Meta's Moderation and Nvidia's Domination | E2069

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist *Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025 Oracle. TWiST listeners can try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠ Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain:https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST Today's show: Jason and Alex discuss Meta's moderation announcement, Nvidia's seeming domination in the processor space, Anthropic's $2B raise and some fun products coming out of CES. (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show.(5:15) Fire in Pacific Palisades and Malibu: Insurance and Startup Opportunities(9:48) Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist(17:32) Meta's New Content Moderation Strategy and Zuckerberg's Motivations(20:09) Oracle. ⁠⁠TWiST listeners can try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠ (22:35) More on Zuck's motivations and what the new president can do(30:30) Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain:https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST(40:26) NVIDIA's AI Supercomputer Chip and Tech Industry Innovations(49:15) Lenovo's Rollable Laptop and Slack's iOS Integration(56:31) BYD's Supercar and Anthropic's Valuation(1:02:45) Jason's Experience with Luxury Japanese Minivans 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 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: (9:48) Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist *Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025(20:09) Oracle. ⁠⁠TWiST listeners can try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at ⁠⁠https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠(30:30) Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain:https://www. Squarespace.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?

  Look at this, folks.

• 0:00Speaker 01

  There's no one in the driver's seat.

• 0:02Jason Calacanis?

  Car with a crazy spoiler. Obviously, a lot inspired by Tesla from BYD. They kind of steal everything. But watch that. What?

• 0:10Speaker 01

  It jumps. Also, this is a McLaren, not a Tesla. Jason, this does solve the enormous market hole for billionaires running from the cops, who are on a poor road, who need to jump over a pothole to prevent capture.

• 0:26Jason Calacanis?

  Or the spike strip.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Oh, the spike strip. If you're in a spy film.

• 0:30Jason Calacanis?

  I like it. I'm punching it up. So, yes, that's what this is for. If you're running from the cops and a spike strip. No, this is like Batmobile level stuff. There's no functional use for this thing, except for us to talk about it. Well played, BYD. This is the point of CS. Come out with a feature that we can't help but talk about.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is easy online payroll, benefits and HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com/twist. 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 Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new 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.

• 1:28Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I am in a dark hotel room in the Secco on Wednesday here at 10:00 PM at night. Alex is in New York. It's, I guess, 8:00 AM there. We're taping the show a little bit on an odd time for those of you who like to watch it live. This Week in Startups is on YouTube and X, and we go live to my personal LinkedIn as well.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:52Jason Calacanis?

  But here we go. There's a lot of news going on. I am in Niseko, which is in Hokkaido, which is the northernmost part of Japan, and I am skiing for a couple of days.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03Jason Calacanis?

  Where the greatest powder in the world exists. I left Niseko two years ago. It was covered in powder. I showed up again, Alex.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:11Jason Calacanis?

  It was dumping powder.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 2:13Jason Calacanis?

  And I was out there today and I did a couple of hours, couple of runs. And then tomorrow I'm doing something very special. It's called cat skiing. So I'm going to be on a cat, which is that machine with the tractor wheels.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26Jason Calacanis?

  And so it's very strange. And it turns out in Japan, they had many, many ski resorts. Those ski resorts, a lot of them shut down because of population decreasing and there not being a lot of families and skiing. It's like, it's a family activity as well as like for individuals. So one of these ski resorts that shut down, they have just one of the lift lines open. All the other lift lines are literally down. There's no lift cable and it's just dilapidated. So it looks like something out of The Walking Dead, like an abandoned ski.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:01Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, and so what they do is they just take eight people up. There's two cats. They take you up. You ski down. They take you back up. You ski back down. But every time you go on a trail, you're the first person to touch it. We call that in the industry and the business, um, first tracks.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18Jason Calacanis?

  People will line up for hours before the ski mountain. They'll see a first track. So you're basically guaranteed to get full tracks. So I am.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  I've been in those cats, but I've never, I've never done that type of skiing, but I just, we were talking literally last show, I think about the chaos and the crisis at Vale over their mismanagement. And then over in Japan, there's not enough people. I, I feel like there's a market opportunity here to take folks to. There.

• 3:42Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting you say that.

• 3:45Jason Calacanis?

  The majority of people who are skiing here are Chinese and Australian and American.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:50Jason Calacanis?

  And it turns out during this time period, um, during the ski season, it's gotten so popular because it literally is the best snow in the world. The volume of the snow, Alex, is like twenty to one to the volume if it was water. In like other places, it might be ten to one, fifteen to one, five to one.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  So it's

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  In other words, fluffier.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:12Jason Calacanis?

  It's a very weird thing. You hit a foot or two of this powder and your skis disappear. But nothing else changes. You're just floating on it. So it is like the most, uh, amazing experience I have. Um, and I'm, I feel very privileged to be able to do it.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  All right. Tell me the truth. How much did the Niseko Ski Tourism Advocacy Board slip you under the table for that? Cause that's a real, you're making me want to go.

• 4:38Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I don't want to endorse it because I kind of want to gatekeep it. Um, as the kids say these days, but I gotta be honest with the audience. It is like one of the wonderful things I get to do every couple of years. The second time I've done it and maybe I'll get to do it two years in a row. But, uh, yeah, it is just my passion and I really enjoy it and it gets me, gets me through the year. I just think about going for a week to Japan and doing this. And now my daughters want to go because I've been skiing with my daughters a whole bunch in Tahoe and I'm really excited to take them to Japan someday. So anyway, um, this is all great, but you know, I felt really bad because I was started taking pictures of all this.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 5:14Jason Calacanis?

  And then I saw Mark Suster, a friend of mine, venture capitalist, that he was like leaving his house and he was scared of this fire. And I'm like, what fire? I mean, I was on a plane, obviously, and you know, wasn't up on what's happening in the Pacific Palisades in Malibu. I used to live in Brentwood. Brentwood's a town just east of Pacific Palisades and there is a fire raging as we speak.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:38Jason Calacanis?

  And a lot of homes have been lost and I think there's some deaths of, of people and property damage is colossal and, uh, you know, obviously animals and people's pets. So. I just felt really, um.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Can we, let's have some context here, Jason. So here is, um, here's a map of Los Angeles.

• 5:57Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  And here is Pacific Palisades up here. Uh, now for those of, for those of people who are not in the U S, I think they think of L A as kind of a monolith. Can you just, for just 10 seconds, just tell us about Palisades, Santa Monica and what this means in the L A context?

• 6:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So when you live in L A, you either live on the west side or the east side. That's delineated by the four or five freeway. And then there's the 10 freeway, north of the 10, south of the 10. Okay. So you got those as like, uh, almost like a four quadrant. And in that top left quadrant is the, what I would say is the most, um, the best place to live. Let's just put it that way. Uh, Santa Monica, a beach town. Many people have been there and just north of that beach town is the town of Pacific Palisades. And then to the east of it, you have Brentwood and, uh, you know, the Getty Center is up there on the hill. And when I lived in, in Brentwood, um, in that area that you're just showing there. You know, and I lived in a corporate apartment in Santa Monica when I was doing Weblogs Inc.

• 6:57Jason Calacanis?

  Back in the days, like a $2,000 a month apartment, I was negative $20,000 in my bank account before we sold it. And, uh, you know, it was a great moment in my life in the early 2000s, living there. Um, you know, they would, it would be fires once in a while on the hills, but they never made it to Brentwood. They never made it to Pacific Palisades, really. They, they were something that happened way up in the hills, um, or, or, you know, or more east inside the inland. And over time, uh, you know, I started hearing people talk about it because I had a wood shake roof. Wood, pieces of wood, right? You know, wood shake. And, um, I didn't have a lot of money at the time. It was my first home and I would, they would get dry and they would crack.

• 7:40Jason Calacanis?

  And I would have the roofer come and take like, uh, fix it. And they would just touch it up for me. Guy said, listen, you've been touching this thing up for a couple of years now. You can't, I can't work on it anymore because there's an order. It's because of the Brentwood fire. You can't have a shake roof. You can only repair up to 30% of it. And I've done that a number of times here. You gotta get this done with composites and fake ones. And I wound up doing that, but I was kind of bummed because I just love the look of the wood shake roof. But I looked online at the Brentwood fire, and this is something that happened, you know, many years ago. I don't know if it was the 40s or 50s, but it had gone down from the Santa Monica Mountains and burned a bunch of houses. And gosh, you know, there was this whole thing with Trump saying like, you gotta rake the leaves. You know, he says things in a pretty bombastic way.

• 8:23Jason Calacanis?

  And here we are a week or two away from him taking office again. He's not wrong.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Forest management matters. My best friend's dad was a professor of forestry at Oregon State growing up, and I learned a lot about this. Yeah.

• 8:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So this is like one of those instances where he says something and you're like, what? Rake the forest? Like, is that's going to stop a forest fire? Actually, correct. And it turns out in LA, they have this like tragedy of the commons where, you know, there's a lot of land between people's homes and they don't really enforce enough people cleaning up the debris. And there's a lot of debris up in those hills. And then you have a Santa Ana winds, something lights on fire, a couple of these. And then there was the other issue. The electric cables were above ground. So the housing prices went up and up and up. These houses became worth a thousand dollars a square foot, then $2,000 a square foot. So these are five or $10 million houses we're talking about here. But, um, you know, they were saying this was going to happen

• 9:21Jason Calacanis?

  at some point, you know, it was pretty well known that these mountains were not cleaned up all that often. And the power lines are above ground. Same thing we have in the in the Bay Area, or we have, you know, have had in the Bay Area. So it's just a real tragedy. Um, I just hope everybody's safe and that they get this under control, but it's getting really, really bad because the winds are picking up even more.

• 9:45Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:29Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:51Speaker 01

  I mean, it's funny how three of the major American economies, Texas, Florida and California are suffering from climate change related insurance issues from different, different, different issues, you know, earthquakes and fires in California, hail in Texas, and then of course hurricanes and other sorts of wind and water in Florida.

• 11:09Jason Calacanis?

  Extreme weather is a pattern. Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Well, the thing that I learned about this, I forget which insurance executive I was talking to. I think this is back when I was covering a lot of the insurance tech companies back when Lemonade and Metro Mile were kind of competing for market share. And he said, the thing that's killing insurance companies in the, in the housing market is not just the super extreme stuff that makes all the headlines. It's the less bad stuff that's now coming at a higher intensity. So a big hailstorm, for example, you don't read about a hailstorm on the news, but if it takes out, you know, 10,000 windshields and hurts, you know, 5,000 roofs, that takes a whole area of, of low risk insurance and really changes the economics of it. So it's, it's an issue all over the place.

• 11:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Anyway, thoughts and prayers, as we always say, and hopefully, you know, Better systems to to help these things. I was, I did look at one time when these things were occurring in the North Bay. For fire, I I had seen they use these blankets to go over cars to put them out. I don't know if you've ever seen these fire blankets. And they, there's a thing, this thing called fire blankets. You can pull it up on YouTube and basically it's a, it's a fire resistant blanket. It has long cables on it. You and I were firefighters. There's a car on fire in the middle of Broadway. We unroll this thing. You take one end, I take the other. We're thirty feet away from the, the fire and the car on fire from either side and we drag it over the car. Lay it over the car.

• 12:33Jason Calacanis?

  And it puts out the fire because no oxygen. It's like a weighted blanket.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 12:37Jason Calacanis?

  These things are incredibly, incredibly effective. And I said to myself,

• 12:43Jason Calacanis?

  it'd be really interesting. A blanket like this to go on top of somebody's home.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 12:47Jason Calacanis?

  Because it wouldn't make economic sense, but here we go. That's like, looks like a rivi in here.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:52Jason Calacanis?

  And these electrical, um, ones are really important because those fires, um, can take a lot of wa, they, they don't work for water. But anyway, you see them running that blanket over the car.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Brilliant. Cause it'll, it'll cut the oxygen flows. Oh, and then it crimps. Ah, I love that.

• 13:06Jason Calacanis?

  You crimp it at the bottom. Yeah. It really works. These are fire blankets. I started looking for a fire blanket to go over houses. But I think we could also start thinking about, just like in Florida, they're weatherproofing some of these homes by having the first floor at ten feet be like a pass through for water. And then you're basically live on the, the first floor is essentially ten feet up. So that if there is a flood, you know, or flooding, you can drive it.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  I, I, I'm gonna have to do the thing that we do when we discuss something, but we have to anonymize it ever so slightly. I spend weekends by the coast often. And, uh, on, on that particular drive, there is a house that was built in the last ten years. And unlike every other house in this region between Rhode Island and Massachusetts, if you will. It's Jason, it looks like it's designed for the zombie apocalypse. Like it's, it's got these huge pillars and these stairs going up. And if there was a hurricane that pushed water up 40 feet, by the time we reached that elevation and then the second floor of that house, it, it, it doesn't matter. So it's like bulletproof from a hurricane perspective, and I love it, but it does look a little dystopian in a way. It's not beautiful.

• 14:15Jason Calacanis?

  It's not aesthetically pleasing. What people have done for that issue is they, they actually close it off and you use it for storage or whatever, or like the garage or whatever. But it's made so that if the water does come up, the panels or some number of the panels can just break out and the water just flows through.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:32Jason Calacanis?

  So they have like breakout panels.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  And in skyscrapers, they have floors that are designed just to let wind go through, right?

• 14:37Jason Calacanis?

  Correct, yes. And so basically you have this whatever kind of panel there, but the panels, if pushed, you know, with your hand very hard or with water, they just pop off and then the water flows underneath. So there's a bunch of startup opportunities here as we talk about on this week in startups. Put your mind to these and there were, when these fires were occurring, uh, my house had a sprinkler system on top of the shake roof. And it wasn't working. It had been disconnected by one of the owners, but at some point they had put literally a rooftop sprinkler system because after the Brentwood fire, whenever that was, they were scared and they put sprinklers on the roofs for the shake roofs. But then it turned out they got rid of the shake roofs. You didn't need to have that, but there could be other fire retardant stuff you could put in Tahoe and in the mountain regions where you're having all these fires.

• 15:22Jason Calacanis?

  So there's a big opportunity, I think, for startup founders to start thinking about composite materials, fireproofing these things, floodproofing these things. And that's a way where you maybe don't need insurance because hey, this thing can survive the major things and maybe have a high deductible or something. So a lot going on in the news as well.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  You're not kidding though. One last thing on this, there's that Sauron system that's coming out. That's the new like security system for people. That's a, I think it's a startup. I wonder if we're going to see similar things like that, like, you know, here's the fire department in a box for your house type thing for certain higher end customers. Anyways, yes, lots to talk about on the show. I want to start Jason with something from CES. We had a founder on the show a week or two ago, CEO of the company behind Codium. They built the window. ID that I tested with and built a little app.

• 16:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Well, they got a shout out from someone who we all know. And I thought I would just play this because it's kind of a fun little shout out to a Twister Thunder company. Here's Jensen.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Really fantastic stuff. Codium, every, every software engineer in the world. This is going to be the next giant AI application, next giant AI service period is software coding. 30 million software engineers around the world. Everybody is going to.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  That's enough of that, but it struck me as so fun to see.

• 16:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, we just had them on and you know, no, no offense to us. I mean, I like to think that our words carry a little bit of weight, but Jensen onstage in front of literally every single press in the world.

• 16:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  That's about as big of a shout out as you can get, I think.

• 16:48Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's great. Congratulations to that startup. Um, if you can, and you know, the number of developers in the world is 30 million. It's a very small number. There are cities in China that have 30 million people, like many of them. Uh, and so it's, but 10% or less than 10% of the population of the United States are developers globally. So, you know, being able to expand that number dramatically through software, uh, through AI is going to have a profound impact, like super profound impact on the world. And that's, I think, going to be a very world positive one.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Well, that's great.

• 17:20Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe being debated right now, that's world positive, I think, is the announcement. Zuck put out like a five minute video, which I guess, uh, we got to talk about here at the top of the show. Cause everybody's talking about it. Yeah. And I, and maybe you could just cue it up for the audience if.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:35Jason Calacanis?

  They've been under a rock, uh, and obviously this is close to your art because you're a journalist. And I've been pretty vocal about this kind of stuff too. And it hits on so many different things from, you know, media, fact checking, standards, misinformation, disinformation, uh, and of course something, you know, that's the number one item in our constitution. Uh, which is free speech.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:01Jason Calacanis?

  And so here we go. Zuckerberg, uh, I guess is, uh, gone based and.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  He's gone, he's gone something. I want to get to your tweet about it, but let's just break it down for people. So first of all, Facebook is moving away from third-party fact checkers. They are moving towards the community notes model, originally called Birdwatch back at Twitter, community notes under X, and has, has very much become associated with the Musk X era of social media, if you will. And what I thought was very important in Meta's commentary, the announcement of this, they didn't say, you know, we are looking at the market and learning. They just said, X community notes, we like that, we're going to do it. And I thought that was kind of very clear and honest of them. They are also going to be allowing more total speech. They are changing their speech rules for their platform, making them

• 18:50Speaker 01

  more expansive. We can talk about what they've changed in detail, Jason, if you want. But the gist here is that automation and more moderation thereof haven't worked for Facebook and Meta the way they wanted them to. So they are going to essentially let people be a bit more freewheeling, a little bit more self policing, starting in the US. Other jurisdictions, of course, have different rules. But that is, I think, a fair, top-level summary of the changes on the content moderation side.

• 19:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's, it is a, let's start with community notes. It's an incredible project, predates, you know, Twitter turning into X, and it's, it's actually an open source project. So I don't know if you were aware of that. And it's, which means anybody can use it. I'll just send you the link here. You can pull up the GitHub page, or if you're just typing GitHub, community notes, anybody can go find it. And so I believe anybody can go take a license to this and use it. It's a very fascinating piece of software. And I'm, are you part of community notes by chance?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I do not believe that I am.

• 19:54Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. You can apply to be part of it. And what's really interesting about it is when you see a, you can go and like, look at community notes yourself, or when you're reading a tweet, if you see a proposed community note, you can click on it and you can actually rate it. Hey everybody. It's 2025 and AI is officially everywhere from medicine to self-driving cars. If AI hasn't hit your industry yet, well, you know, it's coming fast. But AI needs serious computing power. So how to stay competitive without breaking the bank? And what if you could cut your cloud bill in half? That's right, 50%. Well, it's time to upgrade to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI as we call it in the industry.

• 20:35Jason Calacanis?

  OCI is blazing fast and it's a secure platform designed to handle everything your startup needs, including your infrastructure, databases, apps, and of course, AI and machine learning. And what about all these savings? Well, compared to other cloud providers, OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking. And that's some serious savings. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters, and Suno AI, who we had in the pod last year. So here's your call to action. Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. But act fast. This offer ends March 31st. So see if your company qualifies at oracle.com/twist.

• 21:20Jason Calacanis?

  That's oracle.com/twist. And what happens is people are rating each other. They've invited a small number of people into it who they trust, who they know who they are. And when you look at one, you might say, I think that this is a good correction because it's easy to understand, it's factually correct, and it's cite sources. So it's, it's kind of like inspired in some ways by what Wikipedia does. We have reputation and a community of people kind of debating stuff. And these things get kind of voted up and down to which community notes get seen. So to game it is extremely hard, just like gaming the Wikipedia was extremely hard for a long period of time.

• 22:05Jason Calacanis?

  Now, you do have an issue with Wikipedia now because it's, there's a bunch of people who, you know, baked accounts for many years and then they do edits for pay, let's say. And, you know, maybe Community Notes will have that issue down the road. It's, none of these systems are perfect, but it's, it's, it's really does pretty well, Community Notes, I think. Whereas fact checking through multiple organizations, I think when they decided to do that, it was, and this is where like Zuckerberg's motivation comes into play here. And that's the really important thing to think about. Zuckerberg really cares about business, really cares about winning. I believe his primary directive is winning.

• 22:48Jason Calacanis?

  He's got, I don't know, close to 3 billion people using these platforms. He was more than happy. And this is what I wrote here, you know, listen, Zuck kicked Trump off the largest platform in the world. When that was the popular decision, this was my tweet, you know, when I was a little jet lagged here. Now he's bending the knee and firing the sensors he enabled because that's the popular decision. He is the definition of a frontrunner of Kamala one. He would be doubling down on censorship. I actually believe that. I believe, you know, he is, the motivation here, I think, is not that he wants to do the right thing, or he's suddenly seen God, or he's had an epiphany. Because the timing of all these things simply correlates with who's in office.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. 2016 was when fact checking began on the platform after a wave of misinformation or disinformation or just crappy information. And then now with Trump coming back and I'll say some pretty mean things. I mean, Trump threatened to put Zuckerberg in jail.

• 23:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so back to like, you know.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  I don't think we can, I don't think we can say, you know, don't take him seriously. Literally threatening someone with life in prison, Jason's a big deal. Like, come on.

• 23:56Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, but I will say like, just for the sake of the next four years, like he, I'm going to just say like, he says bombastic stuff. He's not able to do that, but what he would be able to do is maybe break Facebook apart or pick the people in office that might have that, just like Biden picked Lena Kahn, who wanted to break things up in big tech and not do M and A. You know, he will have his chance to pick people like Brendan Carr or whatever, who match his philosophy. So it might not be the God king comes down and Biden says, break up Google. It might be Biden picks Lena Kahn, Lena Kahn says, we're breaking up Google. And the same thing goes for Trump, right? That's kind of how our democracy works for better or worse.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  I mean, I, can I quibble with that just a little bit? I think that having someone come in with a particular antitrust perspective is more meritorious than.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Going in with a particular animus against one company or an executive. And Trump agrees.

• 24:52Jason Calacanis?

  Totally fair.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  And Trump agrees that his threats work quoting from Politico. Incoming President Donald Trump said the new approach was quote probably due to threats he made against the technology mogul. So Trump thinks he got his pound of flesh here. And I think this sets the toe, not even making a judgment here. I think this sets the tone for the next at least year of Trump's administration. Cause he'll have a grace period before presidents become less popular as the terms go on historically. So he'll have a period of time when Congress is under his party. He's a new, you know, newly elected president, not stuck with years of incumbency. And so I think during that period of time, we will see more of this. I just, that's disappointing to me as someone who likes the free market versus kings.

• 25:35Jason Calacanis?

  Now, the good news here is, um, I don't think they were actually using any of this fact checking for anything. It wasn't actually being implemented on the site in any major way. It was strictly a way for them to deflect or pretend they were doing something. What did matter was the decisions they made. And then we talked about this on the program many years ago, was this oversight board. Which you can go see at oversightboard.com. Zuck funded this back to the tune of like 150 million. It was originally like 10 or 20 million. There's a hundred.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  I saw 280 is the latest number that I saw.

• 26:11Jason Calacanis?

  That's probably the total over time.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  I saw it once, but like a lot of money.

• 26:15Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of money to put a bunch of like, let's face it, like very elite academic people into a group and say, Hey, when we make decisions for these, what is it almost 3 billion people using our platforms? Yeah, and it's well over 2 billion. You know, we're going to let you adjudicate some of them and give, um, you know, your decision as opposed to us making the decision. And fact checking, you know, is different than a terms of service, but let's pause for a second. These are all companies that get to choose how they operate them. Reddit is pseudonymous. They, you don't have to use a real name. LinkedIn, gotta use a real name. Okay. Yeah. One's a message part about video games and whatever. And the, or,

• 27:00Jason Calacanis?

  you know, originally it was a video game about like hobbies, passions. The other one was like a business network. Business network, you gotta have real names. What's the point? And so you can have all these different things exist, but this is big because it is the largest. And if you were to look at Zuckerberg's decision making, he also, it's super important. Oh, here we go. Oh my God, it's over three billion.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  3.29 billion. This is a Q3 number and that was a 5% year over year. So we'll have to see what it is now in the end of 2024. But that's the latest from their earnings report. 3.29 billion people, Jason, is more than, well, there's about eight and a half billion people on the planet.

• 27:40Jason Calacanis?

  Something like that, yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  If that number isn't right, I plead the fact that we are doing this nice and early.

• 27:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, anyway, I mean, it's literally there in the document. So, um, over 3 billion people using his platform. He kicked the president off for the safety issue. The open board, the oversight board said, hey, that was like a weird decision. Like maybe in the short term, like if you thought it was going to be another January 6th and, you know, maybe Trump would incite it. That was actually the common thinking then. I know that's not something people really want to talk about now. They kind of memory hole all that moment in time. But there was a moment in time, Republicans and Democrats were in unison, like, hey, Trump might say something even crazier and cause like January 6 times 10 or 100. There was like an actual fear from Republicans, from Democrats, both sides of the aisle, and the media like, oh

• 28:31Jason Calacanis?

  my God, like, what do we do here? If he tweets, like, everybody, instead of coming to the Capitol, everybody come to this location, everybody come to that location. Let's give him hell here. Let's give him hell there. It just felt like he was out of control at that time. I'm talking about Trump here, and that this could be crazy and, and maybe people got, even more people would get hurt, or people could get killed, right? Um, because he had so many followers. And then that's when Twitter banned him, YouTube banned him. It was, it was in unison. Everybody banned him. You know, at the same time, the oversight board then came and said, hey, we're going to overturn that, basically. Here's our advice. And then there was this whole thing where is Zach going to take their advice or not? I just want to put it out there. So people are super crystal clear. He's the god king.

• 29:11Jason Calacanis?

  He has what's called super voting shares. He controls and rules this three billion person network with an iron fist. However, however, if but 10% of people were to stop posting because they disagree with his decisions, he would change his decisions. He cares about winning. That's why the number is so big. That's why it's 3.29 billion.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:37Jason Calacanis?

  Because he cares so much about that number going up. He's addicted to that stuff. I know him. I know how he thinks. And you don't need to be a genius. You don't, you know, I don't have a personal relationship, but I want to overstate it here, but I know him since I, since he started his career. Um, you know, in fact, the first time I met him was when he, it was a private social network. He wanted to win more than anything. He wants to be accepted. He wants to be popular, all this stuff. And the reason he has three billion people is because he's willing to do whatever it takes. So as an entrepreneur listening to this week in startups, he's like the perfect example of somebody who's win at all costs. And he sees now that winning at all costs meant to kick Trump off the platform because that was the popular decision, to censor people, that was the popular decision. Do

• 30:22Jason Calacanis?

  not let people talk about issues that they can talk about on other platforms, which is his right. It's his business.

• 30:30Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:15Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:37Jason Calacanis?

  But he's in control. But remember, as users, at any point in time, users could opt out of using that system.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:46Jason Calacanis?

  If you don't want him to be so powerful, all you have to do is do what I did. I don't go on Facebook but once every couple of months. In fact, I just had to reload it because they'll get into my Instagram I had to do it because I was authenticating so we could stream to our, I started to get restreamed to go to my Instagram.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Instagram, yeah.

• 32:03Jason Calacanis?

  It doesn't work very well. Um, but

• 32:05Speaker 01

  We'll get there.

• 32:06Jason Calacanis?

  You could just not use these products or services.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And I don't.

• 32:12Jason Calacanis?

  And you don't. And you know what? I think there's going to be many people who just say, you know what? I just don't think I want to use his product or service. And then he would change his decisions if you don't like them. Or you can compete and make your own products.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  I, I, I will.

• 32:24Jason Calacanis?

  Now we have Blue Sky. Now you have, you know, he created Threads. You have Blue Sky. People can create any, you have Mastodon. I mean, these things don't have insignificant number of people. And I just read that Blue Sky is raising at $700 million valuation.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:39Jason Calacanis?

  So.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  We'll talk about that in a second, but yes.

• 32:42Jason Calacanis?

  It's not as insurmountable to compete with Zuckerberg as you think.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 32:47Jason Calacanis?

  But there's a lot of things there for you to comment on. I'm sure you have some thoughts.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  I have so many thoughts, but like the thing, the thing that I, the thing that I don't like here is that I think that we're speaking occasionally in too broad of terms. Like for example, um, that Facebook is now a free speech haven. It's absolutely not. So for example, uh, you can't have, uh, female presenting nipples on Instagram. Now you might think.

• 33:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, free the nipple was a whole movement, right?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Right. And so I just, I just decided I remembered that. And so I went to the Facebook trend, sorry, the Meta Transparency Center under the Community Standards Section, Subsection, Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity. And they say, we restrict that because some people in our community may be sensitive to sort of content, particularly due to cultural background or age. Fair enough, but that is making a value judgment that limits speech based on the corporation. And so to me, watching them say, and I went through this morning, the changes that Facebook made to its, uh, hate speech rules. You can now. Dump on trans people as much as you want.

• 33:48Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  But you can't have nipples because one is politically expedient and the other is bad for business. And to me, this is not free speech. This is just a company following the trends, trying to maximize income. I don't want to give them the moral imprimatur of free speech when they're not doing it.

• 34:07Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. He cares. The reason there will not be a nipple on there, or a female nipple, I should say, is because it's not good for advertising.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:18Jason Calacanis?

  Disney, Ivory Soap, Apple, they don't want to be near breasts. And so this is the reason. And other platforms like, might have no problem with it. They get more traffic, they get less advertising, they make that decision. But I think it's super important for people to give him zero credit on a moral basis, that he's making some great moral judgment. Has nothing to do, this is just breast tax, folks. He's just going with the crowd as to what is best for shareholders in business, which means you should buy the stock, you should own the stock. I own the stock, it's gonna do phenomenal. I feel guilty owning it, but it's a great trade. And it will keep growing and he'll, he'll always win because he's always going to do this.

• 35:01Jason Calacanis?

  It has nothing to, if Democrats win next time and they say, you know what? We want to have this set of topics be the ones that we censor or we, whatever they, what is it called when you de-promote something?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Uh, de-boost, shadow ban, de-prioritize.

• 35:18Jason Calacanis?

  De-prioritize. There you go. That's the word. Yeah, we're going through all the ways to move stuff down your feed.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  It's early and late, guys. We're doing our best.

• 35:26Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here's what I think. I think ultimately what we're going to see with social networks here is the idea that, I think all the social networks are going to just start to move to, it's going to be more like Reddit, maybe 4chan, like X, where there's just a, you're going to have to as a consumer, understand it's the wild west.

• 35:47Jason Calacanis?

  These are these there this idea that it's going to be groomed and clean like LinkedIn. Or like Facebook used to be where, you know, if you said something about the COVID vaccine, you might get kicked off or deprioritized or labeled. You know, all this kind of stuff is just it's it's gonna lean towards free speech, which I like, you know, that's my personal belief, but I also believe people should be able to do what they want to do. I kind of I kind of like having multiple choices. I like that LinkedIn doesn't have fake names and I like that they don't have nudity on LinkedIn or other, you know, like spicy content or whatever on LinkedIn, because I'm there to do business. I also like that Reddit has pseudonyms because people I feel

• 36:31Jason Calacanis?

  over time can be honest about their reviews of stuff and I can click on their profile and see what else they wrote. And yeah, I I understand I might be getting duped. There might be somebody in there who is getting paid off by, I don't know, some movie to write something, but I I don't take it all too seriously. It's like one little piece of information from me Reddit. You know, LinkedIn is one piece of information and then I come to my own version of the truth. So you're gonna have to like lower your standards as to like how valid the information is on these.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  I I just find the I I know this is my boy scoutness coming out and we've talked about this before, but I do find the posturing annoying, like like adding Dana White to the the the meta board is such a sop to Trump to try to buy favor with the incoming administration. It's just, it strikes me as a little bit gross. Like, for example, if Dana White-

• 37:22Jason Calacanis?

  Or savvy. I see this. I started and I was like, well, that's a savvy move. Now he's got like-

• 37:28Speaker 01

  What happened to merit? What happened to merit? What happened to only hiring people who are good? If Dana White was a lefty-

• 37:36Jason Calacanis?

  For a board, for a board, it's just about access and power. And he gets more power and more access, right? He's got a, he's, he had ground to, to make up here. Just like Tim Cook's got ground to make up here, right? So they're all giving a little donation here, inauguration, whatever it is. And in this case, you get Dana White on your board. Dana White's obviously good friends with Trump. Boom. And Trump probably prefers community notes and he came out publicly talking about this. Hey, this is great. Look, I, you know,

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, they sent the Republican on to, they sent the Republican on Fox, to Fox and Friends to pitch this to Trump. It's a lit, to, to me, business savvy should not be predicated on kissing political rings. And I, I think that like it's, I, I wrote about this. I'm like, this is probably a good business choice, but I do not like that our system, our system is allowing this to be the business norm. Cause I don't think it's healthy and it, it boo, Jason, I say boo to it, but I will say Mark wins and Mark keeps winning and Mark has all the shares. Um, one last thing about this before we go, you said about owning, uh, the meta stock. Here's an example about how we all do.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  So I pulled up the fidelity, um, total market index fund. And if you look at its holdings here, you will see that 2% of it is in meta, only behind Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple. So if you buy the market, you're buying a lot of Zuckerberg. And I think that's, that's very interesting. By the way, um, magnificent seven, anybody? I mean, just, just look at this, it's crazy.

• 39:11Jason Calacanis?

  It is crazy. Yeah, we were talking about that on all in or Chamath was talking about all in. It just, what an amazing, um, uh, how weighted index funds are getting to the mag seven. But these companies are getting wildly profitable and they're going to continue to be wildly profitable because of AI, like we talked about here. Um, so more to come on this decision, but it is his network. If you don't like it, create a competitor, don't use his network. Stop complaining about it, everybody. I mean, listen, he, and the great part about this is like, all these people went to like threads and they're like Zuckerberg's got our back. You know, it's going to be better. And I'm like, hmm, are you sure?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Okay. The biggest lesson of Meta throughout all its iterations and histories is never trust it as a platform because they will never trust you.

• 40:04Jason Calacanis?

  Zuck is a really good operating system.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Unless unless you are the person who's running Reality Labs because then he has your back to the tune of several billion dollars a quarter.

• 40:15Jason Calacanis?

  He does believe in that one. Yeah.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  All right. Um, where do you want to go from here, Jason? We could talk about some Nvidia stuff. We can talk about some couple of some funding rounds that are coming up. Anthropic, Blue Sky. We got.

• 40:26Jason Calacanis?

  I thought the Nvidia stuff was was really interesting. There were there were two pieces I thought were super interesting. One, he made a Mac Mini that costs $3,000. That's absurdly powerful. And then the other one is he seems to be making like real world models and simulations that I believe are open source. And this is something that could be incredibly beneficial for people building robots or self-driving cars. If there was an open source way to understand the world, then collectively more people could build things that move around the world, whether it's a drone or a tiny robot or a burrito delivery robot or a walking dog or whatever. So I think those two were the most interesting

• 41:10Jason Calacanis?

  to me. And I don't know if you had any other stuff that you thought was interesting.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  I want to talk about the the project digits. And if you don't know what we're talking about, here is Nvidia's latest toy that everyone's going to want. Forget the Apple Vision Pro. This is going to be awesome. So what they've done is taken a single Blackwell chip, their upcoming awesome AI supercomputer chip, and stuck it in a box that you can buy for your house. So instead of having to go to AWS or Azure and rent an instance and fire it up and pay them, you can for $3,000 get a Nvidia GB10 Grace Blackwell super chip, which has a pedophobe of AI computing performance. Basically, you can run a 200 billion parameter

• 41:51Speaker 01

  model at home for 3K. Now, this is definitely going to be a bit of a gimmick and probably not going to change the world. But Jason, if you're a company that has developers working on AI, you're paying them 200, 250 a year, probably?

• 42:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So why would you give 1% or a fraction of a percent to have this on their desk?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 42:14Jason Calacanis?

  I'd say the thing that's really interesting about things that start as toys. Or as hobbies.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 42:21Jason Calacanis?

  This feels like the Raspberry Pi.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:24Jason Calacanis?

  Like, you know, the PC in the early days, you know, these things were toys and, you know, people were tinkering with them. And then an application comes out and then people really want it. And then everybody has to have it. The Palm Pilot, you know, and the General Magic Machines were like these little digital assistants. They were PDA's, personal digital assistants. They had a dictionary on them, a calendar on them. They weren't connected to the internet. You had to plug them in with a, you know, a big fat cable into your computer to get the data to sync. It never worked. It took an hour. You know, and then all of a sudden now we all have iPhones and Android phones. In fact, I got, by the way, I got the Google Pixel nine fold.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 43:06Jason Calacanis?

  Have you used one of these foldable phones yet?

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Uh, my father in law has one. I don't know if I've actually taken it out of his hands and used it.

• 43:15Jason Calacanis?

  It's incredible.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Really?

• 43:17Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. I thought it was a gimmick. I thought it was stupid. And now I have one. And the Google nine integration with Gemini.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 43:30Jason Calacanis?

  Is like everything that Alexa and Siri should have been times a hundred. It actually works now. So you know, when we were like doing testing previously, we had Sunny on and we were like asking it to do certain tasks. It just wouldn't do it.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:43Jason Calacanis?

  Now I'm starting to ask tests like, hey, open Google Play and download this app for me. And it did it. And I was like, whoa. Or it pulled up the page and I had still to click the installment.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  That's better than Siri, which would give you, sorry, yeah, Siri should be three Bing results. Yeah.

• 43:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, I don't know, I'm going to search the web, maybe, but. So it's actually understanding like the operating system and like jumping out and actually doing functional things for me. So, and then when you're using your phone and you're on the, when it's closed, you have a screen. And you know, you could just use it like that. You answer the phone or you text. But then, you know, you're sitting in your bed or you're in line at Starbucks or you're having a Starbucks. Or here I was having a coffee, you know, in the sec, oh, you know, after skiing a little bit, I open it up. And I open Slack and I start talking to you. I start talking to the people and the keyboard splits and goes to either side.

• 44:39Jason Calacanis?

  And I'm thumbing and then I'm using speech to text, which kind of works now. And I get this screen that's kind of like, remember the iPad mini?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  I did.

• 44:48Jason Calacanis?

  That people kind of liked as like a big iPhone? And it's pretty great. But you couldn't carry an iPad mini with you because it didn't fold. And this thing folds and it folds and I don't feel like I'm going to break it.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Uh oh.

• 45:00Jason Calacanis?

  It feels sturdy. Now, the last one I saw Marquez was just saying it was garbage. This works. It, it, the reason this relates to this Blackwell thing is I think, you know, putting out this little hardware as a 1.0 kind of play with it kind of thing. You, you might have people start playing with this and somebody builds an application that everybody's like, I gotta have that. I need that.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:25Jason Calacanis?

  And I'll buy it. I don't know what that is, but $3,000 is a lot of money. But not for the hobbyist crowd, you know, the hobby people spend a lot of money on a lot of things like I ski. I spend thousands of dollars a year on skiing.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Cycling.

• 45:39Jason Calacanis?

  Hundreds of thousands with traveling cycling. People buy $10,000 bikes and they rob them. So I think this is kind of like reminds me of the muscle car or PC movements. If you remember, like people used to change their carburetor, they would put in better tires that would change spark plugs. You do all this kind of fun stuff. In the PC era, people would add a hard drive. They would add memory chips to get more memory. This is all done by opening the computer up and putting in cards and it, you know, there was always very complicated in the eighties and nineties to do this stuff. I think that's what I see with this Blackwell. What, what are they calling this device?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Project digits and it's going to be made by third parties. So I think it's kind of like the Microsoft model, like

• 46:19Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, OEMs.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  The R thing and then have OEMs built.

• 46:23Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, that's even better. So that that's that's kind of a shot across the bow of like the PC industry or whatever. Because what if this thing, can it run Windows?

• 46:34Speaker 01

  If I recall the research I did, the answer is no. It sits next to your Mac or Windows PC. But back to your point about toys to tools, Gen one, okay. Gen two, if it runs Linux and I can or Chrome OS or something.

• 46:51Jason Calacanis?

  Or somebody puts in, you know, some other Raspberry Pi like device and it comes as one unit.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 46:57Jason Calacanis?

  And now you got a Mac Mini that can kind of do both. And you know, these new Mac Mini M4s, I was talking about them on the show, how incredible they are.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:05Jason Calacanis?

  Those, I saw somebody stacking those, connecting them together and then running LLMs on them.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 47:12Jason Calacanis?

  When you see this kind of hobby stuff going on.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 47:14Jason Calacanis?

  Get curious. Get curious. Very easy to dismiss. But get curious because somebody's going to take three or four of these things and put it in a car or do something with it and it's going to be magical. So, you know, like if you put that $3,000 thing on a, you know, a bicycle or a motorcycle or something. What's it going to be able to do? You put it on a drone, what's it going to be able to do? You put it on a boat, you know, I'm picking things that move around the real world, a robot. This, this could escalate quickly, folks. I think this is Nvidia's at the top of their game with a lot of money, being, having a lot of fun and running a lot of experiments. You know what?

• 47:55Jason Calacanis?

  The same thing happened at Google with Project Loon, Google Fiber, Google City. Remember they did Google City?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  I do.

• 48:03Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody remembers any of these projects anymore, except you and I, who are passionate about these projects and cover them. You know what? You know what all those projects wound up being? Waymo.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:14Jason Calacanis?

  Forget every project, Google was Project X. What was the lab called? Google X. Right. And so Google Glass was in there. Project Loon. Project Loon was a balloon that would spread Wi-Fi. Didn't work. Starlink works better. Wing, they had a drone delivery service. Hey, maybe that was too early.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah.

• 48:35Jason Calacanis?

  Google Glass was too early. But these moonshots, if 19 of 20 didn't work, and we don't even know what other ones were in there, you know, well, let's assume there were 20. And Waymo works, which it is apparently working pretty well. Still have work to do. All worth it. That's what I'm, that's the vibes I'm getting from Nvidia and Jensen right now.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  I cannot agree more. I was blown away by the sheer scale of things they announced. I mean, we haven't even mentioned, for example, the foundation models they put together, their computer vision stuff. They had autonomous driving announcements. They dropped an entire new line of PC gaming GPUs that I'm gonna buy, by the way. I'm gonna get one. But I do want to go back just for a second to the idea of the foldable phone, because I found something for you, Jason, that I think you're going to love. So Lenovo had a rollable laptop concept. And this year, I see, yes, they announced that they are actually going to build it. It's gonna launch this year for $3,500. And I have the video for you. And I think that you're gonna love this, because I-

• 49:39Jason Calacanis?

  A rollable PC concept. Wait a second. And that's not standard laptop.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Watch this.

• 49:48Jason Calacanis?

  Look at that. Look at that. Oh, my God. For people who are watching.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 49:54Jason Calacanis?

  The screen of a laptop is extending like a shade.

• 50:03Jason Calacanis?

  You just press a button.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  And it adds several inches to your laptop screen.

• 50:10Jason Calacanis?

  Genius.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  So this is the type of thing that I'm sure Apple will eventually make in seven years after Android. Um, but this does mean that eventually my MacBook Pro will have a screen that expands. Because do you recall back when Android phones were getting bigger and everyone called them fablets as a disk?

• 50:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  And now, now my iPhone is the huge.

• 50:30Jason Calacanis?

  The, the fact that Apple doesn't have a foldable phone, I, to me is crazy right now.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:36Jason Calacanis?

  They would make one that'd be extraordinary. It would sell like hotcakes. And I think maybe what they're doing is waiting for this to be a little more rugged. I think the issue is like, will they break or not?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 50:50Jason Calacanis?

  This second one feels super rugged. I've had it for a couple of weeks now, maybe two weeks. And it feels solid. I've opened and closed it, you know, 500 times. You know, I don't feel like it's, and I open it, close it all the time, 10 times a day, no problem. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Uh, and it's really nice. And you know what I, it's silly stuff, but like watching a YouTube video or an NBA game. You know, I was on the plane. Usually I would take out my laptop if I want to watch the Knicks game or a movie. If I've downloaded something and then I have this, I open it up. I can watch the movie on it. It's really nice. Um, so I.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  You just nailed it. If you, if Apple makes this, we don't need iPads anymore. Not that we need iPads now, but they, they go away. Um, I want to make a, a quick technology point there because you just reminded me of something. I had a moment when I was blown away by technology and I want to give a shout out to some, some stuff that doesn't get a lot of love. Uh, Slack and iOS. So I was, um, hmm, I think it was Monday night. I was taking care of the girls and I was talking to Bianca on the investment side because she's the, the local god king of software. And I had a question about Coda. And we were going over this and I, I literally have a baby in a carrier. I'm sitting in the living room on the floor and I'm talking to Bianca on my phone and she screen shared. Into Coda.

• 52:10Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you didn't know that?

• 52:11Speaker 01

  No, I knew it. I knew it existed, but I hadn't had it shown to me as it was so slick, so fast, so high res. We were in voice chat with video. It was just, I was like, okay, this is.

• 52:22Jason Calacanis?

  Slack has Zoom built in with huddles and huddles. You can do screen sharing and you know what? Slack does a really bad, this is what happens when a startup gets bought by a company and they stop doing keynotes like Jensen's doing. You don't get this like fervor around a product anymore. And so these great product announcements, you just don't have them. This is why like independent companies can kind of thrive and they, they get more aggressive and releasing more innovative products. Whereas in a big company, like if I asked you, who's the CEO, who's running Slack, you wouldn't know. Nobody knows who's running Slack.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  I read her name. I read an interview with her.

• 53:04Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  A month or two ago.

• 53:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And where's the, is she doing a keynote where she releases 10 new features? No.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Well, no, because Mark, Mark does the keynotes over there.

• 53:14Jason Calacanis?

  There you go. Right? And so you really, this is very hard for companies to have 10 different products and have all of them really aggressively going after different markets. Like, but Zoom is, keeps adding a ton of features and you do see, you know, Zoom getting credit for them. You know, to a, to a larger extent, they did add channels to Zoom to kind of like

• 53:39Jason Calacanis?

  counter what Slack was doing and they don't work. It's a janky, bad product. The UX is terrible.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:46Jason Calacanis?

  It just doesn't work. The calendar in there worked pretty good in Zoom. I find that I find myself, I used to open my Google Calendar to get to Zoom. Now I go to Zoom, it's got my calendar in there and it kind of worked pretty well. So sometimes like I'll find myself changing my behavior and going there. That's when you know you have something.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  That, that's when I'm willing to actively change my behavior. By the way, one last thing from the previous segment, you said that you were using voice dictation inside of Slack.

• 54:15Jason Calacanis?

  I'm using it generally on the operating system level. I think Apple's is solid and Google's is just transcendent like.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Okay. Bulletproof. I don't, I don't think anyone should give you more tools to send more Slack messages. So I think, I think that, I think that's, that's the crisis. Um, one last thing on the Nvidia point though, because we have a couple of companies on the 2500, etched rebellions, mythic, Samba Nova that are building AI specific chips. And I was pretty excited about them because I thought, look, here's like so many different ways to go about this model of trying to have faster, more efficient, better AI crunching chips. And then Nvidia came out with their series of CES announcements. I just kind of sat back and I was like, good luck to the startups because this is a company that is really firing on nine out of eight cylinders right now. And I just, I hope someone can knock a piece off of them, but.

• 55:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there are going to be cases where, you know, you can make unique silicon cheaper in a vertical and faster, cheaper, better, faster. So, you know, it's not like you're going to build a hundred thousand of, you know, one of these chips. But, you know, for inference, you have Grok, uh, which Sunny's working on, and they're starting to put in a lot of hardware now. You've started to see them there on their account. If you follow Sandeep, you know, you see him shipping a bunch of these things to different parts of the world and building data centers. And then in the Teslas, they have their own card with their own chips on it. So you're starting to see people say, you know what? I don't want to give 50% of my margin to Nvidia.

• 55:53Jason Calacanis?

  If I build my own, which by the way, is what Steve Jobs realized at a certain point, hey, how much are we giving to Intel? How much are we giving to Qualcomm? You know, and some of these things are patents, you can't get away from them. But, you know, the, the idea that Apple would make their own chips was kind of crazy. Yeah, there's Sandeep Mantra and he is shipping racks on racks on racks of, um, rock inference service. So when you ask a query, this makes it go really fast to have those when you build it, they're not for building a model, they're for inference.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  For inference, but I mean, inference is. Gonna be much bigger than the model training market.

• 56:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Um, so a lot going on. I did see BYD launched a Batmobile. Did you see that? It was in the thread that you shared with me.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  I'm gonna pull that up for us.

• 56:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. Shout out to Alex and the team, Matty. Everybody doing a great job. We try to get 10% better a week here. 2% better, 3% better every episode, compounding three episodes a week. We can be 10% better. If each of these episodes is 3% better, let me know how you think we could be better. Just add us and mention us. You know, if you want better show notes, you want better chapters, whatever it is, better topics. We always want to make it a little better for you to learn and just get an edge when you're building your startup. But this BYD, um, I saw in the show notes and

• 57:15Jason Calacanis?

  what is happening here? Yeah. Make it full screen. Look at this, folks.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  There's no one in the driver's seat.

• 57:20Jason Calacanis?

  Car with a crazy spoiler. Obviously a lot inspired by Tesla from BYD. They kind of steal everything. But watch that. What?

• 57:29Speaker 01

  It jumps. Also, this, this is a, this, this is a McLaren, not a Tesla.

• 57:35Jason Calacanis?

  It looks like a McLaren, right? I was looking at the interior.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The interior is straight rip.

• 57:40Jason Calacanis?

  Straight ripped of it, yeah. So it just, for those people who aren't watching, this thing looks like a McLaren. It's got a spoiler, like an aftermarket spoiler that's huge. So it looks kind of like a Batmobile. And I guess you press a button and it jumps up two or three inches off the ground?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  But because it's going so fast, a couple of inches of altitude gives you quite a lot of, of horizontal distance. So we can jump over potholes. Jason, this does solve the enormous market hole for billionaires running from the cops who are on a poor road who need to jump over a pothole to prevent capture.

• 58:14Jason Calacanis?

  Or a spike strip.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Oh, the spike strip. If you're in a spy film.

• 58:18Jason Calacanis?

  I like it. I'm punching it up. So yes, that's what this is for. If you're running from the cops and a spike strip. No, this is like. Batmobile level stuff. There's no functional use for this thing, except for us to talk about it. Well played BYD. This is the point of CS. Come out with a feature that we can't help but talk about. Why do you need your car to jump two and a half inches in the ground and then land properly? It doesn't make any sense. Why would you do that? Do you press a button on the steering wheel? I mean, what do you do next? Oil slicks and a machine gun? What is this? Spy hunter? It makes no sense to me, but I love it.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  I absolutely love it. And if you want to know what it is, it's the BYD supercar, um, Yonglang U9, and it can jump apparently, according to our notes, six meters forward. On the show notes point, though, you were talking about that when I was pulling up that video. Uh, we forgot to change the permissions on the second iteration of this, so people could leave comments. And I know that because someone emailed in. So I think that goes to that people like it. So, uh, we are going to keep doing this. If you want to follow along, this becomes startups.com slash docket will have the latest docket up top. And we're gonna have a historical archive of preceding dockets down below. So if you're watching an older show, want to see a fact chart data point, it'll be there. We're gonna keep doing this.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  It's been, it's been good fun. Um, can I squeeze in one tiny note about a different story before we go?

• 59:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And then I want to tell you about the minivan in Japan that I'm losing my mind over.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Okay, I can't wait for that. Uh, really briefly, two things that came out from the world of AI economics that I think are worth discussing. One, Anthropic is, according to reporting, uh, from the Journal, in talks to raise about $2 billion more from Lightspeed, $60 billion valuation, company is on a roughly $875 million run rate. Why do we care? Because they raised $4 billion recently from Amazon. Well, the thing is, they have about a 69x run rate multiple, which is very, very expensive. And I wanted to compare that to OpenAI, $3.7 billion run rate, $157 billion valuation, 42x. So then I asked Jason, why is Anthropic being valued at a higher run rate multiple than, uh, OpenAI? My thought was Anthropic

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  makes most of its money B2B. And OpenAI makes

• 1:00:35Jason Calacanis?

  It's more sustainable than up against Gemini and Grok.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Precisely.

• 1:00:40Jason Calacanis?

  And Zuckerberg, which we just mentioned, kid likes to win. Oh, look at that. Wow. So Sam Altman tweeted insane thing. We're currently losing money in OpenAI process. Visions. People use it much more than they expected.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  The pro is the $200 a month version of OpenAI that has more O1 access.

• 1:00:57Jason Calacanis?

  So they're losing money hand over fist. And I guess people think they're making $6 billion this year or something. They're going to double it. I don't doubt those numbers. I do doubt that you're going to be able to charge for these things and make a profit off of them. Because I think people with existing businesses, franchises are just going to make them free. So Twitter will have it free. Apple will have it free. Google will have it free. Google already makes it basically free. I pay for the $20 one, but $20 is close to free. It'll be free eventually. Uh, Microsoft will make it free. Uh, somebody said that Sam, who's been tweeting about AGI a whole bunch. Might be trying to raise that 300 billion is the word on the street.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Um, well, that would explain a lot of the

• 1:01:41Jason Calacanis?

  300 billion.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's let's let's war game that. Um, if you buy into a company on the private markets of $300 billion, you're expecting at least a trillion dollar company.

• 1:01:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a bit of your money for sure. Yeah. If you put in 10 billion or 20 billion into it, yeah.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  So a trily.

• 1:01:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there's about 10 companies.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, if if not OpenAI in the AI game.

• 1:02:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Who would you put up there? Because because, um, XAI is worth, uh, crap, I forget, 40, 50? Yeah. Anthropic's worth 60?

• 1:02:17Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I just think we're losing the script a little bit on these valuations and people are withholding, you know, their disbelief and putting that on the side and saying, hey, we have preferred shares. We put 10 million into the 10 billion into this. Thing's not going to be worth less than 10 billion or whatever the preference stack is now 50 billion or 30, maybe it's 30 billion. Thing's going to be worth more than 30 billion. We'll at least get our money back. We'll take a flyer.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  I do it. I do it. All right.

• 1:02:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you might. You might.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Japanese minivan? Would you like?

• 1:02:46Jason Calacanis?

  I just sent you the link.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  I haven't pulled up. That's good.

• 1:02:49Jason Calacanis?

  You do? Okay. So I I've been riding in these in Japan. Um, it's called the Alfred, like Alfred. You're a butler kind of thing. It looks like. A standard mom minivan, soccer mom minivan, soccer dad minivan.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  I'm gonna hit play on this while you talk.

• 1:03:07Jason Calacanis?

  Hit play. You don't need to have the sound on it. And it has the most comfortable seats in the back. So when you get in this thing, and it's so easy to get in and out of,

• 1:03:21Jason Calacanis?

  it's, where do you see the cabin? You basically have these incredibly luxurious seats that, and a tray table, it's a basically like a first-class seat in a minivan. And

• 1:03:35Jason Calacanis?

  you're completely inconspicuous from the outside. On the inside, it looks like a private jet.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  I want this so much.

• 1:03:43Jason Calacanis?

  You lay down in these seats, there's two seats, captain seats, and in the back, there's a regular bench. There's two captain seats that have a control panel where you can, with the LED, you know, and you just set the heat, you can lay down in it. It is like the greatest first-class seat on, you know, Emirates or, you know, whatever incredible international airline. And it's two hours from the airport to Naseco. I slept like a baby for an hour and a half. That never happens to me. I get car sick. I was playing chess and doing Slack and tweeting nonsense about Zuckerberg, and I didn't get motion sickness.

• 1:04:26Jason Calacanis?

  So I'm trying to figure out, how do I import one of these? This is my dream car. Why are they not selling this here? And I was looking at getting a Sprinter van, like an executive coach, to drive around in. You know what those go for?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Actually, I don't.

• 1:04:43Jason Calacanis?

  $250,000, because they're all custom made. They're not manufactured. This thing's a minivan.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:50Jason Calacanis?

  The totality of the genius is they just put two. Unbelievable seats in it. They go for $60,000. So I don't know who can get me one.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Well, I know who's your ally in this. It's Eric Bond from Hustle Fund because

• 1:05:03Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I like Eric. He's smart.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  He's also the only guy I know who's a minivan enthusiast. And he, every time you talk about how many kids you have, he's like, have you bought a minivan yet? He's insanely on point about it. And maybe he has a point. Maybe I've been wrong this whole time about minivans.

• 1:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the thing. Minivans are very easy to get in and out of. The sliding doors are everything. And having a work chair slash sleeper thing is extraordinary. This could, would be an incredible seller here in the United States. And I like that you wouldn't know. Here's the thing. Vans are smoother than SUVs.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:41Jason Calacanis?

  Vans are so smooth when you're just, they're buttery smooth on the road. Uh, now I don't know about safety, but anyway, shout out to our friends over at Toyota for making something unbelievably cool that I am loving. And it's, it's kind of like high and low. Shout out to Akira Kurosawa since I'm not my Japanese name, high, low. High end, low end, same time. Absolutely brilliant. We'll see you next time in This Week in Startups. I'll be back in a couple of weeks. I'll be going to the inauguration. Not the actual inauguration, but I'll be doing a bunch of podcasts in the inauguration. We'll probably do this week in startups from there as well. Uh, so be prepared. Uh, and

• 1:06:24Jason Calacanis?

  we are doing the show notes if you want to see them. Thisweekinstartups.com/docket. Go there. Thisweekinstartups.com/docket and you'll see what we're going to have on the show. And we start about six hours before. Then you can also see stuff in the show notes. You can see those show notes in the docket. When you open up your app, if you're using a cool app, it has the notes there. The one thing I want to try to put in the notes as we get 10% better a week, 3% better an episode, two and a half percent better an episode is putting images. Into those. So there's some advanced things that we do chapters on this week in startups, but you need to have an advanced player that has chapters and you can also put unique album art. So I think you can do album art per episode. We got to figure that out and we got to figure out

• 1:07:07Jason Calacanis?

  how to enhance those show notes inside of the podcast notes. But for now, thisweekinstartups.com/doc. Get in on the doc. Tell us what you want us to talk about. Give us like little nooks and crannies. Check Matty and the researchers team work. Maybe we missed a citation or you have better data for us. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye.