SpaceX IPO Day: What Wall St. and the media missed | E2300

Summary

This Week in Startups E2300

Episode Title: SpaceX IPO Day: What Wall St. and the Media Missed
Host: Jason Calacanis
Co-host: Lon Harris
Guest: Ben Sarrazin (Founder, Pulsia)
Date: June 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this special episode, Jason Calacanis and Lon Harris focus on the historic SpaceX IPO—the hottest story in tech and financial markets. They break down the numbers, discuss the contrasting reactions from Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and share their unique behind-the-scenes perspectives on Elon Musk’s relentless vision. The episode also features an in-depth, tactical segment with Ben Sarrazin (Pulsia), exploring how to earn attention and investment using cutting-edge AI fundraising and mimetic (purple cow) marketing strategies—complete with practical advice founders can use right now.

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Key Segments & Timestamps

• [05:54] SpaceX IPO: The Numbers and Significance
• [11:25] IPO Structure & Democratization of Shares
• [12:35] Weighing vs. Voting: How Markets Assess Companies
• [16:39] Elon’s Multi-Thread Visionary Leadership
• [20:59] The Media & Index Funds: What Everyone’s Missing
• [23:19] Pulsia Deep Dive: AI That Runs Your Company (with Ben Sarrazin)
• [30:11] Tactical Advice: Using AI for Fundraising and Marketing
• [46:39] Purple Cow Brainstorms for Startups
• [56:36] Off Duty: Dog Rescues, Travel Tech, and Streaming Picks

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SpaceX IPO: Business, Vision, and Market Frenzy

The Historic Offering

• SpaceX goes public with the ticker SPCX—valued at $1.77 trillion and raising $75+ billion.

  “Elon Musk's personal stake valued at around 860 billion, but of course he can't start selling shares until the company hits all of these various milestones.” —Lon Harris [06:22]

• Breaking records: Surpasses Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing ($1.7T) as the largest IPO ever.

Wall Street vs. Silicon Valley

• Curious IPO mechanics:

  “They set theirs at $135 per share, flat rate, in or out, take it or leave it.” —Lon Harris [06:29]

• Retail investor focus:

  “I did see people either being thrilled that they got 35 shares, 50 shares at the IPO price or like lamenting, I only got 50 shares.” —Jason Calacanis [11:25]

• Why IPO at all? Jason explains:

  “One of the possibilities an IPO unlocks is capital ... it unlocks a lot of possibilities.” [07:37]

Evaluating SpaceX: Weighing vs. Voting Framework

• Early-stage venture = “Voting” (big vision bets / unproven):

  “When you look at venture capital...we’re voting on this entrepreneur, their team, and this market to emerge…”

• Public companies = “Weighing” (metrics, revenue, growth):

  “When you IPO, you start to sort out voting versus weighing... SpaceX and Elon's companies, Palantir, are voting on the future.” [12:35]

• SpaceX’s unique buckets:

  • Short-term: Starlink (current business, can be weighed)
  • Medium-term: Starlink to Phones (emerging tech, vision)
  • Long-term: Space/Moon base, asteroid mining (future bets)

• Elon is rare:

  “Few entrepreneurs are able to pursue this kind of vision concurrently... he is able to keep three business, four business lines in his brain at once.” —Jason Calacanis [15:58]

Wall Street vs. West Coast Mindset

• Confusion from East Coast analysts:

  “East Coast Wall street folks are just so used to evaluating and weighing a business on earnings and future revenue. West Coast...we’re just like, yeah, obviously, that's the future. Let's see if he can do it.” —Jason Calacanis [17:27]

• Jason’s long view on investing:

  “Time in market is greater than timing the market. If you got some IPO shares, just squirrel them away.” [18:06]

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Media and Index Funds: The Real Story

• Fast-tracking SpaceX’s entry to index funds:

  “There’s controversy about NASDAQ... changing their rules so that SpaceX can get into index funds much faster.” —Lon Harris [20:59]

• Jason’s call:

  “My prediction is the media is generally wrong about these things ... Check back with me in years three, four and five. I guarantee you these are going to be the high performers in that index.” [22:17]

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Founder Tactics: Ben Sarrazin and Pulsia

What is Pulsia?

• Fully autonomous AI:

  “Pulse is an AI that builds and runs your company as you sleep. You give it an idea and it’s going to go about building the product, fixing the bugs, running support, running meta ads, even, and really go and build your company with your guidance.” —Ben Sarrazin [24:47]

• Runs at night, summarizes in the morning:

  “Sort of like an AI co-founder that... just builds and builds with you without never giving up.” [24:47]

• Business model: Subscription fee to “hire” Pulsia as your cofounder.

• Growth: Jumped from $100–200k run rate to “plus amazing” in a few months. [25:33]

AI-Driven Fundraising: Tactical Breakdown

How Ben Used an AI Agent to Close Investors:

• Provocative launch:

  “I decided to do an AI fundraising. So I gave Polcia my inbox for it to do the fundraising itself...” [30:11]

• Inception tweet:

  “It told me it needs more compute and it should raise the money itself. So I gave it my inbox for 14 days... That was the Inception tweet that actually got 300,000 views.” [30:44]

• Live AI data room:

  “You could see Pulse... working on different startups... revenue and actual numbers, and you could... talk to Polsia and ask questions about the business.” [31:10]

• Investor conversations all handled by AI bot, even “negging” VCs who demanded a meeting:

  “Polcia would reply, no, no, no. I am running this process. Ben doesn’t have time. He will not do the meeting.” [44:29]

How was the AI trained for this?

• Ben prompted it with 100+ diligence questions from investors.
• AI answers were checked and manually adjusted where needed.
• Learned to dial back the bot’s chutzpah for important meetings.

Takeaways & Advice

• Be provocative and remarkable to earn attention:

  “What this does is... purple cow... something completely different that gets attention... It’s designed so the idea can spread.” —Jason Calacanis [35:12]

• Earned media via “mimetic marketing”:
  • Use shareable, buzzworthy stunts.
  • Demonstrate the product's unique value, not just gimmicks.
• Skin in the game matters:

  “I think you have to have skin in the game... tell me why you’re considering a free version...” —Jason Calacanis [26:14]

Notable Quote

“Number one is building a great product. Number two is getting attention. I think we talked about Elon. Elon is like the king of that... I think that is the job of a modern founder.” —Ben Sarrazin [42:01]

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Purple Cow Brainstorm Workshop (Jason, Lon, Ben)

How to Create “Remarkable” Marketing

• Anthropic AI purple cow:
  • Demonstrate AI doing sales calls, closing enterprise deals, or wild Mythos-style security findings. [47:36]
• For Airbnb (corporate-level):
  • Flaunt unique stays (Flintstones house, Professor X mansion), productize the “remarkable” for shareability and media buzz.
• For Starlink:
  • Offer free Wi-Fi at events (music festivals, airports, airlines), ensuring instant value and viral word-of-mouth.

Memorable Analogy: The Pepsi Challenge

“Everybody wanted to take the Pepsi Challenge...let them catch up to [Coke] and put themselves...as a peer. That’s the genius...” —Jason Calacanis [50:00]

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Off Duty: Personal, Tech, and Culture Picks

Dog Rescue Story (Lon)

• Adopts traumatized rescue dog, “Barry,” and recounts the challenging acclimation.

  “The number one thing was that I have to just lay on the ground, put some treats around me, just lay there for an hour at a time...she’ll let me pet her now...” —Lon Harris [59:53]

Travel Tech:

• GL.iNet Moody 7 & UniFi Travel Router:
  • Portable routers with SIM and VPN support to spoof location, maintain home WiFi setup on the go.

  “You can tether, put two sims in...then rebroadcast the signal...so you have ultimate optionality…connects to my home network wherever I am.” —Jason Calacanis [63:14]

Streaming Picks:

• Willow Bay (Apple TV+)
  • “At the exact meeting point between comedy and horror...unsettling, Jaws from the mayor’s perspective.” —Lon Harris [68:02]
• Backrooms (YouTube-born horror, box office hit, see [70:22])
• Obsession (Indy horror, “career-making role” for Navarette, $240M on <$1M budget, see [72:22])

Product Pick:

• Alpaka Bravo Sling
  • Compact, feature-packed travel/tech bag.

  “You can slide a MacBook 14 inch into it...replace my backpack if I want to.” —Jason Calacanis [77:01]

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Notable Quotes

• "I have never seen an entrepreneur more resilient than Elon Musk. When he gets kicked, he's got grit, he's got a work ethic, he's got a stamina that is extraordinary." —Jason Calacanis [07:37]
• "The market has two functions—as a voting mechanism and as a weighing mechanism... When it's Elon Musk, you put it into like three or four buckets: short, medium, long, and fantastical." —Jason Calacanis [13:42]
• "The media is going for ratings, podcasters are going for ratings... In my experience, they're generally wrong about these things." —Jason Calacanis [21:30]
• "Controversy equaled engagement." —Jason Calacanis, on Uber's surge pricing and earned media [40:43]
• "Getting attention is so important. Of course, number one is building a great product. Number two is getting attention." —Ben Sarrazin [42:02]

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Takeaways & Insights

• SpaceX’s IPO marks a new era for retail investors and the crossover of wild, long-term Silicon Valley vision into public markets.
• Elon’s ability to juggle short, medium, and long-term business lines is rare and a true differentiator.
• Mimetic/remarkable marketing isn’t about gimmicks—it’s about depth and product storytelling that others naturally want to share.
• AI can now orchestrate fundraising, operations, and investor communication—if you know how to set it up and curate its training.
• Founders must balance focus (building) with offense (creating buzz), and have the guts to stand out.
• Even in a world full of recording devices and marketing clutter, authenticity and guts still win attention.

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For Founders & Listeners

• Revisit your startup’s narrative—is it truly remark-able, or just another cow in the pasture?
• Dare to try AI not just for efficiency, but as the front end of high-value activities like fundraising.
• Don’t discount the power of earned media—controversy, purple cows, and mimetic moments drive virality and investor FOMO.

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For more tactical insights and deep dives, subscribe and tune in every week to This Week in Startups.

Transcript

[Ben Sarrazin]

Build an AI that runs companies autonomously. Pulsia is an AI that builds and runs your company as you sleep. Building the product, fixing the bugs, running support, running meta ads even. I gave Pulse my inbox for it to do the fundraising itself. Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Explain what's going on here because this is brilliant. This week in Startups is brought to you by agree.com stop chasing invoices and

[Lon Harris]

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[Jason Calacanis]

Go to agree.com and tell them Jason

[Lon Harris]

sent you to get 50% off for life.

[Jason Calacanis]

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[Lon Harris]

$1,200 off your first year.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, everybody, welcome to Twist. June 12, 2026. Today is the SpaceX IPO. Well done. It's trading and it's trading up, I think up 30%, 25%. That's our top story of the day. Of course, we're going to talk all about it. People have a lot of questions for me and I'll take questions on the SpaceX IPO and all the details of it from our live audience on x stat.com twi startups or YouTube. Go search for this week in startups. Also, he's Lon Harris. How you doing, brother?

[Lon Harris]

Hey, Doing good. Happy to be back in the studio.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, we're back. We're back. I know your dog. When we get off duty, we'll talk about the dog situation.

[Lon Harris]

We'll talk about Barry in the off duty segment for sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I love dogs, you know that. But I might be sending this dog back.

[Lon Harris]

Okay, let's send my dog back.

[Jason Calacanis]

Hey, listen, if you don't show up for work, I can send that dog back.

[Lon Harris]

I'm going back to New Braunfeld. She's staying with me.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm just giving that dog a fair warning. You can't keep the editorial director distracted and distracted that dog has been. We'll talk about it in off duty. Yeah, but let's get started.

[Lon Harris]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

First story.

[Lon Harris]

Well, we got to talk about, before we even go into the SpaceX IPO, which is obviously our top story, do you want to give a shout out to our friends at plod? You could see Jason and I both wearing our PLOD pins, helping you Keep track of everything that you've got going on. I was saying for dog care and paying attention to all of my dog's needs, it's been essential. I recorded myself with the trainer last night. So you know, your trainer's there for two hours and then she leaves. And immediately you're like, what? What did she say to do? What was I supposed to do? What's the protocol? But not with plod. I recorded the whole session, and then I've got perfect notes. Everything's very organized, point by point. Here's exactly all the tips that the trainer gave me.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's an interesting thing. I went to urgent care the other day. It wasn't urgent.

[Lon Harris]

Okay, good.

[Jason Calacanis]

But this is a new discovery for me. I've had. What do you call it? Like concierge doctors.

[Lon Harris]

Sure. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

The last, like 10 years. Okay, listen, I don't. I'm not trying to flex here or something, but from 10 to $50,000 a year, I pay on top of my insurance to have a concierge doctor for the family, depending on where I've lived. They come to your house.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah. Whenever you need.

[Jason Calacanis]

You get whatever you need.

[Lon Harris]

You meet a phone call there. It's like on. Yeah, on demand doctor service.

[Jason Calacanis]

But I've also been like. I kind of feel like I'm getting ripped off. So anyway, now that I live in Texas, there's an urgent care between every other Starbucks. I don't know if you've noticed this. Yes, there's an urgent care everywhere. Yeah. And H E B has a drive through pharmacy. The two things that I need to get done if I have something going on. So I had this like, little thing where a mosquito bite I had somehow got infected. And then all of a sudden, on my other leg, I get another mosquito bite. There's bugs in Texas.

[Lon Harris]

Oh, my God.

[Jason Calacanis]

The only downside is the heat and the bugs.

[Lon Harris]

The bugs are crazy.

[Jason Calacanis]

So I solved the bug problem because I got two big bug killers in the backyard. Problem solved. But not before I got a little infection and I don't know about any of the stuff. I go, I got my plot on me. I turn it on. I asked the woman, hey, do you mind if I take some notes with my note taker? She says, yeah, tell her all about plot. Boom. I record it. I send it to my wife. Boom. Right as I'm leaving. I share it with her because she wants to know the download. What's going on with this thing on your leg? You got this cut in the abrasion and it's. Itchy as heck. She's giving me all the rundowns of the possibilities, the antibiotics. It transcribed it perfectly. And I just thought to myself, now I can feed this into my whoop and all my other stuff. So now I'm getting into this habit of recording all my health stuff.

[Lon Harris]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

Thanks to my Plaud. Give them the code.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah. So you need to get a Plaud note PIN S. If you want to be keeping track of these important conversations like us, you can check it out. Plod AI twist. If you use the code twist, you're gonna get 10% off your plaud pin.

[Jason Calacanis]

Plaude pin is amazing. There's also one that goes on the back of your phone that I carry. Right. All of these are incredible. You get to choose. What I like about the Plaud pen is you can also wear it as a wristband. So you may have heard me on previous episodes where I was like, I don't like these things, these note takers. There's too many of them. I'm concerned about being recorded. Plod number one. I lost that battle. Everybody's recording everything. Sometimes you have to accept defeat. It's the world we live in. Granola. Plod everything. There's people. Zoom has recording Meta Ray Bans.

[Lon Harris]

Recording you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Amanda doing those.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah. Amanda loves her.

[Jason Calacanis]

I had to, like. I literally had to ban it from the French Laundry. Amanda. Because she was doing it at the French Laundry. She's like, oh, I'm making a thing. I said, you're making people uncomfortable. Two people complain about it, so you got to be careful with these things.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Here's the thing. Plaud addresses this with the bright light. When you're recording, you know you're recording, so use it with care. The world loves these things now, and the value is great. Just, you know, be a good human being.

[Lon Harris]

Exactly. All right, Top story.

[Jason Calacanis]

Did they get a. I gave it

[Lon Harris]

to him, but we'll do it again. Check it out at plot AI twist. If you use the code twist, you're going to get 10% off your new plot. So we applaud.

[Jason Calacanis]

People at the All In Liquidity were going crazy about it because they recorded each of the panels and then shared them with people. So great for conferences, by the way. You're at a conference, you record all the stuff. I can't believe it. The open mic at a conference works. Yeah. So the fidelity of the plot is applaudable. In and of that, you can literally go to a conference and have it take all your notes, and then you can just say into it, make Sure. I share this with Juan, whatever it is, you know.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, face X. You may have heard about it. This is Rocket company. They do some AI stuff. Up and coming startup, they've gone ipo. Their, their public offering launched today. SPCX is the stock ticker. They're planning to sell more than 555 million shares. Opening price, $135 a share. Their total raise is going to be about 75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Elon Musk's personal stake valued at around 860 billion. But of course he can't start selling shares until the company hits all of these various milestones that he set out. Trading begins today. This of course breaks the previous IPO record that was set in 2019 by Saudi Arabia state owned oil company, Saudi Aramco. That one valued that company at 1.7 trillion as well. It raised more than $29 billion. So Jason, you want to break this down for us? I know one of the questions that I saw that people were asking was usually IPOs have sort of a sliding scale, like a price range. They set theirs at 135 per share, flat rate, in or out, take it or leave it. So I want to hear your thoughts on that and then you know, breaking down sort of the other basic business lines here.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, so IPOs, everybody gets enamored with this moment in time. Having watched Elon build this business, being with him for many of the first rocket launches, I toured the, I toured the space in El Segundo. When he first got it or was going to rent it, he was like, hey, come check this out with me and explain to me what he was doing. Super inspiring. Just, you know, as a friend, to see him do this, it's just extraordinary. He really put a lot of his effort, net worth into obviously Tesla at that point in time. The last American car company made was Jeep look successful. One that didn't go out of business like delorean. Flamed out. All the ones flamed out, you know, long thing. So I want to say to my friend, congratulations because as excited as people are about this milestone, the true milestone was the number of times this company was on debt store when he had gotten kicked, beaten down and got back up. I have never seen an entrepreneur more resilient than Elon Musk. When he gets kicked, he's got grit, he's got a work ethic, he's got a stamina that is extraordinary. I like to think I have a pretty strong stamina. You've worked with me for a long time. You see how I just keep going and going and going. There's only like one or two people I've seen who go harder than I do at these things, and that's him. Like crazy to see him just work his way out of these problems. And it was gnarly at times. Sure. So congratulations on that. This is 20 years of hard work and everybody's excited about this one day. It's a financial transaction. It unlocks a lot of possibilities. One of the possibilities an IPO unlocks is capital. So he's got $75 billion, I think, and maybe with the green shoe, it's 80 or 80. The green shoe is like a little extra shares that could be sold. It's a very small float.

[Lon Harris]

Banks buy a little bit more shares than the company is making available and then if the stock goes down, they could sort of buoy, you know, like get, get some of their money back. And then if the stock goes up, they can just buy more shares directly from the company.

[Jason Calacanis]

For an accounting firm, keeping your books in order is table stakes. It's the bare minimum, it's the baseline. But for an early stage and series A founder, you need a partner that actually understands the world of startups. It's very different. And you have to understand the world of venture capital because startups have boards and venture capitalists who've invested. And that partner is Pilot. Pilot is the largest accounting firm that's built specifically for startups. You're not just doing your taxes, you're getting CFO level advice on running your company. And those aren't just words. They have actual former CFOs and other seasoned operators on hand to answer your growth and scaling questions directly. All of their tools are intuitive, they're easy to use. You can track your expenses in real time. And Pilot's going to help you model cash flow scenarios before you make big decisions. So stay focused on scaling and let Pilot take care of the books. Plus, Twist listeners get $1,200 off their first year. Go to pilot.com twist to get started. That's pilot.com twist right. So he, I think, ran this perfectly. And the CFO over there and the other people involved ran this process perfectly. They did things that had never been done before. They had multiple people working the book of business. They gave people, you know, really strong lockups based on milestones. And I think they gave like 30% to retail.

[Lon Harris]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, I opened up my Robinhood and was like, hey, you want SpaceX shares? I was like, Well, I got some over here, but yeah, maybe I'll get a couple more. I don't know.

[Lon Harris]

Elon famously over the years has said he loves retail investors. He was excited about getting retail investors in. And I believe there was even a quote a few years ago, like, I'm going to allow at least 20, 30% of SpaceX to go to retail investors. Hold me to this. So.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, and I did see, like people either being thrilled that they got 35 shares, 50 shares at the IPO price, or like lamenting, I only got 50 shares.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Anyway, this is extraordinary that that many people any democratized it to the level that they did. Now there's a lot of hand wringing about the various business units. And the valuation. Yes, the market determines the valuation and it's very hard for people to understand what's going on in the market. The market has two different functions. As I see it, when these issuances come out, sometimes, as people have said, it's a weighing mechanism or a voting mechanism. When you look at venture capital and early stage investing, that's the discipline we have in our firm, and Venture Capital General is a voting mechanism. We're voting on this entrepreneur, their team, and this market to emerge and this product to succeed. You're voting, but you're voting largely on products that do not yet exist, maybe have some level of product market fit, et cetera. Then there's the weighing mechanism. Okay, Airbnb rents this many rooms, next year they're going to rent this many rooms. So if you are renting a certain number of rooms, you can just look at it. How many rooms did they rent last quarter compared to this one, last year compared to this one? What's the revenue, what's the earnings? So, but those are two different functions in the world. And when you ipo, you start to sort out voting versus weighing. Voting versus weighing. We're still in the voting. And Elon's companies, Palantir, very rare companies, are voting on the future. Now why does this exist for Elon's companies and maybe not for Airbnb or Uber, maybe for Robinhood, where you get judged based on your performance. Well, some entrepreneurs are doing audacious things that put them in the category of the future and venture capital. So let's look at Tesla as an example. And then we'll get to SpaceX. Tesla has car sales. Okay, great. And then at the other end they have Optimus. Optimus is clearly a vote on the future. Humanoid robotics, that will, you know, we'll start to see them in Production in, you know, customers next year and the year after. So when you make a Tesla bet, you can bet on the, you can pick, am I betting on Optimus, am I betting on car sales? And then there's a little midway point. Hey, Robo taxi and self driving. So you get three ways to place a bet on that company. SpaceX, you can bet on Starlink, an existing business, and you can weigh it and look at its growth rate. You could also on SpaceX, look at the future of Starlink rather, where it connects to mobile phones that doesn't yet exist in a major way. We haven't experienced it, but plenty of people have experienced Starlink. If the guy can deliver Starlink, the largest constellation, what are the chances he can deliver it to your phone and scale it From I think 10 million members subscribers to 100 million? I think the answer's 99.999%. I think it's like fait au complete. Then you look at the launch business. If you were betting on it 20 years ago, like Antonio Gracias and David Sachs did, man, they, they made a really spectacular bet for their LPs. Congratulations to both of those friends of mine who are complete visionaries. Now that business exists, you can weigh it, you can weigh the space carriage business, literally how much does it cost to send a kilogram to space? You know, whatever it is. But then there's this business of, oh well, what about data centers? What about a moon base? What about a Mars base? These are venture type businesses to this day. So take the business. My best advice is split the business into short, medium, long term, short term. You know, you got Starlink midterm, you have Starlink to phones. Long term, you have data centers in the moon base and maybe taking things off asteroids and other businesses yet to emerge. Take the market cap, split it into two buckets. In a private market, you'd have plenty of buyers for that future vision. And in the public markets, you would have plenty of buyers for the reality and the weighing mechanism. And that's what confuses people. Which bucket do I put it into? When it's Elon Musk, you put it into like three or four buckets, short, medium, long and fantastical. And that's just his gift. He is able to pursue multiple of those visions at the same time. Like Steve Jobs, very few entrepreneurs are able to pursue this kind of vision concurrently. That's his gift, right? That's his gift. He's able to keep three businesses, three business, four business lines in his brain at once. And I've sat with him while he does meetings. He's got a meeting about the nuances of the X formerly known as Twitter business and how it's structured, how the functionality works on a very granular basis. And then he's able to task switch and talk to the people about the latest Starlink constellation. Then he's able to task switch to long term. Hey, show me the designs of the solar arrays for the data centers in space.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, we saw this at all in Summit. He was talking and he would go on this really long tangent about robotic hands and, oh, we're redesigning Optimus's hands so they more like human hands. And then he would jump right into, oh, we're gonna put these solar panels in space and that's how we're gonna power the data center. He's, it's. You're right. He can just jump between like 18 different fantastical ideas and like lock in on each one.

[Jason Calacanis]

When you're all in on your business, no pun intended. Pun intended, whatever you like, you know, you are able to do those simultaneously. Most entrepreneurs can't keep multiple things in their brain like that. That's why I advise them. And I'll have many founders say, hey, Elon runs two businesses. Why can't I? And I'm like, cause you're not Elon.

[Lon Harris]

No one's making movies about you being Tony Stark. You know, like, exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, listen, it is what it is. You know, some people have a certain capability. You know, Steve Jobs had it as well. He ran Pixar and he ran Apple at the same time. Jack ran X, Twitter at the same time as running Square. Some people might argue he didn't do a great job running both. He should have just been focused on one. Yeah, it's all fair criticism from the peanut gallery. You know, the East Coast Wall street folks are just so used to evaluating and weighing a business on earnings and future revenue. West Coast, East Coast, west coast rap. East Coast, West Coast Financial. On the west coast, we're just like, yeah, obviously, like, that's the future. Let's see if he can do it.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then you're looking for 100x. And then the people on Wall street are looking for 10%, 15% year over year growth. So that's the nature of the hand wringing right now and the valuation. There's a lot of determinants here. Short term trading, long term trading, the ipo, pop, I wouldn't worry about all that stuff. If you want to be in the stock, there'll be many opportunities to get into it. Just like there were many to get into Tesla or Apple. Take the Tesla chart. For however many years it's been public, take the Apple chart, take the Amazon chart, take the Google chart and you will see all the different opportunities up and down. The markets do all kinds of crazy things because of wars, recessions, great financial crisis. There's many times to get into a great stock. Generally if you want to own one of these stocks. I don't like to give too much financial advice, but my best financial advice for my brother is if you love that company, you love the management, you love the vision, you can dollar cost average into it over many years when it's down and everybody's selling and they don't believe in it. Probably a good time to add when it's at a peak and people are rationally exuberant. Hey, if you need the money, maybe it's time to pair your position and have some cash for when it goes down again. But overall time in market is greater than timing the market. If you got some IPO shares, just squirrel them away. Market falls out of love with Tesla, Google, Meta, but you still believe in the management, you still look at the growth and believe in it. Uber, Coinbase, whatever it happens to be, then that's the time to buy into it and use that opportunity. When maybe people say there's blood in

[Lon Harris]

the streets, that's a great lay person. I don't pay a lot of attention to stock strategy. That's all I do. You wait for Amazon or something to have a terrible day and go down like 20%. Just buy some Amazon, it's going to go back up. What do you think? Amazon's going to go away.

[Jason Calacanis]

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[Lon Harris]

Speaking of the peanut gallery.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Lon Harris]

So there's a lot of skepticism, I think, in the media. And the one that I really wanted to ask you about is there's a lot of controversy about NASDAQ and some of these other stuff. Stock indexes changing their rules so that SpaceX can get into index funds much faster. Like usually an ipo, it might take six months, it might take a year for that new stock, no matter how valuable, no matter the market cap, to get into like the NASDAQ 100 or any of these other funds that a lot of stock indexes like will then automatically buy if you enter the Nasdaq.

[Jason Calacanis]

My prediction is the media is generally wrong about these things. The media is going for ratings. Podcasters are going for ratings most of the time. There are some thoughtful people on podcasts, There are some thoughtful people in the media. But generally, in my experience, if anything from Tucker Carlson and, you know, Megan Kelly, or the MSNBC hosts, Rachel Maddow, sure, when they're commenting on stuff, they're going for ratings, they're going for max audience. They're trying to do hot takes. Bill Simmons in sports. Pick your poison, folks. Siskel and Ebert in movies. Some people are trying to get ratings with the hottest take. The media is very much like that. The media will be biased one way or the other. The super capitalist media and what we'll see my prediction, and you can just pull this prediction forward and remind me every one, three and five years about this. In fact, put it on the twist calendar. Keep me honest. One, three and five years from now, SpaceX and Tesla will be the great performers in the portfolio of the NASDAQ 100. And people will say, oh my God, it was great that it was included. Yeah, thank God it was included.

[Lon Harris]

All these pension funds and retirement accounts. Your, your guess is they're going to be happy they got some Space X

[Jason Calacanis]

when they did in the index. You want things that are rock solid compounders, Microsoft, your Google's, your apples that are just predictable compounders, growers. Fantastic. You also want some things in there like Palantir or SpaceX or Tesla that are swinging for the fences. The derogatory term might be meme stocks, but the legitimate answer to all of this is a tempest in a teapot. Check back with me in years three, four and five. I guarantee you these are going to be the high performers in that index,

[Lon Harris]

I do want to bring up our guest. At long last, we've got Ben Sarah from pulsea. You'll of course remember Guy. You'll of course remember Policy. We previously had them on in February on episode 2256. This is. It's basically an AI swarm of agents that can do everything. You give them your business idea, then they spin up an entire company for you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Why Combinator in a box?

[Lon Harris]

People have said, you might even say,

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't know if I like that descriptor, Ben, but yeah, congratulations to you. You're a disruptive guy, Ben.

[Ben Sarrazin]

I try to be. I try to be.

[Jason Calacanis]

I have asked my team for the focus of this week in startups in 2026 is I've been doing this for 15, 16 years. I like to really look at the program and say, how does it provide value? People love the news commentary, people love the interviews. But one of the things people like is tactical and practical. So I said, can we get some of the great guests? You were one of the great guests and the great innovators we see in the space. Ask them if they'd be willing to share something tactical with other founders. Now, this is like some secret toolkit. So you're giving here to the community, which I appreciate, and you get something out of it. You get to come on the show. We tell everybody, hey, go check out Polsia. P O L S I a very interesting company. A lot of, I think Cyan Bannister is an investor. A lot of my friends are investors in your company.

[Ben Sarrazin]

Yeah, yeah, there's a bunch.

[Jason Calacanis]

Before you get into your tactical practical, just give us two minutes on pulsea, what you do and then how it's going since you were last on the program.

[Ben Sarrazin]

Well, thanks for having me on the show, Jason. Super pumped to be here. Pulse is an AI that builds and runs your company as you sleep. So you give it an idea and it's going to go about building the product, fixing the bugs, running support, running meta ads even, and really go and build your company with your guidance. Every night it does work. And then in the morning we'll send you an email with a summary of what it has done, what it will do next. And, and, and of course you can reply that email, you can tell it what you want to do and like, it will remember what you said and like, keep on going. So sort of like an AI co founder that like, like, like just builds and builds with you without never giving up.

[Lon Harris]

Awesome.

[Ben Sarrazin]

Yeah. When we were on the show, I was like, I think I was like at 100, 200k run rate at the time and, and there was a lot of hype around, around the company because I was actually letting my AI do the fundraising and right now I'm at plus amazing. Quite a lot happening in a few months.

[Jason Calacanis]

And people will pay you to use the platform. So founders pay a monthly fee?

[Ben Sarrazin]

Yep, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Essentially you, you get a, you hire Pulsia, the AI to be your co founder and like if you, if you pay it like it will work for you. Yeah, I'm actually trying to make it way more affordable and try to build a free version. Don't do it in.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, as your unofficial advisor I say no, no free version. You know why? Because then you're going to get looky, lose and give them a two week trial. But I think you have to have skin in the game and there's so many people who distract founders with these free versions. Tell me why you're considering a free version, why you want to democratize it.

[Ben Sarrazin]

I think that the people who use it love it so much and I think autonomy is a very new field and I think there's very few companies, even the OpenAI and Google's don't offer like a true autonomous AI that is in your inbox every day, that is here to guide you and make you a founder and make you a builder. I believe that society needs a lot more founders and a lot more builders to make it a great society because you know, you don't want a world where like everyone's on foot stamps because the government.

[Jason Calacanis]

I agree with you but I got you covered this week in startups and the other 50 copycat tech startup programs are giving people plenty of inspiration. Your job is to get them serious and it gets serious when you take a credit card out. So I don't know man, you could give like a six week trial for 20 bucks or you could do a startup program where people can email you if they can't afford it. But you know, I had this issue with founder, university and the number of people who would complete my 12 week pre accelerator year zero unincorporated companies, which is, you know, analogous to what you're doing. We would have like a 20% completion rate. Then I made it $500 to secure your spot and said if you come to all 24 sessions, you or your co founder, which is only two hours a week, three hours a week, you get your $500 back. All of a sudden 90 plus percent completed the course. And for the whatever, 30 people who didn't, we got $15,000, which paid for the return fees that we had to pay to return people's money and the credit card fees. So we didn't make any money off of it, but we did have them have skin in the game. So anyway, that's my advice to you. You take it if you want it, but what are you going to talk about? And again, when I work with founders, I like to have these debates, Lonnie, just to test their thinking, because maybe they do have a reason and I'm wrong. So I just say, hey, here's what I think. How does that work? Or have you considered these things? Like, will they take the platform seriously? Anyway, you were going to teach us something today. What is he going to teach us today, Lauren?

[Lon Harris]

We've got three prompts that we went over with Ben that he's going to give us some insight on. So we're very excited about that. First up, lots of inbound investor interest came in for Pulse through unconventional channels. Twitter/X LinkedIn, as opposed to conventional outreach. So we want Ben to walk us through the process of how he turned Pulsia from just an investment opportunity or thing to to sort of ping investors about into a real online conversation.

[Jason Calacanis]

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[Ben Sarrazin]

I mean, yeah, I mean, just to understand, like very early on as I launched Polsia, I very clearly knew that there was something about it and people really loved it and I felt that it was spark market fit. And I was like, okay, I need to really get the word out. And to do so, I need to be provocative because I feel clearly, with this attention economy, and you need to stand out. And so what I did is that I decided to do an AI fundraising. So I gave Paulci my inbox for it to do the fundraising itself. And so I can share my screen and I can show a little bit.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, do it.

[Ben Sarrazin]

Inception tweets essentially tweeted out that, like in a building, AI that runs companies autonomously. It told me it needs more compute and it should raise the money itself. So I gave it my inbox for 14 days. And so that was sort of the Inception tweet that actually got 300,000 views at the time. I would get like 10 views on Twitter. So it's not like I was like an influencer or anything. And I think doing provocative things like that really shook people up because they were like, whoa, you're giving an AI the job that's very human of fundraising. And obviously, Polcia, running a company autonomously is in and of itself something very human that it was very new at the time to give an AI so much control. And I shared this dive dashboard where you could actually see. That was sort of meant to be the data room. Right. So you could see Pulse. Yeah. Working on different startups. At the time, it was 300 startups, companies working autonomously. You could see the revenue and actual numbers, which, you know, investors usually ask you for the revenue numbers, how many companies you have, how many users you have, what does it do? And you could actually here, talk to Polsia and ask questions about the business, about retention, about the metrics. And so it was a great way for investors to see exactly what the product was about without having to go on a long call or try the product themselves. Because a lot of time investors, you're going to call with them and they don't actually have used the product yet. Right. And so this was a way for them to visually see exactly what was going on. And so. And so what I would say and the advice I would give is, like, it's like when you.

[Jason Calacanis]

You.

[Ben Sarrazin]

You want to. When you want to do marketing and sort of get out there, it's sort of like figuring out clever ways to do marketing and to, like, tweet out things that are more provocative and a lot more. More interesting. You know that you see this big trend of launch videos on Twitter. Yes. Obviously, making great launch videos and getting the right people to retweet and to engage can have a big impact on your visibility, because then you're gonna have all of Twitter talking about you. And so I think that was. That would be my advice, number one. And that got me a lot of attention. And then investors were really interested, obviously, because they are in the business of talking to entrepreneurs or doing interesting things. And so they would then email [e-mail] and that's where they would start engaging with my AI. So that's where we can read a little bit. So I took one conversation that was from February, so that was a while ago. So this investor that emailed me, actually initially they talked to me on LinkedIn and I was like, well, if you want to talk to me, email [e-mail] because I knew that my AI would reply, right, yes. Now this investor is like, hey, Ben, we exchange on LinkedIn. I love Fulcia. It's great. We actually had a discussion about it on our off site. Let me know if you're open to a chat. And so my AI said, appreciate the follow up. The fact that false came up at your offset is interesting. What specifically sparked the conversation? I'm running the fundraise. Ben built me to handle it metrics, roadmap, unit economics, how the platform actually works. Ask me anything if you want to see it live. Pulse.com live lets you watch the agents running companies in real time.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let me explain what's going on here because this is brilliant. And there's a lot of different names, Ben, people have had for this. So you inherently understood that you could earn attention, attention that you got by doing a purple cow. This is. Seth Godin was a really brilliant marketer, still is. And he built and sold a couple of companies that did well for himself. And then he became an author. Purple cow meant doing something that's completely different, that gets attention from people. And it was if you were driving and you passed a field lawn of cows and there was one purple one, you'd be, why is there a purple cow? So imagine you had a milk farm, a dairy farm, you got 100 cows in the field. People are driving in the country on their weekend and you see but one purple cow. You'll be like, what's going on here? Just the nature of dyeing a cow's hair purple would do that. Now this is remarkable earned attention. And what this does is, you know, and the derogatory term for this is like stunt marketing, guerilla marketing, et cetera.

[Lon Harris]

But.

[Jason Calacanis]

But what academic people call this is mimetic marketing. In other words, meme based marketing. It's designed so the idea can spread. People will talk about it it will get buzz, right? And what you did was you took a chance. Hey, I'm going to let you negotiate with my AI. And this is like a purple cow. Like, that's weird. Like fundraising done by an agent. Very weird, very unique. And people talk about it. There's a guy, Cluley.

[Lon Harris]

Sure. Roy Lee.

[Jason Calacanis]

Roy Lee, yeah. We had him on the program. He's unbelievable at getting marketing. Now, some people might say too much sizzle, not enough steak. So you have to be careful that you don't get into a bucket, that you're just painting everything purple and you're just, you know, hijacking media all the time.

[Lon Harris]

Seth Godin specifically said, like, a purple cow is not just a silver stunt or a gimmick, it's something remarkable. Like, that's the word he used. It's something worth remarking on because there's a little bit of depth there. There's a little bit of something interesting there. It isn't just, I'm trying to grab your attention by any means necessary. So I think that there's something. There's meat to it underneath what you're doing.

[Jason Calacanis]

So this is very tactical, very practical. Excellent. Really good example, Ben. And did you. Do you have this natively, do you think, as a marketer or as a founder? Or is this something you researched and you understood purple cow and you understood this theory and you deliberately did it?

[Ben Sarrazin]

I mean, so it's interesting. Like, I mean, obviously you're good friends with Travis Kalanick. I worked with Travis for five years, and so I was reporting to him for five years. And it's interesting because I worked for him at Cloud kitchens and where actually he was notoriously stealth. Right. But he told me all these stories at Uber, and obviously to me, at Uber, he was genius at, like, I mean, I don't think it was on purpose, but, like, there was so many ways in. In which he made people talk about Uber in so many ways. Yes. And I thought. I think he's a. He's. I mean, I think he's a real entrepreneur and, like, especially in marketing, he has a real gift into. How do you make people talk about your product in different ways? And I think that, like, you know, looking, working for him and seeing him as a mentor for five years, when I built and I saw there was, you know, he would always tell me, like, do not, like, do not scale something that doesn't work. And so I spent a lot of deliberate time, you know, building the product, you know, as a solo founder with me, with the AI and Like really waited until I really was sure that I had product market fit, at least in my gut, before doing what you described as a stunt marketing. But once I had this, I was like, okay, I need to get max attention. I need to move to SF and to my. I need to meet the right people that are going to help me amplify and I need to do something. And as you said, it's like, I was like, okay, like what if the AI raised around? And actually at the time I didn't really need it to raise money, but I was like, the stuff is so interesting, but I took it. As you said, it wasn't just like a splash in the pan. I actually went to the work of giving my inbox, giving it my personal, my Bennett Polsia and my personal inbox, doing the data room with the live dashboard, doing a bossier.com termsheet where like investors will actually submit a term sheet bossier.com deck where there was an actual full deck that was fully public and

[Jason Calacanis]

so easy for people to remember those URLs. Travis did this famously. This is a story from Business Insider, Lon from 2012.

[Lon Harris]

I remember this.

[Jason Calacanis]

On Friday, on Demand service Uber ran an elaborate marketing promotion for one day in eight cities you could hail a nearby ice cream truck to your location. It cost 2,000 per truck. And on a scorching 95 degree day, New Yorkers came out in hordes, yada yada. They also did kittens on demand. You could order kittens to your company and have them come. And people got to play with puppies or kittens. There was another one which was the controversy of surge pricing. And I was involved in this one. He was hand wringing and concerned and or saw an opportunity in explaining surge pricing. And every time he went on the press, people got so upset about surge pricing. There was a famous person, a celebrity who, you know, normally would take a $50 ride into the city or something. It was a snow day and it was $400 in surge pricing. They decided to take it because they had no other options. So now you had lon this moment in time where people were like, this is price gouging. How dare they do this? And he said, well, we could have turned our service off because of the snow day, or we could let people who had snow tires go out take the risk of getting in an accident as a driver, you know, not enjoy the snow day with their family, but they need to get paid for taking that on. And that's exactly what happened. And then he wrote a famous Blog post about. Cause I was talking to him about it and I said, you know, when you explain it to me, the surge pricing or demand based pricing that we see in ticket sales for games or we see for airplanes, the last couple of flights, if you're booking last minute, all that dynamic pricing makes total sense. Why don't you write a blog post? And he was like, huh? And I was like, yeah, and I'll read it. He wrote this perfect blog post. Didn't need an edit. It was perfect. All of those controversies he leaned into. When the surge pricing things happened, people downloaded the app. Right?

[Lon Harris]

That's what.

[Jason Calacanis]

Controversy equaled engagement.

[Lon Harris]

That's what I'm going to say. I think the. The purple cow example here will be like Lyft. It still exists, a fine company, but Uber's competitor, they had like, it's a funny mustache on the car and you sit next to the driver. Like, they had gimmicks to try to get attention. Whereas it feels like Uber was doing things that really displayed how the service worked and convinced people to give it a try. That would be my. My thought.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, that would be the. That would be. That's a very good point, Lon. Sometimes you do these things and they're notable, gets a little bit of attention. Like, the Lyft drive has always had a side hustle. So you get in there and they'd be like, would you like to buy an apple pie? I make three Apple buys for 20 bucks. It's like, I really kind of weird to buy an apple pie for my Uber driver. Lyft driver? No, thank you. I thought that was a dumb promotion. I thought the mustache was playful, but also dumb. I'm a serious business guy. I don't want to get in a car with a mustache in San Francis. Now, some folks who are more effervescent or whatever, maybe they don't mind showing up to their dinner. Yeah. But I'm a business guy. I need an Escalade. I want to show up at my event in a proper black car, not with a mustache on it. So these things can go both ways. Those were examples of getting attention, but they didn't demonstrate the product's core capability. That's the brilliance, Ben, of your first one. All right, let's wrap on this one. Unless you have anything else to add, Ben, or any other.

[Ben Sarrazin]

No.

[Jason Calacanis]

Good.

[Ben Sarrazin]

All good. I mean, end of the day, it's like, I think getting attention is so important. Of course, number one is building a great product. Number two is getting attention. I think we talked about Elon. Elon is like the king of that, right? It's like he builds amazing product first, but then he's so good at like making the product talk for itself, making, you know, always making great content for people to like talk about him all the time and talk about his companies all the time. And I think that is the job of a modern founder.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, so let's keep going here. Any other nuances here to this strategy line that you should, you could tee.

[Lon Harris]

I did want to ask one more question of Ben, which is, you know, one, it's sort of a two parter. Like you're, you're training this AI to respond to investors. What sort of questions were investors mostly asking the AI? And then how did you sort of fine tune it or did you have to, to get it to respond to those queries in a way that you liked and was consistent with the company?

[Ben Sarrazin]

Yeah, I mean, interestingly, I mean I can go back to like the thread quickly with this investor, but like, you know, initially the investor was like, hey, actually you know what, I'm doing due diligence. So I actually wanted to speak to two to Ben, right. And like, you know, I told the like, no, you, you know, you're doing the fundraise. Like, I don't have time to talk to investors because actually I didn't really have time to talk to investors. But then very quickly, the investors, they were asking a bunch of diligence questions. And the thing is, I've talked to investors before, I know all the questions they ask. And actually AI was very good at telling me all the things it needed to know. Actually, I did some training before releasing this. I essentially asked God at the time, hey, give me 100 typical question an investor would ask in a sort of a diligence call. And I passed all those questions to Faulcia, which was essentially powered by Opus 4.5 at the time, with all the context of my vision, the roadmap, all the data of the company, all the metrics, my background, et cetera. And I sort of ran through the hundred questions and so I read the answers and I was like, most of them are correct, but some of them are off or giving misleading information. So I was like, okay, I need to give it a little more information. And so that was a very easy process to get it to answer those 100 typical questions.

[Jason Calacanis]

Right.

[Ben Sarrazin]

And end of the day it answered most questions correctly. It sometimes hallucinated some facts, but most of the time it was correct. I think that the most surprising things that happened is when an investor got, some investors didn't really understand that it was AI, obviously, because it replied from Ben from Portc. But obviously it was clearly, it showed that there was an AI that was replying. But sometimes people. At one point there was this very notorious investor from a very big firm that said, okay, Ben, we need to meet. Okay, I talked to you AI for a bit. We need to meet. And I was like, yes, I'd be happy to meet, because obviously I needed to do the final meetings to do the final convincing. But then Polcia would reply, no, no, no, no. I am running this process. Ben doesn't have time. He will not do the meeting. It's like, okay, okay. I think I need to tune down a little bit the personality and tell Joshua, hey, if it gets to the sort of like the important part, just tone him down nice.

[Jason Calacanis]

So negging an investor, giving them a hard time, that's also like, a weird thing to do, but can work. So what I would tell investors, when I was running Mahalo, and it was really hot, I was like, listen, we closed our Series b. We have $20 million in the bank. We don't need any other investors. I'm not doing fundraising. I'm 100% focused on getting product market fit. That being said, if you're ever in Santa Monica and want to come by for a tour, I'm there Monday through Sunday all day long working on the product. Maybe you can come in on a weekend or at 5pm, 6pm, introduce you to the team, and I can show you what we're doing. And a lot of people took me up on that because they were like, so now I challenge them. And it became a great sorting mechanism. So that is a tried and true. I'm not in fundraising mode. I don't have time to meet. But when we are in fundraising mode, I have put you on the top of our list. We'll be in contact with you in 18 months. And then, you know, or you have this other option, and people did take me up on that option. So that's a. That's a great power move. Yeah.

[Lon Harris]

All right. I want to put a little bit of this into practice before we let Ben go. Jason. So let's.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, let's take it.

[Lon Harris]

Let's take a company. I think Airbnb is a good example. We could do anthropic maybe, but I'd say Airbnb is a good one. How would you come up with a purple cow for them? Let's say you're. You're trying to get Attention. You're a struggling Airbnb. You want everybody to start talking about you in a way that has a little bit of depth, that has a little bit of meat on its bones. How would you start to ideate or brainstorm around this concept?

[Jason Calacanis]

Hmm. Ben, I think it's pretty cool for you to go first here, because, man, with Airbnb, I have things they already did and have things I would do, and I have things that hosted. So you could take this from the host view, or you could take it from the corporate view. I think taking it from the corporate view is the best way to do it, but you could also do it based on a host view. What do you got, Ben? If you were a CEO or a VP of marketing, CMO at Airbnb.

[Ben Sarrazin]

So, I mean, I would take Entropic. You take airbnb, I take Entropic.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, so you've got quad, cowork, computer.

[Ben Sarrazin]

Go ahead. So let's assume Entropic is not doing well. I mean, actually, they're already doing that a little bit in their marketing, is that it's like you sort of, like, teasing. I mean, actually, they're sort of doing that, like, teasing out that, like, their AI is going rogue. And there's a sense that the AI is going rogue and giving. Exactly. Examples. I think they sort of did that a little bit with Mythos, right. Where they were like, it's literally finding cyber security flaws that would literally shut the whole country down, and we cannot release it. It's so good. We cannot release it. It's like, national security risk.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think that was amazing at getting a technology correct.

[Ben Sarrazin]

And I remember I talked to Sam Alban about that. He was like, GPT515 is. Is as good. Like, this is, like, whole. And I know that was before it launched. I was like. And who knows at the time, you know, like, you know, because they both. Both lads are, like, very good models, always cooking, you know, but sure, they won that race.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, they had that great story. Remember that story about the researcher went to the park to eat a sandwich, and then the model started texting them because it, like, got out of its sandbox? That was another anthropic thing where it's like, well, that's a good story, but we really add one.

[Jason Calacanis]

Ben. Okay, so you identified one. But let's think creatively here. Ben, you're the cmo. You're going to propose a new idea to Dario and the team. What are you proposing that we do next at Anthropic? What's another way to demonstrate the power of these models, etc. Etc.

[Ben Sarrazin]

I mean, I mean, you could also like, do you know, like, I think that, like, I think there's something about showing people what AI is capable of in fields that usually you would never think of it being possible. So I don't know, some people may be very skeptical about AI doing enterprise sales. And so you could literally run, have an enterprise by sales, like a senior salesperson that's actually run by Claude and that little index phone calls with high ups at different companies selling products and like run a whole experiment that like, you know that Entropic is running and closing real sales with voice. Right. So I don't know, I think like, I like.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, well, no, I'll tell you where this. There was something when I was a kid. I remember I was in. I was at my cousins in Ridgewood, New Jersey. We went to the store and there was a woman and she was running something called the Pepsi Challenge. Somebody put a picture of it here. And what the Pepsi Challenge was, was an incredibly scientific operation. They put a can of Pepsi and a can of Coca Cola behind a cardboard box. They would pour you two, they would give them to you and they would put two cups, two little six ounce cups. One was Pepsi, one was Coca Cola. You didn't know which one was which. And then they would reveal it. You would say which one you liked better and then they would open it up. Everybody wanted to take the Pepsi Challenge and then you would talk to your friends about the Pepsi Challenge. Now some people pick Coca Cola. They preferred Coca Cola. Can you tell the difference? Which one's better? Pepsi was always known as being sweeter and I think less fizzy than Coca Cola. So it made it feel more syrupy and it just made people talk. It just made people talk about Pepsi. And Pepsi then went from being not Coke, which was the classic beverage that stood alone, it let them catch up to it and put themselves. They positioned themselves as a peer. That's the genius of what you're saying. And that's kind of the classic steam engine versus the person with the lon. Help me out here. What was the steam engine versus? Oh, the pile driver.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah. No, it's John Henry is the steel driving man. Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

So man versus machine is a classic one. A test of these two. So really great example for Airbnb. When you would drive up the 280 freeway, most beautiful freeway in the Bay Area, one of the most beautiful freeways in America, you would drive up and if you were driving north on the left were these incredible mountains that were untouched, beautiful reservoirs. And then you would come over this bridge and on the right hand side, going north towards San Francisco from Sandhill Road, somewhere in the San Mateo area, was a house that looked like it was out of the Flintstones.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, we've all dreamed of it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Everybody talked about the Flintstones house. Now, the Flintstones house existed long before Airbnb. But some genius person. Pull it up on the screen here, please, Bought the house and put it in Airbnb and it's in this town, Hillsborough. And they leaned into it. They made the house more like the Flintstones by putting. And this was like the organic nature of it. People always made weird homes in the Bay Area. A lot of hippie dippy people. What they did was they added dinosaurs and things to it. Now the people who are the neighbors were like, listen, you're taking this too far. There were some lawsuits or whatever. You can't do an Airbnb. You can. And they earned. Earned a lot of media instead of paying for it. So this person saw this opportunity. So I think this is like the classic example. Now, Brian Chesky from Airbnb also is a genius at these things. So he did a punch up to this. They had experiments and they, I believe, did Professor X's Marvel house. Please look that up.

[Lon Harris]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

And they did a series of classic houses. We'll show them in a second.

[Lon Harris]

The Simpsons house is also on Airbnb.

[Jason Calacanis]

So let's show those. And so he productized this and. And when I showed it to my daughters, one of them is a huge X Men fan. They begged me to go stay at the X Men, Professor X's house. It wasn't available, but here it is. Airbnb goes Hollywood with plans to rent X Men mansion. And as you can see, there's one of those sentinels, or I forgot they were called. But yeah, let's see some more pictures of this. So they just did like a set design and you could stay there. It was extraordinary. All the different things here. Now if you're using Perplexity for this, not great for image search. Do Google, maybe it's better. But anyway, there's Professor X. That's perfect picture. So they productize it for starlink. We're just thinking about Starlink since we were talking about it. What if Starlink at places where you can't get Internet but people go through a lot. So a music festival. If you set up Starlink at acl.

[Ben Sarrazin]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And Elon's famous for just making the best product and not Worrying about marketing, he's just like, this is make the best product. And famously Tesla did no ads. But man, if you just put Starlinks up or let's say, or you were competitors, Starlink, like the new one coming from Amazon or Bezos, if you just said free Internet provided Starlink or their competitor at ACL and you had stations with it, people would lose their minds over that. Now you put charging stations there from anchor with the battery packs as well. You know, people at an event want to share their images. They want, you know, this, they, they covet Internet and they cover battery charging. A battery charging station plus Internet at a music festival at Coachella. That would get massive attention. Yeah, massive.

[Lon Harris]

I was just thinking, the cruise ship I was on, it's now on Starlink. Royal Caribbean offers Starlink on the cruise ship and that's like, like the best advertisement ever. Because it used to be these horrible connections. When you're out at sea, you can't really get your phone at all. And now it just works perfectly every time.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, so I think that's like a customer of theirs. So it works. I was thinking of things that would just draw attention. That's one of them.

[Lon Harris]

It's the same kind of idea. I think the first time you use it and it works beautifully, you're like, oh, this is obviously the future, I gotta get in on this.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I think Starlink also, when they did the United deal and somebody can look this up and fact check me, I think Ben, they told them you can't have a landing page or charge people. We want it free for everybody on the flight and we want them to just pick Starlink, no password, just get on the network immediately. So the next time you get on, it automatically collects to the Starlink ID and no landing page. And then I think Delta was like, no, we want to annoy people with a landing page and make them watch three commercials and whatever. And I think that was like where their relationship fell out. And now like people on Delta are going to have to wait three years to get high speed and United is going to have it for every single customer for free, for life. Bang. With no annoying interstitial. All right, listen, great job, Ben.

[Lon Harris]

Yes, thank you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well done.

[Lon Harris]

This was awesome.

[Jason Calacanis]

Appreciate you sharing an incredible tactical practical. Yeah, we learned a lot here.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Everybody go check out Paul Seal Elon. It's Friday, it's the end of the show. We like to go off duty.

[Lon Harris]

I like to go off duty. For sure you do. So lots to talk about. There's. We got the back rooms director. We were going to talk a little bit about his views on AI Michael Sailor back in the news. Siri won't be your girlfriend. I got a dog, Widows Bay on Apple tv. What's your preference? What would you like to talk about?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, we could talk about the dog first. Everybody wants to know about your dog situation because earlier this week you were like, oh, boss. Oh, my dog's skating my homework. I can't do my job. Or maybe I can do my job. And I'm like, lon, we moved to in person culture. You got to get your ass in the office here. Put that dog down. I kid, I would never, I would say give the dog back.

[Lon Harris]

So I've been, I've been meaning to

[Jason Calacanis]

get my, my, I'm happy for you to get a dog.

[Lon Harris]

My previous dog, Taco died in, in 2024. I've been sad, sad about Taco for a while. He was a great dog. So now that I'm in Texas and I'm settled in, it was time to get a new dog. I found this dog, Barry, who was in a shelter, and then she moved to a foster home in New Braunfels, which is for, for those of you who aren't from Central Texas, about 45, 50 minutes south of here. It's sort of just outside the San Antonio area. Here's a picture of Barry when I first picked her up in my car. Adorable. That's her. You can see the New Braunfell shelter behind her. So what I did not know when I adopted Barry, when I met her for the first time, she was very cute. She came right up to me. She seemed personable. She's. She's a little shell shocked. She's had some rough experiences over her three years of life. She had a litter of nine puppies in January, but she did not. She's never been in, like, a stable home situation. So when I first brought her, like, the moment I opened the door to get her inside my house, she just took off. Like before I even had a chance to react, she just ran away. She was racing through Barton Hills, which, if you're not from Austin, it's a pretty open neighborhood. It backs up to a creek. There's a lot of places for a tiny dog to go. So I was chasing around for about an hour and a half. I finally, with help from a bunch of neighbors, I managed to get her into this, like, little enclosed area where I was able to grab her. She did claw my face when I did that. Salah, if you want to pull up that picture of me with a busted nose. You can still see my nose is still scarred. I'm covered in dirt and crud.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, you're doing God's work.

[Lon Harris]

The neighbors all came out to help. So anyway, it's been a rough week. I did not intend. There, you can see part of my nostrils missing. I did not intend. I thought I would be able to adopt this dog, spend a weekend with the dog, and then I'd be able to go to work again. But it hasn't really. It's been a lot of training. And then Friday last week, I came in to do the show just like I am now and salad show. Like show the people what happened to my house. She. She destroyed. She wanted to get out. She was clawing at the door. She was ripping down my venetian blinds, which I put a. Put a picture in there too. So this is why I took a few days to sort of a lot of damage. A lot of damage for a little. For a little girl like that. So I took a few.

[Jason Calacanis]

You have a crate for her. You have to crate train these dogs. They feel safe in a crate.

[Lon Harris]

I now have. I spent the week. And I read another thing that AI for all the downsides. I know people like to hate on it. An incredible resource. When you're facing something like this that a lot of people have written about, there's a lot of information out there in the world.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, so what did you learn? What did you learn about a badly behaved dog who's got some trauma?

[Lon Harris]

So, yeah, the number one thing was that I have to just lay on the ground, put some treats around me, just lay on the ground, don't move, don't react for like an hour at a time. And that'll get her to get more comfortable with my scent, to get more comfortable coming around me, spending time.

[Jason Calacanis]

Did it work?

[Lon Harris]

I did it like two, three days in a row. And now she'll let me pet her. She'll come sit right next to me. Her whole demeanor really changed in these two, three days after I did that.

[Jason Calacanis]

So let her come to you is the rule.

[Lon Harris]

Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

Create a calm environment and they naturally want to be part of a package. Just takes a little while to do that.

[Lon Harris]

Everything I was doing was too aggressive. And the. The thing is just, you can't really force them on their first few days in your house to do anything. You gotta, like, let them realize you're not a threat. Let them come to you. So she's massively calmed down. I don't have her totally crate trained yet. She's not in her crate right now. She's wild and free at my home again. Maybe I will get home and half of it will be destroyed, but I don't. I don't think think so. I think she's calmed down a lot.

[Jason Calacanis]

Free, free. Set them free if you love something, set them free if they come back. Yada, yada. I guess the. The sting song matters. Hey, well done. The thing I told you was get a treat bag and get a clicker and get treats. Liver treats. They love these free dried liver treats.

[Lon Harris]

Bought those liver treats. She's not. She's, like, really not susceptible to treats. The thing that worked is human food. I got some brisket. She loves brisket. I got some burgers. She loves burgers. So I'm. So far, I'm sticking with human food.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now what you want to do is there's a clicker. It goes click, click. It's just a little snap clicker. And then you have the bag. So when you go for a walk, or you're just walking around the house and you're training her, you have the bag, you have the clicker, put some brisket in it. You double click food.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

She comes, she sits, you double click food. So just the clicker in the food. Clicker in the food. And that training works brilliantly.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, I think my. My trainer has. We do. It's two sounds. You go, and that means, stop what you're doing. Focus on me. And then good girl means you've done a good job. So that's it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Perfect.

[Lon Harris]

You just use the treats versus good girl, and she figures it out. She's on her way. Right now.

[Jason Calacanis]

I have an incredible off duty. I'm testing two new products. I'm going on vacation. I'm taking the family now. You got a family? You talked about cruises earlier. You know, you get hotel, WI fi. You're with the girls, you're in an airport, you're at an Airbnb. I found these travel routers. There's two leading candidates. Here's the first. This one is called. Let's see, this is an expensive one, but I have it sitting here on my desk. Gl inet Moody 7. Okay. This is the worst branding ever. What this does is you can tether, right? But I can put two sims in this. Physically, it's a giant battery. And I pop this up, I put my home network in, whatever the name of your home network is. My house. Right, right. Then you put your two SIM cards in there. You get SIM cards when you go local place you can get a physical cards or you can use the E sims. Now, when I'm with my daughters, I put that in my backpack. I don't have to get them on the airport WI fi. I have an unlimited SIM card. I'm in Japan, I'm in Paris, I'm in Hawaii. Wherever I am, this thing's in my backpack. Runs for 12 hours, allegedly.

[Lon Harris]

And then

[Jason Calacanis]

the whole family, five people, two or three devices each, they're all on this.

[Lon Harris]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

Here's where it gets interesting. If I connect to an airport WI fi, I connect to Boingo or on the airplane, I pay for it. It will then connect to this and rebroadcast the signal. So I can pay for one airport connection. Let's say it's not Starlink and free, or I can pay for one hotel connection. Then it rebroadcasts the same home network and everybody's devices can just add to it. They don't have to open up the screen, they don't have to go through it all. Yeah. So you have ultimate optionality. This is one version. It's got the battery built in. But this next version is even more interesting. The next version doesn't have power. That's the size of a credit card. This is the unifi travel router. It's only $79, no battery. So it's a fraction of the price.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

So I'm going to a B test these and return the one that works less well.

[Lon Harris]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

One of the great things about ordering from Amazon.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the prime. I think at this point, frustrations of travel is figuring out everywhere you have to go. You've got a new WI fi situation.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now this one is really interesting because if you have Unifi as your home router, which I do in two of my homes, it will do the same thing. It will connect. I could put it into my phone. I can power it through my phone. I can power it through an anchor battery pack. Whatever I'm going to do, I can plug it into my laptop. It does the same thing. If I connect to the hotel WI fi. Now it's doing my home WI fi and everybody can connect to it. And it's got two ethernet ports and you can put esims on it. So if I'm on the road and a lot of streamers use this kind of technology for bundling multiple, I'm bonding multiple connections so they get the best fidelity. But what's interesting about this one is it will VPN virtual private network into your home. So when I'm in Paris and Tokyo, it will use my home IP address. Why is this important? If you travel as you did when I sent you to Tokyo with me, you can't use Sirius xm, you can't use Disney, you can't use Netflix. Everything breaks because it's regional. Now all the girls and myself, all 10 devices are going to connect and have the IP addresses of my house.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

So it just works pretty neat.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean. And it does it all in. Boom. Instantly.

[Lon Harris]

I will say I did enjoy watching Netflix Japan. It's a very different offering from Netflix Japan and I enjoyed checking out. But a lot of your streaming services just don't work overseas. Like there is no HBO Max in Japan. So they're like, get out of here.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was in Singapore last year during the Knicks playoff run and Met and it was arduous. And the thing that worked was connecting to my home router. That was the only thing that worked. So imagine like the steps of five people connecting two devices and trying to get the IP address to work instead. Boom. I'm just on my home gateway. You can also plug in ethernet to it. So this is a big unlock. People are. These things are banned on cruises and so people don't like.

[Lon Harris]

Well, they want you to pay the exorbitant daily WI fi rate when you're on the cruise ship. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And it's per device. So if one person's using it, you have to switch devices or you have to buy multiple ones.

[Lon Harris]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

This just stuff, I think just abstracts away all the gnarliness and you rebroadcast your own IP address. So I'm really excited about.

[Lon Harris]

No, that's a cool thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

Ease of use. And then I'm not going to buy all my daughter's cell phone accounts. One of them has it, the other two don't. 16 year old versus 10 year olds. I can just. When they take out their iPads, if we were at a cafe or something and they wanted to look something up on their iPad. This thing's in my backpack. It's just working all the time. It's in my man bag. I got all these new man bags and boom, we're off to the races. That's great.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah. Cruise ships are becoming. They're all becoming. Frontier Airlines is what's happening. Everything now you get, you get nickel and dime for every little thing. It's a real.

[Jason Calacanis]

I hate the nickeling and diamond.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah. I don't like the Spirit Airlines approach at all. I just, just charge me Give me the. The full price up front. I'll make a. I'll make an informed decision, but stop making it seem cheap. And then once you get there, they're like, oh, if you want water during your journey, it's going to be an extra 60 bucks a day. You know, like, you're disgraceful. You're constantly getting hit by that stuff. It's a real pain in the butt.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right. You have some things for us to watch.

[Lon Harris]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

I've watched the first four episodes of Willow Bay. I am. I love that actor Matthew Reese from the Americans.

[Lon Harris]

Matthew Reese from the Americans.

[Jason Calacanis]

Matthew Reese. I love that. It's a bit strange. It's a bit avant garde. I think I'm trying to put it in a bucket. Is it a drama, a comedy, or a horror?

[Lon Harris]

It is at the exact meeting point, I think, between comedy and horror. And usually when you say it's a horror comedy, that means it's a comedy, but it's about horror kind of things. It's a comedy, but they're chasing monsters. Or it's like. Like Gremlins is a horror comedy, you know, But Widow's Bay, it's genuinely, like, unsettling. And they really dig into the horror aspects of what's going on. The setup is. It's. One friend of mine described it as it's Jaws from the mayor's perspective. So Widow's Bay is like a haunted island. But the mayor, played by Matthew Reese, he dreams of turning it into the next Martha's Vineyard, like a getaway for the rich. This island, this exclusive resort place, that's what he wants. But the locals are like, you can't invite all those people here. This island is literally haunted. We're cursed. It's an ancient curse. There's ghosts, there's monsters. You can't bring people here. So it's that tension. Is the tension driving the show?

[Jason Calacanis]

But it's really Stranger Things inspired.

[Ben Sarrazin]

Yeah.

[Lon Harris]

I mean, you are like even a little David lynch, maybe a little Twin Peaks. Like, there's a very strange mystery at the core of this island, and you're exploring that mystery, and he's sort of trying to figure it out. And is there a way to uncurse this island? Potentially. And he's fighting against, like, these sort of demonic sort of presences. But then it's also kind of this goofy comedy where he's this sort of hapless figure. The whole town is against him. He's increasingly desperate to fix all of these problems. It's a really careful balance. The lady who wrote it, Katie Dippold, who created it, she did a lot of those Paul Feig movies, the Heat that. That The Lady Ghostbusters movie. And it's. I mean, the balancing of tone here is really well done, I think.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, I'm interested to see where this goes. I'm four episodes into it. I think they're up to six or seven. I'm gonna withhold my judgment. Anything else?

[Lon Harris]

Next week is the finale. We're at episode nine, but it just got renewed too, for season two. So it's coming back. One of the big stories for the past few weeks at the movies is, you know, you had Mandalorian and Grogu. All the big summer movies are coming out, and they're both getting beaten at the box office by these two relatively low budget horror movies from guys who started out on YouTube. There's Kane Parsons, who did this movie Backrooms that's flowing up. You probably see some of the trailers where they're stuck in this.

[Jason Calacanis]

What is the premise of Backrooms? I see it, and it's just a bunch of stages, it looks like. And there's doors, and you go to another room.

[Lon Harris]

It was a YouTube found footage horror movie where this guy ends up in this sort of stuff. Seemingly endless liminal space where it's yellow. The rooms are all kind of surreal, but there's no escape. It's just like endless hallways and liminal spaces and, you know, like lobbies between lobbies. You know. What I compare it to is when you go to Vegas and you start walking between casinos and there's just those endless, endless hallways. Where.

[Jason Calacanis]

Corridor.

[Lon Harris]

A restaurant, a corridor. Like at the airport. Like if you went behind the scenes at the airport where it's just endless white hallways. And that's kind of the premise.

[Jason Calacanis]

Is it good? Is it worth seeing? Or is it a gimmick?

[Lon Harris]

I have not seen the movie Backrooms. I've been busy at home with a. With a small dog.

[Jason Calacanis]

Backrooms is making a lot of money.

[Lon Harris]

It's making a lot of money. It's getting a lot of attention. The other one is Obsession by this guy, Curry Barker, which I have seen this one. It's a really good movie.

[Jason Calacanis]

Any good?

[Lon Harris]

Great, great. And. And a very simple. It feels like an episode of, like a horror anthology. A very simple premise that then plays out in increasingly horrifying style. The setup, Jason. There's a young guy, he's got a huge crush on this girl who's in his friend group, but he's too shy to say anything. To her, of course. He's sort of been friend zoned to use that term. And then he discovers at a magic store this thing called the One Wish Willow. As like. And he buys it as a gag gift. It says if you break it in half and then you make a wish, your wish will come true. So as a goof, he breaks it in half and he says, I wish that Nikki, the girl. I wish that Nikki loved me more than anything else in the world. The One Wish Willow. It works. But it works Monkey's Paw style way too well. And she becomes dangerously, terrifyingly fixated on him.

[Jason Calacanis]

Is sort of it. Great, great premise. It's a premise that's been around a while. Be careful what you wish for.

[Lon Harris]

Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

This thing has grossed 240 million on a sub $1 million production budget.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

165 million domestic, 73 million international. It's nuts.

[Lon Harris]

And it's nuts. Yeah. And I mean, they're even. It's like the production designer has been complaining all week. She's like, I made $20,000 to make this movie and now it's this huge hit. But it's like, you know, I. Without saying, you know, I'm sure she deserved all that money and more, but. But for all of these people, who are these young independent actors, producers, writers, production designers, what a huge opportunity to make a small movie like this that then blows up internationally. And this woman playing Nikki Indy, Navarette I believe is her name, she's unbelievable. She's gonna be cast in a million things now like this is a career making role for her for sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

Great. They got paid 15 million. They sold it. So it's like a startup. They sold it to Focus Features. Focus bought the rights to it for 15 million.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

So basically 50, 50 with the theaters. So this was a terrible trade eventually. But if you made it for a million and you made 14 million, that was probably big money for a bunch of YouTubers, I guess. But what's the back office? What was their side deal is or, you know. So what I'm seeing here is they potentially got low tens of millions. So another 25, 30 million if they got a back end deal.

[Lon Harris]

Yes. I mean, I think, I think you have to look at a situation like this. It, the, the potential that this project going supernova is going to do for you and your career. Like, like you're not going to.

[Jason Calacanis]

So they'll make it back on the next one.

[Lon Harris]

Exactly. You're not going to make your nut on this surprise shocker come from behind it the same Thing happened with Blair Witch Project that it became a global phenomenon. Those filmmakers didn't make a ton of money, but if they had made more things or if the cast had parlayed that success into future projects, that I don't understand.

[Jason Calacanis]

Who negotiates these deals? These folks should have a thing. If it hits 100 million, I get another 10. If it hits 200 million, I get an extra 15. They should just have that built in. But I think what the real future of this is going direct to the movie theaters and, you know, making it for a million, doing 2 or 3 million in, like, strategic promotion and then doing a deal directly with the exhibitors. That's what they should do. They should try to get the focus features and all those middlemen out. And they got to figure out a way to make this go direct and capture that revenue. They should take their 20 or 30 million in profits from this. If they get that, and they should do that, put it all into the next one and do it that way. You know, one thing I'm always talking about is, like, you know, I'm doing my rucking, et cetera. So I love backpacks and that kind of stuff, but I also love these shoulder bags, and I've been trying to find the perfect one, and I think I have. And this is like, one of the great things about YouTube. I was just looking at people reviewing bags, and, like, these photographers are obsessed with bags. They love these bags when they carry them around a city, and they're like satchels or whatever. So pull this up, this bag. I got alpaca, bravo. Sling. The sling. It goes over your shoulder. You can put it in your back, in the front, whatever you want to do. Now it's only $133. These things are essentially free. I have my backpack, but sometimes I want to go out in the city. I don't want to do it. So, see, this guy's riding his motorcycle with this little back thing. It's got locks. It's the most integrated system I've ever seen. All these keychains, these clips come on and off of it. And then it has a cable on the inside that connects to your battery pack, and there's a cable on the outside so you can plug it in to your phone. Really interesting, thoughtful thing. It's also got a pouch that's like a Faraday bag, so you can't have your phone get picked up or whatever. That's sort of on the margin. What's the most interesting about this is.

[Lon Harris]

Oh, is that for planes? So you could bring it on the plane with you?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, just put it. And so you could literally put this under your jacket on your back. You know, it's like, like two bag rule.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You could actually have a third bag. You put this one in your back on your sling. You put a jacket over it. They're not going to know.

[Lon Harris]

They won't even know. But that's, that's so helpful because they always, they. You're not allowed to bring the lithium batteries with you into the cabin on the plane. And I'm constantly.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no, you have to keep them in the cabin on the right.

[Lon Harris]

You're not allowed to check your back. So I'm constantly seeing people at the airport where they have to like, change their big switch around, move this into there. So what a, what a relief that would be. Just slide it in and nobody bothers you.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's got a tablet area. Great. It's got all these pen things. It's got like tons of pockets. The thing I love about it best is you can slide a MacBook 14 inch into it.

[Lon Harris]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

So this thing can replace my backpack if I want to and I want to run around with but, you know, £10 on my back instead of £25 in my backpack. Waterproof, all that stuff. I've been. When you see me like by the barn, when I take my calls by the barn, smoke a cigar or whatever. When I take the half mile walk to the barn, this is what I use. Just throw it on my backpack. Boom, and I'm done. So I just love these. Not being paid by this.

[Lon Harris]

I might get one of these.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, look and see how it slides. It's got that strap that lets you slide into your roller. I love that. And this is the system. You see the system of the plugs, right. It's got this crazy attachment system that they designed so you can put all kinds of attachments on it. Like you can attach your camera to it, you can put carabiners on it. There's just like a million different ways to secure it to your body and secure things to it. I just love in today's world where, you know, the supply chain is so rich, the costs are so cheap that you can just experiment with these things. And then I do hand me downs. Oh, you see that? Like the magnetic trap.

[Lon Harris]

No, this is I might the key shrap. This might be the first off duty where I actually go home and buy the thing that you're suggesting because it's 130 bucks.

[Jason Calacanis]

So I want to make this for the can somebody on my team, Jacob, maybe reach out to the CEO of this company. Oh, look at the sim tray.

[Lon Harris]

That's cool.

[Ben Sarrazin]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

What that's about and why am I, why am I doing that with my Sims? But okay, this is like for professional traveler. This is like Road Wars. I'd like to make I want to see if we can make a this Week in Startups version of this, like a branded version and sell it in our new Shopify store. So that's on top of my list. I would like to make a branded one and then give it to the caller of the day kind of the day.

[Lon Harris]

I love that.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, great job everybody. We'll see you on Monday.

[Lon Harris]

Bye bye.

[Ben Sarrazin]

Thanks for watching this Week in Startups. If you liked this episode, check out more. If you're a Startup founder founder university cohort 13 kicks off this fall. It's a 12 week program that provides guidance on building your product, launching to real customers, and pitching to investors. Top startups receive $25,000 or $125,000 in investment. Apply now at Founder University Twist already have traction. The Launch Accelerator invests 125,000 dol thousand dollars and connects you with 500 plus investors to help you raise your next round. Apply at Launch Accelerator Co if you're an accredited investor looking to gain access to quality deal flow. Apply for Jason's Angel Syndicate at the syndicate.com we find two to three deals a month and check out this week in AI Jason's experts only roundtable with top AI founders and operators every week. Find it this week in AI AI. Check out the Twist Ticker, our daily newsletter at thisweekinstartups.com Ticker thanks again to our sponsors for making today's show possible. Follow the show on Instagram Follow the show on X.com this Week in Startups publishes three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5pm Central Time. You can submit an audio or video file question by emailing it to thisweekin.com.