This Week in Startups - Jason’s H-1B pitch, the latest on the TikTok deal, and Howie’s first ad | E2182

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Today’s show:New proposal on H-1B visas… and it’s pretty similar to Jason’s pitch from last month!On a new TWiST, Jason and Lon wonder if the White House is watching the pod and borrowing some of our best ideas! Specifically, the new $100K H-1B visa proposal sounds a lot like Jason’s suggestion from August… with a few significant tweaks.PLUS we’re looking at the latest news about the US TikTok entity, why Jason’s not concerned about the new algorithm, the explosion of major data centers in Scandinavia, the European Commission’s scaling back of anti-cookie regulations, AND the first big marketing push from virtual assistant startup Howie! That’s a packed show!Timestamps:(0:00) Alex is out today so Jason and Lon introduce the show.(04:11) Did they borrow their new H-1B visa proposal from JCal?(10:10) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(11:28) Show Continues…(19:21) Public - Take your investing to the next level with Public. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn 4.1% APY on your cash—with no fees or minimums. Start now at public.com/twist(20:28) Show Continues…(26:42) Answering YOUR pressing H-1B questions.(30:13) Stripe Startups - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on stripe.com/startups.(31:30) Show Continues…(32:51) The Murdochs are likely joining the TikTok deal…(34:38) Why Jason’s not concerned about TikTok being in the hands of mostly Trump allies(39:29) A look inside the Nordic data center boom and why it’s happening(01:03:32) Checking out Howie’s first ad… how much did it cost to make?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/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow 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:Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWISTPublic - Take your investing to the next level with Public. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn 4.1% APY on your cash—with no fees or minimums. Start now at public.com/twistStripe Startups - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on stripe.com/startups.Great 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.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Zuckerberg and his family will control meta and their billions of user for all eternity. That's the company that you have to be worried about. This company, you will not need to because the original owners are going to keep their stakes. So Jeff Yass, I think my friend Brad Gersner, Altimiter, has a very public position in the company. I don't know how large it is. So this cap table is going to have, it looks like, you know, dozens of people on it. It will be a fully diversified company and then a large amount of the state.

shares will be floated publicly, which is why all these people are making this investment. They're not making this investment to control the asset. They're making it because it's a great business deal. This is the one company that challenges met as supremacy and will continue to do so. YouTube would be the other, right? Just as the world moves to video in shorts. And so you have to ask who loses here? The big loser in all of this is Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg now has a viable, scary competitor. This week in startups is brought to you by Stripe Startups. Stripe Startups offers early stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits,

expert insights, and a focused community of builders. Apply today on Stripe.com slash startups. Public. You take investing seriously. Public does too. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn an industry-leading 4.1% APY on your cash with no fees or minimums. Learn more at public.com slash twist. And Squarespace.

Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups with me, my co-host for today. Our editorial director, Lon Harris. Welcome to the show, Lon. All right.

What's our top story here, Lonz? Oh, man. I think we should definitely talk about Trump's H-1B visa concept and where he might have gotten the idea for. Oh, really? Here we go. I'm followed by Lutnik and J.D. Vance. I got a couple of followers.

Sacks. A couple people in the administration know J-Kal. You've got some connections. You've even had friends who are the Oval Office, I've heard. I did. Well, actually, I was there. You didn't notice it, but I was holding the camera. What happens the cameraman got sick?

He suddenly had food poisoning. So I was like, don't worry, guys. I'll just hold the camera. And, you know, I was quiet. I didn't ask you questions. Can I just say, part of the personal that I watched that video go viral in waves. Like I saw when All In first posted, I'm talking about there's a video of David Sachs, Chimot, Pia, Dave Friedberg, Jason's besties from all in touring the, Trump is

giving them a tour of the new Oval Office with all the gold fixtures and appointments. And so at first it went viral from Trump fans and all-in fans. Look at the, our boys got this exclusive White House door. And then it died down for a few days. And now we're in the second wave of blue sky discovering it. Like, look at me. Oh, Marie Antoinette dining while the people starve in their golden oval office. We're in the golden age, folks.

Yeah, we're in the gilded age. It's like a whole second wave now of people criticizing it. gilded and golden, two different things. We are in both, in fact. There is a gilded age occurring. There are people with incredible wealth who are living a lifestyle. And of course, I'm talking about myself, Ulu, $100 today. So I'm out of here, folks. From your mansion and Newport, but the golden age, you know, is worth taking a moment on. We are still, you know, even though unemployment ticked up just a wee bit, like 5% or something, we're still at an all-time low of unemployment for our lifetime. It's not evenly distributed. And the stock market at all-time

high. And America's competitiveness in the globe also at an all-time high, I think, you know, despite like maybe some of the foreign relations stuff people might not agree with and the tariffs and how we're doing foreign policy, you put all that together. Still, people want to park their money in America and people still want to climb over the fences and take boats and swim here. I mean, we literally have so many people who want to come to America and it's pretty far away from any other landmass. And one of the ways they want to do that is the H-1B. Correct. Now, I have been on H-1B's for decades. Why? The H-1B program, I saw up close and personal when I was an IT guy in 1990, 1995 period,

right as I was starting my magazines and getting out of corporate IT, they always said the same thing, Long. We can get people from India for 50% less, for 25% less, and we can lord over them the fact that we can bounce them in 30 days from the country, and they have their families with them.

So these, typically was Indian guys back then. I think today it's a range of folks. You might have people from South America as well. I looked up the stats today. It is still majority, less of a majority than it once was. But you're still talking between 65 and 70% of the people on H-1B visas are Indian. Okay. So here's what it is.

India is now the most populous country in the world, 1.4x billion people. They just eclips by like 10 million people. And who knows if these numbers are exactly correct. China. And they don't have enough jobs there. And so there's a big export. of talent from India to Mina and the United States. Even Japan has a big program now to bring in doctors, nurses, and healthcare folks because you just can't staff these positions. And Indian people

have a great education system, an incredible work ethic, honor, detail-oriented, executive function. Like I talked about before the show, like they're known for being incredibly industrious individuals. And so I'm making a sweeping generalization here about a group of people, but it's warranted. So it's a compliment. And it's a nice one. It's a positive one.

It's a positive one. Yeah, I hate to tell you, but overperforming versus peers would be the way to say it. And it is a competition between nations. What that's led to is so many of them want to come to America to make a better life. The H-1B visa program has been abused.

The salaries are the lowest of the people working at these companies. It is not for high-skilled immigration in the majority of cases. It's an abuse system to get cheap labor and then not hire Americans, who I can tell you, from being inside corporate America my whole life. The way leadership looks at it is Americans are lazy. This is what they say. This is not my opinion.

Americans are lazy, and they don't perform as well as their Indian counterparts. So if I can hire somebody from India for 25 or 50 percent, and they'll put in more hours, they'll work more diligently, they're more affable. and more respectful and they want to work harder. This is what I've been told on from the inside. Therefore, I proposed for the last decade on CNBC and on this very podcast, there's a simple way to stop this abuse, which is charge $10,000, $20,000 a year per year to have an H-1B visa.

Now that would close the gap of trying to give these jobs to foreigners that are not skilled. We have this clip. We have a clip from episode 2170. It's from less than a month ago, August 27th of this show. I have the clip ready, if you want me to share that. I will share my screen now. By all means.

And we can take a look at exactly what you said less than a month ago. Here we go. Okay. What did I say? What did I say? Pay the difference between what the person would get paid as an American and what would they get paid as an H-1B. and they should get audited for that. What are you paying the equivalent people at your company?

And by the way, there's a 10K, 20K, a fee for each of these. Not one time, Alex, per year. So then if it is truly a person of unique skill, Colin, this is some AI researcher. We had a guest. We got a PhD from Oxford and whatever, and you got to have them. There's only 20 of them on the planet.

Great. Then you don't mind paying $20,000 a year. They're getting paid 200. It's 220. It's 10% more. You just said you can't find the person. So pay up. Oh, I was angry.

Yeah, a little fired up. Well, we had a guest who was complaining specifically about H-1B abuse. And so that's kind of the angle that we were talking about it from. And you were saying you were going to send this exact proposal to Vice President J.D. Vance, your good friend. I did. I did. I tweeted him.

And we'll send this clip to. They're paying attention because on Friday, President Trump, announced plans to impose a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas. There's been some back and forth about the Rules Commerce Secretary. Howard Lutnik originally claimed this was going to be, just as you proposed, an annual fee. But then the following day, White House Press Secretary, Caroline, leave it clarified. It is not, it is a one-time fee. It only applies to new H-1B applicants, not renewals, not current visa holders.

And it only applies to next year. year's lottery cycle. 2025 recipients, they're free, they're using the old rules. This is only going to start next year. And the $100,000, it's about $6K times the previous cost. So they're definitely making it more, you know, the companies have to go a lot further. They have to really want these people in order to pay. JP Morgan stated bluntly that the move, quote, prices out the utility of H-1Bs as a source

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I don't know exactly what that quote means, but what I'll say is... I mean, I think they're saying it's no longer reason. You would no longer bother hiring somebody. They're making it too expensive for this to be actionable is what J.P. Morton is. Good. that's a good thing because now American companies will be forced to train people and create training programs. When I was coming up in the industry, when I was an IT guy, they gave you a training budget. They trained Americans for these jobs. And so there is a failure in our education system

in preparing people for work in America. Our education system is completely disgraciad. I've said this many times. So then corporations need to pick up this slack. They need to have training. programs. I created one in our venture fund, the launch fund, where we train researchers. And if they get to 500, 1,000 meetings with founders and they work hard, you know, putting 50, 60 hours a week, then they become an analyst. If they do really well there, do another 500 to 1,000 meeting with founders. They get there, essentially, you know, if you think about Malcolm Gladwell, it's 10,000 hours. You probably don't need 10,000 hours of anything to become an expert. What you need is really focused, concentrated effort, and studied effort and mentored effort. And so if you mentor

people, they will hit these notes. But you have to have intense mentorship. Just like if you wanted to get good at basketball, you can just go play at the YMCA. Or after a thousand hours of playing at the YMCA, if you did 100 hours with an actual coach, that would be more than the thousand. So this is awesome. What they should add to this, and I'm going to add another wrinkle to this, is they should also have a parallel auction. They should auction off 10,000 of these a year. Each company should put in how many they want and how much they're willing to pay.

So if you're open AI, your GROC, you know, your Gemini's, you know, deep mind group, whatever it is, you say, you know what, I'm willing to pay $250,000 to get 1,000 of these. So I'll give you $250 million right now. All these companies are sitting on all this cash. They're not paying taxes. There's all kinds of tax loopholes for corporations.

They have money offshore, that they haven't domesticated, that's sitting in bank accounts over there, the tax hasn't been paid at. That's another issue. You just tell them, listen, you can take your foreign money from your, you know, subsidiary in Ireland that owns the IP for Facebook. Shemoth always tells that story, whatever it is. You can take that foreign money and you can use that to pay for this. What does it do?

This is Trump's genius. I always called balls and strikes. I didn't like what happened to Jimmy Kimmel and how that went down with the FCC. see. I had a big, big discussion. We'll get to that in a moment on All In. We can debrief about that. Sure. But Trump does have a certain genius in saying, this has value. Pay for it. And he uncaps it. So every time I come up with something, I said they should sell citizenship. And I think I said you'd sell citizenship for a million dollars. He made it five. Five million. Yeah, the Trump car, the gold, the gold car. The gold card. That was my idea. And then I had this idea, 20K. You have this. You have this,

opening to the administration, it's not that crazy that they might be lifting some of these ideas. I wouldn't say it's impossible. Listen, it is what it is, folks. I don't care if my idea is like the 20th time they've heard it. You have a nice chorus here. This is one of the things I do like about this administration. You guys will hear me call balls and strikes all day long. Politics is a little bit outside the, what is that word?

Pervue. Remit. Remit. Remit. Remit. Remit. Permit. Remit.

Pervue. I'm working on my vocabulary. with AI. The remit or purview of this show is startups. Well, this is something that directly impacts big tech and little tech. For small tech companies, I think every small tech company, a company under 100 should get one H1B for about 10,000. So every small company gets one of these. One time, one, but for 10. Anybody over 100 employees, you've obviously got enough revenue. You've got 10 million in expenses, 20 million expenses already. Then you should just be part of the strict lottery system.

The lottery, yeah. And this is, you know, or the auction, rather. I like the auction or lining up and paying this. And I like the idea of people saying, I will buy a thousand a year for five years. And I'll give you $1.25 billion. And you can take that $1.25 billion right to the bank and cut down our deficit or put it towards education. I mean, that is a great.

I think that, what you just added, I think so many of these revenue generating proposals from the Trump administration would go over better with a mainstream. audience, if they had that, where is this money going to go? Because we don't really have, we're collecting this revenue, but they're not really telling us what they're going to then use it for. And I think that's a big part of the equation. How is this going to benefit the American workers that are being crowded out by H1BBs? Are we going to put this into job training? Are we going to put this into unemployment systems? What are we doing with this revenue? I think the, you know, the thing we have to really start.

thinking about is for one year after college having skills training available to any American in some format. So we already have like in most, I think, states pre-K through 12, which means you're paying for 14 years of education. When I run for president, I'm going to when president, your president jason.com have the domain name. Your favorite president. Your favorite president to vote. When I run for president, you can clip this when I, I'm in office and you could put it in my face, take ownership of what I say and do in the world, as we saw this weekend. I can get to that too.

It's on the docket. It's on the docket. I got it on the docket. Very simple. You got it on the docket. Very simple. Instead of paying for 14 years, we're going to pay for 16. Actually, we're going to pay for 18. Two years of nursery school that's enriched like Montessori-level nursery school is going to be available

for free to all Americans who make under two. $200,000 in household income. Easy, breezy. Then we're going to have trade schools. The trade schools will be run as a new organization, and each one of them will have a five, it's called $10,000 a year budget. Actually, $15,000 is, I guess, what you pay for on average in the United States per year of education. So you can make it, it doesn't need to be as much because it's trade school.

Right. And it could be like four days, three days a week of school, two days a week of apprenticeship. We just have to come up with that trade school policy that is run by states, funded by the federal government, and is available to anybody under, again, $250K and household income. And if you make above that, you just pay whatever the cost is. Right. It's $15K, you pay the $15K. There is that idea of the gap year, you know, after you between high school and college or after college, you know, take a year off to travel. It would be, like, I don't know why we don't use that concept.

to like take a year off after college before, you know, and like, or, or, not before college, after high school, take a year off and study something that's not connected to what you thought your career goal was going to be. Maybe you'll like it. Like learn a trade, learn a skill. Just take that year. If you still want to go to college after that, great. But maybe you'll have found something, you maybe you'll start working somewhere.

Maybe you'll have found a new trade or something that you could, you know, like we don't give people that chance. Like, I was 25 before I was just, like, done with school and out on my own and like, hey, what do you want to do now? And, like, that's too old. You should have given me a chance when I was 17 to ask myself those questions. I'm going to write this up as like a little email newsletter. The secrets out.

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to fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash twist. One more thing I want to add before we move off H1B visas. There was a viral tweet from this University of Michigan Econ professor Justin Wolfer's. I've got it here. I will share it with you. This is an academic elite.

It's an academic, but he raises, I think, an interesting point. He looked at the actual- I'll decide on how I frame him if I agree with this point or not. Fair enough. Go ahead. So he found a subsection on the official White House, you know, announcement of the visa program. Here's what it says. The restriction imposed pursuant to subsections A and B of the section

shall not apply to any individual alien, all aliens working for a company, all aliens in an industry. if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines in the Secretary's discretion that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H-1B is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security of welfare of the United States. So they've basically written themselves a loophole that says the Department of Homeland Security can waive the $100,000 if they decide this is a special scenario. is this as as professor wolfer's asks is this an opportunity for trump to basically do what he always does hold court get people to come visit him and give him little treats and bribes consolidate more executive power i guess would be the accurate way to say it right just like tariffs right right like he's the only way to get out of this so if you want to not have to pay your h1b employees

100K or want to have to pay 100K to hire them, you could go to Trump and do him a favor. Very simple way to mitigate this is to have some transparency in the process. When somebody does not get their visa, it should be like there should be an official process and it should be transparent. Then if there was abuse of this, you would have that. But Homeland Security, there needs to be some executive power in order to make changes that keep the country competitive. And so what I like about even just having this upfront,

is we do have issues with spies. There were spies inside of Twitter from the Middle East. There have been spies inside of Google from China and other countries, you know, Russia, et cetera. So you do have to be thoughtful about this. And there are multiple agencies that look into this. So I'm glad that there's a professor reading all these documentation and building these concerns. And sunlight is the best disinfectant in almost all of these. So that's what I just like to see is a little more sunlight on the process, which is,

you know, was my point with the FCC and Brendan Carr, which is an issue that we talked about on the All-in podcast. It got a little spicy. But, you know, I think right now, Glenn Greenwald, Joe Rogan, myself, Ted Cruz. Carl Rove. Rand Paul. Carl Rove. Lots of people have spoken out.

The Wall Street Journal. This is not an issue where it's like J-Cal is a lib. And I don't understand how people still try to box me into being a lib. I think it comes from Sacks constantly saying I'm a lib. I'm an independent moderate. If you don't believe me, what state do I live in? What do I carry on my hip every day? And, you know, just look at my tweets.

I'm as moderate. And, you know, even this week I talked about my faith, which I literally never talked about because I don't know, it's like personal and I've, you know, struggled with it. Somebody who grew up Catholic, I mean, I'm no longer Catholic, but I am Christian. And I happen to tell people I'm a Christian. This has freaked people out in a way that I didn't. think I, you know, whatever experience, but it's gotten kind of weird that people are like, you're a Christian? And I'm like, yes, is that a bad thing? Sorry, I kind of dig Christ. And I

just like the learnings. I grew up with it. I mean, I'm not allowed to dig Christ. I'm not putting on anybody else. I'm not lecturing anybody else about it. I only draw the line at the Tucker Carlson. You believe in angels and demons. That would take me a bad. Other than that, I think it's fine. I mean, that's part of, and I'll just unpack it here for a second since everybody's asking me about this. I grew up Catholic. Sure. I was a practicing Catholic.

I used to go to church every Saturday and every Sunday at 6 a.m. with my grandfather at St. Anandosl's Church. Catholic or Greek Orthodox? You were just Catholic? I was Catholic. I did go to Greek Orthodox sometimes with my grandfather on the other side. So my Greek grandfather, Greek Orthodox. Oh, I see.

It was the Irish side. So, you know, tie goes to the mom, I guess. And these... Well, in Judaism for sure, yeah, the ties go to the mom. Ty goes to the mom. But my dad was running a bar and playing backgammon and poker, you know, and having like a pretty, yeah, non-religious life in Brooklyn. So, you know, anyway, I grew up Catholic.

I didn't like the Catholic church. I elected to not be confirmed because I had problems with it, you know, gay rights, you know, females' rights, women's rights. I just didn't speak to me. You and I are of an age where the sudden discovery that so much child sexual abuse was going on in the Catholic Church was right in our lifetime. I mean, when I was young, that was not a thing you ever heard about at all. That was not discussed.

I had no idea not being a Catholic. So that I think a lot. Interestingly, growing up in the 80s, they told us, stay away from this priest and this brother. Specifically because they knew that those folks were predators. And I was like, well, why are we going to church if there's predators here? And they were like, don't go to the rectory. Stay away from this priest.

And I'm like, that's a very odd thing. For younger people, they might not realize like how to short a timeline that. Like, it was only the 90s when that movie Sleepers came out. And we started hearing about the Magdalena laundry stuff in Ireland. It's very recent. It's very recent. Anyway. Anyway.

I'm a Christian. Sure. There it is. I mean, I don't, I'm getting tons of Christians who are like, you won't talk about it. And I'm like, am I obligated to? I mean, I don't go to church, but I consider myself a Christian. It's a technology podcast. It's a technology podcast. Okay, let's keep going. All right. Okay. We've got some great questions from the audience about H-1Bs. So here, S from S-K-H-H-D. I don't know. It's S-K-H-H-D. They say each H-1 has contributed. millions to Social Security from every paycheck. What happens to that money? Okay. There is people who have H-1Bs pay taxes and they pay into Social Security. That is a rare win for our

government in retirement accounts. This also happens, I think, with illegal aliens pay into undocumented illegal. They pay into it. So sometimes you pay into something because that's the rules of the country and you don't get the benefit unless at some point you become a citizen. Yeah, move back. So some number of people become citizens. The problem with the H-1B visa, and I think Lutnik brought this up or J.D. brought this up. And again, balls and strikes. Like, they're going to get some things right here, folks, even if you didn't vote for them. The thing they realize is people who are coming on H-1B visas, some of them were getting government subsidies, like, you know,

Like, you know, I'm not sure which ones. I don't know if it was food stamps or whatever it happens to be. But if they were getting paid such a low salary and then they were essentially getting put on the dole as well, like shouldn't that be the company that, you know, pays for it? And this is the problem with the low wage hack that people were doing. So you also hear a lot about this a lot from the left. You know, like companies like Walmart, McDonald's that are paying subsistence wages. And then a lot of their employees end up using food stamps, you know, other.

kind of welfare benefits. And it's like, well, why? We should just make McDonald's pay people more so that we don't have to subsidize their employees. It's going to be a big part of my presidential platform as well, which is we're going to add $1 to the federal minimum wage for like, I don't know, the eight years of my presidency and get it up to 15. Globally, other people have $15, $20 an hour minimum wages, and they have McDonald's and Starbucks. And when you get to $15 to bucks and hour, you know, you're not raising a family on it, but you're also probably not going and getting food stamps. We saw this in, I think, Seattle, New York, and San Francisco, I think, all have minimum wages in the high teens, mid-teens to high teens now. They did it over time. Yeah.

What's that? That's it impossible to live in those cities unless you make, you know, 15 plus an hour, like you're going to die. So, yeah, it's just, yeah, literally would be close to homelessness if you had a 2,000 a month apartment. It's not possible, yeah. Yeah, it says the math doesn't math. So I think that just the federal minimum wage would be like a nice thing. And if you really want it to be smart, this would be something Trump would actually go after for his third term. He should just say, I'm going to raise the minimum wage in my third term and just trolling the fuck. Not a lot of a joke. We have one more, one more question. Or actually, I think this is more a, this is a comment, not a question, from Ronak S on YouTube. They agree about the 10 to 20,

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I mean, there's so much abuse in the system. I don't know specifically what the consulting firms are doing here. But, you know, in some cases, what will happen is they'll just open an office in India and put the jobs there. And then, you know, you can accomplish a similar task in terms of spreading the work around without affecting U.S. workers. That was a big argument I saw about the president's proposal with the 100K is that, well, isn't it possible these companies will just give up having U.S. headquarters? They'll just go somewhere else where you can hire a bunch of people cheaper. No, they need, these jobs need to be on U.S. soil in many cases, but some of the work that doesn't need to be will be there. Already, you know,

a lot of times when you call IT support in a company, it routes to the office in Manila or in India, you know, wherever it happens to be, South America also coming on strong there, same time zone. So, yeah, these are all important details, and it's great that we're addressing them, because for too long, we weren't addressing these, and it built up more and more abuse in the system and more and more resentment. And I think removing the abuse, creating transparency, and making it a revenue-generating arm of the government is long overdue. What else is on the docket here? You want to talk about this Fox TikTok deal? I think it's important because we're starting to get the contours of the deal.

Yeah, we're getting more detail. So on Sunday, President Trump was speaking to Fox News and he suggested that Rupert and Lockland Murdoch, the leaders of Fox News Corp, it used to be news court now. It's Fox. They may end up being among the investors in the new U.S.-based TikTok entity. Trump listed the Murdox along with other people, he said, would, quote, probably be involved in the deal. That includes Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and another new name,

Dell founder Michael Dell. So the White House, the White House is now suggesting that the TikTok deal, it's going to be an executive order. That's how we're going to push it through. And it should be coming as soon as the next few days. The current plan, ByteDance is going to create a duplicate

copy of the TikTok algorithm, which they will then lease to this U.S. venture that's coming together to sort of own it. U.S. users in contrast to original reports, it seems like we won't need to download a brand new app. It's going to work with the TikTok app we already have on our phones.

And the U.S. government is not going to have an equity stake in the new company like they do with Intel. Even though they've sort of helped broker the deal, the government is not going to be a co-owner of TikTok. So I think the big thing that the Internet is discussing based on this is that it does seem like the lineup of TikTok owners is a bit of a who's. who of Trump allies. That includes the Ellison family, now the Murdoch family in Fox News, Mark Andreessen. It's a lot. It doesn't seem like a very balanced collective in terms of their political side of the aisle. Does that raise free speech or bias concerns for you?

No, because every single Democrat and former Democrat is now engaged with the exception of maybe Reid Hoffman in supporting the Republican Party. And so I've talked about this countless times, but Mark Cuban as well. Yeah, that's true. And they didn't, he's not included here. But it seems like nine out of ten business leaders are engaged with the Trump administration. The Trump administration's gone to great lengths to court the business community and to listen to their needs. And that's something, as I said on Jesse Water Show, the Democrats had the opportunity to do, and Obama and Bill Clinton used to do. So the moderate Democratic Party, which I kind of say Clinton was the pinnacle of and Obama was adjacent to and Biden went fully left or further left. They were super engaged with

commerce. And so the Democrats, during the last four years, could have invited all these same people to the White House and had those kind of dinners and listened to their concerns and redid the crypto regulations and thought about all these things. And by the way, the Murdox have been quite anti-Trump. That's been a big point of contention between Trump and Rupert Murdox. So I would put him in the bucket of anti-Trump people or no longer fully throated Trump supporters. No, they've been very critical of him. They had at times.

I mean, I wouldn't say Fox News today is anti-Trump, but. No, not Fox News. I'm talking about the Murdox themselves. Well, but that's the, that is them. That's the Wells Street Journal, The Post, you know. But the Wall Street Journal is, like, if you were to, if you were to look at Trump statements, he really has been down on Fox News and on the Wall Street Journal, the two major properties. And I mean, the Wall Street Journal is the one that was publishing, you know, that

birthday book and, you know, all this other stuff. So it's not, it's not a binary. It's not a one-to-one. Rupert Rupert Murdoch's a complicated guy. So, yeah. And Mark Andreessen, I think, was formerly, you know, Democratic. And his partner, Ben Horowitz, was doing. donating to Kamala very recently. So what's happened here is, so I don't have that concern.

What I do like about this is a consortium. So if it's a bunch of people putting in $5 billion, $1 billion, $10 billion, whatever the numbers are, there's actually not one owner. It's going to be a fully diversified organization and company run by a board of directors. So in fact, there's going to be no God King. And if you want to talk about God Kings, you can look at Larry and Sergey and Zuckerberg. they have super voting shares and they control their company. So if you want to know who can act unilaterally, it's people with super voting shares, different classes of shares where they get 10 or 100 votes.

Zuckerberg and his family will control meta and their billions of user for all eternity. That's the company that you have to be worried about. This company, you will not need to because the original owners are going to keep their stakes. So Jeff Yass, I think my friend Brad Gersner, Altimiter has a very public position, in the company. I don't know how large it is. So this cap table is going to have, it looks like,

you know, dozens of people on it. It will be a fully diversified company, and then a large amount of the shares will be floated publicly, which is why all these people are making this investment. They're not making this investment to control the asset. They're making it because it's a great business deal. This is the one company that challenge has met as supremacy, and will continue to do so. YouTube would be the other, right? Just as the world moves to video in shorts. And so you have to ask who loses here? The big loser in all of this is Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg now has a viable, scary competitor. The competitor known as Snapchat has never really had any kind of impact on meta's supremacy here. So this actually, if you just look at it from a

cap table perspective, which is all you have to do, you know, even if, you know, Oracle and Dell have been seen, you know, at the White House or making donations, et cetera. Everybody's doing that. So that's like 95 plus percent of the industry. And this will be a very diverse cap table. So not worried about it. All right. Fair enough.

Yeah. We got, we got a pair of EU stories. You want to, you want to jump over to Europe and talk about what's going on in the EU? Absolutely. What's going on in the EU? So Bloomberg had, oh, okay, go ahead. Yeah. No, no.

It's, you know, it's one of these things that we don't talk about that often because they have so little impact. That's why I thought. Except when it comes to... The only thing that really comes to mind is the only thing that they ever really have an impact is the Nordic countries releasing great companies. And then everybody else trying to regulate companies. So that's the impact on tech today.

It's regulation in the Nordics. And just Friday we had Anton from Lovable talking about Stockholm being such a great... So that's what inspired me. When I saw two big Europe tech stories, I was like, we got to talk about it. Just because this is an ongoing theme. of the show. So first up, Bloomberg has an interesting report on the rising demand for compute and power in Scandinavia. Data center power demand in the Nordic countries is expected to increase by 4x by 2032. By that point, data centers could account for 6 to 9% of total demand in

Scandinavia for power. The reason is major players like Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta are expanding their footprints in the region. And the reason for that, lower energy prices, power in Nordic countries averages 60% cheaper than the rest of Europe. Parts of Norway and Sweden, it's as low as 80, 90% cheaper, all that on top of ample land availability and naturally cooler weather. We do have a graphic here if you want to look at how much cheaper power is. Yeah. Super interesting that power has become, yeah, you can show that while I'm talking.

Yeah, it's very interesting how power has become the vector of success for this. So in the Middle East, they're going to have a lot. a lot of data centers, China using nuclear. And the Nordics, you know, do have a cooler temperature on average. Plus geothermal power is a very big. Geothermal is very big. Geothermal is very big. Geothermal hydroelectric power. They've got a lot of alternate energy sources. A lot of fjords, a lot of water flowing around. Exactly. And then Norway has some of the biggest oil reserves, even though they're not pulling them out of the sea. Norway has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. So you have rich countries. They're smaller countries, but they have great landmass. It's cool. This makes

total sense. And this is going to give them a huge advantage because this means compute will be cheaper and cheaper for the startups there and they'll be adjacent to it. And when you're adjacent to something, the collaboration goes up. This is what you see with the collisions that occur in Silicon Valley, Austin, Miami, New York, Los Angeles. Being in proximity to a resource can increase the collaboration with that resource, whether it's Hollywood or it's the finance district or the tourism or media stuff in New York. So yeah, this is going to be significant. They have to be somewhere there. And I would think France has an advantage here as well because they have such a pro-nuclear approach and they have no problem building nuclear there. This is an opportunity for France to actually

they have a lot of landmass and they have a lot of nukes. So why aren't that? I wonder playing a bigger role here. They should be putting data centers near their nuclear facilities. And man, that could be such a huge win from France. Maybe they don't have the wherewithal as a government to take advantage of the opportunity. I know they've been in a bit of a chaotic state. We were joking about it. The French government actually collapsed while you guys were on stage at the All-In Summit.

Yeah. So there it is, folks. I mean, what a fumble by France and Germany, which turned off. I think all six of their nuclear reactors were turned off because they were so overjoyed with their pipeline from Russia. And now that's gone too. So what a cell phone by Germany and France to not be collecting this. But this is where high functioning governments can do well.

Small governments, Norway is what, 5, 10 million people and Sweden is like 10. I mean, the whole group is like 50 million people, and they have high functioning governments that represent the will of the people very well. And that's something, you know, the United States is at a disadvantage because we have 50 different unions, such a large landmass and such a disparity in how people look at the world. You have rural America, you have ranches, you've got people who live in cities. The United States is very diverse. We come back to this.

We come back to this a lot. The 50 state thing makes some stuff real difficult. You're all of a sudden now you're dealing with 50 different bureaucracies, 50 different ways of seeing it's very hard to do something nationwide, whereas in a country like Norway, 5.5 million people pretty centralized, much easier to do, say, here's the new rule and everybody gets on board. I did ask Claude, why doesn't France have more data centers near their nuclear facilities? I got a really good answer. France is actually beginning to build data centers near nuclear power, but this is a recent development. French utility EDF is in discussions with three data center providers about supplying power for up to three, one-gigawatt data center projects in France,

and French data center operator data four signed a 12-year supply deal with EDF, making it the first data center operator in the country to sign a nuclear production allocation contract. So there you go. There's a blocker here. The privacy regulations and the red tape in a place like France are extremely high. So if you were to put a data center there, you then have to, in all likelihood, you buy into their privacy regulations, which are significant. And when you try to hold on to data for a long time, France has been known to like, with the telecom companies, I don't think they're allowed to keep your phone records for past a year or two. You can ask producer Claude to check on that, but I remember reading that headline like 20 years ago where the people in France were like, well, why do you?

do you keep my text messages and you have my log of my phone calls. They have my lover on my phone. I don't want that to save. Why don't you get, I'm going into my Italian accent, but they really care about privacy. Back and forth. And here's the thing with the privacy concerns. There's a very simple way to do this. If you look at the UAE, which is incredibly savvy, like one of the most savvy and Singapore, these are incredibly savvy governments. And they will create a zone. So there's a media zone, a finance zone. There's a wagering gambling zone now in UAE where they will say, if you are in that zone, you do not have to obey the UAE's laws. So obviously, you know, gambling, alcohol may be against certain traditions in certain regions.

So they just say, yeah, in this 10 by 10 mile area, you'll have a casino. And they're in fact building, you can ask producer Claude de Paul is up as well, this amazing. casino in one of the, I believe there's seven Emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. You know Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but there's five other ones. And one of the other five ones, which is about, I think, an hour and a half, two hours from Dubai is going to specialize in having a casino. And I don't know if it's the Wynn or Caesars, but it's a major project that's opening next year. Thanks to producer, Claude. We have the answer. It's the Wynn Al Marjan Island is going to be the UAE's first casino. Win Resort secured a gaming license.

in the UAE in 2024. It's under construction now. It will be the first casino resort in the UAE. 5.1 billion dollar resort. They're building on Al Marjan Island in the Raz al-Kema, Emirate. It's going to be gorgeous, by the way. 2027. Look out for that opening in 2020, 27.

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Thank you to them for sponsoring the show. Great partner. We use it every single day, folks. Deep research. And it's getting faster and faster. It used to be like the deep research. You do it and go get a cup of coffee. Now you do it.

And it's like, bink. Here it is. When I first started, I'll tell the story. When I first started using producer Claude for the show, chat GPT was much faster. And I would have to tell the host, I would tell Jason and Alex, give me an extra second or two.

Claude takes a little while. It'll be a great answer, but it takes a little while. I don't have to take that time. As you saw, it's right away now. It's much faster. So here's what France should do. French should say in the 100 mile radius

of the nuclear power plants, they are going to do an economic development free speech zone, and that their laws will not impact the data centers located there. So if on those data centers, the team at OpenAI wants to keep, you know, the memory of, you know, your searches for 10 years indefinitely. And you've agreed to that. That would trump the local laws. That's how they can probably unlock this whole thing.

So somebody send this to somebody in France. It's not a big deal. You just tell the French people, like, do you want to get a lot of jobs and a lot of income? And then just charge a tax for that. If you want to be in the non-restricted zone for AI, you just pay this certain minimum fee. It could be based on the number of GPUs.

It's, you know, a small tax, 1% of the cost of it or something to minimis, but that, you know, the savings is so great. People can't do that. But you would never do this in a place like the UK. because you know the government would then use it as a cudgel to try and get you to behave a certain way. I mean, they're knocking on people's doors in the UK asking them about their social media posts and if they would like to apologize. Yeah. And you're like, what?

Things have gone, things have gone pretty far. Yeah. Pretty weird. And that makes them a no-go for entrepreneurs. If any entrepreneur came to me and said, what country should I put my European outpost in? I'd be like, oh, I can tell you. which ones not to. Definitely don't go to Germany.

You would definitely want to go to Stockholm. Yeah, that's what you, the number one would be Stockholm, I think. Yeah, I think so. One more, one more Euro story while we're on the continent. The European Commission is considering amending the 2009 e-privacy directive. This was the rule that forced websites to get your consent before loading cookies. You know how every time you go on a website now, no matter where it is, you get that lower third like, hey, do you accept cookies?

You have to accept all or reject. You know what I'm talking about. So this is all because the European Commission had this rule in 2009. And now it's basically polluted the entire internet. Everybody's sick of it. Nobody reads those things anymore. So they're revisiting this rule. They're going to come up with a different way.

You can either opt out of it or just approve, accept cookies once in your browser. And then every website you go to doesn't have to like, hey, can you please consent to us leaving cookies in your browser? That is so annoying. It's so annoying. Well, this is the thing about regulations. You know, you make these regulations, and then if you make them beyond what users actually want, they will get annoyed.

And conversely, if you do things that annoy users and you have dark patterns, like, I always tell the story about the Wall Street Journal. Like, they're happy to take your money on their website and your credit card. but they won't let you cancel on their website. And I'm like, okay, and when I asked the woman on the phone, why is that? And she said, well, we're concerned about fraud. I'm like, well, the fraud would be when I purchased it, not when I unsubbed. Nobody's like, you're saving me money.

A fraudster canceled my Wall Street Journal subscription for me. That doesn't have. That doesn't, that's not a thing. They don't make money that way. That's not a good fraud. So this is, I think, what the European Union is going to have to learn is. if you over-regulate, people are going to opt out. I said Figma should make it so their product is not available in the UK.

We don't sell into the UK. We don't have employees in the UK. And we ban UK users from using our product because of what they did to them in terms of their sale. Just give up the UK. Who cares? It's probably less than 2% of their revenue and they're causing them headaches. So this is a natural process where you deregulate, you regulate, and the users eventually have a say.

And users very much underestimate their power in this equation. I saw a movement over the weekend where, and I got lots of these, where people were saying, I am unsubscribing high-profile people from Hulu and Disney because of the Jimmy Kimmeling. Now, I don't know if that's going to be a million people or 100,000 people, but that's a very interesting wrinkle in this debate. And then just last night, they were supposed to have a carpet for this new Lilith Fair documentary that's coming out on Hulu. And Jewel and Sarah McLaughlin were supposed to perform.

And they both canceled in protest. Oh, really? Yeah. So Disney ended up canceling the entire red carpet because talent was pulling out. There, man, talk about a rock and a hard place. I would not want to be Bob Eager right now. They can't do anything right. You got the affiliates.

You got the administration. You've got celebrities. and consumers. People are mad at them because of Gina Carano. They're mad at them because of Jimmy Kimmel. They're getting it from all said. She had such a great character, too. Hey, I just have an idea here.

Can we just let artists be artists and like just leave that out of the political discussion? Like, I love Gina when she was on Mandalorian. I thought that she had a great character. They had that whole show planned. They were going to do a whole show about her. And then they, when they fired her, that, yeah, there were Rangers of the New Republic. I think it was called. It was going to be about her.

and all the other, you know, they have all those like X-wing pilots in the Mandalorian, like they're putting together. It was going to be about them, like the new republic and they're reassembling their military. And she was so iconic. And she was going to star. It was her spin-off from the Mandalorian. I hate to give more advice here. Caradoon is the name of that character, post.

Caradone. I hate to give more advice. However, Bob Eager, very simple. You take Gina to lunch. You give her the VIP tour. access, and give her a club 33 membership. You say, listen, we made a mistake. In hindsight, it was a mistake. We'd like to reboot your show. I'd like to reboot your show in the spirit of things. And then they go back to Jimmy, Kimmel, they say, Jimmy, hey, you know, comments felt a little

insensitive. Some people were upset. Let's find a path to you coming back. Well, Kimmel has said, he wants to come back there. Basically, I'm piecing this together. There's, it's rumors. But what it seems to be is that Kimmel will only come back if Disney's like, you can say what he's got a bunch of other Trump jokes he wants to tell. He's got a bunch of other stuff. And he's like, I'll only come back if you let me say whatever I want on the show. And they're like, no. So that's the back and forth that's happening right now.

They do. Kimmel does want to come back. Here's the solutions to these problems. He's got X amount of time left on his contract. Yeah, May 2026. Perfect. Say, hey, we'll let you come back. back until 2026. We're obviously going to renegotiate. The show's a little bit underwater.

You can go out in a flaming ball of glory or whatever. But if the affiliates don't want you and they do drop you, we're going to have to change your pay scale and the budget of the show to reflect that. And then we're fine with you being online or something. But give him like a path to coming back, but he has to also recognize that affiliates have their own. They're tied to this contract. I don't think they can change the contract. Well, they just pay it off, right? It's not a big deal. But I think you know, in terms of this reconciliation and trying to bury the hatchet in this country, which some people want to do,

some people don't want to do, I get it. It's all very emotional right now. You bring Gina back strategically. So that would be making amends because I don't think she should have been canceled. I don't know. I don't remember exactly what her tweet was, but I don't think any artist should really be canceled

for their tweets unless it's like hate speech or something really gnarly. I believe it was about trans people and it was an honest. ongoing string. It wasn't just, it wasn't just one thing. I mean, people, but, but, but I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that it was, artists can have opinion, like, by the way, I'm not looking to Disney characters for my morality. I'm not looking to comedians for my point of view on the world. I'm looking for them to be entertaining what they do in their own time. If they love Trump, they hate Trump, they love,

what the situation in Gaza is, they don't love it. I mean, I, I'm fine with people having differences of opinions and maybe we can get back to a place in America and in the media sphere where people can have opinions on their own and they can do art and we can kind of put those two things, you know, in two different boxes unless they're criminal behavior or something. I don't know. Let's keep going. All right. Let's move on. We got one more big tech news story about open AI and the video or we can move on to some startup stuff, whatever, whatever you want. I mean, the invidious stuff, I can just tell you, you know, I saw the announcement and I saw the interview with them.

Open AI and Vida announced a strategic partnership. They're going to deploy 10 gigawatts to NVIDIA systems. Yeah. That's roughly 2% of total U.S. electricity consumption. It's basically the entire state of Florida's annual electricity use. So what's happening here is, you know, they are trying to catch up to Colossus, you know, GROC and XAI, you know, they're building something very big. And I think people are starting to realize you need to build big things.

In order to, you've got to have these big data centers in order to maybe solve the next cohort of problems like during cancer, understanding the universe. Like everything we've seen up until now as impressive as it is is not typically a new innovation, not original thought. Right. Sometimes on the margins you can interpret a breakthrough. It's hard to know if that was random or brute force. But there's going to be another layer of this of super intelligence, not just general intelligence. not just general intelligence. So this is all the super intelligence play.

The theory is we're going to write better code, we're going to have better training data, but we're going to just put so much behind this that essentially everybody in the world is going to have an H-100 representing them in the world, which means a billion, five billion H-100s.

That's a way to conceptualize this, is that every human is going to need to have a super intelligence partner, and they will. This is all incremental revenue to everything Nvidia has done to date. And Nvidia is making a big investment as part of this. And then over the weekend, I saw Jensen was in the UK, and he made a huge investment in a self-driving car company. I think it was Wave, which is UK-based. So the real story here is Nvidia wins again. Yes, Wave, W-A-Y-V-E, Wave is the company. And this company's doing incredible, and they're using that Thor architecture we talked about.

So you have Waymo building a hardware stack. You have Elon and Tesla building a hardware stack, and then you have a hardware stack by Nvidia at the same time. So Nvidia isn't just content enough to give the backend servers to people pursuing self-driving. They're building another set of hardware and sensors just specifically for mobility. And that's the big news here is, Jensen wants to facilitate more customers. It benefits Jensen if there are many players in a space competing, not one.

Why? Well, because then they're not dependent on anyone company. And as we saw, Microsoft had been like, I don't know if it was 15 or 20% of their revenue. Everybody was speculating who's like customer. Right. There were those three companies that are like half of their revenue and everybody was trying to guess what those three alphabet or meta or, you know. Pretty clearly, Microsoft plus Open AI is the big fish because that represented two players, but now you have Open AI and Invidia collaborating directly to build data centers.

That's a little bit of the fractioning of the relationship with Microsoft, I think, and them going it on their own with their own compute that they don't have to go to Microsoft to get at Azure. Okay, fair enough. And Microsoft, fair enough, is working on their own large language models as well. So the investments occurring here are significant. The wave one, I believe, was $500 million. And did they say what this Nvidia in Open AI's latest round would be? Let me pull it.

Yeah, it's $100 billion strategic partnership is what they're calling. And yes, half a billion was the wave deal. Invidia intends to invest up to $100 billion in Open AI progressively as each gigawatt is developed. The first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will be done. deployed in the second half of 2026. So it's $100 billion over an extended period of time. So what's very interesting about this and is going to become the next big debate is, is this round tripping where I give you an investment and then you spend it with me? Correct. So the accountants are going to be all over this. Jensen is very smart. He knows this,

but this could lead the SEC. I'm sure the SEC has already asked them about it, and I'm sure they've buttoned it up. But I'm giving you a billion this year. You're buying $2 billion worth of H-100s. This is going to have to face some pretty significant scrutiny. The problem is when the investment and the round-tripping is not justifiable. So Open AIA's got to buy these anyway.

It's pretty clear. And Nvidia's got a bunch of cash to invest. So they're going to own a significant amount. They're going to own 10% of or 20% if it was $100 billion. This doesn't make sense to me. These numbers need to be clarified. And we'll do that in an upcoming episode. But if they were putting $100 billion to the company and they just did a secondary

of $500 billion, then it took a genius to figure out that's like 20%. A huge investment. But I think they're blending numbers. here. Probably. I mean, it's also what the U.S. government does when we sell weapons to allies. We sometimes, like, loan them the money that they then use to buy the weapons from us. Like, that's what Israel does a lot, you know. It's called a loan lease. It happened in World War II, where the U.S. wasn't in the ultimate strong position. So they said to the allies, hey, you can buy weapons from us, but we need them back. And then typically with the situation in Ukraine,

you can have the option to get the rebuild contracts. So when you talk about the war machine and you want to be cynical, it's like we're giving you weapons, you owe us the money for the weapons, and then we get to rebuild the bridges and the hospitals. Correct. And get your rare minerals as well while we're at it.

I mean, it's almost like there's people who want to see wars in the world. I don't want to go full conspiracy theory here. It's not almost. But okay, well, we'll save that for another show. Somebody benefits from all of this. It's above my pay grade folks. I'm just an angel investor, podcaster.

Yeah. I'll do that in our next show, conspiracy corner. We've spent a lot of time this episode on big tech. We've got a ton of startup news and a little smaller stories. We only have time for one or two stories, so I'll give you some choices. We can talk about Bill Gates's daughter's new startup.

We could talk about Blue Sky getting more intense with moderation. We could talk about Howie releasing their first ad and closing their seat around. Hit me with Howie. Howie. All right. So Austin Petersmith, friend of the show. his AI secretary or AI executive assistant startup, Awe made a few big announcements.

They're now available to the general public. They've finished their $6 million seed round, and they have a brand new website, howie.com, which I'm going to pull up for you right now, show it off, the people's secretary, they call it. Amazing, amazing. I should have had them come on. He had texted me.

We seed invested this. I guess we seeded it. I think we were the first investor. You are listed among the seed investment. investors here, correct, on the website? I think we were the first. We, we, you know, he came to me with the idea that he had a general AI idea around productivity. And I said, you know, I think I gave him 500K or 250K.

And I just said, okay, great, because I had worked with him on inside before. So I was just like, go for it. We'll seat it. And so we don't usually do that unless we know the founder. And they made a great, I love these launch videos. Yeah, I was about to have the ad here. If you want to take a look at the, let's play it. Let's play it for, yeah.

And Howie is just so people understand, it's like it does meeting scheduling, like much better than Cal only, let's say, where people report that. And I have Athena assistance. So I'm thinking about getting my Athena assistance, Howie, so that they can be more productive. Because a lot of what they do is scheduling. And what you do is you just say, hey, Howie, and you CC it on your email, and it just finds times and books. And what I have noticed, because a lot of the founders, we book on the show, use Howie. And what I've found is a lot of people don't know that it's an AI. It's so natural.

It's so good at using natural language. It's so efficient. A lot of people all see these email threads of people, be like, thanks a lot, Howie. Like they believe they're talking to a real human personal decision, which has not happened all the time. So that's a mark in their favor. So here's the ad they put up for today's launch video. It's time to bring back the secretary. What?

Hold on. Hear me out. She's funny. She's funny. I like the secretary. Not the job title. Not the right. Yeah.

I like the vibes. Yeah. But the poise, precision. The prestige. Someone else is managing my calendar. You get a secretary. You get a secretary. No, I don't have a pen.

I have a pencil. No more triple bookings or battling for bio breaks. We're not scheduling meetings to schedule meetings about meetings that are soon to be scheduled. Hi, I'm calling about the meeting for the meeting. Thanks for setting the meeting. It's a secretary for all of us. Yeah. Even secretaries.

Meet Howie, the return of the secretary. Things got a little crazy back there, didn't they? Hmm. So, yeah, it's a little spicy on the gender thing, the throwback. People don't like the term secretary anymore. Like executive assistant and the secretary thing went out. So they're kind of being playful. I like it.

I wonder if this was shot or was AI. That was the first thing that came to mind because everybody's shooting these. That's a real. lady. That's definitely a real lady. That's an actor. Yeah, that's an actress. This is a set. I believe this is real. Man, what did this cost you think? Because, you know, making a spot like this, back in the day, there was that guy sandwiched media, I think. Remember that guy who was in all the commercials? And he was charging like quarter million dollars at the peak, I think, maybe a hundred thousand. Yeah. I feel like this is a, uh, now today's. I feel like this, it's got to be a few hundred K.

I mean, just to pay the whole crew that had to be there, the editor, the director, the talent, the makeup. I think this is done for 10K now. 10K? Wow, that would be very cheap. I think so, yeah. I think this set exists somewhere in Hollywood. The actress, I think they get paid. Yeah, but you got to rent this set. They probably needed two days to shoot this whole thing.

There's a lot of setups. I wonder. I wonder. I mean, it's pretty tight. Production is a rule, like, you got to remember, like, every time they have to tear down. and like reset up for a new shot. That's 20, 30 minutes to get out the lighting replaced and move the cameras. And there's like three different teams.

I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I'd be interested to ask Austin. And I also wonder, because I see people doing it themselves now. Like a lot of founders are just shooting them themselves because the cameras are so good. You know, and the templates were there. And did that really good one that we liked, where it was just him at his desk and his leather jacket, remember?

So there's that one. but that's not like a produced concept with an actor, right? It's like him talking about his product. Oh, that was just him talking about his startup, yeah. I just feel like everybody knows production now. Like the mystery of how do you make a great shot has gone down. And I could see like some of these cut shots eventually could be done by AI, right? And so I think we're close to having, I think within a year or two of,

I'll say within two years you can do this level of production with AI. If a human is doing all the creative and it's just the production part that's leave to AI, yeah, I mean, probably pretty soon. No, I don't think it's going to write it or come up with the concept. I'm saying you got a smart person who writes it and has the concept and says, I need the pencil being sharpened. I need the clock ticking. I need this sound. I need the cup of coffee. You could probably already do it.

You could probably do that already, and it would just look a little janky around the margins. We're like a year or two away from it being super polished. Yeah, I love it. I think it's great. And I wonder if these launch videos actually pay for themselves. And I think that's, you know, to just give some startup advice here, be open to any possible experiment in terms of marketing your product, especially if you have product market fits. You've got to remember how he's been around, I think, for two years. And he did it very slow, like superhuman. He was very influenced Austin by the superhuman experience. And he really onboarded people thoughtfully, made sure the product did. one thing better than anybody else. He achieved that. And then whatever, I don't know, two years after founding the company, here he is actually doing the launch video and promoting it. So that's something to think about. Are you doing something very narrow that solves a deep problem, that people have fallen in love with that has product market fit? That gives you the right to then go spend $50,000 on this and then spend $50,000 marketing it, whatever it happens to be.

So I do think, like, be creative folks. And Cluelly did a really good job with this, you know, just getting far too much attention. And I think, I don't know if their product, like how the product is doing exactly. I don't hear people talking about using their product, but I hear people talking about their company. So I think sometimes, like the company promotion can exceed the product. I don't know if that's the case included because I don't know the user base.

But like I said, I hear people all the time using Howie. and then the marketing comes after all that's been built up so that people who are using it get to feel like, ooh, they were part of something, right? As opposed to spending all this marketing dollars before you have product market fit. We should have product market fit first, folks. That's my best advice.

Yeah. I think that's a thing that comes up a lot in Founder U pods and our Portco pods is people who are like, all their ideas are about the marketing, and it's like, your product's not really ready for that yet. You know, like, I feel like that

car before the horse sort of situation comes up a lot. Do you want to do one more story? Oh, go ahead. Well, you know, there was another video from one of our portfolio companies

that I haven't seen. Let's play it here. Oh, this arrogant, AI one. You want to check this one out? Yeah. All right. I didn't know they did a launch video. Let me play it here.

Let me pull it up. Right now. Here we go. You'll get my raw reaction to this. Have you seen it? No. The weekend was just within reach. But the asks,

don't care what time it is. Okay. Guys pounding his keyboard. It's shaking. The room's on fire. It's time to introduce a new way to work. Meet Aragon, the AI operating system for enterprise, a context engine that understands your business, learns over time, and delivers the insights leaders need to make better decisions. Love it. Can you send that to the management team? It's not just automation. It's enterprise reasoning at scale. Okay, enterprise reasoning at scale. So, you know, that doesn't have the production value of Howeys.

I got the room being lit on fire. That's some VFX. That probably cost them. Yeah. You know, that was a little bit of time to put together. No, I think that was literally, I bet you that one was done for low thousands of dollars and was done in-house. I don't think that was done out of house.

That's my guess. I need to know the cost of you things. So let's find out. I think they probably got a VFX company to do the room being lit on fire part. Otherwise, I don't think there's anything there. Well, it's the founder. That's the founder doing it. So I think that's his actual office and they lit it.

But yeah, I wonder if that's just, because it looks like it's cut. That could just be a stock image of something on fire. I mean, that looks like the FX to me. I think they had a guy who knows that. I think AI could do that. Maybe. I think AI is capable of doing that right now. And like the thing with the backgrounds is, like when you see a set now, like, I get fooled

sometimes when I see people's Zoom backgrounds. So even Zoom sometimes at first glance, I'm like, are you in an office or you should take a picture of your office? Like I have a friend who has a perfectly shot picture of his office that he uses as his background. And then people assume he's in his office. And I know he's not in his office. A lot of people have that. Because I know he's traveling because I'm traveling with them.

And I'm like, well, that's interesting. All right. Great show, everybody. And thank you to our partners. And just quick shout out to our friends at Athena as well, who. Provide me with my executive assistants. Go to AthenaWow.com. And they'll give you a couple weeks off

and just tell them your boy, J-Cal sent you. But you got to go to AthenaWWW.com to get my discount, which is the best discount you can get. AthenaWow.com. I have two assistants. And I'm going to give them Howie, I think, this week, so that they can be even faster. And those two assistants,

I have them working staggered schedule. So when you and I were working on the weekend, we had an AI project, we dumped to them. And, you know, it's like nice on a, Saturday, Sunday to have support to just, hey, do some projects. Then I have them back, fill out projects they can do without asking anybody. I'll just have, I have some research projects. I have them do for the sales team, like SDR kind of stuff.

And they do a great job of that, too, when there's no work to be done. Okay. We'll see everybody next time on this weekend service. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, folks.