This Week in Startups - Lovable's Anton Osika on Revolutionizing Software Development and OpenAI Drops Deep Research | E2080

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

OpenAI dropped Deep Research—hilariously, the exact same name as Google’s existing tool. Jason and Alex dive into the AI arms race, break down Lovable.dev’s insane growth to $10M ARR in weeks, and test whether AI can really replace software engineers. Plus, they analyze Trump’s latest tariff chaos and what it means for startups, global trade, and the economy. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show. (1:09) Jason’s talk and case study at Stanford (2:38) Managing the chaotic news cycle (5:22) NBA trade insights: Luka Doncic and Anthony Davis (7:15) Lovable startup's rapid growth (9:44) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (11:02) Lovable's AI demo and European startup landscape (15:20) Lovable's target market and pricing strategy (19:48) PrizePicks. Run your game. Download the app today and use code TWIST to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! Go to: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TWIST (21:39) Custom software development's future with AI (23:17) Launching and designing AI-powered apps (27:07) US sovereign wealth funds and crypto regulation (28:56) LinkedIn Ads. Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (33:42) Creative tax and debt reduction strategies (41:34) Defense spending and OpenAI's new product (46:51) OpenAI's market impact and ethical considerations (53:02) AI's role in content creation and job market (58:13) Venture capital trends and startup ecosystem (1:01:19) DeepSeek's popularity and security concerns (1:03:28) Tariffs, economic impact, and supply chain importance * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Check out: Standford Case Study on Jason: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/jason-calacanis-case-study-creating-resources OpenAI’s Deep Research: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ * Follow Anton X: https://x.com/antonosika LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonosika/ * Follow Lovable: X: https://x.com/lovable_dev Website: www.lovable.dev * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (0:00) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (0:00) PrizePicks. Run your game. Download the app today and use code TWIST to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! Go to: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TWIST (0:00) LinkedIn Ads. Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

All right, so a couple weeks ago, we had the guy behind Deep Research from Google on the show. Great interview, great time. You were a big fan of the product. Sure. I'm a big fan of the product. Then over the weekend, Open AI, everyone's favorite closed AI shop, dropped their own product. And Jason, did you know what they also called it Deep Research? It's fascinating that they, I'm shocked that in any way we would have Open AI do something like steal somebody else's IP.

I mean, it's kind of laughable, right? They just called it the same exact thing. Okay, sure. This weekend startups is brought to you by Limon.io. Get access to LemonHire, a platform with more than 80,000 pre-vetted engineers that you can interview within 48 hours. Get $2,000 off your first hire at lemon.io slash hire today. Prize picks. Run your game.

The best place to get real money action while watching your favorite sports. Download the app today and use code Twist to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. and LinkedIn ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Weekend Startups. I'm Jason Calcanus.

He's Alex Wilhelm. And we do this three days week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, typically around 12 Texas time. But sometimes I have a speaking gig at Stanford like I did today, where I was speaking at Jeffrey Pfeiffer's power class. So we had to push it back a little bit because I do this class every semester because they wrote a case study. on me in the class, which is a very weird experience, but there is a case study literally

on how I accumulated power early in my career that was written maybe 10 years ago. So that is a very surreal thing to have these students said, man, one of the students came at me during the class. It was spicy. Okay, I have a similar story. Not about me, but I was taking some classes at booth business school as an undergraduate. And we were doing, you know, looking at case studies, going through, debating them as a class. And no one knew who this guy was at the back of the classroom I'm just sitting there. And that it turns out he was the principal in the case study we had been going through it.

And we'd all been ragging on the decisions he made. And then he's like, well, that was interesting. And we were all like, ah, okay. But that's the power of, you know, tier one schools is that you get the actual principles to come in and do their thing. And that's why I love it. There it is. Here it is.

Jason Calcanus, a study in creating resources. Yeah, man. Good job. I will read that. But, yeah, no, it's been a crazy two weeks, I guess. Today is Monday, two weeks after the inauguration. So here we are in February 3rd. We're two weeks into it.

And my lord, the news cycle is fast and furious, huh? Yeah. We were joking about this a little bit before the show, but it feels like one of those times in which enough things are happening in so many different places and in different directions that you need to be online, essentially chronically to stay even fractionally up to date. Like there's just chaos is maybe the right word, but kinetic might be the right word as well. Sure.

There's a lot going on. I think people forgot, you know, my nickname for Trump in his first term was Captain Chaos, because he would say things. And he would say things in such a colorful way. And then people would take him seriously or not take him seriously. And all of a sudden, you would have protests at airports. You would have the stock market doing backflips. As somebody I heard say recently, he's the he's the stick in the drink that stirs it. So, you know, if something's happening in the stock market, like he's probably stirring the drink. And today, the stock market absolutely tanked because there was all this talk over the weekend about tariffs. But as you pointed out on X, this is like the third or fourth time he's brought up tariffs and done the saber rattling. And it's the same thing over and over. We're doing tariffs. The person on the other side of the table acquiesces and sends troops to the borders or promises to fix something he does it like. And then the tariffs are off. So I actually recommend maybe once a day if you're a founder, uh, consuming news, put it into a nice tight 30 minute, 60 minute band, get all your news. You know, you'll get some of it here on the pod when you're on

the treadmill or going for a hike. But man, if you try to keep up with this, it's going to rattle your brain over the next two hundred and six weeks that are left of this. Don't, don't say that out loud. I don't think I'm going to survive. But Jason, you pointed out over on, uh, on social media that there's actually quite a lot more than just this going on. There's also been the NBA trade chaos that has been heard around the world. I'm still trying to sort of what the hell is going on there. I do think you make a good point that a little self-care, a little investment in ourselves. It's going to be a, it's definitely going to be a marathon. So I think we should all breathe. Yes. And try to maintain a little calm. Download the calm app. And I literally did a hike.

I always do a hike on the ranch every day with the daughters. And then I was going to do my meditation and two of my three daughters did the meditation with me on calm and we had like a very nice 14 minutes together diet exercise sleep meditation focus on those four things in chaotic times in any times and you'll build a nice solid foundation luckily you can use eight sleep one of our investments you can use fitbot another one of our investments for working out eight sleep for sleep calm for meditation and for diet you can use nutrisent so i have i have a startup in each of these categories. Go ahead and take care of those four things, however you choose. Call him Mr. Power Outlet because he's always got a plug. I got a plug. Yes. I will absolutely

have a plug for all the stuff. But, you know, we like to have founders on the show. Oh, that on the Dallas trade, just for people who are wondering, since Alex and I are big NBA fans, Yes, sir. WTF. Okay. So for folks who don't know, Luca Donchich is one of the generational talent, I think is the way to put it in terms of his disability to play, play the game and was the only player on the Mavericks that I could name, because I'm not a MAV's guy, I'm the Warriors guy. Top three player in the league. Well, says. 25 years old, went to the finals last year.

Maybe shows up out of shape, overweight. People say it's like 280 pounds or whatever. So there, I guess, are some concerns about his fitness. But lo and behold, on Saturday night or Sunday night, Saturday night, I think. He got traded to the Lakers for Anthony Davis, who's 32 years old. It would be like the equivalent of trading Michael Jordan or Steph Curry, like, He's that level in his prime. So it makes no sense.

And they got a very little take for him. And people in Dallas, it's like literally good at the franchise. But I like the conspiracy theory that the family that bought the Dallas Mavericks from Cuban care deeply about, they made their money in gambling and wagering. And that's maybe going to happen in Texas. Maybe not. They want to build a casino with the Mavericks as the anchor. But maybe they are trying to sink the franchise in order to move. it to Vegas, which is an interesting concept. Well, there's a WMBA team, the Aces, play in Vegas

already, and there's a, they have the hockey team there and they move the, help me out, Jason, the Oakland A's, I believe, are now. Yeah, I think so, yeah. So I can see like a growing nexus of, of sports in, in Vegas, but I still really, even with that, I question the trade just as a sports fan. I, I struggle. A.D. is a player. Shout out, you know, good. But I mean, top 15 players. maybe. Yeah. It feels like a downgrade. Anyways,

we love having founders on the show. And Jason, there's been a startup that I've been tracking over on X that has been consistently growing, I think, faster than basically any startup

that I can recall in history. It's called Lovable. And they announced back in December, they had reached 4 million ARR. And then they announced just a couple days ago. They've hit 10 million ARR.

So I wanted to get the co-founder on the show. So let's bring Anton Osica up. He is the co-founder of lovable. dot dev. Anton, how you doing?

I'm super excited to be here. I'm a fan of the pod, Jason and Alex. Yes. So tell us, what is your startup do? LaVable is very simple. Instead of hiring a software engineer, which is costly and slow, you ask an AI system in plain English what you want. Then you get an app or a website out of that.

And yeah, we just hit, as you're saying, Alex, 20,000 paying users. And I'm excited to be here and spread some of my excitement about what we're doing. I'm going to show what I built using Lovable in a second. But just to be clear, are you actually adding something like a million dollars in ARR a week right now? Yeah, it's going very predictably growing one million per week since we launched in late November. Okay. And then Jason, because you see a lot more pitch decks than I do, how often do you see a startup that's less than a few years old growing by a million error a week? Yeah, I mean, that would be some viral moment. It would depend on the price of the product, right?

If the product was a billion dollars to install and that would be crazy because you would have to have this. crazy pipeline of SaaS companies and seven figure deals are rare, and they take six months to 12 months typically to close. If you had a product that was $1,000, getting a thousand people to spend $1,000 a month or $1,000 a year is a little bit easier, but still hard. So, yeah, hypergrowth is hyper growth. It's rare. To show this off, Jason, I'm going to show you what I built, because you know my coding skills are absolutely, you know, top of the, top of the pinnacle. Here is a game that I made this morning using lovable.dev, and I'm going to show off my awesome snake game.

If you're on the audio version, I made snake with obstacles. That's my major innovation in the gaming space. And as you can see, it works. Jason, it's live on the browser, and you can crash and die and do pretty well. But, Anton, there's a flaw in this that we wanted to talk about. Yeah, so you have a leaderboard of the right side. But from what I understood, Alex, this is not something you have connected to a back end with a database where the leaderboard is stored globally.

maybe it works just in your computer, but you asked me like, okay, can we change this? And I said, sure, we can do it live on the stream. All right, founders, let's be real. Finding great developers is tough, especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup and raise money. All of this leads to you having slow product velocity.

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So here is the lovable interface. Again, if you're on the audio version, there is a canvas on the right side where the AI built stuff for you. And then on the left, I have a chat with Lovable's AI talking through it. What's going on? So my leaderboard doesn't work for my snake game. And I have signed up for Superbase, Anton. And now I need to know what I should do to make this work as a non-developer.

Okay. So just stepping back for a second, Anton, you basically put in a text prompt and it writes code. Yeah, so that's what you can see on the left. If you zoom in Alex, you can see like what Alex has been asking the AI to do, and then it's been iteratively changing the entire application that's shown on the right

hand side. It's slick, Jason. Like, I actually knew how to, I mean, we use a lot of AI here at Twist, but I mean, like, this was something that I could pull together as a non-developer quickly, and it was fun. So we go big super base. That's the standard, I think,

half of white company companies, they use Superbase. So here you select your project that you created with Superbase. And then you don't need to touch Superbase more after that. If you want to have low level granular access to the data yourself, you can go into that interface. But now the AI is going to handle the setup of the backend system, which you, like you, Alex, you own all the data that's stored in that backend system.

And then every time you ask something, of course, the AI has to think for a while. Okay, so well, I'm going to stop sharing. We'll come back to this, but I want to talk about how you managed to get to where you are, because the company launched three times, Anton, and it seems the third time was the magic moment. So can you just talk us through a little bit about how you went from a couple of launches that didn't have a major impact to the one that came later last year that ended up growing to 10 million error? Yeah, sure. So before I started the company around this, I actually launched the fourth time or the first time, which was showing off an open source project.

that was called the GPT engineer. So this isn't at all the same product, but it was the first open source project that really captured the mind space of people outside of tech, I think, in that large language models. They can start writing code. So that was back in 22.

But now we launched three times last year with a version kind of prompt to application. And it still had a completely different name. And each time we launched the first and second time, it was behind the wait list. and the product, it was like good, people liked it,

but we wanted to only do a full-on blown launch when we knew it was really good. We had solved some of the big roadblocks from the second launch, which is that AI gets stuck and so on. Sure.

And then we launched in 21st of November, and since then it's going, going straight up. So then I want to talk about doing this inside of Europe. Because one thing we've talked about a lot, I mean, here on the show, frankly, is that Europe does seem to be

a little bit behind in the realm of AI, leading to tweets, like this showing, you know, the US has open AI and XAI and China has deep seek and then Europe only has these impossible to open bottles. You said that you're committed to proving this wrong. So I'm just curious, what's it like building an AI startup in Europe today with a regulatory load? And does the company's quick growth show that it's more possible than some people thought?

Yeah, I sure hope so. I think it's definitely a bit of hard mode to do it from, do AI startups from Europe, because you get as much harder to do. break through the noise. People are generally less ambitious, like the ambition density is usually lower. And so you need, but the talent, like the raw talent is there. So you need to find the raw talent and light the fire and increase the ambition level. And I definitely think there's going to be a lot more acceleration coming out of Europe. And yeah, on your point about the regulatory problems. I think they, from where we are at now,

mostly affect consumers in Europe. So there might be a point in time where we only release something outside of Europe, which will be very sad, right, but it's not affecting our revenue in the same way. So explain to me the product a little bit more. Who is this product aimed at? And then how much are you charging for it? So this product is used by tons of different groups. Entrepreneurs that want to build a company or build even a SaaS startup.

They don't have to find a great development. which is super hard, they can just start building the product all the way to the first version with our tool. And then if they can onboard engineers to the co-base with their tool of choice. So anyone who's an entrepreneur and hustler love this tool. We also see designers and product managers who've been using Figma instead going straight to building the real thing by just prompting and they're getting a beautiful user interface. And finally, agencies and freelancers that usually took days to deliver projects or weeks, they can ship things in less than a day. And those are like all different big user groups that.

And how much does it cost? So it starts at $20 per month and then it goes up based on the AI consumption, which is like extremely expensive from our side. I think you just chart a screenshot on that, Alex, to $900 per month. And so the concept is somebody who wants to prototype or build an app, they want to build a fitness app, a sleeping app, a small, game instead of hiring a developer team, they can go in there, build it themselves, and then maybe hand it off to a developer team if they want to finalize it. I guess that's the

piece that I'm always wondering, because in a native language model, whether using Gemini or chat GPT or even a code like Replit, you know, these features have existed. You can have it build prototypes. But then when does it move from being a toy where you can build like, you know, interesting little projects and be like, wow, it made it to, hey, this is production quality and it can go there. Has that sort of final piece been crossed yet? Or does it still require you to have a developer and a deaf to you in your mind? So there's like 100,000k dollar projects that are shipped with our tool completely. And I could share my screen just to showcase a few of that commercial applications that people

have built. So here's just a sample from our Christmas hackathon here. I'm showing a screen sharing a application that is a hackathon website built with LaVable, of course, where hundreds of people built pretty interesting things and just bringing out a few of those. Someone built a fully commercial fundraise CRM here with Lovable. Sending letters online, you just describe the postal address and then you get it shipped by connecting to existing APIs was built. and learning languages and social media tone of voice guideline generages with AI. So these are some examples of commercial products that have been built all the way with lovable.

Jason, I couldn't have told you that some of those were actually made with an AI prong versus a designer. And that makes me kind of fret for my friends who currently make their money designing websites. I must add that in some cases, you need a lot of devotion if you're not technical to go through all the hurdles. and maybe read up on how to get around the problem and some types of problems that AI runs into. But with sufficient patience, you're going to get through it. Well, I mean, if you think about startups writ large, you know, 20 years ago,

getting a team of developers, making wireframes, and building some basic functionality was, you know, the first three to six months of the journey and then connecting with some consumers. And of course, here now with AI, you can compress that, to three or four hours, and then maybe even let some people play with it and get some feedback, but you still have to do all the other pieces of the puzzle, marketing the product, customer support, selling it, and I guess supporting it. So this is the beginning of the end

of, you know, what I'll call commodity software. And we knew that was coming. You know, if you want to create an app or a timer, you can go find a timer online. But here you could just make a timer. And that's kind of interesting because in the early days of the internet, if you think about it, Alex, you could go make a landing page on MySpace or GeoCities, one of these hosted ones. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, Squarespace gave you the ability to have your own domain name, pop it up, and have a gorgeous looking website that previously would have cost a couple of million dollars. So why wouldn't the applications get built this quickly? Makes total sense to me. All right. The big game is almost here and it's now or never. Don't miss out on

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Like you showed the venture fundraising CRM? I mean, am I going to eventually just have a suite of applications that are just Alex's tools that are all kind of built by myself, hosted by myself, and hold all my own data. I can't decide if that's an exciting feature or one that sounds like a lot of work. Yeah, I mean, let me get to that. I just want I echo what you said, Jason, with software and SaaS is just going to be absolutely disrupted. The amount of software, great software, much better software is going to explode, but the prices

are going to absolutely collapse. I think there is a case for people customizing, kind of building almost their own software, but one of the pieces, even though the engineering time is kind of almost reduced to zero thanks to AI, there's a cost of building good software, which is to test it with a human, us humans. We were kind of the bottleneck

for software, and that's typically what the product manager does, and now I think it's more like an AI builder that is really good at understanding and testing with users. So that's going to remain, and we're like a lovable, we're very bullish on finding

who are the best people building with our tools. So tomorrow we're launching something where we can launch your lovable apps and get feedback from users. And then I think what you're going to see is the single people companies where the founder has a great product taste. We'll be like single person SaaS companies and be able to launch and market them just thanks to the wisdom of the crowds figuring out with the best high value of SaaS products are. And that's launching tomorrow. Yeah, that's launching tomorrow. Oh, well, Berk your little news here on the show, Jason. Yeah, it's a really interesting concept to be able to use text prompts to build code bases and then deploy them to the wild.

And things like, you know, Replit and Subbase or SuperBase and all these things are just abstracting it. And it's apparent that, or at least to me, it's apparent that the future programming language is going to be English. Yes. And you're going to be able to just describe what you want and get it. Now, of course, you will have features and refinement that humans will do in the last stages, but just like people used to be able to create mockups and hand them to developers or, you know, designs and hand them to developers to be built, this is going to speed that whole process up. And instead of needing a 12-person team to build a modern app company, which is kind of what you need,

about 12 people, you're going to need two. Yeah. That's going to unlock what we talked about last week, Alex, which is, all those little nooks and crannies, the long tail, the skiing app, the cross-country skiing app, the cross-country skiing app for this specific mountain in France, you know, for this group of people and retirees at this retirement community, they're going to have their own dedicated app for them. And it will just be this long tail of apps and products and services, like you're saying, that could be bespoke or that could be for, you know, just pickleball, just in Austin, or just in northern

in Austin, et cetera. So very cool stuff and great job to the team. Thanks, Jason. Yeah, can I just ask, is there any app that you want built now that's so cheap and easy to do, Jason? An app for me to be built? I don't have one off the top of my head, no. I just did a landing page for Founding University, and I looked at it and I was like, huh, that landing page would be, you know, last year or two years ago if I asked some average

member of our team to make a landing page, what they would have built. So I do think, you know, the refinement of design is the piece I'm kind of interested in. And I also did a quick one where I said, make me a fasting app. And it used zero as its inspiration, but it didn't have great design. And so the design piece, I think, will be really interesting, whether it happens in Adobe or Canva or inside a lovable, you know, or some combination. The ability to make world-class design is the other big unlock, as opposed to, you know, let's call it, you know, six, seven out of ten level design. And that takes taste, right? And we'll see if the machine can have taste eventually. Anton, just before we let you go, two things. One,

that worked and now my leaderboard function. So thank you. And two, there's been a lot of conversation about the potential for churn amongst fast-growing AI startups. And you guys are one of the fastest growing out there. So just before you go, what's churn like amongst your customer base today? And Is it changing, getting better or getting worse as time goes on? Yeah, so we're seeing this smiling retention curves. Not that much smiling, but they're flattened. And there's a lot of people that come in and they're like, oh, there's a new AI tool. I want to try it.

But for us, which is uncommon, at 45% of the users, that's where the retention line completely flattens out. So that's how it looks right now. And the reason for people, the 55% leaving is currently that there are places where as a non-technical person, it's very hard to kind of build out your entire dream. But this is absolutely changing super fast. So in a few weeks or so, more and more non-technical people are going to be able to build out full SaaS companies. It would be awesome. Congratulations on the early success.

and we'll look forward to following your progress. Well done. Thanks, Anton. All right. Jason, you, my friend, wanted to talk about sovereign wealth funds,

and I am all here for it. So for folks who need to catch up, today at the Oval Office, the president announced the creation of a sovereign wealth fund here in the U.S. Jason, you had ideas on how to fund this thing, natural resources,

crypto. Yeah. You seem bullish. First, we should start with what is a sovereign wealth fund and what's the, purpose of it. So if your country isn't in 36, 37, $38 trillion in debt and you have some natural resource, let's say Norway with their oil reserves or Australia with their mining reserves,

they have rare earth minerals there. It's a pretty big landmass. Those are owned by the country. So what do we have in America? Well, I think our oil is mostly privately owned, but we do have land that we owned. A large percentage of land in the United States is owned. Or you could take some amount of taxpayer dollars and put that into a sovereign wealth fund. So what is the point of a sovereign wealth fund? Typically, you have a sovereign wealth fund because you have excess capital and you need to do something with it. We do not have excess capital. We have massive debt. So this is very strange to be bringing up right now because what are we going to do? Go into debt. Create a sovereign wealth fund. Saudi has a massive debt.

of sovereign wealth fund because they're sitting on top of oil. Same with the UAE. Same with Qatar, those places then want to deploy with their sovereign wealth fund intelligently the people's share of that in order to get a return or to achieve strategic interest. So the reason you have it is because you have excess capital and the reason you deploy it is to grow it for your people to and or create some sustainable future. Hey founders, I want to share with you an experience that I love. And that's when I get ads that are relevant to me, not some nonsense that is not targeted. The other day, I got an ad for a fund management platform. And it was a new one that I hadn't heard of and I managed a fund. So I was able to schedule a call with them. That's amazing. It's not rocket science. It's just targeting. And how did that happen? It happened on LinkedIn. If your business is marketing to other businesses doing B2B advertising, LinkedIn, ads is amazing because it guarantees that you reach the right audience. I don't need an ad for HR tools as an example, right? There are other people who work in HR. I work in venture. So you want

the HR people to get the HR ads. You want the venture capitalists to get the fund management software and services ads. Makes total sense. And LinkedIn's advertising tools will connect you to decision makers based on their firm graphics. So you may not have heard that term before. That's your job title, your industry, your company size, and more. LinkedIn has two things that you need to grow this year. First, reach. LinkedIn has over a billion members, 130 million of them are decision makers, and of course 10 million are C-level executives. And number two, LinkedIn has impact. B2B marketers report two to five times higher return on ad spend compared to other social platforms so you don't waste your money. Plus 79% of B2B marketers

say LinkedIn is the best platform for paid media. LinkedIn allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers. So start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today. We'll even give you a hundred dollar credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash this weekend startups to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Terms and conditions do apply. And Alaska has this, right?

So Alaska gives a dividend, I think, too. You can look it up what it is. But there is a universal basic payment in Alaska. because of, I guess, some of the mineral rights that are there that are owned by the state. And the state of Texas actually owned some land with oil in it, and they put it into a trust for a University of Texas. So there are local state-level sovereign wealth funds essentially, trusts, I guess. It might be how they're described. But this makes no sense for the United States right now, because we have debt. If we had excess money, like let's say we own a bunch of

prime real estate in major cities for the government, and we don't need that office space because we've downsized the government and some number of people are working from home. If we sell that, well, we should take that cash, not invest it in venture capital funds like the one I run, or private equity funds or real estate funds. We should just pay down the debt so we have less interest payments. That makes more sense. So this seems like a bit of a boondoggle. However, here's why it's coming up. TikTok. Ah, good. Yes. The president says, we'll give you a license for TikTok. We get half of TikTok shares when it goes public. So it goes public. It's worth. He says a trillion dollars. People privately say $100 billion. Let's pick $200 billion. As a number, United States, that's a hundred billion dollar sovereign wealth fund now. And we give a billion dollars to each of a hundred venture capitalists, private equity, real estate investors to invest it with the whole. that the interest on that is greater than the interest we're paying on our loans for our debt.

If not, we should just take the shares of TikTok, sell them on the open market, take the $100 billion and pay down our debt, so we pay less. So this has terrible ramifications and downstream effects that we should also consider. Why would we have the government doing the job that we as a nation has, an elite practice in private, right? We want smaller government in private companies doing this. So it's not like there's a lack of venture capitalist private equity folks that our sovereign wealth fund needs to exist. It doesn't need to exist. And so it makes no sense. Well, one, agreed. I don't think this is what we should be doing with our time and money right now. But if you are the

president and you do want to have more influence on the market, more leverage to enact change and to kind of push things around the way you want to. Having your personal piggy bank, which is sovereign wealth fund, you know, writ large, I can kind of see it. But I really struggled to see how we're going to find the money to finance this thing. My question that I'm struggling with a little bit is, does this play into the whole idea of national, you know, Bitcoin or Crypto crust? Could those be melded together? Should we pursue that? It, to me, it seems a little risky for the national bank, but... Yeah, I mean, we own a certain number of bitcoins because of like Silk Road and other seizures. So there's an argument if you think it's going to appreciate and it's strategic to own it

that we take that strategic reserve and put it into this and then have somebody who's super intelligent manage it. So you would hire somebody from the private sector or a couple of people from the private sector to make an investment committee like the one that exists for CalPERS, California's retirement fund or one that exists Mubatala for the UAE and Abu Dhabi and their sovereign wealth fund. So you hire really

smart capital allocators to make the right decision of when to sell an asset or when to hold an asset. Sure, that's possible or you could come up with new ways to generate revenue. One example would be if we want to have a clear framework

for crypto, I think two things would make it very palatable. One, have an investment test where in order to trade crypto, you've got to take a basic test. If you go in Robin Hood and you want to trade options, which are complicated, you have to walk through some tools that explain to you how options work. Now, they're not required to do that. They choose to do that because they want to have people have a good experience with their product and not lose their money. So we should have accredited an accreditation test. Then the second piece might be, well, if you want to trade crypto, there needs to be some rails. Therefore,

any crypto being sold or bought has 10 basis points, five basis points, one basis point, one one hundredth of a percentage. So all these billions of dollars that are going back and forth, what if, if you traded, you know, XRP or Ethereum or Bitcoin, that little bit went into our reserve. Over time, you know, it might build up as a little mini tax. And then that tax would also go to fund the operation of the SEC or other folks who do enforcement, which if you were in crypto and you were a good actor, you would want to fund enforcement against bad actors so that the industry grows and is trusted, which kind of growing, kind of stalled, and it's not trusted. And so I think that there could be ways to look at generating new revenue here.

What if every time somebody wants to IPO or be on the United States market, they have to give 10 basis points of their IPO, whatever they offer, to go into the sovereign wealth fund. So if Alibaba or Uber or, you know, pick another country that has a publicly traded company, you know, if Mercedes was going public theoretically and they wanted to be traded on the U.S. stock market, we'd say, yeah, there's a 10-bip, you know, onboarding fee that goes into our sovereign wealth fund to help us grow our economy. But it feels also like then this is going to be highly politicized, which I think you're pointing out. You know, if MBS wants to build cities or build Neome, a new city, or buy, you know, live golf and do a golf thing, he can do those things because he is the prince.

He's the king. I guess he's the prince, right? So in the United States, we don't have princes. We have every four to eight years, it turns over. So now we would get into, okay, Obama did X, Y, and Z, Trump did A, B, and C, Tomlin, Biden did X, and did X, Y, and Z. And now we're going back and forth. And then the leadership of this has to get ripped out, plugged back in maybe.

And then whose priority is? Is it and why? It just feels like we want less government. Let's go with less government. Well, you could have, you know, five or 10-year terms or lifetime terms and you can have it be set out. But I think we've seen recently that not all norms about length of employment in the government persist.

So I struggle with that. But I was laughing actually because, uh, one of our live viewers dropped a funny comment. They said, I don't like the sovereign wealth fund, but I'm okay with taking 0.1% of tech shares at IPO. To what end in that case? Just stealing them? Taxes are good if they can pay down the debt and make the U.S. solvent. And we have a solvency issue.

So I think being creative with taxes is a good idea. Yeah. And I would put anything on the table in that regard if it is earmarked to pay down the debt, like immediately. Like, do not pass go. Do not put it in a slush fund. just pay down debt, pay down debt, balance the budget. That's all that matters right now. We're on the brink of insolvency. Looking through the list of sovereign wealth funds, because I was just going through the top 10 prepping for the show today, it's basically all oil money.

And so I wonder if there is a way we could create something involving if you're leasing public lands, if you're using public resources, take a slightly larger cut, put that money into a sorrow wealth fund. I can make it work, but I do agree fundamentally that it's a bit of a boondoggle to use your term until we've made actual progress on reducing not only our aggregate debt, but our yearly deficits. The deficit has to get. Yeah. First thing is to stop the bleeding.

So getting the deficit under control is a good idea, right? If your revenue exceeds your spend, you know, or you're at break even, you've accomplished something. Here's another idea. Immigration hot button issue. Hey, if you're an immigrant here and you want a 10-year golden visa, you have to pay a million dollars in taxes over the next 10 years. or whenever you hit a million dollars in taxes, that's when you get your citizenship.

Boom. Like, we can come up with creative things. Now, that wouldn't be the only type of immigration we'd have, obviously. Yeah. But that could be the golden visa, which other countries have. You make an investment, it goes into the sovereign wealth fund, and then you get a visa. And if you're a good citizen for some period of time, you can get to become an actual citizen of the country. So there are all kinds of ways.

If our biggest resource is people want to be here, well, why wouldn't we try to monetize that to pay down our debt. Anything to pay down the debt and balance the budget is my best opinion. Would you be in favor, just about bawling, of adding a couple hundred basis points to the corporate tax rate to help that issue? I think everything should be on the table in terms of taxes, and I would always start with the most affluent. So you don't want to mute economic activity, but you do want to pay down this debt. So if corporations had to pay, you know, increasingly high minimums on their cash hordes, you know, if they had to pay based a minimum tax on certain amounts of revenue. If individuals who had, you know, I'm not in favor of wealth

taxes because people can leave, so you have to be judicious in this. But if people have over some very large number of equities, maybe they get charged a very small amount. Again, when I say like 10 basis points, if you tell me, I had to pay 10 basis points every year on my, you know, economic holdings over X millions of dollars, I'd be like, don't like it, but not going to kill me. And if it balances the budget, short, as long as the waste, fraud, abuse is also getting taken care of at the same time, no rich person, no affluent person, no affluent company is going to feel bad about paying a little more in taxes if they know it's not being wasted. And they know that it actually goes towards balancing the budget, which, you know,

if you're running a startup, you know this, like you, because you run out of money. We have this magical gift that could only exist for a short period of time where we get to print imaginary money and people still want to buy it. And that may not last forever. Well, not unless stable coins become the next big thing and they put all their money into T-bills. I mean, that helps a little bit. But it's around the edges.

I'm curious to see when we get to defense spending and, and waste fraud and abuse there. Because the Pentagon, as people famously point out, hasn't passed an audit. in some time. And I'm curious what, okay, here's a fun game, Jason, what fraction of DOD spending

do you think is wasted? I'm going to go with double digits. 25% probably? I mean, if you don't have to pass an audit, if you don't have to be efficient, and everybody just says,

hey, you know, it's defense. It's defense. We can't touch it. You know, then you're never going to have efficiency or competition. And so,

you know, the competition's here. Venture capitalists are investing in, um, military technology now and plus plus is going away. So we have to attack everything. And so that's, I think, one of the things we're seeing now with Doge and USAID and all these controversial things that are occurring and causing a bit of chaos and making people ring their hands.

My best advice is give it 100 days. Better it's happening, even if you don't like it, better it's getting under control and give it 100 days and then see what happens. That's my best advice. We're five days into it, maybe 10. Give it 100 days. People don't, people forget, but two weeks ago, I had hair. I had a full head of hair and now it's all fallen. No, that's not true.

All right. So a couple weeks ago, we had the guy behind deep research from Google on the show. Great interview, great time. You were a big fan of the product. Sure. I'm a big fan of the product. Then over the weekend, open AI, everyone's favorite closed AI shop, dropped their own product. And Jason, did you know that they all?

also called it deep research? It's fascinating that they, uh, I'm shocked that, uh, uh, in any way, uh, we would have open AI do something like steal somebody else's. I, he's kind of laughable, right? They just called it the same exact thing. Okay, sure. All right. Sure. Uh, anyways, I, I, I,, I've pulled this segment from the announcement video, um, and I think it's a pertinent example to something that you really care about, but I also have, uh, I have a quick demo to show us. So here is what open AI announced, uh, recently. In case you have been living, under the proverbial rock.

We are introducing a capability called deep research. What is deep research? Deep research is a model that does multi-step research on the internet. And what it does is it discovers content, it synthesizes content, and it reasons about this content, adapting its plan as it uncovers more and more information. So this is a finance problem. So I'm an investment analyst in the Silicon Valley VC firm. I want to analyze the market for civilian supersonic air travel and prepare a thorough investment

memo and then many other specifications. And so the model clarifies and we provided some additional requirements for the memo. And then the model kicked up the task. And as you can see, it went in research for seven minutes, used 12 different sources and then came back to us with quite a comprehensive report of the field. And you can imagine if you were doing this for your job. This would be quite helpful to bootstrap your research as you're doing your initial investigation. Yeah. How much did they pay the original researchers for the report they built on top of their research? I guess if they're giving citations, they're going to claim it's fair use. These deep research projects are really impressive because they are, as they read the internet

and scrape the internet, they figure out what questions to ask next. So if you were, and we did this, remember we did it with the model when we were doing our model of what would it take for self-driving cars? Yes. Oh, you know, for all of US rides. Well, when you ask it, hey, what are, it might ask, what are US rides? And it's like, well, there's car rides. And it'd be like, okay, are there any other rides?

and you'd be like, well, there's subway rides and public transportation, would you like to include those? Yeah, those count as rides. Oh, okay. Are there other rides? Oh, yeah, there are school buses. Oh, you know, there's carpooling. Whatever it is, it might find things that you didn't anticipate asking a basic question. And that reasoning and logic really does take things to the next level, as we just saw at the beginning of the program with lovable. So when you start using lovable.dev, I wonder if it was, when it did mine, it said, I'm looking, I'm using zero fasting as inspiration. And I was like, oh, okay, well, that's interesting. It basically did a search in its reasoning. Are there other fasting apps out there? What can we learn from them? What are their features? And then it probably did a scrape of somebody at ZDNet or CNET doing a review of zero fasting. And, what features they highlighted there and then said, oh, well, let's create those features here. So it's using some journalist or maybe reviews from the App Store to then go figure out what other questions to ask and then build software. So this kind of reasoning is taking it from

being not just, let's say, a business process outsourcing worker in Manila in India. That's like, okay, let's fill in these variables into the database. Let's do this type of OCR, character recognition, whatever. And then say, Oh, what would a college person do? Oh, what would a PhD person do? What would a management consultant do? And I think they're kind of like already as good as management consultants. Oh, I absolutely think so.

So two things. One, Jason, I do have a demo to show you. I did a deep research example, but I also, while we were talking, did ask deep research from open AI the Robotaxy question. So it's currently working on that for us. So we'll take a look. But just to show what I came up with for folks out there on the video, I'll try to do a bit of playcasting here, but I asked

deep research from Open AI to do some work for me on the economics of being a small video game publisher, one of my pet industries, took seven minutes, 30 sources and came up with, and I'm not going to read this clearly because it's thousands of words, a pretty interesting rundown of funding sources and then

economic viability between major releases, essentially how do you handle episodic revenue, Jason? And I was very familiar with this question already. And so I asked it because I wanted to just know how good of a job could it do and could it teach me something new? And the answer to the second part of that was in this case, no,

but I thought it was incredibly comprehensive if you didn't know anything. And so I think that these are more like, if you don't have the information or knowledge, they'll get you up to a solid B plus, but they're not going to take you from a B plus to an A plus if you were already there. And that is almost slightly disappointing to me, but also based on what you said, this is taking stuff that already exists.

If you've already read the source materials, what more can it add? There is a limited corpus of information in the world. So if you were like, hey, how do I raise a venture capital firm today? How do I raise my first venture capital firm today? It can go and tell you the entire history of how venture capital firms were made and microfunds and all this stuff and give you the architecture. But that doesn't give you the wisdom of asking somebody who just did it in the past two or three years

or somebody who's an LP who said no to the last 10 that have come into their firm and say, you know, strategically, here's what I think's going to happen in the marketplace. In other words, predicting the future. So perhaps deep research is where we're at now. And then future predictions is where we will get to or current strategy or how to apply this knowledge. So if it was, you know, the history was index the world's information, find the world's information, and then AI guessing the next word or answering your simple question, then evolving onto research and being able to organize, you know, the entire corpus of information. Well, the next piece is then either an agent executing on it or an agent or an LLM giving you advice and predictions of the future. So there's

not much left here. All that's left for the AI to do is to build the venture fund and go raise the money or advise you on how to do it. Right. And in your case, build the game studio or build the game. Sure. And so feels like we're on the cusp of the end game. It does feel like we're on the cusp of the end game. I'm increasingly impressed and I'm starting to think without forcing myself too, oh, I should use this more often.

This will actually help me as opposed to this is a toy I'm experimenting with, much more that I should build this into my day-to-day workflow. And I've been doing the same thing for a long time, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, a lot of typing stuff down. And so I'm probably overly set in my pattern. So if it's good enough now to actually jostle me from those ruts, that says something to me that's pretty material. I think this is better than what I've seen from Google thus far.

But I bet you that Google has something that's baking and in two months it'll be out and then opening I will come back. The pace here, Jason, remains very quick. And I think we're going to see the stuff get out pretty broadly. Currently, you have to pay the $200 a month open AI subscription, but they are going to bring it down to the lower price tiers quickly. And we've talked about AI scaling laws and costs thereof. So I presume in 12 months this will be done in one tons of the time for $1.2.

I think the reason they're limiting it to the $200 one isn't just to make money. I think it's because when you fire these things off, I think it's firing off concurrently many queries. And I think that their servers would shut down because people, if every query was deep research, you know, Oh, analyze the Luca trade, analyzed all the trades in history. Like, it could be launching 10, 20, 50, 500. I mean, the AI would go crazy. So there must be some cap. And I would love to hear from somebody, what are the caps on these?

Like, does it fire off the first 50 and then stop and then require you to then say, hey, give me some more knowledge here and ask follow-up questions? Because these things could run indefinitely. You could tell the AI, just give me scenarios of trades and analyze trades, potential trades, future trades, and make an agent that does this, and it would just burn through cycles and compute. So I think that's where we're at right now is people are maybe concerned rightfully of how much compute is available, inference is available to do all this and put it all together. Then there's storage and electricity. I mean, this could get very, very, very expensive

over time. But that's awesome, because if it's expensive, it's going to get people to work on making it cheaper. And that's going to be awesome. That's more capacity, more bandwidth, more storage, more compute, et cetera. That's actually awesome. I had a very different take on the potential risks here or issues. I was thinking about the poor internet out there. Like, if you're Bob and you have Bob's website and Open AI comes to your website and just pounds it all the time with deep research queries, couldn't this actually increase the total

overall stress load on the internet, let alone the open AI server base? And you make no money from it. The truth is they've probably ingested and are lying and have it in their index. They probably scraped all the. data and they're keeping it on their own hard drives over time or the most common stuff in cash, which they could claim it's in a cache and they don't know what's in the cash. But what if the cash becomes like the size of the English-speaking internet, which if you were to look at Google cash, almost every web page when you click Google Cash used to come up. I don't know today what

the status of that product is, but it used to be every single Engadget page was cashed. Every single tech crunch page was cash. So they could claim it's in a cash, but it's really, for all intents and purposes, ingest it. And they don't need to go read your web page. So this does actually put us back to the point of, are you licensing this data? Do you have permission to do this? Should you need permission to do this? Should you be paying for it? And then if somebody does pay for it, I think that would be the power move. Whichever one of these companies is getting towards hundreds of billions of dollars in value, why not just start buying content sites?

Yeah. How much is CNET worth now? How much is TechCrunch worth to Yahoo? How much is Engadget worth? 30. Yeah, so just, why not just buy them and why not subsidize them and pay the journalist to keep producing content

and then have it as exclusive to your platform? So that's brilliant. And I love that idea. But also, I was thinking, you know, you were talking earlier about how, you know, the LLM's never going to have the wisdom of the person who did the thing most recently, I wonder if in the end, we're going to have

a lot of AI model companies literally buying people's time and sitting down and asking them questions and just feeding that directly in. Yeah, that exists as a concept. There are third-party startups that will have developers, accountants, lawyers,

answer questions or look at questions being asked and verify them. Think about Mechanical Turk from Amazon, but for white collar folks. So if you said to the AI, make me a logo in an Art Deco design and it got it wrong, there are some designers somewhere who are answering questions on behalf of language models and these AI companies to refine it.

Just like in the early days, Google and Amazon had people saying, describe this image. Oh, that's two women baking a cake and, you know, they're in a country kitchen. Boom. So, yeah, that's actually happening. And that could be a job in the future, which would be a human in the loop working for an AI company. Yeah, that could be the future of this. Of course, you can create all the tools in the world.

But if people don't have the motivation to use them and create something of value for their fellow humans, it's for moot. So we saw this with the introduction of the VHS and the digital camcorder. Everybody said, wow, there's going to be like so many more movies and documentaries. And, you know, it did get cheaper to make them. and yes, there is more content because it is cheaper to make. Yeah. But it wasn't, I guess what they would call a Cambrian explosion, you know, that everybody made a documentary film or that there were a thousand times as many documentary films,

unless you count like maybe YouTube existing as a concept. So I do wonder like if people are actually going to use this to be productive. I think they will because they're voting with their wallet. So the information had some reporting out in the last couple of days. the information writes that paid subscribers to Chad GPT nearly tripled the 15.5 million last year from 5.8. And that would put it on by their estimate about a $4 billion run rate. And then their API business, they right, grew to what they think is about a $3.2 billion run rate.

So if that is correct, and we're working with estimates and third party data and doing our best, but that would put Open AI on a $7 billion run rate just from those two products. So I think people are voting with their dollars. I mean, I had to upgrade my open AI account to the expensive one to get this today to play with it for the show because I didn't want to talk about it without having used it. And I bet you I'm not alone, man. There's going to be a lot of sampling of these tools, as you pointed out with lovable. You know, people will sample them. They'll try them.

They might try five of them at once. Forget to cancel two, cancel three, then eventually cancel the other two. So that's happened before. It happened in the app economy. And then after people go crazy sampling, they actually know what they need. Things are free. The winners become apparent. And, yeah, chat GPT is going to have 100 million people paying for chat GPT at 20 bucks a month.

No doubt in my mind, that would be $14 billion a year. I mean, 24? 24 billion a year. So if they had a, yeah, because it's $20 a month. But eventually, I think that price comes down to $10. $100 a year for your LLM, $100 a year. I mean, it's conceivable you could have 250 million people paying for a product or service like that

in the Western world, which would be $2.5 billion a month, which would be $30 billion a year. So there's a $30 billion tam, just like Netflix, is on average probably $10 for 250 million people. Actually, Netflix has gotten surprisingly expensive. I know you and I don't track every dollar that changes in our month. monthly expenses, but like, it's like $20 a month now. I think it's like doubled since.

Yeah, but then you also have places like India, China, other places that are $2 a month, $3. You need on average. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Any time you do, yeah, these averages, you got to take into account what people in India and China and other developing countries or, you know, places that don't have as strong of a dollar. But it's, uh, super impressive. And I think the building of verticalized app and starting companies is going to be changed forever. two people are going to be able to create products and services that make $10 million a year. That is going to change venture capital and the economy forever. So the question there that I have, Jason, is it going to be, let's imagine there's

$100 million in revenue for an idea or a project or a company. And let's say in today's world, one startup will go out there, dominate the market, and you get all $100 million in revenue. Do you foresee in the future five or 10, two-person teams doing $10 million revenue apiece and they're all kind of existing at the same time? Or do we still see kind of a consolidation effect that we traditionally see in software and technology companies rolling those up? There will be certainly roll-ups in M&A that occur. It also requires that somebody want to go pursue that opportunity.

So many times you'll see somebody who has a really interesting medium-sized business. They're like running a store in a local community or they have six of these stores in a local community. and it's making $50 million a year, and it's like they dominate the Northeast for tires, but nobody else wants to go build that company that does flat tires because it's arduous and painful. So you also need to have somebody want to go and make a better version of,

I'll keep bringing up the skiing app, I use slopes. Sure. Does somebody have the motivation to take, if that person's making $10 million a year, does somebody want to go take the time to charge half as much, and steal the customer base and make a million or steal a portion of the customer base

who's price sensitive. So, you know, that's the reality of businesses. Somebody has to want to go displace a company that requires motivation. One of the things that might happen is in society, you'll have so much abundance that you won't be motivated or more people will be motivated to stay home and consume than create. And that's kind of where we are now.

I'm trying to figure out that'll be net bullish or net bearish for venture capital, because consumption on one hand drives GDP, especially here in the U.S., so that's good. But on the other hand, I think people still talk about venture capital being essentially founder constraint versus market constraint. Like, there's not enough people who can break through walls and shoe glass and so forth to actually found more generational companies. Yeah. So I hope people... Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, here's my thought about the $10 million point in slopes. Ten million dollars is $10 million worth of motivation by definition. That's a lot. I don't know, man. Would you like to have another

10 million? Sure. Sure. I mean, if you want to go pursue it and then it's a competition. So even though we could both create slopes today and make that competitive product, well, if that person is on the edge, keep coming up with new features, keep looking at the latest APIs and they just iterate and they keep the product getting better and better, then people, if the amount they're charging is less than the value of people are getting, what's the reason to leave? And that's what happened with Netflix. Netflix has actually pricing power, or Disney Plus. Like, am I quitting Disney

Plus with three daughters? No. Just keep putting the Marvel and Disney and Star Wars stuff in there and I'm good. I'll be subscribed until I die. Yeah. The end, right? Yeah. So you have it, folks. Elsewhere in the world, just really briefly, before

we jump, DeepSeek is catching a lot of bands. And Jason, I wasn't going to bring this up on the show. But did you know Deepseek is still the number one ranked app in many national iOS app stores today. I didn't think it was going to have that kind of stay in power, but something to keep an eye on. I'm shocked by consumer demand. And just so people also know the ranking in iOS is determined also by

recency of a new app. So it's not just how many raw downloads. It has to do with how many new people are putting it on their phone for the first time. So you can look up the app store algorithms. They will give, you know, if a million people down. downloaded Spotify today, but 100,000 downloaded some new music app that competes with it. That new music app might actually outrank Spotify because it's 100,000 new downloads as opposed to upgrades.

Caviots, caveats. I mean, so here's the U.S. App Store rankings, DeepSeek. You go to the United Kingdom, Deep Seek. You go to Canada, Deep Seek's number one. Like, that's... Check back in three months, six months, yeah. I mean, it's...

And it also can be gameed. So I wouldn't put it above the Chinese for gaming it. Like, why is it going to number one? I wonder, like, is it because it's free? I think it's because it's free and open AI, like we just discussed, wants you to pay for things. But in Texas, the governor has banned deep seek and red note on government devices. In Taiwan, it's banned on government devices.

The Navy and NASA are limiting usage. Congress wants to ban staff from using it. So there is a slow rolling institutional response to this. The hosted version. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because the hosted version would then send everything directly to the CCP.

Yeah, of course you want to do that. And then the non-hosted version, if you put it on your laptop or you were to run your own instance on your favorite cloud provider would be fine, I guess. I think that's, I don't see a security issue there, but I'm not a cybersecurity guy, so, you know, check with your local. It's open source. So you'd have to find some backdoor. It would be sending the data back to the mothership somehow. But the hosted version, certainly, I would never allow on any government property. No way, no how.

Huge loophole. All right. Jason, just before we go, do you want to talk about tariffs at all? I mean, give everybody the overview. It seems to me like these are, you know, based on what I'm seeing, they're a negotiating tactic that Trump loves to use

because it makes world leaders call him and bend the knee. Okay, great. I guess that works. And then the other piece I've seen is there's a couple of people on the fringe in the, um, let's say, economic fringe who believe there is a way for a desirable market like ours to enact tariffs

and get rid of income tax. And that is some crazy, obscure thought of how the U.S. could change over time. Where do you want to go with it? Well, I was just surprised to watch how fast people's perspectives have changed inside of technology. We had Anthony Pompeiano on the show a couple months back. What I like about Pomp is that whatever he does, it's 110%. And so when Trump announced that there was going to be 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and 10% more on China, pomp wrote a letter explaining why tariffs are good, why they're not going to cause inflation. And then Trump got on the call with the Mexican president for like 20 minutes and they sorted out something and then that was taken down. But can you imagine how tough it must be to like go forth

and defend tariff policy only to have it be taken apart at the last minute? Like, it's been, it's been kinetic. It's been very, very busy over the last 48 hours. And I was raised in the Chicago School of Economics, if you will. And so I'm not a tariff guy. I'm a free trade guy. I don't like them as, I especially don't like tariffing our allies for no reason. Like, I mean, Canada is a perfectly fine hat for the nation, respect for our Canadian friends.

They're mad. Like, we've actually managed to really anger. an ally that we tend to not even think about. And I think that's just a mistake. And it's not good economics. I mean, if we charge them an extra amount to get their attention to close the border and then we relent,

I think that's probably what's happening here because I don't think we don't want to be able to send our stuff to Canada. And then it just, where does it end? Like, you charge 25%, they charge 30, you go 35. Like, it just kind of eventually unravels. And it's, better for the world if the labor to build products and services goes to the cheapest place

possible, so more people have access to that product or service with the obvious caveat of you don't want to have an interdependency, right? You don't want to have the not be able to get drugs to your country or, I don't know, surgical equipment, whatever it is, gasoline. You do need to have some redundancy in the supply chain. So things being made all in one place is dangerous, but I think this is all posturing and it'll, it's just noise. And again, uh, focus on your startup. Read the news once a day. Read the news. No, don't read the news once a day. Just tune in to twist three times a week. Perfect. We do this Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays. You can get all the news you need in 60 to 90 minutes. Jason and I will be here taking you through all of it.

We have an awesome founder interview coming on Friday with another space company, Jason, that I'm so excited about. And things are cooking along. So we'll see everyone back here on Wednesday. All right. Cheers, everybody. it.