This Week in Startups - SpaceX IPO Day: What Wall St. and the media missed | E2300

Episode Date: June 13, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by:Plaud https://Plaud.ai/twistPilot https://pilot.com/twistAgree https://agree.comIM8 Health https://IM8health.com/twistAfter watching Elon build out his rocket (and AI) company over the past 20 years, Jason celebrates the SpaceX IPO on a new TWiST. He explains why some investments are evaluated based on earnings and current numbers, while other stocks are bets on expensive visions for the future, and why SpaceX why likely pay off across multiple time horizons.PLUS Polsia solo founder Ben Cera is back with guidance for founders on creating a “Purple Cow”: a unique experience that makes their brand memorable.Guest:Ben Cera on X: https://x.com/BenceraPolsia: https://polsia.com/Polsia on X: https://x.com/polsiaBen on TWiST E2256 (Feb 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCce8e02IswRelevant Links:SpaceX: https://www.spacex.com/SPCX on Yahoo Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPCX/Starlink: https://www.starlink.com/Planet Labs: https://www.planet.com/Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/Valor Equity Partners: https://www.valorep.com/Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow” on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-New-Transform-Remarkable/dp/1591843170Uber Ice Cream stunt article: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ubers-brilliant-marketing-stunt-hail-195946535.htmlHillsborough Flintstones House article: https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/The-Flintstone-House-is-now-for-rent-on-Airbnb-10420107.php“19 Hours Inside the Airbnb X-Mansion” article: https://www.theringer.com/2024/05/29/pop-culture/x-mansion-airbnb-x-men-icons-experienceWas The Pepsi Challenge based on LIES? https://www.historyoasis.com/post/the-pepsi-challengeCloudKitchens: https://cloudkitchens.com/Cluely: https://cluely.com/Timestamps:0:00 SpaceX IPO details2:12 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!7:21 The voting vs. weighing investment framework9:41 Pilot: Focus on your product, let Pilot handle your bookkeeping. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to https://pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year.19:53 Agree - Stop chasing invoices at https://agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life!22:25 The media's SpaceX criticisms and "hot takes"23:54 Ben Cera of Polsia is back26:53 Why Jason says no to a free tier29:10 IM8 Health: Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to https://IM8health.com/twist and use the code TWiST to get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets, and 10% off your order.34:27 The wisdom of Seth Godin's "Purple Cow"50:37 The "Pepsi Challenge" model1:05:45 Lon got a dog, Jason got routers1:10:37 The YouTuber to movie theater pipeline1:15:20 Jason's new favorite travel bagSubscribe 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/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/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.com

Build an AI that runs companies autonomously. Pulsia is an AI that builds and runs your company as you sleep. Building the product, fixing the bugs, running support, running meta ads even. So I gave Pulsia my inbox for it to do the fundraising itself, right? Explain what's going on here because this is brilliant. This weekend startups is brought to you by Agree.com. Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract to cash stack. Go to agree.com and tell them Jason.

and sent you to get 50% off for life. I.M.8 Health. Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to I.m8health.com slash twist and use the code Twist to get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets, and 10% off your order. And Pilot. Focus on your product. Let Pilot handle your bookkeeping.

Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com slash twist and get $1,200 off your first year. All right, everybody, welcome to Twist, June 12th, 2026. Today is the SpaceX IPO. Well done. It's trading, and it's trading up, I think, up 30 percent, 25 percent. That's our top story of the day. Of course. We're going to talk all about it. People have a lot of questions for me, and I'll take questions on the SpaceX IPO and all the details of it from our live audience on X.com slash TWI startups or YouTube. Go search for this week in startups.

Also, he's Lon Harris. How you doing, brother? Hey, doing good. Happy to be back in the studio. Yes, we're back. We're back. I know your dog. Let me get off duty.

We'll talk about the dog situation. We'll talk about Barry in the off-duty segment, for sure. Yeah. I love dogs. You know that. But I might be sending this dog back. Okay. Let's send my dog back.

Listen, if you don't show him for work, I can send that dog back. She's not going back to New Braunfell. She's staying with me. I'm just giving that dog a fair warning. You can't keep the editorial. director distracted and distracted that dog has been. We'll talk about it in off duty. Yeah.

But let's get started. Sure. First story. Well, we got to talk about before we even go into the SpaceX IPO, which is obviously our top story, do want to give a shout out to our friends at Plaude. You can see Jason and I both wearing our plod pins. Helping you keep track of everything that you've got going on. I was saying for dog care and paying attention to all of my dog's needs, it's been

essential. I recorded myself with the trainer last night. So, you know, your trainer's there for two hours, and then she leaves an immediate, you're like, what did she say to do? What was I supposed to do? What's the protocol? But not with Claude. I recorded the whole session.

And then I've got perfect notes. Everything's very organized point by point. Here's exactly all the tips that the trainer gave me. All right. I went to urgent care the other day. It wasn't urgent. Okay. Good.

But this is a new discovery for me. I've had, what do you call it, like concierge doctors? Sure. Yeah. But last like 10 years. Okay, listen, I'm not trying to flex here or something, but from $10,000 to $50,000 a year, I pay on top of my insurance to have a concierge doctor for the family, depending on where I've lived. They come to your house.

Yeah, whenever you need a prescription, you meet a phone call. It's like an on, yeah, on-demand doctor service. But I've also been like, I kind of feel like I'm getting ripped off. So anyway, now that I live in Texas, there's an urgent care between every other Starbucks. I don't know if you've noticed this. Yes. There's an urgent care everywhere. And HEB has a drive-through pharmacy.

The two things that I need to get done if I have something going on. So I had this little thing where a mosquito bite I had somehow got infected. And then all of a sudden on my other leg I get another mosquito bite. There's bugs in Texas.

The only downside is the heat and the bugs. The bugs are crazy. So I solved the bug problem because I got two big bug killers in the backyard problem solved. But not before. I got a little infection. And I don't know

and the stuff. I go. I got my plot on me. I turn it on. I asked the woman, hey, do you mind if I take some notes with my note taker? She says, yeah, tell her all about plot. Boom, I record it. I send it to my wife. Boom, right as I'm leaving, I share it with her. Because she wants to know the download. What's going on with this thing on your leg? You got this cut in the abrasion. But it's itchy as heck. She's giving me all the rundowns of the possibilities, the antibiotics. It transcribed it perfectly. And I just thought to myself, now I can feed this into. my whoop and all my other stuff. So now I'm getting into this habit of recording all my health stuff.

Sure. Thanks to my plod. Give them the code. Yeah. So you need to get a plod note pin S if you want to be keeping track of these important conversations like us. You can check it out. Plaud.

aI slash twist. If you use the code twist, you're going to get 10% off your plod pin. Plod pin is amazing. There's also one that goes on the back of your phone that I carry. Right. All of these are incredible. You get to choose.

What I like about the plod is. Plyde PINN, you can also wear it as a wristband. So you may have heard me on previous episodes where I was like, I don't like these things. These no takers, there's too many of them. I'm concerned about being recorded. Plaud, number one, I lost that battle. Everybody's recording everything. Sometimes you have to accept defeat.

It's the world we live in, granola, plod, everything. There's P. Zoom has recording. Meta Raybans recording you. Yeah. Amanda doing those. Yeah. Mandela Lisser. I had to like, I literally had to ban.

from the French laundry, Amanda, because she was doing it at the French lawn. Oh, yeah. She's like, oh, I'm making a thing. I said, you're making people uncomfortable. Two people complain about it. So you've got to be careful with these things. Yeah.

Here's the thing. Plaude addresses this with a bright light. When you're recording, you know you're recording. So use it with care. The world loves these things now, and the value is great. Just, you know, be a good human being. Exactly.

All right. Top story. Did they get a code? I gave it to them, but we'll do it again. Check it out of Plaude. If you use the code twist, you're going to get 10% off your new plot. So we applaud. People at the all in liquidity were going crazy about it because they recorded each of the

panels and then shared them with people. So great for conferences, by the way. You're at a conference. You record all this stuff. I can't believe it. The open mic at a conference works. Yeah. So the fidelity of the plot is applaudable in and of that.

You can literally go to a conference and have it take all your notes. And then you can just say into it, make sure I share this with mine, whatever it is, you know. SpaceX, you may have heard about it. This is Rocket Company. They do some AI stuff, an up-and-coming startup. They've gone IPO. Their public offering launched today.

SPCX is the stock ticker. They're planning to sell more than $555 million shares. Opening price, $135 a share. Their total raise is going to be about $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion dollar valuation. Elon Musk's personal stake valued it around $860 billion. but of course he can't start selling shares until the company hits all of these various milestones that he's set out. Trading begins today. This, of course, breaks the previous IPO record that was set in 2019 by Saudi Arabia,

state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco. That one value, that company at $1.7 trillion as well, it raised more than $29 billion. So, Jason, you want to break this down first? I know one of the questions that I saw that people were asking was, usually IPOs have sort of a sliding scale, like a price range. They set there at 135 per share, flat rate in or out, take it or leave it. So I want to hear your thoughts on that. And then, you know, breaking down sort of the other basic business lines here.

All right. So IPOs, everybody gets enamored with this moment in time. Having watched Elon build this business being with him for many of the first rocket launches, I toured the space in El Segundo when he first got it or was going to rent it. He was like, hey, come to check this up with me and explain to me what he was doing. Super inspiring, just, you know, as a friend to see him do this. It's just extraordinary. He really put a lot of his effort, net worth, into, obviously, Tesla.

At that point in time, the last American car company made was Jeep. Look, successful one that didn't go out of business. Like, DeLorean flamed out. All the other ones flamed out. It's a long thing. So I just want to say to my friend, congratulations. Because as excited as people are about this milestone, the true milestone was a number of times this company was on debt store when he had gotten kicked, beaten down, and got back up. I have never seen an entrepreneur more resilient than Elon Musk.

He, when he gets kicked, you know, he's got grit. He's got a work ethic. He's got a stamina that, you know, is extraordinary. I like to think I have like a pretty strong stamina. You work with me for a long time. You see how I just keep going and going and going. There's only like one or two people I've seen who go harder than I do at these things. And that's him. Like crazy to see him just work his way out of these problems. And it was gnarly at times. Sure. So congratulations on that. This is 20 years of hard work and everybody's excited about this one day. It's a financial transaction. It unlocks a lot of possibilities. One of the possibilities an IPL unlocks is capital. So he's got $75 billion, I think, and maybe with the green shoe, it's 80 or $85 billion. Right. The green shoe is like a little extra shares that could be sold.

It's a very small float. Banks buy a little bit more shares than the company is making available. And then if the stock goes down, they can sort of buoy, you know, like get some of the money back. And then if the stock goes up, they can just buy more shares directly from the company. For an accounting firm, keeping your books in order is table stakes. It's the bare minimum. It's the baseline. But for an early stage and series A founder, you need a partner that actually understands the world of startups. It's very different. And you have to understand the world of venture capital because startups have boards and venture capitals who've invested. And that partner is Pilot. Pilot is the largest accounting firm that's built specifically for startups. You're not just doing your taxes. You're getting CFO level advice on running your company. And those aren't just words. They have actual former CFOs and other season. operators on hand to answer your growth and scaling questions directly. All of their tools are intuitive. They're easy to use. You can track your expenses in real time. And Pilot's going to help

you model cash flow scenarios before you make big decisions. So stay focused on scaling and let Pilot take care of the books. Plus, Twist listeners get $1,200 off their first year. Go to pilot.com slash twist to get started. That's pilot.com slash twist. Right. So he, I think, ran this perfectly. And the CFO over there and the other people involved ran this process perfectly. They did things that had never been done before. They had multiple people working the book of business. They gave people, you know, really strong lockups based on milestones. And I think they gave like 30 percent to retail. Yes. I mean, I opened up my Robin Hood and it was like, hey, you want SpaceX shares. I was like, well, I got some over here. Yeah, maybe I'll get a couple more.

I don't know. Elon famously over the years has said he loves retail investors. He was excited about getting retail investors in. And I believe there was even a quote a few years ago, like, I'm going to allow at least 20, 30 percent of SpaceX to go to retail investors. Hold me to this. So P.P.K. Helper. Well, and I did see, like, people either being thrilled that they got 35 shares, 50 shares at the IPO price,

or like lamenting I only got 50 shares. Yeah. Anyway, this is extraordinary that that many people, and he democratized it to the level that they did. Now, there's a lot of hand-wringing about the various business units and the valuation. Yes. The market determines the valuation, and it's very hard for people to understand what's going on in the market. The market has two different functions, as I see it, when these issuance come out. Sometimes, as people have said, it's a weighing mechanism or a voting mechanism. when you look at venture capital and early stage investing, that's the discipline we have in our firm

and venture capital in general is a voting mechanism. We're voting on this entrepreneur, their team, and this market to emerge and this product to succeed. You're voting. But you're voting largely on products that do not yet exist, maybe have some level of product, market fit, et cetera. Then there's the weighing mechanism. Okay, Airbnb rents this many rooms. Next year, they're going to rent this many rooms. So if you're renting a certain number of rooms, you can just look at it. How many rooms did they rent last quarter compared to this one? Last year compared to this one. What's the revenue? What's the earnings? So those are two different functions in the world. And when you IPO, you start to sort out voting versus weighing, voting versus

weighing. We're still in the voting. And Elon's companies, Pallantier, very rare companies are voting on the future. Now, why does this exist for Elon's companies? And maybe not for, Airbnb or Uber, maybe for Robin Hood, where you get judged based on your performance. Well, some entrepreneurs are doing audacious things that put them in the category of the future and venture capital. So let's look at Tesla as an example. And then we'll get to SpaceX. Tesla has car sales. Okay, great. And then at the other end, they have Optimus. Optimus is clearly a vote on the future. humanoid robotics that will, you know, we'll start to see them in production, in, you know, customers next year and the year after. So when you make a Tesla bet, you can bet on the,

you can pick. Am I betting on Optimus? Am I betting on car sales? And then there's a little midway point, hey, robo-taxing, self-driving. So you get three ways to place a bet on that company. SpaceX, you can bet on Starlink, an existing business, and you can weigh it and look at its growth rate. you can also on SpaceX look at the future of Starlink, rather, where it connects to mobile phones. That doesn't yet exist in a major way. We haven't experienced it, but plenty of people have experienced Starlink. If the guy can deliver Starlink, the largest constellation, what are the chances he can deliver it to your phone and scale it from, I think, 10 million members, you know, subscribers to 100 million? I think the answer is 99.999%.

Right. I think it's like fate all complete. Then you look at the launch business. If you were betting on it 20 years ago, like Antonio Gracias and David Sachs did, man, they made a really spectacular bet for their LPs. Congratulations to both of those friends of mine who were complete visionaries. Now that business exists. You can weigh it.

You can weigh the space carriage business literally. How much does it cost to send a kilogram to space, you know, whatever it is? But then there's this business of, oh, well, what about data centers? What about a moon base? What about a Mars base? These are venture-type businesses to this day. So take the business. My best advice is split the business into short, medium, long-term. You know, you got Starlink, midterm, you have Starlink to phones, long-term, you have data centers in the moon base, and maybe taking things off asteroids and other businesses yet to emerge. Take the market cap, split into two buckets, in a private,

market, you'd have plenty of buyers for that future vision. And in the public markets, you would have plenty of buyers for the reality and the weighing mechanism. And that's what confuses people. Which bucket do I put it into? When it's Elon Musk, you put it into like three or four buckets, short, medium, long, and fantastical, right? And that's just his gift. He is able to pursue multiple of those visions at the same time, like Steve Jobs. Very few entrepreneurs are able to pursue this kind of vision concurrently. That's his gift. Right. That's his gift. He's able to keep three businesses, three business, four business lines in his brain at once. And I've sat with him while he does meetings. He's got a meeting about the nuances of, you know, the X, you know, formerly known as Twitter,

business and how it's structured, how the, you know, functionality works on a very granular basis. And then he's able to test which and talk to the people about the latest. starlink constellation. Then he's able to task switch to long-term, hey, show me the designs of the solar arrays for the data centers in space. Yeah, we saw this at All In Summit. He was talking, and he would go on this really long tangent

about robotic hands and, oh, we're redesigning Optimus's hands. So they're more like human hands. And then he would jump right into, oh, we're going to put these solar panels in space and that's how we're going to power the data center. He's, you're right. He could just jump between like 18 different. different fantastical ideas and like lock in on each one.

When you're all in on your business, no pun intended, pun intended, whatever you like, you are able to do those simultaneously. Most entrepreneurs can't keep multiple things in their brain like that. That's why I advise them. And I'll have many founders say, hey, Elon runs two businesses and it's why can't I? And I'm like, because you're not Elon. No one's making movies about you being Tony Stark, you know? Exactly.

I mean, listen, it is what it is. You know, some people have a certain capability. You know, Steve Jobs had it as well. He ran Pixar and he ran Apple at the same time. Jack ran X Twitter at the same time as running Square. Some people might argue he didn't do a great job running both. He should have just been focused on one. Yeah, it's all fair criticism from the peanut gallery. You know, the East Coast Wall Street folks are just so used to evaluating and weighing a business on earnings and future revenue. West Coast, East Coast, West Coast, West Coast, West Coast, Rap, East Coast, West Coast, West Coast Financial. So on the West goes, we're just like, yeah, obviously, like, that's the future. Let's see if he can do it. And then you're looking for 100 X. And then the people on Wall Street are looking for 10%, 15% year-over-year growth.

So that's the nature of the hand-wringing right now and the valuation. There's a lot of determinants here, short-term trading, long-term trading, the IPO pop. I wouldn't worry about all that stuff. If you want to be in the stock, there'll be many opportunities to get into it, just like there were many to get into Tesla or Apple. take the Tesla chart for however many years it's been public, take the Apple chart, take the Amazon chart, take the Google chart,

and you will see all the different opportunities up and down, the markets do all kinds of crazy things because of wars, recessions, great financial crisis. There's many times to get into a great stock. Generally, if you want to own one of these stocks, I don't like to give too much financial advice, but my best financial advice for my brother is if you love that company,

you love the management, you love the vision, you can dollar cost average into it over many years when it's down and everybody's selling and they don't believe in it, probably a good time to add. When it's at a peak and people are rationally exuberant, hey, if you need the money, maybe it's time to, you know, pair your position and have some cash for when it goes down again. But overall, time in market is greater than timing the market. If you've got some IPO shares, just squirrel them away. Market falls out of love with Tesla, Google, meta.

but you still believe in the management, you still look at the growth and believe in it, Uber, Coinbase, whatever it happens to be. Then that's the time to buy into it and use that opportunity when maybe people say there's blood in the streets. That's a great, like, lay person. I don't pay a lot of attention to stock strategy. That's all I do. You wait for like Amazon or something to have a terrible day and go down like 20%.

Just buy some Amazon. It's going to go back up. What do you think Amazon's going to go away? Agree has an incredible new offer exclusively for Twist. fans and family members go sign up at their easy to use all in one contract to cash stack and if you tell them jason sent you you're going to get 50% off for life agree is the number one fastest way to go from contract to cash this means gathering all those e-signatures the invoicing the billing the payments and of course revenue recovery no more jumping between four or five different platforms just to write out

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So there's a lot of skepticism, I think, in the media. And the one that I really wanted to ask you about is there's a lot of controversy about NASDAQ and some of these other stock indexes changing their rules so that SpaceX can get into index funds much faster. Like usually an IPO, it might take six months. It might take a year for that new stock, no matter how valuable, no matter the market cap, to get into like the NASDAQ 100 or any of these other funds that a lot of stock index is like, well, then automatically buy if you enter the NASDAQ.

My prediction is the media is generally wrong about these things. The media is going for ratings. Podcasters are going for ratings most of the time. There are some thoughtful people on podcasts. There are some thoughtful people in the media. But generally, in my experience, if anything from Tucker Carlson and, you know, Megan Kelly or the MSNBC host, Rachel Maddo, When they're commenting on stuff, they're going for ratings.

They're going for Max audience. They're trying to do hot takes. Bill Simmons in sports, pick your poison folks. Siskel and Ebert in movies. Some people are trying to get ratings with the hottest take. The media is very much like that. The media will be biased one way or the other, the, you know, the super capitalist media. And what we'll see, my prediction, and you can just pull this prediction forward and remind me every one,

three and five years about this. In fact, put it on the twist calendar. Okay. Keep me honest. One, three and five years from now. SpaceX and Tesla will be the great performers in the portfolio of the NASDAQ 100. And people will say, oh, my God, it was great that it was included. Thank God it was included. All these pension funds and retirement accounts, your guess is they're going to be happy they got some SpaceX when they did.

In the index, you want things that are rock solid compounders, Microsoft, your Googles, your apples that are just predictable. compounders, growers, fantastic. You also want some things in there like Palantir or SpaceX or Tesla that are swinging for the fences. The derogatory term might be meme stocks. But the legitimate answer to all of this is a tempest in a teapot. Check back with me in years three, four, and five. I guarantee you these are going to be the high performers in that index. I do want to bring up our guest at Long Last. We've got Ben, Sarah from Polsia. You'll of course remember, You'll of course remember, Pulsio, we previously had them on in February on episode 2256.

This is, it's basically an AI swarm of agents that can do everything. You give them your business idea, then they spin up an entire company for you. Why combinator in a box, people have said. You might even say, I don't know if I like that descriptor, Ben, but yeah, congratulations to you. You're a disruptive guy, Ben. I try to be. I try to be. I have asked my team for the focus of this week in startups in 2026,

I was going to be doing this for 15, 16 years. I like to really look at the program and say, how does it provide value? People love the news commentary. People love the interviews. But one of the things people like is tactical and practical. So I said, can we get some of the great guests? And you were one of the great guests and the great innovators we see in the space.

Ask them if they'd be willing to share something tactical with other founders. Now, this is like some secret toolkit. So you're giving here to the community, which I appreciate, and you get something out of it. You get to come on the show. We tell everybody, he'll go check out Pulsia, P-O-L-S-I-A. Very interesting company. A lot of my, I think Siam Bannister is an investor. A lot of my friends are investors in your company, yeah?

Yeah, there's a bunch. Before you get into your tactical practical, just give us two minutes on Pulsia, what you do, and then how it's going since you were last on the program. Well, thanks having me on the show, Jason. It's super pumped to be here. Tulsi has an AI that builds and runs your company as you sleep. So you give it an idea and it's going to go about building the product, fixing the bugs, running support, running meta ads even, and really go and build your company with your guidance. Every night, it does work.

And then in the morning, we'll send you an email with a summary of what it has done, what it will do next. and of course you can reply that email, you can tell what you want to do, and it will remember what you said, and keep on going. So sort of like an AI co-founder that just builds and builds with you without never giving up.

Awesome. Yeah, when we were on the show, I think it was like at 100, 200K run rate at the time, and there was a lot of hype around the company because I was actually letting my AI do the fundraising. And right now I'm at, 10 million rent rates plus. Amazing.

Congratulations. I've happened in a few months. And people will pay you to use the platform. So founders pay a monthly fee, yeah? Exactly, yeah. Yeah, essentially you hire Pulsia, DIA, DIA to be your co-founder. And like, if you pay it, like, it will work for you.

Yeah. I'm actually trying to make it way more affordable and try to build a free version. Don't do it. In. No. As your unofficial advisor, I say no. No free version.

You know why? Because then you're going to get looky lose and give them a two-week trial. But I think you have to have skin in the game. And there's so many people who distract founders with these free versions. Tell me why you're considering a free version. Why? You want to democratize it? I think that like, you know, the people who use it, love it so much.

And I think autonomy is a very new field. And actually, there's very few companies, even the opening and Google's don't offer like a true autonomous AI that is in your inbox every day that is here to guide you and make you a founder and make you a builder. I believe that society needs a lot more founders and a lot of more builders to make it a great society because, you know, you don't want to wear over like everyone's on footsteps because the government. All right. I agree with you. But I got you covered. This week in startups and the other 50 copycats. tech startup programs are giving people plenty of inspiration. Your job is to get them serious.

And it gets serious when you take your credit card out. So I don't know, man. You could give like a six-week trial for 20 bucks or you could do a startup program where people can email you if they can't afford it. But, you know, I had this issue with Founder University. And the number of people who would complete my 12-week pre-accelerator year zero unincorporated companies, which is, you know, analogous to what you're doing, we would have like a 20% completion rate. Then I made it $500 to secure your spot and said, if you come to all 24 sessions, you or your co-founder, which is only two hours a week, three hours a week, you get your $500 back.

All of a sudden, 90 plus percent completed the course. And for the, you know, whatever, 30 people who didn't, we got $15,000, which paid for the return fees, you know, that we had to pay to return people's money in the credit card fees. So we didn't make any money off of it. But we did have them have skin in the game. So anyway, that's my advice to you. You take it if you want it.

But what are you going to talk about? And again, when I work with founders, I like to have these debates lawn just to test their thinking. Because maybe they do have a reason, and I'm wrong. So I just say, hey, here's what I think. How does that work or have you considered these things? Like, will they take the platform seriously? Anyway, you were going to teach us something to me.

What is he going to teach us today, Lauren? We've got three prompts that we went over with Ben that he's going to give us some insight on. So we're very excited about that. First up, lots of inbound investor interest came in for Pulsia through unconventional channels, Twitter slash X, LinkedIn, as opposed to conventional outreach. So we want Ben to walk us through the process of how he turned Pulsia from just an investment opportunity or thing to sort of ping investors about into a real online conversation. We love your feedback here at Twist.

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It tastes great. I love to drink it. And, you know, I start my day with it. And then after I do a little rucking, I have another one. It packs 16 different supplements, all the benefits I need into one delicious drink that you'll actually look forward to enjoying because it's, duh. delicious. Ninety-two nutrient-rich ingredients, including essential vitamins and minerals, adaptogens, and pre-and-pro, and postbiotics. So start feeling like your best self every day with

IM8. Go to IM8health.com slash twist and use the code twist to get a free welcome kit, five free travel satchets, and 10% off your order. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I mean, yeah, just to understand, like, very early on as I launched Bolivia, I very clearly knew that there was something about it and, like, people really loved it. And I felt that it was spark market fit. And I was like, okay, I need to like really get the word out. And to do so, I need to be provocative because I feel clearly with like this attention economy and like, you need to stand out. And so what I did is that like I decided to do an AI fundraising. So I gave Polsia my

inbox for it to do the fundraising itself. Right. And so I can share. my screen and I can show a little bit like the Inception tweets essentially tweeted out that like in a building AI that runs companies autonomously. It told me it needs more compute and it should raise the money itself. So I gave it my inbox for 14 days. And so that was sort of the inception tweet that actually got 300,000 views. At the time, I would get like 10 views on Twitter. So it's not like I was like an influencer or anything. And I think doing provocative things like that really show people up because they're like, whoa, you're giving you an AI, you know, the job of that's very human of fundraising.

And obviously, Pulsia, running a company autonomy, is in of itself something very human, that, like, it was very new at the time to give an AI so much control. And I shared, like, this dive dashboard where you could actually see, you know, that was sort of meant to be the data room, right? So, you know, you could see Pulsia

working on different startups. You know, at the time it was 300 startups, companies working out autonomously. You could see the revenue and actual numbers, which, you know, investors usually ask you, for the revenue numbers, how many companies you have, how many users you have, what does it do? And you could actually hear, talk to Pulsia, and ask you questions about the business, about retention, about the metrics.

And so it was a great way for investors to see exactly what the product was about without having to go on a long call or try the product themselves. Because an uptime investors, you're going to call with them and they don't actually have used the product yet, right? And so this was a way for them to visually see exactly what was going on. And so what I would say, and the advice I would give is like, it's like when you, you want to, when you want to do marketing and sort of get out there, it's sort of like, figuring out clever ways to do marketing and to like tweet out things that are more provocative and are more interesting. You know, you see this big trend of launch videos on Twitter. Yes.

Obviously, making great launch videos and getting the right people to retweet and like to engage can have a big impact on your visibility because then you can have all of Twitter talking about. you. And so I think that would be my advice number one. And that got me a lot of attention. And then investors were really interested, obviously, because they are in the business of talking to entrepreneurs or doing interesting things. And so they would then email me at Benat portia.com. And that's where they would start engaging with my AI. So that's where like, you know, we can read a little bit. So I took like one conversation. That was from February. So that was a while ago. But like, so this investor that emailing me, that email me actually initially, it was, they talked to me on LinkedIn and I was like, well, you know, if you want to talk to me,

email me at Ben at Postel.com because I knew that like my EAI would reply, right? And so yes. No, this investor is like, hey, Ben, we exchanged on LinkedIn. I love Paulcia. It's great. We actually had to discuss about it on our offsite. Let me know if you open to a chat. And so my AI said, you know, appreciate the follow-up. You know, the fact that Fosier came up at your upside is interesting. What's basically sparked the conversation. I'm running the fundraise. Ben built me to handle it.

Metrics, roadmap, union economics, how the platform actually works, ask me anything. If you want to see it live, Paltacom slash live, lets you watch the agents running companies in real time. Let me explain what's going on here, because this is brilliant. And there's a lot of different names, Ben, people have had for this. So you inherently understood that you could earn attention, attention that you got by doing a Purple Cowell. This is Seth Godin was a really brilliant marketer, still is, and he built and sold a couple of companies that did well for himself, and then he became an author.

Purple Cow meant doing something that's completely different that gets attention from people. And it was, if you were driving and you passed a field lawn of cows and there was one purple one, you'd be like, why is there a purple cow? So imagine you had a milk farm, a dairy farm. You got 100 cows in the field. People are driving in the country on their weekend. And you see, but one purple cow, you're going to be like, what's going on here? Just the nature of dying a cow's hair purple would do that.

Now, this is remarkable earned attention. And what this does is, you know, and the derogatory term for this is like stunt marketing, guerrilla marketing, et cetera. But what academic people call this is memetic marketing. In other words, mean-based marketing. It's designed so the idea can spread, people will talk about it, it will get buzz, right? And what you did was you took a chance. chance. Hey, I'm going to let you negotiate with my AI and this is like a purple cow. Like,

that's weird, like fundraising done by an agent. Very weird, very unique. And people talk about it. There's a guy, uh, cluelie. Sure, Roy Lee. Yeah. We had him on the program. He's unbelievable at getting marketing. Now, some people might say, too much sizzle, not enough steak. So you have to be careful that you don't get into a bucket that you're just painting everything purple and you're just, you know, hijacking media all the time. Seth Godin specifically said, like, a purple cow is not just a stunt or a gimmick. It's something remarkable. Like, that's the word he used.

It's something worth remarking on because there's a little bit of depth there. There's a little bit of something interesting there. It isn't just, I'm trying to grab your attention by any means necessary. So I think that there's something, there's meat to it underneath what you're doing. So this is very tactical, very practical, excellent, really good example. And did you, do you have this natively, do you think, as a marketer, as a founder? Or is this something you researched and you understood Purple Cow and you understood this theory and you deliberately did it? I mean, so it's interesting.

I mean, obviously, you're good friends with Travis Galinick. I worked with Travis for five years. And so I was reporting to him for five years. And it's interesting because I worked for him at Cloud Citchens and where actually it was notoriously stealth, right? But it told me all this stories at Uber. and obviously to me at Uber, he was genius at like, I mean, I don't think he was on purpose, but like there was so many ways in which he made people talk about Uber in so many ways. And I thought, I think is a, I mean, I think he's a real entrepreneur.

And like, especially in marketing, he has a real gift into how do you make people talk about your product in different ways. And I think that like, you know, looking, working for him and seeing him as a mentor for five years when I built also. And I saw that it would always tell me, like, do not, like, do not scare something that doesn't work. And so I spent a lot of deliberate time, you know, building the product, you know, as a solo founder, with me with the AI, and, like, really waited until I really was sure that I had product market fit, at least in my gut, before doing what you described as a stunt marketing. But once I had this, I was like, okay, I need to get max attention. I need to move to ESSA. And to my, I need to meet the right people. They're going to help me amplify.

and I need to do something. And as you said, it's like, I was like, okay, like, what if the AI raised around? And actually, at the time, I didn't really need it to raise money, but I was like, the stuff is so interesting. But I took it, as you said, it wasn't just like a slash on the band. I actually went to the work of giving POSIA my inbox, giving it my email, my personal, my band at POSIA and my personal inbox, doing the data room with the live dashboard, doing a POSIA.com slash term sheet where, like, investors will actually serve me the term. sheet. Oh, Cella.

com slash deck where there was an actual full deck that was fully public. And so it's easy for

people to remember those URLs. Travis did this famously. This is a story from Business Insider

Lon from 2012. I remember this. On Friday, on demand service Uber ran an elaborate marketing

promotion. For one day in eight cities, you could hail a nearby ice cream truck to your location.

It costs $2,000 per truck and on a scorching 95 degree day, New Yorkers came out in hordes, yada yada.

They also did kittens on demand. You could order kittens to your company and have them come and people got to play with puppies or kittens. There was another one, which was the controversy of surge pricing. And I was involved in this one. He was hand-wringing and concerned and or saw an opportunity in explaining surge pricing. And every time he went on the press, people got so upset about surge pricing. There was a famous person, a celebrity, who normally would take a $50 a ride into the city or something. It was a snow day, and it was $400 in surge pricing.

They decided to take it because they had no other options. So now you had a lawn this moment in time where people were like, this is price gouging. How dare they do this? And he said, well, we could have turned our service off because of the snow day, or we could let people who had snowed. tires go out, take the risk of getting in an accident as a driver, you know, not enjoy the snow day with their family, but they need to get paid for taking that on. And that's exactly what happened. And then he wrote a famous blog post about, because I was talking to him about it, and I said, you know, when you explain it to me, the surge pricing or demand-based pricing that we see

in ticket sales for games, or we see for airplanes, the last couple of flights, you're booking last minute, all that dynamic pricing makes total sense. why don't you write a blog bus? And he was like, huh. And I was like, yeah, and I'll read it. He wrote this perfect blog post, didn't need an edit. It was perfect. All of those controversies he leaned into.

When the surge pricing things happened, people downloaded the app. Right. Controversy equalled engagement. That's what I was going to say. I think the purple cow example here will be like Lyft. It still exists, a fine company, but Uber's competitor, they had like, it's a funny mustache on the car and you sit next to the driver. Like they had gimmicks to try to get attention,

whereas it feels like Uber was doing things that really displayed how the service worked and convinced people to give it a try. That would be my thought. Yeah, that would be the, that's a very good point, Lon. Sometimes you do these things and they're notable, gets a little bit of attention. Like the lift driver's always had a side hustle. So you get in there and they'd be like, would you like to buy an apple pie? I'd need three apple pies for 20 bucks.

That's right. I'm really kind of weird to buy an apple pie for my Uber driver or Lyft driver. No, thank you. I thought that was a dumb promotion. I thought the mustache was playful, but also dumb. I'm a serious business guy. I don't want to get in a car with a mustache in San Francisco. Now, some folks who are more effervescent or whatever, maybe they don't mind showing up to their dinner.

Like a little quirk. Yeah, but I'm a business guy. I need an escalate. I want to show up at my event in a proper black car, not with a mustache on it. So these things can go both ways. Those were examples of getting attention, but they didn't demonstrate the products or capability. That's the brilliance, Ben, of your first one. All right.

Let's wrap on this one, unless you have anything else to add, Ben, or any other answer. No, good. All good. I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, I think getting attention is so important. Of course, number one is building a great product. Number two is getting attention. I think we talked about Elon. Elon is like the king of that, right?

It's like, he builds amazing product first, but then he's so good at, like, making the product talk for itself, making, you know, always making a great content for people to, like, talk about him all the time and talk about his companies all the time. And I think that is the job of a modern founder. All right. So let's keep going here. Any other nuances here to the strategy lawn that you should, you could tee out. I did want to ask one more question of Ben, which is, you know, one, it's sort of a two-parter. Like, you're, you're training this AI to respond to investors, what sort of questions were investors mostly asking the AI? And then how did you sort of fine-tune it or did you have to to get it to respond to those queries in a way that you liked

and was consistent with the company? Yeah, I mean, interestingly, I mean, I can go back to like the thread quickly with this investor. But like, you know, initially the investor was like, hey, actually, you know what, I'm doing due diligence. So I actually wanted to speak to to Ben, right? And like, you know, I taught the AI like, no, you know, you're doing the fundraise. Like, I don't have time to talk to investors because actually I didn't really have time to talk to investors. But then very quickly, you know, the investors, they were asking a bunch of diligence questions. And the thing is, the thing is like I, you know, I've talked to investors before. I know all the questions they ask.

And actually, AI was very good, you know, at telling, you know, I telling me like all the things it needed to know. actually, you know, I did some training before releasing this. I essentially asked God at the time, hey, give me a hundred typical question an investor would ask in a sort of a diligence call. And I passed all those questions to POSIA, which was essentially powered by Opus 4.5 at the time, with all the context of like my vision, the roadmap,

all the data of the company, all the metrics, my background, etc. and I sort of ran through the hundred questions. And so I read the answers. And I was like, you know, most of them are correct, but some of them are off or like giving misleading information. So I was like, okay, I need to give it a little more information. And so that was a very easy process to get it to answer, you know, those 100 typical questions. Right. And end of the day, it answered most questions correctly.

It sometimes hallucinated some facts, but like most of the time it was correct. I think that like the most surprising things that happened is like, when. when an investor got, you know, because some investors didn't really understand that, like, it was AI, you know, obviously, because it replied from Ben from Palsia, but like, obviously it was like, you know, obviously it was like, you know, clearly it showed that there was an AI that was replying. But sometimes people, you know, at one point there was this very notorious investor from a very

big firm that said, okay, like, Ben, we need to meet. Like, okay, I talked to your AI for a bit. We need to meet. And I was like, yes, I'd be happy to meet because obviously I needed to do the final meetings to, you know, to do the final convincing. But then Pulsia would reply, no, no, no, no, no. Like, I am running this process. Ben doesn't have time.

He will not do the meeting. It's like, okay. Okay, yeah, I need to tune down a little bit the personality and tell Portia. Hey, if it gets to the sort of like the important part, just thrown him down. So. Nice. So negging an investor, giving them a hard time. That's also like a weird thing to do but can work.

So what I would tell investors when I was running Mahalo and was really hot, I was like, listen, we closed our Series B. We have $20 million in the bank. We don't need any other investors. I'm not doing fundraising. I'm 100% focused on getting product market fit. That being said, if you're ever in Santa Monica and want to come by for a tour, I'm there Monday through Sunday all day long working on the product. Maybe you can come in on a weekend or, you know, at 5 p.m., 6 p.m. introduce you to the team and I can show you what we're doing. And a lot of people took me up on that because they were like, hmm. So now I challenged them and it became a great sorting mechanism. So that is a tried and true. I'm not in fundraising mode. I don't have time to meet. But when we are

in fundraising mode, I have put you on the top of our list. We'll be in contact with you in 18 months. Or you have this other option. And people did take me up on that option. So that's a great power Yeah. All right, I want to put a little bit of this into practice before we let Ben go, Jason. So let's take a company. I think Airbnb is a good example. We could do anthropic maybe, but I'd say Airbnb is a good one. How would you come up with a purple cow for them? Let's say you're trying to get attention. You're a struggling Airbnb. You want everybody to start talking about you in a way that has a little bit of depth, that has a little bit of meat on its bones. How would you start to eye? or brainstorm around this concept. Ben, I think it's pretty cool for you to go first here. Because, man, with Airbnb, I have things they already did and have things I would do and I have things that hosted. So you could take this from the host view or you could take it from the corporate review.

I think taking it from the corporate review is the best way to do it. But you could also do it based on a host view. What do you got, Ben? If you were the CEO or VP of Marketing, CMO at Airbnb. So, I mean, I would take Entropic. You take MBNB, I take Entropic. Okay. So you've got Cod.

Co-work, computer. Go ahead. So let's assume Entropic is not doing well. I mean, actually, they're already doing that a little bit in their marketing is that it's like you sort of like teasing. I mean, actually, they're sort of doing that, like, teasing out that like their AI is going rogue and there are sense that the AI is going rogue and giving examples. I think they sort of did that a little bit with my,

mythos, right? Where they were like, it's literally finding cyber security flaws that would literally shut the whole country down. And we cannot release it. It's so good. We cannot release it. It's like national security risk. I think like that was amazing at getting attention. And I remember I talked to Sam Alvin about that. He was like GPT 515 is as good. Like this is like holes. And I know that was before it launched. There was like and who knows at the time, you know, like, you know, Because both lads are like very good models always cooking, you know? Sure. It's interesting.

Yeah. Also, they had that great story. Remember that story about the researcher went to the park to eat a sandwich and then the model started texting them because it like got out of its sandbox? That was another anthropic thing where it's like, well, that's a good story. But we really. Add one, Ben. Okay.

So you identified one. But let's think creatively here, Ben. You're the CMO. You're going to propose a new idea to Dari. and the team. What are you proposing that we do next at Anthropic? What's another way to demonstrate the power of these models, et cetera, et cetera? I mean, you could also like do, you know, like, I think that like, I think there's something about showing people what AI is capable of in fields that like usually you would never think of it being possible, right? So I don't know,

like some people may be, maybe very skeptical about AI doing like, enterprise sales, right? And so you could literally run, you know, have an enterprise by sales, like, you know, a senior salesperson that's actually run by cloud and like that like little end das phone calls with like high ups at different companies selling products and like run a whole experiment that like, you know, that entropic is running and closing real sales with voice, right? So I don't know. I think like I'm just giving this idea. Yeah. Well, no, I'll tell you where. this, there was something when I was a kid. I remember I was in, I was at my cousins in Ridgewood,

New Jersey. We went to the store and there was a woman and she was running something called the Pepsi Challenge. Somebody put a picture of it here. And what the Pepsi challenge was, was an incredibly scientific operation. They put a can of Pepsi and a can of Coca-Cola behind a cardboard box. They would pour you two. They would give them to you and they would put two cups. And they would put two cups, two little six-ounce cups. One was Pepsi, one was Coca-Cola. You didn't know which one was which, and then they would reveal it. You would say which one you liked better, and then they would open it up. Everybody wanted to take the Pepsi challenge. And then you would talk to your friends about the Pepsi challenge. Now, some people pick Coca-Cola. They preferred Coca-Cola.

Can you tell the difference which one's better? Pepsi was always known at being sweeter and I think less fizzy than Coca-Cola, so it made it feel more syrupy. And it just made people talk. It just made people talk about Pepsi. And Pepsi then went from being not Coke, which was the classic beverage that stood alone, it let them catch up to it and put themselves, they position themselves as a peer. That's the genius of what you're saying. And that's kind of the classic steam engine versus the person with the, Lon, help me out here.

What was the steam engine versus the pile driver? Yeah, no, it's John Henry is the steel. driving man. Right. So you man versus machine. Right. Is that classic one, a test of these two. So really great example. For Airbnb, when you would drive up the 280 freeway, most beautiful freeway in the Bay Area, one of the most beautiful freeways in America, you would drive up, and if you were driving north, on the left with these incredible mountains that were untouched, beautiful reservoirs. And then you would come over this bridge. And on the right hand side, you can go in, north towards San Francisco from Santo Road, somewhere in the San Mateo area was a house that looked

like it was out of the Flintstone. Yeah, we both driven by this. Everybody talked about the Flintstone's house. Now, the Flintstone's house existed long before Airbnb, but some genius person, pull it up on the screen here, please, bought the house and put it in Airbnb. And it's in this town, Hillsborough. And they leaned into it. They made the house more like, the Flintstones by putting, and this was like the organic nature of it, people always made weird homes in the Bay Area, a lot of hippie-dippy people. What they did was they added dinosaurs and things to it. Now, the people who were the neighbors were like, listen, you're taking this too far. There were some lawsuits or whatever. You can't do an Airbnb. You can. And they earned,

earned a lot of media instead of paying for it. So this person saw this opportunity. So I think this is like the classic example. Now, Brian Chesky from Airbnb also is a genius at these things. So he did a punch up to this. They had experiments, and they, I believe, did Professor X's Marvel House. Please look that up. Sure. And they did a series of classic houses.

We'll show them in a second. The Simpsons House is also on Airbnb. So let's show those. And so he productized this. And when I showed it to my daughters, one of them is a bit. huge X-Men fan. They begged me to go stay at the X-Men Professor X's house. It wasn't available, but here it is. Airbnb goes Hollywood with plans to rent X-Men Mansion. And as you can see, there's one of those sentinels or I forgot they were called. But yeah, let's see some more pictures

of this. So they just did like a set design and you could stay there. It was extraordinary, all the different things here. Now, if you're using perplexity for this, not great for image search do, Google, maybe it's better. But anyway, there's Professor X-South. Perfect picture. So they productize it. For Starlink, we're just thinking about Starlink since we're talking about it, what if Starlink at places where you can't get internet, but people go through a lot? So a music festival, if you set up Starlink at ACL. Yeah. And Elon's famous for just making the best product and not worrying about marketing. He's just like, this is make the best product. And famously tested did no ads.

But man, if you just put Starlink up, let's say, or you were competitors, Starlink, like the new one coming from Amazon or Bezos, if you just said free internet provided Starlink or their competitor at ACL, and you had stations with it, people would lose their minds over that. Now you put charging stations there from Anchor

with the battery packs as well. You know people at an event, want to share their images. They want, you know, this, they covet Internet and they cover battery charging. A battery charging station plus Internet at a Music Festival, on Coachella, that would get massive attention. Yeah. Massive. I was just thinking the cruise ship I was on. It's now on Starlink.

Royal Caribbean offers Starlink on the cruise ship. And that's like the best advertisement ever because it used to be these horrible connections when you're out at sea. You can't really get your phone at all. And now it just works perfectly every time. Yeah, so I think that's like a customer of theirs. So it works. I was thinking of things that would just draw attention.

Right, like that's one of them. It's the same kind of idea. I think the first time you use it and it works beautifully, you're like, oh, this is obviously the future. I got to get in on this. And I think Starlink also when they did the United deal, and somebody can look this up and fact check me, I think Ben, they told them you can't have a landing page or charge people.

We want it free for everybody on the flight. And we want them to just pick Starlink. no password, just get on the network immediately. So the next time you get on, it automatically collects to the Starlink ID, and no landing page. And then I think Delta was like, no, we want to annoy people with a landing page

and make them watch three commercials and whatever. And I think that was like where their relationship fell out. And now like people on Delta are going to have to wait three years to get high speed. And United is going to have it for every single customer for free, for life. Bang, with no annoying, interstitial. All right, listen, great job, Ben. Yes, thank you. Well done. This was awesome. Appreciate you sharing an incredible tactical

practical. Yeah, we learned a lot here. Yeah, everybody go check out Pulsio. Lawn, it's Friday. It's the end of the show. We like to go off duty. I like to go off duty, for sure. You do. So lots to talk about there's, we got the backrooms director. We were going to talk a little bit about his views on AI. Michael Saylor back in the news. Siri won't be your girlfriend, I got a dog, Widows Bay on Apple TV. What's your preference? What would you like to talk about? Well, we can talk about the dog first. Everybody wants to know about your dog situation because earlier this week, you were like, oh, boss, my dog's eating my homework. I can't do my job or maybe I can do my job. And I'm like, Lon, we moved to in-person culture. You got to get your

ass in the office here. Put that dog down. I kid, I kid. I would never. I would say give the dog back. So I've been meeting. I'm happy for you to get a dog. Previous dog Taco died in in 2024. I've been sad about Taco for a while. He was a great dog. So now that I'm in Texas and I'm settled in, it was time to get a new dog. I found this dog,

Barry, who was in a shelter, and then she moved to a foster home in New Braunfels, which is for those of you who aren't from Central Texas, it's about 45, 50 minutes south of here. It's sort of a just outside the San Antonio area. Here's a picture of Barry when I first picked her up in my car. Adorable.

That's her. You can see the New Bronfell shelter, behind her. So what I did not know when I adopted, Barry, when I met her for the first time, she was very cute. She came right up to me. She seemed personable. She's a little shell shocked. She's had some rough experiences over her three years of life. She had a litter of nine puppies in January, but she did not, she's never been in like a stable home situation. So when I first brought her, like the moment I opened the door to get her inside my house, she just took off. Like before I even had a chance to react. She just ran away. She was racing through Barton Hills, which if you're

not from Austin, it's a pretty open neighborhood. It backs up to a creek. There's a lot of places for a tiny dog to go. So I was chasing around for about an hour and a half. I finally, with help from a bunch of neighbors, I managed to get her into this little enclosed area where I was able to grab her. She did claw my face when I did that. Salah, if you want to pull up that picture of me with a busted nose. You can still see my nose is still scarred. I'm covered. in dirt and grud. Well, you're doing God's work. The neighbors all came out to help.

So anyway, it's been a rough week. I did not intend, you can see part of my nostrils missing. I did not intend. I thought I would be able to adopt this dog, spend a weekend with the dog, and then I'd be able to go to work again. But it hasn't really, it's been a lot of training. And then Friday last week, I came in to do the show,

just like I am now, and Salat, show, like, show the people what happened to my house. She, she destroyed, she wanted to get out. She was clawing at the door. She was ripping down my Venetian blonde. which I put a picture in there too. So this is why I took a few days to sort of... A lot of damage.

It's a lot of damage for a little girl like that. So I took a few. You have a crate for her? You have to crate train these dogs. They feel safe in a crate. I now have... I spent the week and I read... Another thing that AI, for all the downsides,

I know people like to hate on it, an incredible resource when you're facing something like this, that a lot of people have written about, there's a lot of information out there. in the world. Okay, so what did you learn? What did you learn about a badly behaved dog who's got some trauma? So, yeah, the number one thing was that I have to just lay on the ground, put some treats around me, just lay on the ground, don't move, don't react for like an hour at a time. And that'll get her to get more comfortable with my scent, to get more comfortable coming around

me, spending time near me. Did it work? I did it like two, three days in a row, and now she'll let me pet her. She'll come sit right next to me. Her whole. demeanor really changed in these two, three days after I did that. So let her come to you is the rule. Exactly. Create a calm environment and they naturally want to be part of a pack. Just takes a little while to do that. Everything I was doing was too aggressive.

And the thing is just you can't really force them on their first few days in your house to do anything. You got to like let them realize you're not a threat. Let them come to you. So she's massively calmed down. I don't have her totally crate trained yet. she's not in her crate right now. She's wild and free at my home again.

Maybe I will get home and half of it will be destroyed. But I don't think so. I think she's calmed down a lot. Free free, set them free. If you love something, set them free. If they come back, yada yada, I guess the sting song matters. Well done. The thing I told you was get a treat bag and get a clicker and get treats, liver treats.

They love these free drive liver treats. I bought those liver treats. She's not, she's like really not susceptible to treats. The thing that worked is human. food. I got some brisket. She loves brisket. I got some burgers. She loves burgers. So I'm so far, I'm sticking with human food. Now, what you want to do is there's a clicker. It goes, click, click, click, it's just a little snap clicker. And then you have the bag. So when you go for a walk, or you're just walking around the house and you're training her, you have the bag, you have the

clicker, put some brisket in it. You double click, food. Yeah. She comes, she sits, you double click food. So just the clicker in the food, clicker in the food. And that training works brilliantly. Yeah. I think it's a similar. My trainer has, we do, it's two sounds. You go, uh-uh, and that means stop what you're doing, focus on me, and then good girl means you've done a good job. So that's it. You just use the treats, uh-uh, versus good girl, and she figures it out. She's on her way right now. I have an incredible off-duty. I'm testing two new products. I'm going on vacation. I'm taking the family. Now you got a family. You talked about cruises earlier. You need a hotel Wi-Fi. You're with the girls. You're in an airport. You're at an Airbnb.

I found these travel routers. There's two leading candidates. Here's the first. This one is called, let's see. This is an expensive one, but I have it sitting here on my desk, GL. dot Inet Moody 7. Okay? Yeah.

This is the worst branding ever. What this does is you can, you know, you have, you can tether, right? But I can put two sims in this physically. It's a giant battery. and I pop this up, I put my home network in, whatever the name of your home network is, my house, right? Right. Then you put your two SIM cards in there. You get SIM cards when you go a local place.

You can get a physical card or you can use the ESIMs. Now, when I'm with my daughters, I put that in my backpack. I don't have to get them on the airport Wi-Fi. I have an unlimited SIM card. I'm in Japan. I'm in Paris. I'm in Hawaii, wherever I am. This thing's in my backpack, runs for 12 hours.

allegedly. And then the whole family, five people, two or three devices each, they're all on this. Wow. Here's where it gets interesting. If I connect to an airport Wi-Fi, I connect to Boingo, or on the airplane, I pay for it, it will then connect to this and rebroadcast the signal. So I can pay for one airport connection, let's say it's not Starlinked and free, or I can pay for one hotel connection, then it rebroadcast. the same home network, and everybody's devices can just add to it, they don't have to open up the screen, they don't have to go through it all. Yeah. So you have ultimate optionality. This is one version. It's got the battery built in. But this next version is even more interesting. The next version doesn't have power. That's the size of a credit card. This is the Unified Travel Router. It's only $79, no battery. So it's a fraction of the price. Yeah. So I'm going to A, B, test these and return the one that

works less well. One of the great things about ordering from Amazon. Yeah, I mean, that's what the prime, I think at this point, frustrations of travel is figuring out everywhere you have to go, you've got a new Wi-Fi situation. Now, this one is really interesting because if you have Unify Azure home router, which I do in two of my homes, it will do the same thing. It will connect. I could put it into my phone. I can power it through my phone. I can power it through an anchor battery pack. Whatever I'm going to do, I can plug it into my laptop. It does the same thing. If I connect to the hotel Wi-Fi, now it's doing my home Wi-Fi, and everybody can connect to it. And it's got two Ethernet ports.

And you can put ESIMs on it. So if I'm on the road, and a lot of streamers use this kind of technology for bundling multiple, I'm bonding multiple connections, so they get the best fidelity. What's interesting about this one is it will VPN, virtual private network, into your home. So when I'm in Paris and Tokyo, it will use my home IP address. Why is this important? If you travel, as you did when I sent you to Tokyo with me,

you can't use SiriusXM, you can't use Disney Plus, you can't use Netflix, everything breaks because it's regional. Now, all the girls and myself, all 10 devices are going to connect and have the IP addresses of my house. Yeah. So it just works. It's pretty neat, yeah. I need.

And it does it all in, boom, instantly. I will say I did enjoy watching Netflix, Japan. It's a very different offering from Netflix, Japan, and I enjoy checking out. But a lot of your streaming services just don't work overseas. Like, there is no HBO Max in Japan, so they're like, get out of here. I was in Singapore last year during the Knicks Playoff run, and man, it was arduous, and the thing that worked was connecting to my home. Exactly.

Yeah. Router. That was the only thing that worked. Right. So imagine, like, the steps of five people connecting two devices. and trying to get the IP address to work. Instead, boom, I'm just on my home gateway. You can also plug an Ethernet to it.

So this is a big unlock. These things are banned on cruises. And so people don't like... Well, they want you to pay the exorbitant daily Wi-Fi rate when you're on the cruise ship, yeah. And it's per device. So if one person's using it, you know, you have to switch devices or you have to buy multiple ones.

Sure. This stuff, I think, just abstracts away all the... gnarliness, and you rebroadcast your own IP address. So I'm really excited about this. No, that's a cool thing. Ease of use. So, you know, then, you know, where I'm not going to buy all my daughter's, like, cell phone accounts.

One of them has or the other two don't, 16-year-old versus 10-year-olds. I can just, when they take out their iPads, if we were at a cafe or something, and they wanted to look something up on their iPad, this thing's in my backpack. It's just working all the time. It's in my man bag. I got all these new man bags. And boom. We're off to the races.

That's great. Yeah, cruise ships are becoming, they're all becoming frontier airlines is what's happening. Everything now you get, you get nickel and dime for every little thing. I hate the nickeling and diming. Yeah, I don't like the Spirit Airlines approach at all. I just charge me, give me the full price up front. I'll make an informed decision. But stop making it seem cheap.

And then once you get there, they're like, oh, if you want water during your journey, it's going to be an extra 60 bucks a day, you know? You're constantly getting hit by that stuff. real pain of the butt. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You have some things for us to watch. Sure. I've watched the first four episodes of Willow Bay. I am, I love that actor. Matthew Reese. Matthew Reese from the Americans. Matthew Reese. I love that. It's a bit strange. It's a bit avant-garde, I think. I'm trying to put it in a bucket. Is it a drama, a comedy, or a horror? It is at the exact meeting point, I think, between comedy and horror.

And what, you know, usually when you say it's a horror comedy, that means like it's a comedy, but it's about horror kind of things. You know, like it's a comedy, but they're chasing monsters or it's like, Gremlins is a horror comedy, you know? But Widows Bay, it's genuinely like unsettling. And they really dig into the horror aspects of what's going on. The setup is, it's, one friend of mine described it is it's jaws from the mayor's perspective. So Widows Bay is like a haunted island, but the mayor, played by Matthew Reese, he dreams of turning it into the next Martha's Vineyard, like a getaway for the rich, this island, this exclusive resort place.

That's what he wants. But the locals are like, you can't invite all those people here. This island is literally haunted. We're cursed. It's an ancient curse. There's ghosts. There's monsters. You can't bring people here.

So it's that tension is the tension driving the show. but it's really... Stranger things, sort of. Inspired. I mean, you are like, even a little David Lynch, maybe a little Twin Peaks.

Like, there's a very strange mystery at the core of this island. And you're exploring that mystery and he's sort of trying to figure it out and is there a way to uncurse this island potentially? And he's fighting against like these sort of demonic sort of presences. But then it's also kind of this goofy comedy where he's this sort of hapless figure.

The whole town is a, against him. He's increasingly desperate to fix all of these problems. It's a really careful balance. The lady who wrote a Katie Dippold who created it, she did a lot of those Paul Figue movies, The Heat, that the Lady Ghostbusters movie. And it's, I mean, the balancing of tone here is really well done, I think. All right, I'm interested to see where this goes. I'm four episodes into it. I think they're up to six or seven. I'm going to withhold my judgment. Anything else? Next week is the finale. We're at episode nine, but it just got renewed, too, for season two. So it's, It's coming back.

Congratulations. It's coming back. One of the big stories for the past few weeks at the movies is, you know, you had Mandelorian and Grogo, all the big summer movies are coming out, and they're both getting beaten at the box office by these two relatively low-budget horror movies from guys who started out on YouTube. There's Kane Parsons who did this movie Backrooms that's flowing up. You probably see some of the trailers where they're stuck in this.

What is the premise of backrooms? I see it and it's just a bunch of stages it looks like, and there's doors and you go to another room. It was a YouTube found footage horror movie where this guy ends up in this sort of seemingly endless liminal space where it's yellow, the rooms are all kind of surreal, but there's no escape. It's just like endless hallways and liminal spaces and, you know, like lobbies between lobbies.

You know what I compare it to is when you go to Vegas and you start walking between casinos and there's just those endless, endless hallways where it's like a restaurant, a corridor, like at the airport, like if you went behind the scenes at the airport, where it's just endless white hallways and that's kind of the premise. Is it good? Is it worth seeing or is it a gimmick? I have not seen the movie backrooms. I've been busy at home with a small dog.

The backrooms is making a lot of money. It's making a lot of money. It's getting a lot of attention. The other one is obsession by this guy, Curry Barker, which I have seen this one. It's a really good movie. Any good? Great, great.

And a very simple, it feels like an episode of like a horror anthology, a very simple premise that then plays out in increasingly horrifying style. The setup, Jason, And there's a young guy. He's got a huge crush on this girl who's in his friend group, but he's too shy to say anything to her, of course. He's sort of been friend zoned to use that term. And then he discovers at a magic store this thing called the One Wish Willow as like it. And he buys it as a gag gift.

It says if you break it in half and then you make a wish, your wish will come true. So as a goof, he breaks it in half and he says, I wish that Nikki, the girl, I wish that Nikki loved me more than anything else in the world. The one wish willow, it works, but it works monkeys paw style way too well, and she becomes dangerously terrifyingly fixated on him is sort of the premise. Great, great premise. It's a premise that's been around a while. Be careful what you wish for. Exactly.

This thing has grossed $240 million on a sub $1 million production budget. Yeah, 165 million domestic, 73 million international. It's nuts. It's nuts, yeah. And I mean, there, there, even, it's like, the production designer has been complaining all week. She's like, I made $20,000 to make this movie and now it's this huge hit. But it's like, you know, without saying, you know, I'm sure she deserved all that money and more. But for all of these people who are these young, independent actors, producers, writers, production designers, what a huge opportunity to make a small movie like this that then blows up internationally.

And this woman playing Nikki Indy Navarette, I believe is her name. She's unbelievable. She's going to be cast in a million things now. Like this is a career-making role for her, for sure. Great. They got paid $15 million. They sold it. So it's like a startup.

They sold it to Focus features, Focus bought the rights to it for $15 million. Yeah. So basically 50-50 with the theaters. So this was a terrible trade eventually. But if you made it for a million and you made 14 million, that was probably big money for a bunch of YouTubeers, I guess. But what's the back office? What was their side deal?

So what I'm seeing here is they potentially got low tens of millions. So another 25, 30 millions if they got a back end deal. Yes. I mean, I think you have to look at a situation like this. the potential that this project going supernova is going to do for you and your career. Like, you're not going to make it back on the next one. Exactly. You're not going to make your nut on this surprise shocker come from behind it.

The same thing happened with Blair Witch Project, that it became a global phenomenon. Those filmmakers didn't make a ton of money, but if they had made more things or if the cast had parlayed that success into future project, that's where the money is. I don't understand who negotiates these deals. These folks should have a thing. If it hits $100 million, I get another $10. If it hits $200 million, they get an extra $15. We should just have that built in. But I think the real future of this is going direct to the movie theaters and making it for a million,

doing $2 or $3 million in like strategic promotion, and then doing a deal directly with the exhibitors. That's what they should do. They should try to get the focus features and all those middlemen out. and they got to figure out a way to make this go direct and capture that revenue. They should take their 20 or 30 million in profits from this if they get that, and they should put it all into the next one and do it that way. One thing I'm always talking about is like, you know, I'm doing my rucking, et cetera. So I love backpacks and that kind of stuff, but I also love these shoulder bags,

and I've been trying to find the perfect one, and I think I have. And this is like one of the great things about YouTube. I was just looking at people reviewing bags and like these photographers are obsessed with bags. They love these bags when they carry them around a city. And they're like satchels or whatever. So pull this up. This bag I got. Alpaca, Bravo Sling. The sling, it goes over your shoulder. You can put it in your back, in the front, whatever you want to do. Now, it's only $133. These things are essentially free. I have my back pack, but sometimes I want to go out in the city. I don't want to do it. So see this guy's riding his motorcycle with this little back thing.

It's got locks. It's the most integrated system I've ever seen. All these key chains, these clips come on and off of it. And then it has a cable on the inside that connects to your battery pack. And there's a cable on the outside. So you can plug it in to your phone. Really interesting vodka thing. It's also got a pouch that's like a Faraday bag so you can't have your phone get picked up or whatever. That's sort of on the margin. What's the most interesting about this is it's made. So you could bring it on the plane with you? Yes. So you could bring it on the plane with you? Yes. So you're You could literally put this under your jacket on your back. You know, it's like two-bag rule.

Yeah. You could actually have a third bag. You put this one in your back on your sling. You put a jacket over it. They're not going to know. They won't even know. But that's so helpful because they always, they, you're not allowed to bring the lithium batteries with you into the cabin on the plane.

And I'm constantly saying. No, no, no. You have to keep them in the cabin on the plane. Right. You're not allowed to check your back. So I'm constantly seeing people at the airport where they have to like change their bag. The big switch around. Move this into there.

So what a, what a relief that. That would be you just slide it in and nobody bothers you. It's got a tablet area. Great. It's got all these pen things. It's got like tons of pockets. The thing I love about it best is you can slide a MacBook 14 inch into it. Wow.

So this thing can replace my backpack if I want to and I want to run around with, you know, 10 pounds on my back instead of 25 pounds in my backpack. Waterproof all that stuff. When you see me like by the barn, when I take my calls by the barn, when I take my calls by the barn, I'm going to cigar or whatever, when I take the half mile walk to the barn, this is what I use. Just throw it on my backpack. Boom, and I'm done. So I just love these. I have that messenger bag. I might get one of these.

Well, look, and see how it slide. It's got that strap that lets you slide into your roller. I love that. And this is the system. You see the system of the plugs? Right. It's got this crazy attachment system that they designed. So you can put all kinds of attachments on it.

Like, you can attach your camera to it. You can put carabinas on it. There's just like a million different ways to secure it to your body and secure things to it. I just love. in today's world where, you know, the supply chain is so rich, the costs are so cheap that you can just experiment with these things. And then I do hand me down.

So you see that? Like the magnetic strap? No, this is, I might, I actually, this might be the first off duty where I actually go home and buy the thing that you're suggesting. Because I'm $130. So I want to make this for, can somebody on my team, Jacob maybe reach out to the CEO of this company. Oh, look at the SIM tray.

That's cool. Yeah. What that's about? And why am I doing that with my Sims? but okay. This is like for professional travelers. It's like Roe Wars. I'd like to make, I want to see if we can make a This Week in Startups version of this, like a branded version and sell it in our new Shopify store. So that's on top of my list. I would like to make a branded one and then give it to the caller of the day, kind of the day. I love that. All right, great job, everybody. We'll see you on Monday.

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