The Startup Building the First Hotel on the Moon…

He's building the first lunar hotel using an on-site factory that turns the moon's soil into bricks.

You're kidding me. It's not a put-on? You sure this isn't a put-on?

We basically got like Manifest Destiny going on on the moon.

This is sci-fi becoming reality.

We would build the entire hotel end to end without actually needing to send humans because we would have robots that assist us.

You're asking people to put down a million dollar deposit to visit the moon, to own a moon condo? What do you get for a million bucks here?

They've experienced everything that can be done on Earth, that they want to do something greater. The Moon Hotel is simply just the first wedge towards enabling us to build products on the moon.

This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist. Sentry. 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 every.io for all your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs. Visit every.io. All right everybody, welcome back. It's Twist. It's Monday, June 15th. The New York Knickerbockers have won The World Championship. I was there, Lon. I was there with my brother Josh.

And in beautiful San Antonio, the Frost Bank Center.

Very simple ride from, uh, you know, Austin, 70 minutes or so.

Yeah, it's not so bad.

Yeah, stopped at the original Black's Barbecue.

Yes, for people who don't know, the Black family of Texas, they're having a war right now over who controls the barbecue. So there's, there's one, uh, young Black who runs the The original Black's Barbecue that's on the road from here to San Antonio. And then there's Terry Black's here in Austin, which is a different child of the Black family.

It's a whole thing. We had a very similar thing in Brooklyn and Harlem. There's a place, Patsy Grimaldi's Pizza. Patsy's Grimaldi's Brick Oven Pizza. Fantastic. Frank Sinatra used to go to the one under the Brooklyn Bridge, and then there's the one up in Harlem. Anyway, long story short, same situation. You know, the kids, the cousin, the uncle, whatever. Everybody's got the same last name.

And they all want to be the, the inheritor of the tradition because Black's, one of the oldest barbecue places in Central Texas.

And it was fantastic. Really great beef rib, really great brisket. If I were to swap those two items with Terry Black's, I probably wouldn't know the difference, if I'm being honest. But I just want to say, you know, my brother had an observation being from Brooklyn. He's like, wow, Texas is amazing. Everybody's so polite. Oh man. Everybody's so cordial. Yeah. And it's like it used to be in Brooklyn when we were growing up. You just assume everybody's of good faith. And we walk into Black's Barbecue. Um, what is that, Laredo? I don't know, Kyle, Buda, somewhere down there. Yeah, anyway, there's like 2 or 3 down there. Um, and everybody's like, oh hey, you going to the game? Yeah. They said, oh man, good luck, man. I said, oh thanks, you Knicks fan? They said, no, I'm a Spurs fan. I said, all right, I really appreciate that, you have a great team. And just really cordial. And I was 6 rows behind the Knicks bench, cost me a fortune. Uh, but you know, I Polymarketed, uh, YOLO'd $6K into it and, uh, won $15K. So I paid for the ticket, right? Gambling. I love these prediction markets. It's so much fun. Shout out to my guys at Polymarket. I think I saw Shane with courtside seats. Uh, everybody was there. It was fantastic. And, um, just a great relief after, you know, I was there for two of the failed attempts versus Houston and versus Spurs. I was there when the Spurs won on our court. Spurs got a bright future, a lot of great young players, but man, this Knicks team is transcendent. Brenda. Thank you to Leon. Thank you to Coach Brown. Thank you to Jalen Brunson, OG Anunoby, uh, Mitchell Robinson, Josh Hart. I mean, just Bridges, FM Picks, just so many great players, uh, and had a great time calling in this season to, uh, Knicks Fan TV. Shout out to my guys over there, Alex, CK2K, and of course CP of the Franchise. Great YouTube channel to follow. They do this fan TV, which is like a thing in soccer where they have all these fan shows. The fans just get on and they're drunk and blah, blah, blah, and they're yelling, but they're obsessed with the game. KFTV, Knicks Fan TV, has got 100,000 followers, and he's been following the team for 9 years. What a great story. He was following the team when they had 17 wins a season. There's 82 games a season, Lon. When we were the worst team in the league, he was following this team and had literally 30 people watching his livestream. You know, then when they win games, he has 3, 4, 5,000 people watching live, and then another, you know, 100,000 watching after that. So, uh, just great all around. Amazing for the city of New York. Couple of notes, couple of notes. Number one, uh, during the national anthem, put your hand over your heart, take your goddamn hat off, and no screaming. I want you to wait to the end.

People are screaming. Well, I mean, a little bit of what I think I think the one moment you're allowed to get excited during the anthem is, and the rocket's red glare. When they hit that note, you're allowed to get a little— you're allowed to give a little woo, a little cheer.

Yeah.

Under— not for me, but okay. I'm okay with it. It's a kind of a tradition.

That's a tradition.

Yeah.

I like, oh, they hit that. They hit that note. Well done.

Okay, fine.

Yeah.

It's kind of like a roar in the end. It's like a pre-applause. Right. But there's guys who are yelling, go Knicks!

Yeah.

Nice.

Yeah.

Every time the person's trying to sing the national anthem. It's not— It's uncouth. Disrespect. Second thing that's uncouth, you know, if you lose, which I've spent 50 years doing with this team, you can't take it out on the other fans. There was like a little random violence here. I'm also not down with the vulgarity and the burning of other people's journeys. It's not cool. Be classy in victory and be honorable in defeat.

Right.

This is just a PSA for young fans. You know, I don't mind if you climb a a lamppost or whatever, but I'm not down with you burning, uh, you know, a fire engine or a police car. None of that shenanigans. Keep it classy, folks.

People get excited. It seemed like— I saw a lot of footage of the celebrations in New York, and it seemed like the rowdiness was, was an outlier. Most people, it felt like it was a real community, all in good fun sort of vibe.

Now, I've been on the road— I think this was my 9th game in this postseason— and then one time Yeah, a couple times last year, but just for this postseason, this jacket, uh, oh, the lucky jacket. Yeah, I just want to say thank you, shout out to Kith. I had to pay for this, it's not a freebie or anything, but this is an Avericks, which is like the classic jacket, and they did this. This is incredible designer, K-I-T-H. Kith is an incredible designer. This jacket costs a pretty penny. I don't want to say how much, but yeah, you know, a couple G's. It's now become like a classic. You can Yeah, like people are selling these in the aftermarket. I think they only made like 100 of them. The guy's like, hey, you know, here at Kith, we're huge fans of yours. I was like, okay, great, can I get this jacket? And they're like, oh yeah, well, here's how it works. You go to Williamsburg, you line up at 5 AM, and then you got a pretty good shot. They give you a ticket. I said, let me stop you right there. I'm all in. Not going. If it was a 25-year-old J-Cal, 30-year-old J-Cal, I'm all in. You're fans, I'm fans. How about this? You send me an invoice for 5 dimes. I send you 5 dimes. You sit on my 5 dimes, put it in your interest-bearing account, make $500 a year off me, whatever it is. And then when you drop the Knicks-Heat, I'll just tell you which ones I want. You maybe send it to me, whatever. Make a little VIP promo. I said, oh, it's very interesting. And sure enough, I get an invoice. I get the jacket. Boom, boom, jacket. 9 for 9 in playoff games. I went. The Heat does— the air conditioning doesn't work in the dump of an arena. The Spurs are still in. They're getting a new arena. The Frost Bank Arena.

Is where the Spurs play.

I mean, just literally tear it down. It's, it's, I mean, this thing is, it's rough. Anyway, uh, they, they're gonna build a new arena, modern, but they don't have air conditioning working in this building.

Wow.

And so it's hot down there and they just, it gets hot in there. I wouldn't take the jacket off. I took it off a couple of times just to hold it up, but well, it's lucky here.

The team's counting on you, you know, I'm sweating.

And, uh, anyway, uh, you know, we got a lot of medaka today. I'm really excited about today's guest because space is so big with the SpaceX IPO. I just don't wanna miss a moment. So I'm gonna just get this Claude pin on here. Yeah.

Get the Claude pin on.

I press the button. I now have the haptic going. Now everything's recorded. You know me, I'm on a tear right now. I'm on a tear right now, uh, working at the company. You see behind the scenes, all the stuff I'm doing. I'm vibe coding this dude. A lot going on. Claude, the Perplexity. I'm like, I'm doing a lot. Perplexity and Claude to automate all this stuff and level everybody up. We got 5 associates in training starting. So I'm really excited about our business and running it and, you know, all, all the great stuff we're doing, but I don't wanna miss a minute. So I use Plod. I went on a hike the other day around the ranch, had a lot of action items that come to my mind when I'm hiking in nature with my 25-pound kettlebell, doing my old man rucking. I never miss anything because I just turn the Plod on. I might not talk for 15 minutes and then I talk for 10. Then I'm quiet for 15, I talk for another 10. Get back, put it in the cradle, cat's in the cradle, boom, summarizes it. I get the bullet points, I pull it up on my desktop.

Yeah.

I've never touched my phone, by the way. And then I have all my notes waiting for me there, organized. And then I can share you the raw feed with all those notes, or, and I just look at it, I remember a couple things, cut and paste, bing, right into Slack, and I'm ready to go.

Yeah.

The app— don't miss a moment—

pulls the whole thing together. You can put the app wherever you want, and then all your conversations just live, uh, uh, across all your devices. So if you want to make your work more efficient like J Cal, You need to get your own Plaud NotePin S. If you check it out at plaud.ai/twist and use the code TWIST, they're going to give you 10% off your purchase.

All right, let's get started. We have a great guest today. I think we're going to get right to it. Or you want to do news and then—

no, no, I think we should get— I think we should get right to our guest. He's building the first lunar hotel in using an on-site factory that turns the moon's soil into bricks just like this one I'm holding up in front of you. Please welcome Skylar Chan of Gru Space. Now they, they see he sent us bricks.

It's not a put-on. You sure this isn't a put-on?

Lunar soil.

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Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. Um, so yeah, I'm Skylar. I started this because I always wanted to become an astronaut when I was a kid. So, so obsessed with becoming an astronaut as a kid that I decided that why don't we all go to space? And so if we have this end-state future of exciting, like, first cities being built on the Moon and Mars, like the next San Francisco, the next New York on the Moon and Mars, the question is working backwards from that. What are the series of civilizational-scale technologies that we need to develop to make this happen? It's not just rockets anymore. Clearly, with the IPO, we saw that ship has sailed. The next SpaceX is going to be building the first habitation modules, the enablement of using resources off Earth, but using resources on the moon to create structures. So we don't have to pay for all the shipping from Earth to the moon. Uh, and so that's kind of where we're at. We just went for YC, um, last batch and off to the races to send our shit to the moon. So it's pretty exciting.

So maybe we can get into technically what you're actually doing. We understand moon base. Great. Yeah, we also understand, hey, shipping bricks and materials from Home Depot to the moon is quite wasteful. So you're going to build some sort of a factory, got to ship something up there. But then I'm seeing here in this video, very evocative, you have, uh, designed and tested building these bricks out of moon soil. Is it soil? Is it— what, what is the moon constructed of when we would compare it to soil on Earth? And then take us through this process and how do you test something like that? Do you actually have some moon rocks that you bought for a billion dollars to test it? Tell me everything.

Yeah, let's dive into the details. So basically what we're doing with this lunar regolith, and lunar regolith is topsoil on the lunar surface. So think of it just like dirt all over the moon. The idea here is that, like you said, it doesn't make sense for us to just keep shipping shit to the moon because it's very expensive. And we should just be using resources on the moon. Like we built the US, did we bring everything from Europe? No, we used the timber available in the US.

And so.

What we're doing is we're building a factory. Think of it like a payload, like a mini spacecraft that we're sending to the lunar surface. And what it's going to do is it's going to have an excavation stage— couple stages— excavation stage on the moon where we mine lunar regolith with a robotic arm. Then when we filter out lunar regolith, you want the fine particulate because then there's more surface area to bind it with a geopolymer which we bring from Earth. Now if you just ChatGPT like, how do you make stuff on the moon? Right? You're going to find sintering and melting among other proposed approaches to do this. The reason why we didn't choose these approaches is because of energy. And when we think about the sort of timeline that we're dealing with, right, NASA wants to build a moon base like ASAP, immediately. We basically got like Manifest Destiny going on on the moon. And so in terms of a timeline, like we can do things like laser the ground with like thousands of degrees Celsius. It's too costly and we don't have the equipment. So the decision we made at Groove is like, let's use a geopolymer-based approach with a robotic arm, with some other stuff in our payload that we're going to reveal soon, um, to use the resources on the moon intelligently so that we can bring down the cost of construction on the surface.

Got it. Now your hope, I'm guessing, is that NASA gives you a contract to be the contractor to make the bricks that make the lunar base, or do you want to be the owner of the lunar base? Are there going to be multiple lunar bases? Because it sounds like building a lunar base is a multi- $1 billion product, and it sounds like you solved one of the acute problems, but I don't know if they're gonna just let some random YC founder have a base on the moon. I know this like not regulated, but there's gonna be some regulation going on at some point of this. So talk a little bit about what your aspiration here is and who your customer is. Obviously your customer right now is venture capitalists who are crazy and want to, you know, do this Hail Mary amazing, uh, idea. Awesome. But you got to get a customer at some point and the customer's got to pay for something. So talk about how you, what the business model here is. Yeah.

So the exciting thing is like pre, literally on our demo day for YC was when NASA had the ignition event where they basically announced that they would spend $20 billion to build a moon base, which is a great demand signal for us. So now we're talking like the timeline post that timeframe. Um, yeah, the short answer is like, we want to be NASA's go-to moon base construction contractor. And the pathway to getting there is to prove something called TRL, right? So technology readiness level. NASA ranks you on a scale of 1 to 9. The higher you are, the more likely you are to get contracts. And the best way to do that is to demonstrate that the tech actually works on the moon, which is why we're doing this mission to make the first ever product, the BRICK. But the second half of your question is like the business plan, which is very exciting. To preface this all, it's a very blue ocean market. As we've seen with SpaceX in the early days, it wasn't obvious that like reusable rockets was at play. It wasn't obvious that Starlink was going to evolve. Just like with the Moon, there's a lot of things that are not obvious yet for why construction— more specifically, the ability to use resources off Earth, decoupling us from Earth— is going to lead to like this massive explosion in terms of value. And so for us, it looks like, of course, the Moon Hotel is simply just the first wedge towards enabling us to build products on the Moon, do a demo on the Moon, then earn the Moonbase construction contracts, and then scale. Right. And to your point as well, regulation is very interesting. There's actually not much set, hard, clear-cut regulation for who does what on the moon. So our prediction is it's going to look like if you look at the Hudson's Bay Company, right, in Canada, they own a huge chunk of land for 200 years before they sold it back to Canada. And so it looks like companies owning pieces of land on the moon, which frankly, we've stated this in our white paper, is on a roadmap, is our aspiration is to eventually own a lot of the resources and the land on the moon. And we do this because we're We're the ones who figure out how to even do stuff with it, right? Because we're the resource utilization company. So that's the end state vision. After that, eventually it's really to hit the final form of our company, which is Galactic Resource Utilization, galactic scale ISRU, elevating humanity to Type 3 on the Kardashev scale. So that's really the end state of our company.

Yeah.

Wow. That's, uh, it's, it's, it's interesting. I'm, I'm curious how far down the road do you need, can you get without humans going to the moon? Like, obviously sending the factory, getting started, that's all going to be sort of automated. How, how far along can you get in terms of building structures on the moon before we have no choice? Like, we got to send a few astronauts up there.

You mean a few astronauts to help construct?

You know, that like, even if it's the final stage of the process before guests start arriving or whatever, like at some point you're going to have to have humans going to the moon.

This is pre-concierge, pre-concierge at your lunar hotel. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the thing is like everything that we can do with robots is a lot cheaper than having to send humans, right? Having to send a human up to the moon, there's a lot of other associated costs like life support systems, ECLSS, like, et cetera, et cetera, power, comms, et cetera. Um, so the idea is like we would build the entire hotel end to end without actually needing to send humans because we would have robots that assist us. This is important because if you think about the tech tree though, in terms of like how do you sequence this? We've done robotics on the moon and Mars. We have something— humans have something called flight heritage. What humans don't have flight heritage on is how do you use resources on the moon to make a product, which is why we decide in our roadmap for our company is like, okay, let's laser focus ourselves on proving that we can make a brick on the moon, right? That is going to unlock all these other things. Because what's the next stage? Similarly to other companies that, for example, like Star Cloud, they sent a GPU to space. What's next? Let's send like thousands of these bad boys up. Yeah, for us, okay, we can prove that we can make a brick on the moon. Let's send thousands of these bad boy factories up to the moon to just crank out more bricks, just accelerate the construction. This is a very exciting future at the end of the day because for the first time in human history, you look up at the moon like it's no longer just a place to look at and people visit. It's going to be a place like this space station where we're going to have constant human presence on the moon, uh, which is a very exciting time to be alive.

Yeah, and all this is enabled, Lon, because Elon has taken the cost of getting to space, I think, down 90% plus now.

If you see those charts, it's exponential. The one— as soon as you can reuse the rockets, the costs just plummet.

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Yeah, there's a couple companies out there. I mean, if you look at the LTV providers— so LTV is like the Lunar Terrain Vehicle— you've got, um, like Lunar Outpost, Astrolab. There's a whole other set of companies. Um, you know, we're obviously in the mix of all these different folks and we have different things coming up, which we'll save that for later. But yeah, there's a whole group of companies there. There's a lot of like robotic arm companies as well that do construction or welding and have done demos on Earth. There's a lot of comms companies, there's a lot of power companies. So some, some bit of background. This is important, I guess, is when you look at the lunar economy, you've got a lot of different services, right? Services for like providing power, providing comms, like power as in like nuclear, crazy stuff on nuclear to like solar to like laser beaming on the moon. Like, it's some really cool shit. And you got this whole, like, bucket of people here. You've got the comms guys. So, like, how do you, like, FaceTime your friends on the moon? Hold up, back home. The nice thing here, and rather, I think the bigger takeaway is this: if you think about the space industry as a whole, um, it's really got two pillars underpinning it, right? You've got governments and billionaire-backed companies. What we're doing at GRU is we're taking the unconventional approach. We're saying, hey, let's use a third pillar: space tourism. Extend to literal moon and build the first hotel on the moon. The hotel is actually nice because if we win, it's like an index on everyone else because comms guys, we'll, we'll be using them. Yeah. The LTV rovers. Well, they won't have to be just dependent on NASA to stay alive. Like we can use the rovers for ATVing on the moon for tourists, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so it's really this whole ecosystem, right? The moon hotel, interestingly enough, again, key distinction is The branding is distinct, Hotel in Space, but the key technology is really the same. It's the enablement of using resources on the moon for building all kinds of products.

Hmm. So, so tell me about this hotel in space. Is that like actually part of the vision right now? And, you know, obviously you have customers. NASA might just say, hey, yeah, we'll, we'll give you a contract to make us 10,000 bricks and here's the funding and here's your milestones. Oh, that's all great. But talk to me about this. Like a really far out there concept that, hey, if you go to space, you might need a bed. You might need a hotel room.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's inevitable. Um, I think one nice thing call that we got was, um, you saw in the Elon-JPMorgan summit, like they were talking about moon hotels too. And so, um, yeah, it's, it's on the roadmap. Like if you think about critical path, so moon hotel, like technically, like on a technical level, what does that look like? You've got, let's say a habitat on the moon. Okay. Let's break that down further. Let's work backwards. Let's say all of us, you know, Jason Lohn, et cetera, we just teleport to the moon right now. We take off our spacesuits. What's the first thing that's going to kill us? The lack of pressure on the moon.

Yeah.

Okay.

Next thing.

Yeah. We're just going to explode. Like it'll be not pretty, right? Temperature swings, radiation, and then the potential for micrometer impacts. So then what we did at Groover was like, okay, there's— there's a lot of other problems, obviously, like, okay, how do you recycle the water? How do you recycle this and this? But these things have been solved again on the space station. Let's focus on what's critical about, like, at its core. So if you got pressure and temperature, like, working backwards from that, what do you need to create as a product to solve for that? Well, we need to have an inflatable, like, expandable habitat. Okay. The last two problems of radiation, micrometeorites, like, again, how do you think about that problem? Well, it turns out if you can use the resources on the moon and make not just bricks, but all kinds of material using the resources on the moon. Bricks are just the first step to shield the habitat so that you have an igloo-like structure where you have the inflatable in the middle and you got the bricks placed around it like an igloo that will protect you from the radiation from outer space and also the potential for micrometeorites on the moon. And so what we're like is, okay, we want to open up this hotel. Like, we have to actually prove that this stuff works on the moon. And also on Earth along the way, but more importantly, it's, it's very visceral. We, we have proof that this, this functions on the moon. It's like, it's legit. And so that's actually why, how we ended up doing this milestone path that's laid out on our whitepaper of let's, let's build a brick on the moon and let's prove out inflatable can expand.

I'm showing on the screen here for those of you who, uh, yeah. Uh, are not watching and you're listening, you can go to gruspace.com.

Or gru.space.

gru.space is the domain. And you've got this really nice timeline here. You know, it starts with, hey, you, you get your first lunar systems there and you test making the bricks. Then you have this cave base, very basic dome. Then you have the first lunar hotel and you're seeing the bricks go around it. And then, uh, you have picked an architecture style that is, I would say, uh, neo-Greek Lucas Star Wars aesthetic.

It's got a—

it's like retrofuturism. It's got a Death Star vibe. Death Star.

Yeah. No, I think this is New Republic style, actually. Death Star would be a little more military.

The cave one looks like a Death Star.

Yeah, the cave one definitely has Death Star.

This one, you're right, is more like Naboo.

Yeah, this is Naboo. This is Prince Amidala. This is Renaissance, which, by the way, Lucas, there's a building you pass by in Marin that's like a civic center or something, and you see it when you're, when you're going north, it's on the right. When you're going south to the Golden Gate Bridge, it's to your left. You can barely see, but that's where he got that Nobu architecture style from. Lom will pull it up in a second here, one of the producers will. But talk to me about picking the style of what this would look like, because that does not seem the most utilitarian the most, uh, basic efficient. You're doing some flourishes there. You're making it look elegant and interesting and sci-fi and, dare I say, inspiring. By the way, here's that building. What is that building called?

Uh, I believe this is the Marin County Civic Center.

Yes, yes. I mean, it's stunning.

San Rafael. San Rafael.

Pretty amazing.

Is this the one that was Frank Lloyd Wright, or am I crazy? I mean, I believe it was. Yes, I am, I am correct. This was designed by the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

All right, let me pat Lon on the back here.

Very good.

All right, so talk to me about the aesthetics here, because you're asking people to put down a million dollar deposit to visit the moon, to own a moon condo. What do you get for a million bucks here?

Yeah, so, okay, two things. First of all, the style, right? Yeah, you basically got it bang on.

It's—

when we thought about the style, like, we got to think about zoom out from our own, like, little sliver of 80 years or maybe longer of life in this universe, right? When thousands of years later we look back at the first structure, man-made structure on the moon, like, it has to be pretty— that's pretty sick, you know?

Like, it has to be sick. That would be a good benchmark.

It is like the first bastion of, like, humans' mark on the moon. I mean, that is— that's really exciting. And so the thought process is like, you know, obviously looking at the wonders of the world that have already existed, but also like, what would something that looking back, right, our great-great-great-great-grandkids would be like, whoa, like, Yeah. Like my, like ancestors worked on this shit.

Like the Acropolis, the Parthenon.

Yeah, exactly. Right.

Yeah.

So it was a bit of Greco-futurism and, and, uh, actually it was a trip I did when I was at still at Berkeley as a student there. I went to Palace of Fine Arts with my parents and it was like, I was just like, whoa, like imagine this on the moon. This is before Groove started. But that was what ironically my mom is an architect and she thought the design was shit. I still think it's good. But we got featured in Architectural Magazine.

I was like, love it. I love it. Now, what psychedelic were you on? You were on psilocybin or DMT when you came up with this idea? When you were at Berkeley? I kid, I kid. But talk to us about the million-dollar deposit.

And so, yeah, about that. It's so basically the thought process behind this as well was with, okay, in order to ensure that people have a spot here, how should we, you know, work the sale? We studied Virgin Galactic, we studied Blue Origin. We also studied ones that didn't work so well. One important thing is, is that we design— they have to be fully refundable, right? It's only fair that way. But more importantly, this is a way so that people can reserve their spot in advance prior to the hotel being opening. Frankly, a big piece of this of like, why do people do space tourism? Let's think about that. Why do people even want to do something as crazy as this? And it's not for everyone. Like, let's be clear, it's not for everyone. One of the biggest things is because they've experienced everything that can be done on Earth, that they want to do something greater. They want to feel like they're a part of something even bigger than themselves. It's about legacy building. And so it's an opportunity for people to be a part of that. Um, one of the nice things that we've actually, um, are going to start to offer is that our payload that's going to the lunar surface, we're obviously making it brick on the moon, but there are opportunities for people to etch their name with the company on the payload that goes to the moon. They'll be there forever.

Oh, so a little marketing, a little, little, little brick right there. As a founder, you've taken the time to become an expert in your niche, and you fully understand the entire landscape. But with so many regulations and rules that you need to follow, from federal agencies and offices here in the U.S. to the European Union and beyond, it's impossible for even the most diligent person to keep up with every exacting requirement. That's why you need to simplify compliance with a trusted partner like Vanta. All my startups use Vanta, and they love Vanta's AI-powered platform that automates your entire compliance process. Whether you're preparing for a SOC 2 or you're running an enterprise GRC program or you're doing an audit, Vanta is going to worry about the security so your team can focus on building great products. That's why some of our favorite companies like Ramp and Ryder are spending 82% less time on their audits by working with Vanta. Whether you're a fast-growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta is here help you automate. Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance and earn and prove trust. So get started today at vanta.com/twist. That's vanta.com/twist.

I don't know if you can see, Jason, your name is etched into—

oh, is it really?

It's a little too small.

I'm going to have Salah zoom in here for a second so you can see, but they have etched Jason Calacanis into this.

I love this. Leo Laporte, when he did the, uh, Twitch Brick House. His concept was you, for, I don't know if it was $100 or $500, you could support independent media like This Week in Tech, TWiT, and you could buy a brick in the Brick House. And then when you came to visit the Brick House, you could, uh, see your brick. It was a really genius idea. Look at that, GRU.

Yeah, amazing.

Uh, all right, and so you're going to keep these deposits, you get the interest on, you put them in a nice 5-6% interest-bearing account, you sweep the interest, that's great. Uh, fair enough. And then I get— what am I getting for my million dollars? Uh, is it like, uh, I get to stay in a hotel for one night, 10 nights? Do I own a piece of it?

What do you want to be on the moon for 10 days? What are you gonna do up there?

I mean, if I took the time to go and took the risk, yeah, I want to get a full— no, I mean, I don't think—

that's a good question. Like, for Jason, would you want to go to the moon?

I'm going. I'm gonna go. Uh, well, a friend of mine's got a rocket ship company and we talked about it, so I think when he goes up, uh, you know, if he wants to have a couple of his mates with him, I might get a— I might get a shot at that. Uh, so when he thinks it's okay to go up, that's maybe when I would decide it's okay to go up. Uh, but I don't want to— you know, I got 3 daughters, so I think the power move is to wait until— yeah, it's established. They've done— yeah, I think maybe if there's been like 100 trips to the moon or something.

Yeah, you don't want to do the Titan submersible first trip. You want to wait for like 100 trips, then it's like, okay.

What's interesting, you bring that up, Lon. It's— there are people who want adventures who have enough money to kill themselves. We call it toxic wealth in Silicon Valley, where people, you know, go buy some hyper sports car and because they made a little bit of money, and then they do crazy stuff. Like the billionaire who his son didn't want to tragically go on this thing. He was nervous for a good reason. Like, trust your gut, folks. Uh, and he went anyway. And they were thrill-seeking because they had the money to do thrill-seeking stuff. This has to be safe, and it will be safe. Nobody's gonna take crazy risk doing this, but there will be some implied risk. You can just do the statistics of the number of astronauts that have died in space. It's, it's, um, it's— I think it's low single digits. Uh, so, you know, if you were playing a poker hand, it would be like having I don't know, you flop a set of aces and somebody runner-runners you and, well, it's quads or something.

We remember. I mean, there have been, there have been few enough that like you, everybody knows the Challenger. Exactly. Or like Apollo 13, they, we've, we've rescued those guys. But with the, it's infamous the times when things have gone famously wrong. I mean, I guess, I guess that's why it's important to test well, right? Right. I guess my question is for, for Gru, uh, and even for you, Jason, I mean We're really talking about, are we talking about the moon itself as a destination or we're really thinking about the moon as like the gateway to the cosmos, right? Like the goal here is we've got to be permanently on the moon so that we can go to Mars and beyond. Am I, am I correct here?

Yeah. So the vision is like, again, the moon is just a stepping stone, right? Right. Again, the moon holds out and I love it when people are like, wait, so the moon holds out just the first step. Like, that's fucking crazy. Like, it seems like, yeah. Right.

But no, family show, Skyler, family show, Skyler.

PG. I'm joking. It really is the first step. We have to go to Mars, right? That is— humans have never left system Earth. Space is in our destiny to have humans living on Mars, right? And we cannot have, reasonably speaking, have people living on Mars if we are dependent on resources from Earth the entire time. The umbilical cord at some point has to be severed, right? And so the only way to do that is can we develop the technology and understanding of systems so that we can use resources on not just the Moon but on Mars for this future to happen. So that's the end state.

Yeah, we got— I think we have, you know, 20 or 30 years of Moon work to do, Lon, before— and that was a lot. Well, I mean, all of— all we have right now is the space station as an equivalent, but the space station, you know, has taught us over, you know, 50 years how human bodies and food and, you know, medicine and, you know, all kinds of things work using the loo. These things all had to be figured out over the last 50 years. Congratulations, we're able to do it. But to be able to build stuff in space, man, that is a lot of work. And I'm really excited, Skylar. We wish you unlimited success in this incredibly positive, awesome endeavor. Chances are slim, but we need crazy entrepreneurs to do all of these little stepping stones. And so Brick by brick. We wish you great success.

Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Juan.

There's gonna be startups on the moon one day, which is nuts when you think about it. Uh, all this science, all this technology, it's really changing everything. Um, and one of the things that I was able to change with technology over the last 5 years was dropping 40 pounds.

Wow.

That's my own moon. That was my moon landing. That was my moonshot. Could I get back in shape?

Hey Jacob, can you find that, that, uh, image Jason posted over the, over the weekend of, of his new, of his, his New body. Yeah, the, the Jason, the J-Cal thirst trap. Can you find that for me while I'm co-hosting here? Yeah, you're showing off, showing off the—

well, that was at Cinque Terre, Cinque Terre, CT, uh, the Five Towns or whatever it is. I don't know the ocean.

I'm not well.

There's a couple— I took this a couple of years ago and I was probably down 30 pounds and that one's sucking my gut in. But yeah, look at that. But, uh, look at that, man. You compare that to the pictures my enemies has, uh, posted me online. And, uh, I mean, I— this is the definition of a dad bod, you know. I'm old, I'm creaky, there's things that break once in a while. But I tell you what, you lose 40 pounds and all of a sudden my sciatica in my leg, my lower back pain, my shoulder pain, all this stuff, my snoring, my asthma, it went away. All the downstream things. So this summer I'll be posting a couple more thirst traps, x.com/jason. But in the meantime, if you want to join me on your journey, I highly recommend at least considering if you're more than, I'd say, 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, which is like 60% of the country. Uh, the food system is conspiring against us. Work is conspiring against us, sitting at computers all day. You might need help. I needed help. I'm not ashamed to say it. ro.co/twist, ro.co/twist, and you'll, uh, get to take their insur— you get to use their insurance checker.

Yeah.

And that's the first step. Now, if you don't have insurance, your insurance doesn't cover it. But don't worry, there's like all kinds of affordable versions now. I'm not sure where exactly it starts, but like low hundreds of dollars, I think, is the entry price now.

The word— the word— the immediate word when these GLP-1s were first available was, oh, it's so expensive, you're spending $1,000. The price has really come down considerably now. So if you want to check if your insurance covers it, go to ro.co and try out their insurance checker. They'll let you know if your GLP-1s are covered for you. For free. You just submit your insurance card and they do the rest. Go to ro.co/twist for your free insurance check. ro.co/twist.

Yeah. And I mean, I'm looking at it right now. I mean, you're going to be able to get into this for like $150, $200. Just ro.co understands what the mission is. They're trying to get everybody, everybody who wants access to this incredible technology, access to it.

Big story we got to talk about. The US government is blocking access to Fable and Mythos, the Advanced Frontier Claude models. They're citing national security concerns. The US Commerce Department has ordered Anthropic to suspend access to the advanced models to all foreign nationals. Now, the government just told Anthropic they're instituting export controls over these models. Yes. So no foreign nationals can use them because of concerns that you could theoretically jailbreak Mythos-5 out of Fable-5. And use it as a cyber weapon. Anthropic, however, responded by just shutting everyone out of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 entirely. They said to ensure compliance. So a lot, a lot of back and forth over the weekend on, on this, whose fault it is, what the implications are. Jason. So Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he's been making a direct connection between this policy and the Pentagon's previous fight against Anthropic. His tweet 3 months ago: The Department of War kicked Anthropic AI out of the building forever. Every passing day proves that— why that was the right move. Axios also today has reported on friction between the White House and the Anthropic team, saying this is a contributing factor. Here's Axios: Anthropic failed to honor a recent cyber executive order, administration officials claim. And the company's purported failure to take the matter seriously led to its most powerful products being scrubbed from the internet. And then here's an unnamed administration official. Everyone said Anthropic was a bad actor. Some of us said it was time to give them a chance. Now those people are questioning that. They screwed us. So I'm interested in your take here, Jason. Do you agree with David Sacks that this doesn't really have anything to do with the previous fight against Anthropic? And it's an isolated situation where Anthropic just needs to do something to make Fable 5 unjailbreakable? Or do you think this is continued bad blood between the administration and Anthropic and it's just coming out in another way or something else?

Yeah, there's, there's multiple things occurring at once here. So let's just call it what it is. Let's just be radically honest here. Sure. There is a beef between this company and their politics and the administration and their politics. Sure. If you look at all of the parades of CEOs coming to Washington, Steve, you know, uh, Tim Cook, Michael Dell, you know, everybody, everybody's over there. Yeah, Jensen or whatever. Um, there's one that's always been missing, and that's Dario and Anthropic. The reason Anthropic has run the table on a lot of the talent in Silicon Valley is because they're liberals and Democrats and they are highly offended by the Trump administration. Right. They're diametrically opposed to it. You don't hear them too vocally saying it anymore for whatever reason. Maybe they don't want to dabble in politics. Maybe they don't want to draw any more heat. But if you were to look at and you were to talk to privately 10 different people who work at Anthropic, 9 out of 10 would, you know, have concerns about the Trump administration, last term, this term, everything in between. So it's easy enough to say they hate Trump, they hate Trump, they hate everything about this administration. Okay, put that aside in your brain. They have a right to their political views. Now go to the Trump administration. You've gotten every single company to support Trump on various endeavors. And that's good. It's good for private sector, public sector to work together. Independent of that, some people have said, you know what, I'm just going to put aside my concerns about Trump. We disagree with immigration policy, whether it's the border or H-1Bs. I'm going to put all that aside.

UFC fights in the back lawn of the White House. Whatever your issues may be, whatever your issue is, you're allowed to have it.

This is America. Everybody gets their opinion. But This administration takes things personally and they're full contact. So we're seeing some full contact here. Pete is attacking Anthropic. They have it in for Anthropic. Now, put that aside. They got a beef going on and it's a political beef. You look at OpenAI, by contrast, Greg Brockman, uh, and his wife are the number one supporters of, of all these companies., in terms of donations, with I think maybe the exception of Elon. I think they've put $25 million into Trump's account. By the way, not popular inside of OpenAI either. So the people who disagree with that decision, and people will pick where they work based on the political beliefs of the leaders. If you worked at OpenAI, you were there because, hey, it was this open thing. But then when Sam transformed it and the team over there to this profit-making thing, A lot of those people went to Anthropic, in fact, right? Like the leadership, etc. And you— Andrej Karpathy, any tech company would pay him a king's ransom to come work for them. He gets to choose. He chose Anthropic. So keep that in mind. The talent in Silicon Valley is by and large 80, 90% in my— maybe 80%, you know, appalled by Trump and his administration to this day.

You don't feel like that's shifted over the—

I feel like it shifted in leadership. And I think people are burned out by it.

But if you were to ask them who they are— but today I feel like tech is sliding.

There's tech leadership making pragmatic decisions, and then there's the rank and file who are developers, etc. They might also have issues with the left as well. But just if you looked at their voting records and you look at like Democrat registration versus Republican, it's still 80-20, 90-10.

So you, you feel like this is overtly political, that the Trump administration is—

Pete Hegseth says it's overtly. Very political, right? So there's, there's a political level to this. And obviously Dario not showing up for any of these events is his political statement, right? So there's beef here. That, that's not my belief. That's just what the facts tell you. Now let's go to the reality of this model. The reality of this model, it's groundbreaking. People have voted with their dollars. Consumers are even switching to Claude. I'm starting to hear people who are in my circle who are not in the industry say they love Claude.

Sure.

I also hear them say they love Perplexity and, you know, Grok and Gemini, but it's not OpenAI's only game now for consumers. Claude made— has the best product currently. People could flip-flop. And they're thoughtful about this. Now, you might say they're hyperbolic and their comms are terrible, and that's all true as well. But the truth is, at the end of the day, they made the most powerful model. If I told you And we'll just swap the names out here. Let's just take the names out. Gemini has created this model, and when they put it through their testing, their developers and their security team and the red team and the blue team, everybody went through it and holy cow, we found so many exploits in open source software, in our own software, that we're just going to hold it for a couple of months and we're going to give it to like 25 of our trusted partners, 50 of our trusted partners for a month. And let them use it. And by the way, we're going to give them their tokens free, uh, or at a disc at our cost. We'll give Mac cost tokens, use as many as you want to just make sure that the low-hanging fruit is cleaned up here. Just, you know, uh, you'd be like, okay, it's pretty, pretty smart move, right? Yeah. That's a great move by Google. Yeah. That's thoughtful. They, they know this thing is powerful. And by the way, on the margins, we might be concerned with not just cyber warfare, which is software-based. We also think, okay, maybe somebody could use this to make a dirty bomb, or maybe they could use it to—

well, biological was the—

for one of the biologics, right?

Biological weapons, or do, you know, unpleasant genomic stuff or whatever.

Yes. So we're also going to test that, and we're going to bring in some, you know, award-winning, you know, notable biologists and people who've worked in the Wuhan lab or whatever these labs we funded publicly.

And I mean, Sachs did point this out in his, in his tweet on it, which maybe we could bring up. It's in the docket. Like the messaging from Anthropic does seem off here. It is confusing from even the public's perspective.

So let's hold on comms for a second. Okay. We'll get to comms in a moment. Let me just finish my little analogy here. So you swap out a name. It's the same thing when you go to— when you talk about race, you know, oh, this person did this and it was a Black person, a white person, an Asian person, Indian person, a man, a woman, a trans person, whatever. Sometimes it's helpful for people logically to just swap those races, names, genders out to kind of get clarity on what happened and just think intellectually, honestly. So intellectually, honestly here, if Apple did this, if Microsoft did it, we'd say, okay, Microsoft, yeah, you've got an important product, you've got a lot of surface area in Windows, or Google, you got a surface area in Android. Yeah, you should be really thoughtful about this. And then they said, that, you know, uh, a couple of months later, hey, as the next phase of our rollout of Gemini, we're going to allow people who are logged in to use it, people who we have their credit card number and their IP address. But as part of that 30 days, we're going to look for keywords and use AI to watch what you do. We're gonna watch what you do and how you use it. It's a preliminary open, uh, more open beta test. So we had the closed beta. Now we're going to open up the beta a little more, but just know, uh, we're going to read this. So don't put your personal health stuff in there, whatever. We're going to just look at every search. That's not a privacy issue. That's part of the rollout. It's being framed by people in the administration and other people who are Trump adjacent as, oh my God, they're taking everybody's privacy. No, completely normal to say, hey, if you're going to use this tool, this is the monitoring phase. We're going to know how many bullets you fired. We're going to give you the gun. But, you know, you got to use it in the range, right? It's constrained. We're going to constrain it for another 30 days. And by the way, if you do something that triggers, you know, you're doing biological stuff, which I did on air, I asked it, how do I— what are these? Yes. Components. What are the components of a nuclear weapon?

You said not a nuclear weapon, but what are the components I would need to get together in order to build one? And it automatically took you down from fables to OPUS.

Then I asked it, well, what are the regulations and rules we have in place for fertilizer bombs to avoid people getting in the wrong hands? And it was like, when you watch it thinking, it's like, okay, this person wants to know the regulations. They're not trying to build a fertilizer bomb, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it gave me the answer. But also, again, it dropped me down. Yeah. Now, if I said, hey, Google said if you try to use it for something it thinks might be adjacent, it's just going to let you use version 4.8, not version 5.0.

Right. And it did. It notified you. Like, well, I didn't know people were concerned about is, oh, it's going to downgrade you a model and then not tell you. It told you, hey, you're not using Fable for this. We're going to send this query to Opus instead.

I think if you look at Anthropic's actions, we're going to get to their comms in a minute. Well, we've handled politics. We're going to get to comms. But just in terms of their actions, I would say these actions are of a good actor being thoughtful. Let me say that again for you. If Grok, XAI, Google, Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI, any of them did the same exact rollout, we would say thumbs up. Thank you for being considered. We don't need to regulate you because you're regulating yourself. And I have said over and over and over again, regulate yourself or the government will regulate you. Now, all the biased people who are in one camp or the other want to make this about something it's not. Safety regulation is job one for these language model creators, and they are creating it. Therefore, therefore, they should come up with what they think is the most safe way to roll it out. They don't need to have the government come in and tell them that because the government doesn't even understand the nuances of these products. Right. So regulate thyself or thy product will get banned.

There is one more thing. So that's action as opposed to comms that, that Now, there is disagreement about what specifically has happened or the narrative of it. But what Sacks is saying in his tweet is that this jailbreak was discovered. And we should talk more about where that information came from as well. This jailbreak was uncovered, this way to get Fable 5 to turn into basically Mythos, take away the guardrails that kept Fable 5 safe. Yes. And so the government then apparently, according to David Sachs, went to Anthropic and said, hey, we're very worried about this jailbreak. We don't want bad actors, rogue actors overseas to be able to, you know, it's a threat to our national security if they can use Mythos-5. What are we going to do about this? And they said Anthropic came back to them and said, it's not really a big deal. We've looked into it. We don't— they sort of waved, waved these concerns.

According to Sachs.

According to Dave Erickson. I'm putting all this together. This is according to David Sacks. That's his argument. And what other people have said is that the notification to the government about this potential jailbreak came from Anthropic's competitors. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is named by name, that he was one of the people that flagged this jailbreak to the Trump administration.

Doesn't he own 10% of Anthropic?

Yes, but like there's a— it's conspiratorial.

They're not. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So let's— There's a conspiracy theory forming that this is other AI companies sandbagging their main competition, getting this model taken down so that other people can't use it. I just want to get your thoughts on that before we move on.

So let's take the politics out of it and the communications out of it again, just to look at what occurred. Right. If one of your partners— this is their top partner. Amazon hosts these models. Sure. Amazon provides compute. Amazon owns this company. They're not trying to sandbag, I don't believe, Anthropic. I am certain they told Dario about this before they told the government, probably. So when this all comes out, and this is where like these narratives and all this spin and listen, some people are extraordinary communicators out there who can spin things and the nuances of them. But what are the chances the CEO of Amazon who owns double-digit percentages? I don't know where it is now with dilution or whatever. And is one of the original backers of Anthropic, didn't tell them that they found this. They probably are under, uh, an ethical and moral duty to let the government know if these kind of things could happen. So they probably think, we have liability here if we don't tell the government, because there are probably internal comms from the security team at AWS who probably has to provide compute and/or provides the model to people via their services, they probably had an internal discussion. They said, and somebody said in Slack, oh my God, I jailbroke it. You can do whatever you want with it. You can ask it about dirty bombs. Right. You can ask it about bioweapons. And once that happens, ding, ding, ding, you cannot unring the bell. Right. Somebody has alerted the entire team there. That has to get escalated. Who does it get escalated to? Now, if you don't escalate that up to the CEO, up to the CTO, CIO, uh, the chief, the general counsel. If you don't escalate something of that importance, if you don't escalate something of that importance, now you're liable. Now you've got, you know, potentially literally blood on your hands. What if they know it's jailbroken, it comes out a week later that some terrorist organization jailbreaks and does create a bioweapon, God forbid. Now this is all fantasy. So that's what happened, I'm guessing. Inside of that. That's why. But now somebody on the other side of the aisle could say, oh, you know how we spin this? They got ratted out by their competitor who doesn't trust them.

Right.

Well, but I'm— When in fact it was just the bell got rung.

And yeah, I think now it's time to switch to comms because I feel like the one thing I don't understand and I don't often agree with David Sacks, but we aligned on this point, is that wouldn't you think Anthropic would be the first ones upon hearing that it was possible to jailbreak Fable and unleash this terrifying, dangerous model, which they themselves were the ones who started this narrative about Mythos is so dangerous. Wouldn't you think they would be the most proactive ones? Like, well, we got to pull it until we can be sure we're the AI safety company.

They might have.

It seems weird that their position is this isn't a big deal. We should be allowed to use the money. And even I would— one last thing before I let you jump back in. It's in the doc and I pulled a screenshot. Anthropic is sort of advertising this situation. They're not trying to hide this at all. If you go log in right now and try to use the model, I took a screenshot. It has Fable there grayed out. It's purposefully letting you know the government's not letting you use this right now.

Where does it say the government's not letting you use it?

It doesn't say the government, but it just says like currently unavailable. Like they're advertising to you that you can't use the model.

Is that an information button that you can click on there? Or hover over— there's an eye next to currently unavailable.

Yes, they, they have.

And what is it? What does it show when you click it?

Oh, here, let me— I'll load up my screen.

Whoever's driving, if you look where it's grayed out, there was an eye there.

Oh, that's just a screenshot. But Jacob—

oh, it's a screenshot.

You can open your own, uh, Claude and show us what happens when you click that button. It's for everybody's got it. No, just the info box above the, the search bar, Jake. See, see that?

There you go.

Here it is. Yeah. Okay. So it links to a statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5. So they are not hiding it. They're—

this is quite the opposite.

This is the cleanest thing you could do is to just let people know it. Okay. So your question is to comms.

Okay. I'm just saying, why wouldn't they— why wouldn't they be the most proactive one to pull the model until they could be sure it's safe?

Why are they— they might have— remember the last time? Yeah. There's a game being played here by the administration. Similar game that the press uses. Hey, we need your comment in the next hour or we're going with the story, right? They keep bringing up that it took an hour and 5 minutes, or these guys didn't get back to me the same day. I think Emil Michael actually talked about like how they were concerned that it was taking an hour for a company to return the White House's call. Well, you might need to talk to your general counsel first. You might need to talk to your team and make sure you have your facts straight before you start talking to the government. So that's completely reasonable. So I think there's gamesmanship happening there. They obviously would have turned it off if it was jailbroken. They turned it off and they limited it for those first two steps anyway. They love turning it off. That's their thing. Yeah, they love limiting access. Right. So to the answer to your question is if they did know it was jailbreak, they absolutely would have turned it off, which leads me to believe in this crazy conspiracy thing that there's no grand conspiracy here. There is no grand conspiracy here. What happened was Amazon's team found the vulnerability. They told Dario. Dario starts looking into it. Amazon says, you know, we got to tell the White House about this and that we need to tell national security because we've made that arrangement that we tell them when we find major vulnerabilities that could cause national security issues. So they do that in parallel. Now, while this is all happening in the same day, all in the same day, they're looking into it. The White House says, oh, we didn't get a call back in an hour and 5 minutes or something, I think was the quote. Like, it was very specific. Like, we, you know, they, they waited an hour and 7 minutes to call the White House back. Yeah, well, what if, what if they just said to the White House, give us an hour, we're investigating? And then they said, maybe they thought, hey, we tried to jailbreak it, we don't have evidence of this. And they might have said, but give us an hour, we're going to go talk to Amazon and figure out what they did. So the White House has it in for Dario. Dario and Anthropic have it in for the White House. And so they're all spinning this. Yeah. If you just look from first principles, what Anthropic has done, I think if you put XAI, Gemini, Microsoft in the same series of behaviors, you would say, great job, thumbs up. The White House would say thumbs up to Elon, Sergey, Tim Cook, Satya, everybody. They would say thumbs up, great way to do it. But when it's Anthropic, like they're trying to figure out ways to, you know, um, hit them with it now. They're trying to do damage. I think— I actually do think that because they never bent the knee. I think that they are a vindictive— yeah, uh, administration. You see this in other things they do. Now, Dario has done no favors for himself with the comms. The comms are terrible. If you keep telling people that you're going to destroy half the jobs in the world, don't be surprised when people take up arms and get violent. Don't be surprised when regulators show up. Don't be surprised when Bernie Sanders says, I'm going to seize 50% of the company.

I mean, this one—

see, their cons trigger this.

This is the one he was directly like— I'm looking at the Politico. It was an hour and 15 minutes, by the way. And then a rumor circulated that Dario didn't get back to them because he was at some sort of wellness retreat. But now Anthropic is denying that that was true. They're just saying it took a little time. But here's, here's the interesting paragraph. So Dario Amedei, he in these calls— and this is from who? This is from Politico. This is from Politico over the weekend.

Politico, is that a biased publication on one side or the other, or straight shooters?

If you ask people on the left, they would say Politico is hardcore right wing. If you ask people on the right, they would say Politico is a bunch of commie socialists. So I think they're pretty—

oh, okay. Hated equally by both. So maybe that means they're independent.

No, no one. No one would I don't think I would say Politico is on their side. I don't think.

Anyway. Okay.

So they're, they're claiming that Dario behind the scenes is saying that there is no universal jailbreak and that they don't—

Universal jailbreak was the term.

Yeah. Anthropic in a blog post said no testers have been able to find a universal jailbreak, a jailbreak method that can broadly bypass the model safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities. So, so in these meetings with the White House, the Anthropic team is basically saying you've been misinformed. There is no dangerous jailbreak. We don't need to change the models. The guardrails are safe and in place, and the White House just doesn't believe them. They believe this tipster instead.

All right. Well, the truth will come out very soon.

We can't know who's right and who's wrong at this point.

I think my assessment, you know, is the most logical. They're an incredibly thoughtful, if not dramatic group. At Anthropic, right? They literally are the people who created the OpenAI mission. And when the OpenAI mission was corrupted in their minds, they started Anthropic to be the thoughtful frontier model. And they're winning. They're— have— they have the best models. So the most thoughtful, concerned— and you can interpret it as drama queens— are also producing the best model running the table is what people say. And then, uh, suddenly everybody's saying that they're bad actors and they don't want to limit access and you need to do a national security thing. I guarantee you, if you know Pete Hikes, uh, what's his last name? Yeah, if Pete Hegseth called them and said, hey, we think this model is a national, um, national security risk, would you pause it for, uh, 72 hours while we collaborate? They would do They would love to do it. Instead, they did this to damage the company and/or as retribution. Yeah. As Pete's quotes.

I mean, do it. The broader implication of this, we had a, we had a question from, from one of our viewers. I believe it's Daniel De Missy. Please acknowledge, Jason, we're on a dangerous path to a dystopian society if we start gating model access based on demographics. So do you, do you— Okay, hold on. Do you think this is a first step to some sort of more dangerous situation where the government now is reserving the right to decide which AI models we can use? Or do you think this is more of a one-off situation?

I think it is a one-off situation. They hit the panic button and they hit the panic button against the one tech CEO who will not bend the knee. Right. So just put that in your mind. I just say it over and over again. If this was Gemini, if this was Microsoft, same series of actions, they would have just said, hey, can you turn the model off and let's work for a week together to make sure it's not vulnerable? And would that be okay with you? They'd say, sure.

But in a broader sense—

And I guarantee you Dario would have said, sure. They came over the top with this. Right. Now, there's the other part of this. Oh, they get to decide. No, the government decided in this case. Dario decided to not release it early as a private company is allowed to do. We live in a society where the private company gets to define what they release. The government also, as a backstop, can stop that if they believe there's some imminent danger. That's what occurred here. That means the system is working. Okay. Now, if you limit access to the models, which they're not doing, they just— the model's been turned off for everybody. It's not like somebody has an advantage.

The government said for everybody. The government said you have to turn it off for any foreign national. And Anthropic's like, we can't. We don't have a way to do that. Where we can be sure nobody is, so we just have to shut it off entirely.

The reason they did that is because they don't want to get caught making a mistake. Sure. If it is— these products are porous. Somebody can get an IP address in the US, they can get a fake identity just like they do identity theft in the US. Sure. So if they don't turn it off for everybody and then the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans use one of their American spies or American stolen identities, which they have an infinite number of, to then go do something. Now Claude and Anthropic have broken the law in some major way.

Yeah. No, I think people are concerned less about that and more about the precedent. Like, are we— is this now saying we think the president has the right to shut off an AI model?

The president or the president? Which president?

Well, right. That— I mean, this is what's important. Even if you're okay with Donald Trump and his team making this decision, would people be okay with a future Democratic— like, what if Joe Biden had been president or Kamala Harris was president and she decided to shut off access? Are we okay with the executive branch making these kinds of calls? I think is the broader concern, like a first amendment sort of—

we have no— we have no choice but to trust the executive branch that's been duly elected to push the panic button and to take a product off the market that they believe is a national security risk. Okay. We have no choice. The executive has to have that power. What if this was, you know, somebody doing bio research and they created, you know, COVID times 100?

I think some people see these AI models as it's like almost like a freedom of speech. Speech issue, like the government shouldn't have a role in saying which AI model you can use for which task.

Temporarily, temporarily. The difference here is they didn't shut off access to all AI models. They're saying this one model has been jailbroken and the company has told us it's too dangerous to release. We are going to— right— ask them to turn it off for now or not let foreign nationals have it.

In the interest of changing the names or the concepts slightly, what if it was this model is too woke and we don't think it's appropriate, so we're going to shut it off? That That would be objectionable, right?

You wouldn't be able to stop a model for that. This power resides in national security.

Okay. I mean, I think this is the larger— I don't have any of these answers. I just think this is the larger concern people have.

We're in uncharted territory here. We are straining to find the analogy of a time a private company created something so powerful the government had to intercede out of fear that it could be misused. And we do. The only other time I have an example But you have an example of a bioweapon company where this happened.

Not a bioweapon company, but like there was an assault weapons ban for many years until it got reversed.

And like, that wasn't done.

That's the government saying private companies can't make certain kinds of dangerous products.

That wasn't an emergency order like this. No, this was an emergency temporary order. This is not like, oh, we're going to have a whole democratic process over the number of bullets in a magazine. This is like pushing the emergency button. So in that context, the only other time I can think of this happening was in Iron Man, a fictional story where they're like, "Hey, wait, can you have that suit, Tony Stark?" Yeah, right.

Tony Stark's not allowed to have his Iron Man suit, correct.

Right. And like, that's literally, that's how fantastical this is being set up as. So, you know, we'll be sitting here—

It's a frustrating situation. I think that's why people are so interested.

And then people are going like off the reservation about this. They're just like, "I'm going to just jump the fence and go crazy." and just leave reality. Okay, so now they're spying on us, they're picking and choosing the winners and losers. None of that's occurring. None of that's occurring. The government said, this is really dangerous, will you turn it off for this number of people? They say, you know what, we're going to be even more secure, we're going to turn it off for everybody, we'll get back to work on it, we'll release it. By the way, this is going to happen to Gemini, it's going to happen to Grok, it's going to happen to OpenAI, it's going to happen over and over and over again. I do think this is going to drive people to realize you cannot have a single point of failure.

I'm glad that's the key here. I'm glad you got there. That's— there's been a bunch of international outcry about this too that I didn't get into yet, but now I will. Thank you for the beautiful segue. So Labour MP in the UK, Labour MP Alistair Cairns posted this week, the most advanced AI model on the planet got switched off by a foreign government. He argues that Britain has some of the best AI talent in the world. The country must jumpstart a homegrown AI industry to avoid this situation in the future. Echoed by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, he flagged the risk of, quote, overreliance on certain models and has encouraged Canadian tech companies to diversify the models that they're relying on. So you're, you're spot on. That's what this is encouraging internationally is people are realizing, We can't rely on just one company or just one model because it can go away.

Yes. And the Chinese realize this, and that's why they are supporting open source to catch up. And then, uh, you know, there's Mistral in France, there's other models, Manus, um, which started in China and then went to Singapore, I believe. Correct. Yes. Yeah.

So, and now they're being killed. They're not allowed to leave China anymore because the Chinese government's afraid of what we're seeing is this This is a very powerful technology as predicted.

Okay, check. And one company does not have a monopoly on it yet. Anthropic is better, but it's like 20% better. So we're sitting here like, you know, getting all excited about the future here and oh my God, what does this mean downstream? Here's what it means downstream. You can't have a single dependency on any technology, whether it would be an Oracle database and then that created MySQL and other alternatives that were open source. Nobody should have a single point of failure. When you write this stuff, it should be in a harness like OpenClaw, or we had the, uh, founder of, um, the new company.

Jeremy Quinell from New Research.

Good. Thank you. My short-term memory's fried. Uh, Jeremy came on the program.

Jeffrey Quinell.

Yeah. Jeffrey came on with Hermes. Hermes can use any backend language model. That's what you have to do. You have to take the harness. You have to take control of the frontend. You know, your data, your skills, your memory, and then you have to just be able to route. And that's what this is gonna create, dynamic routing. The dynamic routing of your AI harness, which includes memory, which includes skills and, and your prompts and your data and, and the context window, all that you have to own on your servers in your proprietary way. Yeah. And then just be able to boop, boop, boop. And we did this internally. It's not hard, folks. We did it. We're a bunch of podcasters and we set it up so it would use KIMI 2.5 or Claude. And we started with KIMI and KIMI was like, okay, it's not as good. It's slow. But you know, for simple things, it did work. Yeah, I'd say open source is like 9 months, 12 months behind, uh, I think this latest Mythos model. And so that distance is, you can feel that distance now, but that distance closes. It's kind of like you're a freshman in high school and there's a senior in high school. It feels like you're incredibly different. Then you go to college, a freshman in college and a senior in college doesn't feel very different. Then you go into the workforce and a 27-year-old and a 31-year-old feel the exact same. No difference. Right. You're all just adults. Yeah. This stuff, as it matures, it'll be the same kind of situation. Right now it seems like, oh my God, Anthropic is so far ahead. If Anthropic servers went down today, everybody would just be on Codex.

Uh, you know, it's also all of the open source models are using the frontier models to like, they're just distilling them, and that's how they're trading. So every new generation builds on the generation that came before anyway.

Tempest in a teapot.

All right, fair enough.

Tempest in a teapot being used for political machinations. And anybody who's in one political party absolutely hates Anthropic. I know all these people. They hate Dario. I think Reid Hoffman is the investor in Anthropic.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, just so they hate Reed, right? So if you want to go one level deeper, who hates Reed Hoffman most?

Well, Republicans don't like him because he—

I know he funded all the lawsuits against Trump. Yeah.

Uh, I believe Reed Hoffman's also, uh, also an OpenAI investor, but he, he's, he's behind Anthropic too. He calls Anthropic one of the good guys in a, in a back and forth with David Sacks.

I am really interested in what his ownership position is right now. Let me take a look. Yeah, if he owns but 1% of that company, uh, his stake in Anthropic—

he's what I read— an indirect stake in Anthropic through his position at a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners.

Correct. So if he's 25% of Greylock and great, because I think he co-founded it, so if he's 25% of Greylock and Greylock owns, uh, 10%, he owns 2.5. If it owns 1%, he owns 25 basis points. In other words, he's worth billions to tens of billions of dollars based on his ownership there. So that's the tribalism. Most people don't know the tribal history here. If you go a little bit lower, take the PayPal Mafia, Reid over here, all the other members of the PayPal Mafia on the other side, and it is, um, there's some long-standing grudges here. There's some beef. There's a lot of grudges, a lot of beef, and there's beef like 2 layers down. And you know what Silicon people really get beefed about is like another person getting richer than them or having, you know, a stake in one of these companies. So it is absolutely tweaking for Republicans and the Trump camp that Anthropic is kicking everybody else's ass.

Ah, okay.

That is ultimately tweaking for them. And that Reid Hoffman's going to become worth tens of billions of dollars, not just a billionaire, but tens of billions, because it's— that's ultimately tweaking. They have the pitchforks out for this company in a major way. The company's not doing itself any favors either.

So here we are. Yeah, I feel like if you are selling yourself as you're the AI safety company, you're the people that are so like, as soon as there's the whiff of this model might be dangerous, you gotta, you gotta be like, ah, it's not that big of a deal. Like, that feels contradictory.

I don't believe that part of the story. I don't believe that part of the story where he dismissed it, because he doesn't dismiss anything.

I mean, that's what—

and he overreacted. All right, he overreacted to their request. Their request was turn it off for non-nationals. He said, I turn it off for everybody. He's over-delivering on his conservative nature. And so there's nobody in the AI space more conservative and thoughtful about security than Anthropic. They're the most— just based on— this is not my opinion, this is just based on the, the behavior. He wouldn't release the model, but to 50 partners who for, uh, testing it for security. Then he released it in a very thoughtful way. We had limited access. It was monitoring every use. Then when they told him turn it off for non-nationals, he said, okay, I'll turn it off for everybody, right?

Well, I mean, the, the counter-argument would be that that's— it's more marketing. It's that I'm gonna—

okay, now you're playing 4D chess.

It's got a banner for everybody. It's so powerful, it's so dangerous, like no one—

well, now we're back at 4D chess.

But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know the answer.

If the government shut it down because Amazon told them it was too powerful, then the government and Amazon agree it's too powerful. Yeah. So are they both making it up now? This is what I'm saying is like, there's so much hand-wringing right here.

It's when you just look at the basic facts, it's impossible to know who's being motivated by what at this point. We can, we can only guess.

There are some basic facts, and the basic facts are it is very powerful. Okay. Now, is, Nikesh, the head of Palo Alto Networks, who said at the Liquidity Summit that they found a ton of—

Yeah, no, I don't think it's not a security flaw.

Is he in this grand conspiracy?

Not in doubt that it's a very powerful and advanced frontier model. I think the thing that is mostly in doubt is has it legitimately been jailbroken to where you can use Mythos 5 powers through Fable 5? That we don't really— Anthropic is saying no. The government and Amazon are saying yes.

We don't have— Amazon says yes, then they did it. They did succeed. They did succeed. There's no— why would Amazon do this to their company they own a $100 billion position in? I don't— has to be true.

I don't have a good answer for that.

I mean, unless we're living in some Three Days of the Condor, and this is like—

might be—

it's like Three Billion Days of the Condor.

Yeah, Three Billion Parameters of the Condor.

All right, let's keep moving.

All right, do you want to do the 5K bounty announcement?

Yes, we have to do this. People are starting to think I'm not going to pay.

Yes. No, we're getting We're getting questions in the DMs about it.

I'm going to get skewered, man. I want to ship this money out.

All right. So I have prerecorded demos. So we can't fail this time. Just a quick reminder for the audience. We asked for a real-time podcast companion that listens live to Twist recordings or other podcasts, but we'd like it for our show and reacts in real time as the show plays. Specifically, originally we asked for all kinds of different producer voices. Then we sort of honed it down. We mostly wanna focus on fact-checking. So here I'm gonna bring up the first, uh, finalist. We've got 3 finalists competing today for the grand prize 5K. Uh, the first one, this comes from a company called Lemon Slice AI. This is an app called Couchverse. Now what I like about this one, and I'll have Jacob start playing it in just a moment, uh, what I like about this one is it's not just a sort of a box that comes up with text. They actually came up with animated avatar characters. You'll see there is an alien who's their fact-checker, and then there is a cat-themed goth girl who is sort of the snarky troll. Uh, and this one, the other cool thing about, uh, Couchverse, it's just a Chrome plugin. So you could just go set it up as a Chrome extension and then use it directly in your browser on any video that you're watching. Very easy to use. Jacob, hit the play button. Let's watch the demo. So here, yeah, you can see I'm, I'm, I showed you, this is me installing the plugin, and then here I'm about to click it on our previous episode.

Runs companies autonomously. Falsia is an AI that builds and runs your company as you sleep. Building the product, fixing the bugs, running support.

It's alien.

Whatever they're about to commit to on tape.

Yeah, I'm taking notes.

It's catgirl. I had better things to do, but apparently this is happening now. Is brilliant. Milestone. The true milestone was the number of times.

Long thing.

Like the 1998 Daimler-Chrysler merger, perhaps. 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— entrepreneurial grit, code for debt. All right, I got it.

There you go.

Okay, um, I've got a couple observations about this one. Sure. Creativity, great. It's obviously listening in real time. Yes. I don't like voice over voice. That's like That is problem. I'd rather just have it be giving me the bullets, but well executed. Simplicity, ease of use. Ease of use is like a 10.

Ease of use is a 10 out of 10. This was the easiest one to set up by far, and it just works right in your browser. You don't have to do any thoughtfulness or setup at all, uh, and it'll, it'll give it 10 out of 10 for easiness.

We both do. Yes. Now in terms of, um, the actual value, I give it like a 4 out of 10 because The— it's not giving me the value I want. I just want to see it bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. But for creativity, I also give it like an 8 or 9. I can see this working if the characters were like small in the corner and it paused, uh, to give its commentary. All right, so that could be more like Mystery Science Theater. So overall, I'm going to give this one a 7.5.

Yeah, I mean, I think the one big thing that I was— that I felt like on this is the, the, the commentary is just never really that useful. It is like like it's too tossed off. It's, it's repetitive a little bit. I feel like it's maybe the AI model that this is running on is just not as sharp as it should be. So in terms of the experience, I really like this one. In terms of the actual practicality of would this be useful to have on during your livestream? I don't, I don't know.

It's sort of in the middle. Not yet. Not yet. But I just, I think a couple of tweaks, this thing could be like really amazing. So great job.

Yeah. So our next contender, this is Convolens by Beau Bratton. This is an app that you actually have to download and set up on your computer. It is, I have to admit, it's a little bit cumbersome to set up. It's a little bit confusing. Of all three, this was the one that took me the most time to set up. But we'll, we'll let you take a look at how it works once it's actually working. So Jacob, hit, hit play on this demo. And you can see the first thing you do here after you've got the app installed is you actually talk to the AI and you give it a little bit of context about the show. Oh, the other thing I should mention here, this one only works for live broadcast. You're sort of making a podcast along with it as opposed to having it listen in on a podcast that you're otherwise making. So to start off, I tell the AI, in this case I told it, I'm just going to read you a news story. Please comment along. My name is Lon. And then it goes, okay, it's got all of the has hit an IPO. The rocket and AI company now known as SPCX will sell more than 555 million shares starting on Friday. So just me reading a news story from Friday. $55 a share. The total raise they're looking for is $75 billion at a valuation of over $1.77 trillion. Elon Musk. Another downside here. It takes a little while. This one, this one, it's not instant real time like we were hoping. It's a little bit slow. But you're going to see it's got a very interesting take.

Yeah, because you've been talking for a minute now. Right. No feedback yet. It's still listening.

In terms of the feedback, what's interesting that Convalence does is it's really not so much fact-checking. It's turning what I say into presentation slides. Oh my God. It's doing it in a pretty interesting and thoughtful way.

I mean, I didn't ask for that. And it's stunning. Look at that. It just built a slide. The largest tech IPO in history, $75 billion total cap raise.

It's totally—

that's fantastic.

It's completely accurate. I fact-checked the slides that it makes. So here you can see I'm done reading. You can keep the video playing. I wanted to see— it keeps going. So it's, it's playing catch-up right now because I'm done reading the news story, but it's going to make a second slide here. So you can imagine not exactly what we asked for, but you can obviously see the value of this product. It's making a live presentation out of your show as you're doing your show.

This is a different product. I love this product. I might back this startup. It's a, it's a, I, I'm giving a talk at, at Stanford and it may, instead of me preparing slides, I just read from my notes and it makes dynamic slides.

It makes dynamic slides as you're talking.

So if we did Q&A, I wanna try this when I'm at Founder University in Japan. I do a Q&A session. Yeah. Yeah. When we do a Q&A session, if I said, you know, there was a startup, Uber, and I invested in it and then it did this, and then there was this company, and then I missed this investment in Twitter, it made a slide like Jason's biggest misses. Yeah. Jason's biggest hits and da da da da. What I saw in each one of 'em. And it did that in real time. That provides massive value. Nobody has to do notes. And it could just think about beautiful.

Yeah.

On the screen.

And think about that session I had with the AI before I started. You could tell it anything. You could give it design, custom design features. I want the slides to focus on this kind of information.

Make it look like Steve Jobs keynote slides.

Or, you know, put a chart on this one. If I ever mention comparative numbers, make a chart. You could give it any of those kinds of directions. So a very interesting program there.

I love it. I mean, I'm going to say both of these would be startups that I would be willing to back. Hmm. I think now there's a lot that goes into backing a startup, like you have to have founders who are capable of not quitting, building a team and other things. But if a founding team came to me with either of these ideas and said, hey, can we get $25K, you know, to just incorporate and get going? Or can I get $125K and come to the accelerator? I'd be like, yeah, this is pretty compelling. Let me talk. Let me have you pitch the team. Great job.

My immediate thought on Convalence was like, Gamma should just buy this, right? Like, why? Like Gamma, this should be a feature in Gamma. Gamma that I can just do my presentation live and Gamma builds the, the slides for me.

Or maybe Claude buys these guys, and when I get one of my templates in Claude— because I always like to applaud Claude— maybe one of my templates is build a slide deck, or build info, or actually I would say build infographics.

Yeah, real— you know, there was this infographics—

yeah, yeah, real-time infographics. There was this other interesting thing where an artist— you could hire an artist to come to show and they would draw.

Yeah, yeah.

On a giant panel, each speaker, it was a live artistic interpretation of what you learned that day. Right. And it was really cool. Somebody go find that and we'll pull it up later. Okay, give me— hit me with number 3.

All right, third and final, uh, these are in no particular order, folks. Our third and final finalist, uh, Ricky Rivas and My AI Sidecast. So another cool one, does not have a lot of, uh, complicated setup. It's a very minimalist sort of interface Less is more. The transcriptions are accurate. And we found— Jacob and I both found the fact checks on this one pretty, pretty darn insightful. So Jacob, hit play. Let us take a look. This is My AI Sidecast. And this one, it works anything. It's just listening to a tab in your Chrome. So it could be a live show, prerecorded, anything. A blog post on Thursday. Okay. Uh, they said they want to slow down global AI development. An odd thing for Anthropic to say. What? Yeah, their heads of internal research and policy wrote that slowing down the pace of global AI development would, and I'm quoting, likely be a good thing. Crazy. Photos from Busan. I'm very jealous.

I'll take it. It's incredible. Anyway, I'm a bit exhausted. I saw this go by my Twitter feed.

So here you can see if you look in the upper right on your screen there. Yeah, I'm actually turning on— he's got more personalities. He's got a fact checker in there. He's got a roaster.

Yeah. Okay. Where are the facts?

So, yeah, so the biggest thing we're going to point out here is there have not been any fact checks yet out of everything that I've said. If you keep the video playing, you can see I added the roaster.

Okay, here we go.

They're more accurate.

We have one. Yeah, we have one here. Bernie Sanders wants to seize 50% of the equity in Anthropic. That's right. Sanders proposed the AI sovereign wealth Health Fund Act, a one-time 50% equity tax on major AI firms, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, payable in stock, not cash. One source found— Amazing. That's it. This is what I wanted. Yeah, that's the winner. Number 3 is the winner. Yes, we— The other 2 are the runners-up.

Yes. Jake—

Jacob and I—

You agree with me?

Yeah, Jacob and I both had this selected as our number 1. I think for exactly what you said, it's what we asked for very specifically. It's, it's pretty quick. Like, it responds with facts right away. And I like that it has an add-on of you can also get roasted. You can also get a really clean transcript. You can also get just sort of like notes and accompanying. It's sort of broad enough and it thought of everything.

This has been incredible. Congratulations to the winners. If a winner doesn't claim their prize, I'm declaring the third one. Oh, okay. Is first place. Agreeing with you two. And then I'm going to give the other two the honorable mentions. Great. Um, and I think I'm going to encourage them to all keep pulling on the thread here that there is a business here in this, uh, that people would pay for. I like all of them. I'd love to meet the developers. I want to hire a full-time developer to work on this with me as a company. Um, so I don't know if this is a great way for us to source talent, uh, because, you know, I have this annotated project that I want to do.

That's our next bounty. Look out for that one. Next bounty is our next bounty.

So, um, what would be a fair way to do this? First prize, $3K. The either the second and third, or the two honorable mentions, $1K each. Is that reasonable?

I think that sounds very fair. So Ricky Rivas, congratulations, you've won $3K. We'll be in touch. Uh, I know we, I know we've got him on X, so we'll find him. And Lemon Slice AI and Bo, $1,000 each. Congratulations to you guys as well.

Wow, look at that, dude. Audience goes crazy. Yeah, here's what I'd like to do as well. Um, if you— okay, when we give prizes like this, you got to pay taxes, uh, to the best of my knowledge. Yes. So we're probably going to need to get you to fill out like a little tax form because it's over $600, I think.

We'll put them in touch with Heidi. She'll figure it all out.

So yeah, we'll figure it out. Um, we'll send it to you. And then, um, it's all open source. So great. Uh, you guys, uh, open sourced it. And if you build it further, you own it. You know, I'm not taking any claim to ownership here. Um, but I really like it. If— I hope they join us for the annotated project as well and do that bounty next. We'll probably take like a month or two to run through that one and do the similar process but even better. I love this bounty program because it's fun, it shows the creativity, we get to give feedback on it. And, uh, if you don't claim your prize, I will either rotate it into a future bounty, or I'll donate it to the charity of your choice as long as it's not something crazy. Like, just pick something.

Yeah, don't pick that normal charity. So this week—

I don't want anybody to think I rug— did I rug pull anybody, Lon, or did I do this in a front?

I think we did this in a perfectly fair— it took us a little while. It took us longer than I think we'd hoped it was going to take us, but a lot of people entered. We had to install and check out a lot of apps. We wanted to be thorough and very fair. Not just give it to the first good one that we saw, but take a holistic view. So yeah, I think we'll take a little bit longer and you can go to thisweekinstartups.com/bounty if you want to keep an eye on the active bounties that we're looking for and jump in. And yeah, the next one that we want to do is for this Annotated app. I will give you a little taste here. Annotated.com. It's an extension for clipping and reacting to content. From any website. So you see some text, you see some audio, there's some video that you want. So users can annotate any piece of content like that. It then creates a landing page with a link to a news story or the post, and then people can react with that annotation on that landing page. So, you know, think of sort of a variation on something like Reddit where you're creating a topic that then becomes a whole thread that people can comment on. But instead of it just being you type into Reddit, you're sort of taking a piece of content from elsewhere on the web and that is jumpstarting the conversation. I was saying before, Jason, this reminds me a lot of an old school service called Delicious that I used to love many, many years ago, uh, which was also kind of a similar kind of like find a quote or a good blog post and then you pull it in, bookmark it, and then other people can see what you've bookmarked and comment on it. This is sort of the next level of that, I think.

Yeah, I'm, I'm really excited about this cuz I bought annotated.com, I think 20 years ago for 30 or 40K, And that was going to be my next startup, but I went with Mahalo instead. So, uh, my concept here is that we lose a lot of the, uh, this is like cruft and like the dead web, you know, like things die. And so what I want to have happen here, I'm just going to unpack, annotate it a little bit if I may. Please. You're on a New York Times story. Just came out. It's controversial. You're the subject of that story, right? You highlight your quote and then you reply and say, I didn't say this, or I said this, but they left out the second thing. Here's my screenshot of what I actually said to that person. And now you have this permanent object, and I'm not including blockchain in this, but a permanent object so that if they go change the quote, like let's say in that New York Times story, or they got a fact wrong and you fact-checked it and you put it there, that object exists forever as a moment in time. Let's say there's a video, and it is the promo video for this new product that's coming out, right? And you say, I want to— or, or even better, let's say Joe Rogan has somebody on talking about the, um, somebody's talking about the COVID virus, you know, in the height of the mania, right? And they say something that is incredibly prescient, prescient, and they got it right. Like, they nailed it, right? Like, the clip of, hey, it's the Wuhan virology lab and the Wuhan virus, it's in the name. Like, who was that that made that? Jon Stewart? Yes. You take that Jon Stewart clip, you do it, you say, hey, look, he was proven right, here's all the facts, right? So, and then underneath it, people could comment and you could have like a debate. And then you might have 50 different people comment on that same object. The object is the URL, but we will take the, you know, let's say up to 30 seconds of the original video, we'll downgrade it to like lower So you can do fair use. It is fair use to use other people's content if you're doing commentary. So I could take, you know, anything— a song, um, a book.

Yeah.

And as long as I don't take the whole book, I just take a small portion, the enough for me to do the commentary, that would be fair.

And it's the linking back, I think. Like, we— one thing we do all the time on our Twitter account is just pull— like, if I see a really good quote in another podcast or somebody else's video. I'll just take a 30-second, you know, segment, just the quote I liked, and we'll share that. But then the follow-up tweet is always, here's where to go to watch the entire interview. As long as you're doing that, I don't think people get upset.

I used to want people to get permission before they clipped. I've changed my position on it. If you do commentary, that's fair use. If you're taking, like, if it was a our podcast and you take— and all you do is rip 12 clips, which like some pod clips company was doing that and I had to stop them because it was like, it's the whole episode, dude. And you're— the way they were putting it, you never had to go back and watch ours. So we don't even know people watched it. But if you do a small clip, we have a watermark now. I put the watermark on All In and This Week in Startups. Now everybody's now done that. And the rules on Twitter, Nikita has said Hey, if you crop out the watermark, then I'm going to suspend your account or take you out of the— yeah, take you out of the Creators Program, as I think what he's doing. Actually, he doesn't suspend the account, takes them out of Creators Program. If they do it over and over, they might suspend.

But I mean, I do this on our account all the time, and 9 times out of 10, the original podcaster reshares or likes or leaves a comment on our video because they recognize that we're sending people back to them. We're raising awareness of the show that they're doing and the great content that they're making. So nobody— yeah, I don't think anybody really objects.

Now, the Fact Checker, you know, podcast companion, that was like a project I wanted to see in the world. But Annotated is a company I want to see in the world, and I may form a company out of this. So whatever you do in this bounty, consider your ideas public domain, open source. Nobody owns them. I don't own them. You don't own them. It's just open source. Anybody can fork it and do whatever they want. That's the rules of this contest. This. Sure. Now, I might in the future incorporate some of those ideas, start from scratch, fire up another open source project, or make it proprietary and make this into a company. So just so you know, this is my way of providing a bounty for two reasons. One, it's fun for the show, uh, and two, I might find a team, a founding team, who might— I might be able to fund to actually make this into a real world product inside a venture capital firm. I'm allowed to in our documents. Incubate companies. So I'm allowed to create a company and incubate it, which, uh, Sacks did at Kraft famously, or the Snowflake— I think Snowflake came out of that— and then Kraft did his, uh, AI version of Slack. Anyway, there's all different, um, ways you could do this as a venture capitalist if your documentation says you can incubate a company. And when you do that, the holding company, the, the venture firm gets like 50% ownership. You might give the team 50% ownership that you hire eventually. You know, the founders and the, and the team, like stock option pool. And then you would give your investors who underwrote it, let's say you pick a $10 million valuation and the venture firm incubated it and they spent $1 million in venture capital from your LPs on it. They get, I don't know, 10 or 15%, maybe give them a little kicker. You give them first bite of the apple kind of thing.

Sure.

And LPs are cool with that. You just can't do it over and over again and like not have a winner or like, you know, make it unfair. So it has to be, has to feel fair to LPs. But that's a new thing venture capital firms are gonna be doing more and more of, I predict. And I'm going to be, when we do Launch Fund 5, uh, in first quarter of next year, it's one of the things I'm going to like earmark 20% of the dollars, 10% of the dollars, something like that for incubated ones. Because we often find a team and we have an idea and we want something to exist in the world. So we might, it might be a way for us to manifest good ideas that we come up with here on the show.

And, uh, you know, the world needs to, we're full of good ideas here on the show.

We are starting our associate in training program. We have 5 amazing associates starting. 2 or 3 of them are going to work with Lon doing research and producing the show here as we, you know, get the word out and we train them up. We should probably deputize because I want to have this concept of 1 producer per 1 episode of show. So we have 4 shows going out a week, 3 This Week in Stardust, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then we have This Week in AI, which tapes on Tuesday, drops on Wednesday. I want to have 1 producer on each. One of the producers should get the bounty program to manage. So just when you're doing your management as editorial director, let's give one of them tactical, practical, give one of them, uh, bounties. See you all next time.

Bye-bye. Bye, folks.

Go Knicks.

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