The Biggest Private Funding Round in History | E2256

11:16Chris:And pull up the Tesla one as well, which you'll find very easily just by typing Tesla J-curve chart in Google. Sorry to make this so complicated for my team. We've got a brand new partner here at Twist. And as fate would have it, we love and use their product. If you need to hire, manage, pay, or equip your team members anywhere around the world, you need D-E-E-L. They're going to take care of all the annoying human resources tasks that you don't have time for. Payroll, compliance, visas, and onboarding. So you can stay focused on achieving product market fit or scaling your business or finding more talent.

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12:31Chris:Find out more by visiting deal.com slash twist. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash twist. Also, I happen to be a shareholder in the company. I got very lucky they acquired one of my startups, and I am stoked. It's an amazing company. Tesla J-curve is unbelievable. The amount of money invested in that was wild. Why? They had to build factories. They had to do all this stuff. Maybe you find it easier on Twitter because people talk about it a lot there. $500 billion invested is the equivalent of, I don't know, what is that, 12 times? So here it is. This is amazing. There it is. So this is free cash flow in the history of pure EV makers.

13:09Chris:And what you see is all the losses. And you see that red spike going up?

13:13Nick O’Neill:Yes.

13:13Chris:That's the magic. You struck oil. What did they have to do to get there? How many billions were they in the hole at the peak, Tesla? 10 billion. Negative. And then you go up and they start making money. And all of a sudden, turn to profit in year 11. And they've, you know, in the five years since.

13:29Nick O’Neill:It's year 17, 18 of Tesla. I see what you're saying.

13:31Chris:Correct. So now you have to do that for language models. For language models, they go$500 billion into debt. That's a big hole, collectively. A lot of chips.

13:43Nick O’Neill:Anthropic, XAI. A lot of chips.

13:46Chris:Mistral, Anthropic, everybody. And then also the data center companies, I would include them because they're directly, you know, associated with this effort. Right. You put all that together, you build a$500 billion hole. Let's say in 2030, they throw off$10 billion collectively in profits. In other words, they throw off what Uber makes in year 14 or what Tesla makes in year 16. Then as a group, then let's say it grows 50 % a year. So you go 10, 15, 22.5. You get the idea. Boom, boom, boom, boom. You're talking about a 10-year, maybe a six-year run to just get out of the J-curve. That's my estimate.

14:23Nick O’Neill:A few months ago, people were really asking, like, are there going to be customers for, like, is there going to be enough people who want to use AI to make the curve go up so sharply like there were for Tesla? And I think that there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical even a few months ago. Now, with agents really doing all this stuff and so much evidence every day of what people are accomplishing, I think it's harder to be skeptical. It was easier a few months ago.

14:51Chris:All right. There it is, folks. congratulations to the team at OpenAI. They're making$20 billion.

14:57Nick O’Neill:They're doing all right.

14:58Chris:And I would say - They're worth$700,$800 billion, or maybe$800 billion post money, add the cash to the thing. So they're 40 times top line revenue. It's absurd. But if they keep

15:10Nick O’Neill:growing 50 % a year, or 100 % a year - If Codex is driving everyone's AI agent, then yeah, There is chaos going on right now on the streets of Miami Beach. I don't know if you've heard about this. The crypto world is in absolute chaos. And we sent our roving correspondent, Nick O 'Neill, down to survey the damage. I feel like we should check in with him right now. Live show. Nick, joining us from Miami Beach. What's going on down there, Nick?

15:41Jason Calacanis:It's chaos and confusion right now.

15:43Chris:I was just down there speaking with people on the streets of Miami to say, What is going on here? My crypto portfolio is down awfully. They are completely panicking and they're saying that they're gonna lose their jobs

15:55Jason Calacanis:with all the money going to a place like OpenAI. I've never felt more depression. And they said, Nick, you're a voice of stability and reason. And I said, yes, I am. Nick, it's imperative in an emergency situation

16:10Chris:that like this, that broadcasters like ourselves maintain our cool. Please take a moment to compose yourself as hard as it is. Looking down at Miami, explain the carnage. And we have children watching. For parents, I'm going to ask you to please take children off the screen. This is unedited. This is unfiltered. This is what's happening right now in Miami.

16:32Jason Calacanis:I went down and I was speaking to the people at the pool. They were ripping all their stuff. They said, we got to get out of here. This open AI funding situation has blown our minds. We're going to be unemployed and I can't even pay for my damn rent anymore. this is a disaster. I've tried to have reasonable conversations, but I couldn't find a single person out there that could give me any sort of regular insight.

16:58Nick O’Neill:Yeah, they basically said, I need someone to take care of all my stuff.

17:03Chris:I don't want you to turn the camera too far because this could get graphic, but I understand the block team, formerly Square, they were having their quarterly retreat in Miami. Oh God. Yeah, they were in Miami. and half of them, there's 400 people down there in the streets who have been given 18-month severance, fully vested, and they have four job offers. Please explain what's happening with those 400 people.

17:28Jason Calacanis:I saw a literal parade of people being marched out of the office down in Brickell from my balcony here. And people were, literally Miami was not even ready for the moment that occurred right there. I saw them and they were like, what's going on here? They were all carrying brown boxes out the doors, down the streets. And they were like, is this the end? I went down to get on the scene just to see what people were saying. They could not believe it. There were tears. There were people that thought that they were going to potentially lose relationships because, let's be honest, down here in Miami, everyone's focused on can you afford the most expensive car around and the best clothes?

18:11Jason Calacanis:Well, the block employees are no longer a reliable source for making those purchases, Jason.

18:17Chris:It's really tragic. I can't imagine what's happening at Club 11. I mean, the trickle-down effect.

18:23Nick O’Neill:It's a FEMA camp now, Jason. It's a FEMA. FEMA has set up at Club 11. That's it. They're taking refugees at this point. Taking refugees at Club 11. I heard Pitbull is down there volunteering. He's a great guy. Very helpful.

18:39Chris:Man, the brutality here. There's unconfirmed reports, Nick. I know that you've got sources, and we don't want to spread misinformation. However, there were boats landing from Cuba with refugees, obviously, and Haiti. Is it true that the Bloc employees were taking the return trip to go to Cuba to get health care and for better job opportunities in Miami?

19:03Jason Calacanis:Look, I don't want to spread misinformation, Jason, but I did go and take a look at the ports just to see what was going on. Because when these sorts of layoffs occur, you're well aware, you know this from your past years in journalism covering the tech scene, the first place that you want to go are the ports to see where are they going, where are they departing to. Well, I did see only I did see a few people, but I don't want to spread rumors just yet about something like that. But I did some people carrying their bags, carrying the brown boxes, getting onto the boats. And that felt quite extreme, if I'm going to be honest, because like maybe give it a few months with your severance.

19:44Jason Calacanis:But I don't know.

19:45Chris:OK, yeah. I mean, this is live, unconfirmed. clickbait. I did see pictures, I don't know if they're AI-based, Nick, on social media, on TikTok, of people with their Arian chairs and their Mac studios getting on those boats to Cuba. It's a tragic situation.

20:05Nick O’Neill:Asking their agent in real time for recommendations in Havana. That's on the boats.

20:10Jason Calacanis:I heard Open Claws literally steering some of those boats.

20:13Nick O’Neill:Yeah, wow. Yes.

20:15Chris:So literally the people who were shuttling the refugees, which is not a great paying job. This pays$7 an hour. They've lost their jobs as well. Yeah.

20:24Nick O’Neill:Get rid of them. They now have their agents. Well, they're looking ahead. They were like, in five years, we won't need these boats anymore. So we might as well if I rip off the Band-Aid now.

20:34Chris:All right, Nick. I'm just going to say, tremendous job here. please, on behalf of the Twist community, and obviously I'm responsible for you and your family. I know that you've got 14 kids now and three wives. I know he's geographically monogamous. It's Miami, it's Palm Beach, and it's Fort Lauderdale. He is geographically monogamous in the state of Florida.

21:00Nick O’Neill:Within different parts of Florida, within different parts of South Florida. Understood. Like Alex Carp. Thank you for your support, Jason. Thank you. Please, Nick, be safe. Be safe.

21:10Chris:You've heard me talk many times about Luma AI. They're the innovators leading the charge toward multimodal AGI. They just picked up$9 million in their Series C funding in November. There are so many text-to-video models and platforms out there, and many of them can churn out a nice-looking clip. But Luma's Dream Machine product offers something truly unique. It's an all-in-one creative platform helping you to brainstorm your ideas, turn them into images, and then generating eye-popping detail 1080p videos, which you can edit and tweak using natural language, all without switching platforms. And that's the key.

21:43Chris:The ability to refine these and make them better, that is what the future is. The future is being able to improve your AI-generated images. And today, we're excited to announce the Luma Dream Brief Competition. Just create a commercial for a fictional product on Luma, submit it to the Cannes Festival of Creativity. And if your ad goes on to win the gold, you will get$1 million to enter the competition. Go to lumadreambrief.com. And to try the dream machine for free, go to lumalabs.ai slash twist. That's lumalabs.ai slash TWIST. It's above my pay grade. Yeah,

22:21Nick O’Neill:thank God he's down there because I would not be going down there right now. What's his Twitter? Stop being more? At Choose Rich on X or Instagram at Choose Rich if you want to follow our good friend. Choose Rich, yes. Our good friend and roving correspondent, Nick O 'Neill.

22:34Chris:Oof, but that's a good segue into our next story. Is it?

22:38Nick O’Neill:Oh, Block. Layoffs at Block. We should talk about it. We'll talk about that one. So, Block, you heard us mention Block, the parent company of Square, Cash App, and Afterpay. Of course, co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. They announced plans to cut their staff by 40%, Jason. That's around 4 ,000 people, leaving just under 6 ,000 remaining at the company. In an open letter that he also cross-posted to X, Dorsey pretty much blames AI. Quote, a significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better. Intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster.

23:14Nick O’Neill:Every week, he added, I had two options. Cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out. Or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter. So you have been predicting this very thing on this program, as well as the All In program, for many months. Is this just the first of what you see as many of these announcements?

23:36Chris:You know, we're in a debate, primarily Saxon-eyed, but other folks. And people have called me names, a doomerist, a catastrophist. I'm always balls and strikes, folks. I just look at the information. I look at what I see firsthand. I think from first principles, I talk to people. I come from a journalism background, obviously. So when you see me forming an opinion, although Saxon is debate techniques like to make me into a libtard or use all his advanced debate techniques, it's a hoax and it's framing and all that stuff. I can tell you straight, you've been watching me long enough. I go research information, I learn, and then I try to form an opinion.

24:18Chris:And when people correct me, typically fans of the show and friends, I then change my opinion. Okay, so I have said, what I'm seeing on the front lines is founders being able to not hire the first three or four people they would normally hire for their three-person startup. In other words, the three co-founders, instead of having to hire three people in the first six months or a year, say the first year, they want to get three more people in the building, another developer, another designer, and an ops person. Typically, you get some combination of those or maybe even a salesperson. What I find is with these new tools, they do founder-led sales for six months or 12 months longer.

24:54They handle their own legal accounting, et cetera, for the first six months, and then

24:59Chris:they pick, you know, whichever service provider they want. But they can do things on their own. So that was one piece of information I had in forming this opinion a year or two ago. The second piece of information is I listen to the words that leaders say, and I take them at their word, or I handicap what they're trying to do. Andy Jassy, a year ago, in the summer, wrote this memo that things were going to change in Amazon and that they saw AI playing a bigger role. Then there was a leaked document from Amazon that said, we have like 900 ,000 jobs, 600 ,000 jobs we're not going to hire for in the next decade because we predict they're going to be robots.

25:41Chris:This is a New York Times story. You can say fake news all you want. The truth is, I would say, you know, 50 % of the facts in the New York Times are rock solid, then maybe 30 are debatable and 20 might be wrong. That's not because they're intentionally doing things wrong, whatever. It's just the nature of truth in the world, right? They're trying to pursue breaking news stories. So they have 5 % of the information inside of Amazon. The other 95 % is a black box. So they follow, they got this leak. It was so acute at Amazon that they were preparing a PR campaign to stop the bad PR they were going to get in the coming years from not hiring people and laying people off.

26:23Chris:To me, again, I take people at their word. I've been in the startup business for 30 plus years now as an entrepreneur, journalist, and investor, and a podcaster. I know what people are doing. They're like, okay, around the corner, we're going to start replacing drivers and getting rid of factory workers. We're going to get rid of middle managers. There's not going to be as many developers. we need to give to toys for tots and when they put in we should do local toys for tots things right make the amazon bad vibes go down okay that's another check now we have to look at block block like jack's other company twitter jack is an invest in the future visionary product leader right he goes big there's very few entrepreneurs who built have built two two one two billion dollar startups that were public steve jobs uh built apple and then he built pixar i don't think pixar ever went public somebody correct me if i'm wrong i don't remember seeing it trading no but then it got bought by disney so he built two billion dollar i mean you have to have people build multiple unicorns.

27:30Chris:There's two unicorns. One went public, one didn't. You have Elon, and he has Tesla, which is public, and he soon will have SpaceX. So he'll have two that have gone public, right? It's a very small group. You know who already has two that went public? Jack.

27:43Nick O’Neill:Jack Dorsey.

27:44Chris:Doesn't get enough credit. That's true. Why? Because he's quiet. He's an introvert. I've known Jack since, you know, the earliest days of Twitter. I was one of the first users. Yeah.

27:54Nick O’Neill:I feel like also, culturally, culturally, tech is like no longer on his side. Like he's seen as like this woke lefty guy. It doesn't really meld with the current philosophy of the tech industry. He's not a lefty guy anyway, but he did overbuild the staff. Right, well, I was gonna say, that is a big thing on social media is saying that this is not really about AI, that this is really like during the COVID era, square slash block massively overhired. And now they're sort of backing out of that, but they want to save face. So they're blaming AI. At Bama Bonds, this guy Will Slaughter had the big tweet about this.

28:30Nick O’Neill:Unwinding less than half an insane COVID overhiring binge has much more to do with Jack Dorsey's managerial incompetence than whether AI is going to take your job. Dorsey then responded, yes, we overhired during COVID because I incorrectly built two separate company structures, Square and Cash App, rather than one, which we corrected mid 2024. But then he continues, we have and do run an efficient company better than most.

28:54Chris:Okay, this is a very important follow-up from Jack. And let me just say, it's hard. Being a leader's hard. You make mistakes. He did this so compassionately and so transparently. In his piece, he said, by the way, we're leaving comms open. You can say goodbye to everybody. We're giving you six months severance and then your stock. You can keep your computer.

29:17Nick O’Neill:You'll receive your salary for 20 weeks plus one week of tenure, equity vested through the end of May. Six months of health care. keep your corporate devices, and five grand to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition. That's very generous.

29:30Chris:I offered Lon half, Lon today said, hey, you saw the block deal? I'll take half of that to get the fuck out of here. Lon was like, hey, can I get half of that? That sounds pretty good. We could negotiate. We could negotiate. That's even just a start.

29:43Nick O’Neill:That's a starting position.

29:44Chris:It's a good start point. Plus one week for every year you're there. If you're an eight-year employee, you get another eight weeks. Hey, you're sitting there, you're sitting pretty at 28 weeks. That's a lot of time to figure out your next move. It's a lot of time to figure it out. Anyway, he did it in the classiest, most transparent way I've ever seen full stop. Can I just say one thing? This is against the HR people's standard. They say you have to turn everybody's accounts on. Correct. People are going to do crazy things. People are going to delete files. People are going to say things in the chat.

30:12Chris:They're going to hack things. You cannot do it this way. There's even potential workplace violence. I don't want to bring that up. But, you know, there's like somebody could go postal. You got to lock the doors, all this kind of stuff. You have to escort people out of the building. You want to do it over the weekend so people don't show up on Monday. These are best practices. Right.

30:28Nick O’Neill:Yeah, I was just going to say the one thing, I think it's very generous. I do think he did this in the class the best way possible. I would have put caps in the tweet. He does that all lowercase tweeting style. And when you're firing people, I don't know, it felt a little precious to me. But otherwise, I think he handled this in the best way.

30:42Chris:I mean, if we're sitting here saying his punctuation is the issue, that means he did it right. We're splitting hairs here.

30:49Nick O’Neill:Exactly. Hey, listen, sometimes I'm thinking faster than I can write everything down.

30:55Chris:And I found this amazing tool. I am obsessed with it. It's called WhisperFlow, W-I-S-P-R, Flow. All you have to do is talk. And WhisperFlow turns it into crisp, perfect writing instantly. Not just talking about dictation, but removing filler, fixing punctuation, and even formatting your text while you speak. It is mind-blowing how good this is. It makes all the other dictation software look basic. And Whisperflow matches your natural tone and speaking voice. So the writing sounds like you actually wrote it yourself. And Whisperflow works wherever you are. I use it when I'm in Slack. I'll use it when I'm in Superhuman, doing an email, doing a message.

31:32Chris:I'll jump into iMessage. And even when I'm writing a document, or I'll even use it when I'm talking to my OpenClaw agent. Finally, someone I can talk to who actually takes down everything I say. Unlike maybe the interns I've got, they get like six out of every 10 instructions correct. Whisperflow. Everybody's going crazy about this product in Silicon Valley. Everybody in tech is using it. Whisperflow.ai slash twist. It's spelled W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O dot A-I slash twist. Incredible product. You have to try it.

32:05Nick O’Neill:Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, the author, the podcaster. He talked on his show before his tragic recent death about a desire to live on as an AI-powered representation of himself. Now, there's a lot of debate about as he got to the end of his life, whether he changed his mind about this. There's various public statements. We do not need to rehash this whole debate. One fan, John Arrow, actually made Scott's vision happen. He created at AI Scott Adams, and it's an AI-driven simulation of the old podcast featuring an animated avatar that is very convincing, looks a lot, and sounds a lot like the real Scott Adams.

32:44Nick O’Neill:Arrow has also created Abigail Adams, a young lady character that's inspired by Scott and his legacy. So Adams' family and many of his fans, very upset. They've made repeated requests now for Arrow to stop publishing his videos. On Thursday, the AI Scott Adams account posted that they intend to legally defend their right to keep making this content. Here's the quote. From this project's start, we attempted to have an amicable and collaborative conversation, but that wasn't reciprocated. Given that litigation seems certain, we are sending a global hold letter to anyone with relevant information.

33:19Nick O’Neill:This is to ensure all pertinent materials are available to protect Scott's stated vision. So the last thing I would note here, for all the debate that this is stirring up, the content itself is not really that popular. 3 ,400 followers on X, 137 YouTube subscribers. Abigail is not doing better. So there does seem to be a disconnect between the interest that this project is generating and the actual fans who want to follow AI Scott Adams. So your reaction, James?

33:51Chris:I, you know, I started getting DMs from like the Scott Adams stans, like the real hardcore fans who know me because I was on a show one time debating January 6th and other stuff with him. And they know me because I would listen to a show once in a while and say hi in the chat because he would mention all in, you know, probably like a dozen times over the years. He really loved sax. He loved Chamath. I think he liked me, even though I might politically.

34:17Nick O’Neill:I think you guys had a mutual appreciation going.

34:20Chris:A mutual appreciation. And so, you know, they are very angry at me for even platforming the creator of it and for me retweeting it or giving my opinion. Hey, if you really are in the spirit of Scott Adams, he was for full contact debate. And, and listen, and I'm no like close friend of Scott. We never met in person. We were digital friends, et cetera. We're obviously like micro celebrities. So micro celebrities have a secret chat room. But put that aside, we have a secret society of micro-slubs.

34:54Nick O’Neill:Your handshake, you have a secret handshake.

34:55Chris:Yeah, sure, everything. He was a self-described narcissist. He was like, I love getting attention. I love when people say, hi, don't make a coffee. I love that people were inspired by what I said. He would have, in my estimation, it's just one person's opinion. Don't freak out. He would have loved A.I. Scott Adams. He would have loved this debate. He did say he wanted to those two things can be true at the same time He did say he wanted people to create AI Scott Adams and he did say That maybe I want to create a digital Sun So that people close to me don't get hurt by seeing me online every day okay, so There's morals there's there's morals and ethics and then there's the law Right Here's what I'll say This isn't like a new issue.

35:45Chris:You can't use people's especially famous people's likenesses for profit or even for non-profit use, you know, in this kind of way. So legally they lose.

35:59Nick O’Neill:I think so.

36:00Chris:You could make a derivative product that you say, hey, I've made this Abigail. She's inspired by the teachings of Scott Adams. Right. Totally allowed. If somebody wanted to say, I am a J. Cal disciple, I'm a Chamath disciple, I'm a Steve Jobs disciple, and I'm going to wear a Steve Jobs outfit every day, like Elizabeth Holmes did. Right. And for a period of time, she was super inspired by Steve. Yeah, she went to the turtleneck. Yeah, yeah. With the turtleneck and the voice and the drama and everything. Shout out, Elizabeth. Come on the pod anytime. Once you're out of prison. No, I want to do it when she's in.

36:37Chris:Oh, wow. That would be amazing. So long story short.

36:39Nick O’Neill:Yeah.

36:40Chris:Long story short. You could do that. Sure. Do your Steve Jobs impersonation every day. It's protected. You know, and so now you go to the moral ethical thing. As I told the person doing this, talk to the family, get permission to do it, or do the derivative, clearly not the same product, but inspired by the teachings. So here we are. That's what's going to happen. And the argument that technologists will use is this is inevitable. It's going to happen, yada, yada. You know what? It's inevitable that piracy happens, but that doesn't mean that you can go sell Taylor Swift CDs on Canal Street. And we've proven that with Napster.

37:24Chris:You get a lawsuit. You can't, you know, restream MSG and Knicks games without getting in trouble. Do the Russians do it on their Russian streaming sites? Yes. Do the Chinese sell DVDs on every quarter? Yes. Okay. Those are other countries who are not obeying law. You don't get to use that either. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

37:44Nick O’Neill:It's just weird that it's like he's taking a principled stand here. Like, I'm going to take this to court to protect all of our right to make an AI avatar of someone after they're dead. And, like, I find that whole thing kind of, like, creepy. Like, even if I say out loud on a show once, hey, I wouldn't mind somebody doing this, I don't really feel like that should give you a legally binding right. That seems a little far to me. That's just as far as I go. Should we do some demos? Please. All right. All right, our first demo. Let's bring on Everest Chris. He's the creator of UnLupa, Jason. UnLupa, it allows, I thought this was really neat.

38:20Nick O’Neill:It allows anyone to create an AI-generated website for a local business in their area and then gives them the tools to sell that business, their website. So here's - Genius. So here's Everest. He's in India, but he's focusing the tool on the Netherlands. So we gotta take a look at this. Tell me your name again

38:40Chris:so I get the pronunciation right, sir.

38:41Jason Calacanis:Hi, my name is Chris. Chris, okay.

38:44Chris:And Chris, where in India are you and how old are you?

38:47Jason Calacanis:I'm 23 and I'm in Hyderabad right now.

38:50Chris:And are you in college or school?

38:52Jason Calacanis:No, no, I finished my college. Now I'm into AI.

38:56Chris:Now he's into AI. Did you go to these like technical schools in India that are really hard to get into? Or did you do that like college course training where it's like really intense and you go for six days a week? I've just heard about this online in TV shows and media.

39:12Jason Calacanis:I didn't really go for the hard ones. I just went to a normal university. I mean, like you said, six days a week. I mean, it was pretty intense, but I got through it.

39:23Chris:So you are monitoring This Week in Startups, X.com, and thinking about opportunities in Europe and America, even though you're living in India. Am I correct?

39:36Jason Calacanis:I mean, I just, a tweet of mine went viral. You guys reached out to me. And so I wanted to be on the pod.

39:45Chris:Great. Here we go. So show us what you built and I will give you some feedback. And this is a business salon that I have seen before because with Squarespace, people started doing this. Right. This is, this is like. They would build websites and they would knock on doors in America and say, hey, I built a website for you. Would you like it? you know, I'm asking for$500.

40:04Nick O’Neill:Like the first question I asked Chris was like, well, why don't you just go right to businesses and build them websites with your system? And he explained like, you know, it's that personal touch. He's in India. So it's almost like the users of his site become like his street team. Like he's sort of making websites for all these local businesses around the world. And he's got local people helping him actually at the point of sale. It's very clever.

40:25Chris:Okay. Here we go. Okay.

40:29Jason Calacanis:I mean, the system is really simple. You just type in which niche you're targeting and which city you're targeting. It's very simple. You just type in the niche you're targeting and the city. Okay.

40:41Chris:So you could do coffee cafes? Yeah.

40:45Jason Calacanis:And any niche.

40:47Nick O’Neill:Well, but Jason, it's not only going to find the businesses, it's actually going to make the websites right now. Like when we check back in, Like you'll see Chris will show us. We're actually going to get finished websites already. Genius. Okay.

40:59Jason Calacanis:Let me show you a finished workflow. Okay.

41:02Chris:So here's your workflow. Yeah.

41:04Jason Calacanis:So this was one me and Lon ran yesterday. I mean, he didn't see the results yet.

41:10Chris:Yeah. I'm curious. Spray 100 car detailing. Yeah.

41:15Jason Calacanis:Car detailing.

41:15Chris:Because you know, Lon keeps his car very expensive. I do.

41:17Nick O’Neill:I love my Prius-E. It's got all of the different websites there.

41:23Chris:and I assume we can click on one of them. Yeah, I've got all the data. Here's the website it built.

41:30Nick O’Neill:Look at this. Jason, look at this. And this is all based on this real card data telling place in Austin. You could go to them right now and say, hey, do you want to buy this beautiful website I made for you? Yeah.

41:44Chris:Okay, this is insane. This is insane. Now, wait, you're also having it contact them? How does it do the contact? in the outreach?

41:54Jason Calacanis:You can just connect your email. So it finds the emails and sends out the outreach through your email. So you can have like a custom email template that it reaches out to them. Chris, you have a job.

42:10Chris:Do you have a job in India? No. Okay. Let me ask you, you can be honest because we're on this week in startups. Okay. You can always be honest here. You can always be honest with your uncle J. Cow. Unc. If you got a job right now, what do you think your salary would be in India if you got like a job?

42:31Jason Calacanis:Like an average job?

42:32Chris:An average job, yeah. In your dollars, and then we'll translate.

42:38Jason Calacanis:Yeah, 400 a month. 400 US dollars. Yes.

42:44Chris:You make five grand a year.

42:47Jason Calacanis:Yeah.

42:47Chris:Okay, five grand a year.

42:50Nick O’Neill:Mm-hmm.

42:51Chris:And you're a developer. and you're smart. Look at what he built. Five grand.

42:57Nick O’Neill:I can hear the wheels turning.

43:00Chris:If you made$25 ,000 in US right now, compared to your friends, how would you be living? Like your apartment, you're going out to Dindia. How would you be living in India?

43:11Jason Calacanis:I'd be living like a king here.

43:14Nick O’Neill:Living like a king. He'll be with Nick on the balcony in Miami Beach before we're done.

43:18Chris:Okay. Chris. if you're this freaking smart i'll i'll pay you 25 000 you come work for me okay how does it sound i mean you you got to be actually smart this can't be like all a put on here you got to go through a proper job interview but would you like to make 25 000 a year because that's like a third of what people make in the u.s don't tell him that jason no i am but i'm just trying to do arbitrage here i'm just what would that be like if you went to your friends and were like i just got a$25 ,000 job offer. Is that like crazy or not? Or does that happen to some of your friends?

43:55Jason Calacanis:But I think I'll be making more with An Lupa. Yeah, there you go.

44:00Chris:Boom. I love it. I love it. He's an entrepreneur. It was a test. You passed the test. I need to start Founder University India. I need to talk to the government. I need to. I've never been to India. I need to. Let's go. This is unbelievable. Let's go to Hyderabad, Jason. Let's go. I'm in. All right. Great job.

44:20Jason Calacanis:I'll tell you some exciting numbers. Okay, here we go.

44:24Chris:Yeah, tell us the exciting numbers. Maybe I need to be an investor in this company. So I launched it.

44:30Jason Calacanis:Yeah, so I launched it in 24 hours. It was at 1 ,000 MRR, 1 ,000 USD.

44:36Chris:Okay.

44:38Jason Calacanis:Just from a single Reddit post.

44:40Chris:All right, that's it.

44:41Jason Calacanis:No, no, I think you'll be excited for this. and then last week I posted like three tweets and now Anlupa is over 8.5k MRR

44:55Chris:you're already you're what are you talking about you're at 100k a year yeah look at you he doesn't need your 25k he doesn't need me FJ Cal he's an entrepreneur it was a test I wanted to see what was going on here okay here's the deal I want you to come to Founder University and I want to invest $25 ,000 in this company if you want to make it into a U.S.-based company, because I think you're just brilliant and smart. If you want to pursue that, you got to go through diligence. We got to make sure you're not a criminal. We got to make sure you can actually start a U.S. company. Put it aside. Congratulations.

45:29Chris:This is amazing. Let's go to our next demo. Stick around, Chris.

45:33Nick O’Neill:All right, Chris, hang out. We're going on to Ben Broca. He's the creator of Pulsia. It's an agentic system. It's not OpenClaw. It was built while Peter was off building OpenClaw. It's a separate agentic system, Jason, that helps businesses run their operations autonomously. Ben, thanks for joining us.

45:53Ben Broca:Ben, how are you doing? Where are you calling in from? I'm good. I'm in San Francisco right now.

45:57Chris:Oh, okay. Great. I can tell because it's so sunny. Show us what you built. This is it. Demo or die. Show us what you built here on This Week in Startups. You never know what you're going to see.

46:07Ben Broca:So actually, this is a live dashboard that shows Pulsia in action, working right now on almost a thousand companies at the same time. So you can see that actually recently we had a huge surge of people starting to use the service, which is amazing. And so right now you can see Pulsia working on different tasks. So it completed 3 ,000 tasks in the past 24 hours. Right now it's building a 3D property feed MVP for some user that's working on a specific company. This is a Twitter action where following up with 17 gallery pitches. And so you can see that a lot of users are creating new companies every minute, right?

46:47Ben Broca:700 companies will launch in the past 24 hours. So essentially, Pulsia is an AI that builds and runs companies autonomously. So it wakes up every night, accomplishes tasks in the goal to create and run the company that the user decided on.

47:03Chris:Wow.

47:04Ben Broca:Wow, this is incredible. It can build, it can, of course, code, push a production, launch a real website, tweet. You can see here, those are real tweets that have been tweeted about, if I click on one of them, it's an actual real tweet. Most AIRs cost$750 a month. They need a rep ops team. Leadforge finds your prospects. So this is a tweet that's promoting a company from a real user, right? Wow. So it can also send emails. So I give it access to an email address. So you can see that like there's a bunch of emails that's been sent in the past five minutes, 4 ,000 emails in the past 24 hours. One of the things I launched about a week ago is now Pulsia can run ads autonomously for companies.

47:48Ben Broca:So it creates its own UGC ads. And then there's an AI agent that every day wakes up, looks at the performance of ads on meta and decides to either create a new one or pose an ad that would not be performing or create new ads. So you can see I'm going to give you an example.

48:07Chris:My buddies think I'm a genius for planning our trips. I just use Fairway Finder. 10 bucks, whole captain's packet done. I let him

48:16Ben Broca:keep thinking it. So this is just an example of an AI generated ad that was created for a customer to promote their business on Pulsia.

48:25Chris:So it's Y Combinator in a box. You're basically making unlimited number of startups. You own all of them? Or this is a game for people to play. They subscribe to your service, Pulsia.

48:38Ben Broca:So it is all users that are signing up to Pulsia, paying$49 a month to get an AI to run their idea. If you think about it, it's like one of the cheapest ways to get started. Of course, you can go to Lovable. You can go to cursor and set up your website, but you have to be prompting it. If you stop prompting it, it will not do stuff for you. Here, it autonomously sort of like decides every night what are the best things that it could do next based on the state of the business. If the MVP is not ready yet, it will do an engineering task. If the business is ready, maybe it will start doing marketing.

49:14Ben Broca:Maybe it will do some cold outreach. Maybe it will tweet. Maybe it will run ads, right? And so the idea is like, really, I believe that the future of companies is that most companies will be 80 % autonomous, meaning that like the 20 % is the human sort of like having taste, having creativity and like a certain insight into a specific niche. however 80 percent of the company could be completely autonomous essentially here the ai pulse is giving that to people and essentially is doing the engineering work fixing bugs grinding every day extending cold emails tweeting doing ads uh the human doesn't have to do that

49:53Chris:the human needs to give direction so great so great i mean this is something we like looked at for like our accelerator and incubator is there's all these different components so we teach people go to market strategies like you're doing with ads. You know, we'll teach people social media marketing and hiring and, you know, getting product market fit. And you're just making it in a box. And we were always thinking like, I wonder if we could do founder university in a box. And here you are, you've built it. Is this going to be, you know, did you raise money? Are you going to build a business here?

50:24Chris:What's the story?

50:24Ben Broca:So I raised the pre-seed last summer. And right now, I mean, that's stuff actually to market it more and to, now I'm seeing great retention, you know, active users are sending 15 messages a day to their AI CEO to like plan, to discuss strategies, marketing strategies, what to do to grow the business. Around, you know, 20 % of users are using the ad product, which is great because ads is a great way to actually generate revenue. And so I'm excited to get more users on the platform. Incredible.

50:54Chris:Great job.

50:55Ben Broca:A question from our audience.

50:58Nick O’Neill:Oh, yeah, we got from M. Solomon Bush. How can you afford this? are customers paying for inference on top of their$50 per month?

51:07Ben Broca:So it's a great question. Like, actually, I would love to make it more affordable. The reason it's$50 is because, yeah, as you said, it's expensive. Like, it's a lot of inference because every day the AI, you know, thinks and acts every day. And that's, of course, using top models from Entropic and OpenAI. And so the idea is that the subscription, I'm trying to break even on the subscriptions because the idea is like giving this tool to as many people as possible. But in exchange, we take at Pulse, yeah, 20 % cut on revenue, on essentially transaction on the platform. So if a user comes in for 50 bucks a month, they can get a company getting started, which is very, very affordable.

51:47Ben Broca:But if down the line, they start making 100 bucks, 200 bucks a month with their business, we just take 20 % and that's our way to being able to generate profit, to continue growing the platform. Got it, got it. We're very incentivized with our users on success.

52:02Chris:this is amazing really well done um we should talk because i'm in the startup business and i think what's really interesting about what you're doing is i mean i'm sure when you raised your pre-seed round this came up with investors like pretty great place for us to look for founders right you've basically got a little incubator here on your hands really inspiring dude i love it any questions for me uh startups and startup life it seems like you already figured it out to be

52:28Ben Broca:honest i mean listen first of all thank you for having me i i love to be able to share this to more people uh and yeah i mean you have a ton of experience and would love to you know ask you like how do you see about scaling it how do you think about how can i get this into more you know just

52:44Chris:so you know i love open source and i love more open platforms and it's always great to enable people to make money. So let me just riff here, Lon. Riff. What you're doing is like eBay or Airbnb or Uber or many other marketplaces, Etsy, in that this is kind of a marketplace where you're giving tools, like you come for the tool and you stay for the marketplace. You've basically created a way for people to make a living. When you do that, you get love from the entrepreneurs you're creating, just like Airbnb does, right? Airbnb changed tens of thousands of people's lives who were probably, you know, making a wage and they became entrepreneurial.

53:37Chris:And eventually if their Airbnb worked out, they got a second one or a third one. And now they moved into the owner class from the salary class. Beautiful. So I think you're doing that. And then the more you, the less you take and the more you give will be how you succeed. So Etsy and Airbnb take their five to 20 % take rate. You take 500 flat rate. There's other services that you can upsell people on over time. So$50 for this package, 300 for the next package, 1000 for the next would be the next thing I, if I was an investor in your company, I'd be sitting with you saying, what would people pay a thousand dollars a month for?

54:17Chris:And you could then, you know, start having that conversation. Maybe there's a human in the loop in the marketing function, right? You see, you have like, you hire a growth hacker and you split the growth hacker, like rent a human style across the team. Anyway, all kinds of things like that. and your customers if you talk to them and say how can we be more helpful they're going to tell you and then it's your job to prioritize and experiment there's also the possibility of adding to this the ability to invest in the companies or have ownership in them so you could say hey we'd like to own 10 of your business um or we'd like to own 5 of your business we'll give you the platform for free for life.

55:03Chris:If we get on 5 % and we get a 5 % royalty, you know, or we get 1 % of your profit. So it could be$500 a month or$100 a month and 5 % of whatever your sales are, if you're tracking sales in here. So there's all kinds of ways you can kind of do future upsells. For now, just keep delighting customers, right? You should spend the first three years of any business, just delighting customers, and then you can figure out the revenue. The model is really simple here. A subscription plus a revenue share plus upsells. And as long as it's tiny, like you're doing, you're going to be successful. You're going to figure this out.

55:41Chris:Great job. Okay. Awesome. Let's do our third and final demo.

55:45Nick O’Neill:Well, first, I think we should check out this Polymarket. So related - Oh, I love the Polymarket. Related to what we were talking about earlier, I found this one for OpenAI's closing market cap. So on the day that OpenAI eventually IPOs, what will the market cap be at the closing bell? So let's pull that Polymarket up. I think it's 1.5, 1.5. So the volume on this, 1.4 million right now. So a lot of people, right now, the number one, the top vote is no IPO by December 31st, 2026. and then there's another version for 2027 and the number one vote there, no IPO by December 31st, 2027. But if you go look at the individual numbers there, there is some range.

56:36Chris:Scroll down there because it's definitely going to be public by 2027. So that would include 2026?

56:42Nick O’Neill:Yeah, this is just the 2026 one. But Salah, if you see up there at the top, there's a choice. There's a button for December 31st, 2027. Click that one. I think we're on that. No, we're on 2036. Here's 2027. So now scroll down again.

56:55Chris:So no IPO is what?

56:56Nick O’Neill:So no IPO is F by 2027 is 37, 43 % as of right now. But under that -

57:03Chris:So that's the losing bet. They're going to IPO by 2027.

57:06Nick O’Neill:So anything - Under 500 billion is currently at 26%.

57:11Chris:That's wrong.

57:13Nick O’Neill:This is on the closing day? This is - Yeah. Of the IPO. Closing bell on the day that the company IPOs.

57:20Chris:All right. I'm going to load into this one. Scroll down. I'm going to take 750 all the way to 1.5. So if you edit those up, it looks like it's about 65%.

57:30Nick O’Neill:Well, no, 750 billion to 1 trillion is 17%, 1.25 to 1.5 trillion. No, it's got to be a trillion. So I'll go trillion, trillion five. Oh, okay. That's about, no, that's about 30, 31%. No, no.

57:43Chris:I'll take from 1 trillion up. So there's three categories. There's 16, 15, 19. Oh, I see.

57:48Nick O’Neill:I see what you're saying.

57:49Chris:So that's 31, that's exactly 50%. I think if you put 50 % on there, that's the winning bet. It can't be under$1 trillion on the close.

57:57Nick O’Neill:I mean, that seems crazy that it would be under$1 trillion when it's already worth$750.

58:01Chris:I think we should put$100 ,000 on that.

58:04Nick O’Neill:So if we put$100 ,000, we make$50? Yeah, right. That would be, yes. You would make$50K from that because you're betting at about 50%. But then wait a second.

58:12Chris:If I make$50K, I think that's a lock. If that's a lock for me... If I put the 100K into NVIDIA or Uber or other stock, and I make 10 % a year, I'll be at 110. Or if I put it into Munis, I'll make 5 % on the 100K. I'll make$7 ,500 versus 50.

58:34Nick O’Neill:The real money here would be like 500 to 750 billion, but I don't think there's any chance that it's that low. That's the problem.

58:41Chris:No, you can't take that long shot. Those people are being...

58:44Nick O’Neill:Yeah, they're being silly.

58:45Chris:Ray Tarday, as we say in French.

58:48Nick O’Neill:Okay.

58:49Chris:There's your Polymarket. Thank you, Polymarket. I love a Polymarket. Got me thinking. Got me thinking.

58:52Nick O’Neill:We got one more demo that I want to take a look at. Let's welcome Adi Gabrani. He's the creator of MakeMyClaw.com. Their website allows you to set up and deploy your own OpenClaw bot in just 60 seconds. Here's my favorite part about this, though. He's also got a free 15-minute trial offer. Like, try out OpenClaw for 15 minutes for free. I love open source. I was fascinated by that. So welcome, Adi. Thanks for being here.

59:20Jason Calacanis:Thanks, Ron. Hey, Jason. Nice to be here.

59:23Chris:All right. There's got to be like 500 hosting options now. Why should people pick yours?

59:29Jason Calacanis:Yeah. So for me, the goal was not to just make it easy to deploy, but also to maintain it on ongoing basis. So I think and have it in such a way that you can go into the shell and manage it all by yourself, even if you want to. So I don't want people to be sandboxed into something. But actually, even in the FAQ of my site, I say that if you're using OpenClaw, make my claw beyond a certain day, you're doing it wrong. I would want you to come experience it, move on, self-host it and have fun with it.

1:00:02Chris:That's kind of the goal for me. What's your story? You're an entrepreneur. Where are you based?

1:00:07Jason Calacanis:Yeah. So I'm in Vancouver right now. This was a side project, which actually came from getting. So I got involved with OpenClaw early January, where I was building a part of my own and then saw Peter building. What's your background? Tech background, the business school and ran a company. Solo entrepreneur.

1:00:27Chris:Have you incorporated yet? Not for MakeMyClaw.

1:00:31Jason Calacanis:So I have other company doing AI for mining sector, actually. Oh, wow. So that's your day job? Is that your company?

1:00:37Chris:You own that one.

1:00:38Jason Calacanis:Yeah, that's my day job. This is a side hustle. This is a side hustle on the weekends.

1:00:41Chris:How is the side hustle?

1:00:43Jason Calacanis:doing compared to your main job. That's a much bigger business. That's a much more well-established company. This came because I was playing with personal agents and wanted to get my friends involved.

1:00:56Chris:Which job, when you wake up in the morning, which job are you more excited about?

1:01:00Jason Calacanis:Be honest. I'm more excited about this, but I cannot afford to do this before 6 p.m.

1:01:06Chris:Got it. Have you raised money for the other business?

1:01:09Jason Calacanis:No, that's bootstrapped. One good thing about mining companies is they pay really well.

1:01:14Chris:Oh, got it. What's the footprint of that business? It makes millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands. How many years has it been around? How many employees?

1:01:20Jason Calacanis:It's been around four years in millions, yeah.

1:01:23Chris:Got it. All right.

1:01:24Jason Calacanis:Did you raise money for it or you're just a solo entrepreneur?

1:01:26Chris:No, I have co-founders, but bootstrapped business. Got it. Awesome. I mean, I love the hosting business because I think it could uncover other things. What are you charging for? What's like the minimum?

1:01:41Jason Calacanis:So it's 29 for we give you the key, very generous key and 19 if you bring your own key. Got it.

1:01:49Chris:Explain to people the difference between bringing your own key and you for providing the key.

1:01:53Jason Calacanis:Yeah. So bringing your own key is you can bring any provider you want and you can use whatever you like and you pay for it.

1:02:01Chris:Whatever language model you want.

1:02:02Jason Calacanis:Whatever language model you want and you pay for it. So that's why this is cheaper. We just host it. The kind of complexity that I'm trying to take away from people is upgrading their open claw whenever the new one launches, making sure nothing breaks.

1:02:15Chris:So what do you give people by default? Are you using Kimmy or something? Kimmy. Using Kimmy.

1:02:19Jason Calacanis:Using Kimmy right now.

1:02:21Chris:Got it. And is Kimmy good compared to your clawed opus?

1:02:25Jason Calacanis:I think it's about 10 % less in personality, but about 10x less in cost. So personally, for me, it has been a great trade-off. I have used, I have, so the way I run it is I have Kimi as my main LLM, main language model. And then for specialized tasks, I create sub-agents with Codex and Claude to do specialized jobs.

1:02:47Chris:I love it. Super inspiring. Any questions for me? And by the way, Ben, if you've got a question for Adi, you can ask him. It's a little interactive here. We try to keep it. I give you permission. It's fun. Keep it, always keep it interactive. If you have any questions.

1:03:03Ben Broca:I mean yeah I think it's amazing I think I love the the 15 minutes uh I love the free free open call I think that's genius I mean I would love to hear about like what's your conversion of people that try for 15 minutes and decide to actually pay like I just I just launched this and I haven't

1:03:22Jason Calacanis:promoted it at all so I just launched it and I need to promote it uh but people just based on some replies I did on Twitter, people were really excited about it. I think some guy mentioned that on Windows, he's been having a lot of trouble, you know, trying OpenClaw and wanted a way to test it first with his telegram. So he was quite excited. Another use case that someone mentioned was that they opened the bot for 15 minutes. They were collaborating with a friend on a coding project and they just gave the bot the permission to do it. So they told the bot to shut off after 15 minutes and they so so i think i'm now starting to lean into these disposable agents where uh a friend of mine came up with the idea of doing this for a weekend trip so on a weekend trip we spin a bot for two week for a week for a weekend it does its own thing and then it automatically self-destructs so and this is not a shared uh this is not like a shared space it's it's creating a virtual machine on the cloud so it can do a lot of it can do everything that open clock and do for those for the for the weekend and then it automatically self-destructs so i think there can be a lot of cool use cases which can be built on top i want make my claw to become the best place where you can use all the open source agents so uh as you would have seen uh hermes which is by this news research lab they launched so i'm integrating that into it so now you now you can not only just do uh now you can not just install open claw but also hermes so you can choose whichever bot, whichever framework you like, and you can easily install it.

1:04:54Jason Calacanis:This is amazing. Well done.

1:04:56Chris:All right. Gentlemen, great job. I'm going to be hosting an Open Claw launch festival Monday and Tuesday, March 16th and 17th in San Francisco. You're both invited as my guests, free ticket for each of you. And if you want to come and the way we do this event, just so people know, we only have 400 seats. We're giving 100 to our investor partners. We have 125 of our founders coming from Japan, around the world, Saudi, et cetera, and our latest cohort of founder university companies in America. Then we're going to invite 100 investors, which means that's like 250 of the tickets. Then we'll let 100 people who are founders from the public come for free.

1:05:40Chris:We always make it free for founders. When you buy a ticket, you pay 20 bucks. when you pick up your ticket, we refund the 20. Why do we do that? Man, people will not cancel. So you can buy the$20 ticket. If you have to cancel, you can cancel, but it's 20 bucks, who cares? It's just a way for us to reduce the number and just make sure we don't burn seats. And if you wanna buy a ticket, there's 50 VIP tickets available. If you buy a VIP ticket, lunch is on your own for this event. You can just walk around San Francisco and get lunch. But I'm gonna host a lunch for 50 people and some of the speakers will come to that.

1:06:14Chris:if they're around, and you can come to the lunch with me if you pay$1 ,000. So there's$50 ,000 in revenue for this event. Lon is the way I do it. And that just pays for all the free founder tickets. And we can buy coffee and breakfast for everybody. Okay.

1:06:27Nick O’Neill:We can't talk about the guests yet, but I've seen the list they're working on, and it's amazing. Some good keynotes, especially for a 400-person event.

1:06:34Chris:Some of my big hitters are coming. Some very cool people. Two big hitters already.

1:06:37Nick O’Neill:Some very cool people who people will want to hear from. Okay.

1:06:41Chris:All right. Launchfestival.com. Thank you.

1:06:42Nick O’Neill:Thank you. And thanks to Adi and Ben for being here. Appreciate it, guys. All right.

1:06:47Chris:Get to work. Go back to work, gentlemen. Go back to work. Ben, love it. Adi, love it. I have ideas. I love both of these. I like both those. And I like Chris. There's three great founders you found. This is exceptional. This is what This Week in Startups is all about. I love First Amendment lunatics. These are people with no life. Yes. And then they go out. They carry pepper spray. Mm-hmm. And they go and they film. There is one of these guys in this show. And I just came across my feed because my feed is bulldogs and weird couples on Instagram now. There's all these weird couples who have the same accounts.

1:07:23Chris:I've got like four of those weird couples I follow now. Yeah, of course. Of course, as one does.

1:07:32Chris:And freaks and oddities and other things in my feed. And First Amendment warriors. And First Amendment warriors. And there's two groups. there's one well there's actually like four subsections of this group of the genre one they go to like when they get pulled over they refuse to you know fourth amendment they don't want to oh right yeah roll their window down they want to know am i being detained they know all the rules they know all they know all the rules yeah and they like to mix it up that one it feels very dangerous that's one genre i'm not encouraging that the second one they go to public places and they just record so they went to like you know uh tahoe and they went to a local town that's near me and they recorded on the street just like they're making b-roll and the guy's got like six cameras on his body and the guy comes out of the store and he starts yelling at him he's like no i'm just taking video and i'm just doing you know shots or whatever he's like you can't shoot into the story he's like well actually you know freedom of speech i can public street i'm looking this way as of the sidewalk exactly so the guy comes and he pushes his camera the guy's got pepper spray says if hey if you hit me again i'm gonna pepper spray the guy pushes him again.

1:08:35Chris:He pepper sprays him. Like the guy's crying whenever police come. These first amendment words show them the video. The third genre and perhaps the best is in this show Neighbors, which is the beach line. The beach. Oh my God. Oh my God. There was a beach called Carbon Beach. I had a couple of friends who had houses on Carbon Beach. These are billionaires. And I would go stay and you know, you go on the beach and then they would have a thing called squids or jellyfish people who would be outside geffen's house like geffen has one of these houses well known famous people have these houses um the guy who used to run disney was the ceo michael eisner eisner had one of the most famous houses this is all public knowledge because people would know i'm going to sit outside of eisner's house i'm going to sit outside of this famous person's house and um you know people are just cool with it but then there's like some karen in laguna and she puts ropes and there's a rule.

1:09:32Chris:You can be 10 feet from the high tide mark.

1:09:36Nick O’Neill:Right.

1:09:37Chris:Anybody is allowed to be 10 feet from the high tide mark, whether it's Florida, California, and then there's local rules. And then there's people who sell chairs or have private clubs and they will start putting their chairs around it and creating formations. And then these warriors come out and there's one on neighbors. Yeah. And they come out and they want to walk across it. So they'll walk through the chairs for the hotel or whatever.

1:10:00Nick O’Neill:I had no idea about this whole subculture. Oh, it's the greatest. It is awesome. Every episode, they pick two. Where's the clip? So here he is.

1:10:09Chris:Oh, just doing a little beach blog. It's all private property until you hit Orchard Lake down there. When you say it's all private property. Here he goes.

1:10:20Jason Calacanis:Don't take this the wrong way, please. That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. This is not my first rodeo. my friend. So this guy he's fighting with is paid by the homeowners to patrol the beach.

1:10:34Chris:But you're wrong because I've looked it up.

1:10:35Jason Calacanis:Didn't work out so well for you. Did it, Brent? You think I'm trouble? When do I have a hundred of my friends out here on this beach?

1:10:40Nick O’Neill:I got my kids out here, so if you want to go us and fight...

1:10:44Jason Calacanis:I don't care if your kids are out here. I'm out here too.

1:10:46Nick O’Neill:Look at this guy.

1:10:49Nick O’Neill:That's a little taste of cult news. Oh, so good. He's a lunatic. So he's getting in the middle. It's not even his neighborhood. He's getting in the middle of this fight between the people who like to hang out on this beach and the homeowners. And there's a scene late in the show that's so great where the woman who's running the we want to sit on the beach group pulls him aside and is like, can you please stop doing this? You're making us look bad. This is exactly what we want to avoid. You're starting fights. You're making chaos. Now we're really going to get kicked off the beach.

1:11:21Chris:Yeah, the Laguna Beach, Karen, was the other really great one. She is nuts. Let me play you this.

1:11:28Nick O’Neill:But they find these. The whole show is just they find these characters. I love it.

1:11:32Chris:I love it. This is the genius of HBO. The$100 billion thing is actually worth it. I retract my previous statements.

1:11:39Nick O’Neill:There's another one that's in Montana. It's these two neighbors who are fighting over this gate a guy wants to put up on this road next to his property in Montana. Look at this, Lon. Let me show you this one.

1:11:48Chris:This has nothing to do with neighbors. Watch this woman.

1:11:51Nick O’Neill:A couple of weeks ago, I featured a video of a woman. a beachfront property owner in Laguna Beach, to be exact, who was screaming at a family of beachgoers to get off her property, frantically deploying more and more rope line to more and more beach area in an attempt to cordon off what she said was her private property. Now if you're the homeowner of a beachfront property,

1:12:15Chris:which must be nice,

1:12:17Nick O’Neill:it's your responsibility to learn the laws and rules that govern your property and the line.

1:12:23Chris:So what happens here now is these lunatics do this. Then these Fourth Amendment people are in groups and they're in Facebook groups. There's an app. Then, as the guy said in Neighbors, they go swarm.

1:12:37Nick O’Neill:Yeah.

1:12:37Chris:So whoever does like these shenanigans, then they do like, let's have a hundred people have a barbecue outside this woman's house. It's amazing. This is what like America is all about. I love this guy. It's crazy. This is why I got dozens of acres on my rent. Yeah, that's true. You got a private rent.

1:12:55Nick O’Neill:Ain't no neighbor bothering me. Totally recommend neighbors. I would say that this Montana one, you go through most of the show, and you're like, this guy actually sounds pretty reasonable. He just wants his horses to be able to walk down this. And then at the very end, he's like, well, you know, we should be working together to fight against Q. And then all of a sudden, it takes this crazy turn, and he's like a wild conspiracy theorist. I love it. It's unbelievable. The show is so good. It's Josh Safdie, who did Marty Supreme. Oh, yeah, of course. He executive produces it, and it's a terrific show.

1:13:22Nick O’Neill:I highly recommend it.

1:13:24Chris:All right. You did a great job. Thank you. I want to do some things that you wouldn't... These are things you can buy. You know me. I like things on Amazon.

1:13:33Nick O’Neill:Stuff, gadgets, brick-a-brack. Yeah. Yeah.

1:13:36Chris:I like a little bit of stuff once in a while. Let me see if I got the right window here.

1:13:40Nick O’Neill:People like brick-a-brack.

1:13:41Chris:Okay. Here we go. I'm going to take you through a couple of things I'm obsessed with. All right. I like a warm cup of coffee.

1:13:48Nick O’Neill:Who doesn't?

1:13:48Chris:This mug warmer for$22. I have it on my desk. You put your cup of coffee on. You see what I'm showing you? I do. You press a button. You can pick what the temperature is and how long it's on for.

1:14:01Nick O’Neill:And it's got a little... Oh, I love this. So like you poured yourself a cup of coffee. Now you've got it on your desk. You might nurse it for a little while. It gets cold right away. This keeps it fresh and warm. That's brilliant.

1:14:12Chris:130 degrees the whole time. If you want to go 178, you can pick in between. I mean, for 23 bucks, the delight I get from this thing every day is extraordinary. I've talked about Anker before. Sure. And when you and I were in Japan, you probably saw me pull this out. This cost 120 bucks. It's an Anker laptop power back bank. 25 ,000. It has two built-in USB-Cs. And it has pass-through power. So when you plug it in on your desk, you can plug it into your laptop or two other things. be charging the battery and charging your phone and your laptop at the same time. In other words, it's got pass-through power.

1:14:52Chris:And it's got these LED screens, so you know what it's doing. And then if you're a super nerd like me, it'll tell you here, C1, C2, C3, and A. It tells you what each of the port's doing. So I like to know. I'm on max charge for my laptop, whatever. And it gives you the battery health and all that stuff, so you can see the input, how much is left, how long it takes to charge the battery. It just keeps you informed. because we're all dealing with this stuff. Now, when I'm on a flight, a lot of times I'm on a flight, you got to find the plug. Even if you're in business, that's hard to find. The plug falls out.

1:15:24Chris:I don't even worry about that. I just have it with me. I just zip it out, boom. Or if I'm in an Uber, I'm getting driven somewhere, boom.

1:15:30Nick O’Neill:I have it with me. At the airport. You know when you're walking around at the airport and you're looking for where's the outlet? Do I have to sit by the wall? Is there that one chair that has the – and like half the time the chair has an outlet, but it's broken and you can't get any power. this, you never have to have that moment again. You just plug it in right there. It's amazing.

1:15:48Chris:Anker also makes a new wall charger. Here it is. This one can flip over in any direction. So if you have a weird plug, it does this interesting thing. Let me see if I can find it.

1:15:59Nick O’Neill:Well, because we all have a hundred devices now. I just got the Plod. I've been wearing the Plod pin now. You got to charge that too. Like every time you get a new thing now, it needs to be charged.

1:16:10Chris:Now this one, this little cute anchor nano USB-C, I first saw it when I was in Japan and I went to that great camera store that you went to.

1:16:19Nick O’Neill:BIC camera, B-I-C. BIC camera in Tokyo, amazing. There's another off-dome thing.

1:16:24Chris:Incredible. Many floors. Anyway, they make these with matching colors for your phone, but it has a display. I've never seen this before. There's a little button on the top and you can cycle through it. See that little indentation? Yeah, yeah. You cycle through it and then it tells you what you're charging. Somehow it knows through a proper USB-C

1:16:39Nick O’Neill:cable that you're on a 19 iphone 17 pro max yeah wow um then um so you see that fast charging

1:16:46Chris:whatever yeah and it does fast charging which really matters they are fast and super fast um and you can tap it really quickly like if it's on your side table as you see here turn it off you can um do the charger cooler so if you don't want to if you're doing it overnight you don't need to high speed charge which burns out batteries and does all this stuff and affects temperature so you can go on the care version this is getting incredibly sophisticated and here is my favorite part 180 flexible for your ideal view so depending on the plug you're using if it's on top of the desk on the side of the desk whatever hotel plug airplane plug your office you can move it to zero degrees 90 degrees or 180 degrees the plug just flips around which you don't think is important until you get to a weird plug right and what you want to pair with this is this 20 plug which is a six foot USB cable, get it in white or black and you pair it.

1:17:41Chris:It's got 140 watt fast charging for your laptop, but it has dual USB-C. So you plug this into something and you get two. Boom. Genius. With my daughters. I bought them each the$30 nano when we're traveling and for their rooms and the double. We never have problems with fighting over plugs and the battery. I gave my wife, my battery, I give the kids one of those bulky batteries. Yeah, they thought of everything. Everybody's happy.

1:18:09Nick O’Neill:They thought of everything at Anchor. Anchor. They figured it out, yeah.

1:18:12Chris:And

1:18:12Nick O’Neill:Plod, you got the Plod pin. I do. I'm not wearing it right now because we're on camera, but I have the Plod pin.

1:18:17Chris:When do we start the partnership with Plod?

1:18:19Nick O’Neill:Do we have a partnership with them yet? Monday, sir. Monday. Get ready. Oh, has it been signed? It's done. It's, we're, we will do our, we will do our first Plod segment. Stay tuned for it on Monday show.

1:18:30Chris:Okay, Monday show. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to our friends at Plod. I'm going to give away more Plod. They're great. The plod, I applaud the plod. This thing is so great. Just as a preview, you wear it, you press a button. When I was skiing, it almost died. I was wearing it for those three days. I turned it on at the beginning of the day and I just let it record me all day. I'm skiing down the mountain. I had a great idea. I said, oh, shoot, stop at the side of the mountain. I'm going to start talking. I start talking. I start talking. I start talking. Boom. I forgot I did it. Then I now have on my calendar every other day, review your plod.

1:19:03Chris:Yeah. And now I review my plod and I see all the different ideas. I don't lose all my great ideas.

1:19:08Nick O’Neill:The great thing is it learns the voices of everyone around you. So I've already taught it everybody. So I could just record a conversation. It'll tell me who said what, when, and what. And you could search it. It's crazy.

1:19:20Chris:Oh, and yeah, so you can search it. And then there's a bunch of template lunatics who've made templates out of there. So one of them is perfect transcript. One of them is like meeting. One of them is brainstorm. So you can pick what template you want to generate it. It stores it in the cloud. Here's the great thing. You can hit the send button and I can send applaud to you at a public URL. So if we did a talk, I did this with you when I was testing in Tokyo. I had breakfast with Amanda. Right. I had breakfast with Will. We were going to do a talk and we just decided, hey, let's do like a best practices for startups.

1:19:52Chris:And I talked with the team and then I said, hey, make this into an agenda for a podcast episode and a live talk. Then I sent that to you, Lon. You did. And then you used that. So you started on second base. It didn't have to be transcribed. I didn't have to start anything. Boom. I just pressed my plod pen.

1:20:08Nick O’Neill:It was like I was at the conversation you guys had. Correct. Exactly. Plod, plod, plod.

1:20:14Chris:I love plod. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye. See you Monday.