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- [00:00]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, let me guess, let me guess.
- [00:02]
Alex Wilhelm
Hit me.
- [00:03]
Jason Calacanis
I have some concepts here because that ad is for Target. It's a generic ad. The copy up there was for some sort of technical memory. It went by pretty quick. But some memory technology hardware looked like discussion it was having with ChatGPT. So it's not a targeted ad, it's an ad for Target.
- [00:20]
Alex Wilhelm
Kind of keep going.
- [00:22]
Jason Calacanis
Okay, it says shop at Target. So here's what I think happened. I think this person downloaded a Chrome extension or some other third party app that was inserting ads covertly or sneakily and that they wound up conflating that with OpenAI doing it and that's why it looks so weird now. That wouldn't look weird if you were looking at a, I don't know, the Drudge Report and you saw a Target ad, you'd be like, fine, it doesn't make any sense. If it was an ad from OpenAI, their idea and is to look at the memory and what you've searched for over and over and over again and it would be hyper targeted. This week in startups is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret turns feedback noise into customer intelligence so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next. Head to interpret.com twist to book a demo and see it in action. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to www.squarespace.com twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Superhuman, get AI that works where you work. Unlock your superhuman potential@superhuman.com podcast.
- [01:36]
All right everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. Welcome back to Twist. I'm Jason Calacatnis, he's Alex Wilhelm. And there is a, I guess some big news out of OpenAI they called a code red and now there's been some discussion of advertising. Fill us in, Alex.
- [01:54]
Alex Wilhelm
All right, so there was a viral Screenshot of someone's ChatGPT conversation and Jason, I'm going to pull it up here on the screen. Take a look at this. Now if you were just looking at this without any context, you would just see a normal chat conversation with an AI. And then at the bottom there is a shop for home and groceries Target module. Everyone thought, hey, this is an advertisement. We're were talking about OpenAI adding ads for some time now. And so this was criticized pretty heavily. It turns out however, that that ad looking module.
- [02:24]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, let me guess, let me guess.
- [02:26]
Alex Wilhelm
Hit me.
- [02:26]
Jason Calacanis
I have some concepts here because that ad is For Target, it's a generic ad. The copy up there was for some sort of technical memory. It went by pretty quick. But some memory technology hardware looked like discussion it was having with ChatGPT. So it's not a targeted ad, it's an ad for Target.
- [02:44]
Alex Wilhelm
Kind of keep going.
- [02:45]
Jason Calacanis
Okay, it says shop at Target. So here's what I think happened. I think this person downloaded a Chrome extension or some other third party app that was inserting ads covertly or sneakily and that they wound up conflating that with OpenAI doing it. And that's why it looks so weird. Now. That wouldn't look weird if you were looking at a, I don't know, the Drudge Report and you saw a Target ad, you'd be like, fine, but it sticks out like a sore thumb. So I think that it doesn't make any sense. If it was an ad from OpenAI, their idea is to look at the memory and what you've searched for over and over and over again, then tell the AI. Given the history of Alex and everything he's talking about, you know, 20 different advertisements would you serve to him and how would you make the message to him that would resonate and it would be hyper targeted. Okay, so tell me what happens.
- [03:39]
Alex Wilhelm
I love the hypothesis. Not entirely wrong. I can't give you full points. I'm going to show you a headline here, Jason, that helps explain what we're seeing here.
- [03:46]
Jason Calacanis
Okay.
- [03:46]
Alex Wilhelm
This is from November 19, 2025, and it reads, OpenAI and Target partner to bring new AI powered experiences across retail. This is partially OpenAI doing work for Target and also a Target application that you can connect into inside of ChatGPT. So as far as we can tell, this little module that you and I both think is an ad, turns out is actually an invitation to connect to Target inside of ChatGPT. You can now argue that that's an advertisement, but OpenAI is taking the position that it's not.
- [04:17]
Jason Calacanis
It's an ad. It's not a targeted ad. It's in house promotion. It's an in house ad. So when you are working at the New York Times and they have some extra ad inventory, they might say, hey, check out our new podcast. Hey, you know, come to this times discussion at the. Whatever. And so those are in house ads. So this is like an in house ad? Yeah, it's somewhere in between the two. It wasn't a hacked ad.
- [04:42]
Alex Wilhelm
No. Now let, let's talk about what the company said really briefly. Nick Turley, he runs ChatGPT, says, quote, I'm seeing a lot of confusion about ads rumors in ChatGPT. There are no live tests for ads. And then also one of the companies exec said you, you know, I agree that anything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care. And we fell short. Looping back Jason to your point about Code Red, he says we've turned off this kind of suggestion while we improve the model's precision. The code red that OpenAI called was to improve ChatGPT and it pushed back things like advertising. So right now we are not seeing ads in OpenAI as we expected them to. And I think that what they tried to do here was a partnership and a connection tool and it ended up just being sloppy and kind of gross, which doesn't give me a ton of confidence, Jason, in their product decisions.
- [05:27]
Jason Calacanis
To be honest, this sounds to me like they don't have a person deputized to think about how advertising or in house ads, cross promotion should exist inside of the product. So sometimes when you're running a company there'll be like two outfielders, you know, and one person's in left field, one person's in center field and there's a shortstop and whatever the ball kind of is in between those three players and it just drops in between all three and they all look at each other. That's what happened here. And what they really need to do is say, hey, call it when it's in the air. So when somebody said, hey, we're going to do this, we have to get this Target promotion up for Christmas, we have an obligation to them. We sold it. Sam Altman said it. Somebody, you know, if left field was the tech team and center field was the UX team and the shortstop was the business team, somebody should have said, I got it. And they should have just shepherded home, full stop. Now what they're going to need to have is a partnerships coordinator who is just responsible for how this stuff looks in the end product. They're overreacting to all this. Every time you insert ads into a product on a site like X or Twitter or Reddit or Hacker News, our industry is going to over respond and get all their, you know, hand wringing, etc. It's coming folks, and it's going to be awesome. And if you want free ChatGPT and you want to burn, you know, an H100 to make your funny memes, somebody's got to pay for it and it's going to come from advertising. My belief is the 75% of the revenue at OpenAI that's coming from consumers is going to go down to, you know, at least 50% in the next two years. People are going to stop paying for these things. When ChatGPT was one of one, people paid for it. Of course, now that you have Gemini, Grok, you know, and everything in between, they're going to stop paying. Consumers are not going to pay for this. It doesn't provide so much value that an average consumer will pay for it. So then how will it be distributed? It'll be distributed by advertising because of the Code Red they called because the LLM is falling behind Gemini and other Rock and Claude or making better products and leapfrogging OpenAI. They're in a panic mode because. Because they realize they don't have a better mousetrap. They have the same mousetrap as everybody else. And everybody's mousetrap is getting 5% better every three months. And in a situation like that, they're gonna need to actually get ads on faster. If I was OpenAI, I would be working to get ads on there faster and have it ready to go. When they said they were pausing it or not focusing on it, I call B.S. i call. I think they're tripling down on it and having it ready so that the second somebody else puts ads in, I. E. Google, they'll have it ready to go. Because if they don't, man, it's going to be Netscape all over again. I brought up that analogy for the last couple of months.
- [08:15]
Alex Wilhelm
Can I ask a question about Code Reds and startups, Jason? Because we often think about startups as an idea. You build a product, you find product market fit, you grow like hell. Eventually billions of dollars appear. How often do startups need to call a Code Red like this? And is that a weakness or is that something that you should use tactically inside of a startup to ensure that you don't kind of like get too lazy?
- [08:34]
Jason Calacanis
All right, you want the candid version or you want the real version? The candid, the real or the sugar coated?
- [08:41]
Alex Wilhelm
I want you to give me the one you would tell a founder on a phone call at 3am sure.
- [08:45]
Jason Calacanis
So the way founders use this is to shock the system, figure out who on the team is committed and who's not and as a way to get results quickly. So if you call a Code Red and people are like, oh, you know, I got a wedding this weekend. Oh, you know, I'm taking my kid to little league. Oh, you know, I'm going to my aunt's funeral, and they consider all the Things in their life, like a funeral, their children, their spouse, whatever it is, all of a sudden you're like, okay, here's the people who are hardcore and here's the people who are going to their, you know, second cousin's funeral or whatever. So that is. And most people will consider this dark. There is like sort of a hardcore test implied in it. Code Red, figure out who's hardcore. Figure out who's.
- [09:30]
Alex Wilhelm
Who's not.
- [09:31]
Jason Calacanis
And you don't have to say it. It's not like you have to be like, yeah, these three people, they're not bringing it. It's like, they're not here this weekend. Okay, everybody knows who didn't show up this weekend during a Code Red. There's that piece to it. There's also the piece to it, hey, you got competitors, you could get displaced and you want to prove to the team that through deliberate hard work, everybody rowing in the right direction, we can fix a problem. And that builds confidence. So there's the confidence building aspect of this, there's the reality of competition aspect of this. And then there's the, are you actually hardcore? Are you in this like a Jedi? Or pick your analogy, that no worldly possessions, relationships are more important than the mission of this company. Now that is going to ring to a normal, well adjusted person as insane. You know, like, if AOC is hearing this and she's like, what? Like, why would the union allow this? Like this, this is like hardcore stuff. And that's what Sam's doing. He's trying to figure out who's hardcore and if this squad is actually going to get them there. We test out a ton of AI tools behind the scenes at my venture firm, Launch, and a lot of them make big claims and they can't back it up. That's why I'm so enthusiastic about one of my favorite companies, Superhuman. Their productivity suite combines three of the best tools on the market today. Grammarly, which is your personal editor, makes your writing crisp, clear, readable. It just makes you a perfect writer. Superhuman Mail, which I love. It's the best email software in the world. It's going to help you get to Inbox zero and finally, Coda, the all in one workspace. For startups, these aren't standalone apps you have to copy and paste your work into. You don't have to worry about sculpting that perfect prompt. It's just going to do what you need it to do right there while you're working. Everyone at Launch works with all of these apps and uses them daily. That helps us stay super organized. Hey, we get our chores done faster and with less mistakes.
- [11:23]
Lon Harris
So.
- [11:23]
Jason Calacanis
So get the AI that works where you work and unlock your superhuman potential. Learn more@superhuman.com podcast.
- [11:35]
Alex Wilhelm
I didn't think, Jason, on this show you were going to point out that AOC is a, is a normal and well adjusted person. But I appreciate you pointing that out for everybody.
- [11:41]
Jason Calacanis
No, no, I'm not saying she is. I'm just saying for people who like, would represent, you know, normalcy. It's so hard to talk to like two groups of people. People who do startups are in Seal.
- [11:55]
Alex Wilhelm
Team 6 extreme athletes. Like people that have a singular, singular focus people versus general focus people.
- [12:00]
Jason Calacanis
Exactly. So I'm just saying AOC or like the union might be like, wait, we're coming in on a. We're staying late on Saturday night to clean the Starbucks and make it spick and span and we're going to have like a barn raising. Or in my case, every Wednesday night I have a management team dinner and it starts at 5:30pm 10 Texas time. So at the end of our day, I bring in dinner, I bring in a nice sushi, whatever the team wants. We talk for two hours. It goes from 5:30 to 7:30. So hey, yeah, you're missing dinner with your family, your loved ones. You might give up yoga if you go to yoga after work. Whatever. It's like don't work at a startup for, or a venture firm for a maniac who says, hey, yeah, every Wednesday you got to give up that day. You got to be late. If you have something, you got to tell me why you're missing the management team meeting. It's like it should be a little intimidating for a person to like tell their boss, I'm going to go to yoga and miss the management team meeting meeting. Like there's yoga classes all the time.
- [12:51]
Alex Wilhelm
I think also if you opt into being an executive at a startup by, you know, applying for the job and getting it, you are essentially seeding some of your personal life to that role. The only thing that I would throw in here as a caveat is I do always create an exception for people with kids who are sick or whatever. But apart from that, I think that makes perfect sense.
- [13:08]
Jason Calacanis
Sick kids make sense. Yeah, yeah. And if it's a life event for a kid, like they're in the play. Like you got to go to opening night of the play.
- [13:16]
Alex Wilhelm
Oh, for sure. But like I would put the, the taking care of your children's life events and then yoga entirely on different Ends of the barbell. Jason, I have the tweet here from Michael Burry about opening I be the next Netscape. I think it's worth reading. Just so everyone has to quote. Everyone that knows anything knows this. OpenAI is the next Netscape doomed and hemorrhaging cash. Microsoft is trying to keep it afloat while keeping it off balance sheet and sucking out the ip. Not wrong. So why do they keep getting funded? The whole industry needs a $500 billion IPO ASAP. Essentially arguing, Jason, that there's been so much private capital put into this firm that if it goes down, then everyone's hosed. I think is this point, you know.
- [13:55]
Jason Calacanis
I got to think about that. If OpenAI had their valuation stumble and was forced to do a down round at 250 billion, what would happen? I think it would be a shock to the system for short, for three or four days, stock market go down 10%, 20%. And then I think what would happen is people would take out a chart. I made a chart. I had Kabir on my team make A chart of OpenAI versus the World. OpenAI versus the World in terms of market share. What people will realize is the first person up the hill takes the arrows and they will process in the. I would put this at a less than 10% chance. So. And I'm not rooting for it. Less people think when I'm being critical of OpenAI, it's like I got some axe to grind or whatever. I'm friendly with Sam. I would consider him a friend. I mean, we don't go to, like, dinner socially, but we've known each other for 20 years, so I would consider us more than just acquaintances. I think we have, like, somewhere between an acquaintance and a friendship. What I would say is there's a 10% chance that could happen. They could stumble, and there's a 90% chance they'll just keep soaring. And it could be flat or up. But the reality is first person up the hill takes the arrows. When you have 100% of the market, the only way to grow, and when you have these competitors, the only place you can go is down. Let's go through the competitive set that they're facing. Elon Musk is not a competitor you want to have. That's like having a competitor like Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger competitor. You don't want that competitor, trust me. Ask anybody who's had that competitor. It is the nightmare competitor. Then, by the way, you have Microsoft and Google and Zuckerberg as competitors. So those three Are the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Like, if you are Sam Altman, Elon, Satya, Sundar, Zuckerberg. This is like Dario. Well, yeah. And then let's add some others. You got Dario from Anthropic, but I wouldn't say Dario has the reputation, the chip stack of those individuals. Right. He's strong, but he would be peers with.
- [15:55]
Alex Wilhelm
Oh, I see your point. Yeah.
- [15:56]
Lon Harris
Okay.
- [15:57]
Alex Wilhelm
Okay.
- [15:57]
Jason Calacanis
So I'm saying those four are like truly scary because they've built trillion dollar companies. Those are the trillion dollar competitors. That's a very scary thing. Now, in what world do those four. And let's throw in anthropic. Let's put those five up as those are your five competitors. In what world do those five get less than 10% of the market?
- [16:18]
Alex Wilhelm
No world that I've ever heard of or conceived of.
- [16:20]
Jason Calacanis
Thank you. Now, let's pull up this chart we made. Everybody's seen the trending version of this chart, which showed three years ago was a stacked bar chart and it showed all the different ribbons of. And I think it went to present. So you see the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8th bar over is present day. Right. With 32% of the market being other than ChatGPT and 68% of the market being ChatGPT. Now, if you go just to 3 years ago and 2 years ago and even 18 months ago, that was a market that was either 100% or 95% OpenAI ChatGPT, today, they have 2/3 of the market. Pretty impressive, right? Having 2/3 of the market. So you have to ask yourself, incredibly impressive. Incredibly impressive. However, you yourself said, those five competitors, there's no world in which they don't get 10% each. So if 10% each would be 50% of the market. So what I just did was said, okay, let's agree on that and go to 2026, 2027, 2028 and 2029. I'm going to estimate in somewhere between 27 and 28, you will see ChatGPT go to 45 to 55%. In other words, less than 50% of the market. This is percentages and market share. What this doesn't take into account is that the pie is growing rapidly. So even though they only have less than 50% of the market, they will still have a much larger business. These two things will be true at the same time. But what it means is the market, when ChatGPT were to have a stumble or, you know, have headwinds, where they were growing slowly, it's going to be a shock to the system until people go, oh, this is bigger than anything we've ever seen before. Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna keep investing in this.
- [18:05]
Lon Harris
Yeah.
- [18:05]
Jason Calacanis
So I would say Michael Burry pointing out the Netscape analogy.
- [18:10]
Lon Harris
Yeah.
- [18:10]
Jason Calacanis
Like I did. Super valid. But it doesn't mean that Amazon, Google, Yahoo and Facebook and LinkedIn don't grow as well during that time period. And the number of users online.
- [18:20]
Alex Wilhelm
All right, Justin, here's the charge you wanted. It shows generative AI traffic share over time starting 12 months ago. Working forward to today, as you kind of intimated, we do see a decline in OpenAI's market share. And the biggest growth here is from Gemini, which has done fantastically well. And we can also see a decline in deep seeks market share, but consistent erosion of OpenAI's market leadership through a different lens.
- [18:41]
Jason Calacanis
All right, very good. From some data provider online who I will remain on. This is. This is with pace and love to all SaaS companies trying to slip in data to get customers. Your content marketing skills have no power here.
- [19:02]
Alex Wilhelm
Hey, I. You saw, you saw us like today. I took that to heart. I'm out. I'm out here shooting stuff down left and right.
- [19:07]
Jason Calacanis
This is what happens when you have a podcast. These, the PR people, content marketing people are so good now. They're like, oh my God, we have an incredible data set. We want you to talk about us on your podcast and our SaaS product. I'm like not going to fall for it, but we'll use your data.
- [19:21]
Alex Wilhelm
We have a bet here just to wrap this up, we have a bet that we put in place. On August 15, 2025, OpenAI advertising launched in chatbot. 12 months less or more. I took the under. You took the over. What's interesting though is as we look at our bet with this.
- [19:36]
Jason Calacanis
Wait, say it again. What was the, what was the date of when OpenAI would have ads?
- [19:40]
Alex Wilhelm
August 15th was the start of the bet. One year time window. Do they have ads before or after that 12 month reset? And I said it'll take less than a year for ads. You said it'll take more than a year for ads. We had this new news about the code red and so forth, so I thought for today's poly market, we should look at what the market thinks about the chances of there being ads in ChatGPT.
- [20:00]
Jason Calacanis
You should be making an argument here. I mean, as your counsel. That was an ad. It was an in house ad. But it was an ad. But it's not ads in ChatGPT.
- [20:11]
Alex Wilhelm
Intellectually, you know, Jason, the day I pick a fight with you, it's gonna be over more than $100, I'll tell you.
- [20:17]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, no, but I mean, it would be an angle shot for sure. But this is what people do in these prop bets. They're like, technically speaking, it is an ad.
- [20:25]
Alex Wilhelm
Did you see what happened to Alan Keating at the Hustler live game with Senor Silk?
- [20:29]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. He got up and left because they were being little, because they tried to angle shoot him on not turning his car during a prop bet. And he did. Did you know Squarespace is our longest running sponsor in the history of this week. In startups, you can find episodes from more than a decade ago with me singing the praises of this wonderful platform, Squarespace, and how they're going to help you build an incredible website for your new business. That kind of longevity is no accident, folks. Squarespace has been in the game for some time because there's no better, easier way or faster way to make your first website. And they're constantly upgrading and making their product better. They now have an AI powered blueprint feature which works right alongside you, helping you upgrade your design game. And it was just named one of Time magazine's best innovations of 2025. And it doesn't matter what kind of business you're in. This could be your personal branding. You could be an influencer, you could be an author. You want to have a beautiful, highly functioning website and Squarespace can help you with that. So check out squarespace.com twist for a free trial. And. And when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. That's squarespace.com twist.
- [21:37]
We're keeping the bets at thisweekinstartups.com bets. You can always find our bets. And hopefully we have the Sandeep Madra ones. Cause those are all gonna be coming due and those are for big, big money.
- [21:47]
Alex Wilhelm
All right, so here's the latest from our friends over at polymarket. And there's two ways to look at this data, Jason. Uh, there is, will there be ads in ChatGPT by December 31? The market has decided that that's not going to Happen. Currently at 4% and dropping over $400,000 in volume there. What is interesting though, is the fact that they added this March 31st timeline. Now, there's not a lot of betting yet on the extended time frame for will there be ads in ChatGPT by then the end of Q1, but still not a lot of optimism here. People really don't think it's coming. So these folks think that it's going to be at least Q2 before we see advertisements in ChatGPT. And you always ask what are the terms of resolution? And what matters is the market will resolve to. Yes, if OpenAI integrates ads into any of their major GPTs and that is made available by the date. And critically, this is what I wanted to check in on. Limited advertisement releases restricted to a specific region will qualify. So this is actually pretty, I would say generous. Like if they launch ads in like, you know, Bangladesh, then that counts.
- [22:54]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. So this is a really interesting market. I think the challenge is going to be, and this is like a game of chicken, whoever launches ads first also will take a bunch of heat for putting ads in their product. So if you add ads, the first person to put it on a website got a bunch of heat. I think it was wired putting the Zima ad up. You know, a lot of people claim different ads. First time on the Internet, putting ads into RSS feeds, putting ads into podcasts. It was all very controversial. Putting. We put ads into blogs, we had the first ad in a podcast on the autoblog podcast. People did do the hand wringing, as I've talked about earlier. But it does degrade the consumer experience marginally. So you have to give to get. So what they should say is if you allow ads, you. You get deep research, you get unlimited searches, you get pro. You get pro if you turn on ads and you just have to give something at that moment in time. So in this great game of chicken, we'll see what happens. I think if I am chatgpt, Claude or even Google, when you do a deep research, you know how it says using deep research for this? Come back in a minute, we'll send you a message. Like they'll even send you a notification on your phone. That's the perfect time to say, and your deep research is being brought to you by. And then just put a little thing brought to you by your friends at LinkedIn, Jobs, Chipotle, click here to start an UberEats order, whatever it is, you know, doordash. And you can make that based upon previous searches. So that is what I think will be the winning one. This is called an interstitial in the business. So a lot of times you'll see websites. Now you click on a link and before it lets you go to the link, it shows you a survey or like a box and then you have to hit the X or Skip those kind of interstitials, force you to just consider the advertiser for a microsecond. Or In I guess, YouTube's case, it counts down from five seconds. That's what's coming, folks. And why not? If you can get deep research for free, that's a. And it takes a couple of minutes anyway. It's kind of a win, win, win. The advertiser is not putting you out because you're getting the deep research for free. The, you know they're going to make a nickel or a penny from Claude for they're going to be able to charge for that, et cetera.
- [25:03]
Alex Wilhelm
So I also think that the consumers are willing to take such an insane ad load in general. Like if you think about the ad mix on professional sports, on Amazon's E commerce marketplace, on YouTube streaming service, people take a lot of ads and they still use the product. So a lot of money on the floor there. Next up in the docket, we are going to talk about Warner Brothers. Discovery covered it on Friday. A lot of breaking news. I asked our dear friend Lon Harris, editorial director here at Launch, to join us. Lon, where are you at?
- [25:29]
Lon Harris
I'm right here.
- [25:30]
Jason Calacanis
This is great. The deal's closed. As we. It looks like Netflix won and the deal's over. Everybody's very happy about it. The people who competed all said, hey, great competition. You won. I congratulate you on the win, and mazel tov. Good luck.
- [25:46]
Lon Harris
We've moved the Stranger Things kids into the water tower next to the Animaniacs. We're all done. Everything is. No, Alex didn't get that one. See the Animaniacs on that old cartoon show, Alex? They lived in the WB water tower in the studio. So I'm joking.
- [26:02]
Alex Wilhelm
Just old enough to recall Animaniacs, but I wasn't allowed to watch a lot of TV growing up. It was more. Jesus.
- [26:08]
Lon Harris
I'm joking that now Netflix is going to jam the Stranger Things kids in there with the Animaniacs because they're owned by the same company.
- [26:14]
Alex Wilhelm
That might not work out because President Trump has weighed in.
- [26:18]
Lon Harris
Yes, there's, there's a lot of resistance going on. I mean, obviously from the public. There was a lot of outcry. People are very worried. They're, you know, they're not going to be able to see their WB movies in theaters anymore. Their. Netflix is going to cancel theatrical distribution for all time. But it seems that some of these concerns are being shared by our wonderful, terrific, amazing, praiseworthy American president. POTUS has jumped into the ring and said that he could share some of these antitrust concerns. Here's the quote. I have a lot of respect for him. I think he's talking about Ted Sarandez. I have a lot of respect for him. He's a great person. He's done one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies and other things. But it is a big market share. There's no question about it. It could be a problem. And then another quote. They have a very big market share. And when they have Warner Brothers, that share goes up a lot. I'll be involved in the decision. That's the key part of the takeaway. He said that Trump said specifically, I'll be involved in the decision. So he's putting himself in the middle of this negotiation. A lot of people are reading that as very favorable to Paramount because, of course, the Ellison family sort of align themselves with Donald Trump. So people are saying if he's gonna play favorites, he may just throw this to the Ellisons over at Paramount. However. However, if things weren't complicated enough, there's also been some drama over the weekend between our president and the people of Paramount. He's. He's not happy with them over a 60 Minutes segment that aired. He feels like the real problem with the show, however, Wasn't the low IQ they had Marjorie Taylor Greene on 60 Minutes. Trump did not like that. So he's saying. But he's saying even the real problem with the show, however, wasn't the low IQ trader, Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was the new ownership of 60 Minutes. Paramount would allow a show like this to air. All caps. They are no better than the old ownership who just paid me millions of dollars for fake reporting about your favorite president, me. Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten worse. Oh, well, far worse things can happen. So. So now chaos. I mean, is Trump going to side with Netflix, who he's praising is a great company?
- [28:27]
Alex Wilhelm
You forgot the critical last thing for Jason to respond to Paramount. Also today, Jason launched a$30 per share all cash offer for. For the whole company, not just the part that Netflix wants to buy. So we have a hostile bid.
- [28:37]
Lon Harris
I was gonna guess that they're offering a lot more money.
- [28:41]
Jason Calacanis
Is it a lot more money? Explain to me, like, the difference in the deals, if you can.
- [28:46]
Lon Harris
It is more money.
- [28:47]
Jason Calacanis
It is more money. And they're willing to buy the cable assets.
- [28:51]
Lon Harris
Correct. Here's the quote from Ellison. He told CNBC, we are offering shareholders $17.6 billion more cash than the deal they currently have signed. Up with Netflix and we believe when they see what is currently in our offer, then that's what they'll vote for. And they're of course they're also suggesting Paramount still believes they will have an easier time getting through these regulatory hurdles than Netflix will because their businesses are more aligned and less directly competitive. Paramount plus isn't the chief rival for Netflix the way HBO Max is, so that's kind of the overall argument.
- [29:27]
Jason Calacanis
Got so much to unpack here.
- [29:28]
Lon Harris
I know to bring it all into the numbers. The Paramount offer 108.4 billion for all of WBD. The Netflix offer 82.7 billion just for the Warner Brothers film and TV studio.
- [29:42]
Alex Wilhelm
And those are both enterprise valuations.
- [29:44]
Jason Calacanis
Not all right. So number one, I'm an idiot because I j traded Warner Brothers, lost a little bit of money, then sold it to bank the loss last year so that I could offset it against some gains I had and I missed the Hail Mary and it would have been, I think a double up for me at the current share price could have 2x'd in 3 years. But I don't invest in companies for Hail Mary outcomes. But here it is. There's a Hail Mary outcome. If you're not listening to your customers and iterating based on their feedback, your startup will fail. So if you're drowning in feedback from support reviews, call calls, it's time for N terpret. Interpret is the customer intelligence platform that helps you turn random comments and feedback into actionable insights that help grow your company. Their AI system is already trained on your business and your product. It then reads all your support tickets. It reads all your reviews, call transcripts and surveys. Then their agents actually update your team in Jira, Linear, Zendesk and Slack. So this feedback doesn't just sit in some email or messaging thread, but it actually helps keep your team moving the ball forward. Find out why Canva, Notion and Perplexity are already using Interpret to stay on top of what they need to fix or build next. So if you're ready to turn feedback chaos into customer intelligence, head to interpret.com twist to book a demo and see it in action. That's e n t e-r p r e t.com twist.
- [31:11]
Putting me aside, There is a concept here of an auction and what should happen next is there should be an auction and the auction should go to and stick with me here fellas, because it's going to get complex. The highest bidder, by definition that means the person who puts the biggest number up. So we've had A bunch of this back and forth. I'm tired of this story. And this is all meaningless. It's meaningful to people who work in Hollywood who are directly impacted. I get it. But the truth is you are all rearranging a bunch of deck chairs on the Titanic.
- [31:48]
Lon Harris
Thank you.
- [31:48]
Jason Calacanis
Or, you know, insert another analogy here, because total minutes on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, dwarf, all of this nonsense. This is a bunch of rich people trading magazines 20 years ago. This is a bunch of rich Nepo babies. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I mean, when I say Nepo babies, what I mean is people I'm extremely jealous of because I had to build this goddamn chip stack. If I could have started with $100 billion, if I started with a hundred million dollar chip stack like Trump or this Ellison kid, man, I would. I would be a trillionaire.
- [32:26]
Lon Harris
You weren't playing with Oracle's bankroll anyway.
- [32:28]
Jason Calacanis
I'm extremely jealous of the chip stacks of Nepo babies. But what I will say for the Nepo baby crowd is like, sure, this is exactly what happened. The rich widows, the Nepo babies, they all love to bid on the previous shiny objects. They love to own the Atlantic. They wanna buy the Washington Post. Or actually Bezos bought that. But you get my point. They love to buy the famous restaurant, the famous movie studio. They're always looking in the rearview mirror. Why? We're all status seeking creatures. Some of us seek status by being blue collar hard workers who make it like myself. Other ones are like, I'm going to go buy my daddy's or my mommy's love by buying the thing they love. That's what's happening here, folks. I hate to get all Freudian on you.
- [33:17]
Lon Harris
I do think there's one element we're overlooking, which is Netflix is a much healthier company. In 2025, Paramount can make this deal, but they're basically just putting themselves in a very, very deep hole of debt, taking this money from, you know, sovereign wealth funds and Redpoint Capital anywhere they could get it. Whereas Netflix, I mean, they are also taking on loans and they've got banks on board to help them, but they're a company that can afford to just sort of.
- [33:49]
Exactly. So I do think that might be part of it. If you were Warner Brothers and you were looking for who can support the long term health of this TV and film studio. I do think there's an argument for Netflix over Paramount, which is just going to end up probably scrapping everything and selling it off for parts anyway.
- [34:06]
Jason Calacanis
Here's what I'm gonna say. From now on, there should be a 60 day pre vetting approval process for antitrust. This is when I'm president, Jason.
- [34:19]
I run for president.
- [34:21]
Alex Wilhelm
I like it.
- [34:21]
Jason Calacanis
I'm going to lean a con this. And what I'm going to say is, from now on, we're offering for the low, low price of $25 million, your ability to get your deals pre vetted. So if you are Google and you want to buy YouTube, if you're Adobe and you want to buy Figma, if you're Adobe and you want to sell Photoshop, if you're Google and you want to sell YouTube, we will tell you who is going to trigger an antitrust deep review and who is not. And we are going to make it easier for these transactions to go through. So you don't need breakup fees, you just need to pay the government to put people on it. And then what we'll do with the 25 million is we'll hire four independent assessors of this who will write four reports for $5 million each. We'll pull them from a pool of 50 possible intelligent people. We'll collate that, we'll share it with the public because it's got to be in the public's best interest. And Ernst and Young and McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group and whoever wants to write these reports can write really thorough reports of what they predict will be in the best interest of consumers.
- [35:34]
Lon Harris
This is a great idea. This is like it's TSA PreCheck but for M and A deals.
- [35:38]
Jason Calacanis
Yes, yes, I'm creating. Clear, clear your deal. TSA PreCheck for your deal. Now what this will do is reduce drama and then it will take out the favoritism because the decision will be based upon a collection of reports by really intelligent people and based on a very simple test what will be in the best interest of consumers and competition. That's it. That's it. And some smart person, McKinsey might say, you know what? When comparing the viewership of this to YouTube TikTok and you do the full minutes consumed by generations, they'll say, listen, when these boomers are gone and these Gen Xers are gone, it's not gonna look good for these companies. Like, this is not where the competition is. Here's where minutes are being spent. Okay? So that fixes the regulatory thing, which. And we're gonna have an auction. And the auction will have terms to it. It'll go from five bidders to best three bidders to best two. And, you know, I'm going to run an auction process. Winner wins. That's it.
- [36:37]
Alex Wilhelm
Who runs the auction in this model?
- [36:39]
Jason Calacanis
On this model, you would hire Allen & Co. Or some bank to run.
- [36:42]
Alex Wilhelm
The auction on behalf of Catalyst or whatever. Okay. You were like, we're going to have intelligent people, these five. And then you started listing off Ernst and Young and McKenzie. And that's where you lost me. I mean, that's giving consultants way too much credit. I just wanted to make a.
- [36:54]
Jason Calacanis
Meme. His consultants are actually very good at these kind of things. They. This is something where they do a great job because they can look historically and they know inside these businesses really well. Like, they understand the nuances of these existing businesses. Where McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group might be have a more challenging time, is what we do in Founderland, like, hey, we're going to create this disruptive thing called Robinhood, and it's going to, you know, destroy all these, you know, trading companies will be like, wait a second, we don't have the date on that because it doesn't exist. You know, that's where venture capitalists have an advantage. They actually have an advantage on venture capitalists and folks like private equity people do, because they understand existing assets so well, because they probably have worked with them or in them. So somebody like BCG has probably been inside of Disney doing 27 different projects in the last 10 years. They've spent. They've done 15 projects for Netflix. They understand those kind of the mechanics. So that's where they would actually do a pretty good job. And then you could have futurists, you could say, hey, I'm gonna hire Kevin Kelly, a futurist, and give him and his consulting group a million dollars to do their take on it. You can have a lot of fun with that and really do a thorough job that is. That takes away. It's Lina Khan leaning people towards this or Biden or this cobble of liberal lunatics who are biased, or it's Trump anointing people who. Or it's Obama who gave people a Netflix deal. Or this person gave Obama a $10 million podcast deal or a $20 million book deal. The Clintons got this deal. Or, you know, everybody's getting these deals from the media companies. We need to make these groups more independent, and we need to have them answer not to the executive branch, but to the people. I'm Jason Calacanis. I'm running to be your president in 2028. I hope I have your vote.
- [38:50]
Lon Harris
And I approve this.
- [38:50]
Jason Calacanis
Message.
- [38:52]
Yeah, there's only one thing left here. The final thing that's left here is President Trump's comments and trying to interpret them. He's going to comment on the failed news any chance he gets. Let's take this 60 minutes. That's just him grinding 60 minutes and, you know, working the refs, whatever, like anybody else does. But he does particularly well and he does it in a pretty comical way. Let's put aside that and let's go to just his very granular comments here, because I do think people don't give him enough credit for the things he says. And you have to get past some of your biases here or one's biases towards him that he's just riffing. He's not riffing. There's a couple things embedded here I noticed. I have a lot of respect for him, Ted Sarandos. He's a great person. He's done the greatest job. He's done one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies or other things. Praise a very influential media channel that he actually knows is going to win this. So he's giving him his praise, giving him his flowers. Why? Got to work with him. Hey, and Netflix is going to give him a documentary series when he gets out, just like they gave it to everybody.
- [40:02]
Lon Harris
Else. Well, maybe. Maybe Amazon Melania's documentary is coming to prime video. So there's going to be some bidders. There's going to be some.
- [40:08]
Jason Calacanis
Bidders. I know, but what he's doing here is he's prepping Netflix to do a.
- [40:12]
Lon Harris
Similar.
- [40:12]
Jason Calacanis
Correct. Right. He wants to keep them in the.
- [40:14]
Lon Harris
Game.
- [40:14]
Jason Calacanis
Absolutely. Very smart. But it's big market share. There's no question about it. It could be a problem. That's actually accurate if you're not considering TikTok and YouTube. It is a lot of market share of the old thing, which represents like half the number of minutes now or a third of the number of minutes and some percentage of the revenue, their share is going to go up a lot. I'll be involved in this decision. This is the key. He's not supposed to be involved in the decision. Like, that creates a legal out for anybody. Like, if he were to give it to Paramount and he were involved in it, then you've got the lawsuit of all lawsuits. Netflix can come in and say, listen, he said it right here, by the way. People aren't watching the law fair going on. But he did a similar thing where he scuttled his own case against Comey and Letecia by saying, we're gonna Go after them. I don't know what his exact quote was there, but he basically said, we're gonna do this. Now, there is a concept here that we can't have a prejudicial justice system. By saying those things, he's created the ultimate easy way to have a case dismissed. The President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, directed the prosecution of Letitia James and.
- [41:27]
Lon Harris
Comey. I mean, if you're thinking of that to that tweet that he sent or that Truth social message to Pam Bondi. There's there. There's ambiguity. Some people think that he did that accidentally and it was meant to be a direct.
- [41:40]
Jason Calacanis
Message. There are no.
- [41:42]
Alex Wilhelm
Accidents. There was further reporting law, and that it was actually a mistake. He went to send it as a.
- [41:46]
Jason Calacanis
Deal. Okay, I don't think it is. I don't belong. I'm bi for a minute, but I'll say there's no way he makes that mistake. Even if it was a mistake. He said plenty of other things about going after them. He said, before the election, I'll be your retribution. We're going to put all these Democrats in jail. And that is why those cases recently got canceled. Like it's the easiest out in the world, or it's among the reasons these things got canceled or got canceled because he put it in a lawyer without having them approved properly or.
- [42:14]
Alex Wilhelm
Whatever. So, Lindsey.
- [42:15]
Jason Calacanis
Halligan. Yeah, it's all prejudicial kind of situation. I think he's doing that on purpose here. I think he just wants this thing to be over. He's saying he's going to be involved in it. That basically makes it like, okay, we just got to give this to Netflix, get this thing done. Boom, it's done. It's going to Netflix. There is a family, the Ellison family, who bought from the other family. That private transaction. That family got to make that decision because they were the primary shareholders. In this case, the primary shareholders are not a family. It's the public and pension funds, etc. Which makes it super easy. Highest bidder, best offer. And that's what this is going to go to. Now, if the Ellisons have made the best offer, then this could get reconsidered, I guess. I don't know if this is.
- [43:05]
Lon Harris
Locked up, but the board opted to go for Netflix. But now Ellison is trying to basically do a hostile takeover, go directly to the shareholders. You're getting screwed. You should go with my deal instead, and we will see what.
- [43:19]
Jason Calacanis
Happens. The other possibility is Netflix made this offer. They got that $5.8 billion fee for the breakup. And maybe they realized, like, hey, okay, I guess we're not going to get through antitrust, or maybe it's a chance we're not going to get through this antitrust. And so, yeah, let him outbid himself and overpay for the.
- [43:36]
Lon Harris
Asset. There was a Puck News piece that suggested that this is all elaborate game theory by Netflix. They knew they were going to get rejected. They didn't think they were going to make the acquisition go through. But you tie up your main rival in the streaming marketplace for a year and a half, two years, while every distraction. They can't get acquired by anyone else. They can't acquire anyone.
- [43:59]
Jason Calacanis
Else.
- [43:59]
Lon Harris
Yes. You're sort of using them out for a year to you continue growing, expanding. There are people in Hollywood who think that's what's going on. And this is just Netflix throwing a wrench in the.
- [44:11]
Jason Calacanis
Work. And if you happen to get it.
- [44:12]
Lon Harris
Great. Win, win. Yeah. You either pick up your chief rival or you tie them up for two years, distracting everybody while you.
- [44:19]
Alex Wilhelm
Grow. Just a clarification. Netflix pays the $5.8 billion if the deal falls.
- [44:24]
Jason Calacanis
Apart. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, so they may at some point want to, like, not have to deal with that. So they. In other words, in the game theory, they create chaos. They get their top competitor.
- [44:36]
Lon Harris
Distracted.
- [44:37]
Jason Calacanis
Exactly. And if the other party wins, they don't have to pay the breakup.
- [44:41]
Lon Harris
Fee. And if they win, they assume they soak up HBO Max, their chief rival. So it's win.
- [44:46]
Jason Calacanis
Win. That's all they want. They want HBO Max and they want the DC characters. That's. That's my theory. That's the only.
- [44:51]
Lon Harris
Thing. Well, Harry Potter, there's a lot. There's a lot.
- [44:53]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. I mean, Harry Potter's nice, I.
- [44:55]
Alex Wilhelm
Guess.
- [44:55]
Lon Harris
Yeah. And they're making that new HBO show, the Lone.
- [44:58]
Alex Wilhelm
Sopranos. You know, it's a lot of.
- [45:00]
Jason Calacanis
Stuff. There's. Tess Arandos would like that. They did model. You could tell me if I'm wrong or not. Lon. Did they not model Netflix when they first went out as HBO.
- [45:10]
Lon Harris
Prestige? Netflix would cite Casey Boy's stuff at HBO as, like, the North Star. And you could tell when you look at left, like, House of Cards, that initial pack of shows, Ozark, they were obviously basing it on prestige TV from hbo. Places like amc, you know, that that was what they were aiming.
- [45:28]
Alex Wilhelm
For. How did it become. Is that cake? Like, have you seen that show when they have to guess if the thing is cake or.
- [45:33]
Lon Harris
Not? How do we go? They figured out and this is. They brought in Bella Bajaria who now runs content for. For Netflix. And she was like the real sort of figurehead behind this realization. A lot of people are putting on Netflix in the background while they're on their phone, while they're cleaning, while. While they're doing other stuff. And that a lot of the stuff that does the best on Netflix is that kind of background viewing. It doesn't. Not everything has to be squid game. Some things people just like to kind of leave on while they're doing other stuff. It's very low impact. And those are a lot of the biggest shows. Emily in Paris, Ginny in Georgia, even like Bridgerton. It's like pretty to look at. It's not hard to follow. You can check in and out. And I noticed too, a lot of Netflix original movies and even Stranger Things started doing this. They signpost constantly in the. So every time they get somewhere new, they're like, well, here we are, the state fair where we said we had to go investigate. That clue you found because they know you're kind of checking in and.
- [46:28]
Jason Calacanis
Out you're on is because of dual screen. Because of two screen viewing. People playing chess, which I find myself.
- [46:34]
Lon Harris
Doing. A chess alert comes scrolling.
- [46:36]
Jason Calacanis
TikTok. I forget to pause. And then I was doing this with Landman last night. I was taking a bath, my back was hurting. I'm watching Landman and I. And I get a chess alert and I move over and I'm like, oh my God, what am I doing? This is such a great performance happening in this latest episode of Landman with that old guy, Sam Elliott. And I'm like, I'm missing the Sam Elliott performance of the season. So I basically pulled it back 10 minutes, put my notifications off. I was like, I need to actually soak this in, so to.
- [47:03]
Lon Harris
Speak. There's your explanation for like, that's why so much Netflix content is that kind of is it cakes.
- [47:09]
Jason Calacanis
Stop. So annoying. Yeah. This is why I think they should have gotten cnn because you would keep. If you had cnn, they would have it running constantly. They just don't want to touch politics, news and.
- [47:21]
Lon Harris
Politics. I think especially because the international. So much of their viewing is overseas. All these different markets. I think they don't want to have to worry about customizing and individualizing that content for all.
- [47:32]
Jason Calacanis
These. That's already done though. So what they should do is they should figure out who was running CNN back in the day when it was just straight reporting and they didn't have Opinion stuff and roundtables. If they went to straight reportage. Hey, we're here in Baghdad. Things are blowing.
- [47:48]
Lon Harris
Up. BBC has changed a lot. But this used to be BBC too. In like the 90s when you'd watch BBC news, it was very like, here's an anchor and here's the news and here's another news story. And it was very matter of.
- [48:00]
Jason Calacanis
Fact. Yeah, there was nobody with an.
- [48:02]
Alex Wilhelm
Opinion. It's expensive to have. You need to have Middle east bureaus and you have a bureau in Beirut and you need to have stringers and camera.
- [48:08]
Jason Calacanis
Crews. But you don't need to give Anderson Cooper 25.
- [48:12]
Lon Harris
Million. That's true. Or keep sending Stanley Tucci to Italy to wander around for a few.
- [48:17]
Jason Calacanis
Months. Well, no, but let's call it what it is. I think actually sometimes you got to zig where people. You got to zig and zag here. When I am running Disney, I'll buy cnn or I'll launch a news network.
- [48:29]
Alex Wilhelm
Presidency. First studio ahead. First.
- [48:31]
Jason Calacanis
Yes. I'm going to do two jobs. Elon's got two.
- [48:33]
Lon Harris
Jobs. You will own ABC News studio when you have.
- [48:36]
Alex Wilhelm
Disney.
- [48:37]
Jason Calacanis
Perfect. I will make ABC News. ABC News will be ABC and ABC and will have just reportage. Anybody has a personality. GTA.
- [48:47]
Lon Harris
Fo. You could have a little personality. Yeah. We don't want to hear your opinion. So you just want to hear.
- [48:53]
Jason Calacanis
The. The most personality allow would be Alex. And you got to be under Alex in personality. I don't want.
- [48:59]
Alex Wilhelm
Any. I'm the Mendoza line for.
- [49:01]
Jason Calacanis
Commentary. Yes, Yes. I would like them to have less personality, Alex, as a.
- [49:07]
Lon Harris
Rule. Oh, man. Van Jones, you're out the door, man.
- [49:10]
Jason Calacanis
Sorry. No Van Jones. Forget.
- [49:12]
Lon Harris
It. Van Jones is first guy out.
- [49:14]
Jason Calacanis
Enough. He's. He's got insights. He's reconsidered things. I don't want anybody. Your opinion is incredible. For you to write down in your journal during your morning notes, over coffee. And at night you can namaste, have your chamomile tea and write it down in your journal as well. When you're on abcn, your job is to report a.
- [49:35]
Lon Harris
Fact. I'm.
- [49:35]
Jason Calacanis
Sorry. And if the fact changes, you report that fact. If anybody doesn't. And by the way, you're all getting paid the same goddamn salary. Here's the salary structure. It's $150,000 a year. Bust your ass. And every year, you hear, you get 6% more and that's it. If you don't like it, GTFO.
- [49:54]
Lon Harris
Miss now is just down the.
- [49:56]
Jason Calacanis
Street. Go to Ms. Now. But can you imagine how amazing would be to turn on news and just have them tell you what's.
- [50:04]
Lon Harris
Happening? And they. It's weird that every time a new person goes in to run a place like CNN or CBS News, they always say, this is the plan. Like, we're going to get away from all this commentary and talking heads arguing, and we're going to get back to more like, practical. Here's what's going on. Current events, news you could use. And then it never quite seems to happen. It always just becomes a different person's opinionated.
- [50:28]
Alex Wilhelm
Perspective. In the same way, Lon, that I think Netflix ends up at. Is this cake? I think CNN's obvious, you know, point of denouement is next up on our CNN panel. Right. It's because it's easy, it's cheap, there's no prep.
- [50:42]
Lon Harris
Required. Their new show is Tony Shalhoub traveling around the world tasting bread. This is.
- [50:47]
Alex Wilhelm
True. Well, I mean, that's why we have.
- [50:49]
Jason Calacanis
Hgt. No, no, but Alex is right. If you get four talking heads with different opinions, you have them scream at each other. It used to get ratings. It was a good ratings playbook, and it was theoretically cheaper until Megan, Kelly, Tucker, Anderson Cooper. These people became expensive. These people came. $25 million a year. I mean, Anderson Cooper, 20 million a year. Wolf Blitzer was 15. Jake Tapper, 8 million. I just asked producer Claude. No, I think they've all been run.
- [51:20]
Lon Harris
Down. He's not.
- [51:20]
Jason Calacanis
Working. John King, Aaron Burnett, 6 million. Aaron Burnett, 6.
- [51:24]
Lon Harris
Million. Yeah, she's.
- [51:26]
Jason Calacanis
Famous.
- [51:28]
How about we get, like, I don't know, the next Aaron Burnett, and if you're on air, you get paid $150,000 a year and you're on for four minutes, you tell us the facts, and then you hand it off to the next person. Tell us the.
- [51:42]
Alex Wilhelm
Facts. Yeah, no, it sounds.
- [51:43]
Jason Calacanis
Good. Lon, what are you watching? What's your favorite streamer show right.
- [51:46]
Lon Harris
Now? Oh, wow. Tough, Tough choice. You know, I was. I've been enjoying the IT show on hbo. Max, welcome to Derry. But I don't know, I feel like they might have. They might have lost me this week. It went pretty far outside the parameters. But I am loving Pluribus on Apple tv, the new Vince.
- [52:02]
Jason Calacanis
Gilligan. Well, yeah, in the new year, I asked Lon on the Friday show to come on, and we're going to do a little thing at the end of the show where we go off duty and we're going to give you our takes on great media things for your weekend. And Pluribus is My pick as well. This. Have you watched this now yet, Alex? Or you.
- [52:18]
Alex Wilhelm
Have. No, no, but watch tv. No. I keep hearing about Pluribus and so I'm actually to hear Lawn recommended as.
- [52:24]
Lon Harris
Well.
- [52:24]
Alex Wilhelm
Type.
- [52:25]
Lon Harris
Right. Jason, do you think that it is a metaphor for AI? Because that's what a lot of.
- [52:29]
Jason Calacanis
People. I think it is simultaneously. I know they said it isn't. It is a metaphor for AI the.
- [52:35]
Lon Harris
Singularity.
- [52:35]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. Socialism.
- [52:38]
Democracy and the end of the American empire. All of these things.
- [52:42]
Lon Harris
Wow. Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot going on. It's a really interesting perspective. But once I started thinking about is this an allegory for AI? A lot of stuff fits. Like the kind of the way that the humans talk to one another now has a very chatgpt kind of sensitive, logical, sycophantic. Right. They're always like, oh, Carol, we love you so much. That's such a great.
- [53:04]
Jason Calacanis
Idea. That's a great idea. Let's workshop it. Yeah. I mean, it's. It's always the same, you know, AI It's AI.
- [53:10]
Lon Harris
Slop. Right. The world has become a form of AI Slop in a way.
- [53:14]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. It is AI Slop. And like one of the characters is living in the ultimate AI Slop. Right. In Vegas is unbelievable. But I would say the protagonist to me represents America. I have a slightly different. I think it represents personal freedom, American exceptionalism, self determinism, how messy it is. And then the collective represents.
- [53:37]
Lon Harris
Socialism. I think it's also. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think in a lot of ways it's just about that feeling of feeling alone. The entire world is on board with something and you personally feel like.
- [53:48]
Jason Calacanis
You'Re not a part of it. I love that too. The rugged individualism of like, hey, I still want to read a book. I want to make my own.
- [53:55]
Lon Harris
Breakfast. Yeah. But even in a way, like the feeling of being depressed or that feeling of being isolated where like the whole world is sort of feel. Right. Like it's a very human thing. And I think you could almost apply it to any scenario. It's just about that emotional state of feeling.
- [54:11]
Jason Calacanis
Alienated. If they stick the landing in the next three weeks, I think this is going to be one of the. The top five shows of the new.
- [54:16]
Lon Harris
Century. It's been. It's been spectacular and it's coming back. We already know it's coming back for season.
- [54:20]
Jason Calacanis
Two. Well, it has to come back. I mean, even if they fumbled it, like lost it in the end, but it. It's kind of like a better version of Lost in some ways. It's a more intellectually rigorous version of Lost, where Lost, they were like, yeah, let's just. Just do something weird. And they're like, what? It's a.
- [54:36]
Alex Wilhelm
Hit. We thought we were going to get cancelled. Like everything.
- [54:38]
Jason Calacanis
Else. They know the ending of this. This is going to be a four series, five series max.
- [54:43]
Lon Harris
Arc. Yeah. I feel like Gilligan has an idea of where he's.
- [54:46]
Jason Calacanis
Going. Oh, he does. He's not winging it. No, no. I think last thing I wanted to talk about here that I think is kind of interesting is that a PR guru who I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.
- [55:01]
But she wrote the Go Direct manifesto, which I think actually I get credit for, but. Okay. I think she probably rewrote my ideas. I don't know when her. Let's see, when this manifesto came out about Going direct, because. Yeah, 24. Yeah. No, she gets no credit for that. Sorry. I created that Going Direct. Okay, but whatever. But explain to us what's going on here. A PR person, this. I do find this fascinating. A PR person is starting a venture firm. That's really.
- [55:31]
Alex Wilhelm
Fascinating. Lulu worked at a large number of large technology companies in a comms role. She eventually left that, did a lot of talking in public, founded her own firm called Rostra, which is named after a part of Rome where they stood on old bits of ships and talked to the public. And her big pitch has been go Direct. Don't use intermediaries. Now, what she has done, as Jason just alluded to, is put together a firm, a $40 million vehicle, to go along with that, essentially, as far as I can tell, investing in the companies that she works with. And she told Axios the quote, storytelling is alpha investing. Compliments rosters work because narrative and capital both compound. And then she says this thing, which I've heard from a lot of other people we'll talk about in just a second. Right now it's easier than ever to build new things and harder than ever to get people to care. So her argument is that building stuff a little bit easier than it was. You can code faster. I don't know, vibe, code whatever you.
- [56:22]
Jason Calacanis
Want. No, you definitely build startups, but telling the story is like a big part of it.
- [56:27]
Alex Wilhelm
Right? Yeah. So I was thinking about this story and I know a couple of other examples that come right to mind. First one is Day One Ventures. This is founded by Masha Boucher. Actually, I know her back from my San Francisco days. And she has put together a firm from her comms practice. So she runs her own venture firm and has raised not just one, but two, but three funds. Jason. Each of increasing size 20 million 52 and then 150. Amazing. Yeah. She was in true bill, at $15 million valuation. Sold the rocket for 1.3. So some success there. There's another firm, VSC Ventures. This is part of the. An arm of VSC, another comms shop. And they also, again, stress the importance of getting attention for products. So not the first, not the second, but the third time we've seen this trend of essentially, service providers building venture capital funds. I like.
- [57:16]
Jason Calacanis
It. It's somewhat interesting. I think it speaks to what we saw in journalism when a bunch of journalists, and specifically a bunch of TechCrunch journalists, your alma mater, were like, wait, journalism is dying. There's no more competition for our services, and this pays better. And it's essentially the same job, which I think most people would agree. I was the pioneer in that because I was the first to do it after Michael Moritz. So it was Michael Moritz, me. Oh, Malik, M.G. siegler. Yeah, it was a good cohort. And that job is also trying to figure out what. What the reality or the story is. In the PR job, it's how to spin the story to get attention or how to massage the story or how to scale telling the story, all that kind of stuff. If you. I don't like pr, like PR people generally, because it's just, you know, exhausting to deal with them. That being said, having one in the building who's really good, that makes sense to.
- [58:14]
Alex Wilhelm
Me. It makes a lot of sense to me. I have a lot of friends that work in and around the comms industry, and if I was ever in trouble, I know that they're like, they're my first call because they've been through it, man. They just know how to handle a crisis. They also, back to your point earlier on the show about being able to do a code red. You know, who's really good at fire.
- [58:31]
Jason Calacanis
Drills? Comms people, the good ones. But this is the problem. As a former journalist, you became friends with PR people. This is always the trap. Like, the PR people know how to ingratiate themselves and spend time with journalists, et cetera. When I ran all of our pubs, we wouldn't talk to journalists. I ban the Engadget reporters. Do not. I'm sorry, from talking to PR people. Yeah, just do not talk to PR people. Just go to the subjects. Talk to them directly. If PR people call you and want to talk to you. Say, we don't talk to PR people. Same thing I do here at this Week in Startups. All in PR people email us. We have a little sentence. Thank you so much for your interest. We don't take pitches. Please remove us from your list. NPR people hate me, but they respect me because they know, like, and then I would always have, like, clever people. Well, how do people do get on the show? I say we pick them. How do you pick them? Why? I pick what I think is interesting. Oh, okay. Well, I'd love to tell you why this is interesting. Like, oh, no, we don't take.
- [59:20]
Alex Wilhelm
Pitches. I don't want you to tell me what I think is.
- [59:23]
Lon Harris
Interesting.
- [59:23]
Alex Wilhelm
My. My job is to be.
- [59:25]
Jason Calacanis
Informed. Yeah. And I made Molly. And I think I instructed you to do the same thing with this Week in Startups. I hope I did at some point. Like, just use this snippet. I want them to think there's no way to get on the show. And it's, like, a little uncomfortable at first to write that. I don't know if you found it.
- [59:41]
Alex Wilhelm
Uncomfortable. I've had to say it on a lot of phone calls. Like, people like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, how you doing? I'm like, oh, good. They're like, hey, we got a guy. When I first joined, everyone thought that I joined all in. And so they're like, can we get on the show? And I'm like, I. I'm not on.
- [59:54]
Jason Calacanis
That. I don't even.
- [59:54]
Alex Wilhelm
Know. I'm sure maybe you can, but not. Not through me. And eventually people figured it out, and then they stopped trying because I kept saying things like, no, and we don't do that. And also, you don't. We don't want to fake interest in somebody. You know, Like, I don't want to have someone come on the show and be like, I'm not compelled by this, Jason. Let's talk to them for 15.
- [60:13]
Jason Calacanis
Minutes. The only thing that can happen is sometimes, like, somebody's like, I do Michael Dell's book. And I'm like, well, Michael Dell's a hero. Whatever. And I'm like, yeah, just tell Michael to reach out. And they're like, okay, well, he doesn't do that. I'm like, and then I just said, okay. And they're like, okay, so he's gonna be on the show. I'm like, no, I just told you, if Michael Dell wants to come on the program, tell him to ping me. He knows how to get me. And, like, of course. Like, what are we doing here? Like, if you're pitching me a friend of mine or somebody who's been on the show, like.
- [60:42]
You didn't even know they've been on the show or that we have a relationship, like, what are you doing? PR people. PR people are just. 90% of them are just dumb. They're just low IQ. 90%.
- [60:53]
Alex is like.
- [60:54]
Alex Wilhelm
Sure. Well, I mean, I don't know, what am I going to do, interrogate that and argue that 75. I mean, no matter what, I look like an asshole. I want to point out though that everything you're saying underscores Lulu's philosophy. She thinks that you should go around intermediaries, be they PR people or.
- [61:09]
Jason Calacanis
She cribbed my Go Direct.
- [61:11]
Alex Wilhelm
Strategy. Other notable venture capital firms started by non traditional folks, Harry Stebbins and 20 VC invested in Poolside emerge.dev couple of Twist 500 companies. And then there's a lot of other smaller ones that I found. So wpp, the big advertising.
- [61:25]
Jason Calacanis
Conglomerate. Yeah, that's a core corporate. It's, it's adjacent. But that's like a corporate VC.
- [61:29]
Alex Wilhelm
Arm. Yeah, yeah.
- [61:30]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. But corporate VC arm isn't like, I'm leaving pr PR sucks or I'm leaving this and going to that. But yeah, it's.
- [61:36]
Alex Wilhelm
Adjacent. It's adjacent. I found some like breadcrumbs about other PR firms starting firms starting funds that didn't really kind of make it and the websites weren't up anymore. And then if you want to go further afield to non traditional venture capital firm founders, there's a number of celebrities. Serena Williams, Ashton Kutcher, Snoop Dogg and Kevin Durant come to.
- [61:54]
Jason Calacanis
Mind. Yeah, that's another angle to get into VC is to use a chain smokers to use your celebrity to get access to deals and then use your platform to then go promote stuff. And it can work. It's worked out for Serena, obviously, and Ashton. All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in to this week in startups. We'll be back on Wednesday. Bye bye. All right, everybody. Tomorrow on the show, Alex will interview on Tuesday a couple of Twist 500 companies coming at you. And Wednesday I'll be back for the news roundtable. Bye bye.