What we'll learn from Anthropic's $2-$3T IPO | E2325

All right, everybody. It's twist. It's Friday, August 14th. Lon Harris is here. Follow him at L O N S on Twitter. Hear his media recommendations and Trump Derangement Syndrome. Oh, just plenty of stuff there for you. And you can follow me on that, Jason. You can hear me intelligently dunking on Trump Delightful Syndrome. No, Trump Dedication Syndrome. It's not a political show. But you know, I got to tell you, Lon. Hmm.

I got a couple things. It's enough already. Somebody in the audience make a jingle. If you make a great jingle or a great interstitial with Jake Alzang, enough already, or it's enough already, I'll send you like 100, 200 bucks in X money. Make a jingle, share it on Twitter X, @mentionus, because it's enough already. It's enough already with 2 things. I've had enough with transcribing everything. I was just on a board call. I had to go around the horn, 6 people on a call. Please certify that you're not using Granola, Zoom Notes recording, Notion recording, any of it. It's enough already with the transcripts.

With the AI note-taker, I— every meeting you have now, you've got 8 AI note-takers. It feels weird. It feels like you've got an audience even when you're alone in the Zoom.

Enough already. Enough already with the note-takers. Second enough already. This is a back-to-back enough already.

You've had your—

Because I like Claude. I got enough of Claude. But I opened up Zoom today. Zoom, you're doing too much.

Yeah.

This is what my mom said to me when I was running marathons. I'm going to school at night. I'm working 3 jobs. And you're doing too much. I had an Irish-Jewish mother.

Sure.

You're doing too much. Look at this. Pop it up on the screen. I just shared it in the Zoom chat. This is my message to Zoom. You're doing too much. I don't need Slack and Zoom. I'm trying to get on a goddamn call, Zoom. I don't want to describe the agent I want to build.

Yeah.

What are we doing here? Competing with my agents on, you know, Claude, Hermes, OpenClaw. Everybody wants an agent. Benioff wants me to use his agents in Slack. It's too much already.

Weren't we just talking about this the other night?

Enough already.

That like everybody wants to be Notion now. You've got a Notion and a Slack. Slack inside literally everything. Like, you go—

Slack added Notion.

Yeah, you go, right, you go to like buy hot sauce and it's like, why is there a Notion and a Slack inside this hot sauce store?

Literally, I was at In-N-Out Burger and after they gave me my number and it was like, would you like to create an agent and transcribe this? And I'm like, no, I just wanted, I just want an animal style Double Double. That's all I want.

This Week in Startups is brought to you by Odoo. The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free. Get started today at odo.com/twist. CLA. Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at claconnect.com/withyou. And PayPal. Pay zero processing fees on your first $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at paypal.launch.co.

So we got a full show.

Oh my gosh, we got more, more time than we got time for.

We're doing too much and enough already, but there's a lot of news. Sometimes we like to start with whatever the biggest news story of the day is. What's the biggest news story of the day here on a Friday?

I gotta tell you, I think it is Anthropic. Anthropic's plans for their IPO according to Financial Times, who spoke with a number of insiders. Anthropic plans to seek a valuation of $2 to $3 trillion for their October IPO. That would top the $1.7 trillion record set by SpaceX just a few short months ago. Only 5 companies in history have ever actually touched the $3 trillion valuation mark. Investors are expecting Anthropic's ARR to hit $100 to $120 billion by the end of this year. 43.5%, Jason, of US businesses currently paid Anthropic for subscriptions or tokens in the last month, according to new data we got in from Ramp, uh, 39.7% for OpenAI and just 6.2% for Google's suite of AI, uh, tools. So that's— we've got some more Anthropic news, but I feel like that's the big headline people want to hear you react to.

Okay.

Yeah. So it's gonna go out at $3 trillion. Uh, they're sandbagging with the $2 trillion. It's gonna go out at 30 times top line revenue. It's gonna be awesome to look at the books because we're gonna understand their revenue ramp, the composure of their revenue. Hopefully they might tell us like which are the biggest customers or something along that lines. And we'll also get an idea of cost and profitability.

Right.

They're gonna be able to abstract some of that, but it would be interesting to understand like what do they spend on salary, stock-based comp as a percentage of that $100, just make it $100 billion by the time this thing goes out. What do they spend on compute to do $100 billion in revenue?

Sure.

What is the depreciation and how are they depreciating data centers if they're building them, renting them, or otherwise?

Well, and even chips. I mean, that's— we've been discussing how fast do these chips depreciate is like a huge story as well.

Who knows if they're gonna have that data in there or if they're just gonna tell us, hey, we're renting this stuff, we don't have that. But it will also let us know impact is that on Amazon Web Services, Elon Web Services, where are they buying Crusoe Cloud? CoreWeave, where is that money going? And we'll just uncover, like in poker, I kind of feel like we know our hole cards right now. People are using AI. It's incredibly effective. That's our hole cards. And then in OpenAI, that will unlock, you know, something slightly different than the enterprise-driven compute renting Anthropic. OpenAI is building data centers. They're making massive commitments.

They didn't say, We're going to rent from people, right, Lon? So then we'll see what a builder— because they're kind of like a CoreWeave plus Crusoe Cloud plus Elon Web Services and a consumer AI business. So we're going to understand what the consumer is driving. They have a billion people, I guess, using OpenAI ChatGPT.

Right.

Some number of those pay $20 a month, $250 a year. How many? Do they have 10 million subscribers, 20 million, or 5 million? If they've got 20 million paid subscribers, times $20 a month and they're making $400 million a month from consumers, which is $5 billion a year. That's nice. It's nice. But that's 5% of the enterprise-based business that Claude has. Right. Right. And we were sitting here 18 months ago and people were like, what's Claude? And boom, it went racing past it. Yeah.

I will say on IPOs, ChatGPT was the iconic, like, that's the one everybody got introduced to AI as a technology from. And so it's, it's been an amazing shift over the last, I guess, 12, 18 months or so. To see, you know, now Claude is synonymous and ChatGPT is sort of the stepchild.

Correct.

So here we are, folks. Uh, absolutely amazing to see these 3 cards. Your flop is SpaceX, Anthropic in Q4. As soon as October, it's like 8 weeks away, 10 weeks away, and they'll have the roadshow, so information will leak. Um, it's a $3 billion IPO. Do I suggest you buy shares at the IPO? I don't suggest you buy any IPO shares, I think. I mean, if you want to get a little tasty poo, but wait, because in all cases, the bankers and the CEOs price IPOs to perfection, and typically they get a premium in a hot market. So whether it's Figma, whether it was Instacart, Reddit, SpaceX, pick the company, the pop happens, and then very quickly it comes back down to reality when institutions start buying. And so You know, you could have bought SpaceX at $200 or Figma at some crazy valuation, $50, $60 billion, um, and then it comes back down to $30 billion, whatever it is. Same thing with, I think, Instacart, Maple Bear. That one went up and then down. So my best advice is own things for a 10-year window, slowly build a position. And I don't think in today's day and age you need to race into IPOs. Just my personal observation. I think the data's with me.

You're waiting to get a good deal because you're trying to lock it in long term. You're not— we're not day trading here. It's like if you want to own it in 10 years.

We're day trading.

We're day trading. Exactly. Do you want to hear some more Anthropic news before we get to our first guest?

Lightning round.

So, uh, in other news, Anthropic is also in talks to acquire Israeli startup Descartes AI for around $6 billion. This would be their largest acquisition to date. Descartes makes software that helps chips run more efficiently, so it would allow Anthropic's infrastructure to absorb more demand. By some accounts, they boost throughput by up to 8x according to some of their literature. And it works across Nvidia chips, Amazon's Trainium, Google's TPUs, and so forth. They also make Lucy, a real-time video generation and transformation model, and Oasis, a world model for physics-accurate simulations. The price, $6 billion, represents a 50% premium over Descartes' prior valuation. So your thoughts on this deal, and is this purely about improving Anthropic's margins? ahead of this big IPO?

All right, um, 1% of $3 trillion, I believe, would be $30 billion. They're buying this for $6 billion. Yeah, you know, so it's literally like 25 basis points of the company. One of the great things about having a public currency, and one of the reasons in fact to go public, is so you have that currency in order to acquire customers and President Donald J. Trump has done an exceptional job. As you bring up casually—

I'm always talking about that.

And frequently in our group chat.

He's my favorite president.

Yeah. Yes.

And he's done an amazing job with M&A. M&A is back on the menu. You can buy things again. And these are ticky-tacky acquisitions. Any acquisition under $250 billion, under $100 billion, it's kind of ticky-tacky in the age of trillion-dollar companies. So this is a great sign for liquidity, for venture capital. Venture capital went through 4 or 5 years in the wilderness. You know, it was like the winter, and now it's springtime for Trump and M&A. Springtime for Trump and M&A. Yeah, I was gonna say, what other famous world leader has springtime for him?

But it's like—

Springtime for Trump and M&A. It's so great.

It's great.

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Do you see how thrilled I am? Why? 'Cause I was like, oh my God, I'm a venture capitalist in an era of no exits. Here we go, baby. Cursor got bought by Elon for $60 billion. This is getting bought for $6 billion. OpenAI's buying like Jony Ive's company. That's like a design studio for $5, $10 billion.

They're buying podcasts.

These $5, $10 billion dollars.

They're not even thinking about it.

They're buying a $200 million podcast You know, 20,000 listeners. I mean, it's incredible what's going on here.

We love it.

So let the good times roll. Let the acquisitions happen. Only 1 in 10 acquisitions has to work. So when you see these acquisitions happen, just keep in your mind, like a venture portfolio, if 1 in 10 becomes Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Android, these were all purchased companies, or back in the day, PowerPoint and, uh, I think Excel were both purchased. Mm-hmm. Um, and Word was built in-house for Microsoft. Any of these things can become super accretive to shareholders, and 9 out of 10 can be write-offs. So great job to Anthropic. Let's go to our first guest.

All right. Uh, so—

Oh, and do I have to do a quick, uh, pause for the cause?

Uh, yeah, sure.

Uh, we could—

let's, let's talk about row.co. Why not? Let's talk about row.co.

Oh, little row.co. I am— today I saw $169 on my Scout.

Wow. At my peak caloric degeneracy, I saw 213.

Between those 2 numbers is about 43, 44 pounds.

Yeah.

I feel great.

And it's thanks to GLPs. You can get on a GLP and check if you can get your insurance to pick it up at ro.co/twist. They got an insurance checker.

Amazing.

ro.co/twist. But something has happened. I have 3 or 4 people in my life who didn't like the concept of a shot.

You know, like, I'm a tough guy.

You know that, huh?

Big tough guy.

Doesn't bother you.

I'll take a shot.

Yeah. Give me the thickest needle gauge.

I don't care.

And so this, you know, even the Ozempic and Mounjaro, it was like the tiniest little thin needle, but it still freaked some people out.

I'm not— I didn't like the idea of giving myself a shot every day. You know, it's all those after-school specials. That's what it did when I was growing up. That was like the steroid kids were the ones giving themselves shots in the locker room. I, I, I, I just, I don't know. It made me, it made me feel a little uncomfortable.

But, but you wanna make the big announcement here? My brother Jamie lost 20 pounds. He started taking a pill that he got from ro.co/twist. ro.co/twist is where they're gonna do the insurance tracker and you can get this pill, which is, uh, what, once a day you take a pill?

You wake up, you wake up in the morning, you take, it's a tiny little pill. You take a pill. The only real rule, like the only, like you can't is You have to wait a half hour before you drink or eat anything, even water. They're like, don't drink too much water with the pill or it makes the pill not work. It's gotta go into like an empty stomach. So you, okay, you wake up, so you wake up, you take the pill, you like shower, you start making coffee, you take the dog out, whatever. 30 minutes, you can have your coffee or whatever, and then you live the rest of the day and that's it.

Okay. Now I put a contest here.

Yeah.

I offered you and Jamie, my brother, uh, who works here at Launch and the, and the podcast, $5,000 for each of 3 milestones. He had set 20 pounds as his first and he hit it.

Yeah.

I shipped him 5 dimes.

Very quickly.

And we'll see if he hits his second and third. And everybody opted into this. There was no coercion except for $15,000. That was the only coercive mechanism here.

Mild coercion.

Which Lon doesn't need. He's a trust fund baby. Uh, but tell us, nepo baby.

He's not.

Not true.

It's not true.

Not true.

Um, you started taking it last week. Where are you at?

I'm down, I've taken it for 6 days. I started last Saturday. It is now Friday as we're recording this. So not even a full week. I'm down 8 pounds so far, which is incredible.

That's ridiculous.

Look, this is a real photo from this morning on the way to the studio.

We did ask you to put a shirt on for the show.

Please, it's indecent. But you know, I look good. I look good. I wanna show off. But no, I—

It looks like you feel good too.

I had not even, I didn't even wanna weigh myself yet. I thought I would be discouraged if I weigh myself in the first week, you know, I won't have lost that much. But my friend who's also done GLP-1 says you lose a lot of weight sort of right away. And so I was amazed to take a look and see that I'm down 8 pounds already.

My first— What's your first milestone?

15 is my first tier, so look out. I didn't know it would be this quick. I didn't know it would be this quick.

We're on an honor system here, so be honorable.

I took photos of the scale, so we— all right, I can demonstrate it with evidence.

I don't want any wide shots of you on the chair, on the scale butt.

So you are just zooming it in?

No, I'm zooming in on the number, just the digital readout, just the digital. Please, just—

no, you can have all kinds of things happen if you're on a wide shot.

I'm very shy.

Enough already. All right, there you go. So thank you to ROE.

Check out roe.co/twist to get your free insurance check and see if it's right for you. Uh, it is very easy, by the way. You go in, in 10 minutes they're sending you your pills. It's not— it's a, it's a low, low impact, uh, signup procedure. So ro.co/twist, check it out. All right.

Awesome.

Let's bring in our very first guest. He is the CEO and co-founder of Wisewell. They make a countertop water purification device. We will turn the camera. I have one right here with me in the studio so we can take a look live.

Sammy.

He's Sammy Horevi. Thanks for being here, Sammy.

Hello, great to be here.

Sammy's a friend of mine from the region. So when I go to the region, which is the Middle East, Sammy and I have dinner and we're friends. And he told me about this great idea, which was everybody loves filtered water. People drink a lot of water. They got to drink more water, yada yada.

And I've been looking for a water system because I use one of the pitchers. And it's a pain in the ass, but I have a pitcher-based system. Sami, you created something new. Explain to us what you built and why.

Yeah, thank you, Jason. So I started Wisewell a few years ago because people in the US and around the world have actually lost their faith in tap water, rightfully so. The average age of a pipe in the US is around 78 years old. And, you know, we don't expect them to get upgraded in our lifetime. So there's been huge growth in bottled water. Also a choice that with the discoveries of microplastics and nanoplastics have serious health implications, and of course, cost and sustainability issues as well. So started WiseWell to really try to create something which gets people comfortable with water purification, really leading to distributed water infrastructure and drinking water infrastructure. And so we've developed a set of products now that are, are, are taking tap water and converting it into premium mineralized water, but letting you know how it's working and leveraging design that is a lot more aligned with the expectations of today's customer.

Yeah, it's beautiful. We can see the system there, uh, to the right of Lon. It has an app, um, and, you know, it's got some science behind it. Explain to us what What gets taken out, say, in America, an American water system, and then what gets put back in? Because you mentioned minerals, and everybody likes a little bit of bubbles in their water. And I, when I moved to Texas, started doing this Topo Chica.

So delicious, lots of bubbles. And then everybody's got to break my heart and be like, yeah, don't use Topo Chica.

It's got these chemicals in it or whatever minerals. It's no bueno.

So I, I'm always like, I need somebody to solve this problem for me.

Tell me the science and how you solve this problem and how you know you solved it.

Yeah.

So, you know, Jason, what we've done is we've, we've taken what you see in some of the really sophisticated large-scale purification plants and condensed it into something that could fit on your countertop or as a floor-standing unit. So we put a carbon filter, which is what you probably find in your pitcher, which gets rid of sediment, some of the chlorine smells, and basically a little bit of dirt that's in the water, but doesn't clean it all the way. Because what we're seeing in most taps today are PFAS, forever chemicals, and those require something as robust as reverse osmosis, which is our next step of filtration that strips the water of everything, makes it perfectly clean, but makes it flat, getting rid of, you know, the flavor and texture that we're used to with a lot of those delicious waters that you mentioned before.

One of the themes we talk about over and over again on This Week in Startups is making sure you do your chores. I'm no expert on these things. I have some experience. Steven Estes from CLA is an expert. Let's talk about being cash efficient. Tell us about efficiency and what you see in the, in the top-tier startups in your practice.

We're seeing kind of an interesting trend out there where companies aren't needing to raise quite as much as they had in the past. You really have to be careful as a founder to only take on as much money as you really need. You've got to do the forecasting, you've got to do the modeling, and you've got to dial it in and get it right. Otherwise, you're going to end up either not raising enough capital to get to where you're going and you're going to have to go get venture debt or go back, have an extender to the round, or you're going to give up too much of the company because you just didn't recognize how much money you actually needed.

Yeah, very important to get this stuff right, folks. And that's really a bummer when startups don't do things in a button-up way. Always have a great partner, a good partner to have on this adventure. While things change, my friend Steven over at CLA. So if you want a trusted advisor by your side who will navigate you through taxes, accounting, and everything in between, It's time to take action. Visit claconnect.com/withyou and don't forget to drop a mention that your boy JCal sent you. That's claconnect.com/withyou. Start today.

And so, the last step, and this one was quite interesting because we worked with a water sommelier who's on our team. There's 250 of them in the world. And we really were trying to find the best way in a sustainable and distributed manner to, to put the minerals back into the water that would be aligned with the expectations of the top flavors and textures of a premium water. And so we use a natural stone filter that actually distributes sodium, calcium, potassium evenly back into the water, bringing it back to life, bringing the pH back up, all kind of on your countertop, which is, which is the, the exciting part. Now that in itself, in terms of the filtration, is, is great, But we thought that's not enough because we want to get people fully over the line to switch and understand what a brand-led and a design-led company focused on purification would look like. And that's, that was really the ethos behind Wisewell. So we spent a lot of time ensuring that we've got the right industrial design, something that you don't want to hide, you kind of want to point at. Took inspiration from Dyson, what he did with the vacuum and it and the blow dryer. We took inspiration from And of course the fan, which you typically hide until you got one that had no blade on it. And then we took a lot of inspiration from Tesla because the electric car was a boring sustainability thing up until the Tesla came out. It was faster, it was at a much better cost than the alternatives that had the same kind of performance. And it was something that you wanted to kind of explain and show to your friends or anyone who kind of passes by in the early days. And we think that water was ready for that because it's a huge problem, whether in the US or globally. And, uh, we're, we're really focused on taking that on.

Uh, this water sommelier, I can't let you get, get by without mentioning that this is not a joke. Here's a story from National Geographic in 2010. Martin Rees, it was, I think, the oldest one in our, uh, LLM research, uh, who became one of these experts And, people really, as people get off of alcohol as their primary beverage, go into mocktails, this has become actually a thing where there's different waters that you can taste the difference from. I am able to taste the difference, I think, in multiple types of water. So, I don't know if Wisewell does this, but is there a way to dial in a certain profile that would be like Fiji or Evian or Pellegrino?

Yeah.

Some people like— and do you do bubbles too? And how does that work?

Yeah, so we just actually— you gentlemen are going to be trying the first one that's right behind you, our first sparkling product released in the US. And with that one, we did take a lot of the different profiles of sparkling water. So what are the most popular brands of premium water globally? And in our research, what we wanted to do was really recreate the flavor and texture profile or bubble profile, as you'll see with the with the sparkling option of the most popular ones universally. So in the still water world, you would see that the, the Aquapana as a premium water, the Tuscan spring water is probably the most popular universal version of it. A lot of people love Evian, but a lot of people don't. So what we wanted to do with—

What's the flavor profile there? What's the difference? What are they getting? Is it that Evian feels too minerally? It's like you got a couple rocks in your Exactly.

That, that's it, right? So it's, it's too minerally. It's, it's a very high TDS water and, and that means there's lots of minerals floating around in there and you taste them in your mouth, right?

Yes.

And, and, and so Aquapana is actually a low TDS water, but if you give it to 100 people, even those who like Evian will like Aquapana, but vice versa wouldn't, you wouldn't see as much. So we, we were really, really focused in the first couple years on Flavor, texture, and then if we zoom out a bit, the technology behind it, because we know exactly what's going on with each of our customers' water. So we, we've designed, we manufacture, and now we distribute the product as a subscription model because we really want to be in charge of everything going on with our customers' water. We don't just want to sell them a unit and hope they change their filters. We want to ensure that they're changed exactly when they need to be. That if anything is happening with their tap water, it gets detected, we flag it to them. So we've got machines are all sent, are all connected to the internet or via Bluetooth. As you mentioned, there's an app, but I, like, I'm sure many other people are getting annoyed with having another app for something that I'm— I don't mind it.

Yeah.

So we've now taken it on screen with the, with the Sparkle. So everything that you need can get messages over the air updates, again, inspired from the Teslas of this world. So, you know, my water purifier can now get more features, more functions. over the air in terms of the different things that we're doing in the context of detection of different elements, but most importantly, ensuring that the water is always most premium. The filters are robust, and as soon as you need, we automatically send you your next set of filters with the sparkling. Once you've done your first 180 liters of water, sparkling water, we'll ship you the next 2 canisters. So love it.

Really try to make it a blade-based system.

You're going to subscribe.

That's the business model, I think. And I gotta tell you, Elon, I started out as a San Pellegrino guy.

I was a Pelli Pelli guy.

Sure.

I would just drink a glass bottle of it straight.

It's very good.

Very easy, smooth bubbles.

Yeah.

But as time went on and my addiction to sparkling water grew, I got more aggressive. And then when I made it to Texas, that thick, ice-cold Coca-Cola-style bottle of Topo Chico.

Topo Chico, yeah.

That's aggressive bubbles.

Yes. These are aggressive, I want to give a fair warning with love. This is delivered with peace and love. If you're going to do Topo Chica, you're going to have the wet part of the brisket. You and I go get that fatty brisket or we have that fatty beef rib at Terry Black's or we go to Salt Lake. You need something to cut through the fat and that's where Topo Chica comes in. That rips through your teeth like a Diet Coke.

It's very crisp.

High school Diet Coke. It's going to rip it. Gonna rip that oil out, all that grease.

So we've got, we've got the hard bubble setting for you, and that, that'll give you that, that same kind of, you know, fizz in the mouth. Definitely break up, break up whatever fat you have in, in the barbecue.

Where it gets in your nose is when you bring the— when you bring the glass up and you can— it hits your nose. That's how you know it's got those— yeah, it's got those—

that's true addiction.

It's got those heavy bubbles. Yeah.

Okay, so I was talking to you about this. This is a Great business to be in. Um, because I'm— full disclosure, I'm negotiating a little slice for J-CAL here. I'm gonna, I'm gonna place a little bet here on this company because Sammy pitched me on it. I have machine number 1. I told Sammy, I'm gonna pay for— if you're gonna bring this to America, if this comes to America, I want, I want in. I need a taste.

Gotta wet— you gotta literally wet your beak on this one.

Jason, what we're doing is we're taking, uh, profitable consumer subscription business models But having the same kind of retention rates as utilities. So if we take a look at our business, we're actually around a 2% attrition rate on our tens of thousands of users already. And that's constantly getting better as we improve our product from container to container. And so what we really wanted to do was give that ease and that sense of a consumer business. But what we're doing is distributed drinking water infrastructure at the end of the day. So our average, you sign up to a 2-year subscription. That's the commitment. We manage the machine. Anything happens, we're on top of it. And actually, we get to see things well in advance. But very importantly, we're also seeing how our customer is reacting to the machine, right? Are they, did they suddenly drop off in usage? Is there any real spike in their tap water quality or in their spike in their tap water, uh, TDS, which means the quality has gone down.

The input is—

and exactly, by the way, here in Hill Country where I live, in the Hill Country and outside of Austin, and in Austin, the water— you know, we don't have state taxes— water can be challenging at times, man. You smell the minerals sometimes coming out of this water. Yeah, people do not drink from the tap in Austin. In Brooklyn, man, Brooklyn water, chef's kiss. It's got fluoride, a little fluoride in it, but Brooklyn water is like the best tap water. You wouldn't order bottled water in Brooklyn.

You just order from the—

Well, that's what they say about the bread. Why you're Philly, you need your Philly cheesesteaks and your New York subs because it's the—

Or Brooklyn pizza.

Right, because it's the bread.

Or bagels.

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I gotta tell you something about Brooklyn water and Toronto water where I grew up. One issue is actually, unfortunately, the amount of chlorine they're putting in to keep it clean through the distribution networks. As I mentioned, the average pipe is 78 years old, is really, really high. So we actually do a really interesting test, and I think everyone trusts their dog. We pour tap water. We've done it in Toronto, we've done it in Brooklyn, and we pour Wisewater. And 10 times out of 10, your dog will go to the— Might as well water.

I'm testing this out with Barry tonight.

Yeah, test it out with Barry. They can smell the chlorine. They're a lot more sensitive than we are. And so, you know, a lot of the things that have been put into the water to keep it as clean as possible during distribution are what we're taking out. And that's, that's kind of the key. And we're not just taking it out and hoping that we know when to change a filter next. We're on top of it for you as a customer. And Now with the sparkling water, we've actually seen, you know, an incredible reaction because water in itself is something which is, you know, absolutely essential, but sparkling is a luxury and a costly one for those who get hooked on it. So from, from a savings perspective, we provide huge savings to, to all of our subscribers from day one.

This is what I try to explain. I, you know, like literally, you know, I got people who work at the ranch and they show up with a bottle of, you know, giant water that they bought on the way to work, or they got a Starbucks. I say, whoa, whoa, timeout. I got double filtered water, I got my WiseWell, I make a fresh coffee pot of coffee every morning. Please stop spending $4 or $5 or $6 on your latte in the morning. Stop buying a $3, $4, $5 bottle of water. It's $10 a day. You're spending $4,000 in post-tax on beverages. That's D-U-M-B, dumb. You need to dial in your coffee, your tea, your Cold brew, and you know what the common denominator line is in terms of flavor—is the quality of the water. It's a good one. You make cold brew, you make espresso, you make a tea, whatever you're down with, you got to get the water proper. It's got to be correct. So I'm super excited about all this. I need to ask you a super important question here, Sammy.

Alex Jones, who's always way ahead of the curve—you know who Alex Jones is? Yeah, I do. He's the guy who talks like this on his course. He's always ahead of the curve. I found the Bohemian Club, and. And, uh, you know, um, we're gonna release the, uh, Bohemian Files. Um, he said that the water is making frogs gay.

Yeah, the tap water.

Can you— can tap water is making frogs gay? Sammy, is there any— have you determined if this is true? And then how do you ensure that Wisewell does not make me gay from the water? I'm joking, half joking.

But we, we've, we, we've done a lot of research on it. We were focusing on the frogs, but actually we learned about humans. So we all have, if you drink bottled water, a teaspoon, so 7 grams, like an actual physical plastic teaspoon worth of plastic in our brains. And cadavers with dementia are 10x that. So that's the scary thing.

Okay.

The microplastics. You're talking about the microplastics.

Yes.

And just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with being gay. There's nothing wrong with gay frogs or any amphibians as far as we're concerned here.

Let the frogs live their life, Jason.

Let them live.

I don't know.

Let them live. I got any gay frog I have frog friends on my ranch. Frog love is frog love. Period.

Full stop.

This took a real turn. It did. But no, no, this is the point. There's a lot of conspiracy theories, whatever, around water.

Sure. Fluoride in the water.

Yeah. RFK has gotten into this a bit. I thought, okay, that's a good idea.

Another guy who's got this voice.

Another guy who talks like that.

Why? What is it with guys not trusting water who talk like they need more water?

They do. They seem parched. They seem a little parched. They need a wipeout.

I mean, I didn't know that there were so many jokes in water. Um, we're doing all right. We're doing okay.

We got there.

But I— fluid conversation.

But, but what is the story with microplastics? Because I was talking to my friend Brian Johnson. He said his balls were filled— not just as you telling me your brain, but he was telling me his testicles were filled with microplastics. Now listen, I'm past having kids. But I just don't like the idea of having, you know, testicular microplastics. This is— that's actually true. This is actually true, that microplastics are in the water supply. Also, I understand that in major cities in America where like a third of the population in some cases are on pharmaceuticals, SSRIs, etc., that this— that gets into the water too. And that we now— and this, Lon, this is a true statement.

I believe it. Literally heard that.

Why am I still surprised? Sammy, Sammy, the wise man of water, our wise man of water, tell us, birth control in the water, SSRIs in the water, is any of this true? We know plastics is true, but explain to us what's in our water supply.

It is, it is very true. And actually, one of the first, uh, times I heard about it in big public forum was on All-In when it was a, you had a science corner and Friedberg was talking about the study about nanoplastics.

I remember this. Yeah.

And it went from the assumption that there's 10,000 units of nanoplastic per liter of bottled water to 240,000 micro— sorry, microplastics to nanoplastics. And that Increase in number was not just alerting in the context of more of it being there. It's the size of them because they can cross the blood-brain barrier. As I mentioned, it actually gets into your brain, heart, plaque buildup, and in our balls and reproductive organs. We're seeing a huge amount of instances where men with measurable amounts of plastic in their balls are Much more likely to be infertile. And so male fertility has declined by around 30%. And if you take a linear scale of plastic consumption, almost identical. So the signals are there. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Surgeon General's warning on a plastic bottle in the next decade. The first class action acts have gone out against bottled water companies. Yeah. And we're just, we're just seeing it happen.

Fiji, I believe.

That's, yeah, that's right. Fiji's one of, and we believe that there's going to be a lot more over the coming decade as Those signals, uh, become scientific studies that have actual outcomes.

And just to be clear, they are finding all kinds of, you know, trace amounts in wastewater. Uh, so here are, you know, many studies you can find online. Antidepressants emerging, uh, contaminants occurrence in wastewater treatment plants and surface waters in China. It's happening here in the U.S. However, thanks, quote, If you were to drink 2 liters of water a day for 70 years, at the end of those 70 years, you would have taken 1% of the normal daily dose of someone who's taking a prescribed medication.

So it's a very minor—

It's a very— you're not— you still need your Zoloft. You're still going to need whatever you're taking.

I'm drinking all this tap water. I'm still miserable. Yeah, I could have told you that.

I could have told you that. Lon's like, I'm on my 10th liter today and I'm still sad. So that one's not bad, but the plastics are.

Yeah, um, plastics are there for sure, and the PFAS. Yeah, so you've got a lot of stuff there.

I think this is great. Um, what is it gonna cost here in the US? Tell us what this 2-year commitment is, because I could tell you, like, you know, I was spending— I don't know, Topo Chico was like $2. They're pretty— $1.50, $2 a bottle. Even when I'm buying like the 6 or 12 pack, it was still like $1.50, $2 per sparkling. Probably because I like glass bottles of that Mountain— what's the Mountain one that's a flat water? I was getting that for a little while. Mountain Spring something, I don't know. That was also like $3 a liter. I mean, I was spending hundreds of dollars a month, thousands of dollars a year.

Oh, Mountain Valley, I believe. He's right. Mountain Valley.

Mountain Valley. But people say Mountain Valley is very good. Um, you know, it's certainly good to the taste, but what's this going to cost versus, you know, a lunatic like me with You know, 3 daughters who grab a Topo Chica and drink 3 sips, and then I find all the 50% open bottles in my house, which makes this dad go crazy.

So we've got 3 product lines, uh, and the, the Nano, which is a small one, smaller households, is $29 a month, uh, unlimited water. We're on top of your filters. We just, we take care of everything. Dollar a day. Our, our, uh, that, that is, that is a month. And then actually the one that's behind Lawn, which is a Sparkle, that's our flagship product, which even has wearable integration as well. We're going to Apple and Google Health and, and if, and if, yeah, there's NFC technology in there that goes for $89 a month for unlimited water, which comes hot, cold, room temperature, and you can select the amounts you want. If you like green tea, yeah, you could have the, you could exactly set your green tea level, or if you like your water freezing, we could do the same. That goes for $89 a month with unlimited sparkling water.

$3 a day. Easy breezy.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we're—

No, wait a second. I'm going to be able to take my Whoop and NFC tap it that I drank my water is the goal.

So actually, we're integrated into Apple and Google Health. So we will be able to— you're in— we're actually the first example where you've got an input as opposed to just, you know, your body sending signals because it is a really important thing. Our average Wisewell is used 25,000 times a day. Times a— sorry, it's used 15 times a day by our subscribers, which makes us the second most used device to the iPhone in the household. Wow. So, you know, that, that screen becomes a very interesting place to learn maybe about new products, about partnerships, or even about your health and wellness from water.

Yeah. See, this is critically important because if you can measure it, you can manage it. And one of the things that was a big health breakthrough, Juan, you gotta get in on a Whoop or an Oura or an Apple Watch. Is, you know, I can take this, um, I like, if I do a meditation in a meditation app like Calm or Waking Up, it automatically puts it into my Whoop via Apple Health. And then I wanna record my water, but I forget to do that. And if it was a little simpler, 'cause I am like a camel, I forget to drink water.

Sure.

And then I don't sleep well. And then if I drink like an extra, you know, I don't know how many ounces, like 30 ounces a day, My sleep scores and my recovery go up the next day. How do I know that?

I started recording in my Whoop.

It's not a commercial for Whoop, but it has a journal.

And, when I put in my journal that I had electrolytes or creatine or I slept with a dog or I slept with an eye mask or I took a flight, it then tells you how that affects your recovery. Turns out if I do a long walk, like a certain number of steps, if I drink my electrolyte drink, if I drink enough water, And, uh, if I use an eye mask, all of these things, and warm bath, these are like +4 to +10% on my sleep and recovery scores. That's— this is the future, folks. You're going to be able to understand this as well as with your blood works. Where can people learn more, and is it available in the US yet or not?

So the, the Sparkle just came out for, uh, presale, so available in a very limited run. Full run is coming out in October. Um, we also have our Nano and Model 1, which are The floor standing and smaller unit are ready available for sale, and we're we're just very excited to be taking on this problem in the U.S. as well as the region.

In the region, wisewell.com, wisewell.com. No promo code, and I don't want a freebie. You can give Lon a freebie.

It's okay. I'm taking this.

I don't want a freebie. He's that.

Yeah, you keep it at the office. You can do whatever you want to do.

No, it's coming home with me.

Like you get. I like your. I like your new health thing. All right, Sami, great job. Appreciate you.

And everybody check out WiseWell.

I'm not an investor yet, but you'll know I'm an investor if you see me drinking out of this on All-In and here on This Week in Startups. You see me drinking out of this bad boy—

Oh, this? My WiseWell?

If I'm drinking out of a WiseWell, then you know I'm on the cap table.

If you see me drinking out of a This Week in Startups—

I'm the only one with a cup. There you go. If I'm drinking out of a This Week in Startups tumbler, I'm not an investor.

So that'll be your tell.

No, I always tell people if I'm doing it. Sami, great to see you.

And I will see you when I'm in the region. Thanks, man.

All right, Jason, thank you so much.

Great to see you on the show. All right, take care, my brother. You know, it's like I collect people, Lon.

Sure.

You know, I get to meet a lot of people in my life.

Of course.

And I'm very good now at putting people into buckets of like, this person is like using me or has something they want to get from me.

Right.

This person is a flake. This is just a good person. And then like there's like really good people who like you want to hang with. Like Sammy very quickly went from like an acquaintance to, hey, if I'm in the region, I'm having dinner with Sammy. Yeah, he's going to introduce me to a couple interesting people. We're going to hang, you know, it's just like he's a good hang. Like you're a good thing.

That's the thing I've heard too, that in America it's like you meet people and it's like we should do business together, and then you become friendly. You're like, oh, you know what, this is a good guy, I like hanging out with him, we should go see a movie. In the region, they say you become friends first, and then it's like, you know what? You're such a good friend. We should figure out a way to do business together.

And what happened in the region? I learned this is everybody from America came with the American attitude, and they're like, "I'm gonna go to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh and Qatar, and I'm gonna come back with like a couple of LPs." Let's make some deals. Yeah, I'll see you in year three. Right. You know, like you literally got to go to the region like you got to five, six, seven times. Get some shawarma.

You know, you got to do. Shake some hands, you know.

You, you haven't come with me. I took you to, uh, Tokyo for the first time, but I will take you for Mama Nora. Yeah, Mama Nora, man. This Mama Nora in Saudi, my Greek brother, you're gonna love.

Ismail was not impressed, but I'm gonna— I want to go check it.

He had a different shawarma place.

He's got like Shawarma Kings, I think he likes. It's kind of like going into burger culture or like brisket culture here, right? All right, we got to do a real quick interview. Um, Yes, we are.

Well, one thing I wanted to give a quick shout out to our friends at Harmonic because they're so helpful in prepping for that last segment with Sammy. I actually looked up the total addressable market for home water filters and I got a whole lot of really compelling information. I'll pull it up here very quickly so you can see.

Now, people who don't know, Harmonic is like this great database of everything, but then, you know, of every transaction, every company in the world. And we use this for our research.

And then we did a partnership with them because I was like, listen, I need my investment team to have access to Harmonic. This is saving— let me just say this. We have like 20,000 applications for funding. This is saving us 1 hour, 1 hour, not on the 20,000 people who apply, because a lot of those aren't like candidates. But of those, we meet with the top 10%, top 20%. So like 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 startups per year we're meeting with. Like some weeks we've done 140 meetings because there's like that many good companies. Some weeks we do 30. This is saving 1 hour of researcher time. I don't even want to tell Harmonic that they're saving me $3,000 or $4,000 a year at $30, $40, $50 a year because they're going to benchmark the savings and then whatever. But you did a quick one on the TAM of home water filters. Can you close the left-hand bar so I don't see all your weird searches there? I don't want—

All my weird—

all my weird Harmonics I don't wanna know what you're searching on, Hormadic.

It's dark, man.

But here it is.

Yeah, so I just—

What did you ask it?

Well, we didn't get, we don't talk about water filtration companies that much on the show, so I just wanted to get some quick background. So you can see I asked, what are the most popular water filters and filtration systems on the market? And then what's the TAM on home water filters? And I mean, it gave me some, you know, here's a breakdown of the industry, here are the most popular countertop, pitchers, under sinks, gravity-fed. You know, there's all these different kinds of water filters.

Gravity-fed. Okay.

So yeah, like whole house systems to get set up. But it gives you an idea about how large all of these markets are. What are the biggest companies doing each of these different kinds? Like obviously if you want a pitcher, Brita is sort of the market leader. And then I went down here and look at immediately a whole grid, the total addressable market by these different kinds of water filter systems or how you're choosing to do it. Water treatment systems versus just point-of-use systems. And then it also gave me like a bunch of just interesting facts, like the Asia-Pacific region dominates 60% of the total point-of-use water filtration market, which when you think about it, it makes sense because of water quality concerns in places like rural India, China, Southeast Asia. Those are the hottest places on the planet for, you know, people worrying about water filtration. So just even a niche topic like that, so much interesting information. Try it yourself at Harmonic.ai.

And this, just to give a shout out to Harmonic, they have like the database, they have their own proprietary data, then they have their own proprietary LLM. You put that together, that research is not possible on like, you know, frontier models, whatever. No, you—

if you ask a clone, it would guess, but it wouldn't nail it like that.

Exactly. And this is where they really come in handy. I would say actually that research was beyond— I was just thinking we're gonna get like, here are the startups and here is what they're doing. This really gave you the the tam tam tam tam. Yeah, it went deep. Like tam tams. Yeah, yeah. Big big job. So hey, listen, if you're if you love tam tams, those are the cookies in they're they're very good Australia.

Yeah, they're so good.

Do you know about tam tams?

I've had them. Sure, they they sell them in like there are those novelty like you know candy cookie from around the world.

Here's the secret about tam tams. This is what kids do with tam tams in Australia. I learned this in my time in Sydney. You bite off Both ends.

Okay.

Then you put it in the glass of milk or coffee or whatever you're drinking, and you use it as a straw. Yes, yes. Oh my God, so delicious. All right, let's keep moving. I got another interview.

We got we got we got to jump. But we before we go, we got a we want one more interview. We're we're going to talk to Puneet Puri from Grit Robotics. They are we talked about Grit a few weeks ago. You may recall they have created AI infrastructure that automates the installation. of solar panels with robot arms.

Yes.

As you'll recall, we watched that.

I pointed this out to you. This was my find.

This was your find. This viral video you found of the— they don't produce— these are off-the-shelf robotic arms. The team at Grit, they're making the AI software that you use to teach the robots how to do all of this specific work in the field. So, Puneet, thanks so much for being here.

Now, Puneet, hold on a second. I saw this and I said, okay, this is AI slop.

Somebody is showing us— I'm dead serious. When I sent it to Lan, I was like, is this AI slop? Like, because this is what Elon's been talking about, other people have been talking about for a long time, which is we're going to build solar farms, like, in an industrial way that, you know, out of the back of the factory, and we just go on forever.

Now I'm looking at this.

This is a very large solar farm. This is a real installation that you're doing at your company?

That is correct. Yes. Yes. And we actually have robots right now in Nevada too who are actually installing at this time.

All right. So what we're— explain to us what we're seeing on the screen here, because this literally does not look real. What are— describe what we're seeing here.

Yeah. So I think what's happening in the solar industry, they've realized there's a huge labor shortage, right? It's 70% attrition, 30% of people can't even pass a drug test. And huge amount of these have to be built in record amount of time. And another shocking statistic which I came across when we were starting the company was agriculture, retail, manufacturing has seen a 1,000% productivity boost since 1965. Construction as a whole has seen a 46% decline since then, right?

In other words, the craftspeople are high, And there aren't— they aren't trained and they quit, according to what you just told us.

And, and, and skilled workforce— it's, uh, 41% of U.S. skilled workforce will retire by 2031 in construction.

This is crazy. And so, uh, what we're seeing there, for people who are listening, is there's like a tractor with an arm.

It's picking up a solar panel with what looks like a suction or something. And it then places it on a rail.

Then the rail— this other robot or another arm comes in.

It's got all kinds of lasers and whatever it has, and it's bolting it onto the framing. And there's a couple people watching it work, and they're doing a little work alongside it. So there is a human in the loop here, and it's on a little bit of a fast pace, but it looks like it's installing a panel, I'm gonna guess, in 15 minutes. Per panel installed? What is the pace that it's doing that? Because there's thousands of panels in this video.

Yeah, so there's actually a— this video has a collection of a bunch of robotics companies installing, not just ours, right? So Get Robotics is our company. I can talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, so typically what we are seeing, uh, I can talk about numbers in the field right now. Uh, typically a crew of 8 would do 800 panels a day. A good crew. So you're doing, one person is doing 100 panels a day if you're really solid. If you like, a weak crew would do 50 panels a day. What we are saying is once you let AI come into the field and actually boost the productivity, you could see almost 3,000 to 4,000 of these panels being installed by the same crew of 8, right? And that's what you really need because, so in our case, I think we can cycle time close to 19 seconds, 18 to 19 seconds panel to panel to panel to panel. which is pretty fast at this time. But, and then it's also solar site has a lot of other steps. You need to clear the site, you need to put the poles on, you need to put the trackers on, you need to put the panels on, you do electrical, then you do, you know, in the end you commission the plant. So there are a lot of steps. In general, it's like 20% goes into labor, right? 8% is mechanical labor. We are saying, hey, let's just go for that 8% of the mechanical labor first. And then from there on, we can even encroach into the electrical labor. And then start creating an impact.

Great. How long have you been doing this? How many solar installations are you up to now? And then what will it look like next year? 'Cause there's a lot of data center demand, there's a lot of solar demand, local communities are getting into it. And here in the great state of Texas, despite what people might think, we're the largest install base of solar, we're the biggest proponents of solar in America, great state of Texas.

Yes, absolutely. I think one thing people don't realize is that every time we double the production of solar panels, the price of them comes down by 48%, and it's happening every 18 months. So it's almost following something like a Moore's Law because it's kind of based on silicon. There's a lot of those synergies there, and the biggest cost is the cost of installation, the people, right? So if you can actually speed that up, Suddenly now we as a civilization can print solar panels like a newspaper. There's a giant fusion reactor in the middle of the solar system. It never stops. And then we have plenty of land, right? It's an obvious energy source which we need to be tapping into. And the challenge is, can we do this work using automation in deserts of New Mexico, in the winter of Maine, in paddy fields of Texas when it has rained last night and it's 8 inches of water, your vehicle is literally sinking as you're installing, right? So what kind of intelligence do you need which can understand these outdoor settings, construction settings, and can work safely alongside people, right? And that's what at least we are focusing on. We are saying, hey, let's learn the representation of construction world. We say, hey, everyone wears a hard hat, people wear vests, material comes on pallets, trenches are open. Can our model learn the representations of construction world, right? And then these representations go across different construction verticals. They're not just limited to solar. Right? And then solar is like a first starting point for us. As far as installations goes, we've done like 7 sites until now. It's like 35,000 panels, but we are supposed to install close to 6 million panels in the coming 18 to 22 years. It's almost close to 2.8 gigawatts. That's the contract size we are on right now. And it's— the demand is crazy. Like, I'll give you an example. One of our customers, There's a big bank, I won't name, but they came to our customer saying, hey, by the way, I want you to build a 900-megawatt power plant. They said, how long will you take? And these guys have been building power plants in US for the longest time. They're probably one of the largest solar construction companies. They're like, oh, you know, a 300-megawatt plant takes a year and a half, 900, probably 4 years. Those guys are like, no, I want it done in 18 months because I have a data center to power. And then these guys are panicking. And then they said, okay, fine. Now I want you to build 1.8 gigawatts. My requirements went up because I would need to now build bigger data centers and can you do it? So it's like, I think there are no people. We have to build all this infrastructure. And if we cannot have automation help us like it helped us in manufacturing, it's going to be a struggle.

Yeah.

Here's solar photovoltaic module prices versus cumulative capacity from our friends at Our World in Data. Great website.

And yeah, it's over time just plummeted from $100 all the way down. And, um, you can find many of these charts. Here's solar panel prices from $100— what is this one? $100 in 1975 was $128 per watt. Yeah, here we are, 2024, when I was—

26 cents.

When I was a kid, it's not even 26. Yeah, go ahead.

When I was a kid, having solar panels on your roof was like a high status, like, oh, those are the rich people, they're gonna try to use solar for part of their power. It was like, because it was very, very expensive. That's just like how you always thought about using solar power is like, well, it's great, but it's going to, it's going to cost you.

Yeah. Yeah. So utility-scale solar in the end, once you're done, you're close to like $0.80 or $0.90 a watt, like fully built plant. At your home, it's typically $2 to $3. But just the panel prices now, the new panels coming out, especially if you don't have like tariffs on them in Australia, you could get it probably for $0.18. Like in US, we are getting it at 26 cents, 25 cents. Also, there's going to be a little bit of a revolution on how we install solar. Again, this is like at least our thesis, and we might be wrong, is we right now put solar panels on single-axis tracker. So we are tracking the sun, right? And we leave a lot of empty space in these sites. You would've seen the videos also. There's like, you know, why is there like land exposed when there's like sunlight falling, right? And the reason is because they're trying to extract the most amount of energy in the day and the nighttime when the sun is at a high inclination. And that's where the power is most expensive. So that's how you build the plants. But once you have like a good amount of storage, you don't care. You get power in the day, you want to absorb the maximum out of it. So last time will go by these mechanical assemblies on which you're tracking, hopefully will go down and you'll have like fixed tilt panels become so cheap. Like the single axis tracker, I think they're at 12 cents a watt, just the mechanical structure. The panel is 26 cents a watt. The new panels coming out of China, I think they're like 14 cents a watt. And if you go fixed tilt, that's like 0.2 cents of a watt. So imagine like from where you've gone so less. So you're like, I can just paint the floor with solar panels with like some small piles. And robots can do that really well. And then now you can have crazy amount of energy all day long. And hopefully we get to a dream where energy is too cheap to meter, right? With the right amount of storage.

Lon, I'm gonna give you the last question here, Lon, 'cause I know you care deeply about solar.

I'll take it. Well, I'm interested in this case in the training. You're combining, you know, real footage, the robots are watching other robots, you know, put together these solar panels, and you're also using world model, like simulated data. Can you tell us about how those two work together and like what, you know, what each version of what each kind of data is good for?

Yeah, so we've spent a lot of effort creating huge AI simulation data pipelines at the back. We will look at a real site, include it into our simulation, and then inject like synthetic SKUs onto them. And then from there on, we can start training them. We can actually have like reflections, heat, like, sorry, rain, mold, like bunch of stuff which can happen on a site. And then you train on that. There is a little bit more to it. It's also the representation of the construction world. I don't know if I can actually share like a quick thing if you guys are open to that.

Yeah.

Let me see. Let me see. So what we're saying is, look, there is a lot of common elements on these sites. Workers always wear vests and come in a hard hat. Construction environments and get hammered with rain, snow, dust, right? You're picking up some of that. It could be cinder block, it could be solar panel, and you have some tool, big robot, small robot, right? What we are saying is let's learn the representation of this construction world and create task-specific models which can do different tasks. You could put rails on, you could be putting, using the same construction tech to eventually tie rebars. And then on the cinder block, there's huge sound barrier walls to be built alongside highways. So essentially you learn the representation of the chaos of an outdoor environment. And then you translate it to different construction verticals, right? And that's what allows you to eventually do it. Like, you know, we trained a robot to like do rebar tying. We could just get it done up literally like 2 days is all it took us to get this robot to train on tying a rebar. We asked it to place cinder blocks, it could get it done in a day's time.

So what we're seeing—

And that's because we have the training.

This actual footage of the robot arm going in and tying together these pieces of rebar before concrete is poured. Absolutely fantastic.

Yeah. Puneet, what you're doing is extraordinary. This company is a Series A, Series B company. How much have you raised?

Where are you based? Yeah, we're based out of South San Francisco.

Millbrae, you're in the Millbrae, you're in the armpit of the peninsula, like between the city and Hillsborough and San Mateo.

Actually, shall I joke? It's worse than the armpit. We are in the South San Francisco industrial city. Oh, on the east side where the 49ers stadium was? Yeah, it's, it's— there's like a concrete plant right behind the facility at this time. So yeah, it's like—

I'm always fascinated by that area. Like, you have these incredible places, you know, from San Mateo down to Redwood City down to Atherton and Palo Alto. You have San Francisco down to Noe Valley, all incredible. Then there's this chunk of the city which is this industrial part which nobody can seem to figure out, like This area. And the reason is because all the airplanes coming out of SFO fly over it. So if you have a home there, it shakes.

It's a little bit of a problem for people, but that's where you're based.

For us, it's awesome.

How much have you raised?

For us, it's awesome. So yeah, we recently closed our Series A around $26 million. We raised $32 million until now. We're 18 months old, a pretty young company. Amazing.

Well, I am enamored with what you're doing. Thank you so much for sharing it. I think you're hiring probably people in robotics. So where— Yes, absolutely. If people wanna come work on this brilliant vision of yours, where can they go to find out about careers?

Yeah, it's just go to grit.ai. You know, we have grit.ai. You go there, you'll see the job openings. And we have a phenomenal team. The hardware team is all MIT. We joke around and call them the MIT Mafia. The robotics team, the robotics team is all Carnegie Mellon trained roboticists.

They were all part of the PhD program. Those are the 2 big ones, Rodney Brooks over at MIT.

And then our field team is also kick-ass because these guys are ex-Marines. They deployed robots in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so they're like firsthand. So they are helping deploy robots on the solar construction site and other construction verticals too.

Rich robots.

Yeah, it's a phenomenal thing.

So just get in there, work. And if you're optimizing an ad network to get 10 basis points more clicks on nonsensical ad networks, I don't want to name out any specific companies, just go north. Go work in this industrial area and do something incredible for humanity. Puneet, thank you for sharing, and I wish you great success because it's going to be the success of, uh, humanity if we can make this work. Good job.

Great job.

Thank you guys. I appreciate it. Take care.

I mean, it's just amazing.

2 great founders back to back just tackling big issues. And Atoms in the world— shout out to my guy Travis TK with Atoms. People are doing hard stuff with moats. Okay, I pushed my other interview back 10 minutes, just so you know. And so where do we want to go from here? Do you want to do the annotated update? Uh, ladies' choice here, Lon. Ladies' choice. Let's go off duty. You can go news. And listen, you're getting so slim and you're work— you're working on your health.

I am. Well, let's look going We should go off duty, I think, 'cause there were a few things here I wanted to run by you. Specifically, did you see this New York Times article about emojis and how all of our emojis are making us look like boomers?

I didn't, but I'm a little concerned here because I see in the notes that the one I use most often, which is the crying laughing.

Crying laughing, yeah.

That is mine.

They got a bunch of— Google sent them a bunch of data from Android phones. So this is not including iOS. This is all data taken from Android phones in 2025. But what they found is the number one most used emoji now is the crying face, not the laugh crying, just the ooh, like crying face, tears pouring down.

Yeah.

And that is because they talked to, they had a whole team of New York Times analysts, emoji analysts break this down. Gen Z considers the crying laughing emoji overused. It's for boomers. They don't use it anymore. They've switched up entirely to the tears stained with, with tears, cheeks stained with tears version. That's that. As you can see here, those are declining in popularity. Some other interesting insights from this article. The skull, meaning I'm dead, had a brief moment.

Yes.

It had a brief moment in 2023, but it's now rapidly declined. Instead, the kids are using the tears instead. To mean I'm dead.

I know this because producer Nick, uh, who worked here at Twist and then All In, and now he's over at the All In Corporation LLC, um, he was using dead and then he went to full-on crying. So when—

Correct.

Something spicy. So this is incredibly important for me because, um, people have called me out rightfully for using the crying emoji, uh, but I use the one where the 2 tears are coming off either side of the eye. Right. That's the dated one. It's laughing and crying, not—

Laugh crying.

That's the dated one. But I did that because Because I'm— my tweets are primarily non-serious laughing ones. And then somebody's like, you know, you— what that means is you laugh at your own jokes. And I was like, I'm trying to signal to people this is satire, don't take life so seriously.

Right.

Um, and okay, so is there— is there an emoji listed here, or is there emoji advice that you can give me and other unks? Because now I'm in my unk Phase.

Sure.

Unc J. Cow. Unc Cal. Unc Cal. What should I be using now?

You know, I think I don't think you should try to follow what everyone else is doing. Okay. There, I think there are some emojis to avoid, obviously, that are going to tag you as a boomer. For example, they're saying teens prefer the fire emoji, whereas older people use the 100. So don't use that. I think it's more what to avoid. Teens prefer prayer hands instead of thumbs up. So I think it's more about— it's use whichever ones you feel best about, but avoiding the minefield of the ones that have been outlined for boomers. Like, I'll give you an example. Since moving to Texas, I really like the guy with the cowboy hat emoji. And I use that—

Yes, yeehaw.

Yeehaw. I use that in place of like thumbs up or fire, anything I approve of. I'll just put cowboy guy on there. He's smiling. It communicates the same thing. And I also like eyes, like the eyes looking in one direction, like looking at—

Yeah, it's like I'm taking note. I'm taking note.

Right. Noting that Oliver, I think, is who got me started on that one. But I think that one's good too. As long as you're avoiding the pitfall, this one makes you look like a boomer one. I think you're— I think you're safe.

I'm a salute guy. I'm a salute guy. Everybody knows that because I'm a Yes Chef salute guy. Sure. the great state of Texas. And people didn't know what the salute was. I just felt it was elegant and it was in my vibe. So take from that what you will. I had a little something here that I'll share. Uh, you know, I love dictation.

Sure.

Um, but, and I, you know, I have studio mics like this one that I use. Um, but sometimes I'm in the car, sometimes I'm in a meeting, and I'm finding the fidelity when I'm whispering and I'm at this level, is not good enough to get picked up by dictation software.

I, I like Whisper. Grammarly's got dictation.

All of the LLMs have a dictation mode now built into them.

Yeah, the dictation is how you take your instructions, your agents, you know, your interactions with large language models to the next level, because you can just talk and talk and talk and explain what you want. If you're writing 1 or 2 sentences per prompt You're getting it wrong. What you want to do is spill your guts out, and you want to talk for 2 minutes, 3 minutes, and that's something you wouldn't bother typing out. And you can just go total stream of consciousness. When you say it to the LLM, you're using like Claude Cowork or, you know, Perplexity Computer, which I talk about.

Hermes, uh, agent. Hermes. I call it Hermes.

You do, I know.

It's like the Prada agent I use as well, um, from, from Apple.

Yeah.

Anyway, it just does better. It does better. And so I was sort of researching microphones, and DJI— DJI, uh, you can see here, I just bought this one with 2 microphones that clip on. They have magnetic clip-ons, they have a standard clip-on. I clip this thing on, it lasts for hours, it's over Bluetooth. Pull it up on the screen, guys.

I think I shared it Yeah, I, I will. Give me one moment.

All right, this is— Jacob should be pulling this stuff up so we can keep you in the moment.

I fully agree, but here we go.

Yes, so this one has a pack, uh, as you can see. But what you can also do is if you just want to get the DJI Mic 3 transmitter for $84, it's the 3rd one over in those Chiclet squares under the price. Um, you could just buy a solo dolo one here, Lon, for like $80.

The thing's the size of a quarter and it connects over Bluetooth. The fidelity is unbelievable.

Yeah.

And you do have to, on your mobile phone, kind of tweak it a bit because it's only a microphone, it's not a speaker. And like, getting that to work with individual software, you're gonna have to get into the settings to make it work. But once you do, it's well worth the price you pay. DJI is not a sponsor. This is Off Duty where we just— yeah, we're just talking about stuff we like.

Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, DJI used to be like the influencer when I was first doing like digital media. Everybody had their little DJI that was like the go-to, like I'm gonna go to an event and film myself and make a vlog out of it later. So look at the shout out to DJI, they're staying in the game. Yes.

Um, uh, I have one other recommendation, please. Uh, Ted Lasso is back for season 4. It is the show. It's amazing. It's on Apple. And I think the first 2 episodes are out now. And it's absolutely fantastic. Very basic premise. You know, if you watch season 3, no spoilers here, but just generally, you'll get this off of, like, the first 5 minutes of it. Ted Lasso has gone home to take care of his kid. And then there's a big question. They want him to come, and they want him...

To coach.

To coach now the women's team and go back to England to coach the women's team.

There you go.

That's all I'll tell you.

Mixing it up for season 4.

I was like, what are they gonna do here? And they nailed it.

The first 2 episodes are dynamite.

This has been a long time coming. And after season 3, Sudeikis and the creators were like, you know what? We're good. We're done. Great run. We did everything we wanted to do. This is it for Ted Lasso. And it was really like the fans were just so— like, people didn't want to say goodbye to these characters in this world. So they sort of got cajoled into bringing it back for season 4.

It's just charming and lovely, and the actors are fantastic. Finally, Lanterns is coming to HBO.

It is.

This Sunday.

The critics have seen the first 6 or so. I've heard a lot of good buzz from LA people I used to do videos with.

Now, this is critically important because they went to the guy who was doing all the DC stuff, uh, with Batman— what's his name, uh, the Snyder Cut or whatever. Um, I think they went to Snyder to do this originally. He had his own vision for it.

Yeah.

Yes.

Uh, yeah.

Um, and which I would have loved to seen, but that was going to be hardcore, um, you know, like, yeah, superhero.

Yes, they decided it was very comic booky. He's— that's, that's the Zack Snyder thing.

Which is great.

Like, which is make it look like the original, you know, make it like a comic book.

Yeah.

But here's the thing. It has now been shifted because they wanted something a little different. They wanted a series that could go on for a little bit. People don't know this. Green Lantern, one of my favorite characters. I think my favorite character in the DC Universe is Green Lantern and the Lanterns. On the other side, you know, I'm Team X-Men. I always loved that. Lanterns now is being done by the writers from Ozark, True Detective, and the showrunner is Lindelof.

David Lindelof, who did— David Lindelof, who did, I mean, Watchmen, The Leftovers.

I love both of those.

Lost. He and Carlton Cuse were the co-creators of Lost. A big, a big name in TV. It's also got— they've got Tom King working on it, who is a very well-regarded comic book writer. Like, he, he, he wrote the comic book that that new Supergirl movie was based on, The Woman of Tomorrow.

Yes, I didn't see that yet, but all I want to say is this is looking very promising.

You know what it looks like to me? And I mean this in a good way. I mean, this is the best way. People have been saying that, and I, I see why they're saying that. To me, it looks like Taylor Sheridan. It looks like, what if you took the— what if you took the Landman? What if you took the mayor of Kingsman? It's like the Fleabag vibe, it's like the Beestown, the Lioness vibe, but in a DC world with the Green Lanterns. That's what it looks like to me. And I, I say I'm all for it. Let's do it.

Yeah, fantastic. Anything else you want to add here as we wrap?

You know, there's one more show I will point people to very quickly because I know you've got to go. It's on, uh, it's on Hulu. You can also watch it on Disney+ because that's how they do it now. It's called Furious. Uh, it is loosely, loosely— it's loosely based on that '80s movie Black Widow. The basic setup is you're following 2 stories simultaneously. One is it's a woman who was formerly human trafficked and she is now a serial killer who is taking revenge.

What?

And then there is a different woman who is a young or a rookie FBI agent who is sort of on her trail. And you're following both of those stories, sort of a Killing Eve kind of vibe to it. But man, they are very interesting characters. These are really, really good lead performances. Emmy Rossum, from Shameless plays the FBI agent. Lola Petticrew, you saw her right there, is the serial killer. It's a really interesting cat-and-mouse thing where you're following this investigation. That's Scoot McNairy as her— as her, uh, the cop.

All right, I'll see you're furious and I will raise you— I'm gonna see you're furious and I'm gonna raise you a The Shards. I am a huge Bret Easton Ellis podcast fan. I'm a fan of his books, American Psycho, uh, and, uh, um, Luna Park, I really liked that one. All this great stuff. And, and, uh, he decided 4 or 5 years ago during COVID to serialize a novel which has got his character himself as the protagonist, as you see there, this incredible actor. Yeah. And it's kind of got Euphoria vibes. Um, it was going to be done on HBO. HBO fumbled. The guy who did Love Story—

Ryan Murphy.

Ryan Murphy, who's great, has spent millions of dollars on these first 2 episodes to make it an homage to the '80s. And it is unbelievable what's on the screen. There's 2 episodes out. I've only watched the first, and I was blown away because, um, the first— I listened to the serialized version.

He just did it on his podcast as like 20 minutes at the opening of each podcast, 30 minutes.

Yeah, yeah.

He serialized the book, and then his agent was like, hey, dumbass, I'm your book agent. You're Bret effing Easton Ellis. You're an author. What are you doing giving this away for free? It's fantastic. So then they produced it as a book. HBO bought it. They fumbled. Now AMC did it. It's 5 years later. This is going to be, I think, like Euphoria-level hit if they don't Fumble it.

Hmm. He did. There was that movie Rules of Attraction, too. That was a Bret Easton Ellis book. It looks like it's a kind of similar world of, like, debauched teens and 20-somethings.

Yeah.

That nobody captures, like, the debauchery and the aesthetics. This is what I love about Bret Easton Ellis. He is a fan of aesthetics, and he will make something beautiful aesthetically, and use everything from the cars to the clothes to the food to the mall, the Galleria. You know, there's a Corvette in this. Like, just driving up PCH, it's just an amazing bring you to the '80s. And the guy from Love Story— I saw that Love Story with JFK Jr.

Right.

I was in New York at that time, and I was enthralled at Love Story.

My wife and I watched it.

We both loved it because it's romantic and tragic and celebrity.

But I was like, oh, that's Walkers. Oh, that's this place.

Oh, that's the Odeon.

He's always very good at that. That American Crime Story one they did with O.J. Simpson where they recreated L.A. in the mid-'90s. I was already— I was living around L.A. at that time. And it is like, it brings you right back. Like, I don't— And in LA, it's impossible to do that. Nothing looks like it looked in the 1990s anymore. It's a totally different city.

So you're gonna love the first episode of The Sharks because he goes to Westwood to go see The Shining.

And like, Westwood looks nothing today like it did when The Shining came out. Nothing.

And he goes to those 2 theaters on the catty corners that was across from Stan's.

It's the Bruin.

It's the Fox and the Bruin. Is it? Yeah, they're on opposite sides.

He pulls up in his dad's convertible Mercedes, like iconic, parks outside of there at a meter, walks up to buy a ticket, and then on the display it's got the, uh, the Kurosawa film Kurashige or whatever, um, from 1980s.

Kagemusha.

Kagemusha as like coming soon. And I'm like, the detail level here on this show is just like—

it's Easter eggs in the same way comic book ones do that, Another amazing episode here of Twist. This is Off Duty. On Fridays, we like to go off duty. We like to prepare you for the weekend. These are the great— these are the great suggestions, whether it's a product, whether it's a movie, whether it's a service. You just got to get in there on Fridays for Off Duty with Lon Harris and your boy J. Cowell. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye, everybody.