicorns.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  So we talked a lot about power laws, you know? And how, you know, if you were an early stage investor in Figma, that probably returned your fun because it did so well, you know? Good stuff.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Think about the incremental value of an AI paper, right? The average paper. And then think about the value of the real seminal ones. Like, for example, Attention Is All You Need, that kicked off the LLM revolution. It's, uh, it's, it just shows that volume is not everything. Now, producer Claude points out that the nations that have the highest per capita, when it comes to research papers here are Singapore, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland. So what we're seeing here is what I call the small country effect.

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  When you only have 25 people, if you do two papers, you look like you're a world-class research hub. We should set a floor of 100 million, probably.

• 52:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we'd set the floor at 50 million, 30, 30 million. I'd say at 30 million, because if you do 30 million, you take out Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, well, Sweden's at 35, I think. You take out Norway, you take out Netherlands, you leave the United Kingdom, you leave Australia. Yeah, 30 million is a number. But you also take out Israel with whatever, 6 to 9 million people.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Israel always punches above its technological weight. But China was only ranked 21st in per capita AI publications. The US was ranked 17th, according to producer Claude. So it's interesting to see how they're kind of diluted under a larger population. I'll just say this.

• 53:27Jason Calacanis?

  How great is producer Claude? I just want to give a shout out to our new producer, producer Claude, because for deep research, this would have taken like a producer a day or a half day to kind of find this information on the web and then, you know, distill it down. And now we can do it in real time. It just shows you where we're at as a, uh, and, and just like that, producer Claude updates with me. We're quest of less than 30 million. Thank you to our partner, producer Claude.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  This is from producer Claude. This shows AI publications by country in 2024. And this is only with countries that have more than 30 million people. And this is a per capita number. So, uh, notably, notably, the UK has the highest number of AI publications for 100,000 people at about, oh, Jason, what's that, 13? Then Canada at around 10 or 11, Germany, France, South Korea, then the US, and then Italy, which I made fun of earlier, Japan, Spain, and then China. So it appears that per capita, quite the, quite the different dataset.

• 54:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you know, the quality of then now the next level to peel the onion would be like the quality of these like there must be and it's above you and I's pay grade but the quality of the citation like maybe the you know the maybe there's a country in there getting citations for something that's nonsensical right or just not relevant or not a highly cited publication who knows what the benchmark for that is let's continue on in our docket that's a really interesting lot of interesting things to think about with regard to immigration and what we're seeing in terms of our own countries it means we need to get more of these people to the US and make them aligned with US values

• 55:04Jason Calacanis?

  get them to assimilate trigger warning for socialist libs assimilate means take on American values and bring some of your own values to the melting pot which was a concept that will also be triggering to some people that when we all bring a little something to the soup it's a better soup

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Jason I want to grab the wheel here for a second and just talk about BYD because we were looking at a story about BYD imports of EVs into Brazil and we have a whole bunch of information about that we can talk about that if you want but I want to say an LLM point here I was pulling information from BYD's investor relation website figuring out how many cars they sell overseas that are electric and I got lazy and I didn't want to do my own chart and so I literally just had in my case chat GPT I'm like can you just chart this data set for me and look at what it made for me Jason it's so cute this speaking of time saving this is a better chart than I could have made in Google Sheets and it took me about three seconds it didn't make the y-axis the way

• 56:08Speaker 01

  I wanted it to so I told this change the y-axis start at zero I changed the headline via a prompt and here it is like this is so cool

• 56:16Jason Calacanis?

  This is a really interesting story this company BYD is making incredibly cheap sexy cars that I probably wouldn't put my family in yet because of safety concerns the last thing Chinese producers are interested in is safety. The number one thing they're interested in is cost. And number two and number three are cost. So do not trust any Chinese product for anything that requires a lot of safety. I would have red flags up. They have a different view of this culturally and in business. It's kind of like, that would be like trusting people in the 60s and 70s in the US.

• 56:59Jason Calacanis?

  When they're making like, or maybe the 50s and 60s in the US. When they're giving you advice on cigarettes and baby formula like. Uh, here we go. So here is, um, let's just play the video.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Over 7,000 Chinese EVs just showed up in Brazil. But here's the twist. They didn't get unloaded. They drove off the ship themselves. Seriously, a few days ago, this giant ship pulled into Itajai port. BYD's own ship, the Shenzhen. It's 200 meters long, 38 meters wide. Basically a 60 story building on water. But the real shock, it carried 7,292 electric cars, all made in China. Not parts, not containers, a full blown EV army. Dock workers were like, this isn't shipping. This is a landing and no cranes were used. The ship has ramps, front, back, both sides. It's called row, row, roll on, roll off. The cars just drive off in a line, about 100 cars per hour, like leaving a parking garage. So I go all out because BYD's Brazil factory isn't ready yet. And instead of waiting, they said, fine, we'll build ships and deliver cars ourselves.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Other car companies use shipping firms. BYD, they built a fleet and Shenzhen, that's just the start. More are coming. Changsha, Xi'an, eight ships total, a full on EV navy. This isn't just exporting cars. It's China saying, we don't just make cars. We control the road and the sea. Now here's the real question. If a BYD EV pulled up in your city, would you drive one? Comment below. Down.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Okay, so can I, can I fill in some gaps here?

• 58:20Jason Calacanis?

  Please, because you know, I saw this video and I'm like, is this real or CGI? I sent it to junior producer Oliver and I was like, get on this, just. I'm busy. I don't know if this is true or not. And I think we found out that this is actually true.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Okay, so mostly true. Nearly all true. There's many facts in there, Jason. There's there. You can't. It's not a blanket statement. So here's what here's what we found out. First of all, yes, BYD owns a lot of boats. They own six currently with a total capacity of 45,600 or 7,600 cars per on average. They are adding two more to bring their fleet up to eight, and those will have an average capacity of 8,100. So yes, BYD owns its own fleet. Yes, they are large. Yes, they are going around the world. Now, is BYD exporting in volume to Brazil? Yes, they actually exported quite a lot of cars in, I believe it was June, because the EV tariffs for imported vehicles were going to rise the next month. So they shipped a lot of cars there. Is BYD not making

• 59:17Speaker 01

  cars in Brazil? Not anymore. This is now wrong, because BYD's Brazil factory, as of, I believe, early July, has put out their first quote BYD Dolphin Mini. So they are now also building cars domestically inside the Brazilian market. Now, one more claim. What about the cars driving themselves off? Are they all self-driving cars? I could find no corroborating information for that particular claim anywhere. So I do not know if they are self-driving off the cars. But yes, to the Navy, yes, to the exports, no to the Brazil can't make them, and unknown on the self-driving. There you go, Jason.

• 59:52Jason Calacanis?

  Pull up the Yang Wang. Yang Wang U8. This is, or the Yang Wang U9. Yang Wang.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  U9.

• 1:00:01Jason Calacanis?

  U9. This is like, the craziest thing they produce. They're trying to get into the supercar space, which is essentially when, you know, you're in, like, the top of the line Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti, million-dollar supercar race. And this is their EV version, which looks like a Corvette.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  That kind of ran into a Tesla Model S, and then has a McLaren wing on the back.

• 1:00:28Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, yeah. And so, you know, they're playing to win. I think that thing costs a quarter million dollars US.

• 1:00:36Jason Calacanis?

  Supercars typically start at 500 to a million. The new, if you pull up the Zora, uh, which is the new Corvette that I think this is the Corvette I think I'm gonna get. I'll show it to you. I've been wanting to get a new Corvette. So it's the ZR1X, which they call the Zora. I just finished the Nuremberg.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  ZR1X.

• 1:00:53Jason Calacanis?

  And set the record. Corvette ZR1X. When you see this beast of a car.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Ooh, she pretty.

• 1:00:59Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah. I'm gonna get this. I need to have a place to keep it. That's not the ranch, because driving a low profile like this on my ranch is gonna destroy it. But I've been hankering for a new.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  This is what you should buy while we're doing the car talk here. Have you seen the McLaren Senna?

• 1:01:16Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. I've seen the original McLaren. Those are like 250, I think. I have a couple of friends who had them.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm trying to find a good picture of the Senna. The Senna is their, um, essentially their fastest track day car. Uh, it's basically all the F1 tech you can fit into a, um, their website's surprising. McLaren, fix your website so you have better shots of your cars. Uh, but here's a picture of the Senna. I'll just pull up this one, uh, so you can see it. This is the car that I would buy if I was going through my future midlife crisis right now.

• 1:01:44Jason Calacanis?

  Please, yeah. Oh, wow. Look at that. That is sexy, too.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  She's the most gorgeous car of all time. They didn't make that many of them, of course, because exclusivity.

• 1:01:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  But you can drive it on the road. That's the thing. It's essentially like a speedy track car, but you can also drive it, uh, out and about. And Austin's flat, right?

• 1:02:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, you, you could drive it. I, you know, what most people do with the Corvettes, and I had the E-Ray, the, the folks over at Chevy sent me an E-Ray to play with for a couple of weeks. I loved it. Uh, and that's what got me like, you know, back into wanting to own a sports car before I die. Uh, so I can zip around a bit and have some fun. Um, but you need a lift. You have to put a lift on it. So most people will lower their cars.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:27Jason Calacanis?

  These new supercars are slow, so low that there's a lift button that you could add for like three grand. That stock, it's an option, basically. So you lift it up a little bit. So yeah, this is a contender. I like.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Jason, I'm getting worried about you. Don't know if you're gonna raise Fund Five, third act of my life, and then you just said, before I die. Like, I mean, what's going on, man?

• 1:02:52Jason Calacanis?

  I just am acutely aware, through tragedies in my whole life, where I've had friends die too young, that I just think about it now. That we're all, and I should have been thinking about it younger, but hey, the folly of youth, I just think, man, there's a certain number of years left here. And I've probably got less years in front of me than behind me. I don't think I'm gonna make it to 108 in less science. So if I have less years, gotta make them great. And I probably have equal number of adult years, right? And I got, you know, I've been pretty darn lucky in this life. So you start to do calculations, like there's, you know, like your retirement account calculation, and like, how much money do you need?

• 1:03:37Jason Calacanis?

  And this like rule of 4% coming out of your principal. And every time I run those simulations, they're like, and I think about my current lifestyle and how I spend, and it's like, you're gonna be dead with a lot. And I'm like, okay, what if I spent three times as much as I am used to spending? And it's like, still gonna have a bucket load left. And I'm like, Jesus, I gotta spend more money. And I'm so cheap that, you know, I drive a Model Y. I love that car. It's my favorite car ever. I drive a Model Y. And I typically keep my car seven years, but if you're gonna be, you know, if we're not gonna be driving much longer, I might as well have something I like. And also, I'm gonna buy, I decided I'm gonna buy 1969, pull this up, 1969 Corvette Stingray.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  So this, this is what I call a long-nose car. Like, this car is like, it's a guy like, enough room for like, you know, so much engine.

• 1:04:28Jason Calacanis?

  They don't make those. And I'm gonna drive it to, I'm gonna buy it to drive it. So I'm not looking for matching numbers. I'm not looking for, I'm looking for perfect suspension, perfect engine, drivable. I don't care if the numbers match. I don't care if it's the original engine or trendy. Prefer it to be a new one. I think they call it a Resto mod. Um.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  When they kind of update the end.

• 1:04:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you restore it and modify it. I would like it to have that aesthetics. I think that might be the most beautiful car I've ever seen. Let's get back to the docket here for.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, where the hell, how did we end up in?

• 1:05:04Jason Calacanis?

  No, well, the BYD thing I wanted to point out because it does dovetail with tariffs.

• 1:05:11Jason Calacanis?

  And protectionism and ambition. China's ambition is to own all cars on the globe. America needs to think this through.

• 1:05:21Jason Calacanis?

  Europe's gonna block BYDs, I'm sure of it. There are reports that BYD is gonna be available in the EU like 2028. They're gonna block this. The idea of having cars that cost half as much and are like this well-built, like the same way Japan and South Korea and China are very protectionist in letting you bring cars there. Singapore as well. The United States is just gonna have to reciprocate with this or else there will not be a US car industry and there certainly will not be a German European car industry this.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  There will be, there will be because Fiat, Jason, is building the next hypercar. Let me show you what they're building.

• 1:06:03Jason Calacanis?

  Who?

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  I present Fiat, I present to you the future of supercars. It's the Fiat Topolino.

• 1:06:10Jason Calacanis?

  Come on, man.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  I want this so badly.

• 1:06:14Jason Calacanis?

  Look at that. It's a go-kart.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:06:16Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, okay, for Europe and you're going to dinner.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Jason Calacanis?

  Totally fine. That's gotta cost 15K, I'm taking it.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  It's like 15 or 20. It's a reprise of the Fiat Jolly, which is a car back in the day that was.

• 1:06:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you couldn't get the Fiat Jollies unless you knew people because they were rare. And so they brought back the fun aesthetic for the EV era. I live in a city with small roads. I don't live in Texas. So that car is perfect.

• 1:06:40Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the problem with that car. I've been watching some safety videos online. You know, I got kids. I wanna like live as long as possible, yada, yada. That car, when a, you know, SUV or truck hits you from behind, you're dead.

• 1:06:58Jason Calacanis?

  So true. Now, if everybody drove those, then we would be living in a Disney bumper car world, and that would be fine. There is an argument on small islands and small towns to only let those cars in. Hmm. I think it's a genius idea. If you lived in Kauai, or Sardinia, or whatever, just say the maximum weight of cars is X. Yeah. Every car has to be this amount, and trucks can drive from 11:00 PM till 6:00 AM in the city on these roads, but everything else is golf carts. You could purposely make roads for that. But, man, the ambition of this company, BYD, the fact that they want to build their own shipping cars and driving people off of them just shows the ambition.

• 1:07:44Jason Calacanis?

  I do think it also speaks to how quickly we're going to have autonomous cars, and how quickly ride sharing is going to ascend. And I am completely diversified, folks. I have plenty of investments in all the players across many different vehicles, like financial vehicles. So I'm not speaking my book with Uber. But when you look at Volkswagen, and you look at We Ride, and Pony, BYD, Tesla, Waymo, man, there's so many people going after this. There's so many cars that are going to be produced. All right, everybody, that's another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. If you want to participate in the docket creation, go to thisweekinstartups.com/docket, follow at TWI Startups. If you really

• 1:08:27Jason Calacanis?

  help me, when you see us tweet the docket for the day, or the day before, or the morning of, here's what we're going to talk about. We'd love to get you in the replies telling us, hey, I'd love to hear Alex and Jason comment on this, or want to comment on that. Give us what you want us to talk about, because it's a slow month in August. We need a couple of things to talk about, although, gosh, it's been kind of crazy. We'll see. He's at Alex, I'm at Jason. We all have four or five character Twitter handles. That tells you everything you need to know. Old school, OGs. See you next time. Bye, bye, boys. Bye.