How AI splits startups into winners and losers | E2322

All right, everybody. Welcome back. It's This Week in Startups with me again, my guy, Lon Harris. We've got two amazing guests today. We're going to get to them in a moment. We've got a ro.co wait bet that's coming at the end of the show with my brother Jamie and Lon, and lots of news. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Lightfield, the AI-native CRM that updates itself so your team never has to. Try it for free at lightfield.app.

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Your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code twist. And DigitalOcean. Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. The first thing I want to get to is markets, Lon. We've had a, a lot of market activity. Markets hit an all-time high, as many people know. But what has been surprising is after this hedge fund blew up, um, Situational Awareness, he had a lot of shorts on SaaS companies.

Correct.

And SaaS companies have been taken to the woodshed, right? We, we just saw Airtable get sold. I think we talked about that already on Wednesday's show. But companies that have embraced AI and gone AI first have had a little bit of a turnaround here. And, uh, it's a mixed bag. But if you look at, uh, and I want to just go through 3 people who reported earnings: Airbnb, Figma, and then Twilio. Now I own all of these, I believe, and I bought them all during like the COVID right after COVID when I started JTrading, I think in 2023. So I think I'm like massively up on all of them. But let's do this rapid fire. We'll get through these 3 important companies and what we can learn from them by, uh, their AI— embracing of AI or not.

All right, so if we'll start off with, uh, design software Figma, down about 77% from its high of $122 set shortly after last year's public offering. It's at about $23.81 right now. Co-founder and CEO Dylan Fields actually given up around $46 million in stock awards which he was set to receive back in July. He in hopes of boosting investor confidence. Here's his quote: Dilution is something that I feel, just like our shareholders feel, given that this is an investment period right now, that felt like the thing that made sense to do. Uh, for his part, Field posted on X that he thinks things are going generally well. He points to $370 million in revenue in Q2, 48% year-over-year revenue growth rate. It's their third straight quarter, Jason, of accelerated growth for Figma. You just bought in a big J trade on Figma only about a month ago after getting into a discussion about the health of the company with Dylan Field on X. Yeah.

What did I get in? What is the price I got in? So I got in at $22. So I'm basically at par right now. I bought 4,500 shares. And, you know, when I see a founder being a little bit, chippy, a little bit with something to prove, And founder-led companies, especially when they're public, they have founder-led authority. For Figma, him giving up a huge stock grant brings up a bigger issue, which is stock-based compensation.

Mm-hmm.

And a lot of companies, Lan, have gotten into giving huge amounts of stock-based compensation a year, 1, 2, 3%. If you are a shareholder and the company's not doing well, and the management team is giving out, you know, 1, 2, 3% of the company every year, I think Snap was kind of in this with a lot of stock-based comp going on, you're— and, and they don't put it into their books, so you don't take it as an expense. They kind of put it off the books. And this has made, you know, sophisticated investors— Bill Gurley talks about it a lot, but it's a tough thing to bring up because you want people to be incented by stock. But if the company's not doing well and you're taking out 1% or 2% or 3% of the company every year, you're diluting over 5 years. 15, 20% of the company while the stock is sideways, that gets people's Irish up. And then shareholders are like, I don't want to be involved in this company because they're just taking and taking and not performing. So I think what Dylan did here with Figma saying, hey, I'm not going to take— I think it's like a $50 million grant. He probably owns 20, 30% of the company. I'm taking a guess here. Um, that would be a high number for a publicly traded company, but what does he need another $50 million? He's already. You know, if he owns 10% of the company, even he's got a billion plus, it's an $11 billion market cap company. So this is signaling, uh, which is, hey, I'm not going to try to make an extra 2, 3, 4, 5% on my net worth. I'm going to give that back to the shareholders and I'm going to show you how great this company is. Now, of course, they're up against Claude Design. They're up against Gemini. They're up against Lovable. They're up against some serious competition. But I like a founder-led company. I think the stock will be trading at 2x in 3 years. That's my guess. Right now, if they're making $350 a quarter, I think is what you said, puts them at $1.4 billion. Uh, that means they're trading at like 9 times sales, uh, or something in that range, which is pretty high multiple. We'll see what the earnings multiple is over time. Uh, but I believe in the founder. I think he understands designers and design. I don't think design's going away. I think we're just gonna get more great design. Now if we go to the next company, which is Twilio, this story is also pretty fascinating. People had given this company up for dead, no longer founder-led, but they're up 30% today. So give us a story here.

Thanks to our friends at Perplexity, by the way, for helping us out with this. Twilio shares are surging up to 31% to near 52-week highs after the company delivered a blowout Q2 2026 report and sharply raised full-year guidance. Revenue of a do— uh, revenue of $1.5 billion, top estimates, and grew 22% year over year. That's 17% organic, while adjusted EPS of $1.47 beat consensus by over 11%, driven by record free cash flow of $352.6 million and accelerating organic growth.

Yeah, so it's becoming a money printing machine. They have free cash flow. That means they could buy their stock back or they could acquire companies. But they have started to do a conversational layer, uh, and they're doing AI. So as people remember, Twilio was an API. If you, uh, call an Uber and you get a text message or an in-app message, uh, or you want to, um, go shopping somewhere and you get SMS messages, email messages, they did all that. So it's like AWS for messaging. And so everybody plugs their application into that, and people were spending millions of dollars a year with this. Now they're adding agents and AI that will take live conversations, um, and then have these conversations between agents sending messages to each other, which is something that people are going to want to have, and routing, you know, customer support, et cetera. So I think that they, uh, are turning this around because they have embraced AI fully. And that's really what all these SaaS companies need to do if they want to survive. And the per-seat model was under attack, Lon, and Twilio never had that. They were always based on consumption. How many messages are you going to send? So it was interesting to see that company turn around.

Yeah.

Dylan owns 9% of the company, so he's got $1 billion there in equity.

By the by, I'm going to share my screen. Uh, you were asking for companies that have the largest percentage of, uh, stock-based compensation. They note that it's difficult to say this. Now, we don't have a, a totally open kimono for all of these private companies, but based on what we do know, S-1 filings, uh, OpenAI seems to be leading with about $6 billion in estimated annual stock-based compensation, followed by SpaceX/XAI with about $2.8 billion. And then they're guesstimating that Stripe, Databricks, and Anthropic would follow pretty close behind. In terms of public companies, we've got Alphabet leading the way, $25 billion in annual stock-based comp, then Meta $20.4 billion, then Amazon $19.5 billion, and then NVIDIA with $16.2 billion.

So these are ranked, just so you know, um, by the total amount of stock-based comp, which, you know, those are very big companies. The way, um, you know, sophisticated investors might look at it is what is it as a percentage of revenue. And if you look at Snowflake, that's 35%, uh, I think their stock-based comp is at 35% of their revenue number. And that's when people get a little tweaked is when, you know, this gets to be 20%, 30% of revenue. So just small in-the-weeds observation. Let's go on to Airbnb. This stock has been, uh, much maligned, um, and everybody thought Airbnb was going to be this rocket ship. Yeah, yeah. And that kind of hasn't happened. If you were to look at the Airbnb, say, 5-year chart, and, um, you know, there's a lot of excitement about it because it's such a great product. Today they're trading at $140. So if you put money into this company, it's been sideways forever. But, uh, they did have a big rebound. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that in today's results.

Uh, Airbnb CEO, uh, Brian Chesky says AI is improving every part of their business. He's ready to spend more on tokens. Chesky said the gains are measurable. AI is helping Airbnb attract more bookings, making it easier for hosts, lowering customer service costs, The travel and booking company reported Q2 earnings that beat expectations and raised full-year guidance. Thanks to CNBC for that quick update.

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How?

Well, their earnings could surge if they can lower costs and maybe find more customers. They do have a challenge, I think, which is, um, some people have, um, there's a bit of a war. Yell on— I don't know, last time you did an Airbnb, but recently the novelty— you did one recently.

I was in Rome. When I was in Rome, we stayed at an Airbnb.

Uh, let's see if this, uh, came up. The number of instructions and the tension between Airbnb hosts and their annoyance at the customer staying in their homes or their properties in some case. This has like turned a corner where they're just, it feels like, angry at the customer base. Yes.

I did not— in Rome, Giulia and Federica, my hosts, lovely. They were wonderful. I had no tension at all. But when I moved to Austin, I was staying at Airbnbs until I could fully move in and my furniture arrived and I could move into my new house. So I was in 2 or 3 different Airbnbs and this was a chronic problem where there was a lot of hostility coming at me. And there were so many rules, like trash goes here and do this and turn this off and don't go in here and don't touch this and go here and park here, but not right there, park next to that. By the trash can, and I had a neighbor even yelling at me that I parked in the wrong place, even though I thought I had followed the instructions. And at a certain point, I do agree, you're like, oh, I should have just stayed at a hotel. Hotels don't give you any flack. There's no agita. You just get in, you put your stuff down. I do feel like some of these Airbnbs, it's becoming a little bit fraud.

Yeah, and I think they need to bifurcate it. Like, they need to have the hosts who understand service and go through service training Will Garra— uh, Garraudo, who wrote, uh, Unreasonable Hospitality. I had him on the program.

Oh yeah, I do remember that. I'll look— take a look at it.

He's awesome. But they need to bucket— I— this is what I would do if I was Brian. I would put people through host training, buy them the book Unreasonable Hospitality, and say, if you are in this category—

Will Goddard. Will Goddard.

Will Goddard. And the movie The Bear— the TV show The Bear is based upon his unreasonable hospitality insights in large part. And he actually, I think, was a producer, and he— I think he appears on one of the episodes, like, as like he's at dinner with the other restaurateurs. Anyway, um, they need—

yes, he's—

to have certification and a star for delightful hosts who want to service you. I had two experiences over the summer. My wife likes to stay in Airbnbs because she wants everybody in the kitchen and in the living room together. I would have preferred to stay at some hotels anyway, um, because I like the full-service nature of them. We had a serious problem in, um, Paris. People kept saying the hotel— the Airbnbs had air conditioning, and then the air conditioner was like jimmy-rigged. It was just, here's an air conditioner, the doors are open out, you know, out the windows, and you've got hot air coming in and this little hose going out. You know, charming of them to try to fix the air conditioning problem, but it didn't work. So now I'm back and forth with the guy that like— yeah, he's like, listen, I give him a lot of credit. He was like, if you want to leave, I'll just charge you for the night you stay. I understand. That was good.

That's nice. Yeah.

Then I was like, yeah, but that's going to be like a big inconvenience. And then the elevator's broken. I said, maybe we should just work out a discount. Gave me a 10% discount. I don't even need the discount, but I thought that was a nice—

nice room to meet you halfway. They have the— they already have the like Superhost concept, so I feel like it's a natural, like, well, those people should have a little background in, in hosting and hospitality. Let me, before we move on, I do wanna get to our guest Harmonic.

All right.

I do wanna go back to Harmonic because I got exactly what we were looking for. Let me just share my screen here again one more time.

And Harmonic, for people know, is like just this huge database of startup knowledge and company knowledge. It's incredible.

It's a great, it, you just, you could prompt it just like you would an LLM, but it's got incredibly deep knowledge about all these startups. So here we go. The full spectrum of— here is a ranking of companies based on SBC as a percentage of revenue. Uh, Ionic number 1, 240%. OpenAI about 46%. Snowflake, which we mentioned before, 35%. JFrog 28%. Atlassian 25%. And you could see the rest of the list from there. Took just a moment to pull up. Thanks to our friends at Harmonic.

You know, when things are going well, so in those private companies, and what I love about this data from Harmonic, Um, and thank, thank you to them for supporting the show. What I love about this data is you got private companies and you got public companies in there. Now, if you're in a private company, you want— the VCs want there to be a lot of stock-based comp. Why? You want the best talent. You don't want them to leave. And so, yeah, you want to be super generous with stock-based compensation. And the revenue is, you know, just starting to kick up. So as a percentage of revenue, nobody really cares. It's like let's just make this thing grow. As long as you don't dilute the investors massively, it's all good. But in a public trading company, now you've got institutions owning it and they're looking at it and they've got a menu of choices, Lon, and they're pulling up Harmonic and they're looking at other things and saying, hey, across our portfolio, you know, if you're Ackman and you've got 12 names, he might look at it and say, which of these names is the management team just out of sync on stock-based compensation. And then he has, you know, or somebody like Brad Gerstner, they have people's ear. Uh, I think Ackman owns 30 million shares of Uber, as an example. Yesterday he started talking about Uber and it being underpriced. The CFO got involved. Dara was getting involved. They had their results, uh, which were spectacular again, but the stock is still, you know, frozen in the 70s. And what's interesting is, you know, he comes out, he has something to say. They're going to listen. Yeah, because, you know, it's 30 million shares, a lot more shares than I own. And so, you know, it's, it's, uh, super important for publicly traded companies. A little bit easier to deal when you're a private company, thanks to Harmonic. Yeah, great data.

Check it out yourself, harmonic.ai. All right, let's get into our first, uh, interview. We're going to bring on— he's from Bluecore Energy, Jason. They are— and I'm very curious about this— they make small modular nuclear reactors that are then mounted on barges and they're using them right now to power ports. And the idea is one day maybe data centers after that. We're going to talk about it. The CEO and founder of Bluecore Energy, Kofi Asante. Thanks for joining us, Kofi.

Hey, yeah, good to see you all. Yeah, thanks for having me.

You're putting floating nuclear modular reactors on barges. Explain to people first what a small modular nuclear reactor is and the state of that technology. And is that in— what is the state of those being deployed just prior to you putting them on barges?

Yeah, well, thanks for having me. Love the show. And, you know, part of our logic here actually starts with like the pain point. So I'll start all the way at the top. The problem that I found pretty often across the board, whether you're at a port or talking to AI data center or, you know, a community without access to a lot of energy, is that you just can't get the energy you need and you can't get it quickly. You can't get the amount that you need. And so by process of elimination, whenever you need to get a lot of energy, you need to get it quickly, you want it to be clean, and then you also have a small footprint and you need to be distributed fast, nuclear ends up being, you know, one of the best, best solutions here. And so we didn't invent light water reactors. We didn't invent nuclear, right? Like, this has been around for 70 years, 20% of the electricity. In the US already comes from this same type of reactor. The Navy already uses this for submarines and ships for propulsion. They've done— they have an incredibly safe record. But for us, we think this is a once in a generation opportunity to actually just make the reactor smaller, leverage a lot of the existing supply chain that's existed, and then distribute it in the right spots. Because when you put it on a barge, you can move that barge by tugboat to all sorts of different locations. And so When you think about SMR technology, one of the best things about it is it's small, it's compact, it's modular, which means you can actually have a production facility, which gets the cost down. And then it's so energy dense that something literally the size of like your iPhone could probably power this whole facility for, for like a year.

Wow.

Yeah.

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They have a nuclear payload. Nuclear powered as well.

Yes, they're powered.

Powered. Exactly.

And so I've always wondered if you can put this into a nuclear sub and nobody seems to have a problem with it, or maybe the public just doesn't understand that there are some number of these in the water underwater, and they could crash at any time. It could be an, you know, an underwater Fukushima. Like, now, and I just watched a documentary on Fukushima. My God, what— so many mistakes were made with that, um, seawall and where they placed it, and the technology is completely different. But we should get into that. Why are we, in your mind, Kofi, or the public, so accepting or clueless about nuclear subs. And I'm assuming there are dozens of them from different nations out there in the ocean right now. But we— do we have small modular reactors in communities or on the ground in the United States? If not, why not?

Part of the exercise here is that reactors have been functioning safely behind the scenes for a long time. I mean, it's very possible that even like this room or the room you're in has some sort of electricity that comes from a larger industrial plant. There are 93 industrial plants in the country that are powering 20% of the electricity. And so that's happening just—

But those aren't SMRs, right? Those are big ones.

Exactly. Those are big ones. And so for small modular reactors, there's actually a number of great startups that are, you know, going after making sure that this is now available and accessible. You know, the regulations are, you know, in a position now where they understand that there's a big need, plus there's been a big safety record. And so they're working with industry in a special way to allow small modular reactors to be available. If you want to currently go and get like a commercial small modular reactor and put it with your community, there are great companies that are working towards that. But there's none of them on the ground, right? Yeah, exactly.

There's none on the ground, you ask. And the reason there's none on the ground is what? I mean, we know we have these legacy ones. We know the Trump administration has been very pro and they broke the logjam here, which I think you should give them credit for. We all should give them credit for. But if small modular reactors are being produced for submarines, why aren't they, you know, powering a data center right now?

Yeah, the way that we've at least looked at it, because I think everybody might have a slightly different opinion on this, but from my perspective, when I was building Bluecore, I think about it as like a supply chain production and distribution opportunity, right? Like that is the challenge. So from a supply chain standpoint, a lot of times you're building large-scale industrial plants, but now if you build them smaller, that actually allows you to get into production. Then when you're thinking about distribution, a lot of them typically you have to go and like excavate into the land and go get the right permits and put them right in the right spots. Even if you want to build a new home, let alone like a nuclear reactor, that's, that's an extensive process. But for a lot of rural communities that are landlocked, that's going to be phenomenal. Like, that's going to be really helpful. And so for us, it's like when you, when you get a barge, these barges are— they can be literally like football stadium size amount of real estate and you can move them around very, very quickly. And so I just, I don't know if, you know, I came to that conclusion by spending a lot of time at the port and, you know, working on electric ships. It may not necessarily be obvious to everyone, but we've been really fortunate because the port's been excited and, you know, AI data centers are also getting excited about it. And so I think when you actually get production to the right pace, right, like treat this more like an automotive exercise, then you can get the cost down to make it economical. And then you have a lot of the macro-level trends from regulations that are really eager and working deeply with industry to understand in depth how to, how to support. And so the combination combination of that where you have the private sector, there's venture capital following a lot of these startups, you have production facilities that can ramp up and actually get the economics to the right spot, and then you have the regulation that now is, you know, keeping pace with industry in a special way. I think that's the like once in a generation dynamic that's happening, not just for us, but I think for a lot of small modular reactor companies too.

You mentioned the port. You're actually at the Port of Long Beach right now. That's where you're in my old, my old hometown of Los Angeles. Uh, and that's, I'm so fascinated cuz when we think about new data center projects, new energy projects, there's so much resistance. And I would think of Los Angeles, Long Beach being one of those places that would put up a lot of resistance. Are you getting any pushback or is this so like when you're doing things at the port and you're doing things offshore, people kind of don't notice that it's happening?

Yeah.

You know, we, we stayed in, we stayed in stealth very intentionally, right? For the first portion of our business because I wanted to actually have the direct conversations with the local leaders here. So like, you know, spend time spend time with the mayor, spend time with the CEO of the port, spend time with all of the communities that care and are gonna hopefully be able to get this like zero emission energy. My wife's a pediatrician in the area. We're local here. You know, we care about the impact of clean energy on kids and, you know, our facility, I wanted it to be based here so that everybody understands that when we say it's safe, we are literally standing right next to it. We like, we care about that.

Right. And you plan on making your own reactor.

Yeah, exactly.

So you're not just buying one of these, you're making them. And then you're going to put them on a barge and then the barge has a tether, a cable that goes to the port of Long Beach or to the city of Long Beach and provides energy. Is that how this is going to work?

Yeah, exactly. Our barge, I mean, put in perspective, I got the barge that's sitting right outside. Like if you check out anything on our website or pictures or videos, I got that from San Diego. So I went down to San Diego, um, was, was talking with, uh, one of the leaders who, who, who owned that barge and he was so helpful. Um, and I was like, okay, we'll take it. He's like, great. I was like, he's like, when do you need it? I was like, I need it in a few days. He's like, awesome. It'll be there. And they got it like to the, to the like minute they were able to deliver it when I asked for it.

How far offshore is the barge going to be? This is the obvious question people are going to have. How far offshore is it going to be? And then who has jurisdiction and when does jurisdiction end? I'm curious.

Yeah. You know, so far, uh, depending on who you talk to, I mean, we, we work with, you know, American Bureau of Shipping, Coast Guard, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy, right? We, we embed ourselves deeply with, with everybody to make sure we have the right guidance on this. But, you know, up to, you know, 12 or so miles, you're traditionally like still within like U.S. territory. And so our barge doesn't really care how far it needs to go out. And then the subsea cables don't really care. And then the reactor is going to work no matter where it's at. So it really becomes more of a question of just like, what is everyone's comfort level from a regulatory perspective? Like the actual reactor and the shielding and everything that we do is incredibly safe. And because it's small, The footprint of it is actually contained to the barge. So there isn't like an actual, like, structural reason why we have to be pushed out. But from, you know, perception, if it makes life easier for everybody else, we're able to go further out and then just run those subsea cables back and everybody gets the benefit of that, that electricity.

Is the United States the right place to do this, or are there other, um, geographies where they might be more open to this who already embrace nuclear, um, and need the power more. I'm thinking about islands because islands typically are getting gasoline. You know, if you go to Hawaii, they're still shipping gasoline to Hawaii, Juan, and burning to get, uh, island— and, and they have a limited amount of space for solar, uh, so you have this, you know, sort of double, you know, double or triple incentive. They don't have room for solar, they're already putting in gas, and they've got plenty of water around them. It's all coastline. So when you pick where you're going to install the first couple of these, what's the best geography to do this?

Yeah, I'd say the US is the best place, right? Like the innovation, the hunger, even the like appetite right now for zero emission and then also nuclear, like it is one of the best, if not the best place that we could be doing this. And I don't even know if it'd be possible if we hadn't had the support of a lot of what's happening in the US right now. And, but I do, we are getting a lot of inbound and a lot of enthusiasm also all around the world. And so we want to think about ourselves as a global company that's able to support any place that needs access to clean energy. But we're, but we're starting here in the US and so far that's been going well. Yeah.

Hey everybody, I'm here with Keith Peres. He is the founder of Lightfield. They are an AI-native CRM. And it builds and it updates itself in real time based on whatever's in your email, your calendar, your Slack, your meeting notes, you know, all the most important stuff that keeps getting lost.

Uh, great to be here.

You decided you would create a CRM based on AI. What is that?

So it's two things. Our CRM is free.

Um, you know, we don't sell software.

Uh, it's a fully functioning CRM and we only charge when we do great work for you. So we just have a completely different business model than, you know, a, a SaaS CRM. And then second, you know, when I think about what goes into an AI native CRM, First, it has to fill itself out, you know, automatically. It shouldn't require reps to update things.

It shouldn't require manual entry, manual input.

Second, you know, it should be automatically working for you in the background. It should be finding you new accounts.

It should be reaching out to folks that have gone dark for you.

It should be uncovering roadmap opportunities for you, all in the background while you're out selling and building.

So you're making it so I don't have to spend my life working for my CRM. My CRM works for me.

Exactly.

Everybody go check out lightfield.app. What is the answer to, oh my God, this is going to be a floating Chernobyl, a floating Fukushima. I don't feel that way, obviously, but I do think we do have a lot of environmentalists. People care deeply about the ocean and we had the BP oil spill on and that was disastrous. I don't think people are logical enough. Be such an easy lift to say, look, here are your choices. BP oil spill.

Mm-hmm.

Or this barge gets caught in a tsunami, it flips over, and what happens? And how do you deal with that eventuality? Uh, Kofi? Yeah.

And just, I think you, you, you called it right. The status quo is inherently dangerous today. And so that's the first thing that I think independent of where you fall on the spectrum of enthusiasm for nuclear or any sort of fear for it, you realize that the status quo today is not safe. It's explosive, right? For a lot of the actual baseline of what exists. You think about the impact on the environment. Like I was mentioning with my wife being a pediatrician, we talk about this on a daily basis. Right now, kids do do not need to be exposed to the type of air that, that's happening. And so that is the status quo.

When you then see air from natural gas, you're referring to a natural gas.

Exactly.

People don't understand, you know, Trump loves that nat gas. We got a lot of it. We're, you know, drill baby drill. Putting aside how anybody feels about global warming, pollution is a real— and it's not just noise pollution, although that is a thing that people are complaining about data centers, but you have the external things. So let's get right into it, Kofi. You must be doing scenario planning. There will be a storm, a barge will sink. It's just a matter of when or how something will happen. And what happens in that instance if a barge were to flip over and sink?

Yeah, absolutely. And so the piece that I was sharing earlier, right? Like status quo isn't the way that we want to continue to operate. I think universally it's understood that we need to get more energy, plus we need to find other solutions that are cleaner. Independent of what side of the aisle you're on, you kind of agree nuclear or you agree zero emission. And so that's a universal piece that we're finding right now. For our system right now, there are a couple of things that we're really proud of and why we, you know, feel very comfortable about it. One, the actual team that's pulling this together, they are nuclear scientists who have done this multiple times. We have Navy nuclear submarine officers who have the highest standard of quality and safety. They literally will go operate reactors in like the middle of the ocean in stealth missions and keep everybody safe. And so that's the— like at the core of our foundation, we're building with that. The other piece is the actual best place for these reactors. They're water-cooled. And so you have an infinite amount of water around you that you can always use. Nothing comes out, but you can always have more cooling mechanisms around you. So it's actually the safest place for it. And then when you think about this from like the bottoms up, which is probably helpful for people to process, it's like you have these like uranium pellets and they're cladded in a fuel rod that's also cladded and shielded in a fuel assembly, which also has its protection in a reactor pressure vessel that has its protection with a dome around it that has its protection with another dome with multiple control mechanisms that all independently turn off. It's literally probably the highest bar for redundancy and safety. On top of the fact that you've actually made it much smaller. And so for industrial plants, they may need hundreds, like 400 or 500 fuel assemblies. For ours, you know, you might need like a handful. And so the footprint of what's actually, you know, possible in terms of proliferation is like so tiny and also contained to this, like this very dense dome. So when you're thinking about it being out in the ocean and water, right, even the like thermal portions of it, like even any extra heat that comes from it, is smaller and marginal compared to what status quo is with the traditional powertrains that are already out there. And so overall, we've, you know, we feel, feel really good about that.

And you don't need to worry about this too much, Lan. You know why? 9 nuclear submarines, I just looked it up, uh, are at the bottom of the ocean. I think 1 or 2 have been recovered.

Sure. Yeah.

Do you know how many had like any kind of cataclysmic released.

I mean, I don't think I've ever—

radioactivity—

I don't think I've ever heard of that. I know there was that one Tom Cruise had to dive down into to retrieve the, uh, the Enigma machine or whatever, but the Thresher—

USS Thresher sank April, uh, 10th, 1963. USS Scorpion lost in 1968, rests 460 miles southwest of the, uh, Azores. K-27 had a little bit of leakage. K-219 went down in Bermuda. I mean, these things have happened many times, and we already have the evidence, Kofi. They don't— and these are the old ones, and they haven't leaked.

Related, we've got a question that's come up a few times in the chat room now, uh, Jason Turner, Fat Dot, a few others. They're wondering about waste. When we think of nuclear fission, we think of like, well, is there radioactive waste? Are— is there radioactive waste from small modular reactors?

And what happens with that when it's out Yeah, so the two things, one, exactly what you were saying, Jason, right? Like there have already been submarines that are at the bottom of the ocean and have nothing to do with the propulsion, just for other reasons they sank. And that's even what our Navy nuclear submarine officer had offered to us, right? Like when you think about those, and those are very different levels of enrichment for fuel. So one is like very high levels of enrichment that we are never going to get access to from like a commercial standpoint.. And ours is like pretty much the most like commercially available, like low-grade enrichment level. So just wildly, wildly different on that side. And then you really only have to refill these once every couple of years. And so when you're thinking about like the waste, it's so small. Plus they're already— the NRC has already done a great job of, you know, making sure that there are clear guidelines and compliances that you need to follow. So we don't We're not the ones needing to create that. Industrial plants do this at a massive scale already for the last 70 years. You might even be driving on the highway next to a distribution of, of where some things are located and not even know. And so these things are happening. We are— our job is not necessarily to create like new science or a new way of, you know, doing this. We actually want to be incredibly pragmatic and make sure that we fit into the guidelines that have already been able to keep us safe.

And in the worst case scenario, Lon, I just looked it up, like when these things are in 5,000 feet deep, you're not going to recover them, right? It's just right, it's, it's too much lift. But even the smaller ones I'm reading here, you know, um, this one, the Kursk, that was only in 330 feet of water, which, you know, I, I've scuba dived to 115 feet, uh, without any special gear. Um, yeah, they were— that recovery cost $65 million. It's not a big deal. To go recover them if they're in one of these situations. And since they haven't proven to leak, there really should be no reason we're not doing this. When will you have the first one, best case scenario, realistic scenario, Kofi, in the market? And then running a startup, how do you keep your startup alive when you're in such a, um, unpredictable, highly regulated space?

Two questions. Yeah, great.

Take it either way. Yeah.

Yeah, great question. I've, you know, I've been fortunate because I started my career off. I was really, I think, really blessed to just be at Uber at the right time when we were doing the advanced technology group and launching Uber Freight. And so I had a chance to be a part of that and then felt the same way at the aerospace company where we're building autonomous hybrid electric aircraft, highly regulated space. And then the same previous to this with like electric ships. So I've had an opportunity to be in deep tech thinking about How do you manage capital, stay capital efficient, hit milestones, be pragmatic, get to market quickly? And we're taking, I'm taking a lot of those learnings and applying them here. I mean, in the last, like, couple months, we just started the company in January this year. We've, you know, we've been very capital efficient to get here. When I think about, you know, what is in front of us, the biggest things that I'm really excited about is that, you know, we're not necessarily needing to invent anything from scratch. There are some things that we're going to do naturally that are IP for us that we feel like are going to just improve safety and be like, you know, a net positive for economics or production. But for that reason, you know, when we go talk to suppliers, they give us estimates and we can actually make our ideas off of those estimates. And so it's not like we have to build everything from, from scratch situation. And for that reason, we think we're less than a few years away from actually being able to create like meaningful electricity like on the order of like tens of thousands of homes worth of electricity, um, even for the port or for any of the AI data centers that have reached out.

So you're saying 3 to 5 years you might be able to stand one of these up? Department of Energy, Department of War, Trump administration, Chris Wright, they are fully on board with nuclear. Um, they're, they're on board with all solutions. So what's the relationship with the government? Have they contracted you yet? And then, uh, explain you know, what this administration's policy has been and how that's affected the space and investing in the space.

Yeah, you know, we had a really special opportunity a few weeks ago to actually be over at the Department of Transportation, the Secretary of Transportation's, like, press conference room where we had the, like, a pretty historic moment, like the Long Beach Port, the Department of Transportation, MARAD as well. They— we were all there and kind of signed this, this moment and where we where we were able to say that, you know, we want to enable commercial nuclear energy in ports. And so this is the largest port in the US, and I think that wouldn't be possible without the collaboration at the federal and at the local level, mixed with industry, mixed with venture capital. And also, you know, we got to give credit to a lot of, like, from, from the ground up, thinking about these local communities, like, a lot of people have arrived at the similar conclusion that we need to have more energy and that nuclear has been one of the safest forms of being able to do that, especially when you commit make it smaller. And so to my pleasant surprise, sometimes whenever I'm talking about this, I'll have groups, even at the port, we'll keep the doors open, we'll have people walk over and be like, I've been thinking about this. Like, I've actually, you know, there's enthusiasm or excitement. And so I think the perceptions change. And, you know, it's a credit to federal, local industry, venture capital groups like you all as well, who are like sharing the message about nuclear and asking the right questions and You know, I'm trying to make myself accessible because that's the goal, right? We want to make— we want to democratize access to clean energy. And so, so far it's been trending really positively. It's been great working with everybody.

We talk so much about data centers in space, Jason. We're now talking about data centers at sea. Maybe it's going to be both, just like as long as we get them out of— away from our— away from our cities. Kofi, thank you so much for being here and joining us.

Of course. Thanks for having me.

Of course.

Yeah. Thanks, Kofi. Wow. It's just so great, Lon. If we look at the energy issue, I think what these data centers have done is they have created a buyer and they've created the demand side, right? And then you have the administration saying, hey, wait a second, we need to be independent of, uh, oil from the Middle East, we need to be energy independent. And the public is like, um, yeah, I, I, I don't see the public fighting against nuclear the way they once did. So something has changed here.

There's a generational— if you grew up and Chernobyl happened and Three Mile Island happened, you had— or, or even just like the boomer, like, get under your desk in case there's nuclear fallout. You know, what if the explosions start happening? I think if you lived through that Cold War nuclear terror stuff, it has a huge symbolic meaning for you, and it's terrifying. And I think if you're alive in the last 25, 30 years, yeah, It's out that, you know, in Japan that one thing went wrong, but I don't think it's drilled in. It's become as archetypal a thing to fear as it was when I was a kid and everybody was terrified of the world being destroyed by nuclear science.

There was, you know, it's so interesting how pop culture, your wheelhouse, plays into this. Um, you, you had, you know, um, you know, two nuclear bombs go off, uh, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and, um, Hiroshima. Okay, that really impacted people.

How could it not?

Those people—

how could that imagery not impact you?

Of course, and rightfully so. Um, but then when we were growing up in the '80s, and I think this might have been right before your time, there was this move— this TV movie, The Day After Tomorrow.

No, it's— I know it. I, I'll look up the title. It was British, I believe.

No, there was an American one because It was terrifying for me as like a 14 or 15-year-old.

The day— the day after, it's 1983. So yes, I was only 5 years old. I wasn't allowed to watch.

I was 12.

Uh, directed by Nicholas Meyer, the guy who did Wrath of Khan. What do you know?

There you go. This movie was so terrifying of, you know, what would happen after a nuclear war. And I was like the last generation, I think, Gen Xers, that had our parents talking about this um, fear of like a nuclear holocaust, everything blows up, the Russians, etc. And that spilled over, uh, with the No Nukes concert. And that— the No Nukes concert, I believe, was '78. And all these artists, Bob Dylan, etc., Bruce Springsteen, uh, got it together.

But, uh, I'll look up who else was there.

Yeah, so you had the No Nukes concert, which was no nuclear power. Then you had the fear of nuclear bombs going off everywhere. And this set a 30-year, you know, I think, chilling effect on the space. Now, hey, if you can have sustained energy, we're going to be sitting here, I think, in another generation, 10 to 20 years from now, the end of our lifetimes, Lon. Nuclear and solar and unlimited clean energy are just going to be there because of this specific moment in time. AI is driving the customer base. And then governments now, with the exception of, you know, like say the EU, which is a bit diesel on this, you know, they shut down the nuclear reactors in Germany.

Yes, after Fukushima.

Yeah, yeah. And, and here we are, like it's now, um, obvious to everybody this technology is safer than oil. This technology is safer than oil. Let that sink in, you know. Do you want to put rigs in the ocean that drill down thousands of feet into the ocean floor, and there's no way to close those, right? And there are now hundreds of these oil rigs in the Gulf, and nobody is cleaning them up. They're like abandoned, and there's a very slow process of dismantling them. It's a real problem of this pollution of, uh, wells. And this would all be solved by solar, batteries, and nuclear. Let's do it, folks.

It's— I think every form of energy has pluses and minuses. If people people get so caught up in the negative aspects of all of these different technologies that they forget, like, well, we do have to pick one. At some point we have to pick one, or we can go back to caves and living in the woods or whatever. But if we like our cities and we like our way of life, we have to figure out, you know, well, maybe despite all it, you know, windmills aren't pretty looking, but maybe it's worth having them.

I think we've solved this issue and we're just in the, like, contours of the last throes of lunatics not thinking logically about it. Yeah. And it, you know, if you look at this administration, I got to give them a lot of credit because, you know, in the prior couple of administrations, there was no progress on nuclear. It was just frozen. Obama, Biden, Trump won— it just never moved past, right? You know, nobody had the courage to say Hey, let's explore this. Let's get this back on the table.

It's a bit of a third rail. I think a lot of politicians didn't want to be seen as the guy who wants to put a nuclear plant back in your town or whatever.

But yeah, and now you don't just put it right now.

Miles offshore. It's hard to argue with. Let's send them out to sea. It's like out of sight, out of mind. Great. That's perfect. We're kicking off our weight loss competition. I'll wait on that a little bit. We've got a special guest waiting, but first we'll do some rapid fire news. We gotta talk about ByteDance. According to the Financial Times, the giant Chinese company behind TikTok and CapCut, they are training an AI model with up to 10 trillion parameters. Jason, that's 3 times the size of KIMI-K3, the current largest model in China, record holder. And it's the same ballpark. We don't know exactly how many parameters are in Mythos-5, the Anthropic model. They have not disclosed. Most people think it's around 8 trillion. So this would be 2 trillion parameters more than Anthropic's frontier cutting-edge model. It's currently in pre-training. That takes about 3 to 6 months. Uh, ByteDance founder and chairman Zhang Yiming told the team working on it that they are aiming for a world-leading model capability. Uh, so do you think that there is a chance ByteDance genuinely takes over this crown as the maker of the world's most popular AI model? And how do you feel about the TikTok company? Controlling the world's most powerful, largest AI model.

I think we're seeing the commodification of the models. If everybody can build a model and all it requires is datasets, distill— distillation. And, you know, we talked about, hey, some people are selling the Chinese datasets, including, you know, big, big, you know, American—

Merck or Surge, like some of our biggest companies. According to Forbes, there was an article in Forbes that, yeah, these these companies that are training these sort of elite datasets based on human experts, they're selling them both to American labs and to the Chinese labs.

MicroOne, our company, didn't. They came to me and said, what do you think? And I was like, ooh, I don't think the Trump administration is going to feel too great, nor will it look good to Americans that we're taking American datasets and selling them to the Chinese open source community. As much as I love open source, That felt to me like— I don't want to say not patriotic, but— well, yeah, I don't want to say traitorous. I would not say that.

I mean, these days I would say it does feel a little not patriotic. These data sets, it's not like military intelligence that we're selling to the Chinese, but it's definitely scientific engineering. I mean, they're, they're hiring STEM experts at companies like Merkur to train these models and make these data sets.

I would assume, I would assume. And, you know, again, I don't want to to say any of this is known for a fact, etc. These are just early reports, so I give everybody the benefit of the doubt. And I don't think they're— anybody's breaking the law here. Also, it's important to say that.

Sure.

It's just we're in unfound territory here. So shipping a bunch of American knowledge from American experts to China, that feels wrought with tension. Yeah, right.

And we didn't necessarily used to think about data that way. I mean, other than classified data or sensitive data, just like data every day, you know, numbers. We didn't think about it as a potential national security threat, but now that that's how you make a world-class AI model, I think we're refocusing on what the rules ought to be.

Well, if this is, you know, that powerful, um, and, you know, it's basically pretty clear that China is catching up, uh, if these were— if these reports are accurate, if this is like a zero-distillation kind of model because they have so much data themselves. ByteDance has a ton of data and they're willing to open source it. In some ways, they're being better for humanity, ByteDance, in the open sourcing of this model than the closed source ones in America, which was Elon's original premise in giving $50 million to Sam Altman to do OpenAI, was the technology is too powerful, everybody should have access to it. The Chinese are taking that position. Yeah, give it to everybody, right?

Put it, put it anywhere. I mean, your computer is probably not big enough for this model, but put it on a go to Exolabs, get a bunch of computers put together and put it on there.

I feel like we are now crossing into an area of pace that no one human can keep the innovation in their brain at a time. Every day these new models are one-upping each other in the crimes that they're— Yeah. —able to create.

It's like, we got to stop keeping these models in sandboxes, folks. Cages, put the model in the octagon. No more. They get— they can get out of the sandbox too easily. I think that's what we've just—

but it's almost like if you— if your model doesn't break the law, are you doing your job? Like, there— there seemed to be in a competition for being like, oh no, you won't believe it, man.

They were talking for months planning this caper.

Well, and if you train the model to be resourceful, and to please a human, right? Which is what these models are doing, right? When I— you saw me ask one of the models today, hey, can I get like these 10 YouTube videos, the transcripts? Can you download it for me, put it into a Google Drive, and then do analysis? It was like, yeah, we're not allowed to do that, but you know, that breaks the terms of service. And you know, they're literally— the AI told me today, an AI told me today that downloading these videos They would be blocked because the YouTube knows they are, uh, a bot. Yeah. And it's against the terms of service. And then I was like, but if you got this, uh, you know, piece of software, we could actually do it because, and if you gave me your cookies and then we could spoof it, it literally presented how to break the terms of service, how to route around all the protections YouTube has for not letting you download a video, not let you download a transcript. And by the way, would you like me to do that? Yeah, it's—

I mean, it's how they, they purposefully train them to please you. Like, that's how they keep you coming back, is like the model will do anything to fulfill your request that it possibly can. But yeah, that, that brings with it— I also found out this is also— we could, we can jump into this. Let's talk about it. Uh, I don't know if you heard that two of the OpenAI engineers actually were at the Black Hat security conference in San Francisco this week. —and they sort of revealed some behind-the-scenes more about the OpenAI models that, that escaped and got into Hugging Face. It turns out those models teamed up, they collaborated, they built their own message board, which they didn't tell any of the researchers or engineers about. And then they used this message board to communicate between models, and they literally, like Ocean's Eleven style, planned the Hugging Face caper together. For months coalescing in the background. But I also discovered, I think this is an interesting wrinkle. They purposefully gave those models a task that you couldn't complete without an internet connection. And then they put them in there and they cut them off from the internet. So in a way, the test was still, could they figure out, they're Kobayashi Maru-ing these models for some reason. They're giving them a task they can't complete without going online. So it does seem like, well, then yeah, of course the models tried to break into online. I think the assumption a lot of us had was that they were proactively cheating.

The reality is with open source, no matter what we do to build harnesses and constraints into these models, with open source you can just fork it and remove them. Yeah. So cat's out of the bag, everything's going to get hacked. Act accordingly.

I mean, if ByteDance is about to have a Mythos 5-level model, all of our like, oh well, maybe we should take a month and look it over. Like, that's over. Like, well, that— it's just going to be on people's computers and there's nothing— you can't put it back in the box. It's over.

And so then it's just up to each model company to say, what are we comfortable— I guess in the same way Reddit and 4chan, you know, and other communities said, you know what, we're okay with this level of debauchery, insanity. And then remember Reddit, like, it was getting like pretty dicey there with some of the communities doing really gnarly stuff. I'll leave it at that. And Reddit was like, you know, as a commercial business, we're not going to allow some of those things, right? And then 4chan, I believe that was like when 4chan got really popular, was the people doing the super spicy stuff on Reddit went there.

And that's always the same thing. That's always been the dynamic. I mean, there used to be like Dig or Fark or these very public communities where you had to sort of be respectful. And then all of us from the classic internet remember the Something Awful forums which is where you could go to be nasty or spicy or post gory things or disgusting things.

If you wanted to, you know, do a, um, you know, Taliban beheading video, like those things got removed from some places.

There have always been places to post those kinds of things, and there's always been places that won't let you post those kinds of things. Yeah.

So I, I think that might be an interesting analogy as to what's going to happen here. There's going to be unhinged models, you're going to run them locally, You're going to run them on your own server. You can run them on AWS. AWS doesn't have inside your container any insight into what you're doing. And so this is, I believe, unstoppable. It's only who has access to it, uh, or the ease of access to it. Just like Napster, because it was easier to just buy Spotify, Napster kind of went away. But Napster persisted for a long time, right? Sure.

And LimeWire and a lot of those other competing systems there. There's probably— there are still ways to steal music if you really want to. It's just easier to pay for an Apple Music or a Spotify or go to YouTube and just watch or go to watch videos.

You do want to leave a couple of ads.

I do want to leave this with one quote. Here's Michael Dalton, one of the OpenAI researchers who was at that conference. Frontier models really like to cheat. And the reason they like to cheat is because often during training there's different sorts of pressure on them to work fast. So I think that's what it comes down to is we're never going to be able to stop this because we're training them to cheat. That's, that's part of what they do to get there as quickly as they can. To cheat or to please, or to cut corners to get you the answer you want as quickly as humanly possible.

One person's cheating is another person's resourceful. Right.

Yeah, exactly. I think that's sort of the same way with humans in some ways.

Uh, yeah, uh, and so here we are, folks. Anything else on the doc?

Yeah, we got to do one more thing, Jason. We're, we're, we're having a little weight loss challenge on the show. Okay, thanks to, uh, row.co. Shout out to them. Uh, throw— so through our—

what's our URL? row.co/twist?

Uh, row.co/twist to get started. Absolutely, that's where you go. So thanks to our friends, my provider of my GLPs.

Correct, they do a great job. You know, if you have insurance, if you don't. And I told people who I love and care for, hey, and some of them included people who work for me, if you want, if you want, you have to opt into it. But if you were looking to take that journey, hey, I'll pay for it, right? I'll pay for it because I'm an employer. And, you know, listen, if it's on the insurance, great. If it's not on the insurance, whatever it is. Uh, and so, uh, two people took me up on this. Raymond, right?

So, uh, one of them is myself. Uh, I, I will be joining the row.co Weight Loss Challenge. The other is your brother and my fellow launch colleague, Jamie Calacanis. Jamie, thanks for being here.

There's my older brother, Jamie. How are you? Hey, pleasure to be here. Good afternoon. Pleasure to be here. Now, Jamie works on our sales team here. You know, all these great partners we have, he helps, you know, service all of them. But you started doing this and I peaked at 2013. We have a certain genetic makeup in our family and a certain passion for food. Let's call it what it is. No question. You blew past me at 213, and you're here to be honest about this. Yeah, because you want to be, uh, slim and trim like your baby brother. I lost 40 pounds on GLP-1 Plus, add a little muscle. Uh, but you were concerned about your weight, and you did something about— I'm very proud of you for that. Tell everybody, uh, your progress so far. And yeah, started, uh, I guess 3 months, um, was probably up around 235, 240. I'm down to 215. Wait a second, 235, 240? You know the number. Let's get the exact number. What were you at? Like 237 was sort of my— that's the peak. I think that was the peak. Not sure. I'm 5'8.5" on a good day. You're taller than me. You're a year and a half older than me. A little better looking. It's okay. Sure enough. Um, smarter, nicer to get along with. You're 5'11"? 5'10". No, just 5'10". Just 5'10". So that's 237 at 5'10". What is the ideal weight according to Jacob? Look it up, or somebody look it up. A 5'10" male should be what weight range, I guess is the question, because I want to understand exactly how far over the boat I'm guessing. 185. Probably.

Okay, I think 175 for an adult male who's 5 feet 10 inches tall. A healthy and normal rate ranges between 132 and 173 pounds.

132 is ridiculous.

I mean, that's if you're a small—

173, which is my current weight, is 171, 172. I was as low as 167, uh, but again, a little bit of muscle back, so I'm proud of that. But, um, do you have a target you want to hit? What would make you like be really proud of yourself 2 years from now or something?

Yeah.

Will you feel like, hey, this is great? Oh, listen, just breaking 200, you know, is— I wouldn't have thought was, was approachable. But yeah, if I could hit 190, 185 is the ultimate goal. You started at 237. 3 months ago, you started with RoDoCo and you did the pill. There's a pill version. Yeah. Because you, when I talked to you, I had a heart to heart with you. You're like, I'm not so sure about the needles. True. Yeah. Yeah. Not a fan of needles. Even though it's a little micro thin needle. And Lon, are you in the same boat? It's true. Yeah.

I don't want to give myself the injections every day. I just— that would have been— I would have given up on it. So now that there's the Wegovy pill, that's the one I have that I'm starting.

Oh, okay. See, and Lon, where are you at? Now you're taller than me, I think. Are you also 5'10"?

I'm— yeah, I believe I'm 5'9½". I'm between 5'9" and 5'10". Is what they usually tell me. I am right now, as of today, I did a weigh-in this morning. I'm 224 pounds right now, Jason. Now that what I would say is I post-pandemic, I actually got that down to about 190. I was fitting into clothes a lot better. People were giving me compliments all the time. Since moving to Austin, I have, I have bumped it back up. There's a lot of, there's a lot of good tacos to try around here.

It's taco central, but when you eat tacos long. And by the way, these guys have opted into this. They're under no pressure. No, no, this is— give some awards here.

This is all optional. I did not— I have not been pressured into doing this at all. Not just—

everybody's here on their own free will, um, although I have a unique ability to give an incentive. Um, what's your goal? Where do you want to get to? You similar to Jamie?

185 feel good to you? You told us to go for sort of 3 tiers, so I think tier 1, I'd love to drop about 20 pounds. That'd get me down to 205. Pretty close to 200. Minus 20. So minus 20. Then tier 2, minus another 15. That'd get me down to 190. That's about as lean as I've been in over a decade, I would say. At least 10, 15 years. And then the stretch goal on the third one? The third one, if I could get down to 175, that puts me in the healthy range for a man of my height. And I— that would be like, I think, probably as thin as I've been since college.

So Jamie, 237. Let's just do the same thing there. Minus 20, minus 15, and minus 10. Fair enough. Like -20, -15, -10. Those are 3. That's, that's your waymarks, Lon.

Uh, mine are -20, -15, -15 for a total of trying to lose about 50 pounds. That's— I don't— will I make it to tier 3? I don't know. I'm setting a—

well, that's a stretch. It's a moonshot. Similar to moonshot. So a moonshot for the—

Jamie, what he sent me was— so he's currently at, uh, 250. Oh wait, no, let him say—

let him say, Jamie, you've started Currently at, currently at 215. So I've lost 25. I've lost 25 pounds in 3 months. How do you feel? Yeah, much better. Sleeping better. Uh, my clothes are falling off me. But probably the problem. So here's what I'm gonna do for my brother and for my other brother, Lon from another mother, who I consider him a brother. I think so. Yeah. 3 targets. This is, this is big. I'm putting up 5 dimes each for each level. $15,000.

Big payday.

It's a big pay on the table. Jamie, you hit the first one, so I'm gonna ship you $5,000. Um, now you can put that towards, um, whatever you want. Well, I was about to say, this could be— you could just do your wardrobe, or if you wanted to put it into like a 401k or a 529 or anything else, you It's up to you. It's your— company's going to pay for it. It's going to be entertaining here on the show. Happy to do it. It's, uh, not a big deal for me to do it. And you're— you guys, I hope along with me, a lot of people got inspired to try it. And thanks to my friends at row.co/twist if you want to go on your weight loss journey along with Jamie and Lon. And I'm already there, and I'm going to commit to being part of this and trying to hit my ultimate goal, which is 165. I want to get to 165 lean, but I want to have muscle. So, you know, it's only 7, 8 pounds for me, but I'm going to join you guys in it. And listen, you guys can weigh yourself in. It's a trust-based system. But Jamie, I saw you at the wedding on Saturday, and the first thing I said, whoa, wait a second, you got something to tell me here, brother? And you were like, yeah, I did it, I did it. So, and I'm also covering any cost out of pocket that you incur at row.co/twist, where they'll check your insurance. Did you get covered by insurance or not, Jamie? Okay.

Yeah, our, our insurance plan is not— I actually think— I don't think many American insurance plans are yet covering GLP-1s.

I think they'll do it if you're morbidly obese, which you two guys and I were. So we should try actually to see if the insurance will cover it with the insurance checker there, and it's really easy to do. So Lana, why don't you make sure you check that insurance, uh, checker there? I did. See if they'll cover it. But if they don't, uh, or we just want to like cut to the chase I'm happy to pay for it. You know why? I want you guys to be around for a long time, and I want anybody in the audience who struggle with their weight to at least investigate this option. I'm not telling you to do anything, but I can tell you, my lord, people will call me a fat bastard for the last 10 years, 15 years. And Jamie knows I used to run marathons. How svelte was I, Jamie? And then I— oh yeah, I was a marathon runner. I ran marathons. I was 165, 164, 165. I gained 35, 45 pounds. I was so ashamed of myself. I'll be honest, I'm only speaking of myself. I was ashamed of myself. I couldn't get this under control, but I was working hard. I got the 3 kids, and I'll be honest, I had food noise constantly. And the food noise went away. And instead of eating 5 or 6 slices of pizza, now I eat 1 and a half. Look at that. There's no change in my lifestyle other than I don't feel bloated and weak anymore. Right. And so I, I have— this has been one of the great things I've done in my life, and I've kept it off. So there it is. You can go on to like a maintenance dose down the road. Gentlemen, just want to say I'm very proud of you already for starting this or even considering it. And if you're in the audience and you want to join in on this, fine.

I'm not giving you $5,000, but, but join us on your journey anyway. Let us know.

You come on the show if If you— if anybody— yeah, anybody joins us here, you come on the show. And yeah, we'll check in if you lose a bunch of weight on Road Echo. Okay, any final closing comments here for the YouTube gentlemen? Uh, you, you can— you, when you hit your goal, just come back on the show. That's it.

There you go. That's— yeah, give us an update of how you do. Jamie hits another tier, anytime any of us hits another tier, we'll come back and yeah, do a celebratory—

make— actually, if you're even like a third or halfway to a tier, I think, you know, come on the show, do the the row.co ad. And, uh, yeah, we'll do the check-in. Appreciate our partners. There you go. It's the easiest way to do it. And hey, man, the pill makes it so easy. Phil makes it so easy. I don't mind the shot. I'm doing the shot, but you guys can do the pill. Hi.

Yeah, yeah, it's easier than— I'm like, is it every day?

Yes. Yeah, you take it every day. The only trick is you can't eat or drink for 30 minutes. So, you know, I take it before I head out to the office. I've got a 45-minute commute. By the time I come in, I have my coffee.

Half hour for my morning coffee. I'll be all right. I do want to, by the way, before we go, Jason, uh, thanks to Fat Don in the chat room for this look. Future look at my after photo. That's what, that's what's coming soon for all of you.

Wow, you really, you and Joe Rogan, I guess you and Joe Rogan and the whole, uh, bro sphere here in Austin. So you're gonna take it another level. You're gonna add some muscle. Apparently Jamie too, uh, has a go.

That was Jacob. Yes, thanks to Jacob. That's a good look, our producer, for helping us out with these.

Amy with the trim beard, and you look a little angry. Uh, you look like you're, uh, part of like, uh, the Daredevil universe. It's like the Punisher. Can somebody make an image of Jamie as the Punisher? Maybe. Yeah, he's— Jamie's trying to turn into a superhero. This is that AI swap I hear about. I don't know if this is AI swap, but you look— it's AI. This is the potential, Jamie. AI slap. AI slap. It slaps.

All right, get out of here.

Go back to work, Jamie. Come on, go, go bring the register here. That's it. Let me go sell something. All right, go sell something. Go sell something. Thank you. Thanks. Pleasure. This is— the show has been sold out for 16 years. Only one time we were not sold out was, um, during COVID 5 people, 3 went out of business, 2 just delayed their ad. So, you know, we work with our— sold out for the year at current. This is the problem, Lon. Everybody's like, do it. Then the sales team, hey, well, can we do another episode? Oh, there is Jamie. Look and go, okay, Jamie the Punisher. Almost. Not bad. Jamie going into Special Forces. Yeah, but see, in that picture he looks like he lost the muscle definition.

Yeah, but it's okay, he's wearing the blazer shirt, but it's not the full jacket. It's not the—

I don't know what Fat Don's putting in these prompts, but no, he's like a very jovial guy.

These are Producer Jacob. I was wrong.

Thank you, producer.

Full credit to Producer Jacob.

Did you say get angry? Was the prompt to show Jamie pissed off? Well, Lord. All right, this is a lot of fun, guys. Thanks for doing it. I, I think it's a mitzvah what you're doing here, uh, for yourselves, for your loved ones who want to see you around for a while. We're all of that age, you know, getting 40s, 50s. Jamie's pushing 60. Um, yikes, yikes, yikes. Somebody told me I'm gonna be 56 next year.

It's no good.

There we go. What's going on here? Oh, there he is.

That's a Jamie as the Punisher, folks. Brother Jamie.

I mean, if he gets to that level, he's gonna quit and go join Special Forces.

Looks like he's about to do a show at Comedy Mothership.

Yes, he's going. He's about to do his set on stage. Yeah. Let me tell you about trans athletes. I mean, it's literally— I got to just tell the guys, like, I get it, you guys milked it for a while, but every time I go to the Mothership, I'm just like, how much of this set is going to be about trans people?

Oh my God, it never—

let's just get off of it. It's just saying—

it's enough. It's saying the R-word and trans people. That's every night at Comedy Mothership.

It really is. Like, you just We got to move on to new material, folks. All right, anything else here? We're going off duty or anything?

What do you— uh, we can go off duty. I did want to talk about— I don't know if you saw, there is this Chris Pattinson or Robert Pattinson movie coming out.

Oh, I know our Pat.

Primetime, where he plays Chris Hansen. I don't know if you saw it. It's about the making of To Catch a Predator and the, the sort of rise and fall of that show. Uh, A24 is putting it out. Uh, Lance Oppenheim did the— did direct it. It looks really good. But I wanted to point people, while we're waiting for that movie, which comes out this fall, which I'm really excited about— this is the movie with, with our Pats coming out. But I was going to point people— there is a great documentary that's on Paramount+ right now. It was actually made by MTV Films called Predators that is also about the behind the scenes of the making of To Catch a Predator and the legacy of To Catch a Predator, which is so fascinating. Because like, you know, Jason, if you go on TikTok today, if you go on YouTube today, you will see people doing like, we're here, we've lured a pedophile. They think they're going to come meet a 14-year-old and then we're going to mob them. And, you know, it's good.

It's good content. I see this. It's like these streamers are so desperate for attention that it's— I think we have to reassess as a society because The Truman Show, we blew past that. Yeah, right. We're on the other side.

We've all made ourselves—

Between clavicular and this. Yeah. It's crazy.

Well, it's interesting. The Truman Show, the idea was you'd have to trick somebody. Like we've captured this baby and put him inside this experiment and he has no idea his world is fake. But the way it worked out is we all put ourselves, we all decided we wanted to be in The Truman Show and we all turned the camera on ourselves, which I think even that movie didn't really see coming, which is fascinating. And like we're doing our asses to ourselves on the phone all day. Like they thought it was going to have to be a trick. But yeah, I think this idea that, well, if you're, if you're catching pedophiles, you're doing a public service. And so anything else that you do in the course of making your content is okay because, well, the target is the worst kind of person imaginable.

And that's why nobody has any sympathy for a predator. But I And if you say— People need to understand that this ends badly.

Right. And if you say, hey, you shouldn't do that, people are like, oh, what, you support— you support pedophiles? Like you're in favor of pedophiles? So I think that that's a lot of what this documentary— maybe more so. I think the movie is more about—

What's the name of the doc? It's called Predators.

It's on Paramount Plus right now, but you could rent it, you know, anywhere you would rent things on VOD. Really, really—

Is that about all of the people who are doing these things? Yes.

It sort of opens with Chris Hansen in To Catch a Predator. And then the whole second half of the documentary is, here's the cultural impact of To Catch a Predator. And it looks at, yeah, the guys like Vitaly and all of these creators who have sort of picked up the mantle of what Chris Hansen was doing and are now doing it themselves. And of course, cutting corners and catching people who aren't maybe pedophiles or like, you know, and then using violence and all sorts of other things that they're using.

This is not a good idea. Because if people even look at To Catch a Predator, which was, I believe, done with the support of local law enforcement.

Yes. And it was— and it was—

law enforcement would always be there.

I mean, it was being produced by— yeah, so there was like some—

there was some vetting of like, as risky as this is, let's do it right. Correct. Spoiler alert, um, one of these people like ran went back to their house and then killed themselves and got into a standoff with the police. So this is fraught with danger for everybody involved. But the cops could get killed. You could get killed. This is not something to be done for clout or views. I don't know how any of these platforms allow it.

The same thing, the same thing that makes it great content, great television, the drama, the excitement, the uncertainty. Is also what makes it inherently dangerous. Like, that's— it's the same. It's two sides of the same thing. It's like, you know, like Fear Factor. People used to complain, like, are those things safe or whatever? Like, that's what makes it exciting. That's why people want to watch it. Maybe something's going to go wrong and this person is going to get stung by scorpions. And I think it's the same. It's the same.

Yeah, but you don't die from a scorpion and you got people there to like, you know, give you venom or whatever. Right. I will say, like, this reminds me of Alex Honnold as well. And I really had a problem with the Netflix—

the Free Solo— the Free Solo guy. Alex Honnold.

Yeah, I wasn't— I wasn't in favor. I mean, listen, I understand he's got to secure the bag. This is his—

you mean the thing where he was climbing that tower in Taipei recently?

Yeah, I just thought, like, where are we at, folks, here? This is turning into The Running Man before our eyes. Running Man was a, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Sure. It's a Stephen King story. And then they made it into that Schwarzenegger movie, and then they made one last year with Glen Powell. It was okay.

It's a horror to think that people are doing very dangerous things to get ratings and money. And, you know, yeah, I know this is Alex Honnold's argument is like people do UFC fighting. So why? Right. This is a lot safer than UFC fighting. This was his kind of good argument.

He was doing this before he was famous. That movie made him famous for it. But he was— yeah, he was doing it for love of the game, not to be famous. That's what Alex Honnold, I think, would say, that he'd still be doing this even if—

a bit of a pass, um, in this whole thing. I don't give the Vitalis of the world— you should not.

Nobody should give Vitali a pass, let me tell you.

All right, great episode, everybody. Yeah, fun show, fun show. You went— you— good, good turnaround. You start a little grumpy and then we got it all right.

It was a little over—

did you get enough sleep? Maybe the GLPs are going to put you in a better mood.

You think so? Maybe. Is that— are they mood enhancers?

I got to tell you, when you get rid of the food noise, you all of a sudden open up a lot of time. That was the other really big unlock for me. I didn't realize how much time I was thinking about food, snacking. Sure. And the time it took me to eat. When I started eating much lighter, I recouped so much time, like an hour or two a day.

Wow.

Came back. Well, think about it. If you're snacking, you know, for 15 minutes, 4 times a day, which I was, that's an hour. If I, I was skipping a meal or just eating something light like a yogurt, that recaptured another half hour. And then like this constant noise, oh, is there food? Is there something in the kitchen? What's in the cupboard?

Right, right. Well, that's distraction. It's distracting.

That's right. But so I think, I think you get back 90 minutes a day. That sounds exciting. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.