This Week in Startups - Apple Drops $500B on AI while Google Gemini Eyes Your iOS Devices! | E2089

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Today’s show: Jason and Lon break down the latest trends shaping AI training, the evolving job market, and the shifting landscape of social media. A tribute to Steve Jobs on what would have been his 70th birthday explores his lasting impact, Apple’s massive $500 billion AI investment, and the future of US manufacturing. The conversation dives into Outlier’s role in AI training data, its effects on journalism, and broader job market implications. Jason also shares insights on autonomous vehicles, Apple’s AI strategy, and the latest in crypto—covering meme coins, regulatory battles, and the state of angel investing. Plus, a look at Oscar season and the cultural moments making waves.*Timestamps:(0:00) Jason and Lon kick off the show!(2:59) TikTok discussion and Steve Jobs' 70th birthday tribute(4:36) Jason's history with Steve Jobs and impact of blogging(8:56) Jason's interaction with Steve Jobs about podcast monetization(10:13) Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(11:27) Steve Jobs' legacy and Apple's innovation(14:12) Apple's $500 billion investment in AI and TSMC chip manufacturing(20:08) Vanta. Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(21:18) Geopolitical implications of Apple's US manufacturing investments(24:06) Outlier's role in AI training data and legal risks(27:02) Journalists in AI training and job market implications(30:40) Vapi. Go to https://www.vapi.ai and use code Twist200 to get $200 in credits(32:39) Outlier’s AI training recruitment and global reach(34:14) AI's future in various industries(36:53) Experiences with autonomous vehicles and Waymo(37:23) Hot-swappable LLMs and Apple's AI integrations(41:03) Commercial implications of AI deals for Apple(43:08) Public access to podcast docket and meme coins discussion(47:03) Milei’s meme coin and libertarian views on crypto(52:15) Crypto trader's tragic incident and dangers of investing on margin(58:19) Jason's gambling habits and future of crypto regulation(1:01:05) Angel investing and Oscar season discussion*Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/LonsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonharris*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Thank you to our partners:(10:13) Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(20:08) Vanta. Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(30:40) Vapi. Go to https://www.vapi.ai and use code Twist200 to get $200 in credits*Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland*Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis*Follow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com*Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

I've been reading a whole bunch about this company Outlier. Outlier is one of many companies that's providing these kind of services, like a human editor to aid in training your AI model. And here's the great news. If you're a worker at Google or you're a worker at Facebook or you're a worker for our government, you can collect that paycheck while doing this in your office. I'm going to send you back to the office. When you get back to your office, you can do.

Don't tell Elon. Don't tell Elon. This is why overwork or overworked. Overemployed is such a phenomenon. I guarantee you people are doing these while they're ostensibly working at other places. I know it because- Oh, I've got a window open right now. I've been doing this the whole show. Oh, fantastic. Great. Well, double dipping. Here we go. This weekend startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code

twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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 sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And VAPI. Add real-time AI powered voice conversations to your apps or business in minutes, not months. Go to vappy.a.i and use code Twist 200 to get $200 in credits. That's over 1,000 minutes and free calls. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week and startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis, with me. Producer Lon is here. and Alex is on a little vacay. He'll be back, I think, on Monday. Is that right, Lon? I believe that is correct. Yeah, we're got this week to ourselves and then Alex returns next week. Big show on Wednesday, big show energy coming when we have Vlad from Robin Hood and Raul from Superhuman, two of my earliest stage investments that have had incredible success. So I'm going to talk to both of them about how they're doing with their businesses and startup lessons, all kinds of great stuff. So this Wednesday's Big Wednesday energy. Make sure you tune in live.

YouTube.com. Do a search for this week in startups. Hit the subscribe button, click on all notifications, follow me at X.com slash Jason or follow Jason Caliganis on LinkedIn. Those are the three places. We stream live Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 12 Texas time, 10 a.m. Pacific time, 1 p.m. Eastern time. But those two interviews, they might run on Friday or next Monday. So just keep that in mind. If you tune in live, you get a real good preview of what's coming down the pipe. We've got a pipeline of great stuff. And we're expanding the social footprint. Where can people find us again?

We're at TWA Startups on X. We're at this week in startups on LinkedIn. Go to Instagram this weekend startups, all one word. We've also got the subreddit going. I'm back in there moderating R slash TWI startups. And TikTok is next on my itinerary. We're going to get over there and start posting there because, you know, I'm 46 years old. I got to be on TikTok, right?

That's where all the middle-aged, divorced guy energy people are going. Yeah. I mean, it's so addicting. Everybody's there. I want to start doing some videos just for TikTok in the coming weeks, something I've been wanting to do. And I think I've got to do reaction videos because I noticed there are so many great videos, even historical ones of people who've been on the program or me interacting with famous people.

It might be fun to go through some of the things I said. And I like these videos where people do reaction videos. videos or they talk, play the video, talk. Yeah, you got your head in the corner commenting on what people are watching. That's classic TikTok. Yeah. So I want to learn that genre, as it were. Speaking of genres, today would have been Steve Jobs' 70th birthday, I believe.

I'm pretty sure it's 70 because I saw that Tim Cook did a nice little tribute on X. You are right. 195. He was born February 24th, 1955. Well, 20 years ago, when I was doing, and gadget and the company Weblogs Inc, Autoblog Joystick. We were real pioneers in podcasting and blogging back then. I wound up selling that company to AOL 18 months after I started.

It was a big part of my success in those early years. And I would go to a conference that Walt Mossberg and Karen Swisherwood host called All Things Digital, All Things D. And this is from 2005 when I... I had started, first started doing podcasting. I did a Calicanist cast, which eventually became this program, this week in startups, and we did a podcast for AutoBlog, which were two of the first five to ten podcasts ever. Shout out to Dave Weiner, who created RSS and the podcasting technology along with the podfather, Adam Curry, two legends who don't get enough credit.

But let's play the clip here, and Lon, you can give your thoughts after. Here we go. Steve, there's a thousand bloggers at Microsoft and bloggers that people at Apple, I understand, are not allowed to blog, and you don't blog. I'm saying employees. Why is that? Well, I don't blog for the same reason that I read Bill describing why he doesn't blog. It's a pretty time-consuming thing. And once you start, you kind of feel like it's one more thing you've got to do every week.

50-year-old Bill Gates. But in terms of blogging at Apple, you know, again, we have a lot of secret stuff going on. And it's one of those things where we'd really rather not have to have some of our employees spreading that around and not have to get upset with people who, you know, made a bad judgment about what to put in their blog and whatnot to put in their blog. So pause there. For context here, I was running the blog company at Microsoft and a guy named Robert Scoble had infiltrated. He was working at Microsoft. He created, he took the blog platforms that were already out there and he just said everybody at Microsoft start writing about what you're doing. And he would run around Microsoft with a camera and make short videos and talk to them.

I don't know what's going on with my haircut there, but I'm obviously a way a little bit more than I do now. That's like a really interesting. It's not even a mullet. What is that? It's like everything in the same lengths. It's almost like you're doing like a little pompadour thing. You've got like this little flip in the front, but instead of going up a little, it's down. I don't know what that's called.

I don't know what this is called. I think it's called like super cuts. Maybe I was on a budget. You got to remember, I was kind of broke back then. I met you about two years after this. And this was not your look anymore. You had a totally different look by that. No. I mean, this is like preppy Brooklyn J-Cal. And I don't know what's going on with the collar of that shirt is a little bit off. But anyway, putting aside my aesthetics at that time. You've had a glow up since then. Had a little mini glow up since then. But the blogging thing was an interesting question because blogging had become this radical medium. We take it for granted now that anybody would publish. But back in that day, everything you said as a technology company was interpreted through the media, right? Sure, yeah. If you were releasing a new product, and this is why this Wall Street Journal D conference, and Rupert Murdoch owned this conference, I think he paid Karen Swisher and Walt Mossberg, 500,000 to a million dollars a year to host it, which was very controversial at the time. But it made, you know, 10 million bucks. The tickets were, I don't know, at that time, probably $3,000, $4,000. I couldn't afford it, but I got a journalist pass. Well, you're rubbing elbows with Bill Gates.

He's sitting right cool. I mean, it was pretty cool. All of those people who were doing stuff at that time were being interpreted by the Wall Street Journal. So if Bill Gates came out with a new product, there was no YouTube at the time. I think YouTube had just launched, but it wasn't like it is today. Twitter wasn't launched. The iPhone was launched, right? In 2005, was the iPhone launch?

No. Not yet. No iPhone yet. No iPhone yet. That really dates this. 2007. That was 2007. Right.

So shortly he did that. And podcasting had just come out. And this event was a seminal moment because Adam Curry was there and he had negotiated with Steve Jobs to in iTunes. And iTunes is where you bought music to allow you to go to iTunes and add an RSS feed. Like you take the URL of somebody's podcast and put it in there. And then it would put on your iPod, which was a music player from that. then an album that said podcast and you could subscribe to podcasts and would show up on your iPod. It would download it when you synced your iPod because iPods didn't have an internet connection.

And back then we were using, I guess, like, whatever the precursor to 3G was, like a very low data. You couldn't download over data, audio or video at that time on a mobile phone. And the mobile phone you would have been using would have been a Nokia. So no bueno on an MP3. But you would download them. And the next day you would listen to these podcasts. And I had a couple of them, as I said. So I was going to ask him next.

I had a two-part question. One was, why don't you blog? The second question I was going to ask him is, would he allow us to sell our podcast for a dollar and create a revenue stream? Because I was desperately trying to figure out how to make money off these things. And let's play the second part of the clip. Will you be able to add any RSS feed to the, or any podcast's RSS feed to iTunes? Or is it only through the store?

Oh, you'll be able to add anything you want completely open. We're just working with the open standards out there. Yeah. And will you help companies like ours sell podcasts, you know, be an audible? So if we wanted to sell a podcast through your service, would you help us do the fulfillment? You know, we're planning on having all the podcasts be free at first, but zing me an email with what you've got in mind, and we're open to anything. Same email I always send it to you on? Yep.

Okay, you got it. So. Big laugh. It's always nice to get a big laugh from a crowd like that. That's a good feeling. I mean, people think like me making jokes and being witty is like a new thing. I've been doing this my whole life. But the funny part about that was I knew I was telling a joke in the moment, but I did have Steve's email and we would trade emails. Sure. Because of Engadget. He read Engadgett and he would tell me if we got something wrong. And he's just such a giant. I miss him so much. I didn't have a personal relationship with him, but I met him a dozen times. I was in like press junkets with him, you know, one on one, a couple of. of times. I had conversations with him. Squarespace makes stunning professional websites ridiculously easy. It doesn't matter if you're just selling a product or a service. Maybe you're

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So start your year off strong at Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Squarespace.com slash twist. Thank you to Squarespace for making such a great product that we used year after year at an affordable price. And we really appreciate your partnership. I was one of those people when Steve Jobs died where I was a little skeptical on the globe shifting genius stuff. It's like, you know, I mean, I, I, always think of these things as these companies are teams. These are collaborative. Anytime

anybody's like, this one guy is the genius, I'm always a little cynical on that. Like, well, they were in charge of this huge group of innovative people and they all came together to make the iPhone. But if you look at Apple post-Steve Jobs, it's clear that something has fundamentally changed. I think going back, hindsight being what it is, he was obviously bringing a level of whatever, or creativity or, you know, like, ambition, whatever it was, that Apple is not the same without him as with him. So I think that, like, his legacy has been cemented over the last few years of Apple coming out with various technologies that are not as globe shifting as the iPhone. Exactly correct. Steve Jobs put Tim Cook in charge. And it was a controversial move because Tim Cook isn't like a creative force visionary. And I think he would admit that, you know, obviously not parable to. Steve Jobs, nobody is.

No. But he was the supply chain guy. So what did we see since Steve's passing? How many years has it been since Steve passed? My gosh, it's got to be 10 years now. He died in 2011. So, yeah, close to 15 years. Unbelievable.

And it's just such a presence that's missing. He was at that time kind of like Elon in terms of his presence everywhere and, you know, the attention he got. Bill Gates always kind of like second fiddle to him because Steve's aesthetics, his products were so much better at the time than Microsoft's. Microsoft had more products. Microsoft had more revenue at the time. He was always that archetypal like coder, developer, nerd. Like he was the guy behind the scenes writing the code. But Steve Jobs was that like the creative, artistic visionary where he wasn't just building products that worked right. He was. thinking about the future and like what does what's everybody going to be doing in 10, 15, 20 years. And so I think it is a different kind of idea. I wonder now that the Steve Jobs roadmap,

one of the last things he was working on was like TV and solving the TV problem. Sure. Which Apple TV was set to do, which was to just let you do a search with Siri for anything on your Apple TV and not worry about where it lived and just give you, you know, that kind of thing. But he was, He missed the AI wave. I wonder what Steve Jobs would be doing right now during this period of time with AI. And I can tell you, it would not have been like Memoji AI or handing it off to Open AI. I mean, he would have been in the thick of this. I think that's that, you know, Steve Jobs, his vision, it was always the walled garden.

We're going to, we're going to create our own bespoke version of this technology that just works intuitively. and you don't have to worry about all the, you know, setting it up or the complexities. It's going to be a perfectly smooth experience. So I think very different from how we're seeing AI develop now where things are leaning towards open source and it's all these different tools and products that you can sort of mix and match on your own. I think Apple would have had a much more like, here's Apple AI, here's the suite of products, and it's all our, it's all in-house in our system.

It doesn't interact with everybody else's whatnot. All right. Speaking of Apple, big news today, and this goes to the Make America Independent again, I would say. Innovative again, whatever you're, yeah. Resilient again. Mama. Mama. Make America manufacturers again, Mama.

So that'll be one of our trends here. Apple has announced plans to spend $500 billion, hire 20,000 people in the U.S. over the next four years to build AI servers. Company said it was his largest spend commitment ever. Ever on anything ever. It's a 250,000 square foot factory they're putting in north of Houston and Texas. That's going to be a Foxcon plant for assembling advanced servers. Now, of course, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company, famous or infamous, depending on your

perspective, for assembling iPhones overseas in particularly Chinese factories. the working conditions in Foxcon factors in China, a longstanding issue for Apple. Foxcon already has AI servers operating in Mexico. So they're going to move some over here. It's part of an elaborate plan to avoid potential Trump tariffs rather than bringing in all of these servers from elsewhere. They're going to make them right here in the U.S. So they don't have to pay the 20% plus premiums.

Foxcon also planning data centers in Arizona, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon. elsewhere maybe, and it is important to bear in mind just for clarity, the servers are going to be assembled in the U.S. Some of the parts like the chips and other advanced components, they're still going to import from elsewhere to then assemble the servers within the U.S. This is a tough thing here because $500 billion in servers in a data center is a curious thing to happen here because they don't have their own language model. So I am confused. What is the point of these 500 billion and this giant data center?

They are going to put what servers or GPUs in here? Are these going to be Nvidia servers? Are these going to be, you know, some new service? It's very unclear. And then what would this giant, you know, data center actually do? Is it going to be competitive with Colossus by Grock and Elon? Musk, is it going to be competitive with Sam Altman's Open AI and what they're building? Or, you know, I have my own theory. Apple has not been in the data center race and doesn't have a

cloud computing offering, like AWS or Azure for Microsoft or Google Cloud or Oracle's Cloud, right? So you get these four giant clouds. If you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup, you can go, you know, instead of standing up your own service, you just rent them, right? And people can move between them, really well, it's awesome. And Apple doesn't have one. What if Apple did have one? And then if you were an app developer, it was somehow deeply integrated into the app store. And if you were a media company, you somehow could leverage it as well. This could be very interesting and would be a totally new revenue source. Now, they would be the last person to the party, obviously. But they do have this advantage. And they have a huge developer community making apps. Right.

So if they made it, you know, free for apps or $100 a month for apps that are, you know, have X number of users, I think they could get a lot of that business. And then they could do deep integrations into the phone. It would be trusted. So maybe that's what they're planning here. The New York Times does say these servers are going to contain chips made by the Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company or, you know, TSM. One of the world's biggest suppliers of these. So they're going to be the chips are going to be made in Taiwan. and by the Dutch company ASML. Interesting stuff because, you know, TSM actually makes invidias, right? Invidia does the architecture of them. The actual assembly is being done there.

So I wonder if this means Apple is going to be making their own AI chips. I don't know if they already do that. But, you know, it's kind of interesting what we're seeing here with President Trump. He wants to do onshoreing. That's a big focus. And, and he's very. He's very, you know, interested in maybe becoming independent of TSM and China and having our own supply chain. This doesn't solve that problem if TSM is making them, but TSMC is making fabs here in the United States.

So this feels to me like the decoupling from China, which is a huge priority. Yes. Who is the biggest manufacturer, biggest American company involved with China? It's Apple. Right. And this does tied directly in Biden last year before leaving office awarded TSMC $6.6.6 billion in grants to build more chips here. Some of those chips are already being assembled in a plan in Arizona. So you're absolutely correct.

This is part of decoupling all of this as best we can from China and bringing that manufacturing over here. Nailing product market fit is every founder's top priority. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on second. selling it, especially to big customers. You know, we call them lighthouse customers. Some people call them whales. To land those deals, your security compliance has to be rock solid. Certificates like SOC2 or ISO- 2701 are the keys to building trust and unlocking these opportunities, but they take time and energy, pulling you away from building and shipping a beautiful, great product. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're your partner. Vanta is the all-in-one compliance solution, helping

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That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash T-W-I-S-T. I wonder geopolitically if this means, I hate to get big picture here, but zooming out. I think this means that China is going to invade Taiwan, and we're not going to defend Taiwan, and we're in a race to get Taiwan. Taiwan semiconductor on short here in the event that happens. Now, hopefully it doesn't happen.

But I think, you know, everything I hear from people on the inside is that we are, yeah. In big picture geopolitical terms, Trump's very anti the idea of America being the global cop, the everybody's protector, having all of our fingers in all of these different pies. And that was an increasingly big topic during the Biden years was, you know, China's ramping up militarily in the South China Sea. There definitely are increasing hints that, you know, Xi wants Taiwan back. And just like Putin wanted Crimea and Ukraine back, Xi wants Taiwan back. And so, yeah, I mean, I think U.S. foreign policy for the last several decades has been we're Taiwan's ally. If China invades Taiwan, we're going to back Taiwan.

And, you know, the semiconductor industry being in Taiwan was only an added inducement. We have to defend Taiwan at all costs. I think President Trump sees things very differently than that. He doesn't want to be on the hook to fight China in the event that she goes after Taiwan. So right. So big picture this is. It's almost like he's trying to force. I feel like Trump is trying to force a multipolar world where we're independent, isolated.

if China wants to, you know, have some adventures in that area and take over Taiwan, so be it, if Russia wants to, you know, do things on their border, that's up to the EU to defend it, but the United States is going to focus on the North American continent. Yeah. I mean, you could hear it explicitly when J.D. Vance is attacking, you know, globalism, this is what he's, this is exactly what he's talking about, this idea that all of the allied countries of the world are a united front against all of the evildoers of the world. And that's just how America has viewed the world since, really, since the end of World War, too, the Cold War. And it's fascinating, too, because it's a very democratic position to not be the world cop, you know. Well, if you went back to when I was like in high school in the 90s, of course, it was very progressive liberal. Like, why are we intervening in all of these other countries' business? That's their business. And it's just economic colonialism.

And we should get out of, you know, all of these other countries. And now, because it's President Trump doing it in a lot of ways, it's sort of flip. and Democrats hate the idea. I've been reading a whole bunch about this company Outlier. Sure. It is a training data company. Now, what is training data? As you know, all these AI models are slurping up data off the open web.

They used an open web crawler, this open web project. They did it without getting permission. That's why the New York Times is in a lawsuit and countless other people. You put that against the backdrop of, well, how do we get more information into these There was a really interesting product that captured everybody's imagination 20 years ago called Mechanical Turk. There was some Sarasaurus, which was doing tagging of like images and data entry. There's business process outsourcing in the Philippines and India that's always occurred where Westlaw and LexisNexis would take legal documents when they were faxed, you know, back in the day and they were print. And they would literally type them in and do data entry.

Well, now we're entering a new phase. which is finding subject matter experts and then having them do queries, look at the results, and fix the results. And I think they're actually going and putting primary data into these based on each vertical. Why is this important? Getting sued could cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars. You could get an injunction against you. And so there is an opportunity here for startups to take subject matter experts,

humans, have them go find information on the web, and have them type it. Now, they could be stealing the information as well. But because they are a little bridge with this outsource company, it doesn't matter because Open AI, let's say, or, you know, some other language model anthropic could hire this company. And I don't know the details, but they could hire a third party and these third party data providers exist everywhere. Who knows how they're getting the information? They could be scraping. They could be writing it in. They could get subject matter experts. So all different ways to do it. And then they buy that from them. That company indemnifies the company.

They just bought the data from them. If there was ever a problem, it's at arm's length. The same thing was done to cede social networks. People hired third parties to put content onto social networks. Another way of saying paying people to go rip videos from other sources, put it on there. There was a very interesting angle to this story about journalists. So basically, Outlier is one of many companies that's providing these kind of services, like a human editor to aid in training your AI model.

And a lot of those jobs are going to former journalists people who are at risk or have already lost their job to AI are now helping to improve and fine tune the AI systems that are putting them out of work. Journalism jobs in 2024, 2025, increasingly hard to come by. The news industry cut around 5,000 jobs just last year. That's a 49% spike from 2023 the year before. And these outlier type AI training jobs, they're fully remote. They're consistent whenever you want to work.

You can do them full time. You can do them part time. They pay $35 an hour or more. You can see why as a freelance writer, this is a perfect fill-in supplemental gig for me. I can, if I only have 25 hours of writing work to do this week, another 1520 helping to edit AI systems. well, now I'm full-time employed. So far, I totally appreciate what you're saying that you could use these to actually build the training data for your models.

So far, what Outlier is doing mostly is having them sort of fine-tune the results. So they're fact-checking, they're looking for hallucinations, and if there are hallucinations, they're reporting them and correcting them, and they're even noting when they get responses from chatbots that pull from inaccurate or less than ideal sources. So if it sees, oh, the chatbot's relying too much on blogs or personal writings or op-eds or social media posts that aren't verified, we should refocus it to more verifiable, reliable sources.

So one thing I thought was interesting, if you think about it, it's basically the work a human editor used to do for a human writer. Check your sources. Make sure your facts are right. If something doesn't sound, fix your grammar or something doesn't sound right. So that's, that job is really not changed. You're just helping a chatbot get better at writing instead of a, you know, a green reporter who's just starting out. Outliers owned by SF's Scale AI.

The company's valued at $13.8 billion. Their customers so far include OpenAI, meta, and Microsoft. So these, these journalists are feeding the biggest, you know, they're working for chat, GPT, basically. This is a good use of funds. If your company is worth a couple of hundred billion and you're raising $10 billion, I mean $35 an hour. If you were to do a million hours of work would be $35 million. If you did $10 million hours of work, it would only be $350 million. 10 million hours of work. I think you could recreate the corpus of everything in the world. That's a lot of time. Yeah. So this process is called reinforcement learning with human feedback, R-L-H-H-C. Yes. And it's outlawyer.com. We should definitely get the CEO in the program. Sure. But it's interesting that they're going after journalists, and this is the point.

New work is always created. Here it is. New work is being created. Yeah. And I bet you that this work pays better. 35 an hour is good, man. That's from home? I've definitely had writing jobs that did not pay 35 an hour.

Like, not even out long ago. If it was work from home as well, it's a $70,000 a year job, you know, just times it by 2000. That's incredible job for work from home. Yeah, think about it. You just log in when you're ready to work. And because it's not, you know, they've always got plenty to do. So you just log in. Yeah. Here's your day's assignment. Okay, I did my eight hours. I'm done. And here's the great news. If you are a worker at Google or you're a worker at Facebook or you're a worker for our government, you can collect that paycheck while doing this in your office. Of course. I'm going to send you back to the office. When you get back to your office, you can just tell Elon. Don't tell Elon. But no. But

this is why overwork or overemployed is such a phenomenon. I guarantee you people are doing these while they're ostensibly working at other places. I know it because- Oh, I've got a window open right now. I've been doing this the whole show. Oh, fantastic. Great. Well, double-dipping. Here we go. But we'll be in an office soon in a studio, so I'll be over your shoulder and I'll know if you're doing it. Then you'll be noticing. 2025 is going to be the year that voice AI really breaks out. Voice AI is going to change everything. And this technology is perfect for building a chat bot or automating customer calls and basically creating these next gen voice experiences. But building with these tools is so difficult. It's just a bear. It's going to take your developers months to build and test anything

even basic unless you use VAPI. This is the fastest and easiest way to integrate voice into your products. It's just the most simple API you've ever used. It helps you build. and deploy voice agents in just minutes. And you can create ultra-realistic AI voices and customizable personalities. I like that part, all with real-time response speeds. You know, it would be great. Maybe I just demo it, okay?

Listen to this. Hey, Jason, it's great to be on your podcast. Oh, okay, great. Are you interested in being the co-hosts of the podcast? I mean, I'd love to. Just imagine the banter AI and humans, the ultimate duo. But I think I'll stick to helping out with Bobby for now. All right.

What's up in the startup world today? You know, we have so many things going on in the startup world, including AI. So I'm wondering if you have any tips for founders on how to create great AI experiences. Totally. I mean, first off, keep it simple. Focus on solving real problems or users. Then make sure it feels natural. Good conversation dynamics are key.

Oh, and don't forget to optimize forward speed. Nobody likes waiting for a response. What do you think? That sounds really good to me. Take care and chat soon. Gotta say, these are ready for primetime. And if you want to give it a try and you can see, it works. Now you've got to give VAPIA try, VAPI.AI.

VAPI.AI, use the code, twist 200, T-W-I-S-T-T-W-I-ST to get $200 in free credits. That's over a thousand minutes in calls. Great job to the VAPE team. The ad we showed there was Outlar is looking for talented accounting and tax experts to help train generative AI models and you need a bachelor's degree or hire in agricultural-related subjects, experience working as agricultural professional. They're really, they're not just looking for random freelance writers. They want category experts. People that expertise in very specific niches because, you know, they're going to, they've got so much data they've got to sift through.

They need somebody who's just going to focus on farming, agriculture, you know, like interior department stuff. And then I'm sure there's other people on, you know, know, nutrition and food, like everything a newspaper would report on, you know. It's really fascinating stuff. There's a ton of other people who are doing this Appian data adaptation. Sure. Scale AI, the parent company of Outlier is doing some of this themselves. I also thought that it was interesting. They're looking for people in international languages. They want people to do this in Thai, Dutch, indie, Swedish, Spanish, and French now, too. Funny joke from Cecilia Hack, we can pull up here. Outlier is looking for advanced English

writers to help train AI systems in LLMs. When they offer to pay you to help make your journalism job become obsolete. In some ways, it's true. You know, if you're an accountant and you train this and there's 100 accountants training this and they do a really good job, then maybe the AI will be doing those accounting jobs. Right. Yeah, if they do a good enough job, this can take over the writing of blurbs.

They don't need blurb writers anymore if the AI gets good enough. captions, all that stuff. And then you think about like pilots when I was talking to some of the Jobies of the world and other, you know, uh, Kitty Hawk, which then got subsumed by some other company at the All In Summit last year. One of them said, we're just trying to make the best pilot in the world, the singular best pilot in the world, like Sully. Like airplane pilots?

Yes. Like, you think you're going to fly in a plane that's being flown by a computer? That is what VTOLs, the vertical take off and landing. You first. Well, here's the thing. It turns out actually that already 80, 90% of flying is done on autopilot. Of course. I get that.

Let's say the 20% that isn't is the landing in a lot of cases and the takeoff or whatever. And then when you get up in the air, they press the button. But sometimes they press the button when they're landing. You put it all together. That last 10 or 20% will be figured out by AI and it will be done better. Just like driving and cabs will be better than your average cab driver because humans are fallible. Whether that happens in five years or 15, we can debate, but it's happening. And I think that those wrote jobs, truck driver, pilot, and cab driver will be done better by AI,

certainly 10 times better, because almost every time it's pilot era, it's almost every time, it's a driver error or distracted driver. And you still need to have some experts in the loop to take over. But yeah, it's going to be pretty impressive when we see that happening. Wow. All right. Yeah. I don't know.

I'm going to wait a few other. I'm going to wait a few years before I get into an AI airplane. That's just, that's just taking it. It's going to be a process. You know, if you look at Waymo, Waymo in San Francisco. It's pretty amazing when you take one, but it goes slow. It's jerky at times. It takes weird routes.

You know, it's not forever. I tried my first Waymo the last time I was in Austin a few weeks ago. It was open through the... Amanda and Z and I took a Waymo while we were hanging out. Did somebody have the invite from the Waymo app? It was Amanda, Amanda, your friend Amanda has one. What they're doing in Austin is, I think, because somebody from Waymo invited me as well. I got to click the link.

Yeah, you have to have an... I've never been in one because I didn't have access. So that's the test. And it did it. What was your impression of it? I was very impressed. to work perfectly. At one point, we made sort of a weird, like, three-part right-hand term that was a little

nerve-wracking, but not really. There was at no point that I feel in any danger at all. Another trend that's happening, that's pretty clear, and I tweeted about it today, we'd like to focus on trends, is hot-swappable LLMs. Hot-swappable means you can just, like I was saying, with Biden, they were going to hot-swap Biden, which they did. You could hot-swap hard drives, what that meant is. you could pull a hard drive out of a server,

plug another one in, and the rate array would just balance and redo the backups. And you could hot swap, which means you take it out. The system doesn't stop running. Well, with LLMs, we're going to start seeing hot swapable LLMs, and there was a tweet by Aaron Paris,

Aaron P613. Yeah, from Mac Rumors. He's a Mac Rumors guy. He tweeted this, because, you know, what they do is, it's really interesting. They go into the betas,

and they look at the code somehow. Right. And then they find little breadcrums. One of the breadcrumbs here is that in iOS 18.4, we might see Apple Intelligence instead of just being able to launch a conversation with chat GPT by OpenAI. They could you could pop one open with Gemini. And I think Gemini is a bit better than OpenAI right now. And so this is interesting.

We're looking at down the road somewhere. This is obviously not coming in iOS 18.4 necessarily. but they're laying the groundwork for maybe integrating Gemini along with OpenAI's chat GPT into iOS at some point. 9 to 5 Mac says we're probably going to see Apple Intelligence debut by iOS 18 or 19. Apple has already said they are hoping for the conversational Siri model to be here by iOS 19. Apple demoed its Apple Visual Intelligence suite of products and features back in September, But nonetheless, the company may be giving users more options in terms of AI services. There's some suggesting that maybe perplexity and even other models could get in on this over time.

Barry Schwartz responded to this Aaron Parris comment and suggested maybe rather than it just being Gemini, it could be specifically integrating Google data into Apple intelligence. like, could it be Google shopping results being pulled in, but not necessarily full Gemini integration into iOS? Aaron says no, but did not decline to go further in terms of why that's impossible. Yeah, it's a different product is the answer. I think that this is the next giant search deal and that obviously Android has integrated Gemini on a very deep level. So I specifically bought the Google Pixel 9 fold so I could experience both the fold and experience Gemini integrated into the Android operating system.

In fact, I bought you on, or I asked them to buy you a Pixel 9, so you could experience that as well. It's on its way to me right now. Perfect. Not the fold. I got you the regular one. The fold's a bit much,

and I think it slows you down. I don't need the fold. I'm okay. Well, I'll say I have found it really nice when I'm at a cafe or I'm on a plane. I do find my, myself opening it up and watching a YouTube video. Sure.

Or, uh, which is very nice experience. I got the MacBook Air though. It's so it's, it's, it's almost like a tablet mixed with a laptop. I bring it everywhere. I like having three, four screens with me at all times when I travel. Yeah. So I bring my iPad pro, which is giant.

I bring my MacBook Air. I bring my Google pixel fold and I bring my iPhone. Sure. And I like having the optionality of different ones for different purposes. I also like, you know, since I'm an angel investor in all these companies is being focused on that. But let me pull up my tweet here for a second, and I'll just tell you what I think's going happen here.

Because of hot swappable LLMs, I think Apple will obviously let you choose which one you want to do. They do that now at search, right? You can pick duck, dot, go. You can pick Bing. If you want to go into the settings, you can pick which music app. You launch by default, which Maps app. And, you know, it was a lot of hand-wringing and Justice Department pressure and pressure from other companies causing, you know, Apple to have to, you know, add that. Back in the day, they didn't

allow third-party media players. They got pressured into putting VLC on there. They didn't allow third-party browsers. They got pushed to put opera and Firefox and Chrome on your iOS. And obviously, you know, they don't want to get caught up in banning other music services from iPhones because that would be a bad look. Yeah. So obviously Apple is going to let you pick. When you talk to Siri, I think you'll, in your settings, say, chat GPT, Gemini, GROC, whatever you prefer. But this is going to lead to a commercial deal.

And then chat GPT and Gemini, GROC and everybody flawed, will all bid on it. I think Apple will get at the start at least a billion dollars annually for this. Wow. This is big business. Yeah, yeah.

And I think they'll do like a five-year deal, very similar to what they did with Google search, right? when you do on your phone, and this was really important, and this is tens of billions of dollars a year for Apple and pure profit, that the default is Google. But I think this is going to determine like 10, 20 points of consumer queries to language models. In other words, as great as Chat Chipit's lead is, if they don't get this deal with Apple and Gemini does, then Google's going to have done what they did with search. They locked down Android for half the queries. They locked down an iOS for the other half. So if Android uses Gemini but fault, they're already at like 50% of the queries that

could come from a device. And so the iPhone deal is going to determine who wins the language model wars and the AI query wars in all likelihood. Yeah, I think that makes, I think that makes total sense. And it's interesting how these companies are sort of battling over this same thing in so many different areas. We just saw like Apple and Google are fighting over streaming now and Who does Apple TV get to be on? Get to live on Android devices. So it's just the next front in that ever, ever non-ending war of who's allowed into whose platform and who's walled garden.

All right. If you want to check in on the docket, go to this week in startups.com slash docket. We are making the docket public. If you're using the docket, you can put comments on the docket. The team will see them. We start working on the docket in the morning before the show on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. So you can watch us actually in real time build the docket. This week serves a start at the night before. It's a lot. It's a lot of work.

It's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot of docket. And we get to only about half the stories. I like to have twice as much docket as I need. And then, yeah, that means we can serve up a great show for you. And what you see live is about 125% of the show. In other words, the published show is 80% of the live show. And the docket is 2x, the live show. So there's a lot of content there that we don't get to and you get to have all that content right at your fingertips. Let's go to the next story here. This one is underreported. I think it's important, you know, there's a real problem with these meme coins. And I think the problem is one group of people sees them as collectibles, which is fine if you want to have that interpretation. But how they present, as I talked about on All In on Thursday with Collison brothers, they present a stocks, even if you believe they're collectibles. And there are a certain number of share. There are a certain number of coins. They trade, and they trade in some cases on platforms like Robin Hood, Coinbase, etc. And people

share charts of them, and they have a ticker symbol. So it looks like a duck. It quacks like a duck, but people don't want to believe they're a duck. This is what always gets me about the collectibles thing. I think you're exactly right. When you are a fan of a collectible and you're a collector. It's always about the individual item. You're not looking at, well, here's the Pokemon index for this week. It's about this individual card or this pack, or you're looking for one item that you particularly want. With, you know, funcos are everywhere, but you want that one special funco that's worth so much. And that's not what mean coins are. Mean coins are commodities. They're stock. I want to get a certain percentage of this and invest in it,

hoping that it goes up in value. It's totally different, I think. It is, but I will say that, you know, you can go back and forth on this. If you go to, you know, I've been looking at maybe buying another Corvette. You know, I had a Corvette when you met me. Sure. And let me just show you something here. So I've been going to haggerty.com.

And so, you know, I can look at over time what a 19, I want to buy a 1970 to 1970. These things are incredibly affordable. $30,000, you know, and there's other versions of it, two-door convertible, eight-cylinder, there's engines, whatever. But people do look at over time how much they cost in charts. And I can, you know, if I was paying for the professional thing here. So I don't think, you know, collectibles do have a trading price. Right.

But you're not looking at the daily Corvette market. You want that actual car. It's more than just, it's not purely a financial instrument. Of course, right. Exactly. Yes. And then, so I do believe NFTs, even though they're just digital, you know, there could be one of one. They could be one of a hundred.

Like there's prints. Anyway, wherever this goes, closer to the collectible argument, it's still like you're kind of buying a receipt for the art. There were complexities, but. Yeah. So here's my thinking on this. And here's what I said about Millais's. meme coin. What Malay did was he rug pulled the people who put him in office. The people who voted for

Malay are the ones who got hurt here. And when you think about leadership at its core, you know, the appearance of impropriety is impropriety in my mind. That's the leadership standard that should be here. So even being near this, your sister launching it, your brother launching, whatever it is, the taunting of his own followers, you know, I'm out on Malay right now. This is what he said. The reality is if you go to the casino and lose money, I mean, What is the claim if you knew that it had these characteristics? Leaders own their mistakes. They don't attack the victims.

You take ownership of it. And the way you should judge people, I think, is what they do when they're given a lot of power and what they do when they make mistakes. Millet is a failure on all of those fronts. It's absolutely important. A lot of people say, why we should talk about the Trump coin? Yeah, that comes up to be all in on subreddit often. A lot.

A few times. Let me address this. All in is four people. Right? one of them works directly for Trump. Not. He's the crypto czar, sir. He's the crypto czar.

I, because of my friendship with David Sachs, people will weaponize me to say, even Sax's friends says these things. And obviously it's uncomfortable for him, I'm sure, I don't know, this to have me as a friend because I'm popping off about all kinds of topics. I feel the same way about the Malay coin as I do the Hucktoa coin, as I do the Dave Portnoy coin, as I do about the Trump. the Melania coins. It's all the same to me. It's all a griff. The rules of the road are designed to have the people who host it, do the transactions. They get paid tons of fees on the

transactions, apparently, and the snipers. So I think the games rigged. There's like five or six different ways to rig it. Like every time they, like, there's a lot of new wrinkles or these people figured out, even a different way to skim off the top. This one probably was one of the most egregious. in terms of those respects. And then maybe on the spectrum, the Trump coin was the least egregious because they had like a holding period for the 80% owned by Trump and his family

or this company. So, you know, you can go back and forth on this. People are debating is the Malay coin, the Huktua coin, the Dave Portnoy coin, or whatever he did. And this, and the Trump and the Malay, are they all the same? No, they're obviously different.

I think because these things trade the way they do, that there needs to be some more thoughtfulness about them. And having an accredited investor test, if you want to participate in these things, would be a great way to start because it would create friction. If you want to trade these things, you need to have taken a course. And there's a lot of libertarians who are like, nope, I can tell you how crypto people think. Crypto people think that the people buying these are sheep and pigs, your sheep and pigs

to these crypto people. And they've said this to me. And I've been in conversations with them. They're libertarians. They believe if you're stupid enough to buy these coins, knowing it's an insider game, then you are the sheep going to slaughter.

And that if you try to get really smart about it and you're a whale and, you know, you have made some money on it, they will eventually slaughter you like a pig. And there is actually a term, think it's called pig butchering or something. I believe that is what it is.

Yeah. And so they literally in crypto have a technique of having a woman account go find stupid guys who are getting into crypto, get in their DMs. They then send them to exchanges that aren't real. They tip them off on crypto. People buy the crypto in these pig slaughtering or pig butchering scams. I think pig butchering is the proper term. It's an old term. It refers to any scam where you build a trusting relationship with your victim.

over a long period of time. The idea that you're fattening up the pig. Often in, I mean, we've seen this throughout the history of, you know, long cons or whatever, you use a fake romantic relationship. So you would use a woman to hit on a man over time, get him more and more trusting, willing to put more and more money in. You're fattening up the pig for slaughter, essentially. So you, you know, buy a couple of mean coins, you make a little bit of money, you make $1,000, you make $10,000, you make $25,000, and then, or maybe it's one, two, three, then they get you to put $50,000 into the fourth coin. And then they shut, the website you've been going to this whole time in trading on is a Fugazi, a Fugazi. It's not real. It doesn't exist.

Insert Matthew McCona, he here. And so I think that's what these are. You've seen House of Games that David Mammett movie. It's great. It's Joe Maintaini plays a con artist who teaches this author and psychiatrist, like how to the nature of the business. But he explains in an early scene. It's called a confidence game, not because you put your confidence in the con man. It's because they put their confidence in you. And when people are reciprocal, so when a stranger trusts you and puts their confidence in

you, it prompts you to want to do the same. You trust them. You reciprocate to them. That's how people get scammed. the scammer appears to put themselves out on your behalf. And so you feel like, oh, well, they're, they're helping me out. I got to help them in turn. Yeah.

So be where. That's how I feel about it. So anyway, that leads us to today's story. Tell me what's, I mean, I don't even want to believe this is real. It seems like it's really. It was, I mean, it could be an elaborate hoax, but it would be pretty elaborate. Let's put that disclaimer here. And then I guess we're supposed to do a trigger warning about self-harm.

So if you're somebody who... We won't get into graphic detail. We're not going to get into two graphic detail, but it's a graphic story if you've been impacted by self-harm or people who've committed suicide to and out of the program now. So the disclaimer, we're about to discuss a self-harm related story. So a 23-year-old crypto trader named Mr. FU, he uses the real word, but I'm going to say Mr. FU, apparently shot himself while streaming live on X after he lost a final $500 in a meme coin. pull. His dying request before pulling the trigger was for his fellow traders to start a meme coin in his honor, which some of them did. It's called Mr. Coin. It is available for trade right now. There was at least some debate in the forum after he died about whether or not this would be

ethical to profit off of his suicide. Somebody eventually did it anyway. There's speculation that this was a stunt gone wrong. There seems to be on the blockchain. A developer sent Mr. FU a supply of this meme coin that was named for him before his death. So they seem to be already planning for the aftermath of the shooting before it happened. There have also been speculation that it might have been a Russian roulette type situation because apparently the gun clicked once or twice before the fatal shot was fired. So we're still lots of questions remain. And like I said, maybe these guys are just very, very clever. There's money involved. Maybe this is all a big hoax and we're falling for it. but I don't think so.

It seemed to be a fairly legitimate story from what I could tell. The community reacted with shock horror. People are very upset. We pulled a few tweets here of people who are devastated by what happened. But other people are calling out the community for hypocrisy and being upset. Danny Worldwide tweeted we've seen a million coins that involve deaths and suicides from justice. But when some random dude offs himself on stream and people to make a coin, that's where we draw the line.

Got it. Play the white night. But another anonymous commentary responded, the mean coin industry is pure evil. You know, this is, I think, if this is real, big it. If this is real. Big enough. Put that out there. Yeah.

If this is real, I think what you should take away from it is people losing money who don't have it can put people into a serious sense of despair. and it can cause extreme hardship. So much extreme hardship that they might kill themselves and do something irrational. And this doesn't mean that gambling shouldn't exist in the world, but I can tell you being a somewhat high-stakes poker player, I have played with people who should not be in games.

How do I know they should not be in the game? Because, well, like, I don't know, they're an actor or something, but not like a notable actor who makes 20 million a film, like a TV actor or a reality actor. And I've watched people I know do not have the means to play in certain games, play in certain games, and then lose. And then be put on a payment program,

then, you know, all kinds of hardship. You know, their spouses leave them. Gambling is really dark for 5% of people or less. The last time I went to Vegas, you know, you got a way in line to get your loyalty card. so when you play, they can keep track of how much you're betting. Maybe you'll get a free meal or something. Right by where you wait for that is the room where you can sign up for a line of credit

at the casino. And so when I got there, I'm like, who is? I'm well aware. Who's doing that nobody's doing this? They just have that office there. But just while I was in line, 10 minutes at the Venetian, three or four people must have gone into that office. All right.

I can explain that. A line of credit at the casino. I have a line. But what it is is, it's, not as pernicious as you think. When I go play in like the World Series of poker or like some high stakes game or whatever, I need to send 25K, 50K there. I understand. Because the buyer is 10k. I'm not actually getting a line of credit. I'm doing wires. So that same room is where you wire money in. Right. And they will give you a line of credit at a, you know, whatever, 10% fee or whatever and you can pay

it back. But yes, it is a dark thing that exists. And I think, don't get on credit. No, don't, don't Campbell on credit. Oh, my God. Well, I mean, this is what margin is. On Robin Hood, when you trade, one of the criticisms is people can trade on margins. But you have to have a certain amount of money there, I believe. And so they have become very, we talked to Vlad about it on Wednesday. They become very dialed into this that some people trade stocks, you know, more for entertainment value, just like I play price picks for entertainment value. I love price picks. I love price picks. I do it every Knicks game. I bet $100 to $500.

It's like nothing to me. It's when I buy tickets to the Knicks, you know, I'm spending a couple of thousand dollars on those tickets because I get decent tickets. You know, me putting $100,500 in the game is nothing, but it makes me more engaged in the game because I'm betting on individual players and props and parlays. And I love it.

And it's just fun for me. It makes the game more interactive. It makes me focus. On the Oscars, yeah. Oh, you bet on the Oscars? I mean, it's not a, not, not, I would like to get in on that. Where do you bet on the Oscars?

I've got a bunch of film writers and YouTube guys. We have an Oscar pool. So I'm in on that. Oh, how do I get it on that? I got, I want to do an Oscar pool. I'll email Rob after this. You can be in on our Oscars.

What is it? A Hyundai a person? And you just pick your winning? 20 bucks. I don't want to be involved. I want to be in a $1,000 pool for the Oscars. We're not. We're film writers.

If you want to do a thousand dollar pool for the Oscars, let's set it up. We'll give 10%. That does sound fun. That sounds like a little high. not on credit. Maybe you'll be my sharp. I'll be the money. You be the sharp. We could get in there. Yeah. You should start a, like, a rich guy Oscar pool because I'm pretty good. Yeah, I would like to start a rich guy Oscar pool. I'm pretty good. So, do you want to talk about award season? We could jump into that. Yeah, we'll jump into that. I just wrapping up the midpoint then. Put a cap on this,

yeah. This is what I think will happen in this administration. The last administration too cold on crypto, no regulation, just follow the securities law. That obviously doesn't work because this is a new thing. in the world. We've pointed out endless times that trading cards and stocks, this is, you know, somewhere in between, right? Right. Okay. And then some coins have utility. You use them, you burn them to get

a service online. That's different than a stock or a commodity. Some of them are centralized. Some of them are decentralized. Some of them, there's a controlling party that owns 80% of the coins. I believe like maybe XRP would fall into that category. where it's centrally controlled, Bitcoin not centrally controlled. The problem is our government is composed of 85-year-old people, and they just, they think of crypto as this monolithic thing. There's a thing that was invented called crypto, and we need to figure out what to do about it. But actually, crypto is just this umbrella term for a thousand

different financial instruments and inventions and concept. Correct. You've got NFTs, you've got Dows, you've got meme coins. I feel like every day there's a new, here's a thing that's been built with blockchain that has elements of crypto, but it's not exactly like Bitcoin. And in between the new regulation that Friends of Money and the SEC chair and everybody are working on, that'll be just right. But right now we're in a too hot period. To call with Gary Gensler, too hot with no rules in between these administrations where people think they can run them up. And then eventually I think we'll be just right. And so my best advice is do not participate in this with money you can't afford to lose, you know, keep it to

5% of your net worth, expect to lose it all. So by the way, what I tell people when they're angel investing in startups, I say, if you're angel investing in startups, only invest money that you can afford to lose. And here's a book I wrote about it. It's on the shelf back here. Read the book. It'll explain, you know, the power law. It'll explain diversification.

He'll explain the time horizons called angel. Or you can just read the power law and understand that like, I don't know, 20, of 30 bets, 39 of 40 bets will return no capital. One will return. Hopefully in this portfolio theory called venture capital or angel investing will return the majority of your returns. But let's talk about Oscar season as we get to the end here. I asked you just a quick question because you see everything. I'm assuming you've seen all the major films. I have seen, there is a best picture nominee. I have not seen. I'm still here from Brazil. It's only in theaters. I haven't had a chance to get to a theater to see. I'd really like to see it. Walter

Saulus, the guy who directed Central Station, which is a great, a great Oscar movie from the 90s, it's his new film. Okay. I just want to point out, Timothy Chalameh. I didn't see the Dylan film yet. It was great. I really liked it. Yeah, he does a great, he does a great job. And he's singing, it's all him singing and playing, and he's... And that's not a gimmick, right? That's like, you consider

that performance and, like, you know, add it to the story. It's very impressive the way that he's not it's not just like an impression like he's not just doing a dillon voice he's like evoking Dylan in a way he's channeling him yeah it's really interesting and uh he does he's he's great yeah and if you compare it to ray charles what was uh the ray charles film and he did that it's just called ray with james fox that's the taylor hatcher so i was impressed by that is it similar in that way i think it's very it's similar in that way where it's not like it's not like he's just he's doing like an s nl ray charles it's like

He's really embodying the spirit of Ray Charles in this kind of interesting way where it's a real performance. And Walk the Line would be the other one? Right. James Mangold actually, the same director as this one also directed Walk the Line. Oh, okay. So I enjoyed Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix. Yeah. Doing Johnny Cash.

And interestingly, Boyd-Holdbrook plays Johnny Cash in a complete unknown. So Johnny Cash is a character in the Dillon film. Okay. So we got the whole 1960s, 70s, cinematic universe. But he did a pretty controversial acceptance at whatever award show was yesterday. The SAG Awards were last night. Conclave won best ensemble. Conclave and Enora are sort of duking it out for Best Picture right now.

Most people think it's going to be one of those two. Demi Moore won the Best Actress Award for the Substance and Chalamey won for his portrayal of Dylan. In his speech, he very openly says he wants to be one of the great actors. He says, you know, I know these are subjective awards, but it's very important to me. because I'm in pursuit of greatness and I want to be one of the greats. I would normally be turned off by that, but here is the video. Let's watch the video and then we'll give our comments. I can't downplay the significance of this award because it means the most to me.

And I know we're in a subjective business. But the truth is, I'm really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight. I'm as inspired by Daniel Day Lewis, Marlon Brando and Viola Davis, as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps. And I want to be up there. So I'm deeply grateful to that. This doesn't signify that, but it's a little more fuel. It's a little more ammo to keep going.

Thank you so much. I think he's like still stuck in his Dillon impersonation. It's a little bit like a little bit like Elvis. I just want to say I'm very in pursuit of excellence. And I know that this is a subjective thing. Yeah, a little bit like Oscar Butler, how he couldn't kick. the Elvis voice for a little while. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's fine with him. Sometimes I get stuck in an impersonation. I get stuck in my Jordan Peterson now all the time. When I'm at dinner, I do Jordan Peterson with people. Santa Canis, too. It was a hard one to drop. Oh, Santa Canis.

I had a hard time getting out of that one. But my Jordan Peterson, it's just, you know, these young men, who's looking out for them? I just do Kermit. You know, it's, you know, when you've got high hole, when you're looking out for Wednesday. Someday will find it. The rainbow connection.

It's like somewhere between Permanet. It's a little bit like this permit. Let's get back on track. 29 years old, Timmie's the youngest lead actor winner ever at the Sack Award. Who's going to win Best Picture? You know, I have my Oscar ballot here. I went with Anora,

but I think it could also be conclave. I'm very... A Nora is about... It's a Sean Baker film. The guy did the Florida Prize. Project, panjurine, Red Rocket.

This is his newest one. It is about... Very indie director is what we're saying. And it's, it's Mikey Madison, who you saw on

once upon a time in Hollywood. She's in the new Scream movie, a screen five, I believe. She plays a sort of a stripper escort.

She meets this the son of a very wealthy Russian oligarch who's in America, spending money, doing drugs, partying.

And this guy basically hires her to be his, you know, girlfriend for the week, they go to Vegas, they're having so much fun, they get married while they're together. Oh. The Mikey Madison, the stripper, she believes

this is her golden ticket. She's arrived. Her future is set. But this guy's parents are like, you're not getting married. We're getting this annulled. So it becomes this kind of uncut gems thriller. Wow. I love uncut gems, man. The oligarchs enforcers are trying to

force them to get divorced. Mikey Madison is like, F you, we're going to go live our lives and be happy and it becomes very chaotic. But it's also funny and it's sort of, I saw my friend Megan Kelly, MK Ultra, as I call her, uh, or she's on her pod. She was like, this is it, this is a porient, uh, Christianity, blah, blah, blah. Oh, Concliffe. Conclave is, uh, we're, we may see the real life version happening any day now. It is basically a movie opens the Pope. dies. Ray Fine plays the dean of Cardinals who has to call all the Cardinals together. It's about if you follow the process of voting for the new Pope, but they make it into a sort of a noirey detective thing where all of the candidates to be the next Pope, there's

a scandal, there's a problem, there's a mystery, there's something they're hiding. And so Ray Fines has to use this conclave to like dig into the truth and figure out what's going on with all these cardinals before they vote on the new Pope. All right, everybody. We will see you on Wednesday. This week at startups.com slash docket YouTube.com. Go search for this week. Startups.

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We will see you all. next time. Bye-bye.