How to Raise a Seed Round in 2026: Ask Jason | E2294

22:00Lon Harris:Then I applied to Launch Accelerator. So that's what we're seeing. And so the time from idea to first customer, and first customer is light product market fit. You can convince people to pay for anything, but let's just say some level of product market fit. That's down to weeks. It's down to a weekend. Yeah, I was going to say it's down to days. We've seen companies on the last few months of the show that are literally like, oh, I built this 14 days ago, and we're talking to them on the show about all of their hundreds of customers. Our bounties program is a perfect example of that. We have two bounties out this week in startups.com slash bounties or bounty.

22:36Lon Harris:And the one for the fact checker, real-time fact checker, we have 15 people, and I think three of them are really good. Yeah. That was like in under 30 days. And then we're doing another one, another$5 ,000 bounty for annotated. what I'd like to do with one of those companies is actually making a startup. So I'll give them the prize, but then I want to hire them and incubate the startup. So that's my hope is that the real-time fact checker becomes an actual startup company or annotated becomes a real startup. So I'm hoping to find a founder or two I can hire and put into like a startup or a company I incubate.

23:09And by the time this airs on VOD, we'll have already picked a winner for our sidecast or live producing company. Or multiple winners. You never know. We've seen some amazing submissions. There are really some great submissions. All right. Next question from Founder University vet Mahika Golani of a company called Treya. She wants to know how should startups think about differentiating when Frontier Labs release products in the same vertical that they're building in? Of course, this is a huge story. People are always worried about are they going to get death by clotted and is Anthropica to just take over their business?

23:43So what do you think founders should be doing to try to sort of early differentiate, give themselves a little bit of moat against OpenAI, Anthropic, and others?

23:52Lon Harris:Absolutely. So there's always going to be a feature set that the interface of the large language model is not going to add because of clutter and confusion. So let's take travel. We had a great startup, Rome. and they, I think, were built on like the preview, like the 2.5 of, and you can look up Rome and we probably have it in our database here. I think they wound up giving the money back to investors because in ChatGPT 2.5, that was like an API and then they were letting you put in, I want a three-day trip, I want to go to Italy, I have three weeks, my boss gave me 19 days to be out of the office.

24:31Lon Harris:Yeah, that was great. What should I do over my 19 days? because my boss is so goddamn accommodating. And Rome was like one of the best previews I've ever seen. It's in our database. It's not public because it's shut down. But let's take that one as a travel example. You can ask all these travel questions inside of ChatGPT, and people do. But if you were to build an interface around it and features around it, and you're constantly adding features and then building a community around it, The community, the support, these extra features, they're not what ChatGPT is going to work on. They're just going to ChatGPTX.

25:10Lon Harris:They're going to just give you your basic output. But what if you want, when you get the basic output, you want to play multiplayer mode. So you and I and Amanda and William and Bianca are doing our next trip to Tokyo. And we're like, hey, let's do this as a group. Let's all research where we want to go for three days on a bullet train. and let's all research where we want to go for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and shopping. And then we all do our research, but we're watching each other do the research. And then we click and we vote and we add it to an agenda. And then we finalize the agenda. All that stuff, Roam Around was the company.

25:45Lon Harris:That's not going to be done by ChatGPT. So you can build all that around it. And then you could build the concept of a virtual travel agency, somebody who uses AI and does all this itinerary with them, and you pay them per hour to do it. Or you pay them for ground support. When you're on the ground in Tokyo, they match you with a local guide. Those things will not be done by ChatGPT, if that makes sense, right? So that's, I think, the differentiator you can do. TaxGPT, another example of it. I was just going to say, having just planned a trip, you do look things up on AI. It's natural. I use it in place of a search engine at this point.

26:21But then there's also Viador and TripAdvisor and all these other platforms. And it's using both. It's not one or the other like I think a lot of people think. It's sort of, you know, you layer these different tools on top of one another to get the best result. So I think there's truth in that.

26:37Lon Harris:I think community, multiplayer mode, support, services around those things, they're just not going to do that. They're not going to create a marketplace with local guides. One of the things I want to do when I go to Japan next time is there are now food guides who have come out. Yes. And, you know, one of the things is because of social media, everybody goes and, you know, does a video of the memorable stuff. Right. And then all the influencers go there. But it turns out, like, unless you speak Japanese and you know the surrounding area, those places are targeting American tourists. But there's 20 other places with pancakes that are just as good or better that don't have a line.

27:22Lon Harris:And you can hire, there's one guy who's a bit robust. And his thing is like, he's, I don't know if he uses the term fat or, you know, whatever. He's your jolly fat guy who takes you on tour. That's amazing. And I guess there was a movie. Yeah, there was a movie about like Brendan Fraser was in about like rental family. Yes. And the concept is he's an American actor and he's hired to pretend to be like a surrogate father in this family that doesn't have a dad around. And apparently this is, I mean, the story behind the movie is that this is a real service in Japan, that you can like rent a fake family member for occasions or for times where you are particularly missing having like a dad around.

28:07And then he becomes, of course, bonded with the family. And it becomes a sweet story like that. You could also do rent an old guy for fun. Yes.

28:16Lon Harris:So that is a thing. You rent an old guy. Rent a girlfriend, rent a girlfriend services. Those get talked about a lot. and it's not a sex worker thing. It's just like, I want somebody to go to this ball game with, you know, like it's that kind of thing. Yeah, but the renting a food thing is like, that's even better. So let's say you have this idea for an AI planner, but then the AI planner has to result in something like you're on the ground. Okay, so you get the basic ChatGPT features for free, but we could also connect you with somebody who books this or gets in line for you, brings you, translates, It sits with you, gives you the backstory, takes you and arranges for you to go in the back and make the ramen, you know, between, you know, lunch and dinner service.

28:58Lon Harris:Yeah. In Rome, we booked a one of those golf cart tours where the guys drive you around the golf course. We got to go into a bunch of crypts and stuff under the churches because he like would get he would give the nuns like five euro. He knew where to go and like who to talk to. So we got to see like genius, the tomb of St. Cecilia and all this sort of aqueduct under the Trevi Fountain stuff that most tourists don't get into, which is cool. So, yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, there's a service there if you can find your sort of spot in the stack. Yeah, for sure. So from Triperidot on X, they are a dating app for serious daters.

29:30I'll bring it up here on the screen. They compare it to being like it's like being set up by a friend as opposed to just sounding on an app by women for women. A new take on the dating app. That is their business, their question. And I quote, founders are often told to find the right investor, but most advice reduces to stage, sector or warm intros. When you evaluate founders, what tells you there is real alignment beyond the obvious category fit? And then the founder adds, they're asking because fundraising feels to them like a marketplace with weak signals and poor coordination. They feel like the best founder investor matches are not just about who invests in their space, but who sees their problem the same way that they do.

30:13Your thoughts.

30:13Lon Harris:Okay, so you've identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in. So you're all set to launch your new company, right? Not so fast. If you want investors and potential customers to take your new business seriously, you need to consider forming a Delaware C-Corp. And that's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. They're going to give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email, and of course a phone number. And that's going to take just 10 minutes and 10 clicks.

30:45Lon Harris:They don't charge hidden fees. Customer service is available around the clock. They're not overwhelming your inbox with spam and they make it easy to cancel at any time. So get all the advantages of a Delaware C-Corp independent, regardless of where in the U.S. you're operating from. Visit NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com slash twist for more details. And the links are in the show notes. Okay, so there are investors who, investors have all different sets of signal and processes in which they invest. I have a friend who's an investor at True Ventures. He only invests on things that come through his network.

31:23Lon Harris:He's an older guy. He's probably 60 now. And he basically looked at his career of 40 years and said, or 30 years and said, you know what? All the great investments came when one of my friends told me about a company. Therefore, I'm not taking any emails. People can email me all they want. The only way I'm taking a meeting is if another venture capitalist or a portfolio founder tells me I should meet with it. And he just uses that as his filter. And I think it works for him. Then there are people like Y Combinator or us. You come to launch.co slash apply. We meet with 10 % of the companies that apply every week.

31:56Lon Harris:So some weeks we get 200 people applying, sometimes 500. We meet with 25 people a week now. We were meeting with 140. That was too much. It's crazy. So we meet with those 25 at the end of the year, you know, all said and done, we've done three, four or five thousand meetings and we've invested in 100 companies called down from 10 to 20 ,000 applications. You get the idea. But we don't invest in biotech or military tech right now. We're looking at military. We actually started with military tech, but we didn't do biotech. We didn't previously do bio, you know, and everybody's got a different preference.

32:30Lon Harris:So figuring that out is hard and it's work. and I think the best thing to do is to study what people have already done. You get a Crunchbase account or any of those things. You start following on social media the different firms and figure out 150 different firms that invest at your stage and have invested in similar companies. So if you're a marketplace and they did Uber or Thumbtack like I did or they're doing FinTech like I did Wealthfront and Robinhood, you can know that when you come to me, we share that. So if you're doing a fintech marketplace, you can be like, hey, J. Cal, you did Thumbtack, and you also did Robinhood.

33:10Lon Harris:We're doing a marketplace for financial advisors, and you pay financial advisors by the hour instead of 1 % of your net worth or your portfolio size. And I'd be like, oh, yeah, that's a really good idea. I would love to hear that pitch. Yes. So that's your job. And you have realized now as an investor that this is not a clean, easy to navigate marketplace. It's a bit bespoke and underground. We have a product called Whisper Network for our founders where they get to go in and search through and put in their materials, ask us for an introduction. And even with that tool, it's still hard. You're hunting, you're packing, you're doing research.

33:48Lon Harris:I think AI will make it a little bit better, but it's your job. It's tedious. It's a full-time job treated as such. That's why if you have three, three, three, co-founders in a company, one of them can focus on the product, one can focus on sales, and one can focus on corporate development. Corporate development is another fancy way of saying raising money. And that's what you need to do. You have to look at fundraising as a full-time job. You have to collect investors and build deep, meaningful relationships with them over time. Less is more. Number one, it's about legwork and putting in the hours and shoes on the pavement, as they say.

34:25You know, it's like about just hitting the streets and hearing the pitches.

34:28Lon Harris:It's a sales funnel. You have to qualify each sale. Are you qualifying each investor? Do they invest? Have they invested in your stage? Are they actively investing or is their fund in maintenance mode and they're in between funds? What check size do they do? Do they lead a deal or do they follow a deal? Are they like my friend and they only take intros from existing founders? OK, then you have to do the work to meet one of their founders then in order to meet them. Okay, are you willing to do that work? So if you have 10 great VCs you want to meet with, maybe your best strategy is reaching out to five of their founders, meeting two of them, and then using those two founders to get one of them to introduce you to a partner over there.

35:11Lon Harris:Now you're talking about sending 50 emails to founders to get 20 meetings to maybe get on the radar of those 10 venture firms, maybe get on the radar of three or four of them. So again, that's the sales funnel. Yeah. It's like, it's like, you have to treat us. It's like when you're applying for your summer jobs as a teen and it, you know, like at first you're like, I filled out three applications. I went to the ice cream store and the bookstore and, and it's like, no, no, you got to fill out a hundred applications to get that one interview and to get that job. It's the same kind of story. Oh, and you know, you can be creative about it.

35:43Lon Harris:Like, uh, there was somebody I saw who went to San Francisco and put the pitch. You can, somebody can look it up here in the producing team. They put the pitch for their startup on the back of their laptop, and they just sat there in a cafe in South Park, I believe, which is not South Park, the TV show, but a little park in San Francisco where there's a couple of cafes and there's VCs tend to be around that park or there's some number of VCs. And they just said, I'm going to sit here and run into some people. And there was a Paul Graham quote or a video clip that went viral recently. it turns out san francisco and the bay area are very unique in that the startup culture there is to help people without an expectation of short-term rewards and everybody helps everybody this podcast was my way to give back and that's why i've done 2 000 episodes of it people tell me all the time oh my god you really helped me i'm like okay i've never met you they're like oh no i listened to your podcast and inspired me to start a company then i started my second then i met somebody who was on your podcast because i emailed them and told them it's a podcast that helping people without expectations of return is a unique part of the tech industry and Bay Area culture.

36:46Lon Harris:You can only experience that by going to the Bay Area and meeting people. We found this post, the guy who put a sign on his laptop. I'm going to share it right now. Thanks to producer Jacob who have dug that up. Yeah, a guy put a sign on his laptop. AI B2B startup raising pre-seed. Product is live. Come say hi. A few investors came up to him. No cold emails, no pitch deck, no intro, just visibility in the right place. So your laptop as a billboard. would sort of be the concept there. There you go. Yeah. All right. People see you coding. We got a, we got a, what do you want to do one or two more?

37:17Or you, you're, you're. Sure. Keep going. We got a, we got a, my energy is good. Good question in from one of the live viewers right here on this very live stream we're doing right now from at Yadon9884. What's the best path for a bootstrap hardware founder once the prototype is real and nearing profitability? Would you stay lean and grind revenue or start bringing in strategic people before you scale up?

37:40Lon Harris:Yeah. I think you should get investors if you're at that point. And investors have totally 180 their position on hardware. It used to be hardware is hard. I don't want any part of it. Now it's hardware is one of the only moats left. I love hardware. Plod is doing a great job with that. We just had on the program, somebody made a bookmark that goes into your book and then you can scan it. And Alex was like over the moon with this product. And I was like, why do I need that? Different strokes for different folks. But hardware is now a way to get lock in. Whoop, as a hardware product, has some amount of lock in.

38:13Lon Harris:My eighth sleep. All of this now has become a moat and a way to increase the fidelity and the usefulness of a product. So yeah, hardware is no longer a blocker with investors, which is really fascinating to me. I invested in many hardware companies, Terra Cafe, Cafe X. We had a Butterfly, which was a drop cam camera ring competitor. didn't work out. We had a smoke detector back in the day before other people came out with smoke detectors. Most of these things fail and Eight Sleep succeeds. It's just Terra Cafe is succeeding really well. Cafe X is still going and actually doing really well. But hardware is hard.

38:53Lon Harris:And it just takes a little more capital. So you're going to have to find people who are comfortable with investing the capital. And there are now a large number of hardware companies. You can work backwards to them. Kickstarter is still like a very viable option doing viral ads to get your first thousand customers to give you a thousand dollars and, you know, charging them three or four times what the retail product would be to go first. You get, you know, dummies like me who are like, yeah, I don't care about the price. I just want to be the first to have it. Yeah. Great. You know, whether it's like the Tesla Roadster that I paid 150 K for or countless, uh, Kickstarters I've paid for and the boxes are in my closet unopened or I used it once.

39:34Lon Harris:It was like, oh, that's interesting. I learned something and now I move on. I wonder if robotics is going to really supercharge this whole thing. You could drop a few grand and get a Chinese humanoid robot at this point. Soon that's going to be its own hardware categories, people buying weird little new robot designs for their house. I think figuring out what to do with commoditized robots is going to be a very interesting business. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. They ultimately will be$1 or$2 an hour is my guess. So if you think about - Oh, you think it's going to be like robots as a server.

40:06You don't shell out all the money for the hardware, but you pay less. And then every month you've got to pay your$12.99.

40:11Lon Harris:If I was making Optimus or Figure, I would go to Amazon and say, what do you pay somebody to sort packages? They'd say it's$27 an hour and then fully baked. It's$35 an hour. People sue us for workman's comp, insurance, all this other stuff. And I'd say, okay, we'll give you a figure robot. You're currently paying$30 an hour fully baked,$20 to the person,$10 plus 50 % for everything else. We'll give it to you for$4 an hour. And we'll have somebody on site who's maintaining them for you. And you have 100 robots here sorting packages for$4 an hour. How does that sound? And they say, great,$4 an hour times 8 ,000 hours a year, four times eight, boom, it's going to cost$20.

40:55Lon Harris:$30 ,000,$40 ,000 a year to have these maintained and ready to go. But then when it goes to consumers, you can really abstract it like a lease. So you'll just pay a$299 a month lease, and that gives you 500 hours of your robot's time. If you go over, it's a dollar extra. Like you lease a car, and you go over a certain mileage, you pay 50 cents a mile. That will be a really good model for these eventually. And then there are going to be all kinds of applications. Great acronym, too. ASS, Automatons as a Service. It's going to be great. Or a ton of Tom's as a service. Yes. Yes. That would be your acronym.

41:29Lon Harris:They'll cover your ass. I think they're going to be great. I mean, we had a security one, Nightscope, that had been at like TechCrunch50 or one of the early launch festivals, one of the early ones. That was that weird looking robot that just drove around. Sure. Now there's many of those security robots. And I think they were taking the same approach, which is security guards,$20 an hour for them to pay, play, candy crush, and fall asleep. This thing never falls asleep. It works 24 hours and it's$10 an hour. And even if it was the same price, it does a better job because it never stops walking around.

42:01Lon Harris:It's got 360-degree cameras recording everything, which a human's not capable of. It's not going to accidentally shoot as many people probably, hopefully, as the human security guard would. But good luck with your hardware startup. It's good timing. Yeah. All right. We got a question from Jacob. We got a very spicy question that you're free to punt. Or we can react to some videos. What's your pleasure? Give me the spicy and then we'll do a video reaction. From Sean Sully, a.k.a. Arugle on X. Out of all the people in Silicon Valley, who's the one person you really don't like the most and why? Who don't I like in one way?

42:33Yeah, the one person you don't like. I think you could pick your reason. You disagree with them on things. It's a personality conflict, whichever. Yeah. You take your pick. I have some guesses, but I'd like to hear your pick.

42:45Lon Harris:Well, listen, I would say, you know, we all operate in the same ecosystem. of users. And some people, I think, have damaged the reputation of the industry and the user base. And then some people have just maybe screwed over friends of mine. So like Zuckerberg, I've been a consistent critic of. It's not personal. It's not personal. It's that every time he had a chance to do the right thing for humanity, he picked his own self-interest over that of humanity, whether it's teenage girls and like, or people's privacy or how he worked with partners in his partner program and treated founders every single time.

43:33Lon Harris:He seemed to make a decision that was not in the best interest of humans. That's it. And so I don't like the way he's behaved. It's not personal. Like I don't, I haven't seen Zuckerberg in person in a decade. I mean, I might have been at a dinner and been in the same room as him, I'm sure, a couple of times. But having sat down and had a conversation with him, I'd be happy to do that. I'd be happy to interview him for a project or a product. But I think he is so obsessed with the growth of his companies, which has made him tremendously successful, that copying other people's ideas blatantly, screwing partners over in the partner program he had, not being thoughtful about teenagers using his product, not being thoughtful about, you know, all the reports that he had internally about teenagers and specifically teenage girls and how damaging Instagram was for them in terms of eating disorders and anxiety, and then optimizing all these platforms to keep you online is, it just, it's a level of selfishness in decision-making that, and cutthroatness that I understand, but that, you know, I wouldn't do.

44:44Lon Harris:And I think has damaged the reputation of the tech industry. I think he actually has made people look at the tech industry and be like, ugh, you know? Well, I mean, we've seen that. Sam Altman I don't like because he screwed Elon, and Elon's my friend, and I watched it happen. But I kind of liked Sam, or I did like Sam interpersonally. We always had some, like, interesting things. But he, you know, he kind of shivved my friend, and I'm team Elon. not cool to what he did to him. And listen, I'm not the only person who thinks like, hey, maybe Sam should not behave this way on a business level. But again, it doesn't matter in business.

45:21Lon Harris:You can be incredible. The two people I'm talking about are two of the most successful people ever in the history of business. Yeah, they're doing all right. So in some ways, being able to make self-interested decisions and not worry about what people think about you and not worry about losing and burning relationships is a quick path to extraordinary success. I think being a, being a like high level tech CEO definitely self selects for some of those qualities that we would associate with, you know, like someone who you might consider like a jerk or a not, not very nice person in your life. I mean, the number of people who in that piece, um, in the New Yorker, which, you know, listen, I, these press pieces, like it's probably, you know, 60 % true, 40 % true, 80 % true, who knows?

46:06Lon Harris:And then people have agendas. So you have to sort that out. And the press doesn't care about sorting out the agendas. They care about like, hey, is this piece going to rip or not? Right. So I don't, the New Yorker piece on Sam was brutal. And a number of people called his behavior sociopathic. I didn't call his behavior sociopath. That's what, you know, Ronan Farrow and his collaborator, I didn't participate in that piece. They asked me to. I was like, you know, I don't really have any business interest with Sam. So, like, I'm not qualified. And then, number two, I don't talk to the press. So I'm good.

46:39Lon Harris:Thanks. But they were like, we had specific questions to ask you about Sam Waltman, about the Sequoia Scouts program. I was like, yeah, feel free to put them in writing and I'll consider. And they're like, we don't do that. And I was like, I just didn't respond. Right. Well, I don't care. You know, I just was interested in what the questions were. I probably wasn't going to answer them anyway, but I was curious, like, what the question even was. Yeah. I mean, when you're writing a piece like that. So anyway, that's the answer. There you go. Fair enough. And it's not personal. Like, so, you know, everybody wants to make it personal.

47:08Lon Harris:Like, I'll bring up maybe the guy with the guy in military tech, you know, like when I popped off on my answer about him. It's not that I dislike him. I just thought what he did was brain dead, like stupid, like to do covert stuff. Now, is the press story correct or not? I don't know if that press story was correct. And I did kind of pop off and I apologized to him because like, yeah, I look back on and I was like, yeah, you know, maybe I was a little bit too hardcore in my answer. But if that story was true, I do think he did the wrong thing, but I didn't have to say it as brutally as I said it.

47:40Lon Harris:And I did kick him when he was down, he got fired, I was kicking him. So I kind of looked at it and I was like, yeah, maybe that was not a classy or kind or Christian thing for me to do. So I was like, yeah, okay, I take ownership of that. Sure. I kicked a guy when he was down. When you podcast every day, you're just reacting, you're doing hot takes. You get caught up in the moment. Well, but you see how I do it. We were doing a recording before this and people were asking me about a case and, oh, Y Combinator and General Catalyst supporting a founder who allegedly did things that were unethical and copied another startup.

48:13Lon Harris:I framed it like, if this is true and we don't know if it's true, this would be maybe unethical, but not illegal behavior. And maybe, you know, General Catalyst didn't know what this founder was doing, if it's even true, and maybe they're trying to clean it up right now. So I really think through, like, before I pop off, and I just don't trust the media or any report now. And when you hear me on All In, you know, sometimes people just run with a Kane Koa the Great story or like some viral clip. And I'm like, just so we know, that viral clip could be AI. It could be an old clip. Nobody knows. So this is alleged.

48:50Lon Harris:And I kind of make a joke about it. Allegedly, perhaps not confirmed. I put all those disclaimers on it because I'm old enough now to know like some non-zero, like low double digit percentages of time I'm reporting on a news story. It's not exactly accurate. I think that's a good lesson for even if you're not hosting a podcast, even just in your everyday life. In 2026, you got to take that beat. It might be very satisfying to be like, oh, this idea of the story lines up with my personal biases. I can't wait to share it and prove how right I've been. You always have to take that extra beat like, is this AI?

49:26Is this true? Is there a community note? Is there some additional information? Is this being framed in a certain way designed to provoke a reaction? Because everything is -

49:34Lon Harris:Lon, this was your first trip to Italy? This was my first time ever in Italy. Yes, that's true. Okay. So - I went to Greece. Oh, you didn't went to Greece as well? I went Santorini and Mykonos. I visited Santorini and Mykonos. Amazing. It was amazing. So give me your general impression of Greece and Italy. What were your favorite parts of it? What was extraordinary? And then what was underwhelming and didn't hit the notes as we go off-duty here? Yeah, so I went. It was Lon off-duty in Italy. I went. I did a week in Rome. Me and a friend, we stayed in an Airbnb right by the Castel, St. Angelo. Right, right.

50:10It's sort of the middle of the city, right? Not far from Tristevere. Staying in the Airbnb was amazing. We're walking distance from the Vatican. It's a building from the 1600s where the Pope's staff used to live in the Renaissance era. So it was an unbelievable place. The best thing we did was that crypt tour. We did a golf cart crypt tour. And a guy took us to all sorts of out-of-the-way churches that had bone temples in the basement and all of this crazy art. That was amazing to see. We took a bullet train one day to Florence and went to the Efisi Gallery. We went to this amazing pasta restaurant called Osteria Pastella.

50:51Lon Harris:I think I went to both of those. That's great. Yeah, they're one of the places they take a huge wheel of cheese and they pour brandy in it. And then they light it on fire. And then they mix your pasta in the cheese bowl. And then they topped it with white truffles. It was incredible. And the Efisi, you know, lots of great art. I will say a down thing. It's very, very crowded right now in Italy. Lots and lots of tourists want to see Rome and Florence. I was not alone. And one thing that really bugged me in all the art museums that we went to is people are standing in front of the paintings of the sculptures and they're just snapping photos on their phone.

51:26And I mean, this is like Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Caravaggio's Medusa. Just go on Google Images. There's 100 beautiful, up-close, high-resolution photos of every. You can get the birth of Venus on like a mouse pad. Like you don't need your own photo.

51:43Lon Harris:I think this is a, this is a gripe. This is a gripe. That's worth noting. Yeah. And just be in the moment folks, just be in the moment. And this, I'll tell you the thing that makes me crazy in these places, the selfie stick or the, or the I 360 guy, you know, the I 360 guy with the stick and it goes up and he's got to walk around and he's got to have a 360 view that he's never going to look at. But the 360 guy is worse than the selfie guy. The selfie guy has got his iPhone on the stick, whatever. These guys are walking through Vegas casinos. And I'm like, what are you documenting? Your life is incredibly boring.

52:23Lon Harris:You're the least important person within a hundred miles of this place. This place has been documented as you correctly point out to the point of absurdity. And now everybody's got to be on your i360 and you're smacking people in the head nobody cares you're never looking at these things if you want to quick take a quick photo of yourself in front of your favorite piece totally fine right and that's i did i posted a few of them to twitter i would take a picture of myself like here i am i'm in the up easy i want to remember this moment i'm not saying don't be a tourist don't take a photo don't take a selfie but it's that stand just just taking it and like we went to a rothgo exhibit as well in florida it's like a modern museum and it's like those paintings, it's being in the room with it.

53:05That's the point. It's overwhelming when you're standing in front of it. You're not going to appreciate it on your phone. What are you doing?

53:11Lon Harris:Here's my idea. Here's my idea for these museums. 24 hours and increase the price to go a little bit. Yeah. Or maybe like on the off hours, you pay a premium. Oh, sure. I would like, Because these all close at 6 o 'clock, right? They're done. Yeah. Ufizi, I think, is, yeah, it's like 10 a.m. to like 4.30. But you have to get a time. They send you through in shifts. So when you buy your tickets, they give you a time to show up, and then you get in the line. And there's like a VIP line. You pay an extra couple of euros. So what did you pay, 10 euros or something? It's not expensive. No, I think it was like 30 euros apiece.

53:50But we also made those plans a little last minute. I bet if we got in earlier, we probably could have gotten a cheaper Ufizi pack.

53:55Lon Harris:Here's my idea. Yeah. The place closes, like the last entrance is 4.30, which means they're kicking you out at 6. Right. 6 to 8, 8 to 10, 10 to 12, 12 to 2, 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. I know maybe people don't want to work those. Have a 100 euro experience. Now, 100 euro,$100 experience per person sounds insane. But by the way, if you're an Uber driver or you're a housekeeper in New York, you're making 30, 40, 50 bucks an hour already. And that person might want to have an experience with 10 % as many people there or 20 % as many people there. It would be a totally different experience to go and really like soak it in on your own and have the time instead of being pushed around and everybody's trying to push.

54:44Lon Harris:I would have loved, loved to go to dinner and then I like to do my after dinner walk because I'm old and I'm controlling my weight, row.co slash twist. I would love to do my two hour walk in the Louvre from 8 to 10 p.m. or even 10 to midnight. How great would it be for us to be in the Louvre at 11 p.m. and see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo with but a half dozen people there? Yeah, because also I, yeah, in the British Museum too in London, And I had the same experience where it's like, it's amazing to see that stuff. But you're you're constantly in like this huge crowd and everybody wants to take their photos.

55:24And it's really.

55:25Lon Harris:Did you go to the Florence gelato place that I told you about? You know, I did. I went to a gelato place in Florence, but we were only there for 24 hours. I ran at a time. I did not get it. I missed that. I missed that one. But I did. We did go. We got some incredible food the whole time. I roamed, too. We went to some really amazing restaurants. And then so that was week one. And then week two, we joined my dad and my uncle and his girlfriend, Karen, for a cruise. And that went to Santorini, Greece, Mykonos, Greece, and also a town named Kushadashi in Turkey, where there's the ancient Greek ruins of Ephesus are there.

56:02And so we did a little quick tour of that.

56:03Lon Harris:Santorini, beautiful, right? Oh, my gosh. Hillside with the – did you get to go on the donkey ride? No. Up and down the – I felt bad for the donkey. I don't want to subject a donkey to my 200 pounds. I felt like I'm not going to do that to that poor donkey. Well, this is why row.co slash twist will get you down to 180, and you'll be fighting what you want to. No, I thought the donkey thing was a little bit extreme, too, but they have, like, this very steep hill. Yes, it leads up to you, right. And you take a donkey ride up it. Oya, the sort of—it's the city when you think of Santorini and you see the Instagram posts with the white houses and the blue dome churches.

56:39That's Oya. And so we got to go check out the town. We took a bus to get there. And then we went to Fira as well, another town. And then they took us to one of those black sand beaches. So we got to do a little beach time in Santorini. That was incredible.

56:52Lon Harris:I'm glad you got to take some time off. Me too. And this is where I don't have a problem with the metaglasses, actually. I'm okay. Sure. I have an exception for metaglasses. If you take them to dinner, you're not invited to dinner. Right. However, if you're in a museum and you want to put those on and record, go for it. Go for it. It's better than the selfie stick everywhere. I still don't think you're really going to get a lot out of that after the fact. Part of being in the museum is you're in the museum. It's real. You can look up art on the internet all the time. I do it all the time. Take 10 pictures.

57:28Lon Harris:Okay, take 10 pictures. You're saying, yeah, yourself at the front, yourself in front of your favorite piece of art that you saw. Okay. At the cafe, having a coffee and whatever. I'm not anti-selfie. I took a ton. But like when you're standing in front of a Rothko, you don't need to have your camera. It's just. What are we doing, folks? It's just lines on a canvas on a photo. You have to stand there and soak it in. Yeah. All right, everybody. It's been another great twist is in the can. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.