This Week in Startups - HuggingFace Buys Pollen Robotics, DHH & Bezos Founder Advice & a JCal Origin Story | E2111

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Today’s show: In this episode, Jason, Alex, and Lon dive into Blue Origin’s all-female celeb spaceflight (yes, Katy Perry sang on reentry), Hugging Face’s unexpected move into robotics, and Jack Dorsey’s wild take that we should “delete all IP law.” Plus, they break down Figure AI’s eye-popping $39B valuation, the risks of SPVs, and what founders and investors can learn from the SPAC boom. As Jason puts it: “You just have to assume an 80% failure rate.”*Timestamps:(0:00) Jason kicks off the show!(1:34) Blue Origin all-female crew launch and space tourism(7:17) Emerging technologies and tech adoption trends(10:07) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(12:38) Hugging Face acquires Pollen Robotics; Open AI and robotics debate(19:42) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(20:42) Significance of Hugging Face in generative AI; Jack Dorsey's IP law stance(25:01) U.S. high-tech job market; revisiting IP law discussions(30:03) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(31:03) IP law and American innovation(32:22) Challenges in startup exits and secondary trading platforms(37:09) Figure AI's valuation controversy(46:37) Startup insights and investing perspectives(50:39) Jeff Bezos on risk assessment(57:03) Jason’s personal journey and reflections(1:02:06) Developing a samurai mindset; societal systems abstraction*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/lons*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(10:07) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(19:42) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(30:03) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twistGreat TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow 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

Out of these specs, there will be a FedEx, an Amazon. There'll be some great company that comes out of this. You just have to assume an 80% failure rate. Now, when I say 80% failure rate, I mean a zero. Yeah. Lose all your money. Space tourism, when I saw that one come up, I was like, that's a hell merry. If you're betting on that, you should expect it to be one in 250.

Now, if you're betting on Jobi, I would take it from one in 250 down to one in 50. And that's just what I do for a living is to make these assessments. It's taken me a lot of pain and suffering to get that skill. Right, yeah. Man, there are so many companies. A lot of lessons learned along the way. There are so many companies, Lon, that I thought we're going to do so much better. That went to zero.

And there are so many that beat my estimations unbelievably that I would have put behind those other companies, man. There's so much randomness in this. And the randomness is really the founding team. This Weekend Startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites they've got you covered.

Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwestredagent.com slash Twist today. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, choose offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. and Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers.

Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twists. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this weekend startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me again, Alex Trebek calling in from Jeopardy. Now, Alex, Alex, he's X.com slash Alex. He's in Providence, Rhode Island.

We're here in the great state of Texas and Austin with Lon Harris in our studio. Hey, hey. Shout out to my friends at Capitol Factory for hosting us here. Yeah, shout up. Let's get to the process. program. What's in the news here, Lon, Alex? I do want to start us up by talking about this Blue Origin rocket launch. They sent six women into space.

Oh, it's all six women. All the entire crew of women. This is the first all female crew to go to space since 1963. The Soviet sent a cosmonaut up Valentina Erishova. In 1963, she went into orbit. This is a great move by, I tell you, this is a power move by Bezos because there are very few female astronauts. And there's always been this controversy, like, who goes on. Yes. And so basically what you're telling me is all these female NASA astronauts who haven't been able to go up have gotten up. Oh, these were not NASA astronauts.

These were, it was Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos's lovely bride. Fiancee. Fiance. It was like a wedding present. Oh, oh, I see. Okay. So she went up with five astronauts. She went up and she had five of her lady friends.

Aisha Boe, who is a scientist. Amanda Wynn, who is also a Nobel Prize, a Nobel Peaceworthy. prox nominee and a scientist. This is great. Journalist and Oprah friend Gail King. Okay. Film producer, Terry Ann Flynn, and pop star Katie Perry. Okay. Katie Perry.

Yeah. All right. This image went viral of Gail King just before this is when they were walking on to the spacecraft. And Gail King, she's got a little trepidation. People thought maybe she had agreed when this was an abstract, like, hey, you want to go to space? She looks terrified.

Yeah. And then when they were walking onto the space shuttle, she's having second thoughts. And then the moment they got that. Is that Katie Perry vomiting? No, the moment they got back, this is right when the spacecraft landed, Katie Perry kissed the ground. Yes. Okay. Once again, Katie Perry making herself the center of attention. Of course.

Oh, even more, Gail King let us know that as they were attempting reentry, Katie Perry treated them all to a little song. The best part was to when we got back in our seats after Zero G's, Katie said, what a wonderful world. She did. That nice? Oh, my God. What a wonderful world. I see dreams.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. You're in a spacecraft, you can't get away. It's a command performance. You can't escape. Wow. I can't think of anything worse. Just let us enjoy the moment. Get out to space.

We're looking at Earth, the majesty of the cosmos all around you, and Katie Perry's got to be like, hang on. I need to make this moment better. I mean, wow. I just want to shout out Orlando Bloom. Now we all know what this poor man has to go through. I mean, she's just. breaks out in Zog and ruins the flight. I don't know that ruined, but I feel like I would have wanted to just appreciate the majesty,

the grandeur of being in space. All right. I'm going to defend Katie Perry here. She's a singer. What did you think she was going to do on the way down? Juggle? I'm just literally trolling. I mean, you could have just did, yeah, let everybody enjoy.

It's such a lot. It's not just to Katie Perry specifically. Anybody. This has ruined it for me. Now I don't want to go to space. Okay. I will take your. seat. A friend of mine and I are going to go up at some point when he's ready to go up.

We have a group of four of us that are going to do something similar to this. Yeah, I feel like that's spitting in the face of our lord. There's no oxygen up there. Like, that's not. It's an inhospitable place for... All right. Well, here's the thing of the Blue Origin approach. And listen, amazing job to Bezos of getting this stuff going. I mean, yeah, they're doing it. They got to space. They came back. everybody's safe and alive at work. Number one, there's something about his rocket. A little...

What a great moment for feminism this was. There's a lot going on here. I'll just leave it at that because that rocket, kind of feel like the design of the rocket is a little bit trolling. Oh, it couldn't look more wang-like. There's nothing you could do to make it look more like a wang. No, it is literally designed to evoke a certain, yes. A pallic image.

I mean, rockets inherently look like penises, and then this one is designed to just look like a circumcised penis. Yeah. If people are curious, this is a new Shepard rocket. I think this is the 11th crude flight from Blue Origins. They've been doing this quite a lot. This is not, by the way, the new Glenn, which is their big, take, you know, cargo to space rocket. This is their, like, space tourism rocket. So just data points.

I'll just give some credit where credit is due. Absolutely fantastic that we now have a second, you know, really, super. super viable, it seems. I mean, they're a decade behind, but it's viable. It's nowhere near what SpaceX is doing, obviously, but maybe they're 10% of the way there. It's just kind of interesting, too, that it's sort of a different framing marketing approach. Like, SpaceX is so focused on transported. We're going to deliver satellites. We're making deliveries to the international space stations. Argo. Cost per kilo is what they're going. Right. And Blue Origin, they're leaning much more into these space tourism. Like, we're taking celebrities up and we're having these

incredible experiences. And I feel like they're kind of branding themselves differently. Yeah. It was like the Virgin, Virgin Space, which doesn't seem to have made it. Right. Galactic. Virgin Galactic. It doesn't seem to have made it. But, you know, this is entrepreneurship. This is capitalism. Some companies work, some don't. This is great because we've been talking on this program for 14 years about things like VTOLs, flying cars, right? Sure. We've been talking about space tourism. We've been talking about self-driving cars, Waymo, FSD, the DARPA project. We talk about a lot of these things and that they're coming, drone delivery of food and brewers.

It feels like in the last couple of months, a lot of the stuff that was supposedly coming in the next 10 years is actually starting to land. Yeah, absolutely. Gil King is not getting on a rocket. She's a pragmatist. No way she's going up first. No, I feel like she feels like me where it's like, we're really like, why am I testing testing the odds? here. You're the laggards laggard on this. I, yeah, I do. She's a laggard, too.

I mean, I'm sure it'd be great once you're up there. Pull up the early adopter curve. There's a curve that, you know, people in the audience should know if they're founders. And it basically goes, you know, you have the laggards on one side. You have the early adopters on the other. This is like Clayton Christensen, like, you know, classic way of looking at the adoption curve of new technologies. You have early adopters. You have the vanguard all the way out there, standard deviation. And so when you look at this, you got the innovators, right?

It's 2.5% of people. Now, these are astronauts, are innovators, right? They're the ones who will come up. They have early adopters. Early adopters will be, you know, right after them, you know, these crazy people who will pay $50 million to go on one of these things. Sure. And then you have the early majority, the late majority in the laggards.

What we're seeing here is the early majority is doing spaceflight now. These are not early adopters. This early majority kind of behavior. Mainstream kinds of people. Yes. And so the equivalent here would be. when you looked at the Tesla rollout, innovators were the ones who bought the Roadster. Early adopters bought the model S.

The early majority bought the model X. The late majority bought the model three and Y, and the laggards still haven't bought electric cars. Or maybe they're buying other brands of electric cars or hybrids, right? Like a Prius or whatever. Plug-in hybrid might be the Rivian folks, yeah. The Rivian folks would be actually, that's correct. Yes, they would be like the late majority, I would say. And it's really important to look at that group.

Now, when we look at this and we talk about self-driving in Waymo's. Right now, Waymos is in the early adopters race. We're not even to the early majority. We only have probably low hundreds of thousands of people who've ever used a Waymo. Right. And my mom was in town this weekend. Uber offered to send her a Waymo to bring her to Uchi the other night. She said, no, no, no.

No, Bueno. Not for mom. She picked Rafael the Uber driver instead. Right. And she's the late majority. Yeah. She might be a laggard. I mean, she will get there.

So then she's a laggard. Yeah, on her second or third trip to Austin, I guarantee we'll get her in a waymo. So this is this, you know, standard innovation adoption lifecycle. If you look at that drone delivery, we're really in the innovators and early adopters. Right. We're just going into the early adopters race. Founders, if you're serious about raising money, you need to set up your business the right way. Tight is right.

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fast, private, and compliant. Go to Northwest Registered Agent.com slash twist today. There's all kinds of different challenges along that curve. You don't have to convince Robert Scobel's name was invoked on the last episode. Yes, it was.

Robert Scobel literally would jump on the hood of a Tesla as an early innovator. Oh, sure. Literally, if I was driving my roadster, he literally would jump on and grab the fender to be part of that. He's literally, like, if you had a pill, that could increase your IQ.

And I was like, yeah, we haven't tested it yet. He's the guy who would just take, too. Like, all right, it's tested now. He's that like Jack Black of, he's the Jack Black of the tech industry in a way where he'll chis. But in the most flattering way. I mean, in the most flattering way. I'm not describing his body type or anything.

Just a lesser making a visual. I want to start with a couple of quick things. First of all, Hugging Face, everyone's favorite online repository for AI models and compute has bought April. robotics company, which immediately struck me as kind of confusing because why would a startup by that does, you know, AI model hosting by a robotics company. But the company in question is called Paulin Robotics. It's a French robotics company and they're working on open source robotic technology using AI. So I think the just here, Jason, is that Hugging Face wants to go from just

being the AI, you know, hub and source for the digital world and also become the same thing in the physical world. And I think that's freaking genius. It's a great idea. This company is doing real world robotics. Do you know what format are they? So this is Reachy too. And for folks on the audio version, it's a very basic robot with two effectuators, which are the little hands. And the gist here is open source research, robotics and AI. This is not trying to replace a human right now in a manufacturing facility, Jason. But it is a humanoid robot. It doesn't have leg jet. It's got arms. You know, what's great about this is if the models can have human behavior open source into them, the entire industry is not going to be owned by one person and it's going to move faster.

And what AI needs is open source. When a company is in the lead, they are closed. So, chat GPT and Open AI closed everything. They realized they had a fantastic lead. That's as cynical as it gets. You're committed to being OpenAI and then you close everything down because you can make money. Right.

that is the most cynical thing you can do. It's basically like completely dishonest to make that flip. And the actual point of open AI was AI is so important that everybody should own it. I actually agree with that. It levels the playing field so every person has access to it. Now, when you open the playing field and everybody has access to a technology, that means the business opportunity and the global opportunity is spread equally. If you want to make a competitor to WordPress, you can get WordPress.com,

my friend Matt Mullenweg, and you can pay them to host your WordPress blog. Sure. You can pay WP Engine, and then there was this other one that I've read the ad for. All of those put pressure on WordPress.com. They've had a big back and forth with WP Engine, but anybody can use WordPress. It's awesome. Then you look at what's happening in the AI space. Zuckerberg was so far behind.

He said, Alex, hey, the great thing to do is let's open source everything we do. That's called Lama. Hugging Face is a collection of all those open source products. Right. Put into one place, a repository, and you can then pop things up. But what's missing is a company like Tesla that's very far ahead. A company that Waymo is very hard ahead self-driving. Are they open or closed? Close. Close. Of course, because they're ahead. This is what you need to know as an entrepreneur. If you're ahead, do not open anything up because all you're going to do is lose fast. Right. If you're behind, open up somebody else's closed. That's what's hugging

face is doing. And by the way, Invidia, Alex, you covered an announcement from Individa. V-Vidia, NVIDIA announced Jensen at his last keynote that he was going to do an open source and build into the models directly, self-driving technology. So now, for every action, there is an equal reaction. You have proprietary language models. That's OpenAI, and I believe Claude and Brock are all closed. And they're the top three and Gemini's closed. Those are your top four.

And now we have on the other side, Lama and Deep Sea, open source. Then we look at self-driving. You have Waymo closed. You have Tesla closed, as they should. I'm not making any judgment here. I'm a pragmatist. And an investor, I'm a capitalist. And on the other side, now you have self-driving by Nvidia, and you have this real-world robot for figure AI.

To every action, there's a counter-reaction. And that is how the game is played. I advised, as did Bill Gurley, Uber, to, and I am advising them again. This is a message to Dara. Whatever you do, the number one focus of Uber right now should be to be support, open source, self-driving. Why? Why do I, as the shareholder in Uber still to this day, why am I such a proponent of

Nvidia open sourcing what they're doing and this open source movement with Hubbing Face? and why do I think Uber should back all open source? Why would I do that? Because they're behind. They don't have any bets. They are putting anybody into Uber's network. So they have Waymo, they have We Ride, they've got a bunch of folks. But if open source technology was used for self-driving, think about how many lives would be saved.

I mean, you will hold this technology forward quicker because then anybody who wants to start an open source company, just like WP Engine, and other people want to use WordPress and just start a competitor. What that does is it makes everybody lower prices and move faster because it's competition. Self-driving, open-source project would absolutely crush. Well, it makes the most sense.

Self-driving is one of those projects that makes so much sense for open source because it's so much about the data that you're collecting from all these cars on the road. Like, if all these companies, we're sharing everything they're learning every time they go on these rides, we're going to get where we want to go much more quickly.

More of this is what I'll say. I think on Friday we covered those little robots that drive around delivering burritos. Sure. Power move from one of those companies, open source it. Yeah, Coco and Seamo, I think they're called.

Coco and service robotics, Jason. Oh, my gosh. Serve robotics. There we go. Serve robotics. Samo is the name of the little guy. Surve robotics is ahead. Somebody should make a version of that

where all the parts are hardware open source. Actually, this is what Doordash and Uberi should do. They should make a hardware project that's open source for those where you just publish all the specs. and let anybody make them. And then you open source the software layer

and you open source the data layer. So when you run those robots around Los Angeles, you just publish the data. Just open source publish world data. There's a project called OpenMap, I think. That's the open source mapping project. That was created by Goala, 4Square, and a bunch of other people.

Open Street Map. Open Street Map. Because people were fearing the dependency on Google Maps, And then Apple Maps came out, so they have two competitors, and then openstreetmap.org is where you can see an open source project. The next thing that should happen is open street map plus these little delivery robots, plus Nvidia self-driving. They should all get together and map out the world with LIDAR and make it free for humanity. Now, that could be a bummer for Waymo.

Bummer for Tesla. Yeah, maybe. But only on the margins, because they have other things that make them defensible, the hardware stack, etc. And all it will do is move everybody up the stack to work on harder problems, as opposed to keeping all your data for yourself. Exactly. All right, founders, let's talk about your website, huh? It might be a little bit of a sensitive subject.

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Go ahead, squarespace.com slash twist to get 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. That's Squarespace.com slash twist. The one other thing I would say about Hugging Face that makes this a really interesting thing for me is when I was working on, like when I was first trying out stable diffusion, like during that first wave when everybody was really excited about generative AI and I wanted to try it out. Hugging Face is so essential because that would be where all the little things you want to add. It's like a GitHub for working on those kinds of models where anytime you wanted to add like a studio jubly filter or any other like make me look like a Barbie doll, any of those, you had to download a new model or a new tweak a Laura, they call it, from Hugging Face. So it's very integrated into the process. So I think that's what they want to do.

If you were working on a robotics project, it would be the same thing. Like all the little things, all the little coded details that you wanted to add to your project, you would integrate Huging Face into your. workflow. One thing I want to bring up before we get too far into the show today is a bit of controversy over the weekend. I don't know where you kind of stand on this one, but Jack, Jack Dorsey, formerly of Twitter, formerly of Square, now Block and X. He had a tweet that says he thinks we should delete all IP law. And I'm not exaggerating here. His tweet just reads, delete all IP law. And some people came out vociferously against this. Some people were very much in favor. Hot topic. My dad has a couple of patents. And I don't know, we've talked a lot here about the importance of copyright.

Is Jack having a moment? Or is this something that's a bit more of a normal view in technology than I was thinking? I saw the tweet. I haven't had a chance to respond because I was literally dealing with the fallout from the all-in episode on Thursday, which was the record all-in of all-time. I mean, hit number four in the rankings. We had Larry Summers on, Ezra Klein on. Sacks came back to do a full episode. And it was wild. Before you go on, I want to say, Reddit gives me one of the all-in subreddits, just

shows it to me. And you got shout-outs for your moderation skills during that episode in particular. I just wanted you to know that. Oh, I appreciate that. I have gotten more feedback by my moderation of that episode than the top five moderation jobs I've ever did. No, Sacks was like, why am I not allowed to speak? And I wasn't interrupting him.

Larry Summers interrupted him multiple times and wouldn't let him speak which is new for Sacks to experience because usually people played sacks as the one

who's interrupting folks and so I was trying to defer to the guest Larry Summers a big guess this felt in particular like I feel like this is actual history

like in 30 years when people are talking about this moment the tariff moment and the reaction to it because you had this very notable economics expert going head to head against a member of the White House team that is actually

doing it, instituting this policy where it's a rare thing to see. It doesn't exist in the world. It's a very weird thing. I think this was my, it was like a Frost Nixon moment, wasn't it? Well, there, there is that moment where Ezra. If the president doesn't have to try. There is that moment where Ezra sort of directly challenges Sacks and is saying, like, what what is the actual goal in real metrics that are measurable that we can all look at.

And Sachs wouldn't give it to him. Hedges a bit. And then Chamoff kind of tries to step in and save it. And that to me, it's like, well, that's very notable. Like, that's a, it's a memorable. And the notable thing about that is I had said multiple times on the episode, hey, listen, we all know we have to bring back chips. We have to bring back, you know, ships and weapons.

We talked to Alex, you and I talked about that on a previous episode, how many ships here. And so, you know, what Chamath described is exactly. exactly what the Democrats tried to do in the last. Yeah, it was mostly the Biden policy. It is, no, it is the Biden policy. So you got to give credit there. What Chumot described is what we all agree on and what Biden tried to do with the Chips Act. Right.

And onshoreing, I think, chips, rare earths, you know, and, you know, some of those. Yeah. And pharmaceuticals. Putting that aside, at the end, I felt like we had some, I tried to bring it back to have a little consensus. You know, there are two other metrics we could look at that I added, which is GDP. Yeah. And the number of jobs that work in high tech. So Alex, there's a little homework assignment for Wednesday.

I'd like you to share with the audience how many open jobs there are for high tech factory work and how many unemployed people there are who are capable of taking that and just a general exploration of how many people in America are qualified to do high tech chip manufacturing and what degree and or skills do you need to do that? Because my understanding is to work in a high-tech factory, we have so few people who know how to do that in America today that Invidia, I'm sorry, a TSMC when they built their fab here, they had to bring people from Taiwan.

Because there weren't any people here. Really? I want to try to put some numbers on this and some understanding. What is the reality? Yeah. If we do want to have 100,000 people working in chip thabs here and doing high-tech chip manufacturing or putting phones together here or routers,

what degree do they need to have? What level of precision do they need to have? My understanding is there's like two pieces here. There's like physical dexterity to build some of this. Because it's so small. You're working on something. Yeah, yeah. So there's a physical dexterity, but also there is some knowledge that you need to have as well.

So it's a very hard one for me to understand. Yeah. Well, it seems like it's probably there's got to be different tiers too. I mean, it's a huge team in a big factory. I'm sure some of the jobs are more specialized than others. Okay. So back to the IP recap. I didn't get to do the IP recap.

Alex, because I was literally had so many people complaining and congratulating me over the weekend. So back to IP. Jack's a friend. He's awesome. I don't know what part of IP he was talking about here is the challenge. So let's break it down. Did he say anything in the follow-up tweets? In follow-ups, it looked like it was about AI.

Like, the only way we are going to compete with the Chinese is if we get over this obsession with copyright and IP. Yeah, okay. That's what I thought. That seems to be where he was coming from to me. It is. When you are a billionaire and you've made all your money in software and building software and you're in the technology industry, you very quickly lose any respect for if you had any to start with. Right.

Yeah. For artists. In Silicon Valley, people think artists are to be used because artists are so dumb that they've built all these platforms. The platforms aggregate all the value. And YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, laugh. at how stupid artists are for letting them build trillion dollar, $100 billion, $10 billion franchises off the backs of content creators. Content creators are dumb.

And content creators need to show these platforms exactly that they're not them. And what they should do is get together, Mr. Beast, I don't know, Charlie X, X, X, I don't know who the biggest. Colin and Smiri. Well, they're not huge. I'm saying the ones who actually drive. All the TikTok influencers. The top 25 TikTok influencers and Mr.

Beast and 25 other people should leave those platforms. Now that content is, now that software is so easy to build with AI, they should stick it to them. Leave those platforms and premiere their stuff on their own platform. That gives 100% of revenue or 95% of revenue. It's tough, though. I mean, there have been, there have been groups that have tried to do this. Number one. The Try Guys was a sort of an infamous example.

They built up a huge audience on YouTube. You know, the Try Guys, they were on BuzzFeed originally. It was just, they'll go out and try any crazy things. It can't work with one person. It has to be a sorority of the top ten. Yeah. Dropout. The college humor guys went and built their own subscription platform. Dropout does okay.

Okay. Yeah, I think you need to mix in a record label, too, because that way you can get all the music off if you do. So I feel like right now, the reporting circle between music comes out, YouTube ranks of views and revenue kind of goes back in the music industry is a hard thing to break. But I think that would be clutch. So creators, some artists, a record label or two, you could do it.

There's a very simple way to do it, which is, hey, we're going to put 50% of our content on the platform we own, we'll keep 50% on the existing platform. And every time, we'll say, watch the follow-up or the behind-the-scenes at this new place. And if, you know, there was a consortium that did that, you could actually teach a lesson to the technology. I'm not singling at Jack here. This is like pervasive. Zuckerberg would be the bigger version of this. But Jack himself owns title and he's friends with Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar. Go ask Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z if they think that somebody should be able to take their music and put it for free on the internet, right? And then what that would do to the

culture if those people couldn't make money. And then, you know, I saw Elon retweeted it. Elon, in fairness, has exposed all of the IP, all the patents for self, not self-driving, for a lot of Tesla's patents. But as we just said in the earlier segment, I don't think the self-driving stuff is open source. Right. So people, again, are speaking out of both sides of their mouth. Jack owns title, right? It's still owned by where I believe. Block, yeah. By block. Okay, if he feels that way, then go to Jay-Z and go to Kendrick Lamar and ask them if they're cool with all their IP being free. Right. Okay, founders, let's keep it a buck. Finding the right developers is tough, it's hard, especially when you're trying to

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That's the nature of IP. Artists need to be protected. If China doesn't protect IP, I don't like what Sam Altman and Jack and other people are doing here. I think it's dirty. I think it's a really dirty move to say, because the Chinese are thieves, that we're not going to be able to compete.

and we as Americans should hold a higher standard. Right. And I believe this in IP. I believe it in due process. I believe it in many different spaces. You don't get to take the low standard China has for IP or the low standard that El Salvador has for human rights and due process. And then apply to America and say, and point to those bad actors and say, that's what we should do. Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital says Jack may be smart.

This is his stupidest take ever. And I just want to say that other VCs, Jason, are on your side here. But like I said, I don't understand his intent here exactly, right? And so I have to talk to him first before I actually understand. Sometimes people make tweets and they're, you know, they do have a point like, right? He has a choice here. If he truly believes this, Jack has enough money to go buy Jay Z's catalog. Right.

Go buy Jay Z's catalog and open source and give it as a gift for free to the world and let anybody sample it and use it however they want. Yeah, he doesn't want to do that. Okay. Let's move on to the next story. All right. One thing we've been talking about on this show a lot is lack of exits. Jason, in the first quarter of this year, we saw some IPOs, we saw some MNA activity.

It was going great. Yeah, it's going great. Things have changed a little bit in the last couple weeks. All right. So there's a group called Sutter. They're a secondary trading platform, Jason, and they released their Q1 report showing the most in-demand secondary companies. And I wanted to show this to everybody because there's a bunch of Twist 500 companies on here.

But also, I think it's an interesting look at what VCs are trying to score. scoop from the secondary markets, which is a key place for liquidity these days. Now, at the top of this list, there's some names you kind of expected, SpaceX, Anderol, Anthropic. But then there are some surprises. XAI ranked higher than I expected it was going to, given its youth, figure AI, the humanoid robotics company Jason, Glock with a Q is on there. Open AI ranks under Stripe with sixth and seventh place. I thought this was a fascinating list. Anthropic is at 61 billion. Is that the share price or is that the market cap? I see, SpaceX 3.

That's market cap. Last public round, yeah. That's private round that we know of the valuation publicly. Got it. Okay. Ev, expected value? Last round, expected value, I think, is what

that should mean by EV there. Yes. So there are tons of these secondary markets. It's kind of like a little bit of gray. There's some weird stuff going on here. And so if we were to look at this, Andrew at $28 billion, SpaceX at $350 and figure at $39 billion.

Figure at $39 billion does not make a lot of sense to me. That's a pre-revenue company. right? Yeah. So that's the one that stands out. I mean, XAI does have some revenue and it owns Twitter,

so it has billions of revenue there. So that makes sense. Defense tech, they have billions in revenue, Andrew. I mean, SpaceX has billions. Stripe has billions.

Open AI has 10 billion. Rock is crushing it. So when I look at these, the only out of the top 10 that stands out to me here as maybe you would debate is figure AI. Just so you know how these are driven,

Secondary markets here are driven not by venture capitalist, but by high net worth individuals. Right. And so if you're a high net worth individual, I can go on these and they get pitched on them all the time, and I can buy these pay massive fees, like typically maybe 5 to 10% to buy them, and then a 20% carry or a 10% carry,

or you may just buy them without carry. And when I go buy a million dollars worth of Andrel, you know, and I own about $7 million worth of Andrew right now. I'm joking. That's my guy, Bobmer, lucky. If you were to go buy a million dollars worth of Vangel on this, you're going to pay like $150,000 or $100,000 in fees to get in there. So it's a bit of a racket.

A lot of founders don't like this, and they don't like that these markets are doing this because it just creates a bit of chaos for them. How much of this do you think, because like you said, these are not, this is not VC-driven, this is just individuals who have the money to throw around. How much of these do you think is driven rather than based on the fundamentals of the companies by their notoriety and prominence in the culture. Because I can't help but notice a lot of the companies near the top of the list, they're brands that are recognizable in the world. Your stripes, your open AIs, your bike dances, your neuralinks, they're all famous

company. I would say the Panache, the patina, the branding is but 20% of this. It is playing a factor, but a lot of this is cause in correlation. So the reason some of these are famous, like SpaceX and Stripe is because they've been private for so long. Both of those have been private for well over 10 years now. Those two companies have been private for a long time, which means they have a large number of shareholders. They've got a large number of shareholders because they have so many employees. Employees vast over four years typically.

If a company like Stripe is 12 years old, you might have an employee who has had three different grants, a four-year grant, a four-year grant, a four-year grant, a four-year grant. Maybe they've had, if it's a really high-performer, employee, maybe they have four grants where they overlap. Somebody told me when InVidia was private, that, like, Jensen would just drop extra shares on people. He had, like, a pool of shares that he had, like, Godpower on. He didn't have to go to the board or anything. He would just be like, you did a great job. Boom, I'm doubling your shares. And he wouldn't even do it. He'd have

somebody go do it for him. So he was just, like, dropping these kind of things on people. But there's many, many sellers in these companies because they've been private for so long. A company like Figure AI, they raised this round. And I think Rulov did a tweet about how SPVs were ruining the industry because there were no lead investors. I think this is kind of a sub-tweet. I haven't spoken to Roloff about it. I'm obviously friends with Ruloff. Ruloff, when he said this, at the same time, I was getting pitched on Figure A.I.

At 30, 40 billion. And here's the tweet. We remain destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. SPVs are making a comeback where the lead investor speaks for less than 10% of of the capital, yet eagerly lines up the latest set of tourist chumps. We think the story will end differently this time. It's only been three years head exploding emoji. I think he's talking about figure AI here.

At the same time, he made this tweet, people, I understand, were trying to lead figure AI's round at a reasonable valuation, say $10 billion. And listen, this is no shade at the founder of and the team over a figure AI. They should go for the greatest, you know, valuation they can get, as is their right? That's a marketplace. However, it is a pre-revenue company. when free revenue companies that have serious competitors are raising at a very high valuation,

that is going to get the knives out, and it's going to get more than the knives, actually. You will get a little haters on the margins. The microscopes come out. And the microscopes today are not the microscopes of yesteryear. It's not a spyglass. This is one of those scientific microscopes, like, you know, at Stanford that really get in there.

And then you're going to start getting the real colonoscopy going on here. They're going to really examine this company and say, if this company's rent $39 billion, it's pre-revenue, what are the details of this? And they're going to start getting very granular into justifying that. And, you know, the VCs could be a little upset that some person they consider a knucklehead offers them $40 billion when, you know, let's say Sequoia or Injason Harowitz had offered to fund this thing at $20 billion. And they really were going to give them credit.

Like, okay, you have zero revenue. In my understanding, somebody fact checked me, please, that I heard they were pre-revenue. Maybe the BM, I think they had a BMW deal. I have context on that, Jason. Let me show that really quick. Yeah, please fill me in, so I make sure I get my notes correct. So this is from a story about the $40 billion valuation round that you're referring to and how it's coming together. There's mentioning this piece about SPV, people getting it in for as little as 100K.

And essentially what appears to be from what I can tell, hunt for capital at that price. But the thing that I wanted to highlight is details are a little bit vague and the company likes to talk. So quoting this Wall Street Journal post. And in March 31 post where he shared a video of the slender human working on assembly tasks for BMW, the CEO wrote, this isn't a test, this is what autonomous robots

in production operations look like. Later, a BMW spokesman said that the automaker had three of the robots at its facility for a technical evaluation. So to me, there does seem to be a little bit of a disconnect between promise and reality. He's getting a little ahead of his skis,

and that makes this entire thing to me a little sketchy, although I will say, it's a twist 500 company, so I don't want to be... Listen, there's no doubt it's a great company. It's no doubt that they are one of the top 10 robotics companies, I think, probably pursuing the space and they've cashed up. Here's the challenge.

We've talked about this countless time. If you oversell something while selling shares, shout out to Nicola, people can consider that to be securities fraud. Right. Now, the distance between the two statements you just read us, I will give my judgment. This will be an official judgment. I need to hear the first statement again from the CEO. And I will tell you if this is securities fraud or no. The CEO adcock wrote, quote, this isn't a test.

This is what autonomous robots in production operations look like. Turn the music up, exclamation point. Okay. This isn't a test. And BMW said, BMW spokesman said on April 1, the automaker had three of the robots at its facility for technical evaluation. Quote, only one is used at a time,

but the robot has practiced picking up and grasping parts during non-production hours in our body shop, the spokesman said. The following week, the BNW spokesman said that he had received an update from colleagues at the plant and that there were now

more than three robots on site. He said they were being used in non-production and live production situations. Pretty close. This is a bubble case, for sure. This is definitely a bubble case. Yeah.

Because he said, this is not a test. Then the BNW spokesman explains exactly a test. Yeah. They came back and said, we're using it on both live production and non-production. And then the last one, he got saved. Yeah, that's what, that's the distinction that really matters. The final, the final words, yeah, save him as not guilty. Give me the final words again. The final part of that statement from BMW, the cleanup. Right. That, it feels like that was

afterwards that they were like, oh, we got to throw a bone here. No, no, not even throw him a bone. When they saw that BMW quote, the lawyers that figure or the lawyers at BNW, or somewhere in between, some counsel probably said, wait a second. Yeah. We, our understanding is this is not a test. You just said it's a test. We're raising money at a $39 billion valuation saying you're our key customer. Yeah.

Can you please make sure that what you say is accurate in the press? The final sentence. The following week, the B&W spokesman said that he had received an update from colleagues at the plant and that they were now more than three robots on site. he said they were being used in non-production and live production situations. Right. Okay. Now they're in live production situations, which means not a test. So, not guilty.

This is not securities fraud. The reason I am harping on this, and I don't want to create another parlorucky situation here. No, man. A CEO is really upset. Brett Adcock watching this right now, like, no. No, the point I'm just trying to make here is a partner can say something out of school. like BMW is the number one customer. Right.

This raise is happening because of that BMW relationship. When you look at those SPVs, the people investing in the SPVs are investing because they're seeing those tweets from the founder. If the founder tweets, you know, this is not a test. And then BMW says it is a test, then the person who bought the shares at $39 billion can get a lawyer and then say, hey, I want my money back. because you said it wasn't a test, BMW said it is. That is the ultimate, ultimate way you can buy shares in a company with an option to get your money back, right?

Now when the BMW person says, no, no, it's in production. Now you have no recourse. The CEO said it's not a test. The person from BMW said, we're not testing it. It's in production. Then you have no case. Right. This is, and you have to understand, there are bad actors out there as well.

As a founder, there are bad actors who will take. every single thing you say on Twitter. And there are lawyers who would be more than happy. Sure. A big targeted company with a big valuation and a billion or $10 billion in cash. And they will go junk on them. So just, and if you're taking money from civilians through these SPVs, which is Rulov's point to tie both points together, Alex. Rulov is explaining those people are not making economic decisions the way VCs do,

which is to get returns for LPs like Harvard or Ford Foundation or Calpers and retirement funds. They're not, and sovereign wealth funds, they're not making economically sound decisions at all times. They're making decisions based on emotions, based on how, as you said, how high profile is the company. So if a founder is out there increasing the profile of the company, which is the job, and you take money from Sequoia or Andreessen and Horowitz, they're not going to sue you. They're professionals. They know they pay, they've done the math, they've penciled it out, they've made a whole, hopefully a thoughtful decision.

Civilians are like YOLO 100K. Right. Then you get 100 yolos and you raise 10 million. And then there's five other SPVs in that same thing. Man, this really does complicating. We run SPVs at the syndicate.com all the time at a very small scale. The average one is $700,000. We're putting money into C stage companies, not lay stage companies,

which is where like the average tech size in R is a 7K. And you are yolowing. And we say that. Only invest money. of or to lose. These are typically companies that are either pre-revenue or have a small amount of revenue, hundreds of thousands of year, low millions. I'm actually in the SPV business, as well as the fund business, but primarily the fun business. So yeah, interesting, this is a very interesting situation. Be careful out there, folks. Yeah. Be careful out there. And also,

I think SPACs and SPVs are things that people should use if they're incredibly sophisticated in very rare circumstances when they make sense, not if you're a dentist. You know, they'll be out of these specs. There will be a FedEx. and Amazon, there'll be some great company that comes out of this. The SPAC, you just have to assume an 80% failure rate. Now, when I say 80% failure rate, I mean a zero. Lose all your money. Space tourism, when I saw that one come up, I was like, that's a hell merry.

If you're betting on that, you should expect it to be one in 250. Now, if you're betting on Jobi, I would take it from one in 250 down to one in 50. And that's just what I do for a living is to make, these assessments, it's taken me a lot of pain and suffering to get that skill. Right, yeah. Man, there are so many companies learned along the way. There are so many companies, Lon, that I thought we're going to do so much better that went to zero.

And there are so many that beat my estimations unbelievably that I would have put behind those other companies, man. There's so much randomness in this. And the randomness is really the founding team. I found some fun videos on social media. directly relate to found-up starters. We call these startup insights. I found a really good one this morning from David Heinemeyer Hansen, friend of the show.

Our old friend, DHS. This is from a recent episode of his reworked podcast. He talks about the inherent contradictions in being a founder. The inherent contradictions in being a founder. Go. Let's go in assuming it's going to work. If we're going to assuming it might not work, you know what? You're not going to put your all in to it.

And if there's anything you need these days, it sure as hell is you're all in. everyone else are putting in, they're all in their best thoughts, their best competence, all this stuff into it. You can't show up half-assed and then expect that there's going to be a prize for you. That just doesn't work. And you actually need that conviction because you're going to have sort of a dip in motivation of like, oh, I think it's not going to work. Oh, this is a great idea. It's a stupid idea.

It's going to fluctuate, right? So you need to go in with that conviction, like whether fluctuates, whether it goes up and go down, I believe this is going to work. And then also, again, knowing probably won't. It probably won't. And when it doesn't or doesn't, or does. Because you're going to be happy either way. Because you did it in a way where you did it with integrity, regardless of what that means to you.

You're not doing it in a slimy way. You're not doing it in a quick, scammy, make a buck kind of way. You're doing it in a way where you go like, you know what? I could put my name on this. If there was a little box, a little plaque, I proudly right, made by David on it so people knew who made it. I'm going to be hiding behind something. I'm going to make something I'm proud of because that's just going to make me feel good about it. I also think it works in the market when you're authentically excited and enthusiastic and integral about.

what you're building, and then I'm going to build it in a way that if it does not work, I'm going to be better now than I was when I started. So I thought this was a really interesting sort of insight, and it reminded me a little bit of that Rick Rubin book, the creative act that we like to talk about, where it's making something that you feel proud of regardless. That's how he recommends getting out of this sort of contradiction is. As long as you are happy with the work that you did and it's something you're proud of and you're happy to put your name on it, it doesn't matter.

at the end so much whether it works or not. And I like that approach. Yeah. You know, David's been through the ringer and he makes a couple of really solid points here that you have to keep in mind. If you're not fired up with enthusiasm, you're going to be fired with enthusiasm. It typically refers to employees, but in general, you know, you shouldn't do a project unless you really have that all in. You notice you mentioned all in many times. The reason I named the podcast All In, you know, is for a reason. then you do need to be dedicated and you need to be all in when you're going for a startup. Why?

Because he points out, it's a roller coaster. And you do need to recognize, I'm going all in with the understanding that there's an 80 or 90% chance of failure. But no matter what happens, I put my name on the back of it. And Deval was on all in a couple weeks ago. He sat in the sack seat. And he talked about the social network he created for himself. I forgot the name of it. I had it on my phone.

They sold it. Spent a lot of time on it. And basically, it was going to be an audio version of Twitter where you have conversations on there. And it would be more thoughtful. Air chat. Air chat. Thank you, Alex.

And AirChat was pretty cool. And he said, you know, he tried. He wanted to do something important in the world. He wanted to feel like he was doing something of substance. You know, he sees Elon, he said, and he feels like pathetic sometimes that he's not making something. And he's got to go do something that. he really feels.

And he put his name on AirChat. He was on it constantly. I had conversations with him on it. And you know what? Social networks are like the lightning in a bottle of all lightning in a bottles. Like you literally put a thousand bottles out. Lightning hits one of them and the other 99 shatter.

And his was one of the 99 that chatter, but he said he felt really good about it. And I think that's one of the things to keep in mind. It's a great quote from David Hamer Hanson, friend of my pop. I just want to say, I really want him to follow me around and kind of keep me in line. I feel like if I ever locked off, he'd be like, you're not Ellen! All right. Sorry, D.E.J. In honor of Jeff Bezos and Blue Origins Big Day, we got one more clip here. This is from last year's New York Times Deal Book Summit. And here is Jeff on overestimating risk versus

underestimating opportunity. I think it's generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think entrepreneurs in general would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature. The risks are probably not as big as you perceive, and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive. The second thing I would point out is that, you know, thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, this is something I actually had a conversation with Elon about on his plane 15 years ago. We were, where he was working on Tesla and was trying to get a CEO. And he was just saying, people always overestimate the downside risk was the way he phrased it,

got always stuck with me. It is true. If you fail spectacularly, nobody remembers. You remember. You think it's a big deal. You will think about it constantly. It's the equivalent of somebody going to a party and literally trips and falls. And then they ruminate about that.

rumination, right? And rumination is a real blocker for success in life. Obsessing and ruminating over. Ruminating just means thinking over and over again about something. And when you ruminate over your perceived failings of yourself, you will then start to feel worse about yourself and you'll overindex on it. And what I have learned is that it's much better to celebrate all of the victories, even the little ones. So we've been sitting here as we build out the studio and I've been celebrating the little victories. Oh, we got the lighting better. Oh, we got the flags up. Oh, we now have this OLED. Oh, we got a better shot over here. Oh, Alex is wearing a college shirt, not a T-shirt on the black lights are great. You know, it's just all the little tiny things.

Your perception is that everybody's staring at you constantly and obsessing over you, but actually no one is ever thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves. Scott Lys syndrome. Yeah, exactly. And so that, that is a helpful thing to remember because I do sort of, you know, I feel like insecure social anxiety and you just got to get over that because nobody's actually looking at you. Let's turn this around. So, Jason, what you just described is something that I actually personally struggle with? Like, I'm a big rumina. Really? By, oh, yeah. I'm, I don't know. I'm an insecure introvert. I just pretend. I'm curious about you, though. Like, do you, how do you avoid rumination? Like, personally. Oh, yeah. So it was very simple.

I am super self-aware. And I've always said, like, I'm a kid from Brooklyn who somehow, figured out at a very early age, how to start his own magazine and be an entrepreneur, because I was unmanageable, and nobody taught me anything about entrepreneurship, except watching my dad run a bar, which was chaotic. And I built a mythology for myself. And my mythology was, and the kid from Brooklyn did okay. I was going to be a cop. The expectations were incredibly low. And my lord, you know, out of the gate, I started to exceed them. And now I still championed that mythology for myself, which is, can you imagine a kid from Brooklyn became a millionaire, has everything you always wanted, has a beautiful family, has great friends, and can do whatever he wants in

life, has two of the top podcasts in the world, and, you know, it gets to ski in Japan. And I take the time to just appreciate how much further I am from the expectation people had for me. and I went into my my college counselor, my high school counselor at Severian High School in Brooklyn. This is why I don't donate money to Surveillance High School. Specifically because of this instance and others. And they asked me every year. And in the like famous alumni glass thing they have, they have Chris Mullen. And then somebody told me they had me and a story about me where they, you know, just talk about famous people at my high school.

Yeah, yeah. Fair High School. You're a notable alumni. I'm like the number two notable. alumni. If you look at the people who went there, Chris Mullen, Olympian, incredible NBA player, J-Cal. Okay, very flattering. I'm still not buying you. They pitched me on building the computer science wing with Jason Collicannis. They asked me for 10 million bucks or something. Oh, wow. I've given them $0 for, you know. Oh, you could have like the Calacanus Memorial Library.

Basically, yes. And I'm just like, yeah, no, I'm going to $10 million? Whatever. They wanted for a high school. They literally picked me on doing all this. And, you know, listen, when I went to the the person who was the college counselor, I said, they said, well, what are you thinking? And you were required to go twice. That was the requirement. Yeah, my school had a similar. So I went to there, this is what I'm a sophomore, junior,

and I said, you know, well, I read about Brown. Good school. And in Brown, you can make your own degree. And I'm really interested in computers, and I'm really interested in psychology. I was wondering if there's anything where you can have, like, the psychology associated with technology. What a forward-thinking major that would have been.

This is the age of 15 years old. Yeah, 16 years old. Do you want to know what the guy did? He laughed in my face. Really? Yeah. He laughed at me. Why? What was Brown super outside of your, like, what was your GPA?

Two point something? Yeah, it was terrible. Yeah, that's a little low. Three, whatever. Anyway, he laughed at my face. There was no way you would ever get in there. Have you taken the police officer's task? Oh, that's not very much.

Or the firefighter test. You should encourage the, But chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. This mother, I could believe that, did not even for a second. He could have just said for but 60 seconds. It's really interesting. Where did you hear about Brown? How did you hear about it?

Have you looked into the requirements to get to Brown? Is there a second place you could go? Right. That maybe you could do a year or two and then get into Brown? That's the approach. Yes. What other schools have interesting programs aligned with what you want to study that you could get into and then transfer?

So he gives me this, you know, this nag, and I just thought to myself. And this is when I became J-Cal versus the world. Did you a favor? Well, yeah, in a certain way. And I had started to take martial arts and run marathons. And I started to get my hootspah up. And I was like, you know what, if everybody thinks I'm not going to make it. And I'm going to just prove it to them.

I got a little, starting to get a little chip on my shoulder. And so I went on my own and I figured out, oh, I could go to Ford of University. I knew some friends who were in Fordham in Jesuit school. And so I started going up, but my friend was at Fordham, and he was teaching the Take One Doe program there, the Take One Do Club, and I was in the Take One Do Club at Surveillance. So I started going up there every couple of weeks. And I met with this guy, the council there was Edward M.J. Boland.

I got to find out where he is now. Somebody can find him. If they can, I want to send him a gift basket or something, or just say hi to him. and I started going to his office because I had applied for admission to Fordham. And Edward Boland was the guy there and they sent me a letter and said,

you didn't get in. But I had set up a tour with him. And I said to him, hey, I had set up a tour, but you reject him. He goes, oh, well, the tours have nothing to do with the acceptance. You didn't get accepted

because, you know, we have people with higher SATs and higher GPA. I said, oh, so I can't take the tour even. He goes, no, come up and take the job. tour. So he met me. He took the tour. I took the tour. I said to him, you know, any chance I can get in, you know, and he said, well, you know, traditionally we don't take a student like you. And I said,

well, what about non-traditional? And he looked at me and he's like, that's a good question. I don't know. And he said, well, where have you been accepted? I said, Brooklyn College. He said, I'll tell you what courses take up Brooklyn. If you get straight A's and you do really well, then we'll consider your first sophomore. I said, I hammered this guy. I brought him three letters of recommendation three months in a row, and I dropped them off in his office. I literally went to his office, announced. Hey, Mr. Bolin, it's Jason Kalakannis. And he looked at me to recognize me. He said, I came last month. Remember I had that you guys rejected me a trouble broke on? Yeah, yeah. I said, I did really well. Here's my report card for my senior year. And here's a letter of

recommendation from a place where I had a job. And said, oh, that's great. What are you doing here? He's like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm going to take one dough. He's, oh, you're a friend from the psychologist's well. I said, yeah. He said, yeah, that's great. Nice seeing you. Next month. Mr. Bolin. He's like, you're back. I'm like, yes. He's like, another recommendation letter. I said, yeah, I gave it to him. I get a call on August 10th. Never forget it. My mom says,

Jason, Fordham's on the phone. I run to the phone. I said, Mr. Boland, hey, how's it gone? And I'd give him a third letter. He said, I never told the story on the air. He said, Jason, I wanted to let you know

I'm leaving Fordham University. Oh, no. I said, he put in all that legwork. I put in all that legwork. I lost my rabbi. He's gone. I said, oh, I'm sorry.

What happened? He said, oh, I got a job at Yale. Hmm. He said, you got a job at Yale? I said, that's a better school than Fordham. A little bit. Yeah, I said, congratulations. He said, yeah.

And I had one request for Fordham when I was leaving. I said, oh, what's that? He said, I wanted the most promising non-traditional student to get in. I said, who did you pick? I swear to God, that's what I said. He said, you, Dubby. I said, what? He said, yeah, you're in Fordham.

I said, I already signed up for Brooklyn College. He goes, well, you can get in if you want. I said, okay, what do I do? He goes, go to the Bursa. Do you want to go to Rose Hill? There's no housing available. Or do you want to go to Lincoln Center? I said, well, I can't afford the housing anyway.

Where's Lincoln Center? He said, where's Lincoln Center? You're in New York, right? Yeah, Lincoln Center. 60th Street. I'm like, oh, Columbus Circle. He said, yeah, it's a block off Columbus Circle. He's like, oh, the B train goes there.

I have to, he's like, okay. I was like, okay, I'll go to Lincoln Center. I said, what do I do? He goes, go to the Burstah. He got your name there. I said, okay. He said, goodbye. I said, Mom, I got into Lincoln Center, whatever.

She goes, I can't pay for that? She said, I don't know, figure it out. I went. I went to Fordham. And that's when I learned that there is a whole system, Alex, out there. And you can either be a victim to the system or you can believe in the system or like Neo in the Matrix. You can bend reality. And I decided I would see how far I could bend reality.

It was literally that moment in time. Those two events led me to believe that I could bend reality to what I wanted to be. And it made me so dangerous because then I was like, well, I could just start my own magazine. You just start my own company. I could have Sequoia as an investor. I could do whatever I want. And it just started to snowball. And so once I started to have that mindset that there was a reality available, then like this whole rumination or feeling bad about myself when I did something stupid or

mispronounced somebody's name. I was like, well, who cares? And I just started to view myself as a samurai or a Jedi knight operating in the world as a Ronan. That's where I have my lack of rumination from is that they laughed in my face and told me I couldn't do it. And then I bent the spoons. And then I just literally in my mind just thought I was a Jedi Knight. It is normal for people to think like, okay, what did I do wrong? Why did he laugh in my face? All this stuff. And I realized the reason he laughed in my face is because he's part of the system. And the system is often wrong. It's just a system. Like, yeah, the system's wrong. And it's, it's just a system. It's an abstraction. The whole thing, all of society is just some crazy abstraction. If you want to go to Japan and ski, you can get on a plane with a one-way ticket, go to Japan and start skiing.

And I met this guy, John, who owns the I-I resort. He did that, and then he bought the resort. You can just go do things. He bought you and I. It took three or four years, four or five years to convince you. the village to let him buy this shutdown ski resort. Now he runs my favorite place in the world. You and I.

All right, everybody, there's been another exciting episode of this week. He can turn up. The venue. Guys, stop ruminating. You just do fucking things. Let's just do things, okay? That's the deal.

That's it. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.