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Unknown A
OpenAI stole content. Everybody who leaves OpenAI start, all the leadership that leaves starts another company. The flipping from a nonprofit to a for profit. There is definitely an ethical issue at OpenAI specifically with Sam Altman. According to the people who work for him now. Is he being unfairly treated? Is it like everybody's ganging up on him for some reason? It doesn't feel that way. If it was one or two people, you could make that case. But when it's like 10 or 20 people were saying I have ethical problems and they fired him for ethics.
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Unknown B
It's interesting how the perspective on that is flipped because when the board fired Sam Altman, everyone in technology Twitter was like, this is ridiculous. The non nerds are kicking out the nerds. Sam Altman's a genius who this, this person on the board has a PhD in art. And now we're like, the board was right.
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Unknown C
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Unknown A
Hey everybody. Welcome to this Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis. He's Alex Wilhelm. X.comAlex X.com Jason we do this three days a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. We do it about 12 noon Texas time. You can plus or minus a couple of hours there, back and forth. Follow the feeds TWI startups on X follow me and Alex. We tweeted and LinkedIn we stream to now because they're a great partner. And YouTube, go to YouTube and type in. This week in Startups I wanted to start today by just letting you know I'm still a little bit sick but I went to an infrared sauna. There are these places now you can rent like a little suite because I had an infrared sauna. At the old house. I don't have one on the ranch yet. And they have these little pods that are an infrared sauna.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
It's like a, it's a franchisee. There's like maybe eight of these little suites in a strip mall sauna, cold plunge, shower, tv, Bluetooth speaker, you know, the whole kind of thing. And it's, it's decent sized room and you could have two people in the sauna perhaps. And there are double sized saunas. But man, that infrared sauna and sweating it out with a little eucalyptus on a nice towel, that really helped me. I didn't do the cold plunge because I was like, you know what if I'm under the weather here, am I trying to build my resilience? Resilience or get resilience? So I skipped the cold plunge. But I started using an app called Go Polar, which Presh who used to work for me did. And it's a really cool app. Go ahead and search for Go Polar in your app store and download it. If you're into cold plunges or saunas and tracking it, they have a leaderboard and you score points and it's like a little gamified thing.
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Unknown A
It's the long tail of apps and the long tail of software enabled by small teams is incredible. So every little nook and cranny of hobby of idea is going to become a big deal because you're going to actually able to build those things. It's kind of like the, I don't know if it's before your time bulletin board systems or masters were a little.
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Unknown B
Bit before my time. I'm familiar with them having read, but my first modem was 56K so.
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Unknown A
Oh, okay. Yeah, I started with actually a 300 bond modem.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And then went to 1200 20, 400, 4800, 9619.2 and then 56K. I remember each of those haze modems, Ventel modems along the way. But the idea was if there was a community of people who were into something and it was a niche community, you would never meet somebody in your neighborhood who was into that niche. Now apps, you know, subreddits, all these kind of, you know, discord servers have polarized these people. No pun intended. And so for folks out there looking for an opportunity. No opportunity too small is my new startup advice. Just want to stop with that for a second. No opportunity too small. Why? Because you can learn on a small opportunity. You learn how to run a company, you learn how to incorporate, you learn how to Hire a co founder, you learn all these little things and then you will eventually get frustrated that your community is too small and you can just talk to them and say, hey, what else are you into?
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Unknown A
Oh, you're into cold plunges. Oh, you're into infrared saunas. Oh, you're into fasting. And then, okay, now you got three things in your app. You get the idea. And so I encourage people, don't be dissuaded by VCs telling you this is too small of an idea. Of course they want you to go for a big idea because they want to get that outlier result. But for me running Founder University, I would rather see more people tackle small projects, get a win under their belt, get their confidence up. I think really encouraging founders. In 2025, when you hear us talking about static team size turning into compressed team size, it's time for you to start thinking, hey, what if I had a little side hustle? What if I had a little foundation? You did that yourself with your substack. I don't know what the substacks at, but if I assume you're making tens of thousands of dollars from that, your dependency on me here at this Week in Startup, Your dependency on TechCrunch previously is different than it was prior to that.
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Unknown A
And the media people realize this and they said, you know what, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to have 5k a month or 2k a month, whatever. A little tiny trickle it is of my full time salary coming in from this side hustle. So start something small, start something you're passionate about, why you'll wake up every day and want to build it. And then when you get to the destination, let's say it's a small destination, so be it. Another one of these really interesting apps I use is Slopes, where I track for the last four years, my skiing. And what I found was four years ago I was telling people about slopes. And now in year four, I, I would say one out of five people I mentioned slopes to has it already. So I was talking to Dave Morin, famous venture capitalist, Slow Ventures, friend of mine, and I was, I just shared with him my slopes, you know, just, hey, how my season's going?
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Unknown A
And he goes, oh, you didn't add me. And I was like, oh, there it is. People are starting to use these long tail of products and services. One developer, one founder, you know, two people could build a million dollar business. You come to an venture capitalist with a million dollar business, they're going to be like, oh, congratulations, yeah, get out of here, kid. You come to me with a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand in yearly revenue, 5, 10k a month, I'm going to be over the moon because I'm going to say, you know what, you just distinguish yourself from 999 people who have an idea today. And you're the one person who turned that idea into 5k a month. You know, 50 people paying $100 a month, whatever it is. And so really want to inspire people to start companies. And I think today's story about Boom Supersonic is a really good.
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Unknown A
Because of this meme that has been trending, is a really good example. I tweeted it, which is his resume on LinkedIn and where he worked before Boom and Boom just had their first supersonic flight. Supersonic flight is not a big deal. People have been doing it forever. But for a private company to achieve this, a startup, is phenomenal. Right? It's extraordinary. This is rarefied air, so to speak. But what's really funny is if you.
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Unknown B
Look, here's the experience. Jason, I just pulled it up. Just for folks who haven't seen this meme yet. He was at Groupon and his last job there ended in 2014. He was the senior director of smart deals, Relevance and personalization, which Jason, I believe is about as far away from building supersonic aircraft as possible.
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Unknown A
Or it's not. And let me give the. The reason this is such an evocative resume is because Groupon was considered trivial. Right? Okay, I can go do a yoga class for 10 bucks and it's normally 30. Got a half price deal, a two thirds off deal. It's trivial. But Andrew Mason, a great entrepreneur, created that and he found just a little product market fit. And then you had a marketplace. So learning the dynamics of how a business grows, how investors are drawn to it, how to grow it, even if it's something as seemingly trivial trivial as a coupon, as a yoga discounted yoga class. Just being witness to the entrepreneurial process changes your brain. And you saw this as an entrepreneur? I saw it as an entrepreneur because when I started publications, writers were like, I don't know, that's the business side. I don't know anything about the business side.
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Unknown A
And like literally we would put advertising on one floor, writers on another, the church and state firewall, Chinese wall, whatever term you want to use. You separated these things. And then there were people like me, publishers who could write a story, but also knew how to sell the ads. And then there was distribution. And you knew how to do distribution and get people to read it. I knew all three of those skills, but the people who worked in the other areas knew one of the three skills on that stool of publishing. Now, you talk to an average journalist, they are fully aware of how the business side works. They understand distribution, they understand how headlines work, they understand how subscriptions work. And so once you in your brain unlock, oh, there's nothing. If I know one of the three legs of the stool, there's no reason I can't understand the other two.
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Unknown A
Yeah, then you're dangerous. And so it's just for young people listening, for old people listening who are in a rut, you can do it. You can just do things. And here we have the founder who's been on the program twice, I believe, and we'll have him on again to take his victory lap shortly. And I know they were raising a ton of money and I know it was Paul Graham's biggest investment, I think he said on Twitter. But yeah. Tell us the details of Boom's supersonic flight. Alex Nailing product market fit is every founder's top priority. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on selling it, especially to big customers. You know, we call them lighthouse customers, some people call them whales. To. To land those deals, your security compliance has to be rock solid. Certificates like SoC2 or ISO 27001 are the keys to building trust and unlocking these opportunities.
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Unknown A
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Unknown B
Just before I do that, I have to make a Chicago comment. So Groupon was a big success in the Chicago technology scene, which is kind of where I came of age, you know, through university and so forth. And people forget that Andrew Mason founded a company called the Point before Groupon. And the idea behind the Point was, I think putting like a dome over the whole city of Chicago because it was too cold. So they wanted to. It was something stupid and hilarious. And we all thought he was kind of this goofy guy. And then Groupon went, I mean, people, creative guy.
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Unknown A
And you know, creative guys and gals, they can sometimes see things other people can't see because they just come at it with a different vector.
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Unknown B
Absolutely.
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Unknown A
I became very. We kind of connected because we had a meeting one time and he wanted to run Descript by me in the early days. And he showed up at the office on a Vespa and I said, oh, interesting. I had a Vespa in New York. It's the greatest hack for a city. He's like, exactly. And then we rattled off the reasons is a great hack. They get like 100 miles to the gallon of gasoline and you can split traffic. And then I explained my ultimate hack was when I was in Manhattan. You know, if you couldn't make it down a street, I would hop off the bike and I would walk it on the sidewalk and I'd have the engine running and I would just literally be walking on the sidewalk. And in New York City, nobody cares. You know, it's on a crowded street and you just walk it.
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Unknown A
So I would go down the street the wrong way. When I would go to Michael's for breakfast, we had all these like little hacks. And that's just having your vision open, having your peripheral vision open, being open to possibilities. Anyway, long story short, the Point was the predecessor to Groupon. And the point was a survey. And they were using it to do like, important service. Like, hey, should we put a dome over Chicago surprise once? Or also, hey, should we. Should we, you know, lobby our government to do X, Y and Z? What they found out was people started lobbying businesses, the employees started lobbying businesses for two for one lunches or a discount or a, free, you know, pitcher of beer if they went down there. And it worked.
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Unknown B
And okay, that's the connection between two. I'd forgotten that detail. But to me, having done four Chicago winters, I do think that a description does well. He should go back to the Dome over Chicago because. Oh my God. Now, Jason, you want to talk about Boom? So a couple of things. First of all, Boom's big commercial aircraft is not here yet. We are talking about their XB1 demonstrator plane. It's a cut down, smaller version of It. But big enough now to have a person in there flying the plane. And it reached an altitude of 35,290ft and. And then accelerated to Mach 1.122, or about 750 miles an hour. That is above the speed of sound and is an incredibly impressive achievement. And we have pulled, Jason, the clip of the moment right when the plane went supersonic. So I'm going to play that for everybody.
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Unknown B
Pay attention if you're watching the video here of the Mach counter, which is essentially a speedometer at the lower part of the screen, and you'll see it tip over the 1.0 Mach point. So let's watch this. There we are. XB1 is supersonic. Faster than the speed of sound. We've got confirmation from the control room that it. She is supersonic. What a wonderful achievement. Geppetto and the whole team know what a really historic moment this is. Fantastic clip, Jason. So long in the. In the making. I think about 10 or 11 years since they started working on this company.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Finally reach Mach 1. I'm. I'm excited. And I also know that I now need to start allocating more money for travel for the future because I am not going to fly at 40 miles an hour at a fricking 7:37 until I'm dead. I'm so excited by this.
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Unknown A
It's going to be great. And, you know, the big innovation here is they have figured out a way to decrease the sound. The sonic boom.
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Unknown D
Yes.
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Unknown A
Which is why the Concorde only flew over the Atlantic was because it couldn't fly over, you know, countries because it would leave this sonic boom. So they believe they're going to be able to have a much smaller footprint in terms of the noise that would hit the earth. In this case, they said it didn't even reach the ground because under some circumstances, you don't actually have the sonic boom hit. But I do think this is a great achievement for a startup. And it just goes to prove that if you were in a seemingly trivial job like managing coupons at Groupon or whatever it was, whatever department that was, you could go and create an airplane and you can just do things, I think is the quote. A lot of the accelerant people on Twitter like to do that meme.
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Unknown B
Absolutely. But, yeah, Blake, the CEO made a really funny comment. He said, I wanted to call it the boom heard around the world, but it wasn't heard anywhere. I love a CEO who can actually be witty and funny at the same time while announcing a thing. I worked for A company called Mattermark, as you mentioned back in the day. And Daniel Morrill, the founder and CEO, was an early boom investor. And just to show how much my thinking has evolved over the years, I recall her announcing that deal probably 10 years ago, something like that. And thinking to myself, come on now.
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Unknown A
What happened to her? She was like a little bit of a force of nature in those days. Yeah. What does she do?
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Unknown B
She went to GitLab for a while and now she's, I think, just mostly doing angel investing, as far as I can tell. I'm sure that's wrong and Danielle's going to text me and tell me what I've missed. But the point is she was really able to spot this early on, I think just because of having a non conservative perspective on the world that is not politically conservative, but just like small versus big, you know, let's not make small plans, let's make big plans.
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Unknown A
United has preordered these. I think they put orders in, I think that they are cash deposit orders, like real ones. So I think it's a pretty real business. It's in the twist. 500, by the way. I just confirmed with Matty producer Maddie and so congratulations to them and Blake come back on the pod soon. And congratulations to all the angel investors in the team over there. It's obviously a non trivial thing to do and I too will be enjoying leaving Los Angeles or probably Seattle because of the route to go to Japan. And instead of nine hours, you know, maybe half that amount or two thirds that amount, to be able to get to Japan faster would be a game changer for me. Hopefully I'll still be skiing at that time. What else do we have on the docket for?
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Unknown B
Last thing though, once we have boom and we can go supersonic over the U.S. yeah, you can go to San Francisco for the day from, from the east coast. And that's. That's going to change my life.
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Unknown A
I think you could, yeah, you could go to San Francisco. I think it'd probably be three hours or something. I don't know exactly.
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Unknown B
Little breakfast, get on the boom, get off the plane, go have lunch with some friends, get on back. Can't wait. All right.
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Unknown A
I'd say the other side note on this was they had really crisp, clear video of the. From the. You saw there were two planes riding on either side of it and one of them was videotaping and one of them was just making sure that had visual inspections of the plane, making sure there wasn't anything rattling, etc. So the English accented guy. You know, you need to have a guy with an English accent when you do this kind of live cast. Now they were using Starlink in a fighter plane, apparently to the aviation version of it to get this like crystal clear, you know, HD video of it. So shout out to the Starling team.
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Unknown B
Dude, Starlink really working everywhere.
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Unknown A
Actually, it's interesting you say that. I was in Japan skiing and I sent Elon a picture from the lift. I'm at this place, Rutsu. It's, you know, there's Niseko Iwanai, where I go cat skiing. And then there's this other place, Rutsu, and that's like a family owned resort and it's, you know, 45 minutes from Niseko, so it's not as crowded. It's run by a unique family. And at every base of these lifts was a Starlink, I believe it for free. And so it was like a game changer because I would be at the bottom, I could download a podcast, my email would come in, then I'm on the backcountry, skiing, whatever. When I would take the lift up, I would have, you know, whatever the, you know, your emails or Slack messages. It's pretty cool.
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Unknown B
I expect that's going to be everywhere. And that's why I think, you know, Amazon's working so hard to get Project Kuiper up and running and why the EU is working on this. But it really is amazing how much of a March Starlink has stolen on the rest of the world as they try to get them. China's building one too. But I mean, if Starlink's already in Japan and Ukraine and the. I mean, it'll be good to have redundancy to chip away at.
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Unknown A
It's always good to have competition, redundancy for just in case one of them gets compromised and also pricing. So what you'll see is there's going to be downward pricing pressure when you have five of these things. So the idea of it being, I think it started at buck 25, then it went to 100. I'm not sure what it is now. I have it here at the house at the ranch as a backup to my main connection. And you know, it works so well except the lag time, the latency for doing what we're doing right now. It can jitter sometimes if you know it's moving from one satellite to the other and just the density of satellites and the density of users. So for video conferencing, that's when you're going to know that this Technology is really tight is when the video, you know, HD video zoom calls are good enough for live feeds on CNBC or on a podcast.
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Unknown A
That will be the ultimate test.
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Unknown E
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Unknown A
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Unknown A
It probably, you know, 9 out of 10 minutes perfectly, maybe even 99 out of 100. I haven't tested it for this in a long time, but it has to be much more than that obviously to be reliable for a two hour podcast or something.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I saw this story. We didn't actually talk about it earlier in the week, but this is actually from very early January of this year. It reads, china beats Starlink to high res space ground laser transmission. At 6G standard, it's basically 100 gigabits. Now, I don't bring this up to say that China is about to take over Starlink and win. I'm just trying to say that the technology to make faster transmission from ground to satellite and back down is increasing around the world. So I think what you're describing is going to be technologically feasible and probably with us in a couple of years. And that just again makes me so excited because once we have Internet, that's fast everywhere. I could go live in the woods.
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Unknown A
And you know, there's an announcement I saw. I don't know if it's on today's docket, but there was an announcement about Apple and Starlink working on direct to phones. And I know that's always been in the works as a possibility. Like even I think those are even lower earth orbit satellites to be able to hit your phone. So I think what we're going to have is a multiple stack on phones. And so what that will mean is you'll have 5G. Yeah. You'll have satellite. And then there might even be. And there were a lot of ideas around Mesh and cryptocurrency. I forgot the name of the project, but one of the most popular crypto projects was Helio. Was it Helio, where Helium was the.
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Unknown B
One that did the base stations to create kind of their own mesh Internet network.
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Unknown A
So you could create a mesh network and if I use yours, I got tokens, you use mine, I got tokens, all that kind of stuff. So you could put any Internet connection. And what some cities started to do, I know it was Israel and Spain had it first was putting connections on buses. So you imagine buses or trucks running around with the same SSID WI FI network. Well, what would that do? If your phone automatically could like I think the. Now that I have an Android phone again with my Pixel 9 Fold really great phone, it really does a good job of automatically connecting to safe WI FI networks. There's a setting in it. Forgot the name of it. But you could imagine if Google or Starlink, if you had an account like you do for some of the other networks. I think Time Warner does it and a bunch of other ones.
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Unknown A
Imagine every Tesla had or some number of Teslas or robo taxis all had a satellite dish on the hood or the trunk or whatever the roof. And then they were putting out this Starlink broadband everywhere. The idea that you would not be able to get broadband for free anywhere or for a diminutive amount would go away. So it's going to be a really bright future.
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Unknown B
Pulling our vision very much from the future down to just today, Jason, a couple of big financial things I think everyone should be aware of. One, the Fed's going to announce an interest rate decision later today. So if you're paying attention to the macroeconomic picture, well, today is going to be a big one. No one expects rates to change. People, I think they're going to stay, but everyone's going to be watching to see commentary. How concerned are they about inflation? What's their view on the labor market and what might they say to, let's be honest, political pressure to try to change how the central bank works. I think it's going to be pretty anodyne, innocuous stuff. I'm crossing my fingers that it's nothing too crazy. But it's weird to be talking about politics in this area because usually it's kind of dry economic speak. But it definitely is now part of the conversation because President Trump said recently he wants rates to come down four and a half to 4.5% to the expectation.
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Unknown A
Yeah, I mean, if we go down too fast and inflation comes back, that's going to be a major problem for this administration. I saw some surveys come out and Trump is significantly more popular than the last time he was president. His popularity compared to the last time he took office is significantly high. He's still the second lowest in terms of popularity. So while in our circles, technology circles, business circles, we could be high fiving about, you know, this progress and the team he's put together. He. A lot of the policies are not popular right now, and so. And some are very popular. And there's a really interesting Reuters IPSO poll I think that came out that was very granular. I posted it and this will be worth noting, and I plan on talking about it tomorrow on all in as well, which is, you know, how much goodwill is in the tank.
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Unknown A
Right. And if you find those surveys on my feed, it would be interesting to pull them up. Because what's interesting about these polls is, you know, the least popular, not surprisingly, is the January six, like, people beat up, tops. Do you believe they should have been, you know, released? It's actually overwhelmingly like, I think it might have been, 70% of people disagree with that decision. When you see it get past 50%, that means it's cross party lines. Right? Because it's, you know, roughly even, you know, the elections are all within a couple of million votes. So. And then you look at the most popular things. What's the most popular? Cutting government spending, cutting the size of the federal government, reducing spending, et cetera. These are incredibly popular decisions. So the consensus is starting to build as to what people are in agreement on and which ones are maybe outlier rogue things that the populace is not in agreement on.
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Unknown A
Inflation is one everybody agrees on. And if inflation goes up and already the prices of eggs, which was always brought up as a big Signal, I think McDonald's is the better one because of the avian flu. Egg prices are soaring. So that has nothing to do with Trump. It has to do with avian flu.
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Unknown B
As we learned with Biden, no one cares if it's your Your predecessor spending or your spending that causes the inflation, Nothing matters.
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Unknown A
Yeah. It's just, did I pay more for a dozen eggs? Right.
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Unknown B
And so people are super sensitive to that. But I did go ahead and pull up the poll, Jason. According to this Reuters Ipsos poll from yesterday, the poll showed, quote, 45% of Americans approve of Trump's performance, down from 47%. And those who disapprove was slightly higher at 46%. So he's negative 1% net. But 45% popularity in the U.S. given our polarization is not bad, but an.
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Unknown A
All time high for him is, I think the most graceful way to say it.
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Unknown B
I think that's, that's very reasonable. I will also just say presidents tend to come in with a victory, good PR and then they do stuff and then people get mad at them. Also, I think that on the goodwill point, you raised something very interesting. We've talked a lot about on the show, frankly, how Trump has said many things to many people that they wanted to hear. This is sometimes called big tent or you could say speaking out of both sides of your mouth. I think people being a politician, being a politician, I think, I think people expect a lot from President Trump and I don't know how much time they're going to give him to deliver. But if people expected that he was going to be able to not just maintain a lower level of inflation, but lower prices for household items, groceries, McDonald's, whatever, they might short fuse on that.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Pull up the chart I sent you. There's two charts here I just sent that I tweeted the other day, comm slash, Jason. And so ending requirements that government employees report gifts or investments. 77% of people oppose this. Right. Like we want to know if the government employees are getting gifts or Investments. Right. 20% of people support ending the requirement that government employees report gifts and investments. In other words, people want to know if you're getting grift. Right.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
And then if you go to this, you know, the bottom of the other chart, which is the second one I sent you, downsizing the federal government, 61% agree. You know, and again, this is with a polarized candidate who is, you know, really hated by the other side. So that means something like 15% of Democrats are, or moderates, et cetera, have, you know, go to the other side of the aisle and actually support Trump on this. Easing restrictions on fossil fuel drilling and production. Again, it is 50 50, but you know, it is amongst the highest agreement we have. And then imposing a hiring freeze on federal government Agencies and requiring federal employees to work from an office rather than remote. All of these things are starting to line up. These are the things that Americans are supporting him to do. Shutting the border down as well.
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Unknown A
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Unknown A
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Unknown A
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Unknown B
I think you could pitch, hey, we're going to go look at the government. We're going to find, I'm just making stuff up here, 10% and we're going to, we're going to cut the staff that are doing the least and we're going to save some money. Very popular. I think the way that the administration has thus far gone around doing things with this kind of like, hard and fast. I've been reading a lot of people that are impacted by potential federal funding freezes for research and so forth. And I do think that that's chaos that happens outside of technology circles, Jason. And I think it will chip away at certain goodwill that he may have had in certain areas that will not show up on Twitter. And so I think we should just pay attention to.
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Unknown A
It's not absolutely worth noting. You nailed it. If you do the shock and awe that they're doing, flooding the Zone, you know, pick whatever descriptor you want, cutting deeper than you need to and then adding back. I agree with those strategies, but it will have unintended consequences. And I saw it up close and personal at Twitter. You know, at one point, you all said, hey, we're going to do these layoffs. If we made a mistake and you really want to work here and what you're doing is mission critical, please email us, we'll rehire you. They're doing not. You can't do something that aggressive. But I think this, hey, if you want to resign and get eight months free, and, you know, there's, I guess, all kind of technicalities, it seems like, is coming out in order to execute that, I do think that could be upwards of 20% of people take that deal.
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Unknown B
And I agreed. But just everyone, keep in mind that most of the federal government expense does not go to staffers and agencies that are going to get cut. This is, this is window dressing for the big stuff to start.
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Unknown A
You know, we have to set culture. And so when you set culture, that's what's happening here. And when you say, hey, we're going to be in the office, hey, if you're, if you don't want to be here, here's the off path. When Coinbase did this, this sets a certain culture and a tone which is like, of seriousness. Hey, we're going to go hard. We're going to work hard for the American people, and we're going to look at every single expenditure. And, you know, if they save a billion dollars a day, if they save $365 billion, and I put this in a tweet, you know, just if you're, if you're a family of five, this is going to resonate dramatically because $3 a day, a billion dollars a day is $3 a day per American. That's about 340 million Americans, we don't actually know the number.
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Unknown A
Suffice it to say it's $3. If you save a billion dollars a day, you're saving $3 a day. You're saving $1,000 per person, family of five, you know, now you start saving 5,000 a person. If they get it to 3 billion, you know, now you're talking about saving $30,000 per family. That could either go towards education, paying down the debt, any number of things that are important. And so part of this, like freezing all the spending is to look at it and then just go do yes, no, yes, no, and then to highlight it. It's going to be very uncomfortable for people. There's going to be a lot of mistakes, but the bigger mistake is doing nothing. $37 trillion in debt is crazy. So while you might not agree with all this strategy, you know, I don't know if you do or not. I agree with the strategy because we are $37 trillion in debt.
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Unknown A
If we were $10 trillion in debt and it was like, you know, a smaller percentage of gdp, I'd be like, all right, yeah, this probably is not necessary to do it in such a, you know, strong way, but I am cautiously optimistic.
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Unknown B
There you go. Well, my, my views aside, you know, putting aside what I think about all this for the moment, I think you said something very interesting. If we take that savings and we apply it to deficit reduction, paying down the debt, education and investment in our future, smart things, what I think we're actually going to do, if, based on what I've seen, this is not me talking, it's just what I can see from Congress essentially is that we're going to do all this cutting to preserve the 2017 Trump era tax cuts, and that will not reduce our deficit. And so to me, I really, I really hope that we get both sides of this. If we're going to cut, if we're going to say to the American people, we're going to go through a painful reduction in government services and spending, great, let's not just reduce income at the federal level to a similar degree and therefore keep borrowing $1 trillion a year.
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Unknown B
That would be very disappointing to me. But it's going to be tough to tell people, taxes may not be as low as you want if we're going to tackle the debt. But I just don't think it's fair to say to people, look, we're going to take away X, Y and Z programs that you like, but everyone who's already rich gets more tax cuts.
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Unknown A
I just that's not fair. Take a look at the, the Fred chart. Federal debt, total public Debt. Click the 10 year and what you'll see here is the steady climb and the doubling of our national debt from 2015 until 2024. Right. So in 10 years we doubled it. And doubling it in 10 years is insane and deranged. Now of course you had this Covid issue, but this slope has to in some way get dampered. It has to, you know, it has to go flat, basically. And then once it goes flat, you know, maybe it could go down or just as a percentage of our gdp if we can, if we can flatten it or at least reduce the curve, then as a percentage of GDP it becomes more manageable and we're not paying some huge portion of our taxes to pay down the debt, which is on a variable interest rate in most cases it seems.
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Unknown A
Yes, we are.
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Unknown B
It's very worrying. I just hope that the pain is equally spread around. Now back to technology. Sorry. Jason and I have a lot of things on our mind. This is one of those like kinetic news cycles when every time I open up my phone I'm like, whoa.
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Unknown A
Well, you have to relate these to the. The big picture relates down to what's happening in tech. So let's keep going through the docket.
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Unknown B
All right, so today lots of earnings are coming out. We're not going to go through all of these one by one, just in case people are curious. Tesla, ServiceNow I and then the two companies that I think we should just touch on very briefly, Jason, are Microsoft and Meta. Now why these two companies, we care about them. They are technology's biggest names, they're worth trillions of dollars, they have lots of businesses. But I think people are going to be very curious to see what their CEOs have to say to market questions about their CapEx plans. Because recall a week or two ago, these two companies were saying Microsoft's we're good for 80 billion this fiscal year. We talked about Zuck and his plans to build in a data center the size of Manhattan, more or less. But then in the deep sea era, they now have to go in front of their investors, Wall street analysts and the public and defend their plans.
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Unknown B
And so I think today's earnings from those two companies are going to be highly illustrative of what their plans are for the future. Will we see Satya over at Microsoft say, hey, we're good for 80 billion this year, but next year is 50? That'll be interesting. I don't think we're going to see that. But these are going to be some firecracker earnings reports.
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Unknown A
Yeah. And I'll be totally honest, investing in capex is a great thing for these companies to do with their cash hoards, because even if they utilize but 50% of that CAPEX over the next decade, if there's some waste there, but they find a new business self driving, you know, their existing businesses become slightly more efficient, Whatever they discover through that capex, whatever they learn over time, new opportunities, new products and services will emerge from that capex spend or they won't and they'll just degrade it. So it's not like when they make these pronouncements, hey, we're going to spend 60 billion a year for five years, 300 billion that they can't change. We saw this with Meta with their glasses and the whole Metaverse boondoggle. Right? Like that whole side quest has now been forgotten. He changed the name of the company four years ago, said this is the future of the entire company.
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Unknown A
Two years into it or making that announcement, I think he said, yeah, psych side project. It's a side hustle. It's not the core of the company. The core of the company is going to be AI. And it does seem like the deep sea scare the shock has now, which I kind of anticipated would wane a little bit when we actually got reality. Anything coming out of China, you're gonna have to like, consider it like a Theranos announcement. You know, like they, they've cooked the books, they steal, you know, ip. There's all kinds of stuff going on. That doesn't mean it's not real. There could be real aspects to it, but there could also be things underneath it like we've seen over and over again.
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Unknown B
We're gonna get to Deep Seek and the theft in just a second. But funny, you bring up mixed reality and VR over at Meta because I was blown away by a news item that I saw. And this is at the very, this is the bottom of the docket where I just put stuff that I find interesting. According to Business Insider, they got a internal memo from Meta and Andrew Bosworth, their cto, said that the Reality Labs team, quote, beat nearly all of last year's aggressive sales and user goals, growing RL sales over 40% year over year, quote. We are seeing massive sales growth in wearables and the Quest brand has never been stronger. Have they pulled it off? Because I had the same perspective that you did for so long, which is that meta is spending 2 billion a quarter on, you know, VR. It's a boondoggle. Get it together, guys.
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Unknown A
AR, it's all AR. It's those, you know, Ray Ban glasses they created. What are they called again? The.
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Unknown B
I forget the name of them, but they look like Ray Bans and they had the little camera in them.
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Unknown A
And so, you know, actually looking at what consumers want to do, take pictures of their kids, feed their social media, like that is the killer use case for glasses right now. And playing video games is not the killer use case. And those glasses are becoming obtainable. I think they're $300. Those Ray Bans are providing an actual use case. The other experimental stuff, you know, some people like to do the Try oh my goodbye. You know, every Christmas they buy a quest, they play a couple of Jurassic park games. Beat Saber. There we go. What are they called again?
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Unknown B
The Ray Ban Meta Wayfarers. And they have a number of varieties here, but I think they all go into the Wayfarer brand. I like the blue ones. Not gonna lie, those are hot little chunks.
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Unknown A
I guess they're just called Ray Ban Meta, I guess.
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Unknown B
Is Wayfarer a standard Ray Ban?
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Unknown A
I think that's the style of glass.
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Unknown B
Ah.
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Unknown A
So Wayfair is like the Dylan esque glasses with the vic stems and. Yeah, so that's the Wayfarer as a style. But I was getting these for music from Ray Ban. They have a really cool one that just has a little speaker by your ear. And I love them because I could be walking around listening to a podcast or on a hike and then I could hear people talking.
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Unknown B
Snapchat spectacles was a big deal when they had like the little vending machines parachuting down people. People love to play this stuff if it actually helps them. But Jason, let's, let's move on to the biggest news story today, which is this Deep seq controversy. We've been talking about Deep Seq a lot. Everyone in the world is. But recently there's been some criticism that they might have been stealing from the cookie jar, as it were. So I thought we'd hear from someone you know very well, Jason, Mr. David Sacks over here. And we have a clip from him talking to cable news all about what's going on. So here is David on Deep Sea.
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Unknown D
Well, it's, it's possible there's a, there's a technique in AI called distillation which you're going to hear a lot about. And it's when a one model learns from another model. Effectively what happens is that the student model asks the parent model a lot of questions, just like a human would learn. But AIs can do this, asking millions of questions and they can essentially mimic the reasoning process that they learn from the parent model and they can kind of suck the knowledge out of the parent model. And there's substantial evidence that what Deep SEQ did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI's models. And I don't think OpenAI is very happy about this. And I think one of the things you're going to see over the next few months is our leading AI companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation. And so we'll see if the leading AI companies can prevent distillation by third party companies.
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Unknown D
That would definitely slow down some of these copycat models.
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Unknown B
So, Jason, what do you think about that?
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Unknown A
So OpenAI stole the new York Times, stole everybody's content and then had their content stolen. Now they're calling a foul, I call BS. Like literally OpenAI stole everybody's content. A whistleblower committed suicide apparently because of it, because of the stress they were under or who knows, you know, I don't want to really. It seems uncouth to me to make too many commentaries on a tragedy like that.
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Unknown B
That's why I haven't talked about it either.
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Unknown A
Yeah, well, I mean, listen, we have to talk about. At a certain point there is a 1% chance or less than 1% chance that it's anything other than a suicide. The parents have been doing a tour on podcasts. I got hit up three, four different ways to have them here on this week in startups or have them on all in. And I'll be totally honest, you know, after I listen to a portion of it, I have incredible, incredible sympathy for this, these parents. Right. Nothing worse than this could possibly happen. If I was a parent and God forbid something like that happened to me, you know, I would do everything I could to convince myself that my son was murdered tragically and that they didn't take their own life. Because that is such a horrible thing to have to face. Right. Suicide is just. I remember having a conversation with a friend over a friend who.
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Unknown A
A mutual. Who had committed suicide. And it was just like our brains were broken for a very long time. And maybe my brain is still broken to a certain extent over this tragedy that I experienced in my personal life. And so it's less than a 1% chance. But it is an important note that this person was the whistleblower. So we can't avoid the fact that this tragedy occurred and that he was in the New York Times and that he's the key witness and that he might, he might in fact be the fulcrum or the, the linchpin of all of this. In the New York Times case, OpenAI stole content. Everybody who leaves open I start. All the leadership that leaves, starts another company. So it's not like they're just retiring rich. They all leave, say that they really appreciate their time, collect a bunch of money in secondary, selling their shares to Kushner over at Thrive, and then they go start a competing company.
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Unknown A
Like if you put these things together, and then the flipping from a nonprofit to a for profit. There is definitely an ethical issue at OpenAI, specifically with Sam Altman, according to the people who worked for him. And so if they're. And the people who partnered with him. So now is he being unfairly treated? Is it like everybody's ganging up on him for some reason? It doesn't feel that way. If it was one or two people, you could make that case. But when it's like 10 or 20 people who are saying, I have ethical problems, and they fired him for ethics, then brought him back, and the whole thing is convoluted like this.
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Unknown B
It's interesting how the perspective on that is flipped because when the board fired Sam Altman, everyone in technology, Twitter was like, this is ridiculous. The non nerds are kicking out the nerds. Sam Altman's a genius. Who is this? This person on the board has a PhD in art. And now we're like, the board was right. Sam Altman sucks. It's, it's a vibe shift. And I think it depends a little bit on who you're listening to, but I do think there has been enough there to point out that Sam's probably a little tough to work for, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's hear from them. So here's OpenAI's statement on the possible theft of their reasoning from Deep Seq. We know PRC based companies and others are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies. As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our ip, including the careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in real life.
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Unknown B
But they're like, we protect our ip. Your IP is fair use. Our IP is sacrosanct. And I said this with technology companies, not just OpenAI, but everybody when they're saying, oh, you know, it's just fair use, it's copyright, I'm like, okay, cool. I'm going to tell you that Your IP is fair use and not copyright protected when I use it. And I want you to count until you send your lawyers.
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Unknown A
This is the Napster moment for OpenAI, I believe. And we all know what happened to Napster, right? It gave way to Spotify, which did it legally. So my best advice to content providers, Disney's of the world, book publishers, magazine publishers, anybody who has anything that's on the web is to meet with the Council for the New York Times and see if you can join their lawsuit in some way, contribute to it. Not because I believe in ganging up on Sam Altman or have any personal vendetta against OpenAI. It's because I have a belief that the opportunity to create these products and services is the opportunity for the IP holders, not for a third party, which is exactly what happened with Napster. We all want to have all the world's knowledge in a jukebox in the cloud. We all want the video jukebox in the cloud, the multiplex with every movie playing any second.
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Unknown A
We want to go, that's consumer desire. So you can have that consumer desire. You want to have Spotify, but you can also respect ip. And both of those things have occurred. You can go subscribe to 10 different services for about 10 to 20 bucks a month, and for 150 bucks maybe have a jukebox in the Cloud for 1800 dollars a year, which is a big number, or for half that number, whatever it is, you could have unlimited, unlimited video consumption, which is a lot better than taking five people to the movies for ten bucks each back in the day and then having to wait for that movie to, you know, hit a revival theory or whatever. So I hope that that opportunity gets captured. And my publisher Harper sent me a note. For $2,500 I can give Microsoft the book angel for three years. And I didn't make a decision on it yet.
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Unknown A
I haven't signed it, but I'm probably going to sign it just to show support for that concept that my book.
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Unknown B
Of money flowing from rights holders to technology companies. So here's a fun question, because we're talking about OpenAI in particular because of deep seek, because of the possible distillation theft and so forth. But this I think applies to every single major AI company, Mistral in France, XAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, et cetera. If they all have the shared foundation of copyrighted information that they did not properly compensate people for, does that represent a major risk to AI in the us? Because on one hand, I am so on board with You, Jason. I agree. Let's get paid for our stuff that they're using. On the other hand, I don't want to fall behind China in the great AI race and I don't think Deep Seq is going to have the same IP issues. But if we don't respect the systems of our, the rules of our systems as we try to protect them, we end up with an empty box.
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Unknown A
Ask humans, create systems for clearing these things out in bulk and ask humans for permission.
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Unknown B
Yeah, that's, that's kind of where I end up too. And I do think though, I've really, I've read so much stuff in the last couple of days about this and I really do think that deep sea challenging the world with something that was at least putatively trained for less and has cheaper inference is just going to lead to a lot more AI demand. And I just cannot get over the fact that I think this is so bullish for startups. Did you see Perplexity is already baked R1 into their system and they're going to keep scaling that up.
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Unknown A
I mean, sure, why not everyone model.
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Unknown B
Agnostic just got a gift.
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Unknown A
It's going to keep happening and you know, competition. Back to capitalism and competition, this is a rare act of capitalism occurring in China. And like a free market moment. They'll have their moments of free markets and they're participating in the free market, maybe breaking some rules. Okay. You know, wouldn't be the first time people broke rules as I just outlined. Sam Altman's broken a couple of rules. People break rules all the time. They bend them, they break them, they reinterpret them. But this is all good for humanity. I do believe humans will find more work. I do believe prices will compress. And just like you can spend 100 bucks a year or 150 bucks a year and have unlimited music consumption, whereas previously you could buy 10 CDs for that price. And that was roughly. And you can watch like, and you can listen to the radio.
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Unknown A
You know, technology will be deflationary and provide more products and services at a lower price.
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Unknown B
OpenAI is doing very well throughout all of this. I think there's a lot of like, it's we're so dead or we're so back. People just go back and forth between optimism and pessimism. I think people should level that out a little bit. And keep in mind that while we had these conversations, OpenAI is just doing business and making money. So the information reported that, quote, revenue from OpenAI's most expensive tier of ChatGPT which costs 200 bucks a month, is now generating as much revenue as their enterprise or business team subscriptions. And that was at 25 million a month last September. Now, I don't know, Jason, let's say 25% growth since September of last year. That puts it at about a $370 million run rate, which means that ChatGPT Pro is now an enormous company that could go public on its own. Right. So while we talk about competitiveness and open source versus closed source AI and will deep seat take on, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, OpenAI's is growing and they're just doing very well.
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Unknown B
And I think that gets a little bit lost in the mix.
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Unknown A
So if 1,000 people are paying $200 a month, that's 200,000. If 10,000, it's 2 million, and if 100,000, it's 20 million. So they have 100,000 subscribers already to the paid version. Correct.
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Unknown B
The most expensive paid version, yeah, $200 version a month.
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Unknown A
So they got 100,000 people to sample it. It's not an insignificant number. If they have a million, they have 100 million users a month. I'm just rounding that number out. That would be point one percent. They have 300 million or 400 million or 500 million, maybe 600 million users.
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Unknown B
I just want them to go public.
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Unknown A
So the numbers are regular, 600 million monthly active users because they have the free version. So that's people just stumble across the website and try it one time. But anyway, let's put the number at 500 million. That means a hundred thousand would be like 1%, would be 5 million. So yeah, it's a very tiny, tiny percentage of their overall user base. And so the question is, how many of the 500 million become $20 a month people? Of the $20 a month people, how many of those become 200 of the 200, how many become enterprise?
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Unknown B
On the competition point though, I really, I love that deep seat. Kick some butt. You know, I feel like there was this commentary constantly. Well, it's funny how AI is doing like five business cycles in like a year. It's just so compressed. There was the AI is interesting. It has no use case. There's the US is beating China and then there was China's beating the U.S. then there was OpenAI is worth a trillion dollars. Everyone's gonna buy Nvidia, then Nvidia's dead, China's gonna win. And this is all like the last 12 months. It's crazy fast. But what's cool is everything's getting so much better. It is getting cheaper. And I just think for startups who are building using AI models, they're getting more and more tailwinds from the progress being made. And I. It makes me so bullish on seed Series A companies that are trying to use AI in their goods and services because they have such better tools than they had 18 months ago.
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Unknown B
Surely that's gonna be an accelera. Forget if OpenAI wins or it's anthropic or it's XAI or whomever. The startups who are not the hyperscale model companies are going to feast.
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Unknown A
Yeah, they're going to just. It's downward pressure on the cost of hosted AI APIs that people are using. And everybody, every founder I've ever talked to, every enterprise is making it hot swappable. So at any point in time you can just point your, you know, just like you can change where you store your data from, you know, Amazon to Oracle cloud to Microsoft or Google's cloud or rackspace or whoever, DigitalOcean. Because you can easily swap that and just point it to another direction with standards and open standards and writing clean code. That's how people are setting up their AI. So there'll be no loyalty. And then the question becomes, you know, with these rogue models, with these copycat models, do they have fidelity? And people are going to pay for fidelity. So if it's, you know, all things being equal and you've got, I don't know, $10,000 a month in API hits and you can do it for a thousand or five thousand, you're going to want the one.
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Unknown A
You're not going to mind the difference between 12,000 and 100,000 for a SaaS company, let's say, or any product or service, you're going to be willing to pay for the one that has the best results. Just like you might be able to buy cheaper storage that's slower and has a higher error rate. But why would you. Because if you lose somebody's photos and be quite pissed off to our question about the importance of photos for people. So I think that's the other counter argument to this. Okay, great. Somebody did this cheap. There some fugazi stuff going on apparently. But would you trust your business on it? And the answer is no.
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Unknown B
No. Yeah, exactly.
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Unknown A
You'll play with it, but you're going to want something with resiliency and less hallucinations.
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Unknown B
Yep. All that's to say that it's a great time to build a company. Going back to Jason's comments, at the top of the show. So go build something and then tell us all about it. And if you kick maximum, but we'll put you on the Twist 500 which is now north of 200 companies and growing by about 30 or 40 or 50 a week.
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Unknown A
So, Jason and founder of our university, big announcement I'm going to make shortly, but I'll just preview it here. Founder University has been virtual and I think I may have alluded to this, but I decided, you know, I'm trying to get back in office a bit. So I've got a couple of team members here in Austin. We're looking for a space and we're going to do Founder University. Either one cohort will be virtual, one cohort will be in person, or we'll do some sort of hybrid where you'll get to spend a couple of weeks in Texas with me and the team, you know, doing intensive stuff and, or maybe we'll invite the best of the founder university250 companies and teams to come in person. So it'll be like kind of a reward. So I'm, I'm figuring that out and I'm going to re reorganize our company around this new premise because gosh, the number of people who can start companies now, my observation is, has gone 10x and then the cost of doing them is going to go down 10x.
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Unknown A
So you start thinking about that 100x leverage. That means that, you know, there are more people who will take the 25k check from me to start their company and then more people who will want to take the 125k check from Techstars launch accelerator, Y Combinator or whatever company there is. So while more of those experiments are going to fail because people will be trying different things and maybe not everybody's cut out for it. I did a little back of the envelope math. There's a concept called pull through. Pull through means does your investment make to the next round of funding. So for founding university, you know, getting that first 25k check at a million dollar valuation to incorporate and pay for your legal or whatever, the next phase is typically going to an accelerator 125k and then after that would be a seed round of 500k.
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Unknown A
And sometimes people are doing so well they can skip those. So they skip the 25k check, go directly to an accelerator or take the 25k check, skip the 125 and go directly to a seed round. Sometimes people skip a seed round and get a series A because the team's so Great. And the progress is awesome and the vision is great. Long story short, if pull through was half that amount, but you did a larger surface area of deals, you have a chaotic organization that has to manage many, many, many more projects and entrepreneurs. So you need to really figure that out.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
Because it's a very bespoke industry and it's relationship based. So you have to figure out how to scale relationships. Which is why I want to have, you know, a physical space where people, the best people can come and do, let's call it one to few. You know, me plus 20 founders in a room, me plus eight founders, my team plus 10 founders, that kind of thing, that's the way to scale it is little groups, pods if you will. But I think there's going to be a sea change in venture in early stage where a lot more projects are going to get funded and a lot thusly a lot more are going to go under and be failed experiments. But then a lot more will make it through the filter, the great pull through filter. And so I'm super excited about what this is going to do for the startup landscape and I don't think many people understand it right now.
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Unknown A
So back to that go Polar company which we seeded with our accelerator check. I believe they, it's a tiny vision, but they too have big. Once they got the app done, then they said, oh, here's the next card to turn over. Here's the next one. So sometimes founders get emboldened by milestones along the way and then in their peripheral vision they see a bigger vision and they expand and they expand and they expand. That is a viable way to go about this, right? As a, as a pursuit. Some people just start with the biggest idea in the world, but other ones are like, I'm going to rent you a couch and you're going to couch.
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Unknown B
Her and then that becomes a 10, 20, 30, $50 billion business down the road. I just want, I know we have to wrap up a little bit long on time, but at the start of the show, one thing I wanted to add when we were talking about founding a company, building something is just how awesome it is to do that now because of things like Atlas from Stripe that will just set you up in incorporation. Like when we did this for our little company, we just used modern tooling. We're using Stripe and Mercury and Substack and Atlas and like it's, it's not long tile of yeah tools to fit the Legos together. It's, it's so what I'm trying to say is it's never been easier. And technology makes it easier to build stuff on top of that corporate foundation. So I'm hoping that we see a lot of cool little projects like bring back small, weird tech.
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Unknown B
You know, I want some crazy, stupid stuff like, remember Meerkat that was hot for like a month and it was like pre Periscope live streaming, and we all had fun with that. We need more stuff.
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Unknown A
Yeah, have fun. You know, make weird stuff. Couch surfing, you know, surveys, petition survey to get free beer at your office party turns into Groupon. Descript turns into a full video editing. Incredible tool. All this stuff. Restream turns into a TV studio in a box. Like, all these things can start small and have, like, small beginnings. And great oaks come from tiny acorns. Tiny acorns, Correct. There you go.
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Unknown B
All right, we are back on Friday, friends. Don't forget, we are live on YouTube and all the social platforms you could possibly want. The podcast is available in every podcast provider that you can name. My name is Alex. He's Jason. We'll see you on Friday.
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Unknown A
Bye.