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Unknown A
I've been reading a whole bunch about this company, Outlier.
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Unknown B
Outlier is one of many companies that's providing these kinds of services, like a human editor, to aid in training your AI model.
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Unknown A
And here's the great news. If you are a worker at Google or you're a worker at Facebook or you're a worker for our government, you can collect that paycheck while doing this in your office. Now I'm going to send you back to the office. When you get back to your office.
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Unknown B
You can tell Elon. Don't tell Elon.
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Unknown A
This is why overwork or overemployed is such a phenomenon. I guarantee you people are doing these while they're ostensibly working at other places. I know it is.
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Unknown B
I've got a window open right now. I've been doing this the whole show.
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Unknown A
Oh, fantastic. Great. Well, double dipping. Here we go. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer Code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SoC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get thousand dollars off for a limited time@vanta.com Twist and Vapi add real time AI powered voice conversations to your apps or business in minutes, not months. Go to Vapi AI and use code TWIST200 to get $200 in credits. That's over 1,000 minutes in free calls. All right, everybody, welcome back to this Week in Startups. I'm your host Jason Calacanis. With me, producer Lon is here and Alex is on a little vacay.
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Unknown A
He'll be back, I think on Monday. Is that right, Lon?
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Unknown B
I believe that is correct. Yeah. We've got this week to ourselves and then Alex returns next week.
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Unknown A
Big show on Wednesday. Big show energy coming when we have Vlad from Robin Hood and Raul from Superhuman, two of my earliest stage investments that have had incredible success. So I'm going to talk to both of them about how they're doing with their businesses and startup lessons. All kinds of great stuff. So this Wednesday's Big Wednesday Energy. Make sure you tune in live. YouTube.com do a search for this week in startups. Hit the subscribe button. Click on all notifications. Follow me@x.com Jason or follow Jason Calacanis on LinkedIn. Those are the three places. We stream live Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 12 Texas time, 10am Pacific time, 1pm Eastern time. But those two interviews, they might run on Friday or next Monday, so just keep that in mind. If you tune in live, you get a real good preview of what's coming down the pipe. We got a pipeline of great stuff and we're expanding the social footprint.
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Unknown A
Where can people find us again?
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Unknown B
We're on at TWI Startups on X. We're at this week in startups on LinkedIn, go to Instagram this Week in startups, all one word. We've also got the subreddit going. I'm back in there moderating R TWI startups. And TikTok is next on my itinerary. We're gonna get over there and start posting there because, you know, I'm 46 years old, I. I gotta be on TikTok. Right? That's where. That's where all the middle aged divorced guy energy people are going.
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Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, it's so addicting. Everybody's there. I want to start doing some videos just for TikTok in the coming weeks. Something I've been wanting to do. And I think I got to do reaction videos because I noticed there are so many great videos, even historical ones, of people who've been on the program or me interacting with famous people. It might be fun to go through some, some of the things I said. And I like these videos where people do reaction videos or they talk. Play the video talk.
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Unknown B
Yeah, you got your head in the corner commenting on what people are watching. That's. That's classic TikTok.
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Unknown A
Yeah. So I want to learn that genre, as it were. Speaking of genres, today would have been Steve Jobs 70th birthday, I believe. I'm pretty sure it's 70 because I saw that Tim Cook did a nice little tribute on X.
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Unknown B
You are right. 1955. He was born February 24, 1955.
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Unknown A
Well, 20 years ago, when I was doing Engadget and the company Weblogs Inc. Autoblog, Joystick. We were real pioneers in podcasting and blogging back then. I wound up selling that company to AOL 18 months after I started. It was a big part of my success in those early years. And I would go to a conference that Walt Mossberg and Karen Swisher would host called All Things Digital, All Things D. And this is from 2005, when I had started first started doing podcasting. I did a Calacanis cast, which eventually became this program this week in Startups. And we did a podcast for Autoblog, which were two of the first five to 10 podcasts ever. Shout out to Dave Weiner, who created RSS and the podcasting technology, along with the pod father, Adam Curry. Two legends who don't get enough credit. But let's play the clip here and Lon, you can give your thoughts after.
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Unknown A
Here we go. Steve, there's a thousand bloggers at Microsoft and bloggers at. People at Apple, I understand, are not allowed to blog. And you don't blog. I'm saying employees. Why is that? Well, I don't blog for the same reason that I read Bill describing why he doesn't blog. It's a pretty time consuming thing, and once you start, you kind of feel like it's one more Bill Gates in the audience. But in terms of blogging at Apple, you know, again, we have a lot of secret stuff going on, and it's one of those things where we'd really rather not have to have some of our employees spreading that around and not have to get upset with people who made a bad judgment about what to put in their blog and what not to put in their blog. Okay, so pause there for context here. I was running the blog company at Microsoft and a guy named Robert Scoble had infiltrated.
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Unknown A
He was working at Microsoft. He created, he took the blog platforms that were already out there, and he just said, everybody at Microsoft, start writing about what you're doing. And he would run around Microsoft with a camera and make short videos and talk to them. I don't know what's going on with my haircut there, but I'm obviously a way a little bit more than I do now. That's like a really interesting. It's not even a mullet. What is that? It's like cap, everything the same length.
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Unknown B
It's almost like you've got, you're, you're doing like a little pompadour thing. You've got like this little slip in the front, but it's, it's. Instead of going up a little, it's down. But I don't, I don't know what that's called.
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Unknown A
I don't know what this is called. I think it's called like, super Cuts maybe. I was on a budget. You got to remember, I was kind of broke back then.
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Unknown B
I met you about two years after this, and this was not your look anymore. You had a totally different look.
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Unknown A
By that. No, I mean this is like preppy Brooklyn jcal. And I don't know what's going on with the collar of that shirt. Is a little bit off. But anyway, putting aside my aesthetics, a.
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Unknown B
Glow up since then.
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Unknown A
A little mini glow up since then, for sure. But the blogging thing was an interesting question because blogging had become this radical medium. We take it for granted now that anybody would publish. But back in that day, everything you said as a technology company was interpreted through the media, right?
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Unknown B
Sure, yeah.
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Unknown A
If you were releasing a new product. And this is why this Wall Street Journal D conference and Rupert Murdoch owned this conference. I think he paid Karen Swisher and Walt Mossberg 500,000 to a million dollars a year to host it. Very controversial at the time, but it made, you know, 10 million bucks. The tickets were, I don't know, at that time, probably 3,000, $4,000. I couldn't afford it, but I got a journalist pass.
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Unknown B
Well, you're rubbing elbows with Bill Gates. He's sitting on the street.
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Unknown A
I mean, it was pretty, pretty cool. All of those people who were doing stuff at that time were being interpreted by the Wall Street Journal. So if Bill Gates came out with a new product, There was no YouTube at the time. I think YouTube had just launched, but it wasn't like it is today. Twitter wasn't launched. The iPhone was launched. Right. In 2005, was the iPhone launched?
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Unknown B
No, not yet.
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Unknown A
No iPhone yet. Right. So that really dates this.
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Unknown B
2007. That was 2007.
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Unknown A
2007. Right. So shortly he did that, and podcasting had just come out. And this event was a seminal moment because Adam Curry was there and he had negotiated with Steve Jobs to in itunes. And itunes is where you bought music to allow you to go to itunes and add an RSS feed. Like you take the URL of somebody's podcast and put it in there. And then it would put on your ipod, which was a music player from back then, an album that said podcasts. And you could subscribe to podcasts and would show up on your ipod. It would download it when you synced your ipod because ipods didn't have an Internet connection. And back then we were using, I guess like whatever. The precursor to 3G was like very low data. You couldn't download over data, audio or video at that time on a mobile phone.
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Unknown A
And the mobile phone you would have been using would have been an inocia. So no bueno on an MP3. But you would download them and the next day you would listen to these podcasts. And I had a couple of them, as I said. So I was going to ask him next. I had a two part question. One was, why don't you blog. The second question I was going to ask him is, would he allow us to sell our podcast for a dollar and create a revenue stream? Because I was desperately trying to figure out how to make money off these things. And let's play the second part of the clip. Will you be able to add any RSS feed to the or any podcasts RSS feed to. To itunes, or is it only through the store? Oh, you'll be able to add anything you want.
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Unknown A
Completely open. We're just working with the open standards out there. Yeah. And will you help companies like ours sell podcasts? You know, be an audible. So if we wanted to sell a podcast through your service, would you help us do the fulfillment? You know, we're planning on having all the podcasts be free at first, but zing me an email with what you've got in mind and we're open. Anything. Same email. I always send it to you. Yep. Okay.
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Unknown B
So it's always nice to get a big laugh from a crowd like that. That's a good feeling.
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Unknown A
I mean, people think like me making jokes and being witty is like a new thing. I've been doing this my whole life. But the funny part about that was I knew I was telling a joke in the moment. But I did have Steve's email and we would trade emails. Sure, because of Engadget. He read Engadget and he would tell me if we got something wrong. And he's just such a giant. I miss him so much. I didn't have a personal relationship with him, but I met him a dozen times. I was in like press junkets with him, you know, one on one. A couple of times I had conversations with him. Squarespace makes stunning professional websites ridiculously easy. It doesn't matter if you're just selling a product or a service. Maybe you're just sharing your ideas. Maybe you're an artist, maybe you're a consultant. Squarespace is going to give you all the tools to make this happen.
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Unknown A
And as you know, Squarespace is always adding cutting edge features. This is why I've been using it for over a decade. And Squarespace is actually the longest running partner here on this week in Terms, because every time I need a new feature, Squarespace adds it. And the new AI tools are unbelievable. They have one called Design Intelligence. It's like having a world class designer sitting next to you in your office and you just answer a couple of questions and their AI build you a fully customized site that's perfect for your brand, that's unique to you, and it does it in just minutes. Personalized layouts on brand visuals, premium content. It's all ready to go. So start your year off strong@squarespace.com twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase.
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Unknown A
Squarespace.com twist thank you to Squarespace for making such a great product that we used year after year at an affordable price. And we really appreciate your partnership.
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Unknown B
I was one of those people when Steve Jobs died where I was a little skeptical on the globe shifting genius stuff. It's like, you know, I mean, I always think of these things as these companies are teams, this is, these are collaborative. Anytime anybody's like this one guy is the genius, you're. I'm always a little cynical on that. Like, well, they were in charge of this huge group of innovative people and they all came together to make the iPhone. But if you look at Apple post Steve Jobs, it's clear that something has fundamentally changed. I think going back, hindsight being what it is, he was obviously bringing a level of whatever, creativity or, you know, like ambition, whatever it was, that Apple is not the same without him as with him. So I think that like his legacy has been cemented over the last few years of Apple coming out with various technologies that are not as globe shifting as the iPhone.
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Unknown A
Exactly correct. Steve Jobs put Tim Cook in charge and it was a controversial move because Tim Cook isn't like a creative force visionary. And I think he would admit that, you know, obviously not comparable to Steve Jobs. Nobody is. No, but he was the supply chain guy. So what did we see since Steve's passing? How many years has it been since Steve passed? My gosh, it's got to be 10 years now.
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Unknown B
He died in 2011, so yeah, close to 15 years.
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Unknown A
Unbelievable. And it's just such a presence that's missing. He was at that time kind of like Elon in terms of his presence everywhere. And you know, the attention he got. Bill Gates always kind of like second fiddle to him because Steve's esthetics, his products were so much better at the time than Microsoft's. Microsoft had more products, Microsoft had more revenue at the time.
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Unknown B
He was always that archetypal, like coder, developer, nerd, like he was the guy behind the scenes writing the code. But Steve Jobs was that like the creative artistic visionary where he wasn't just building products that worked. Right. He was thinking about the future. And like, what is, what's everybody going to be doing in 10 15, 20 years. And so I think it is a different kind of idea.
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Unknown A
I wonder now that the Steve Jobs roadmap, one of the last things he was working on was like TV and solving the TV problem.
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Unknown B
Sure.
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Unknown A
Which Apple TV was set to do, which was to just let you do a search with Siri for anything on your Apple TV and not worry about where it lived and just give you, you know, that kind of thing. But he was, he missed the AI wave. I wonder what Steve Jobs would be doing right now during this period of time with AI. And I can tell you it would not have been like Memoji AI or handing it off to OpenAI. I mean, he would have been in the thick of this.
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Unknown B
I think that's the, you know, Steve Jobs, his vision. It was always the walled garden. We're going to, we're going to create our own bespoke version of this technology that just works intuitively and you don't have to worry about all the, you know, setting it up or the complexities. It's going to be a perfectly smooth experience. So I think very different from how we're seeing AI develop now, where things are leaning towards open source and it's all these different tools and products that you can sort of mix and match on your own. I think Apple would have had a much more like, here's Apple AI, here's the suite of products. And it's all our, it's all in house in our system. It doesn't interact with everybody else's whatnot.
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Unknown A
All right, speaking of Apple, big news today. And this goes to the Make America independent again. I would say innovative again, whatever. You're getting resilient again. Manufacturing, Mama. Make America manufacturers again. Mama. Okay, so that'll be one of our trends here. Apple has announced plans to spend $500 billion, hire 20,000 people in the US over the next four years to build AI servers. Company said it was his largest spend commitment ever, ever on anything ever.
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Unknown B
It's a 250,000 square foot factory they're putting in north of Houston in Texas. That's going to be a Foxconn plant for assembling advanced servers. Now, of course, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company, famous or infamous, depending on your perspective, for assembling iPhones overseas in particularly Chinese factories. The working conditions in Foxconn factories in China, a long standing issue for Apple. Foxconn already has AI servers operating in Mexico. They're going to move some over here. It's part of an elaborate plan to avoid potential Trump tariffs rather than bringing in all of these servers from elsewhere, they're going to make them right here in the US so they don't have to pay the 20% plus premiums. Foxconn also planning data centers in Arizona, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, elsewhere maybe. And it is important to bear in mind, just for clarity, these servers are going to be assembled in the U.S.
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Unknown B
some of the parts like the chips and other advanced components, they're still going to import from elsewhere to then assemble the servers within the U.S. this is.
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Unknown A
A tough thing here because $500 billion in servers in a data center is a curious thing to happen here because they don't have their own language model. So I am confused. What is the point of these 500 billion and this giant data center? They are going to put what servers or GPUs in here? Are these going to be Nvidia servers? Are these going to be, you know, some new service? It's very unclear. And then what would this giant data center actually do? Is it going to be competitive with Colossus by Grok and Elon Musk? Is it going to be competitive with Sam Altman's OpenAI and what they're building? Or, you know, I have my own theory. Apple has not been in the data center race and doesn't have a cloud computing offering like AWB or Azure for Microsoft or Google Cloud or Oracle's cloud, right?
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Unknown A
So you get these four giant clouds. If you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup, you can go, you know, instead of standing up your own service, you just rent them, right? And people can move between them really well. It's awesome. And Apple doesn't have one. What if Apple did have one and then if you were an app developer, it was somehow deeply integrated into the App Store. And if you were a media company, you somehow could leverage it as well. This could be very interesting. It would be a totally new revenue source. Now, they would be the last person to the party, right? Obviously. But they do have this advantage and they have a huge developer community making apps, right? So if they made it, you know, free for apps, or a hundred dollars a month for apps that are, you know, have X number of users, I think they could get a lot of that business and then they could do deep integrations into the phone.
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Unknown A
It would be trusted. So maybe that's what they're planning here.
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Unknown B
The New York Times does say these servers are going to contain chips made by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Or, you know, TSMC, one of the world's biggest suppliers of these. So they're going to be. The chips are going to be made in Taiwan and by the Dutch company asml.
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Unknown A
Interesting stuff because, you know, TSMC actually makes Nvidia, right? Nvidia.
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Unknown B
Correct.
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Unknown A
Does the architecture of them. The actual assembly is being done there. So I wonder if this means Apple is going to be making their own AI chips. I don't know if they already do that, but, you know, it's kind of interesting what we're seeing here with President Trump. He wants to do on shoring. That's a big focus and, and he's very, you know, interested in maybe becoming independent of TSMC and China and having our own supply chain. This doesn't solve that problem if TSMC is making them. But TSMC is making fabs here in the United States. So this feels to me like the decoupling from China, which is a huge priority.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
Who is the biggest manufacturer, biggest American company involved with China? It's Apple.
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Unknown B
Right. And this does tie directly in Biden, last year, before leaving Office, awarded TSMC 6.6 billion in grants to build more chips here. Some of those chips are already being assembled in a plant in Arizona. So you're absolutely correct. This is part of decoupling all of this as best we can from China and bringing that manufacturing over here.
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Unknown A
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Unknown A
So here's your call to action. Whether you're closing your first deal or gearing up for growth, Vanta makes compliance Easy. Join over 8,000 companies, including many Y Combinator Techstars and launch startups who trust Vanta. Simplify compliance and get $1,000 off@vanta.com twist. That's V A N T A dot com twist. I wonder geopolitically if this means. I hate to get big picture here, but zooming in, I think this means that China is going to invade Taiwan and we're not going to defend Taiwan. And we're in a race to get Taiwan semiconductor on short here in the event that happens. Now, hopefully it doesn't happen, but I think, you know, everything I hear from people on the inside is that we are. Yeah.
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Unknown B
In big picture geopolitical terms, Trump's very anti the idea of America being the global cop, everybody's protector, having all of our fingers in all of these different pies. And that was an increasingly big topic during the Biden years was, you know, China's ramping up militarily in the South China Sea. There definitely are increasing hints that, you know, Xi wants Taiwan back. And just like Putin wanted Crimea and Ukraine back, Xi wants Taiwan back. And so, yeah, I mean, I think U. S. Foreign policy for the last several decades has been, we're Taiwan's ally. If China invades Taiwan, we're going to back Taiwan. And, you know, the sup. The semiconductor industry being in Taiwan was only an added inducement. We have to defend Taiwan at all costs. I think President Trump sees things very differently than that. He doesn't want to be on the hook to fight China in the event that Xi goes after Taiwan.
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Unknown A
So.
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Unknown B
Right. So big picture.
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Unknown A
It's almost like he's trying to prevent that. I feel like Trump is trying to force a multipolar world where we're independent, isolated. If China wants to, you know, have some adventures in that area and take over Taiwan, so be it. If Russia wants to, you know, do things on their border, that's up to the EU to defend it. But the United States is going to focus on the North American continent.
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Unknown B
Yeah. I mean, you can hear it explicitly when JD Vance is attacking, you know, globalism. This is what he's. This is exactly what he's talking about, this idea that all of the allied countries of the world are a united front against all of the evildoers of the world. And that's just how America has viewed the world since really, since the end of World War II, the Cold War.
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Unknown A
It's fascinating, too, because it's a very democratic position to not be the world cop, you know.
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Unknown B
Well, if you went back to when I was, like, in high school, in the 90s, of course, it was very progressive, liberal, like, why are we intervening in all of these other countries? Business that's their business and it's just economic colonialism and we should get out of, you know, all of these other countries. And now because it's President Trump doing it, in a lot of ways, it's sort of flipped and Democrats hate the idea.
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Unknown A
I've been reading a whole bunch about this company. Outlier is a training data company. Now what is training data? As you know, all these AI models are slurping up data off the open web. They used an open web crawler, this open web project. They did it without getting permission. That's why the New York Times is in a lawsuit and countless other peoples. You put that against the backdrop of, well, how do we get more information into these systems? There was a really interesting product that captured everybody's imagination 20 years ago called Mechanical Turkish. There was some sara source which was doing tagging of like images and data entry. There's business process outsourcing in the Philippines and India. That's always occurred where Westlaw and LexisNexis would take legal documents when they were faxed, you know, back in the day and they were print and they would literally type them in and do data entry.
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Unknown A
Well, now we're entering a new phase which is finding subject matter experts and then having them do queries, look at the results and fix the results. And I think they're actually going and putting primary data into these based on each vertical. Why is this important? Getting sued could cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars. You could get an injunction against you. And so there is an opportunity here for startups to take subject matter experts. Humans, have them go find information on the web and have them type in. Now they could be stealing the information as well. But because they are a little bridge with this outsourced company, it doesn't matter because OpenAI, let's say, or you know, some other language model, anthropic could hire this company. And I don't know the details, but they could hire a third party. And these third party data providers exist everywhere.
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Unknown A
Who knows how they're getting the information. They could be scraping, they could be writing it in, they could get subject matter experts. So all different ways to do it and then they buy that from them. That company indemnifies the company. They just bought the data from them. If there was ever a problem, it's at arm's length. The same thing was done to seed social networks. People hired third parties to put content onto social networks. Another way of saying paying people to go rip videos from other sources, put it on there, there was a very interesting angle to this story about journalists.
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Unknown B
So basically Outlier is one of many companies that's providing these kind of services, like a human editor, to aid in training your AI model. And a lot of those jobs are going to former journalists. People who are at risk or have already lost their job to AI are now helping to improve and fine tune the AI systems that you know are putting them out of work. Journalism jobs in 2024, 2025, increasingly hard to come by, the news industry cut around 5,000 jobs just last year. That's a 49% spike from 2023 the year before. And these outlier type AI training jobs, they're fully remote, they're consistent. Whenever you want to work, you can do them full time, you can do them part time, they pay $35 an hour or more. You can see why as a freelance writer, this is a perfect fill in supplemental gig for me.
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Unknown B
I can, if I only have 25 hours of writing work to do this week, another 15, 20 helping to edit AI systems. Well, now I'm full time employed so far. I totally appreciate what you're saying that you could use these to actually build the training data for your models. So far, what Outlier is doing mostly is having them sort of fine tune the results. So they're fact checking, they're looking for hallucinations, and if there are hallucinations, they're reporting them and correcting them. And they're even noting when they get responses from chatbots that pull from inaccurate or less than ideal sources. So if it sees, oh, the chatbots relying too much on blogs or personal writings or op eds or social media posts that aren't verified, we should refocus it to more verifiable reliable sources. So one thing I thought was interesting, if you think about it, it's basically the work a human editor used to do for a human writer.
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Unknown B
Check your sources, make sure your facts are right. If something doesn't sound, fix your grammar. If something doesn't sound right, so that it's, that's, that job is really not change. You're just helping a chatbot get better at writing instead of a, you know, a green reporter who's just starting out. Outliers owned by SF's Scale AI. The company's valued at $13.8 billion. Their customers so far include OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft. So these, these journalists are feeding the biggest, you know, they're working for Chat.
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Unknown A
Basically this is a good use of funds. If your company is worth a couple of hundred billion and you're raising 10 billion. I mean, $35 an hour. You know, if you were to do a million hours of work, would be 35 million. If you did a 10 million hours of work, would only be 350 million. 10 million hours of work. I think you could recreate the corpus of everything in the world.
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Unknown B
That's a lot of time.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
So this process is called Reinfor Learning with human Feedback R lhs and it's outlier AI.
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Unknown A
We should definitely get the CEO on the program.
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Unknown B
Sure.
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Unknown A
But it's interesting that they're going after journalists. And this is the point. New work is always created. Here it is. New work is being created.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And I bet you that this work pays better. And 35 hours.
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Unknown B
Good man. I. I've definitely had writing jobs that did not pay 35 an hour. Like not even that long ago if.
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Unknown A
It was for work from home as well. It's a $70,000 a year job. You know, just times it by 2,000. That's incredible. Job for work from home.
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Unknown B
Yeah. Think about it. You just log in when you're ready to work. And because it's not, you know, they've always got plenty to do. So you just log in.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Here's your day's assignment. Okay, I did my eight hours.
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Unknown A
I'm done.
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Unknown B
I work.
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Unknown A
And here's the great news. If you are a worker at Google or you're a worker at Facebook or you're a worker for our government, you can collect that paycheck while doing this in your office. Send you back to the office. When you get back to your office, you can elon. Don't tell. But no, this is the. This is why overwork or overemployed is such a phenomenon. I guarantee you people are doing these while they're ostensibly working at other places.
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Unknown B
I know open right now. I've been doing this the whole show.
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Unknown A
Oh, fantastic. Great. Well, double dipping. Here we go. We'll be in an office soon in a studio. So I'll be over your show.
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Unknown B
If you're doing it, you'll be noticing.
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Unknown A
2025 is going to be the year that Voice AI really breaks out. Voice AI is going to change everything. And this technology is perfect for building a chatbot or automating customer calls and basically creating these next gen voice experiences. But building with these tools is so difficult. It's just a bear. It's going to take your developers months to build and test anything, even basic, unless you use vapi. Vapi. This is the fastest and easiest way to integrate voice into your products. It's just the most simple API you've ever used. It helps you build, test and deploy voice agents in just minutes. And you can create ultra realistic AI voices and customizable personalities. I like that part. All with real time response speeds. You know, it'd be great. Maybe I just demo it. Okay, listen to this. Hey, Jason, it's great to be on your podcast.
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Unknown A
Oh, okay, great. Are you interested in being the co host of the podcast? I mean, I'd love to just imagine the banter. AI and humans, the ultimate duo. But I think I'll stick to helping out with Bobby for now. All right, what's up in the startup world today? You know, we have so many things going on in the startup world, including AI. So I'm wondering if you have any tips for founders on how to create great AI experiences. Totally. I mean, first off, keep it simple. Focus on solving real problems for users. Then make sure it feels natural. Good conversation dynamics are key. Oh, and don't forget to optimize for speed. Nobody likes waiting for a response. What do you think? That sounds really good to me. Take care and chat soon. Gotta say, these are ready for primetime. And if you want to give it a try and you can see it works now, you gotta give Vapi a try.
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Unknown A
V A P I Vapi AI. Use the code TWIST200TWIST200 to get $200 in free credits. That's over a thousand minutes in calls. Great job to the VAPI team. The ad we showed there was outliers looking for talented accounting and tax experts to help train generative AI models. And you need a bachelor's degree or higher in agricultural related subjects experience working as agriculture.
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Unknown B
They're really, they're not just looking for random freelance writers. They want category experts. People that have expertise in very specific niches because you know, they're gonna, they've got so much data they've got to sift through. They need somebody who's just going to focus on farming, agriculture, you know, like interior department stuff. And then I'm sure there's other people on, you know, nutrition and food, like everything a newspaper would report on. You know, it's really fascinating stuff.
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Unknown A
There's a ton of other people who are doing this Appian data annotation.
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Unknown B
Sure. Scale AI. The. The parent company of outlier is doing some of this themselves. I also thought it was interesting. They're looking for people in international languages. They want people to do this in Thai, Dutch, Hindi, Swedish, Spanish and French now too.
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Unknown A
Funny joke from Cecilia Hack. We can pull up here outliers looking for advanced English writers to help train AI systems and LLMs when they offer.
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Unknown B
To pay you to help make your journalism job become obsolete.
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Unknown A
And in some ways it's true. You know, if you're an accountant and you train this and there's 100 accountants training this and they do a really good job, then maybe the AI will be doing those accounting jobs, right?
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Unknown B
Yeah. If they do a good enough job, this can take over the writing of blurbs. They don't need blurb writers anymore. If the AI gets good enough captions, all that stuff.
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Unknown A
And then you think about, like pilots. When I was talking to some of the jobies of the world and other, you know, Kitty Hawk, which then got subsumed by some other company at the all in Summit last year, one of them said, we're just trying to make the best pilot in the world. The singular best pilot in the world.
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Unknown B
Like Sully, like air airplane pilots?
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Like you're going to fly in a plane that's. That's being flown by a computer.
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Unknown A
That is what vtols the vertical takeoff and landing.
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Unknown B
You first.
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Unknown A
Well, here's the thing. It turns out actually that already 80, 90% of flying is done on autopilot.
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Unknown B
Of course there's. So I get that.
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Unknown A
I guess the 20% that isn't is the landing in a lot of cases, and the takeoff or whatever. And then when you get up in the air, they press the button, but sometimes they press the button when they're landing. You put it all together, that last 10 or 20% will be figured out by AI and it will be done better. Just like driving and cabs will be better than your average cab driver because humans are fallible. Whether that happens in five years or 15, we can debate, but it's happening. And I think that those rote jobs, truck driver, pilot and cab driver will be done better by AI, certainly 10 times better. Because almost every time it's pilot era, it's almost every time it's a driver error or distracted driver. And you still need to have some experts in the loop to take over. But yeah, it's going to be pretty impressive when we see that happening.
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Unknown A
All right.
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Unknown B
All right. Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I'm gonna wait for a few other. I'm gonna wait a few years before I get into an AI airplane. That's just. That's just.
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Unknown A
It's gonna be a process. You know, if you look at Waymo, Waymo in San Francisco, it's pretty amazing. When you take one, but it goes slow, it's jerky at times, it takes weird routes. You know, it's not for everybody.
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Unknown B
I tried my first Waymo the last time I was in Austin a few weeks ago. It was open through the Amanda and Z and I took a. Took a Waymo while we were hanging out.
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Unknown A
Did you have. Did somebody have the invite from the Waymo app?
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Unknown B
It was Amanda. Amanda or your friend Amanda has.
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Unknown A
What they're doing in Austin is I think because they. Somebody from Waymo invited me as well. I forgot to click the link.
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Unknown B
Yeah, you have to have an. I've never been in one because I didn't. I didn't have access.
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Unknown A
That's the test. And it did it. What was your impression of it?
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Unknown B
I was very impressed. It worked perfectly. It. At one point we made sort of a weird like three part right hand turn. That was a little nerve wracking, but not really. There was at no point did I feel in any danger at all.
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Unknown A
Another trend that's happening, that's pretty clear and I tweeted about it today. We like to focus on trends is hot swappable LLMs. Hot swappable means you can just like I was saying with Biden, they were going to hot swap Biden, which you could hot swap hard drives. What that meant is you could pull a hard drive out of a server, plug another one in and the RAID array would just balance and redo the backups and you could hot swap, which means you take it out, the system doesn't stop running. Well, with LLMs, we're going to start seeing hot swappable LLMs. And there was a tweet by Aaron Paris. Aaron P613.
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Unknown B
Yeah, for Mac Rumors. He's a, he's a Mac Rumors guy.
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Unknown A
He tweeted this because, you know what they do is really interesting. They go into the betas and they look at the code somehow and then they find little breadcrumbs. One of the breadcrumbs here is that in iOS 18.4 we might see Apple intelligence. Instead of just being able to launch a conversation with ChatGPT by OpenAI, you could pop one open with Gemini. And I think Gemini is a bit better than OpenAI right now. And so this is interesting.
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Unknown B
We're looking at down the road somewhere. This is obviously not coming in iOS 18.4 necessarily, but they're laying the groundwork for maybe integrating gemini along with OpenAI's ChatGPT into iOS at some point 9 to 5. Mac says we're probably going to see Apple intelligence debut by iOS 18 or 19. Apple has already said they are hoping for the conversational Siri model to be here by iOS 19. Apple demoed its Apple Visual Intelligence suite of products and features back in September, but nonetheless, the company may be giving users more options in terms of AI services. There's some suggesting that maybe Perplexity and even other models could get in on this over time. Barry Schwartz responded to this Aaron Paris comment and suggested maybe rather than it just being Gemini, it could be specifically integrating Google Data into Apple Intelligence. Like could it be Google Shopping results being pulled in, but not necessarily full Gemini integration into iOS?
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Unknown B
Aaron says no, but did not decline to go further in terms of why that's impossible.
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's a different product, is the answer. I think that this is the next giant search deal and that obviously Android has integrated Gemini on a very deep level. So I specifically bought the Google Pixel 9 fold so I could experience both the fold and experience Gemini integrated into the Android operating system. In fact, I bought you on or I asked them to buy you a Pixel 9 so you could experience that as well.
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Unknown B
It's on its way to me right now.
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Unknown A
Perfect. Not the fold. I got you the regular one. The fold's a bit much and I think it slows you down.
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Unknown B
I don't need the fold. I'm okay.
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Unknown A
Well, I'll say I have found it really nice. When I'm at a cafe or I'm on a plane, I do find myself opening it up and watching a YouTube video.
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Unknown B
Sure.
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Unknown A
Or which is very nice experience.
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Unknown B
I got the MacBook Air though. It's so. It's. It's almost like a tablet mixed with a laptop. I bring it everywhere.
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Unknown A
I like having three, four screens with me at all times when I travel.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
So I bring my iPad Pro, which is giant. I bring my MacBook Air, I bring my Google Pixel Fold, and I bring my iPhone.
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Unknown B
Sure.
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Unknown A
And I like having the optionality of different ones for different purposes. I also like, you know, since I'm an angel investor in all these companies being focused on that. But let me pull up my. My tweet here for a second and I'll just tell you what I think is going to happen here. Because of hot swappable LLMs, I think Apple will obviously let you choose which one you want to do. They do that now with search. Right. You can pick DuckDuckGo, you can pick Bing. So if you want to go into the settings, you can pick which music app you launch by default, which Maps app, and you know, it was a lot of hand wringing and justice Department pressure and pressure from other companies causing, you know, Apple to have to, you know, add that back in the day they didn't allow third party media players, they got pressured into putting VLC on there, they didn't allow third party browsers, they got pushed to put Opera and Firefox and chrome on your iOS and obviously, you know, they don't want to get caught up in banning other music services from iPhones because that would
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Unknown A
be a bad look.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
So obviously Apple is going to let you pick. When you talk to Siri, I think you'll in your settings say ChatGPT, Gemini Grok, whatever you prefer. But this is going to lead to a commercial deal and then ChatGPT and Gemini Grok and everybody Claude will all bid on it. I think Apple will get at the start at least a billion dollars annually for this. Wow, this is big business.
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown A
And I think they'll do like a five year deal very similar to what they did with Google search. Right. When you do on your phone. And this was really important and this is tens of billions of dollars a year for Apple in pure profit that your, that the default is Google. But I think this is going to determine like 10, 20 points of consumer queries to language models. In other words, as great as ChatGPT lead is, if they don't get this deal with Apple and Gemini does, then Google is going to have done what they did with search. They locked down Android for half the queries, they locked on iOS for the other half. So if Android uses Gemini by default, they're already at like 50% of the queries that could come from a device. And so the iPhone deal is going to determine who wins the language model wars and the query wars in all likelihood.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I think that makes, I think that makes total sense. And it's interesting how these companies are sort of battling over this same thing in so many different areas. We just saw like Apple and Google are fighting over streaming now and who does Apple TV get to be get to live on Android devices. And so it's just, it's just the next front in that ever, ever non ending war of who, who's allowed into whose platform and whose walled garden.
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Unknown A
All right, if you want to check in on the docket, go to thisweekinstartups.com docket. We are making the docket public. If you're using the docket, you can put comments on the docket. The team will see them. We start working on the Docket in the morning before the show on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. So you can watch us actually in real time build the docket.
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Unknown B
This week started the night before. It's a lot. It's a lot of work.
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Unknown A
It's a lot of docket. And we get to only about half the stories. I like to have twice as much docket as I need. And then, you know, that means we can serve up a great show for you. And what you see live is about 125% of the show we wind up publishing. In other words, the publish show is 80% of the live show, and the docket is 2x the live show. So there's a lot of content there that we don't get to. And you get to have all that content right at your fingertips. Let's go to the next story here. This one is underreported. I think it's important. You know, there's a real problem with these Meme coins. And I think the problem is one group of people sees them as collectibles, which is fine if you want to have that interpretation. But how they present, as I talked about on all in on Thursday with Collison Brothers, they present as stocks.
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Unknown A
Even if you believe they're collectibles and there are a certain number of shares, there are a certain number of coins they trade, and they trade in some cases on platforms like Robinhood, Coinbase, etc. And people share charts of them and they have a ticker symbol, so it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. But people don't want to believe they're a duck.
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Unknown B
This is what always gets me about the collectibles thing. I think you're exactly right. When you are a fan of a collectible and you're a collector, it's always about the individual item you're not looking at. Well, here's the Pokemon index for this week. It's about this individual card or this pack, or you're looking for one item that you particularly want with, you know, Funkos are everywhere. But you want that one special Funko that's worth so much. And that's not what Meme coins are. Meme coins are commodities. They're stock. They're. I want to get a certain percentage of this and invest in it, hoping that it goes up in value. It's totally different.
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Unknown A
I think it is. But I will say that, you know, you can go back and forth on this. If you go to, you know, I've been looking at maybe buying another Corvette. You know, I had A Corvette when you met me and let me just show you something here. So I've been going to hagerty.com and so you know, I can look at over time. What a 19. I want to buy a 1970-1973 Corvette. These things are incredibly affordable. $30,000, you know, and there's other versions of it, two door convertible, eight cylinder. There's engines, whatever. But people do look at over time, how much they cost in charts and I can, you know, if I was paying for the professional thing here. So I don't think, you know, collectibles do have a trading price.
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Unknown B
Right. But you know, Corvette market, you want that actual car. It's, it's more than just, it's not purely, of course. Right, exactly, yes.
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Unknown A
And then so I do believe NFTs, even though they're just digital, you know, there could be one of one, there could be one of a hundred. Like there's prints. Anyway, wherever this goes, closer to the.
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Unknown B
Collectible argument, it's still like you're kind of buying a receipt for the art one. There were complexities, but yeah.
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Unknown A
So here's my thinking on this and here's what I said about Milei's meme coin. What Milei did was he rug pulled the people who put him in office. The people who voted for Milei are the ones who got hurt here. And when you think about leadership at its core, you know, the appearance of impropriety is impropriety in my mind, that's the leadership standard that should be here. So even being near this, your sister launching it, your brother launching whatever it is, the taunting of his own followers, you know, I'm out on Malay right now. This is what he said. The reality is if you go to the casino and lose money, I mean, what is the claim if you knew that it had these characteristics. Leaders own their mistakes. They don't attack the victims. You take ownership of it. And the way you should judge people, I think is what they do when they're given a lot of power and what they do when they make mistakes.
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Unknown A
Milei is a failure on all of those fronts. It's absolutely abhorrent. A lot of people say, why wouldn't you talk about the Trump coin?
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Unknown B
Yeah, that comes up in the all in on subreddit often, a lot. Let me address that a few times.
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Unknown A
All in is four people, right. One of them works directly for Trump.
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Unknown B
Not so the crypto czar. And he is the crypto czar.
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Unknown A
I, because of my friendship with David Sachs, people will weaponize me to say even Sachs's friend says these things and obviously it's uncomfortable for him. I'm sure I don't know this to have me as a friend because I'm popping off about all kinds of topics. I feel the same way about the Malay coin as I do the hawk to a coin as I do the Dave Portnoy coin as I do about the Trump and Melania coins. It's all the same to me. It's all a grift. The rules of the road are designed to have the people who host it do the transactions. They get paid tons of fees on the transactions, apparently. And the snipers. So I think the games rigged or.
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Unknown B
Six different ways to rig it. Like every time they, like there's a lot of new wrinkles or these people figured out even a different way to skim off the top or yes, this.
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Unknown A
One probably was one of the most egregious in terms of those respects. And then maybe on the spectrum, the Trump coin was the least egregious because they had like a holding period for the 80% owned by Trump and his family or this company.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
So, you know, you can go back and forth on this. People are debating, is the Malay coin the huck to a coin, the Dave Portnoy coin or whatever he did, and this and the. And the Trump and the Malay, are they all the same? No, they're obviously different, I think, because these things trade the way they do, that there needs to be some more thoughtfulness about them. And, you know, having an accredited investor test, if you want to participate in these things, would be a great way to start because it would create friction. If you want to trade these things, you need to have taken a course. And there's a lot of libertarians who are like, nope. I can tell you how crypto people think. Crypto people think that the people buying these are sheep and pigs. You're sheep and pigs to these crypto people.
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Unknown A
And they've said this to me and I've been in conversations with them. They're libertarians. They believe if you're stupid enough to buy these coins, knowing it's an insider game, then you are the sheep going to slaughter. And that if you try to get really smart about it and you're well and you know, you have made some money on it, they will eventually slaughter you like a pig. And there is actually a term, think it's called pig butchering or something.
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Unknown B
I believe that is what it is.
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Unknown A
Yeah. And so they literally in crypto have a technique of having a Woman account. Go find stupid guys who are getting into crypto, get in their DMs. They then send them to exchanges that aren't real. They tip them off on crypto. People buy the crypto in these pig slaughtering or pig butchering scams. I think pig butchering is the proper term.
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Unknown B
It's an old term. It refers to any scam where you build a trusting relationship with your victim over a long period of time. The idea that you're. You're fattening up the pig often in. And I mean, we've seen this throughout the history of, you know, long cons or whatever. You use a fake romantic relationship. So you would use a woman to hit on a man over time, get him more and more trusting, willing to put more and more money in. You're fattening up the pig for slaughter, essentially.
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Unknown A
So you, you know, buy a couple of mean coins. You make a little bit of money. You make $1,000, you make $10,000, you make $25,000. And then, or maybe it's 1, 2, 3. Then they get you to put 50,000 into the fourth coin, right? And then they shut the website you've been going to this whole time. And trading on is a fugazi. A fugazi. It's not real. It doesn't exist. Insert Matthew McConaughey here. And so I think that's what these are.
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Unknown B
You've seen House of Games, that, that David Mamet movie. It's great. It's. Joe Mantegna plays a con artist who teaches this author and psychiatrist, like how to the nature of the business. But he explains in an early scene, it's called a confidence game. Not because you put your confidence in the con man, it's because they put their confidence in you. And when people are reciprocal. So when a stranger trusts you and puts their confidence in you, it prompts you to want to do the same. You trust them, you reciprocate to them. That's how people get scammed. The scammer appears to put themselves out on your behalf. And so you feel like, oh, well, they, they're. They're helping me out. I got to help them in turn.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
So beware.
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Unknown A
That's how I feel about it.
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Unknown B
So anyway, that leads us to today's story.
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Unknown A
Tell me what's. I mean, I don't even want to believe this is real.
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Unknown B
It seems like it's really. It was. I mean, it could be an elaborate hoax, but it would be pretty.
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Unknown A
Let's put that disclaimer here. And then I guess we're supposed to do a trigger warning about self harm. So if you're somebody who.
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Unknown B
We won't get into graphic detail.
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Unknown A
We're not going to get into graphic detail, but it's a graphic story. If you've been impacted by self harm or people who've committed suicide, tune out of the program now.
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Unknown B
So the disclaimer, we're about to discuss a self harm related story. So a 23 year old crypto trader named Mr. Fu, he. He uses the real word, but I'm going to say Mr. Fu apparently shot himself while streaming live on X after he lost a final $500 in a meme coin rug pull. His dying request before pulling the trigger was for his fellow traders to start a meme coin in his honor, which some of them did. It's called Mysticoin. It is available for trade right now. There was at least some debate in the forum after he died about whether or not this would be ethical to profit off of his suicide. Somebody eventually did it anyway. There's speculation that this was a stunt gone wrong. There seems to be on the blockchain, A developer sent Mr. Fu a supply of this meme coin that was named for him before his death.
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Unknown B
So they seem to be already planning for the aftermath of the shooting before it happened. There have also been speculation that it might have been a Russian roulette type situation because apparently the gun clicked once or twice before the fatal shot was fired. So we're still lots of questions remain and like I said, maybe these guys are just very, very clever. There's money involved. Maybe this is all a big hoax and we were falling for it, but I don't think so. It seemed to be a fairly legitimate story from what I could tell. The community reacted with shock horror. People are very upset. We pulled a few tweets here of people who are devastated by what happened, but other people are calling out the community for hypocrisy and being upset. Danny Worldwide tweeted, we've seen a million coins that involve deaths and suicides from justice, but when some random dude offs himself on stream and asks people to make a coin, that's where we draw the line.
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Unknown A
Got it.
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Unknown B
Play the white knight. But another anonymous commentator responded. The meme coin industry is pure evil.
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Unknown A
You know, this is, I think if this is real bigot, if this is.
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Unknown B
Real big, I put that out there.
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Unknown A
Yeah. If this is real, I think what you should take away from it is people losing money who don't have it can put people into a serious sense of Despair and it can cause extreme hardship. So much extreme hardship that they might kill themselves and do something irrational. And this doesn't mean that gambling shouldn't exist in the world. But I can tell you, being a, you know, a somewhat high stakes poker player, I have played with people who should not be in games. How do I know they should not be in the game? Because, well, like, I don't know, they're an actor or something, but not like a notable actor who makes 20 million a film, like a TV actor or reality actor. And I've watched people I know do not have the means to play in certain games. Play in certain games and then lose and then be put on a payment program.
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Unknown A
Then, you know, all kinds of hardship. You know, their spouses leave them. Gambling is really dark for 5% of people or less.
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Unknown B
The last time I went to Vegas, you know, you got to wait in line to get your loyalty card so when you play, they can keep track of how much you're betting. Maybe you'll get a free meal or something.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
So right by where you wait for that is the room where you can sign up for a line of credit at the casino. And so when I got there, I'm like, who is I? Who's doing that? Nobody's doing this. They just have that office there. But just while I was in line 10 minutes at the Venetian, three or four people must have gone into that office.
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Unknown A
All right, I can explain line of.
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Unknown B
Credit at the casino.
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Unknown A
I have a line. But what it is, is it's not as pernicious as you think. When I go play in like the World Series of Poker or like some high stakes game or what I need to send 25k, 50k there. I understand the buyers 10k. I'm not actually getting a line of credit. I'm doing wire. So that same room is where you wire money in.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
And they will give you a line of credit at a, you know, whatever, 10% fee or whatever, and you can pay it back. But yes, it is a dark thing that exists. And I think don't. Regulation. No, don't. Don't gamble on credit.
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Unknown B
Oh, my God.
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Unknown A
Well, I mean, this is what margin is. So on Robinhood, when you trade, one of the criticisms is people can trade on margin. So but you have to have a certain amount of money there, I believe. And so they have become very. We talked to Vlad about it on Wednesday. They become very dialed into this, that some people trade stocks, you know, more for entertainment value, just like I play prize picks for entertainment value. I love prize picks. I do it every Knicks game. I bet a hundred to five hundred dollars. It's like nothing to me. It's when I buy tickets to the Knicks, I'm spending a couple thousand dollars on those tickets because I get decent tickets. Me putting 100, 500 bucks in the game is nothing. But it makes me more engaged in the game because I'm betting on individual players and props and parlays.
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Unknown A
And I love it. And it's just fun for me. It makes the game more interactive.
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Unknown B
On the Oscars. Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Oh, you bet on the Oscars?
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Unknown B
I mean, it's not. Not a thousand.
-
Unknown A
Where do you bet on the Oscars?
-
Unknown B
I've got a bunch of film writers and YouTube guys. We have an Oscar pool, so I'm in on that.
-
Unknown A
Oh, how do I get in on that? I got.
-
Unknown B
I want to do an Oscar. I'll email Rob after this. You can be in on our.
-
Unknown A
What is it? A Hyundai. A person. And you just pick your winner.
-
Unknown B
20 bucks. 20.
-
Unknown A
I don't want to be involved. I want to be in a thousand dollar Oscars. We're not.
-
Unknown B
We're film writers.
-
Unknown A
If you want to do $1,000 pool for the Oscars, let's set it up. We'll give 10.
-
Unknown B
That does sound fun.
-
Unknown A
That sounds like a little high stakes.
-
Unknown B
Not on credit.
-
Unknown A
Maybe you'll be my sharp. I'll be the money. You be the sharp. We could get in there.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, Start. Oh, you should start a like a rich guy Oscar pool. Because I'm. I'm pretty good.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I would like to start a rich guy Oscar pool.
-
Unknown B
I'm pretty good. So do you want to talk about award season? We could jump into that.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, we'll jump into that. I just want to. Just wrapping up the meme coin.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
This is what I think will happen in this administration, the last administration. Too cold on crypto. No regulation. Just follow the securities law. That obviously doesn't work because this is a new thing in the world. We've pointed out endless times that trading cards and stocks, this is, you know, somewhere in between. Right, right. Okay. And then some coins have utility. You use them, you burn them to get a service online that's different than a stock or a commodity. Some of them are centralized. Some of them are decentralized. Some of them, there's a controlling party that owns 80% of the coins. I believe, like, maybe XRP would fall into that category where it's centrally controlled. Bitcoin. Not centrally controlled.
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Unknown B
The problem is our government is composed of 85 year old people and they just, they think of crypto as this monolithic thing. There's a thing that was invented called crypto, and we need to figure out what to do about it. But actually crypto is just this umbrella term for a thousand different inventions and concepts.
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Unknown A
Correct? You've got NFTs, you've got DAOs, you've got meme coins.
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Unknown B
I feel like every day there's a new, here's a thing that's been built with blockchain that has elements of crypto, but it's not exactly like bitcoin.
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Unknown A
And in between the new regulation that friends of mine and the SEC chair and everybody are working on, that'll be just right. But right now we're in a too hot period, right? Too cold with Gary Gensler, too hot with no, no rules in between these administrations where people think they can run amok. And then eventually I think we'll be just right. And so my best advice is do not participate in this with money you can't afford to lose. You know, keep it to 5% of your net worth. Expect to lose it all. By the way, what I tell people when they're angel investing in startups, I say if you're angel investing in startups, only invest money that you can afford to lose. And here's a book I wrote about it. It's on the shelf back here. Read the book. It'll explain, you know, the power law, it'll explain diversification, it'll explain the time horizons called angel.
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Unknown A
Or you can just read the power law and understand that like, I don't know, 29 of 30 bets, 39 of 40 bets will return. No capital one will return. Hopefully in this portfolio theory called venture capital or angel investing will return the majority of your returns. But let's talk about Oscar season as we get to the end here. I asked you just a quick question because you see everything. I'm assuming you've seen all the major.
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Unknown B
Films I have seen. There is a best picture nominee I have not seen. I'm still here from Brazil. It's only in theaters. I haven't had a chance to get to a theater just yet. I really like to see it. Walter Solace, the guy who directed Central Station, which is a great, a great Oscar movie from the 90s. It's his new film.
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Unknown A
I just want to point out Timothy Chalamet. I didn't see the Dylan film yet, but I'm gonna watch was great.
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Unknown B
I really liked it. Yeah, he does a great, he does a great job and he's singing. It's all him singing and playing. And he's.
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Unknown A
And that's not a gimmick. Right? That's like. You consider that performance and, like, you know, added to the story.
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Unknown B
It's very impressive the way that he. He's not. It's not just like an impression. Like, he's not just doing a Dylan voice. He's, like, evoking, channeling him. Yeah, it's really interesting. And he does. He's. He's great.
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Unknown A
So if you're comparing it to Rachel, what was the Ray Charles film?
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Unknown B
It's just called Ray with Jamie Foxx. That's the Taylor Hatcher.
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Unknown A
So I was impressed by that. Is it similar in that way?
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Unknown B
I think it's very. It's similar in that way where it's not like. It's not like he's just. He's doing like an snl, Ray Charles. It's like he's really embodying the spirit of Ray Charles in this kind of interesting. Where it's a real performance. I mean.
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Unknown A
And Walk the Line would be the other one, right?
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Unknown B
James Mangold, actually the same director as this one, also directed Walk the Line. Oh, okay.
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Unknown A
So I enjoyed Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix doing Johnny Cash.
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Unknown B
And interestingly, Boyd Holbrooke plays Johnny Cash in a complete unknown. So Johnny Cash is a character in the Dylan film.
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Unknown A
Okay. You got the whole 1960s 70s cinematic universe. But he did a pretty controversial acceptance at whatever award show was yesterday. Sag.
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Unknown B
The SAG awards were. Were last night. Conclave won Best Ensemble. Conclave and Honora are sort of duking it out for Best Picture right now. That's most. Most people think it's going to be one of those two. Demi Moore won the Best Actress award for the substance, and Chalamet won for his portrayal of Dylan in his speech. He very openly says he wants to be one of the great actors. He says, you know, I know these are subjective awards, but. But it's very important to me because I'm in pursuit of greatness and I want to be one of the greats.
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Unknown A
I would normally be turned off by that, but here is the video. Let's watch the video and then we'll give our comments. Yeah. I can't downplay the significance of this award because it means the most to me. And I know we're in a subjective business, but the truth is I'm really in pursuit of greatness, pursuing.
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Unknown B
I know people don't usually talk like.
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Unknown A
That, but I want to be one of the greats. I'M inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight. I'm as inspired by Daniel Day Lewis.
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Unknown B
Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps.
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Unknown A
And I want to be up there. So I'm deeply grateful to that.
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Unknown B
This.
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Unknown A
This doesn't signify that, but it's a little more fuel. It's a little more ammo to keep going. Thank you so much. I think he's, like, still stuck in his Dylan impersonation.
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Unknown B
A little bit like he's still doing a voice a little bit like Elvis.
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Unknown A
I just want to say I'm very, very in pursuit of excellence. And I know that this is a subjective thing.
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Unknown B
Yeah, a little bit like, that was my Elvis, how he couldn't kick the. The Elvis voice for a little while.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Yeah. So that's fine with him. Sometimes I get stuck in an impersonation. I get stuck in my Jordan Peterson now all the time when I'm at dinner, I do Jordan Peterson with people to canis, too.
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Unknown B
Was a hard one to draw.
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Unknown A
I had a hard time getting out of that one. But my Jordan Peterson, it's just, you know, these young men. Who's looking out for them?
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Unknown B
I just do Kermit. You know, it's. You know, when you got high hole, when you're looking out for incels.
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Unknown A
Someday we'll find it. Yeah. The rainbow connection between Kermit and I don't know what.
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Unknown B
Yeah, it's a little bit like if. Kermit. Kermit.
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Unknown A
Let's get back on track.
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Unknown B
29 years old. Timmy's the youngest lead actor winner ever at the SAG Award.
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Unknown A
Who's going to win Best Picture?
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Unknown B
You know, I have my Oscar ballot here. I went with Anora, but I think it could also be Conclave. I'm very.
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Unknown A
Anora is about.
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Unknown B
It's a Sean Baker film. The guy did the Florida project, Tangerine Red Rocket. This is his newest one. It is a very indie director is what we're saying. And it's Mikey Madison, who you saw in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She's in the new Scream movie, Screaming, I believe she plays a sort of a stripper escort. She meets this, the son of a very wealthy Russian oligarch who's in America spending money doing drugs, partying. And this guy basically hires her to be his, you know, girlfriend for the week. They go to Vegas. They're having so much fun. They get married while they're together. Oh, the Mikey Madison, the. The stripper. She believes this is her golden ticket. She's arrived. Her future is set. But this guy's parents are like, you're not getting married. We're getting this annulled. So it becomes this kind of uncut gems thriller.
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Unknown A
Well, I love uncut gems, man.
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Unknown B
The oligarchs enforcers are trying to force them to get divorced. Mikey Madison is like, f you, we're gonna go live our lives and be happy. And it becomes very chaotic. But it's also funny. And it's sort of now.
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Unknown A
I saw my friend Megyn Kelly, MK Ultra, as I call her, just on her pod. She was like, this is it. This is a pouring to do Christianity, blah, blah, blah.
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Unknown B
Oh, Conclave. Conclave is where we may see the real life version happening any day now. It is basically a movie opens, the Pope dies. The Ray Fine plays the dean of cardinals who has to call all the cardinals together.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
It's about if you follow the process of voting for the new pope, but they make it into a sort of a noir detective thing where all of the candidates to be the next Pope. There's. There's a scandal, there's a problem, there's a mystery, there's something they're hiding. And so Ralph Fiennes has to use this conclave to, like, dig into the truth and figure out what's going on with all these cardinals before they vote on the new Pope.
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Unknown A
All right, everybody, we will see you on Wednesday this week@startups.com docket. YouTube.com go search for this week in startups. Put your bells and whistles on so that we can get at you. He's X.com Lons L O N S. Four characters only. I'm right behind him with five X.com Jason thank you to our partners and sponsors. Thanks producer Maddie and our producers Chris and Courtney. We will see you all next time. Bye.