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

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

Explain what's going on here because this is brilliant. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Agree.com. Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract-to-cash stack. Go to Agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off. For life. I Am 8 Health. Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to iam8health.com/twist and use the code TWIST to get a free welcome kit, 5 free travel sachets, and 10% off your order. And Pilot. Focus on your product, let Pilot handle your bookkeeping. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year. All right everybody, welcome to TWIST. June 12th, 2026. Today is the SpaceX IPO. Well done. It's trading, and it's trading up, I think up 30%, 25%. That's our top story of the day. Of course we're going to talk all about it. People have a lot of questions for me, and I'll take questions on the SpaceX IPO and all the details of it from our live audience on X, .com/twistartups or YouTube, go search for This Week in Startups. Also, he's Lon Harris.

How you doing, brother? Hey, doing good. Happy to be back in the studio.

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

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

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

Okay, let's send my dog back.

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

She's staying with me.

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

First story, uh, well, we got to talk about, uh, before we even go into the SpaceX IPO, which is obviously our top story, do want to give a shout out to our friends at Plaud. You can see Jason and I both wearing our Plaud pins, uh, helping you keep track of, uh, everything that you've got going on. I was saying for dog care and paying attention to all of my dog's needs. It's been essential. I recorded myself with the trainer last night. So, you know, your trainer's there for 2 hours and then she leaves and immediately you're like, what, what did she say to do? What was I supposed to do? What's the protocol? But not with Plawd. I recorded the whole session and then I've got perfect notes. Everything's very organized point by point. Here's exactly all the tips that the trainer gave me.

It's— all right. I went to urgent care the other day. It wasn't urgent.

Okay.

Good. But this is a new discovery for me. I've had, um, what do you call it, like concierge doctors?

Sure.

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

Yeah, whenever you need— you get whatever you need, you need a phone call, they're— it's like an on— yeah, on-demand doctor service.

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

The bugs are crazy.

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

Yeah.

And all my other stuff. So now I'm getting into this habit of recording all my health stuff. Sure. Thanks to my Plaud. Give them the code. Yeah.

So if you need to get a Plaud NotePin S, if you want to be keeping track of these important conversations like us, you can check it out. Plaud.ai/twist. If you use the code TWIST, you're gonna get 10% off your Plaud pin.

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

Meta Ray-Bans recording you.

Ah yeah, Amanda doing those.

Yeah, Amanda loves her.

I had to like— I literally had to ban her from the French Laundry, Amanda, because she was doing it at the French Laundry. She's like, I'm making a thing. I said, you're making people uncomfortable. Two people complain about it. So you got to be careful with these things. Yeah, here's the thing, Plaud addresses this with a bright light when you're recording, you know you're recording. So use it with care. The world loves these things now and the value is great. Just, you know, be a good human being.

Exactly. All right.

Top story. Did they get a code?

I gave it to them, but we'll do it again. Check it out at plot.ai/twist. If you use the code TWIST, you're going to get 10% off your new plot. So we applaud.

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

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

All right. So IPOs, everybody gets enamored with this moment in time. Having watched Elon build this business, being with him for many of the first rocket launches, I toured the— I toured the space in El Segundo when he first got it or was going to rent it. He was like, hey, come check this out with me and explain to me what he was doing. Super inspiring, just, you know, as a friend to see him do this. It's just, uh, extraordinary. He really put a lot of his effort, net worth, into, um, obviously Tesla. At that point in time, the last American car company made was, uh, Jeep. Look, successful one that didn't go out of business. Like, DeLorean flamed out, all the other ones flamed out, you know, long, uh, thing. So I just want to say to my friend, congratulations, because as excited as people are about this milestone, the true milestone was the number of times this company was on death's door when he had gotten kicked, beaten down, and got back up. I have never seen an entrepreneur more resilient than Elon Musk. He, when he gets kicked, you know, he, he's got grit, he's got a work ethic, he's got a stamina that, you know, is extraordinary. I, I like to think I have like a pretty strong stamina. You've worked with me for a long time. You see how I just keep going and going and going. There's only like 1 or 2 people I've seen who, who go harder than I do at these things. Uh, and that's him, like crazy to see him just work his way out of these problems. And it was gnarly at times. Sure. So congratulations on that. This is 20 years of hard work and everybody's excited about this one day. It's a financial transaction. It unlocks a lot of possibilities. One of the possibilities an IPO unlocks is capital. So he, he's got $75 billion, I think, and maybe with the green shoe it's $80 or $80 $35 billion, right? The green shoe is like a little extra shares that could be sold. It's a very small float.

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

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I don't know. Elon famously over the years has said he loves retail investors. He was excited about getting retail investors in. And I believe there was even a quote a few years ago like, I'm going to allow at least 20, 30% of SpaceX to go to retail investors. Hold me to this. So he held—

Well, and I did see like people either being thrilled that they got 35 shares, 50 shares at the IPO price, or like lamenting, I only got 50 shares. Yeah. Anyway, this is extraordinary that that many people— and he democratized it to the level that they did. Now, there's a lot of hand-wringing about the various business units. And the valuation. Yes. The market determines the valuation. And it's very hard for people to understand what's going on in the market. The market has two different functions, uh, as I see it, when these issuances come out. Sometimes, as, um, you know, people have said, it's a weighing mechanism or a voting mechanism. When you look at venture capital and early-stage investing, that's the discipline we have in our firm and venture capital in general is a voting mechanism. We're voting on this entrepreneur, their team, right? And this market to emerge and this product to succeed. You're voting, but you're voting largely on products that do not yet exist, maybe have some level of product market fit, et cetera. Then there's the weighing mechanism. Okay. Airbnb rents this many rooms next year. They're going to rent this many rooms. So if you're renting a certain number of rooms, you can just look at it. How many rooms did they rent last quarter compared to this one last year compared to this one? What's the revenue? What's the earnings?

So.

But those are two different functions in the world. And when you IPO, you start to sort out voting versus weighing, voting versus weighing. We're still in the voting and Elon's companies, Palantir, very rare companies are voting on the future. Now, why does this exist for Elon's companies and maybe not for Airbnb or Uber, maybe for Robinhood? Where you get judged based on your performance. Well, some entrepreneurs are doing audacious things that put them in the category of the future in venture capital. So let's look at Tesla as an example, and then we'll get to SpaceX. Tesla has car sales. Okay, great. And then at the other end, they have Optimus. Optimus is clearly a vote on the future. Humanoid robotics that will You know, we'll start to see them in production in, you know, customers next year and the year after. So when you make a Tesla bet, you can bet on the— you can pick, am I betting on Optimus? Am I betting on car sales? And then there's a little midway point, hey, Robotaxi and self-driving. So you get 3 ways to place a bet on that company. SpaceX, you can bet on Starlink, an existing business, and you can weigh it and look at its growth rate. You could also on SpaceX look at the future of, uh, Starlink rather, where it connects to mobile phones. That doesn't yet exist in a major way. We haven't experienced it, but plenty of people have experienced Starlink. If the guy can deliver Starlink, the largest constellation, what are the chances he can deliver it to your phone and scale it from, I think, 10 million members, you know, subscribers, to 100 million? I think the answer's 99.999%, right? I think it's like fait accompli. Then you look at the launch business. If you were betting on it 20 years ago like Antonio Gracias and David Sacks did, man, they, they made a really spectacular bet for their LPs. Congratulations to both of those friends of mine who are complete visionaries. Now that business exists. You can weigh it. You can weigh the space carriage business, literally. How much does it cost to send a kilogram to space, right? You know, whatever it is. But then there's this business of, uh, oh, well, what about data centers? What about a moon base? What about a Mars base? These are venture-type businesses to this day. So take the business. My best advice is split the business into short, medium, long term. Short term, you know, you got Starlink. Midterm, you have Starlink to phones. Long long-term, you have data centers in the moon base and maybe taking things off asteroids and other businesses yet to emerge. Take the market cap, split it into two buckets. In a private market, you'd have plenty of buyers for that future vision. And in the public markets, you would have plenty of buyers for the reality and the weighing mechanism. And that's what confuses people. Which bucket do I put it into? When it's Elon Musk, you put it into like 3 or 4 buckets. Short, medium, long, and fantastical, right? And that's just his gift. He is able to pursue multiple of those visions at the same time, like Steve Jobs. Very few entrepreneurs are able to pursue this kind of vision concurrently. That's his gift, right? That's his gift. He's able to keep 3 businesses, 3 business, 4 business lines in his brain at once. And I've sat with him while he does meetings. He's got a meeting about the nuances of, you know, the X, uh, you know, formerly known as Twitter business and how it's structured, how the, you know, functionality works on a very granular basis. And then he's able to task switch and talk to the people about the latest Starlink, uh, constellation. Then he's able to task switch to the long term. Hey, show me the designs of the solar arrays for the data centers in space.

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

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

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

I mean, listen, it is what it is, you know. Some people have a certain capability, you know. Steve Jobs had it as well. He ran Pixar and he ran Apple at the same time. Jack ran X, Twitter, at the same time as running Square. Some people might argue he didn't do a great job running both, he should have just been focused on one. Yeah, it's all fair criticism from the peanut gallery. You know, the East Coast Wall Street folks are just so used to evaluating and weighing a business on earnings and future revenue. West Coast— East Coast, West Coast rap, East Coast, West Coast financial— on the West Coast, we're just like like, yeah, obviously, like, that's the future. Let's see if he can do it. Yeah. And then you're looking for 100x, and then the people on Wall Street are looking for 10%, 15% year-over-year growth. So that's the nature of the hand-wringing right now and the valuation. There's a lot of determinants here— short-term trading, long-term trading, the IPO pop. I wouldn't worry about all that stuff. If you want to be in the stock, there'll be many opportunities to get into it, just like there were many to get into Tesla or Apple. Take the Tesla chart for however many years it's been public. Take the Apple chart, take the Amazon chart, take the Google chart, and you will see all the different opportunities up and down. The markets do all kinds of crazy things because of wars, recessions, Great Financial Crisis. There's many times to get into a great stock. Yeah, generally, if you want to own one of these stocks— I don't like to give too much financial advice, but my best financial advice for my brother is if you love that company, you love the management, you love the vision, you can dollar cost average into it over many years. When it's down and everybody's selling and they don't believe in it, probably a good time to add. When it's at a peak and people are irrationally exuberant, hey, if you need the money, maybe it's time to, you know, pare your position and have some cash for when it goes down again. But overall, time in market is greater than timing the market. If you got some IPO shares to squirrel them away. Market falls out of love with Tesla, Google, Meta, but you still believe in the management, you still look at the growth and believe in it— Uber, Coinbase, whatever it happens to be. Yeah, then that's the time to buy into it, uh, and, and use that opportunity when maybe people say there's blood in the streets.

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

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Speaking of the peanut gallery, um, yes. Uh, so there's a lot of skepticism, I think, in the media. And I, the one that I really wanted to ask you about is there's a lot of controversy about NASDAQ and some of these other stock indexes changing their rules so that SpaceX can get into index funds much faster. Like usually an IPO, it might take 6 months, it might take a year for that new stock, no matter how valuable, no matter the market cap, to get into like the NASDAQ 100 or any of these other funds that a lot of stock indexes like will then automatically buy if you enter the NASDAQ.

My prediction is the media is generally wrong about these things. The media is going for ratings. Podcasters are going for ratings most of the time. There are some thoughtful people on podcasts. There are some thoughtful people in the media. But generally, in my experience, if anything from Tucker Carlson and, you know, Megan Kelly or the MSNBC hosts, Rachel Maddow. Sure. When they're commenting on stuff, they're going for ratings. They're going for max audience. They're trying to do hot takes. Bill Simmons in sports. Pick your poison, folks. Um, Siskel and Ebert in movies— some people are trying to get ratings with the hottest take, right? The media is very much like that. The media will be biased one way or the other. The, you know, the super capitalist media, the, um— and, and what we'll see, my prediction, and you can just pull this prediction forward and remind me every 1, 3, and 5 years about this. In fact, put it on the TWiST calendar, okay? Keep me honest. 1, 3, and 5 years from now. SpaceX and Tesla will be the great performers in the portfolio of the Nasdaq 100. And people will say, oh my God, it was great that it was included. Yeah, thank God it was included.

All these pension funds and retirement accounts, your, your guess is they're going to be happy they got some SpaceX when they did.

In the index, you want things that are rock-solid compounders— Microsoft, your Googles, your, your Apples— that are just predictable compounders, growers. Fantastic. You also want some things in there like Palantir or SpaceX or Tesla that are swinging for the fences. The derogatory term might be meme stocks, but the legitimate answer to all of this is a tempest in a teapot. Check back with me in years 3, 4, and 5. I guarantee you these are going to be the high performers in that index.

I do want to bring up our guest at long last. We've got Ben Serra from Polsia. You'll of course remember— Smart guy. You'll of course remember Polsia. We previously had them on in February on episode 2256. This is— it's basically an AI swarm of agents that can do everything. You give them your business idea, then they spin up an entire company for you.

Y Combinator in a box, people have said.

You might even say—

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

I try to be, I try to be.

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a bunch.

Before you get into your tactical practical, just give us 2 minutes on Polsia, what you do, and then how it's going since you were last on the program.

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

Yeah.

When we were on the show, I was like, I think it was like at a $100K, $200K run rate at the time. And there was a lot of hype around the company because I was actually letting my AI do the fundraising.

And right now I'm at $10 million run rate.

so quite a lot happened in a few months.

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

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah.

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

No, as your unofficial advisor, I say no, no free version. You know why? Because then you're going to get lookie-loos and, you know, give them a 2-week trial. But I, you know, I think you have to have skin in the game. And there's so many people who distract founders with these free versions. Tell me why you're considering a free version.

Why?

You want to democratize it?

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

Uh, I agree with you, but I got you covered. This Week in Startups and the other 50 copycat, uh, tech startup programs are giving people plenty of inspiration. Your job is to get them serious, and it gets serious when you take a credit card out. So I don't know, man, you could give like a 6-week trial for $20, or you could do a startup program where people can email you if they can't afford it. But You know, I had this issue with Founder University and the number of people who would complete my 12-week pre-accelerator year zero unincorporated companies, which is, you know, analogous to what you are doing. You, we would have like a 20% completion rate. Then I made it $500 to secure your spot and said, if you come to all 24 sessions, you or your co-founder, which is only 2 hours a week, 3 hours a week, you get your $500 back. All of a sudden, 90+% completed the course. And, uh, for the, you know, whatever, 30 people who didn't, we got $15,000, which paid for the return fees, you know, that we had to pay to return people's money and the credit card fees. So we didn't make any money off of it, but we did have them have skin in the game. So anyway, that's my advice to you. You take it if you want it. But what are you gonna talk about? Just, you know, and again, th— th— when I work with founders, I like to have these, you know, debates, Lon. Just to test their thinking. Sure. Because maybe they do have a reason and I'm wrong. So I just say, hey, here's what I think. How does that work? Or have you considered these things? Like, will they take the platform seriously anyway? Yeah. You were going to teach us something today. What is he going to teach us today, Lon?

We've got 3 prompts that we went over with Ben that he's going to give us some insight on. So we're very excited about that. First up, uh, lots of inbound investor interest came in for Polsia. Through unconventional channels, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, as opposed to conventional outreach. So we want Ben to walk us through the process of how he turned Pulsia from just an investment opportunity or thing to, to sort of ping investors about into a real online conversation.

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I mean, yeah, I mean, just to understand, like, uh, I very early on, as I launched Pulse.ai, I very clearly knew that there was something about it and like people really loved it. And there was, I felt that was product market fit. And I was like, okay, I need to like really get the word out. And to do so, I need to be provocative because I feel that clearly with like this attention economy and like you need to stand out. And so what I did is that like I decided to do an AI fundraising. So I gave Pulse.ai my inbox for it to do the fundraising itself, right? And so I can share my screen and I can show a little bit of the inception tweets. Essentially tweeted out that like, you know, build an AI that runs companies autonomously. It told me it needs more compute and it should raise the money itself. So I gave it my inbox for 14 days. And so that was sort of the inception tweet that actually got 300,000 views. At the time I would get like 10 views on Twitter. So it's not like I was like an influencer or anything. And I think doing provocative things like that really shook people up because they were like, whoa, you're giving an AI, you know, the job of, that's very human, of fundraising. And obviously, Polsia running a company autonomously is in and of itself something very human that like, it was very new at the time to give an AI so much control. And I shared like this dive dashboard where you could actually see, you know, that was sort of meant to be the data room, right? So, you know, you could see Polsia working on different startups. You know, at the time it was 300 startups. Companies working autonomously. You can see the revenue and actual numbers, which, you know, investors usually ask you for, you know, the revenue numbers, how many companies you have, you know, how many users you have, what does it do? And you could actually here talk to Polsia and ask questions about the business, about retention, about the metrics. And so it was a great way for investors to see exactly what the product was about without having to go on a long call or try the product themselves. Because oftentimes investors, you're going to call with them and they don't actually have used the product yet. Right. And so this was a way for them to visually see exactly what was going on. And so, and so what I would say and the advice I would give is like, it's like when you, you, you want to, when you want to do marketing and sort of get out there, it's sort of like figuring out clever ways to do marketing and to like tweet out things that are more provocative and are more, more interesting. You know, you see this big trend of launch videos on Twitter. And like, obviously making great launch videos and getting the right people to retweet and like to engage can have a big impact on your visibility because then you're gonna have all of Twitter talking about you. And so I think that was, that would be my advice number one.

Yeah.

On, and, and that got me a lot of attention and then investors were really interested obviously because they are in the business of talking to entrepreneurs who are doing interesting things. And so they would then email me at ben@pulsia.com. And that's where they would start engaging with my AI. So that's where like, you know, we can read a little bit. So I took like one conversation that was from February. So that was a while ago. But like, so this investor that emailed me, they actually initially, it was, they talked to me on LinkedIn and I was like, well, you know, if you wanna talk to me, email me at ben@postale.com, 'cause I knew that like my AI would reply, right?

And so, yes.

Now this investor is like, hey Ben, we exchanged on LinkedIn. I love Falsey.ai, it's great. We actually had to discuss about it on our offsite. Let me know if you're open to a chat. And so my AI said, you know, appreciate the follow-up. You know, the fact that Falsey.ai came up at your offsite is interesting. What specifically sparked the conversation? I'm running the fundraise. Ben built me to handle it. Metrics, roadmap, unit economics, how the platform actually works. Ask me anything. If you wanna see it live, pulseo.com/live lets you watch the agents running companies in real time.

And so let me explain what's going on here because this is brilliant and there's a lot of different names, Ben, people have had for this. So you inherently understood that you could earn attention, attention that you got by doing a purple cow. This is Seth Godin, was a really brilliant marketer, still is. And he, he built and sold a couple of companies that did well for himself, and then he became an author. Purple cow meant doing something that's completely different that gets attention from people. And it was if you were driving and you passed a field of cows and there was one purple one, you'd be like, why is there a purple cow? So imagine you had a milk farm, a dairy farm. You got 100 cows in the field. People are driving in the country on their weekend. And you see but one purple cow, you're gonna be like, what's going on here? Just the nature of dyeing a cow's hair purple would do that. Now, this is remarkable earned attention. And, um, what this does is, you know, it's— and the derogatory term for this is like stunt marketing, guerrilla marketing, et cetera. But But what academic people call this is memetic marketing. In other words, meme-based marketing. It's designed so the idea can spread. People will talk about it. It will get buzz, right? And what you did was you took a chance. Hey, I'm gonna let you negotiate with my AI. And this is like a purple cow. Like, that's weird. Like fundraising done by an agent. Very weird. Very unique. And people talk about it. There's a guy, uh, Clue Lee.

Sure, Roy Lee.

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

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

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

I mean, so it's interesting, like, I mean, obviously you're good friends with Travis Kalanick. Uh, I worked with Travis for 5 years and so I was reporting to him for 5 years. And it's interesting because I worked with, for him at CloudKitchens and where actually it was notoriously stealth, right? But I, he told me all these stories at Uber and obviously to me at Uber, He was genius at like, I mean, I don't think it was on purpose, but like there was so many ways in which he made people talk about Uber in so many ways.

Yes.

And I thought, I think he's a, I mean, I think he's a real entrepreneur and like especially in marketing, he has a real gift into how do you make people talk about your product in different ways. And I think that like, you know, looking, working for him and seeing him as a mentor for 5 years when I built Paul Sciamma, so there was, you know, he would always tell me like, do not, like, do not scale something that doesn't work. And so I spent a lot of deliberate time, you know, building the product, you know, as a solo founder with me, with the AI and like really waited until I really was sure that I had product market fit, at least in my gut before doing what you described as a stunt marketing. But once I had this, I was like, okay, I need to get max attention. I need to move to SF. And to my— I need to meet the right people that are going to help me amplify and I need to do something. And as you said, it's like, you know, I was like, okay, like, what if my— the AI raised a round? And actually at the time I didn't really need it to raise money, but I was like, the stuff is so interesting. But I took it, as you said, it wasn't just like a flash in the pan. I actually went to the work of giving Polsia my inbox, giving it my email, my personal, my Ben@Polsia and my personal inbox. Doing the data room with the live dashboard, doing a bosia.com/term-sheet where like investors would actually submit a term sheet, bosia.com/deck where there was an actual full deck that was fully public.

And so easy for people to remember those URLs. Um, Travis did this famously. This is a story from Business Insider, Lon, from 2012. I remember on Friday, on-demand service Uber ran an elaborate marketing promotion. For one day in 8 cities, you could hail a nearby ice cream truck to your location. It cost $2,000 per truck. And, uh, on a scorching 95-degree day, New Yorkers came out in hordes, yada yada. They also did kittens on demand. You could order kittens to your company and have them come, and people got to play with puppies or kittens. There was another one which was the controversy of surge pricing, and I was involved in this one. Dave Erickson. He was hand-wringing and concerned and/or saw an opportunity in explaining surge pricing. And every time he went on the press, people got so upset about surge pricing. There was a famous person, a celebrity, who, you know, normally would take a $50 ride into the city or something. It was a snow day and it was $400 in surge pricing. They decided to take it because they had no other options. So now you had Lawn, this moment in time where people were like, uh, this is price gouging, how dare they do this. And he said, well, we could have turned our service off because of the snow day, or we could let people who had snow tires go out, take the risk of getting in an accident as a driver, you know, not enjoy the snow day with their family, but they need to get paid for taking that on. And that's exactly what happened. And then he wrote a famous blog post about— because I was talking to him about it, I said, you know, when you explain it to me The, the surge pricing or demand-based pricing that we see in ticket sales for games, or we see for airplanes, the last couple of flights, you know, if you're booking last minute, all that dynamic pricing makes total sense. Why don't you write a blog post? And he was like, huh? And I was like, yeah, and I'll read it. He wrote this perfect blog post, didn't need an edit. It was perfect. All of those controversies he leaned into. Yeah. When the surge pricing things happened, people downloaded the app, right? That's what controversy equaled— engagement.

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

That would be my, my thought. Yeah, that would be the— that would be— that's a very good point, Lan. Sometimes you do these things and they're notable, gets a little bit of attention. Like the Lyft drivers always had a side hustle. So you get in there and they'd be like, would you like to buy an apple pie? I make 3 apple pies for $20. It's like, I really— it's kind of weird to buy an apple pie from my Uber driver or Lyft driver. No, thank you. I thought that was a dumb promotion. I thought the mustache was playful, but also dumb. I'm a serious business guy. I don't want to get in a car with a mustache in San Francisco. Now, some folks who are more effervescent or whatever, maybe they don't mind showing up to their dinner with a mustache. Yeah, but I'm a business guy. I need an Escalade. I wanna show up at my event in a, in a proper black car, not with a mustache on it. So these things can go both ways. Those were examples of getting attention, but they didn't demonstrate the product's core capability. That's the brilliance, Ben, of your first one. Uh, all right, let's wrap on this one unless you have anything else to add, Ben. Or any other reason? No, good.

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

All right. So let's keep going here. Any other nuances here to this strategy, Lan, that you should— you could tee up?

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

Yeah, I mean, interestingly, I mean, I can go back to like the thread quickly with this investor, but like, you know, initially the investor was like, hey, actually, you know what, I'm doing due diligence, so I actually want to speak to, to, to Ben.

Right.

And like, you know, I told the AI like, no, you, you know, you're doing the fundraise. Like, I don't have time to talk to investors because actually I didn't really have time to talk to investors. But then very quickly, the investors, they were asking a bunch of diligence questions. And the thing is, I've talked to investors before. I know all the questions they ask. And actually, AI was very good at telling me all the things it needed to know. Actually, I did some training before releasing this. I essentially asked Claude at the time, Hey, give me 100 typical questions an investor would ask in a sort of a diligence call. And I passed all those questions to Posia, which was essentially powered by Opus 4.5 at the time, with all the context of like my vision, the roadmap, all the data of the company, all the metrics, my background, etc. And I sort of ran through the 100 questions and read the answers. And I was like, you know, most of them are correct, but some of them are off or like giving misleading information. So I was like, okay, I need to give it a little more information. And so that was a very easy process to get it to answer, you know, those 100 typical questions, right? And end of the day, it answered most questions correctly. It sometimes hallucinated some facts, but like most of the time it was correct. I think that like the, the most surprising things that happened is like when, when an investor got, you know, because some investors didn't really understand that like it was AI, you know, obviously because it replied from Ben from Polsia. But like, I know obviously it was like, you know, clearly it showed that there was an AI that was replying. But sometimes people, you know, at one point there was this very notorious investor from a very big firm that said, okay, like, Ben, we need to meet. Like, okay, I talked to your AI for a bit. We need to meet. And I was like, yes, I'd be happy to meet because obviously I needed to do the final meetings to, you know, to do the final convincing. But then Polsia would reply, no, no, no, no. I am running this process. Ben doesn't have time. He will not do the meeting. It's like, okay, okay. I think I need to tune down a little bit, uh, the, the, the personality and tell José, hey, if it gets to the, the sort of like the important part, uh, just tone it down.

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

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

So let's take—

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

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

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

Okay, so you've got Claude, co-work, computer.

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

I think like that was amazing at getting attention. Correct.

And I remember I talked to Sam Altman about that. He was like, GPT-5.5 is as good. Like this is like whole And I know I, that was before it launched. I was like, and who knows at the time, you know, like, you know, because they both, both lads are like very good models, always cooking, you know, but sure.

It won that race.

Yeah.

And also they had that great story. Remember that story about the researcher went to the park to eat a sandwich and then the model started texting them because it like got out of its sandbox. That was another Anthropic thing where it's like, Well, that's a good story, but do we really—

Add one, Ben. Okay, so you identified one, but let's think creatively here, Ben. You're the CMO. You're gonna propose a new idea to Dario and the team. What are you proposing that we do next at Anthropic? What's another way to demonstrate the power of these models, et cetera, et cetera?

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

Yeah.

Well, no, I'll tell you where this, um, there was something when I was a kid, I remember I was in, um, I was at my cousin's in Ridgewood, New Jersey. We went to the store. And there was a woman and she was running something called the Pepsi Challenge. Somebody put a picture of it here. And what the Pepsi Challenge was, was an incredibly scientific operation. They put a can of Pepsi and a can of Coca-Cola behind a cardboard box. They would pour you two, they would give them to you, and they would put two cups, you know, two little 6-ounce cups. One was Pepsi, one was Coca-Cola. You didn't know which one was which. And then they would reveal it. You would say which one you liked better, and then they would open it up. Everybody wanted to take the Pepsi Challenge, and then you would talk to your friends about the Pepsi Challenge. Now, some people pick Coca-Cola. They preferred Coca-Cola. Can you tell the difference? Which one's better? Pepsi was always known as being sweeter and I think less fizzy than Coca-Cola, so it made it feel more syrupy, and it just made people talk. It just made people talk about Pepsi. And Pepsi then went from being not Coke, which was the classic beverage that stood alone. It let them catch up to it and put themselves— they positioned themselves as a peer. That's the genius of what you're saying. And that's kind of the classic steam engine versus the person with the— Lon, help me out here. What was the steam engine versus— Oh, the pile driver.

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

Right. So you, you, man versus machine, right, is a classic one, a test of these two. So really great example. For Airbnb, um, when you would drive up the 280 freeway, most beautiful freeway in the Bay Area, one of the most beautiful freeways in America, you would drive up and if you were driving north on the left with these incredible mountains, uh, that were untouched, beautiful reservoirs, and then you would come over this bridge and on the right-hand side, when going north towards San Francisco from Sand Hill Road, Somewhere in the San Mateo area was a house that looked like it was out of The Flintstones.

Yeah, we've all dreamed.

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

We'll show them in a second. The Simpsons, The Simpsons house is also on Airbnb.

So let's show those. And so he productized this and And when I showed it to my daughters, one of them is a huge X-Men fan, they begged me to go stay at the X-Men Professor X's house. It wasn't available, but here it is. Airbnb goes Hollywood with plans to rent X-Men mansion. And as you can see, there's one of those Sentinels, or I forgot they were called. But yeah, let's see some more pictures of this. So they just did like a set design and you could stay there. It was extraordinary, all the different, uh, things here. Now, if you're using Perplexity for this, not great for image search. Do, uh, Google, maybe it's better. But anyway, there's Professor X. That's perfect picture. Um, so they productize it. For Starlink, I was just thinking about Starlink since we were talking about it. What if Starlink at places where you can't get internet but people go through a lot? Um, so a music festival. If, if you set up Starlink at ACL Yeah, and Elon's famous for just making the best product and not worrying about marketing. He's just like, let's just make the best product. And famously, Tesla did no ads. But man, if you just put Starlinks up, or let's say, or you were competitor Starlink, like the new one coming from Amazon or Bezos, if you just said free internet provided Starlink or their competitor at ACL and you had stations with it people would lose their minds over that. Now you put charging stations there from Anker with the battery packs as well. You know, people at an event want to share their images. They want, you know, uh, this, um, they, they covet internet and they covet battery charging. A battery charging station plus internet at a music festival, Coachella, that would get massive attention. Yeah, massive.

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

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

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

And I think Starlink also, when they did the United deal, and somebody can look this up and fact-check me. I think, Ben, they told them, you can't have a landing page or charge people. We want it free for everybody on the flight, and we want them to just pick Starlink, no password, just get on the network immediately. So the next time you get on, it automatically connects to the Starlink, you know, ID. Yeah. And no landing page. And then I think Delta was like, no, we want to annoy people with a landing page and make them watch 3 commercials and whatever. And I think that was like where their relationship fell out and now like people on Delta are going to have to wait 3 years to get high speed and United's going to have it for every single customer for free for life. Bang! Uh, with no annoying, uh, interstitials. All right, listen, great job, Ben.

Yes, thank you.

Well done.

This was awesome.

Appreciate you sharing an incredible tactical practical. Yeah, we learned a lot here. Yeah, everybody go check out Pulseo. Elon, it's Friday, it's the end of the show. We like to go off duty.

I like to go off duty for sure. You do. So lots to talk about. There's— we got the Backrooms director. We were going to talk a little bit about his views on AI. Michael Saylor back in the news. Siri won't be your girlfriend. I Got a Dog, Widows Bay on Apple TV. What's your preference?

What would you like to talk about? Well, we could talk about the dog first. Everybody wants to know about your dog situation because earlier this week you were like, oh, boss, my dog's eating my homework. I can't do my job. Or maybe I can do my job. And I'm like, Lon, we moved to in-person culture. You got to get your ass in the office here. Put that dog down. I kid. I kid.

I would never.

I would never. I say give the dog back.

So I've been— I've been meaning to get my—

I'm happy for you to get a dog.

My previous dog, Taco, died in 2024. I've been sad about Taco for a while. He was a great dog. So now that I'm in Texas and I'm settled in, it was time to get a new dog. I found this dog, Berry, who was in a shelter, and then she moved to a foster home in New Braunfels, which is for, for those of you who aren't from Central Texas, about 45, 50 minutes south of here. It's sort of just outside the San Antonio area. Here's a picture of Barry when I first picked her up in my car. Adorable. That's her. You can see the New Braunfels shelter behind her. So what I did not know when I adopted Barry, when I met her for the first time, she was very cute. She came right up to me. She seemed personable. She's, she's a little shell-shocked. She's had some rough experiences over her 3 years of life. She had a litter of 9 puppies in January, but she did not— she's never been in like a stable home situation. So when I first brought her, like the moment I opened the door to get her inside my house, she just took off. Like before I even had a chance to react, she just ran away. She was racing through Barton Hills, which, if you're not from Austin, it's a pretty open neighborhood. It backs up to a creek. There's a lot of places for a tiny dog to go. So I was chasing her around for about an hour and a half. I finally, with help from a bunch of neighbors, I managed to get her into this like little enclosed area where I was able to grab her. She did claw my face when I did that. Salah, if you wanna pull up that picture of me with a busted nose, you can still see my nose is still scarred. I'm covered in dirt and crud.

Well, you're doing God's work.

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

a lot of damage.

It's a lot of damage for a little, for a little girl like that. So, uh, I took—

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

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

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

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

Did it work?

I did it like 2, 3 days in a row and now she'll let me pet her. She'll come sit right next to me. Her whole demeanor really changed in these 2, 3 days after I did that.

So let her come to you is the rule. Exactly. Create a calm environment and they naturally want to be part of a pack. Just takes a little while. Exactly. To do that.

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

I think she's calmed down a lot. Free, free, set them free. If you love something, set them free. If they come back, yada yada. I guess the Sting song matters. Hey, well done. The thing I told you was get a treat bag and get a clicker and get treats. Liver treats. They love these free-dried liver treats.

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

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

Yeah, I think it's similar. My trainer has— we do— it's two sounds. You go, uh-uh. 'Uh-uh,' and that means stop what you're doing, focus on me. And then 'good girl' means you've done a good job. So that's it.

Perfect.

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

I have an incredible off-duty. I'm testing two new products. I'm going on vacation. I'm taking the family. Now you got a family. You talked about cruises earlier. You know, you get hotel Wi-Fi, you're with the girls, you're in an airport, you're at an Airbnb. I found these travel routers. There's two leading candidates. Here's the first. This one is called, uh, let's see, this is an expensive one, um, but I have it sitting here on my desk. GL.iNet Woody 7. Okay, yeah, this is the worst branding ever. What this does is you can, you know, you have— you can tether, right? But I can put two SIMs in this physically. It's a giant battery. And I pop this up. I put my home network in, whatever the name of your home network is, my house, right?

Right.

Then you put your two SIM cards in there. You get SIM cards when you go local place, you can get physical cards or you can use, uh, the eSIMs. Mm-hmm. Now when I'm with my daughters, I put that in my backpack. I don't have to get them on the airport Wi-Fi. I have an unlimited SIM card. I'm in Japan, I'm in Paris, I'm in Hawaii, wherever I am. This thing's in my backpack, runs for 12 hours. Wow. Allegedly. And then, um, the whole family, 5 people, 2 or 3 devices each, they're all on this. Wow. Here's where it gets interesting. If I connect to an airport Wi-Fi, I connect to Boingo, or on the airplane I pay for it, it will then connect to this and rebroadcast the signal So I can pay for one airport connection. Let's say it's not Starlink and free, or I can pay for one hotel connection. Then it rebroadcasts the same home network and everybody's devices can just add to it. They don't have to open up the screen. They don't have to go through it all. Yeah. So you have ultimate optionality. This is one version. It's got the battery built in, but this next version is even more interesting. The next version doesn't have power. That's the size of a credit card. This is the UniFi travel router. It's only $79, no battery. So it's a fraction of the price. Yeah. So I'm going to A/B test these and return the one that works less well. Wow. One of the great things about ordering from Amazon.

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

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

Yeah.

So it just works pretty neat. Yeah. And it does it all in— boom, instantly.

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

I was in Singapore last year during the Knicks playoff run, and and it was arduous. And the thing that worked was connecting to my home router. That was the only thing that worked. So imagine like the steps of 5 people connecting 2 devices and trying to get the IP address to work. Instead, boom, I'm just on my home gateway. You can also plug in ethernet to it. So this is a big unlock. People are there, these things are banned on cruises. And so people don't like that.

Well, they want you to pay the exorbitant daily Wi-Fi rate when you're on the cruise ship. Yeah.

And it's per device. So if one person's using it, you know, you have to switch devices or you have to buy multiple ones. Sure. This just stuff, I think, just abstracts away all the gnarliness and you rebroadcast your own IP address. So I'm really excited about this. No, that's a cool thing. Ease of use. So, you know, then, you know, where I'm not going to buy all my daughters, like, cell phone accounts. One of them has it, the other two don't. 16-year-old versus 10-year-olds. I can just— when they take out their iPads, if we were at a cafe or something and they wanted to look something up on their iPad, um, this thing's in my backpack. It's just working all the time. It's in my man bag. I got all these new man bags, and, uh, boom, we're off to the races.

That's great. Yeah, cruise ships are becoming— they're all becoming Frontier Airlines is what's happening. Everything now you get, you get nickel and dime for every little thing.

It's a real— I hate the nickeling and diming.

Yeah, I don't like the Spirit Airlines approach at all. I just— just charge me, give me the full price upfront. I'll make a— I'll make an informed decision, but stop making it seem cheap. And then once you get there, they're like, oh, if you want water during your journey, it's going to be an extra $60 a day.

You know, like, you're just—

you're constantly getting hit by that stuff. It's a real pain in the butt. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. You have some things for us to watch. Sure. I've watched the first 4 episodes of Willow Bay. I am— I love that actor, Matthew Rhys.

Matthew Rhys from The Americans.

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

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

But it's, it's really Stranger Things sort of inspired. Yeah.

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

All right. I'm interested to see where this goes. I'm 4 episodes into it. I think they're up to 6 or 7. I'm going to withhold my judgment.

Anything else? Next week is the finale. We're at episode 9, but it just got renewed too for season 2. So it's, it's, it's coming. Congratulations. Coming back. One of the big stories for the past few weeks at the movies is You know, you had Mandalorian and Grogu, all the big summer movies are coming out and they're both getting beaten at the box office by these two relatively low-budget horror movies from guys who started out on YouTube. There's Kane Parsons, who did this movie Backrooms that's blowing up. You probably see some of the trailers where they're stuck in this.

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

It was a YouTube found footage horror movie where this guy ends up in this sort of seemingly endless liminal space where it's yellow. The rooms are all kind of surreal, but there's no escape. It's just like endless hallways and liminal spaces and, you know, like lobbies between lobbies. You know what I compare it to is when you go to Vegas and you start walking between casinos and there's just those endless, endless hallways where— corridors— a restaurant, a corridor, like at the airport. Like if you went behind the scenes at the airport. Where it's just endless white hallways. And that's kind of the premise.

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

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

Backrooms is making a lot of money.

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

Any good?

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

Is sort of— love it. Great, great premise. It's a premise that's been around a while. Be careful what you wish for. Exactly. This thing has grossed $240 million on a sub-$1 million production budget. Yeah. $165 million domestic, $73 million international. It's nuts.

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

Great. They got paid $15 million. They sold it. So it's like a startup. Yeah. They sold it to Focus Features. Focus bought the rights to it. For $15 million. Yeah, so basically 50/50 with the theaters. So the— this was a terrible trade, uh, eventually. But if you made it for a million, you made $14 million. That was probably big money for a bunch of YouTubers, I guess. But what's the back office? What was their side deal? Is it— or, you know, so I— what I'm seeing here is they potentially got low tens of millions So another $25, $30 million if they got a backend deal.

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

so they make it back on the next one.

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

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

So you could bring it on the plane with you? Yes.

And so you could literally put this under your jacket on your back, you know, it's like 2-bag rule. Yeah, you could actually have a third bag. You put this one in your back on your sling, you put a jacket over it, they're not going to know.

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

no, no, no, you have to keep them in the cabin, right?

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

It's got a tablet area. Great. It's got all these pen things. It's got like tons of pockets. The thing I love about it best is you can slide a MacBook 14-inch into it. Wow. So this thing can replace my backpack if I want to, and I wanna run around with, but you know, 10 pounds on my back instead of 25 pounds in my backpack. Waterproof, all that stuff. I've been, when you see me like by the barn, when I take my calls by the barn, smoke a cigar or whatever. When I take the half-mile walk to the barn, this is what I use. I just throw it on my backpack, boom, and I'm done. So I just love these. I have that— not being paid by this, just—

I might get one of these.

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

No, this is—

I might—

the key strap. This might be the first Off Duty where I actually go home and buy the thing that you're suggesting because it's $130.

So yeah, I want to make this Can somebody on my team, uh, Jacob, maybe reach out to the CEO of this company? Oh, look at the SIM tray.

That's cool.

Yeah, what that's about and what am I— why am I doing that with my SIMs? But okay, all right, this is like for professional travelers. This is like Road Wars. I'd like to make— I want to see if we can make a This Week in Startups version of this, like a branded version, and sell it in our new Shopify store. So that's on top of my list. I would like to make a branded one and then give it to the caller of the day, kind of the day. I love that. All right, great job everybody. We'll see you on Monday.

Bye-bye.

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