The Biggest Private Funding Round in History | E2256

Summary

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Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups

Episode: "The Biggest Private Funding Round in History" | E2256

Date: February 28, 2026
Host: Jason Calacanis
Panelists/Guests: Chamath Palihapitiya, Lon Harris, Nick O’Neill, Everest Chris, Ben Broca, Adi Gabrani

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Overview

This episode is centered on the historic $110 billion funding round for OpenAI, the largest private capital raise ever, and its ripple effects in tech and startup ecosystems. The panel dissects the details of the raise, explores the growing impact of AI on jobs and company structures (including massive layoffs at Block), and spotlights new AI agent startups through live demos. The group maintains a lively, unfiltered discussion blending high-level analysis, tactical advice, and irreverent humor.

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Key Discussion & Insight Sections

1. Quadrants for Hiring and the Producer Search

[01:00–05:36]

• Jason walks through his busy podcasting schedule, highlighting the need for a new producer in Austin.
• The team discusses Jason’s four-quadrant matrix for hiring: passion/qualification axis.
  • Quadrants:
    • Top-right: Highly passionate & highly qualified (best)
    • Bottom-left: Neither passionate nor qualified (worst)
    • Top-left: Qualified but not passionate
    • Bottom-right: Passionate but inexperienced
• Lon Harris: “I want someone who lives and breathes startups, AI tech... you can teach skills, but not passion.” (03:54)
• Chamath: Tactical Tip (TT) about evaluating people for teams: "Super qualified vs. essential"—draw quadrants to simplify team decisions as done during the Twitter/Elon/Sachs saga.

2. OpenAI’s Record-Breaking $110 Billion Raise

[05:39–14:51]

• Big news: OpenAI raises $110B at a $730B valuation.
  • Heavyweights: Amazon ($50B – $15B upfront, $35B on AGI/IPO milestones), Softbank and Nvidia ($30B each).
  • OpenAI will use Amazon’s Trainium alongside traditional Nvidia chips; Microsoft deal remains untouched.
• The panel compares this investment to historic “J curves” from Uber and Tesla—deep losses before steep profit inflections.
  • Chamath: “I've said this before, we've achieved AGI in 50%+ of skills… We just haven't deployed it fully." (07:00)
• Open debate: How close are we to AGI? Is the funding a bet on near-term AGI or just dominance in applied AI?
• Comparison to Uber and Tesla’s massive up-front losses before profitability. If language models see a similar arc, it could eventually throw off $10B+ in profits after a collective $500B investment.

3. Crypto Crash & Miami: Satirical “On-the-Ground” Report

[15:35–20:59]

• Nick O’Neill joins live from Miami to describe the “apocalypse” among crypto workers fearing job loss and rent issues as capital floods into AI.
  • Vivid, comic color on layoffs, “parade” of Block employees leaving offices, stories of people shipping to Cuba for jobs/healthcare.
  • Chamath (joking): “Is it true Block employees are taking the return trip to Cuba to get health care and for better job opportunities?” (18:38)
  • Lon: “Club 11 is a FEMA camp now, Jason.” (18:23)
• Overall mood: Satirical panic, blending real anxieties about AI-driven workplace disruption with Miami light-heartedness.

4. Block’s 40% Layoff: Is AI the Real Reason?

[22:34–30:49]

• Block (Square/CashApp/Afterpay), led by Jack Dorsey, cuts 40% (approx. 4,000), ascribed to AI efficiency.
  • Dorsey’s open letter: “A significantly smaller team using the tools we’re building can do more and do it better.”
  • Jason: “With these new tools, founders can skip hiring… and do sales, legal, accounting themselves, much longer.” (24:11)
• Online debate: Is this AI-driven, or just unwinding COVID-era overhiring?
  • Dorsey admits both factors, says it’s “the classiest, most transparent way I’ve ever seen” for layoffs. (29:52–30:49)
• The panel praises the severance and transparency, while critiquing the “all lowercase” style of messaging.

5. Debate: AI Likeness Rights & 'AI Scott Adams' Controversy

[32:05–37:44]

• The group discusses the ethics/legalities of AI recreations of deceased public figures.
  • Case: "AI Scott Adams" (created posthumously) and family opposition.
  • Jason: “He would have loved AI Scott Adams. He did say he wanted people to create [it]. Morally, talk to the family—legally, they lose.” (35:08)
  • Sharp line: “It’s inevitable piracy happens, but you can’t go sell Taylor Swift CDs on Canal Street.”
  • Insight: Derivative, inspired characters are fair game, but posthumous digital clones cross lines.

6. Startup Demos: AI Agents for SMBs, Automated Company Ops, Agent Hosting

[38:12–55:45]

6.1 Unloopa: AI-Generated Local Business Websites – Everest Chris

• [38:12–45:33]
  • Chris (23, India) demoed a platform for users to generate websites for local businesses and sell directly.
  • Real revenue: $8.5k MRR from viral tweets and Reddit.
  • Jason offers: “If you’re this smart, I’ll pay you $25,000. Or I’ll invest $25K if you go US-based.” (44:00)
  • Chris (on what $25K/yr means in India): “I’d be living like a king here.” (43:11)

6.2 Pulsea: Autonomous Company-Building AI – Ben Broca

• [45:33–54:58]
  • Ben demoed Polsea, which autonomously runs core startup ops for subscribers ($49/mo): engineering, outreach, ads.
  • 1,000 companies, 3,000 tasks in 24h; charges revenue-share for growing ventures.
  • Chamath: “You're basically making unlimited number of startups. Is this Y Combinator in a box?” (48:24)
  • Jason explores marketplace models and tips Ben on scaling via open platforms and varied take rates.

6.3 Makemyclaw: Deploy Custom AI Agents Quickly – Adi Gabrani

• [55:53–64:54]
  • Adi (Vancouver): Simple platform for experiencing/deploying “OpenClaw” bots—15-min free trial, developer-friendly.
  • Vision: Disposable, purpose-limited AI agents with easy self-host migration.
  • Adi: “If you’re using MakeMyClaw beyond a certain day, you’re doing it wrong. I want you to experience it, move on, self-host.” (59:28)

7. OpenAI IPO Polymarket Betting

[55:45–58:53]

• Review of PolyMarket bets on OpenAI’s future IPO market cap.
  • Most bets for IPO after 2027; Jason/Chamath think $1T+ valuation is a lock.
  • Chamath: “It can’t be under 1 trillion on the close.” (57:51)
  • Jason: Simulation of betting outcomes versus putting the same cash in Nvidia or Uber stock.

8. Gadgets & Nerd Corner: Favorite Devices

[73:30–80:15]

• Panel shares their favorite tech gadgets:
  • Jason: Mug warmer, Anker battery packs/adapters, and the Plaud Pin (voice-note-to-text wearable).
  • Plaud Pin use-cases: Meeting summaries, idea capture, “transcript templates,” AI voice identification.
  • Jason: “When I was skiing and almost died, I just let it record me all day... now I review my Plaud and I see all the different ideas. I don’t lose all my great ideas.” (78:57)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Lon Harris (on passion vs. experience):
  “I want someone who lives and breathes startups, AI tech... you can teach skills, but not passion.” [03:54]

• Chamath (on AGI):
  “I've said this before, we've achieved AGI in 50%+ of skills... just not fully deployed.” [07:00]

• Jason (on the Miami crypto panic):
  “We got to get out of here. This OpenAI funding situation has blown our minds...” [16:32, quoting Nick O'Neill's street report]

• Chamath (on OpenAI’s raise):
  “J curve is when you just amount invested... then you have your profit... tick, tick, tick up.” [09:03]

• Jack Dorsey (as summarized by Lon):
  “A significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better. Intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week…” [23:06]

• Chamath (on layoffs):
  “He did it in the classiest, most transparent way I've ever seen. Full stop.” [29:52]

• Jason (on AI likeness legalities):
  “You can't use people's, especially famous people's likenesses for profit or even for nonprofit use in this kind of way. So legally, they lose…” [35:40]

• Jason (to Everest Chris, Unloopa):
  “If you're this freaking smart, I'll pay you $25,000, you come work for me... or I'll invest $25,000 if you want to make it into a US-based company.” [44:00]

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Demo Company Timestamps

• Unloopa demo (Everest Chris): [38:12–45:33]
• Pulsea demo (Ben Broca): [45:33–54:58]
• Makemyclaw demo (Adi Gabrani): [55:53–64:54]

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Tone & Dynamics

• Conversational, candid, playful: The panel frequently jokes, debates, and riffs on news with occasional satirical segments (see the Miami “disaster”).
• Deeply technical yet accessible: Even complex topics like the J-curve, AGI deployment, and agent ecosystems get broken down with metaphors (Uber, Tesla), tactical tips, and real-world startup analogies.
• Supportive of founders: Jason in particular is eager to invest, advise, or network with the demo founders.
• Wry, sometimes irreverent: Willing to poke fun at tech industry habits, social trends, or themselves.

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For Listeners Who Missed It

• The episode is a snapshot of tech in 2026: AI raises have upended employment, funding, and product development; company founders now use AI agents to run ops instead of building out big teams.
• Expect a blend of macro-level analysis, practical advice, direct feedback for founders, and plenty of banter about gadgets, hiring, and legal/ethical boundaries in tech.
• The three demo companies (Unloopa, Pulsea, Makemyclaw) illustrate the new startup playground: solo creators with global scale through agent automation.
• Stay tuned for Jason’s upcoming “OpenClaw” launch festival and possible partnerships with standout founders from this episode.

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For more details on specific moments and advice, check out the notated timestamps above.

Transcript

[Nick O'Neill]

We gotta get out of here. This OpenAI funding situation has blown our minds. We're gonna be unemployed and I can't even pay for my damn rent anymore.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is unedited. This is unfiltered. This is what's happening right now.

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[Jason Calacanis]

All right, everybody, it's Twist. It's Friday. It's February 27th in the year of our Lord.

[Lon Harris]

AO33. Jason AO33.

[Jason Calacanis]

AO33. 33 days after Openclaw appeared on this program. And we're going to keep building replicants. We're going to keep building open claw agents. Yeah, we're going to. We're using like Slack bot 2% of the time. We're going to check out Notion's new one. We're going to keep track on all of these. We're going to rotate those into discussions. We do this week in startups on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I do all in on Thursday, but it comes out on Friday. Then we tape this weekend on Tuesday and we drop it Wednesday morning. So that's what you're getting from JCAL every week. Five. Five podcasts and we're gonna bring back two more. And we need a producer. We need a producer to work under Lawn and I please. Full time in Austin. Pays pretty good.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And you get to have a good time.

[Jason Calacanis]

We need two things. One, you gotta be motivated by the topic.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Subject.

[Jason Calacanis]

We need you. And this is how I hire now. You make four quadrants. Lon qualified.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Important, has the skills.

[Lon Harris]

Got it. Got it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And passion for the subject.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What's in the top right quadrant?

[Lon Harris]

You're asking me? Yes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What's in the top right quadrant?

[Lon Harris]

So you know the most passionate and then the most experienced would be the very top.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Correct. What's in the bottom left?

[Lon Harris]

Not experienced at all. And you're just looking for a gig. You don't really care about what we're doing.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Correct. So that's the easy box to get rid of right now. On the bottom right. What's on the bottom right? Building your mental model here.

[Lon Harris]

You're Very passionate. But you're. You may not have the qualifications that we're looking for. You're. You're a newbie.

[Jason Calacanis]

Correct.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Now do the top left.

[Lon Harris]

You're extremely experienced. You've made tons of podcasts. You know it cold, but you prefer movies and TV or some other topic. That's not what we're talking about now.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's easy to pick number one and number four. Number four. You don't want unqualified people who don't care about the topic. Okay, that's number four in the ranking. And then number one is really easy. Hey, you're super passionate and you're qualified.

[Jason Calacanis]

Great.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Now, how do you rank 2 and 3? Lon, how do you think about 2 and 3? Would you rather have a passionate green person or an experienced person without passion?

[Jason Calacanis]

What do you think?

[Lon Harris]

You know, I go back and forth on this. When I was new on the scene, when I first started, I would have said experience that. I want people who know podcasting cold. They've done it a million times, and they can learn about tech, they can figure it out. But, but I think. I think I've switched. I think today I would say I want someone who lives and breathes startups, AI tech.

[Jason Calacanis]

They're using all.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Why have you switched, by the way? You're correct.

[Jason Calacanis]

You're correct.

[Lon Harris]

Thank you.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So it's one and then the bottom right hand quadrant is number two, and the top left is number three.

[Lon Harris]

Passion. Because I think you can teach somebody, and I have. I think that's what changed is the experience of showing a bunch of people how to do this job and how to make a podcast. And you can teach that stuff. Stuff if they're smart and dedicated, but especially if they are passionate about the subject and can't wait to learn more. I mean, we saw it with Oliver. Oliver came in not knowing anything about podcasting at all, really, but loved AI, loved startups, couldn't wait to dig in and learn how to use all these tools. And now he's off producing this week in AI.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And that does not. Tactical tip of the day. This is a tactical tip from Jake Allen Lawn. It's a tactical tip. It's a tt. It's a tactical tip for you to think about this weekend and bring to your startup on Mondays because a lot of people get caught up on this. And when you have a. You need to have a mental model, a framework, and you know how essential, you know is another vector you can do this on. When I was doing the Twitter, just, you know, lightly collaborating with Elon and Sachs and Antonio. On the Twitter takeover, Elon was like, okay, super qualified. And then who's essential, right? And that's who we need to keep. And if they're not qualified and they're not essential, well, obviously that's easy. And if they're not qualified, but they're essential, okay, we got to think about that. And then if they're super qualified but not essential, okay, we got to go through all these quadrants. So I just drew the four quadrants

[Jason Calacanis]

on the board and it made it really easy to put people into buckets

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

and say, hey, here's where we're at. So take this with you. Talk to your co founder about it. It's a tactical tip from Twist. It's a twist tactical tip T3.

[Jason Calacanis]

There you go.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And now we can go on to our first story.

[Lon Harris]

That's a big one. It's the biggest private funding round in history. Some people are calling this Jason. OpenAI has raised $110 billion with a B. They're now valued at $730 billion with a B. Amazon putting in 50 billion. That's 15 billion up front. Another 35 when certain conditions are met. We don't yet know what those are. Softbank Nvidia going in for 30 billion each. The secondary big news here is that this is a larger scale collaboration between OpenAI and Amazon. OpenAI committing to using Amazon's Trainium semiconductors at its AWS data centers. They will continue to use Nvidia chips. On some level, we don't know exactly how this is all going to balance out. And they said that this new deal does nothing to, to change the ongoing OpenAI deal with Microsoft. So that's the huge story. I mean, and the interesting thing about this Amazon deal is so they're putting 15 billion up, they're holding back on 35 more billion that they are committing in the future. Information says that those conditions are either OpenAI goes IPO or they achieve AGI. So that's what we're still talking about. This like the deal changes if OpenAI reaches AGI. I mean, how far away do we really think that is now? Is this a real.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I've said this before, we've achieved AGI in 50% plus of skills. Artificial general intelligence basically means you can do any job a human can do better than a human. I think we're at the 50% mark minimum. We might be at 60 or 70. It's just not fully deployed and it's not fully executed on. So sometimes you'll have all the precursors. Precursors for, I don't know, sustainable energy. We have that right now. We don't need to burn carbon. We. We have all the precursors. We are a post carbon burning society. We have just not chosen to implement it. We could have a thousand nuclear power plants and we could have, you know, a project to just put solar everywhere and we would stop digging oil out of the ground. We have the technology. We have achieved sustainable energy forever in humanity. We have not applied the technology yet

[Jason Calacanis]

because we already have the infrastructure for this oil.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And we're just deciding to use that

[Jason Calacanis]

until such time as that's too expensive to pull out of the earth. Okay, fine.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Fair enough.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's where we are with AGI. All the precursors are there. If you sit there Lon and you spend, I don't know, five hours with your replicant. I don't know.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do you have a replicant yet?

[Jason Calacanis]

Have you?

[Lon Harris]

I don't. I don't have my. I do not have my own.

[Jason Calacanis]

Don't have your.

[Lon Harris]

I know the name. I'm going to call mine Gaff after. That's the Edward Almost character from Blade Runner. But he's not exist yet.

[Jason Calacanis]

What? What? What does he say at the end when he gives?

[Lon Harris]

Too bad she won't live. But then again.

[Jason Calacanis]

She won't live.

[Lon Harris]

But then again, who does? Who does?

[Sponsor Announcer]

Who does?

[Jason Calacanis]

Shout out to Edward James Omos. Is that who it is?

[Lon Harris]

Yes. The great Edward James Almost plays Gaff.

[Jason Calacanis]

Incredible.

[Lon Harris]

You had posted a tweet asking for a J curve based on.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yes, I don't think anybody did it. Did anybody do it?

[Lon Harris]

Kabir did it for you. Kabir from lunch has your J curve ready. Let's bring up the next.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's not exactly a J curve.

[Lon Harris]

Here's the next one.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Bar curve.

[Lon Harris]

No, that's the Uber one. Open, Open. AI J curve. There we are.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Still not a J curve, but okay, so a J curve is when you just amount invested. Go find the J curve for Tesla and go find the J curve for Uber. And what it is, how much money you've invested.

[Lon Harris]

Oh, I see it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And you just keep adding that up. You keep adding it up and then you have your profit.

[Lon Harris]

There you go.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Not your revenue, your profit. And then it starts going tick, tick,

[Jason Calacanis]

tick, tick, tick, tick, tick up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

As an example, the free cash flow

[Jason Calacanis]

from Uber in 2025 was 10 billion.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It'll be 13 billion in this year.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is Uber's long road to profitability.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What you see there is just how

[Jason Calacanis]

much money was lost to build.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I Don't know.

[Jason Calacanis]

They're at like a quarter.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

There are 250 million rides a day

[Jason Calacanis]

globally in 10,000 cities. Like, to build that kind of footprint required buying companies, building infrastructure, the team spend, spend, spend. And they also spent money lon on subsidizing rides to build out the driver network and build out the habit. And so they went 30 billion in the hole. This chart is like ending in 24 when they had like couple of billion dollars in profit. So they went from like 32 to 30. We need to take this chart and put 10 billion which would make it skyrocket up and then put another 13 billion for 25 and 26. And what you'd see is 10 and 13 is 23 billion. You would go from negative 30 billion all the way up below that 5 billion line. It would shoot up like a rocket. That is the high art. So if we were to do this properly for. And I'll just have somebody else do it, get me somebody, one of the fans of the show. Build a J curve. There's been $250 billion. If we had a straight line down since ChatGPT came out, it was less than a billion dollars invested in the space. And then you get to about 250 billion invested including this 110 billion loan. Let's assume another 250 billion gets invested.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

500 billion straight down. So this chart of Uber goes down 30 billion. And pull up the Tesla one as well, which you'll find very easily just by typing Tesla J curve chart in Google. Sorry to make this so complicated for my team. We've got a brand new partner here

[Jason Calacanis]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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[Jason Calacanis]

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[Jason Calacanis]

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[Jason Calacanis]

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[Jason Calacanis]

It's an amazing company.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Tesla J Curve is unbelievable. The amount of money invested in that was wild. Why? They had to build factories, they had to do all this stuff. Maybe you'll find it easier on Twitter because people talk about it a lot there. 500 billion invested is the equivalent of, of. I don't know, what is that, 12 times?

[Jason Calacanis]

So here it is.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is amazing. So this is free cash flow in the history of pure EV makers. And what you see is all the losses and you see that red spike going up.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's the magic.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You struck oil.

[Jason Calacanis]

What did they have to do to get there?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

How many billions were they in the hole at the peak?

[Jason Calacanis]

Tesla?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

10 billion, negative. And then you go up and they start making money and all of a sudden turned a profit in year 11. And they've, you know, five years since

[Lon Harris]

year 1718 of Tesla. I see, correct.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So now you have to do that for language models. For language models, they go 500 billion into debt. That's a big hole collectively. A lot of anthropic, Xai, a lot of chips, Mistral, anthropic, everybody.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then also the data center companies I would include in there because they're directly, you know, associated with this effort.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You put all that together, you build a $500 billion hole, let's say in

[Jason Calacanis]

2030, they throw off $10 billion collectively in profits. In other words, they throw off what Uber makes in year 14 or what

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Tesla makes in year 16.

[Jason Calacanis]

Then as a group, then let's say it grows 50% a year. So you go 10, 15, 22.5. You get the idea. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You're talking about a 10 year, maybe a six year run to just get

[Jason Calacanis]

out of the J Curve. That's my estimate.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, there it is, folks. Congratulations to the team at OpenAI. They're making 20 billion.

[Lon Harris]

They're doing all right.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I would say worth 7,800 billion, or maybe 8, maybe 800 billion post money. Add the cash, so they're 40 times top line revenue. It's absurd. But if they keep growing 50% a year, you know, if Codex 100% a

[Lon Harris]

year, if Codex is driving everyone's AI agent, then yeah. There is chaos going on right now on the streets of Miami Beach. I don't know if you've heard about this. The crypto world is in absolute chaos. And we sent our roving. We sent our roving correspondent Nick o' Neill down to survey the damage. I feel like we should check in with him right now.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Live humanity.

[Lon Harris]

Nick joining us for Ivy Beach. What's going on down there, Nick?

[Nick O'Neill]

Chaos and confusion right now. I was just down there speaking with people on the streets of Miami to say what is going on here? My crypto portfolio is down awfully. They are completely panicking and they're saying that they're going to lose their jobs. With all of the money going to a place like OpenAI. I've never felt more depression. They said, nick, you're a voice of stability and reason. And I said, yes, I am, Nick.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's imperative in an emergency situation like

[Jason Calacanis]

this that broadcasters like ourselves maintain our cool.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Please take a moment to compose yourself. As hard as it is looking down

[Jason Calacanis]

at Miami, explain the carnage. And we have children watching for parents. I'm going to ask you to please take children off the screen. This is unedited, this is unfiltered. This is what's happening right now in Miami.

[Nick O'Neill]

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

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I don't want you to turn the camera too far because this could get graphic. But I understand the Block team, formerly Square, they were having their quarterly retreat in Miami.

[Lon Harris]

Oh, God.

[Sponsor Announcer]

They.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Miami. And half of them, there's a. There's 400 people down there in the Streets who have been given 18 months severance, fully vested, and they have four job offers. Please explain what's happening with those 400 people.

[Nick O'Neill]

I saw a literal parade of people being marched out of the office down in Brickell from my balcony here. And people were literally. Miami was not even ready for the moment that occurred. Right there I saw them and they were like, what's going on here? They were all carrying brown boxes out the doors, down the streets, and they were like, is this the end? I. I went down to get on this scene just to see what people were saying. They could not believe it. There were tears. There were people that thought that they were going to potentially lose relationships. Because let's be honest, down here in Miami, everyone's focused on can you afford the most expensive car around and the best clothes. Well, the block employees are no longer a reliable source for making those purchases, Jason.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's really tragic. I can't imagine what's happening at Club 11. I mean, the trickle down effects.

[Lon Harris]

It's a FEMA camp now, Jason. It's a female. FEMA has set up at Club 11. That's it. They're taking refugees at this point.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Pitbull taking refugees.

[Lon Harris]

I heard Pitbull is down there volunteering. He's a great guy, very helpful.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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

[Nick O'Neill]

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

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay. Yeah, I mean, this is live, unconfirmed.

[Lon Harris]

Clickbait.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I did. I did see pictures. I don't know if they're AI based, Nick, on social media, on TikTok of people with their Ariane chairs and their Mac studios. Getting on those. Those boats to. Yeah, those boats to Cuba.

[Lon Harris]

Asking.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's a tragic situation.

[Lon Harris]

Asking their agent in real time for recommendations in Havana. That's on their. On the boats.

[Nick O'Neill]

I heard open claws literally steering some of those boats.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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

[Lon Harris]

Yeah. Get rid of Tragic.

[Nick O'Neill]

They now have their agents.

[Lon Harris]

Well, they. They're looking ahead. They were like, in five years, we won't need these boats anymore, so we might as well fight. Rip off the band aid now.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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

[Lon Harris]

Within different parts of Florida. Within different parts of South Florida. Understood.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Like Alex Carr, thank you for your support.

[Nick O'Neill]

Thank you.

[Lon Harris]

Please, Nick, be safe. Be safe.

[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Jason Calacanis]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's above my pay grade.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, thank God. He's down there because I would not be going down there right now.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What's his Twitter stop being at Choose

[Lon Harris]

Rich on X Instagram at Choose Rich if you you want to follow our good friend, our good friend and roving correspondent Nick o'.

[Ben Broca]

Neill.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But that's a good segue into our next story.

[Lon Harris]

Is it? Oh, Block layoffs at Block we should talk about. We'll talk about that one. So Block, you heard us mention Block, the parent company of Square Cash app and afterpay, of course, co founder and chairman Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. They announced plans to cut their staff by 40%. Jason, that's around 4,000 people, leaving just under 6,000 remaining at the company. In an open letter that he also cross posted to X, Dorsey pretty much blames AI quote, a significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better. Intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week. He added, I had two options. Cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it. Now I chose the latter. So you have been predicting this very thing on this program as well as the all in program for many months. Is this just the first of what you see as many of these announcements?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You know we're in a debate primarily Sachs and I, but other folks and people have called me names, a doomerist, a catastrophist. I'm always balls and strikes folks. I just look at the information. I look at what I see firsthand. I think from first principles. I talk to people. I come from a journalism background obviously. So when you see me forming an opinion, although Saxon is debate techniques like to make me into a libtard or use all his advanced debate techniques.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a hoax and his framing and all that stuff.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I can tell you straight, you've been

[Jason Calacanis]

watching me long enough. I go research information, I learn and then I try to form an opinion. And when people correct me, typically fans of the show and friends, often I then change my opinion. Okay, so I have said what I'm seeing on the front lines is founders being able to not hire the first three or four people they would normally hire for their three person startup. In other words, the three co founders. Instead of having to hire three people in the first six months or year, say the first year, they want to get three more people in the building. Another developer, another designer and an ops person. Typically you get some combination of those or maybe even a salesperson. What I find is with these new tools they do founder led sales for six months or 12 months longer. They handle their own legal, accounting, etc. For the first six months. And then they pick, you know, whichever service provider they want. But they can do things on their own. So that was one piece of information I had in forming this opinion a year or two ago.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The second piece of information is I listened to the words that leaders say and I take them at their word or I handicap what they're trying to do. Andy Jassy, a year ago in the summer, wrote this memo that things were gonna change at Amazon and that they saw AI playing a bigger role.

[Jason Calacanis]

Then there was a leaked document from

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Amazon that said, we have like 900,000 jobs, 600,000 jobs we're not gonna hire for in the next decade because we predict they're gonna be robots. Is a New York Times story. You can say fake news all you want. The truth is, I would say, you know, 50% of the facts in the New York Times are rock solid. Then maybe 30 are debatable and 20 might be wrong. That's not because they're intentionally doing things wrong or whatever. It's just the nature of truth in the world. Right? They're, they're trying to pursue breaking news stories. So they have 5% of the information inside of Amazon. The other 95% is a black box. So they follow. They got this leak. It was so acute at Amazon that

[Jason Calacanis]

they were preparing a PR campaign to

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

stop the bad PR they were going to get in the coming years.

[Jason Calacanis]

From not hiring people and laying people

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

off to me again, I take people at their word. I've been in the startup business for

[Jason Calacanis]

30 plus years now as an entrepreneur, journalist and investor and a podcaster, I know what people are doing. They're like, okay, around the corner, we're going to start replacing drivers and getting rid of factory workers, we're going to get rid of middle managers. There's not going to be as many developers. We need to give to Toys for Tots and when they put in, we should do local Toys for Tots. Things make the Amazon bad vibes go down. Okay, that's another check. Now we have to look at Block Block, like Jack's other company, Twitter. Jack is an invest in the future visionary product leader.

[Lon Harris]

Right?

[Jason Calacanis]

He goes big. There's very few entrepreneurs who have built 2212 billion dollar startups that were public. Steve Jobs built Apple and then he built Pixar. I don't think Pixar ever went public. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. I don't remember seeing it trading now, but then it got bought by Disney. So he built $2 billion. I mean you have to have people build multiple unicorns. But there's two unicorns. One went public, one didn't. You have Elon. And he has Tesla, which is public. And he soon will have SpaceX. So he'll have two that have gone public.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a very small group. You know who already has two that went public? Jack. Jack Dorsey doesn't get enough credit.

[Lon Harris]

That's true. Why?

[Jason Calacanis]

Because he's quiet. He's an introvert. I've known Jack since, you know, the earliest days of Twitter. I was one of the first users.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, I feel like also he culturally, culturally tech is like no longer on his side. Like he's seen as like this woke lefty guy. It doesn't really meld with the current philosophy of the tech.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

He's a lefty guy anyway.

[Lon Harris]

Well, but that's the.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Did overbuild the staff, right?

[Lon Harris]

Well that's. I was going to say that is a big thing on social media is saying that this is not really about AI that this is really like during the COVID era, square slash block, massively over hired and now they're sort of backing out of that. But they don't want. They want to save face so they're blaming AI at Bama Bonds. This guy will Slaughter had the big tweet about this unwinding less than half an insane Covid over hiring binge has much more to do with Jack Dorsey's managerial incompetence than whether AI is going to take your job. Dorsey then responded, yes, we overhire during COVID because I incorrectly built two separate company structures, Square and Cash App rather than one which we corrected mid 2024. But then he continues, we have and do run an efficient company better than most.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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

[Lon Harris]

You can keep your computer. You'll receive your salary for 20 plus one week of tenure equity vested through the end of May. Six months of healthcare, keep your corporate devices and five grand to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition. That's very good.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I offered Lon today, said, hey, you saw the block deal. I'll take half of that. To get the fuck out of here. Lon was like, hey, can I get half that? That sounds pretty good.

[Lon Harris]

We could negotiate. We could negotiate. That's even just a start. That's a start.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

A good start point plus one week for every year you're there. If you're an eight year employee, get another eight weeks. Say you're sitting there, you're sitting pretty at 28 weeks.

[Lon Harris]

That's a lot of time to figure out your next move.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's a lot of time to figure it out. Anyway, he did it in the classiest, most transparent way I've ever seen. Full stop.

[Lon Harris]

Can I just say one thing?

[Jason Calacanis]

This is against the HR people's standard.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They say you have to turn everybody's accounts on.

[Lon Harris]

Correct.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

People are going to do crazy things.

[Jason Calacanis]

People are going to delete files, people

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

are going to say things in the chat, they're going to hack things. You cannot do it this way.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's even potential workplace violence. I don't bring that up. But, you know, there's like, somebody could go postal.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You got to lock the doors, all

[Jason Calacanis]

this kind of stuff. X square people out of the building. You want to do it over the weekend so people don't show up on Monday.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

These are best practices, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Lon Harris]

I was just going to say the one thing. I think it's very generous. I do think he did this in the classiest way possible. I just. I would have put caps in the tweet. He does that all lowercase tweeting style. And when you're firing people, I don't know. It felt a little pressured to me. But otherwise, I think he handled this in the.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, if we're sitting here saying his punctuation is the issue, that means

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

he did it right.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's splitting hairs here.

[Lon Harris]

Exactly.

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I can write everything down and I

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I use it when I'm in Slack.

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm writing a document or I'll even use it when I'm talking to my

[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

talk to who actually takes down everything I say, unlike maybe the interns I've got, they get like 6 out of every 10 instructions correct.

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Everybody's going crazy about this product in Silicon Valley. Everybody in tech is using it.

[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Incredible product.

[Sponsor Announcer]

You have to try it.

[Lon Harris]

Scott Adams, the Dilber cartoonist, the author, the podcaster, he talked on his show before his tragic recent death about a desire to live on as an AI powered representation of himself. Now, there's a lot of debate about as he got to the end of his life, whether he changed his mind about this. There's various public statements. We do not need to rehash this whole debate. One fan, John Arrow, actually made Scott's vision happen. He created I Scott Adams and it's a AI driven simulation of the old podcast featuring an animated avatar that is very convincing, looks a lot and sounds a lot like the real Scott Adams. Arrow has also created Abigail Adams, a young lady character that's inspired by Scott and his legacy. So Adams family and many of his fans very upset. They've made repeated requests now for Arrow to stop publishing his videos. On Thursday, the AI Scott Adams account posted that they intend to legally defend their right to keep making this content. Here's the quote from this project start. We attempted to have an amicable and collaborative conversation, but that wasn't reciprocated. Given that litigation seems certain, we are sending a global hold letter to anyone with relevant information. This is to ensure all pertinent materials are available to protect Scott's stated vision. So I mean the last thing I would note here, for all the debate that this is stirring up, the content itself is not really that popular. 3.4 thousand or 3.34 hundred followers on x 137 YouTube subscribers. Abigail is not doing better. So there, there, there does seem to be a disconnect between the interest that this project is generating and the actual fans who want to follow AI Scott Adams. So, so your your reaction?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I, you know, I'm starting getting DMs from like the Scott Adams stands. Like the real hardcore fans who know me because I was on his show one time debating January 6th and other stuff with him and they know me because I would listen to his show once in A while and say hi in the chat. Because he would mention all in probably like a dozen times over the years. He really loved sax. He loved chamath. I think he liked me. Even though I might.

[Lon Harris]

I think you guys had a mutual appreciation going.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

A mutual appreciation. And so, you know, they're very angry

[Jason Calacanis]

at me for even platforming the creator of it.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

For me retweeting it or giving my opinion.

[Lon Harris]

Hey, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

If you really are in the spirit of Scott Adams. He was for full contact debate and. And listen, and I'm no like close friend of Scott. We never met in person. We were digital friends, etc. We're obviously like micro celebrities. So micro celebrities have a secret chat room. But put that aside. You know, we have a secret society of your hand.

[Lon Harris]

Your handshake. You have a secret.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Yeah, sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

Everything. He was a self described narcissist. He was like, I love getting attention. I love when people say hi to me. A coffee. I love that people were inspired by what I said.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

He would have.

[Jason Calacanis]

In my estimation. It's just one person's opinion. Don't freak out. He would have loved AI Scott Adams. He would have loved this debate. He did say he wanted to. Those two things can be true at the same time. He did say he wanted people to create AI Scott Adams. And he did say that maybe I want to create a digital sun so that people close to me don't get hurt by seeing me online every day. Okay, so there's morals. There's. There's morals and ethics and then there's the law.

[Everest Chris]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Here's what I'll say. This isn't like a new issue. You can't use people's, especially famous people's likenesses for profit or even for nonprofit use in this kind of way. So legally, they lose. I think so could make a derivative product that you say, hey, I've made this Abigail. She's inspired by the teachings of Scott Adams.

[Lon Harris]

Right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Totally allowed. If somebody wanted to say, I am a JCAL disciple. I'm a Chamath disciple. I'm a Steve Jobs disciple, and I'm going to wear a Steve Jobs outfit every day like Elizabeth Holmes did.

[Lon Harris]

Right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And for a period of time, she was super inspiring.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, she. With the turtlenecks. Yeah, yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

With the turtleneck and the voice and the drama and everything. Shout out, Elizabeth. Come on the pod. Anytime.

[Lon Harris]

Once. Once you're out of. Once you're out of prison.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, I want to do it when she's in. So long story short.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Yeah, long story short, you could do that.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do your Steve Jobs impersonation every day. It's protected. So now you go to the moral, ethical thing, as I told the person doing this. Talk to the family, get permission to do it. Or do the derivative, clearly not the same product, but inspired by the teachings. So here we are. That's what's going to happen. And the argument that technologists will use is this is inevitable. It's going to happen, yada yada. You know what? It's inevitable that piracy happens, but that doesn't mean that you can go sell Taylor Swift CDs on Canal Street. And we've proven that with Napster. You get a lawsuit. You can't, you know, restream MSG and

[Jason Calacanis]

Knicks games without getting in trouble.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do the Russians do it on their Russian streaming sites?

[Lon Harris]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

Do the Chinese sell DVDs on every quarter? Yes. Okay. Those are other countries who are not obeying law. You don't get to use that either.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[Lon Harris]

It's just weird that it's like he's. He's taking a principled stand here. Like, I'm going to take this to court to protect all of our right to make an AI avatar of someone after they're dead. And, like, I. I find that whole thing kind of, like, creepy. Like, even if I say out loud on a show once, hey, I wouldn't mind somebody doing this, I don't really feel like that should give you a legally binding. Right. That seems a little far to me. That. That's just as far as I go. Should we do some. Should we do some demos?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Please?

[Lon Harris]

All right. Our first demo. Let's bring on Everest Chris. He's the creator of Unloopa Jason on Loopa. It allows. I thought this was really neat. It allows anyone to create an AI generated website for a local business in their area and then gives them the tools to sell that business their website.

[Jason Calacanis]

So here is Genius.

[Lon Harris]

So here's Everest. He's in India, but he's focusing the tool on the Netherlands. So I, I like. We gotta. We gotta take a look.

[Jason Calacanis]

Tell me your name again so I get the pronunciation right.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Sir.

[Everest Chris]

Hi, my name's Chris.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chris, Nice to meet you. Okay. And Chris, you're. We're in India. Are you. And how old are you?

[Everest Chris]

I'm 23 and I'm in Hyderabad right now.

[Jason Calacanis]

And are you in college or school?

[Everest Chris]

No, no, I finished my college. Now I'm into AI.

[Lon Harris]

Now he's into AI.

[Jason Calacanis]

Did you go to these, like, technical schools in India? That are really hard to get into? Or did you do that, like, college course training where it's like, really intense and you go for six days a week? I've just heard about this online in

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

TV shows and media.

[Everest Chris]

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

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So you are monitoring this week in startups x.com and thinking about opportunities in Europe and America, even though you're living in India, Am I correct?

[Everest Chris]

I mean, I just. A tweet of mine went viral. You guys reached out to me, and so I wanted to be on the pod.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Great. Here we go. So show us what you built and I will give you some feedback. And this is a business lawn that I have seen before. Because with Squarespace, people started doing this is like they would build websites and they would knock on doors in America and say, hey, I built a website for you. Would you like it? You know what I thought was so asking for $500, like, the first question

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, here we go.

[Everest Chris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, so you could do coffee cafes.

[Everest Chris]

Yeah, Any niche.

[Lon Harris]

Well, but, Jason, it's gonna. It's not only gonna find the businesses, it's actually gonna make the websites right now. Like, when we check back in, like, you'll see Crystal, show us. We're actually going to get finished websites already.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Genius.

[Everest Chris]

Okay, let me show you a finished workflow.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, so here's your workflow completed.

[Everest Chris]

This was one me and Lon ran yesterday. I mean, he didn't see the results yet.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, I'm curious.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Scrape 100. Car detailing.

[Everest Chris]

Yeah, car detailing.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Because, you know, Lon keeps his car very.

[Lon Harris]

I do. I love my Prius C. It's got

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

all of the different websites. There's. And I assume we can click on one of them.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Get all the data

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Here's a website it built.

[Lon Harris]

Look at this, Jason, look at this. And this is all based on this real car detailing place in Austin. Like, you could go to them right now and say, hey, do you want to buy this beautiful website I made for you?

[Everest Chris]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, this is insane.

[Lon Harris]

This is insane.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now wait, you're also having it contact them. How does it do the contact?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

In the outreach?

[Everest Chris]

You can just connect your email. So it finds the emails and sends out the outreach through your email. So you can have like custom email template that it reaches out to them.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Chris, you have a job. Do you have a job in India?

[Everest Chris]

No.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, let me ask you. You can be honest because we're on this week in startups.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You can always be honest here. You can always be honest with your uncle. Jcal.

[Jason Calacanis]

Unk.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

J.C. if you have. If you got a job right now, what do you think your salary would be in India if you got like

[Everest Chris]

a job, like an average job.

[Sponsor Announcer]

An average job?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Like US dollar. Well, in your dollars. And then we'll. We'll translate.

[Everest Chris]

Yeah. 400amonth.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

$400?

[Everest Chris]

U.S. u.S.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Dollars?

[Everest Chris]

Yes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You make five grand a year?

[Everest Chris]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, five. Five grand a year. And you're a developer and you're smart.

[Lon Harris]

Look at what he built.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Five grand.

[Lon Harris]

I can hear the wheels turning.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

If you made $25,000 in US right now, compared to your friends, how would you be living?

[Jason Calacanis]

Like your apartment, going out to dinner, how would you be living in India?

[Everest Chris]

I'd be living like a king here.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Living like a king.

[Lon Harris]

He'll be with Nick on the balcony in Miami beach before we're done.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, Chris, if you're this freaking smart, I'll pay you $25,000, you come work for me. Okay. How does it sound? I mean, you gotta be actually smart. This can't be like all a put on here. You gotta go through a proper job interview. But would you like to make $25,000 a year? Because that's like a third of what people make in the U.S. don't tell him that, Jason. No, I am, but I'm just trying to do arbitrage here. I'm just.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What would that be like if you

[Jason Calacanis]

went to your friends and were like, I just got a $25,000 job offer. Is that like crazy or not? Or does that happen to some of your friends?

[Everest Chris]

But I think I'll be making more with an lupa.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, there you go.

[Jason Calacanis]

I love it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I love it. He's an entrepreneur.

[Jason Calacanis]

It was a test. You passed the test. I need to start Founder University, India. I need to talk to the government. I need to. I've never been to India.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I need to.

[Jason Calacanis]

Unbelievable.

[Lon Harris]

Let's go to Hyderabad. Jason, let's go.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm in.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, great job.

[Everest Chris]

Tell you some exciting numbers.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, here we go. Yeah, tell us the exciting numbers. Maybe I need to be an investor in this company.

[Everest Chris]

So I launched. Yeah, so I launched it in 24 hours. It was at thousand mrr, thousand USD.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[Everest Chris]

Just from a single Reddit post.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

All right, that's it.

[Everest Chris]

No, no, I think you'll be excited. And then last week I. I posted like three tweets and now an Lupa is over 8.5k. Mrr.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Because you're already. You're. What are you talking about? You're at 100k a year.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Look at you.

[Lon Harris]

He doesn't need your 25k.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

He's an entrepreneur. It was a test. I wanted to see what was going on here. Okay, here's the deal. I want you to come to Founder University and I want to invest $25,000 in this company. If you want to make it into a US based company, because I think you're just brilliant and smart, if you want to pursue that, you got to go through diligence. We got to make sure you're not a criminal. We got to make sure, like, you can actually start a US company. Put it aside. Congratulations. This is amazing. Let's go to our next demo. Stick around, Chris.

[Lon Harris]

All right, Chris, hang out. We're going on to Ben, Hang out with us. We're going on to Ben Broca. He's the creator of Pulsea. It's an agentix system. It's not openclaw. It was built while Peter was off building openclaw. It's a separate agentix system, Jason, that helps businesses run their operations autonomously. Ben, thanks for.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Hey, Ben, how you doing? Where are you calling in from?

[Ben Broca]

I'm good. I'm in San Francisco right now.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Oh, okay, great. I can tell because it's so sunny. Show us what you built. This is it demo or die. Show us what you built here on this week. In startups, you never know what you're going to see.

[Ben Broca]

So actually this is a live dashboard that shows polsia in action working right now on like almost a thousand companies at the same time. So you can see that, like, actually recently we had a huge surge of, like, people starting to use the service, which is amazing. Right now you can see Polcia working on different tasks. It completed 3,000 tasks in the past 24 hours. Right now it's building a 2D property feed MVP for some user that's working on a specific company. This is a Twitter action where following up with 17 gallery pitches, you can see that a lot of users are creating new companies every minute. 700 companies will launch in the past 24 hours. So essentially, Pulseia is an AI that builds and runs companies autonomously. So it wakes up every night, accomplishes tasks in the goal to create and run the company that the user sort of decided on.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow, this is incredible.

[Ben Broca]

It can of course code push a production launch a real website tweets. You can see here, those are real tweets that have been tweeted about. If I click on one of them, it's an actual real tweet. Most AI VRs cost $750 a month. They need a rev ops team. Leadforge finds your prospects. So this is a tweet that's promoting a company from a real user.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow.

[Ben Broca]

So it can also send emails. So I give it access to an email address. So you can see that there's a bunch of emails that have been sent in the past five minutes. 4,000 emails in the past 24 hours. One of the things I launched about a week ago is now pulsea can run ads autonomously for companies, so it creates its own UGC ads. And then there's an AI that an AI agent that every day wakes up, looks at the performance of ads on meta and decides to either create a new one or pose an ad that would not be performing or create new ads. So you can see. I'm going to give you an example.

[Jason Calacanis]

My buddies think I'm a genius for planning our trips. I just use fairway finder, 10 bucks, whole captain's packet done. I let him keep thinking it.

[Ben Broca]

So this is just an example of like an AI generated ad that was created for a customer to promote their business on.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Paulsia says, why Combinator in a box? You're basically making unlimited number of startups.

[Adi Gabrani]

You own all of them.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Or this is a game for people to play. They subscribe to your service Polcia.

[Ben Broca]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Right.

[Ben Broca]

And so the idea is really, I believe that the future of companies is that most companies will be 80% autonomous, meaning that the 20% is the human having taste, having creativity and a certain insight into a specific niche. However, 80% of the company could be completely autonomous. Essentially here the AI poster is giving that to people and essentially is doing the engineering work, fixing bugs, grinding every day, extending cold emails, tweeting, doing ads. The human doesn't have to do that. The human needs to give direction.

[Jason Calacanis]

So great.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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

[Ben Broca]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Incredible. Great job. A question from our audience, Lon.

[Lon Harris]

Oh yeah, we've got from M. Solomon Bush. How can you afford this? Are customers paying for inference on top of their $50 per month?

[Ben Broca]

It's a great question. Like actually I would love to make it more affordable. The reason it's $50 is because yeah, as you said, it's expensive. Like it's a lot of inference because every day we. The AI thinks and acts every day. And that's of course using top models from anthropic and OpenAI. And so the idea is that the subscription, I'm trying to break even on the subscriptions because the idea is like Giving this tool to as many people as possible. But in exchange, we take at Pulse a 20% cut on revenue on essentially transaction on the platform. So if a user comes in for 50 bucks a month, they can get a company getting started, which is very, very affordable. But if down the line, they start making 100 bucks, 200 bucks a month with their business, we just take 20% and that's a way to being able to generate profit to continue growing the platform.

[Lon Harris]

Got it, Got it.

[Ben Broca]

We're very incentivized with our users on success.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is amazing. Really well done. We should talk because I'm in the startup business and I think what's really

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

interesting about what you're doing is, I

[Jason Calacanis]

mean, I'm sure when you raise your pre seed round, this came up with investors. Like, pretty great place for us to look for founders, right? You've basically got a little incubator here on your hands. Really inspiring, dude.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I love it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Thank you. Any questions for me about startups and Startup Live? It seems like you already figured it out, to be honest.

[Ben Broca]

I mean, listen, first of all, thank you for having me. I love to be able to share this to more people. And yeah, I mean, you have a ton of experience and would love to ask you, how do you see about scaling it? How do you think about how can I get this into more, you know,

[Jason Calacanis]

so, you know, I love open source and I love more open platforms, and it's always great to enable people to make money. So let me just riff here, Lon.

[Lon Harris]

Riff.

[Jason Calacanis]

What you're doing is like ebay or Airbnb or Uber or many other marketplaces. Etsy in that this is kind of a marketplace where you're giving tools like you come for the tool and you stay for the marketplace. You've basically created a way for people to make a living. When you do that, you get love

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

from the entrepreneurs you're creating, just like Airbnb does.

[Everest Chris]

Right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Airbnb changed tens of thousands of people's lives who were probably, you know, making a wage and they became entrepreneurial. And eventually, if their Airbnb worked out, they got a second one or a third one. And then. And now they moved into the owner class from the salary class.

[Jason Calacanis]

Beautiful.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So I think you're doing that and then the more you, the less you take and the more you give will be how you succeed. So Etsy and Airbnb take their 5 to 20% take rate, you take 500 flat rate. There's other services that you can upsell people on over time. So $50 for this package, 300 for the next package, 1000 for the next would be the next thing. I, if I was an investor in your company, I'd be sitting with you saying, what would people pay $1,000 a month for? And you could then, you know, start having that conversation. Maybe there's a human in the loop in the marketing function, right? You see, you have, like, you hire a growth hacker and you split the growth hacker, like rent a human style across the team anyway, all kinds of things like that. And your customers, if you talk to them and say, how can we be more helpful? They're going to tell you. And then it's your job to prioritize and experiment. There's also the possibility of adding to this the ability to invest in the companies or have ownership in them. So you could say, hey, we'd like to own 10% of your business,

[Everest Chris]

or

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

we'd like to own 5% of your business. We'll give you the platform for free, for life. If we can own 5% and we get a 5% royalty, you know, we

[Jason Calacanis]

get 1% of your profit.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So it could be, it could be $500 a month or $100 a month

[Jason Calacanis]

and 5% of whatever your sales are, if you're tracking sales in here. So there's all kinds of ways you can kind of do future upsells. For now, just keep delighting customers, right? You're, you're, you should spend the first three years of any business just delighting customers, and then you can figure out the revenue. The model is really simple here. A subscription plus a revenue share plus upsells. And as long as it's tiny like you're doing, you're going to be successful. You're going to figure this out. Great job. Okay, awesome. Let's do our third and final.

[Lon Harris]

Well, first, first, I think we should, we should check out this Poly Market. So related.

[Jason Calacanis]

I love the polymarker.

[Lon Harris]

Related to what we were talking about earlier, I found this one for OpenAI's closing market cap. So on the day that OpenAI, eventually IPOs, what will the market cap be at the 1.5 billion closing bell? So let's pull that, that Poly market up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's 1.5. 1.5.

[Lon Harris]

So the volume on this 1.4 million right now. So a lot of people right now, the number one, the top vote is no IPO by December 31, 2026. And then there's another version.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay.

[Lon Harris]

And then there's another version for 2027. And the number one vote there, no IPO by December 31, 2027. But, but if you go look at the individual numbers there, there is, there is some range.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So scroll down there because it's definitely going to be public by 2027. So that would include 2026.

[Lon Harris]

No, this. Yeah, this is just the 2026 one. But Salah, if you see up there at the top, there's a choice. There's a button for December 31, 2027. Click that one.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think we're on that.

[Lon Harris]

No, we're on 2026. Here's 2027. So now scroll down.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No IPO is what?

[Lon Harris]

So no IPO is F by 2027 is 37. 43% as of right now. But under that.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So that's the losing bet. They're going to IPO by 2027.

[Lon Harris]

Under anything under 500 billion is currently at 26%.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's wrong.

[Lon Harris]

One point.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is on the closing day.

[Lon Harris]

This is of the IPO closing bell on the day that the company IPOs.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

All right, I'm going to load into this one. Scroll down. I'm going to take 750 all the way to 1.5. So if you added those up, it looks like it's.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's a little 65%.

[Lon Harris]

Well, no, 750 billion to 1 trillion is 17%. 1.25 to 1.5 trillion.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, it's got to be a trillion. So I'll go trillion, trillion, five.

[Lon Harris]

Okay, that's about. No, that's about 30, 31%.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no, I'll take from 1 trillion up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So there's three categories there.

[Jason Calacanis]

16, 15.

[Lon Harris]

Oh, I see. I see what you're saying.

[Jason Calacanis]

So that's 31.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That's exactly 50.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think if you put 50% on there, that's the winning bet. It can't be under 1 trillion on the close.

[Lon Harris]

I mean, that seems crazy that it would be under 1 trillion when it's already worth.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think we should put a hundred. I think we should put a hundred thousand dollars on this. So we put 100,000, we make 50.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, right. That would be. Yes, you would make 50k from that because you're, you're betting it.

[Jason Calacanis]

But wait a second. If I make 50k, I think that's a lock. If that's a lock for me. If I put the hundred K into Nvidia or Uber or other stock and I make 10% a year, I'll be at 110. Or if I put it into munis, I'll make 5% on the 100K. I'll make 7,500 versus 50.

[Lon Harris]

The real money here, you got to think that through like 500 to 750 billion. But I don't think there's any chance that it's that low. That's the problem.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, you can't take that long shot.

[Jason Calacanis]

Those people are.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They're being silly retard as we say in French. Okay, there's polymarket. I love a polymarker. It got me thinking. Got me thinking.

[Lon Harris]

We got, we got one more demo that I want to take a look at. Let's welcome Adi Gabrani. He's the creator of Make My Claw.com. their website allows you to set up and deploy your own open claw bot in just 60. Here's my favorite part about this though. He's also got a free 15 minute trial offer like try out OpenClaw for 15 minutes for free of open source. I was fascinated by that. So welcome Adi, thanks for being here.

[Adi Gabrani]

Thanks Ron. Hey Jason. Nice to be here.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

All right. There's gotta be like 500 hosting options now. Why should people pick yours?

[Adi Gabrani]

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

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What's your story? You're an entrepreneur. Where are you based?

[Adi Gabrani]

Yeah, so I'm in Vancouver right now. This was a side project which actually came from getting. So I got involved with Open Club early January where I was building a bot of my own and then saw Peter building.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What's your background?

[Adi Gabrani]

Tech background, the business school and ran

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

a company solo entrepreneur. Have you incorporated yet? You got a.

[Adi Gabrani]

Not from make my Clothes so I have other company doing. Doing AI for mining sector actually.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Oh wow. So that's your day job. Is that your company? You own that one?

[Adi Gabrani]

Yeah, that's my day job.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Side hustle.

[Adi Gabrani]

This is a side hustle on the weekend.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

How is the side hustle doing compared to your main.

[Adi Gabrani]

That's a much bigger business. That's a much. That's a much more well established company. This Is this. Is this came because I was playing with personal agents and wanted to get my friends involved.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Which job? When you wake up in the morning, which job are you more excited about?

[Adi Gabrani]

Beyond. I'm more excited about this, but I cannot afford to do this before 6pm Got it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Have you raised money for the other business?

[Adi Gabrani]

No, that's bootstrapped. One good thing about mining companies is they pay really well.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Ah, got it. What's the footprint of that business? It makes millions of dollars, Hundreds of thousands. How many years has it been around?

[Jason Calacanis]

How many employees?

[Adi Gabrani]

It's been around for around four years. In millions.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, got it.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Did you raise money for.

[Jason Calacanis]

You're just a solo entrepreneur?

[Adi Gabrani]

No, I founders, I have co founders. But bootstrap business.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Got it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Awesome.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I mean I love the hosting business

[Jason Calacanis]

because I think it could uncover other things. What are you charging for? What's like the minimum?

[Adi Gabrani]

So it's 29 for. We give you the key. Very generous key. And 19 if you bring your own key.

[Jason Calacanis]

Got it. Explain to people the difference between bringing your own key and you brought in the key.

[Adi Gabrani]

Yeah. So bringing your own key is you can bring any provider you want and you can use whatever you like and

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

you pay for whatever language model you want.

[Adi Gabrani]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

So what do you give people by default? Are you using Kimi or something? Or some cheap. Using Kimmy.

[Adi Gabrani]

Using Kimmy right now.

[Jason Calacanis]

Got it. And is Kimi good compared to Claude Opus or.

[Adi Gabrani]

I think it's about 10% less in personality but about 10x less in cost. So personally for me it has been a great trade off. I've used my.

[Ben Broca]

I have.

[Adi Gabrani]

So the way I run it is I have Kimi as my main LLM main language model and then for specialized task, I create sub agents with Codex and Claude to do specialized jobs.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I love it. Super inspiring. Any questions for me? And by the way, Ben, if you've got a question for Adi, you can ask him. It's a little interactive here.

[Lon Harris]

We try to keep.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I give you permission.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's fun.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Keep it. Always keep it interactive. If you have any questions, I mean,

[Ben Broca]

yeah, I think it's amazing. I think. I love the 15 minutes, I love the free open call. I think that's genius. I mean I would love to hear about like what's your conversion of people that try for 15 minutes and decide to actually pay.

[Adi Gabrani]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

This is amazing.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well done. All right gentlemen, great job. I'm going to be hosting an OpenClaw launch festival Monday and Tuesday

[Jason Calacanis]

on March 16th and 17th in San Francisco. You're both invited as my guests. Free ticket for each of you. And if you want to come. And the way we do this event, just so people know, we only have 400 seats, we're giving 100 to our investor partners. We have 125 of our founders coming from Japan, around the world, Saudi et cetera, and our latest cohort of founder university companies in America, then we're going to invite 100 investors, which means that's like 250 of the tickets. Then we'll let 100 people who are founders from the public come for free. We always make it free for founders. When you buy a ticket, you pay 20 bucks. When you pick up your ticket, we refund the 20. Why do we do that? People will not cancel.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So you can buy the $20 ticket. If you have to cancel, you can cancel, but it's 20 bucks. Who cares? It's just a way for us to reduce the number and just make sure

[Jason Calacanis]

we don't burn seats.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And if you want to buy a ticket, there's 50 VIP tickets available. If you buy a VIP ticket, lunch is on your own. For this event. You can just walk around San Francisco and get lunch. But I'm going to host a lunch for 50 people, and some of the speakers will come to that if they're around. And you can come to the lunch with me if you pay $1,000. So there's $50,000 in revenue for this event.

[Jason Calacanis]

Lon is the way I do it. And that just pays for all the free founder tickets. And we can buy coffee and breakfast for.

[Lon Harris]

And the. We can't talk about the guests yet, but I've seen the list they're working on, and it's amazing.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like, some good keynotes, especially for a person event.

[Lon Harris]

Some very.

[Jason Calacanis]

My big hitters coming.

[Lon Harris]

Some very cool.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Two big hitters already.

[Lon Harris]

Some very cool people who people will want to hear from.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

All right. Launch festival.com. thank you.

[Lon Harris]

Thank you and. And thanks to AI and Ben for being here. I appreciate it, guys.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

All right, get to get to work.

[Jason Calacanis]

Go back to work.

[Lon Harris]

Go back to work, Ben.

[Jason Calacanis]

Love it. AI Love it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I have ideas. I love both of these. I like both those and I like Chris. It's three great founders you found on.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is exceptional.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is what this week in startups is all about. I love First Amendment lunatics. These are people with no life.

[Lon Harris]

Yes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And then they go out. They carry pepper spray and they go and they film.

[Lon Harris]

There is one of these guys in

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

this show, and I just came across my feed because my feed is bulldogs and weird couples on Instagram now. There's all these weird couples who have the same account. So I've got like four of those weird couples I follow now. Yeah, of course, of course. As one does.

[Lon Harris]

And

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

freaks and oddities and other things.

[Lon Harris]

And First Amendment warriors.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And First Amendment warriors. And there's two groups. There's one. Well, there's actually like four subsections of this group of the genre. One they go to, like, when they get pulled over. They refuse to, you know, Fourth Amendment. They don't want to.

[Lon Harris]

Oh, right, yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Roll their window down. They want to know, am I being detained?

[Lon Harris]

They know all the rules. They know all.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They know all the rules, and they like to mix it up. That one, it feels very dangerous. That's one genre. I'm not encouraging that. The second one, they go to public places and they just record. So they went to, like, you know, Tahoe, and they went to a local town that's near me, and they recorded on the street. Just like they're making B roll. And the guy's got, like, six cameras on his body.

[Jason Calacanis]

And the guy comes out of the

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

store and he starts yelling at him. He's like, no, I'm just taking video. I'm just doing, you know, shots and whatever. He's like, you can't shoot into the store. He's like, well, actually, you know, freedom of speech.

[Jason Calacanis]

I can.

[Lon Harris]

Public street. I'm looking this way. I was at the sidewalk.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So the guy comes and he pushes his camera.

[Jason Calacanis]

The guy's got pepper spray, says if. Hey, if you hit me again, I'm going to pepper spray.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The guy pushes him again. He pepper sprays him.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like, the guy's crying. Whatever.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Police come, hurts these First Amendment worries.

[Jason Calacanis]

Show them the video.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The third genre, and perhaps the best

[Jason Calacanis]

is in this show Neighbors, which is the beach line.

[Lon Harris]

The beach. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

[Jason Calacanis]

There was a beach called Carbon Beach. I had a couple friends who had houses on Carbon Beach. These are billionaires. And I would go stay, and, you know, you go on the beach, and then they would have a thing called squids or jellyfish. People who would be outside Geffen's house. Like, Geffen has one of these houses. Well known famous people have these houses. The guy who used to run Disney was the CEO Michael Eisner. Michael Iger Eisner had one of the most famous houses. This is all public knowledge because people would know, I'm gonna sit outside of Eisner's house. I'm gonna sit outside of this famous person's house, and people are just cool with it. But then there's like, some Karen in Laguna, and she puts ropes. And there's a rule. You can be 10ft from the high tide mark, Right? Anybody is allowed to be 10ft from the high tide mark, whether it's Florida, California, and then there's local rules. And then there's people who sell chairs or have private clubs, and they will start putting their chairs around it and creating formations. And then these warriors come out, and there's one on neighbors.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And they come out and they want to walk across it. So they'll walk through. Through the chairs for the hotel or whatever.

[Lon Harris]

I had no idea about this whole subculture.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's the greatest.

[Lon Harris]

So, neighbor awesome. Every episode they pick two.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Where's the clip today? Oh, just doing a little beach vlog.

[Lon Harris]

You hit Oyster Lake down there.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So when you say it's all private property. Here he goes. Don't take this the wrong way, please. That's the stupidest thing I've ever.

[Lon Harris]

Ever heard me call.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is not my first rodeo, my friend.

[Lon Harris]

So this guy, he's fighting and you're

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

going to find out the hard way. Tell me I'm on private property and then I'll leave. But you're wrong, cuz I've looked it up. So he's a. Not so well for you did it br. You think I'm trouble? Wait. I have a hundred of my friends out here on this beach.

[Lon Harris]

I got my kids out here. So if you want to cuss and fight.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I don't care if your kids are out here.

[Jason Calacanis]

Look,

[Lon Harris]

that's.

[Everest Chris]

That's.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So here's the thing.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Beach?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, the Laguna Beach. Karen was the other really great one. She is nuts. Let me play this.

[Lon Harris]

But they. They find these. The whole show is just. They find these characters.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I love it. I love it. This is the genius of hbo. The hundred billion dollar thing is actually worth it. I retract my previous statement.

[Lon Harris]

There's another one that's in Montana. It's these two neighbors who are fighting over this gate. A guy wants to put up on this road next to his property in Montana.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Look at this line. Let me show you this one. This has nothing to do with neighbors.

[Jason Calacanis]

Watch this woman.

[Sponsor Announcer]

A couple of weeks ago, I featured a video of a woman, a beachfront property owner in Laguna beach, to be exact, who was screaming at a family of beachgoers to get off her property.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Frantically, she puts out Every day, more

[Sponsor Announcer]

and more beach area. In an attempt to cordon off what she said.

[Jason Calacanis]

Here she goes.

[Lon Harris]

Private property.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

She's attacking.

[Sponsor Announcer]

You're the homeowner of a beach.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And she throws.

[Sponsor Announcer]

It's your responsibility to learn the laws and rules that govern your property. And the line.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

So whoever does, like, these shenanigans, then they do, like, let's have 100 people have a barbecue outside this woman's house. It's amazing. This is what, like, America's all about.

[Lon Harris]

I love this kind of stuff.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's crazy. This is why I got a, you know, dozens of acres on my race.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, that's true. You got a private.

[Jason Calacanis]

No neighbor bothering me.

[Lon Harris]

Totally recommend neighbors. I would say that this Montana one, you go through most of the show, and you're like, this guy actually sounds pretty reasonably. Just wants his horse to be able to walk down this. And then at the very end, he's like, well, you know, we should be working together to fight against Q. And then all of a sudden, it takes this crazy turn, and he's like a wild conspiracy theorist. It's. It's unbelievable. The show is so good. It's Josh Safdie who did Marty Supreme. He.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, yeah, of course.

[Lon Harris]

He executive produces it. And it's. It's a terrific show. I highly recommend it.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You did a great job. I want to do some things that you wouldn't. This is.

[Jason Calacanis]

These are things you can buy.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You know me, I like things on Amazon stuff.

[Lon Harris]

Gadgets, bric A brac. Yeah, yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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

[Lon Harris]

People like bric a brac.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, here we go. I'm gonna take you through a couple of things I'm obsessed with. I like a warm cup of coffee.

[Lon Harris]

Who doesn't?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This mug warmer for $22.

[Jason Calacanis]

I have it on my desk. You put your cup of coffee on. You see what I'm showing you?

[Lon Harris]

I do.

[Jason Calacanis]

You press a button. You can pick how. What the temperature is and how long it's on for. And it's got a little led.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

130 degrees the whole time. If you want to go 178, you can pick in between for 23 bucks. The delight I get from this thing every day is extraordinary. I've talked about Anker before.

[Lon Harris]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

And when you and I were in Japan, you probably saw me pull this out. This cost 120 bucks. It's an Anker laptop power back bank. 25,000.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It has two built in USB Cs

[Sponsor Announcer]

and it has pass through power.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So when you plug it in on your dash, you can plug it into your laptop. Or two other things, be charging the battery and charging your phone and your laptop at the same time. In other words, it's got pass through power and it's got these LED screens so you know what it's doing.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then if you're a super nerd

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

like me, it'll tell you. Here, C1, C2, C3 and A.

[Jason Calacanis]

It tells you what each of the port's doing.

[Lon Harris]

Right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So I like to know I'm on max charge for my laptop, whatever. And it gives you the battery health and all that stuff. So you can see the input, how much is left, how long it takes to charge the battery. Just keeps you informed because we're all dealing with this stuff now. When I'm on a flight, a lot of times I'm on a flight, you gotta find the plug. Even if you're in business that's hard to find, the plug falls out. I don't even worry about that. I just have it with me. I just zip it out.

[Jason Calacanis]

Boom.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Or if I'm in an Uber, I'm getting driven somewhere, boom.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Anker also makes a new wall charger. Here it is. This one can flip over in any direction.

[Jason Calacanis]

So if you have a weird plug,

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

it does this interesting thing. Let me see if I can find it.

[Lon Harris]

Well, cause we all have 100 devices now. I just got the plod. I've been wearing the plod pin now.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, you got that?

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, you gotta charge that too. Like every time you get a new thing now it needs to be charged.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now this one, this little cute Anker Nano USB C. I first saw it when I was in Japan and I went to that great camera store that you went to.

[Lon Harris]

BIC camera.

[Jason Calacanis]

B I C Bic camera in Tokyo. Amazing. There's another off camera thing. Incredible many floors. Anyway, they make these with matching colors for your phone. But it has a display. I've never seen this before. There's a little button on the top and you can cycle through it. See that little indentation?

[Ben Broca]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You cycle through it and then it tells you what you're charging. Somehow it knows through a proper USB C cable that you're on a iPhone 17 Pro. Max.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah. Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

Then. So you see that fast charging, whatever. And it does fast charging, which really matters. They are fast and super fast. And you can tap it really quickly. Like if it's on your side table as you see here, turn it off. You can do the charger cooler. So if you don't want to. If you're doing it overnight, you don't need to high speed charge, which burns out batteries and does all this stuff and affects temperature. So you can go on the care version. This is getting incredibly sophisticated. And here is my favorite part. 180 Flexible for your ideal view. So depending on the plug you're using, if it's on top of the desk, on the side of the desk, whatever. Hotel plug, airplane plug, your office, you can move it to 0 degrees, 90 degrees or 180 degrees. The plug just flips around. Which you don't think is important until you get to a weird plug.

[Lon Harris]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

And what you want to pair with this is this $20 plug which is a six foot USB cable. Get it in white or black and you pair it. It's got 140 watt fast charging for your laptop. But it has dual USB C. So you plug this into something and you get two. Boom. With my daughters, I bought them each the $30 nano when we're traveling and for their rooms. And the double. We never have problems with fighting over plugs. And the battery. I gave my wife my battery. Give the kids one of those bulky batteries.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, they thought of everything.

[Jason Calacanis]

Happy.

[Lon Harris]

They thought of everything at Anchor. They figured it out. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And Plaud, you got the plot pin?

[Lon Harris]

I do. I'm not wearing it right now because we're on camera. But I have the pl.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

When do we start the partnership with Plot? Do we have a partnership with them yet?

[Lon Harris]

Monday, sir. Monday. Get ready.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Oh, has it been signed?

[Lon Harris]

It's done. It's. We're happy. We will do our. We will do our first plot segment. Stay tuned for it on Monday show.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, Monday show. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to our friends at Plot. I'm going to give away more plot.

[Lon Harris]

They're great.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Applaud. I applaud the plod. This thing is so great. Just as a preview, you wear it. You press a button. When I was skiing and almost died, I was wearing it for those three days. I turned it on at the beginning of the day and I just let it record me all day. When you skiing down the mountain, I had a great idea. I said, oh, shoot, stop at the side of the mountain. I'm going to start talking. I start talking. I start talking. I start talking.

[Jason Calacanis]

Boom.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I forgot I did it then I now have on my calendar every other day. Review your plod. Yeah, and now I review my plod and I see all the different ideas. I don't lose all my great ideas.

[Lon Harris]

The great thing is it learns the voices of everyone around you. So I've already taught it everybody. So I could just record a conversation. It'll tell me who said what when. And you could search it. It's. It's crazy.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And. Yeah, so you can search it. And then there's a bunch of template lunatics who've made templates out of there. So one of them is perfect transcript. One of them is like meeting one of them's brainstorm. So you can pick what template you want to generate it. It stores it in the cloud. Here's the great thing. You can hit the send button and I can send applaud to you at a public URL. So if we did a talk. I did this with you when I was testing in Tokyo. I had breakfast with Amanda.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I had breakfast with Will. We were going to do a talk and we just decided, hey, let's do a like a best practices for startups. And I talked with the team and then I said, hey, make this into an agenda for a podcast episode and a live talk. Then I sent that to you, Lon.

[Lon Harris]

You did.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And then you used that. So you started on second base. It didn't have to be transcribed. I didn't have to start anything. Boom. I just pressed my plot pin.

[Lon Harris]

It was like I was at the conversation you guys had with.

[Jason Calacanis]

Correct.

[Lon Harris]

Exactly.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Plot.

[Jason Calacanis]

Plot. Plod. I love plod.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Bye, everybody.

[Lon Harris]

Bye. Bye.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Monday.