Jason turned $11 and one tweet into 1.1M views | E2311

Summary

Jason Calacanis (broadcasting from a sweltering, barely air-conditioned Paris Airbnb) and co-host Lon Harris open with a “tactical-practical” segment featuring guest Tibo Louis-Lucas — the Product Hunt “Maker of the Year,” serial founder behind Tweet Hunter and Taplio, and now builder of Revid.ai. Tibo’s core lesson: ship in public relentlessly. He built and shipped one product a week, failing through ten “shitty” projects before the 11th, Tweet Hunter, hit $1M ARR in under a year and sold to Lempire. The conversation doubles as a case study for Jason’s own viral moment: an $11 AI tool called PodMeme (built with Perplexity Computer plus Grok 4.5) that deep-links the best segments across top podcasts into a single stream — a screenshot of which racked up 1.1 million views on X. Tibo shares a modern influencer playbook: skip the $10K sponsorship gamble, seed products to 50-100 micro-influencers, pay a small base fee ($200) plus a high success bonus ($500 for 50K views), and let the algorithm — not follower count — decide who goes viral. (Note: the interview-transcriber mislabels Tibo’s origin-story segment around [8:07] as “Lon Harris”; the content is clearly Tibo speaking.)

The news block is dominated by Apple’s 40-page trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI, centered on former Apple hardware exec Tang Tan. Jason repeatedly insists Apple has OpenAI “dead to rights” (while guessing Sam Altman himself didn’t know), and calls the fumbling of the Apple, New York Times, and Elon relationships strategic disasters — arguing each could have been a lucrative partnership. He improvises a mock pitch of how OpenAI should have bought its way to peace with the New York Times (a billion in equity plus $100M/year). The crew also digs into Washington DC’s new robotaxi bill (Uber opposing, Waymo supporting), framing it as a managed “civil war” inside Uber, Lyft and DoorDash as they transition from human to autonomous fleets.

The back half covers a “We Must Act Now” open letter from 200 economists and 15 Nobel laureates on AI job displacement, Jason’s compounding-percentage predictions (50% of rides automated by ~2032, plus a likely one-year pause after a fatal on-video accident), and a detailed teardown of Flock Safety’s PR problem after its CEO called the DeFlock mapping project a “terrorist organization.” Jason lays out, from first principles, exactly how Flock should communicate its data-retention and audit policies, before a running comedic bit (“Barry or Big Brother”) over whether Lon would accept neighborhood surveillance to save a lost dog. The show closes with a tribute to actor Sam Neill.

Highlights

”The 11th product was Tweet Hunter, and that was a hit”

“After fading, like, shipping ten products over four month, the 11th product was Tweet Hunter, and that was a hit, like, at the very, very beginning. And it’s… in less than a year, it reached a million per year and got eventually sold to Lempire.” — Tibo Louis, 9:00

yt-dlp --download-sections "*9:00-9:34" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M415TKc8DSQ" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "tibo-11th-product.mp4"

”It cost me $11. It has now 1.1 million views, this tweet.”

“So it named it Podmeme, and you can hit that ‘Play Deep Link Stream,’ and then it was playing all the stuff about China and went to the next one and the next one. It cost me $11. It has now 1.1 million views, this tweet.” — Jason Calacanis, 12:45

yt-dlp --download-sections "*12:45-13:21" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M415TKc8DSQ" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "podmeme-11-dollars.mp4"

”On Twitter, I gave away 25% of the product to an influencer”

“Most people think that they need the best tweets to sell their product. And what I did there, it can seem a little bit crazy, but on Twitter, I gave away 25% of the product to an influencer. And that seemed crazy at the time, but it’s totally what made us work.” — Tibo Louis, 14:44

yt-dlp --download-sections "*14:44-15:21" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M415TKc8DSQ" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "tibo-25-percent-influencer.mp4"

”It’s not about the follower count anymore”

“It’s not about the follower count anymore. It’s about how much hustle you put into the video and if the algorithm picks you up… even if she sells that, she doesn’t get nece- she’s not guaranteed to get picked up and get viral.” — Jason Calacanis, 18:28

yt-dlp --download-sections "*18:28-19:21" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M415TKc8DSQ" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "follower-count-dead.mp4"

”A hardware product that has a 5% chance of working”

“They gave Jony Ive 10 or 20 billion dollars to make a hardware product that has a 5% chance of working. Not because there’s anything wrong with Jony Ive. The average person has a 1% chance of making a hardware product. Jony Ive has five times that. Hardware products are hard.” — Tibo Louis, 36:13

yt-dlp --download-sections "*36:13-36:36" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M415TKc8DSQ" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "jony-ive-5-percent.mp4"

”Enemies accumulate”

“Somebody told me early in my career: enemies accumulate. Enemies accumulate… He had the huge lawsuit with Elon, huge lawsuit now with Apple, huge lawsuit with the New York Times. In all of those cases, those could have been partnerships.” — Jason Calacanis, 37:46

yt-dlp --download-sections "*37:46-38:44" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M415TKc8DSQ" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "enemies-accumulate.mp4"

Key Points

• Ship one product a week until something sticks (8:07) - Tibo’s origin story: built and shipped weekly, failing repeatedly before Tweet Hunter hit (segment mislabeled as Lon).
• Building in public forces a validation mindset (11:26) - Tibo argues it shifts founders from “in love with my idea” to getting the hard no and moving to a better idea.
• PodMeme built with Perplexity Computer + Grok 4.5 (12:16) - Perplexity Computer as the harness, Grok 4.5 wrote it; scans top 25-75 podcasts and deep-links their timestamped segments.
• $11 tool, 1.1 million views (12:45) - Jason’s screenshot post about PodMeme became his viral case study for building in public.
• Killer next feature: export to one MP3 (13:21) - A condensed audio digest with “next up, this” transitions between segments.
• Gave 25% profit-share to an influencer (14:44) - Tibo says builders and influencers both crave partnerships that rarely happen.
• Compound the same audience across products (15:37) - Pick one target customer and problem (creator economy) so every product speaks to the same people.
• Follower count is dead; the algorithm decides (18:28) - Even a million followers won’t get you shared if Grok’s “For You” doesn’t pick the post up.
• Micro-influencer playbook: $200 base + $500 bonus (19:38) - Agents find accounts averaging ~1K views, pay a small base plus a bonus if a post breaks 50K views, then recycle the winners.
• Tibo banned on LinkedIn twice (21:58) - Over Taplio, his LinkedIn management SaaS acquired by lemlist in 2022; leads to a rant on LinkedIn’s anti-automation stance.
• LinkedIn should just give everyone an email inbox (24:42) - Lon says Rahul (Superhuman) pitched this; a billion @linkedin.com addresses would have been “the greatest product ever.”
• Apple has OpenAI “dead to rights” (30:03) - Jason: professional orgs don’t file front-page lawsuits unless the evidence is overwhelming; centers on Tang Tan.
• Jony Ive’s OpenAI equity worth billions (33:00) - $6.4B all-equity acquisition; Jason estimates Ive now holds more value in OpenAI than he ever did at Apple.
• How OpenAI should have handled the NYT (40:14) - Jason’s mock pitch: a billion in equity plus $100M/year for 10 years to make them “partner zero.”
• DC’s robotaxi bill: Uber vs Waymo (44:32) - Bill would allow driverless commercial operation; Uber wants a “hybrid model,” Waymo supports full deployment.
• A managed civil war inside Uber, Lyft, DoorDash (51:00) - Jason frames the fight as internally managing a driver-to-robot transition, not company-vs-company.
• “We Must Act Now” economist letter (53:07) - 200 economists, 15 Nobel laureates, plus OpenAI and Anthropic chief economists warn on AI displacing white-collar jobs.
• Prediction: 50% of rides automated by ~2032 (60:33) - Jason models doubling each year and predicts a likely one-to-two-year pause after a fatal on-camera accident.
• Flock’s “terrorist” PR blunder (62:45) - CEO Garrett Langley called DeFlock a terrorist org; Jason maps out the surge-pricing-style first-principles fix.
• Jason’s UniFi home surveillance setup (71:30) - Facial recognition and license-plate readers across his properties, kept “forever,” reading the public street.

Mentions

Companies

• OpenAI (28:10) - Defendant in Apple’s trade-secret lawsuit; subject of NYT and Elon disputes.
• Apple (28:10) - Filed 40-page suit alleging OpenAI poached staff and confidential hardware info via Tang Tan.
• Lempire / lemlist (9:00) - Acquired Tweet Hunter and later Taplio.
• Uber (44:32) - Opposes the DC robotaxi bill, favoring a hybrid human/AV model; Jason is board chairman.
• Waymo (44:32) - Supports full driverless deployment; referenced re: a low-speed Santa Monica accident.
• DoorDash (49:48) - Building its own delivery robot (“Dot”); managing a driver-to-automation transition.
• Flock Safety (62:45) - License-plate camera company whose CEO called DeFlock a “terrorist organization.”
• Ring (68:46) - Cut a collaboration with Flock after Super Bowl ad backlash.
• Tesla (46:25) - Wants federal AV legislation overriding state/local rules.
• Grin / Captivate / Statusphere (17:03) - Influencer-management companies Jason cites for managing creators at scale.

Products & Technologies

• PodMeme (12:16) - Jason’s $11 AI tool stitching top-podcast segments into a deep-link stream.
• Tweet Hunter (9:00) - Tibo’s Twitter creator suite; hit $1M ARR in under a year.
• Taplio (22:34) - Tibo’s all-in-one LinkedIn management platform.
• Revid.ai (21:35) - Tibo’s current product for building viral social videos.
• Perplexity Computer + Grok 4.5 (12:16) - The harness and model Jason used to build PodMeme.
• UniFi (71:11) - The camera/security system with AI facial and license-plate recognition Jason runs on his properties.
• DeFlock (62:45) - Open-source crowd-sourced map of Flock license-plate cameras.
• Athena (6:00) - Executive-assistant service Jason uses (sponsor-adjacent productivity segment).

People

• Tibo Louis-Lucas (“Tibo Maker”) (6:49) - Guest; Product Hunt Maker of the Year 2022, serial founder.
• Sam Altman (29:29) - OpenAI CEO; Jason argues he likely didn’t know about the alleged poaching but bears liability.
• Tang Tan (28:10) - Former Apple hardware exec at center of the lawsuit; kept on through a transition period.
• Jony Ive (33:00) - Sold his company to OpenAI for $6.4B in equity.
• Garrett Langley (62:45) - Flock Safety CEO who called DeFlock a “terrorist organization.”
• Justine Bateman (62:45) - Actress/filmmaker who criticized Flock’s claims.
• Jamie Siminoff (69:43) - Ring founder; friend of Jason’s, frustrated by surveillance backlash.
• Mark Cuban (40:43) - Cited for the idea of AI firms simply buying off towns that oppose data centers.
• Eric Schmidt / Vinod Khosla / Jack Clark (53:07) - Among signatories/named figures on the “We Must Act Now” AI jobs letter.
• Sam Neill (76:48) - Actor (Jurassic Park, Event Horizon, Possession) whose death is honored at the end of the show.

Surprising Quotes

“They gave Jony Ive 10 or 20 billion dollars to make a hardware product that has a 5% chance of working… The average person has a 1% chance of making a hardware product. Jony Ive has five times that.” — Tibo Louis, 36:13

“I don’t want to support this product, I made an $11 podcast product for myself.” — Jason Calacanis, 13:02

“Somebody told me early in my career: enemies accumulate. Enemies accumulate.” — Jason Calacanis, 37:46

“You’re either pro-criminal anti-Flock, or you’re anti-criminal and pro-Flock.” — Tibo Louis, 69:08

“I’d rather double bolt my door than be filmed around the clock.” — Lon Harris, 74:46

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 I build shitty products. Every new product that was shipping on Twitter, I had a little bit more following. That directly compounded time after time. At every new product that was shipping on Twitter, I was a little bit more powerful, you know? The first product was Tweet Hunter, that was a hit like at the very, very beginning. In less than a year it reached a million per year and got eventually sold to Lempire. I don’t necessarily know which idea is going to work, but I build it in public, I share it with people, and I can tell you Lon, if you share something on Twitter and you’re a builder, people actually will engage with you and give you critical feedback, which is probably 10 times more interesting to build on. All right, bonsoir mes amis, it’s your boy J-Cal. I’m sorry I’m not suited up, but I am in Paris and it is hot.

Lon Harris: 0:53 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 0:55 And they don’t have air conditioning, and I rented an Airbnb and it has like three portable air conditioners. But the French are like now, it’s becoming a thing where they just are not going to give an inch on this air conditioning issue, I think.

Lon Harris: 1:03 Yeah, they’re digging in their heels. They’re like, ‘not for us’.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07 And ‘you Americans are crazy’. It’s like the same ice issue I have in Italy when I ask for ice and they give you two cubes and I’m like, ‘no, no, pack the whole glass with ice and then give me the Coke Zero next to it’.

Lon Harris: 1:21 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:23 So now I’m going back and forth with my Airbnb, which is a charming Airbnb obviously you can see if you’re watching, beautiful Airbnb in a great arrondissement, having the time of my life here, but they put the portable air conditioners in like three of the seven rooms or something.

Lon Harris: 1:34 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:35 So like a third of the place is air conditioned. These things are completely underpowered. It’s 98 degrees outside. And then you know how it has the exhaust?

Lon Harris: 1:45 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:46 They just opened the door windows, threw the exhaust out, but left the rest of the window open.

Lon Harris: 1:48 So you got all that hot air coming in.

Jason Calacanis: 1:49 The hot air’s coming in, we’re trying to put the curtain around the hot air. It is hilarious. But I have learned a distinct lesson, which is, I mean, we have global warming, whether humans are creating it or it just happens to be a fluke, I don’t want to get into it, but air conditioning is an incredible modern innovation.

Lon Harris: 2:07 Not even that modern.

Jason Calacanis: 2:08 Talk to Singapore.

Lon Harris: 2:10 Not even that… like before our time. You know, it was like the 1950s when the movie theaters were like ‘come in, it’s air conditioned’. So they’ve had a while, they’ve had a while to get on.

Jason Calacanis: 2:22 Well and then Lon, here’s the other thing, here’s your other tip. You go to a restaurant and they don’t have air conditioning.

Lon Harris: 2:26 Oh, that’s misery.

Jason Calacanis: 2:28 I just went to Starbucks. They don’t have… Starbucks has a portable air conditioner in it, so the doors are closed, it’s swelteringly hot inside, and they’ve got an air conditioning pretending that it’s doing something.

Lon Harris: 2:36 You can’t enjoy a luscious, delectable French meal while you’re like sweating in your food. That’s no good.

Jason Calacanis: 2:44 Man, but I have been killing it. I had an incredible beef tartare, I had incredible…

Lon Harris: 2:49 I saw the beef tartare, yeah. You shared that.

Jason Calacanis: 2:51 Man, and I didn’t put the duck confit… had an incredible duck confit, and then I had the chicken with morels at my favorite restaurant in Paris, Le Poule au Pot. It is the chicken in a pot.

Lon Harris: 2:59 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 3:00 But they also happen to have air conditioning. Chicken with morels, last time I was at that restaurant was like 15 years ago. Me, David Sacks and the wives went there and had this incredible chicken with morels. It’s the end of the morel season, fancy mushrooms.

Lon Harris: 3:08 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 3:09 Trés magnifique. Trés magnifique and I had a great time at the Ray’s conference. Those are dropping on the other podcast, All-In, but here we are, This Week in Startups, we gotta talk startups.

Lon Harris: 3:17 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 3:18 Big show.

Lon Harris: 3:20 Big show.

Jason Calacanis: 3:21 Got a couple of guests, got some news, so let’s get to work.

Lon Harris: 3:23 Well, before we get into all that, we gotta talk about another patented JCal productivity hack. You’ll see here at the top of our docket. This edition’s hack, you know, we’re talking about for busy content creators. There’s a million little things. I mean, you see the glamorous part, us here on the air, hosting the podcast, welcoming the guests.

Jason Calacanis: 3:43 What could be more glamorous?

Lon Harris: 3:46 It couldn’t be more glamorous. I’m here in, you know, the lavish Capital Factory here in downtown Austin. But there are a lot of little things behind the scenes you guys maybe don’t see that we have to do every single time we produce a new video or episode. We’re super distributing the show across all kinds of different platforms. They each need their own captions, they each have their own titles, different uploads. And then we gotta reach out, we gotta book guests, we gotta schedule things, we gotta get a sense for the analytics, what’s working and what’s not. So, these are all areas where an executive assistant, an EA as we call them, can be a massive time saver. We can have Athena assistants coordinate with the guests, handle post-episode follows, keep the content pipeline moving. They could even pull and organize performance data so we can get a sense for which videos are popping and why at a glance.

Jason Calacanis: 4:34 And uh, I’ll give you one that I did here related to what I was talking about earlier with the Airbnb. I was like, I gotta call an audible here. So, I know which hotels I like, I know where to find them. So I now have projects in Claude, I have projects in Perplexity computer, and I will start a search, and this is like something people don’t tell you. Okay, yeah, everything’s going to AI, sort of, kind of, but the last mile’s the problem. So I was just literally authenticate my Monocle magazine, authenticate my Michelin Star, because they have the Michelin keys now for hotels, New York Times, you know I got all of those, but you know, I’m logged into those, those are paid subscriptions I use, and Conde Nast Traveler. So I go into those, I have it organize everything, I have it put it on a Google Map, then I look at it and I say, I’m really interested in these six or seven, but now I share the thread of me talking to the LLM with my Athena assistant. Then they, and I instruct them, hey, look at how I talk to Claude, look at how I talk to Perplexity computer plugged into Grok, and then they can then fork the discussion and book the hotels for me, right? So I know people are saying hey, do I go human, do I go with an agent, do I just do it myself?

Lon Harris: 5:55 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 5:56 I found… Why choose? Have all three. It’s only $36,000 a year to have an Athena assistant. I have two. They work seven days a week. Go to athenawow.com and it will redirect you to a special secret landing page, which I think is athena.com/jcal. Yeah.

Lon Harris: 6:17 Yeah, so we do want to say thanks to our friends at Athena for bringing you these productivity hacks. You can get $2,000 off your first EA by going to athena.com/jcal.

Jason Calacanis: 6:27 Chamath’s got one too. Oh, by the way, my wife is using the Athena assistants now, so I’m just apologizing ahead of time.

Lon Harris: 6:29 Oh really?

Jason Calacanis: 6:30 Yeah.

Lon Harris: 6:31 Oh yeah. Wow.

Jason Calacanis: 6:33 She’s a pretty tough cookie, she’s got a lot of things she’s got to get done. She’s a mother of three.

Lon Harris: 6:41 Gonna need a dedicated assistant. All right, all right. So we got to bring up our first guest now. You may know him online as Tibo Maker. His name is Tibo Louis-Lucas, coming to you also from France. It’s a very Francophile episode today. So he is the Product Hunt Maker of the Year, Jason, from 2022. Serial founder and entrepreneur. Some of the projects include most popular, most famous Tweet Hunter and Taplio. These were suites of tools for Twitter and LinkedIn creators. Schedule your post, AI-driven content generation and strategy, relationship management, all that kind of stuff. They crossed a million ARR in their first year and then sold to a B2B SaaS company. And now, you know, he sort of helps out people with all of the lessons that he learned, specifically Jason, about building a social media following, building buzz around your product, maybe even before you’ve got a product in the market while you’re still developing and workshopping. So he’s gonna walk us through some of the strategies around there. Tibo, thanks so much for joining us. Whoa, that’s, that’s the intro. Thank you very much. So happy to be here.

Jason Calacanis: 7:50 All right, so you’re going to… this is our tactical-practical section here on This Week in Startups, me asking the team, find us some tactical-practical advice for founders. So you’re going to walk us through some of your tips here on how to grow an audience. You’re a startup founder and you want to grow an audience. What do you do?

Lon Harris: 8:07 I think the… like most people try to just share interesting things and that’s the… they don’t have a specific playbook doing that. And so they, they miss that by doing interesting things outside of Twitter, it directly fuel their Twitter content. And so this is exactly what happened to me. Like I started building on… I started building Tweet Hunter in 2021 after failing for like many, many years. And I did that challenge where I started like shipping… building and shipping one new project every week until something stick. And that didn’t go very well at the very beginning. Like I failed a lot. Like I built shitty projects. But just building one after another, it just, it just stopped, you know? Like every, at every new product that I was shipping on Twitter, I got a little bit more following.

Tibo Louis: 9:00 I got a little bit more interest, and so that directly compounded time after time. And so at every new product that was shipping on Twitter, I was a little bit more powerful, you know? And so after fading, like, shipping ten products over four month, the 11th product was Tweet Hunter, and that was a hit, like, at the very, very beginning. And it’s… in less than a year, it reached a million per year and got eventually sold to Lempire. That was… that was insane.

Jason Calacanis: 9:34 Okay. So the playbook for you was, ‘Hey, I don’t necessarily know which idea’s going to work, but I build it in public, I share it with people.’ And I can tell you, Lon, if you share something on Twitter and you’re a builder, people actually will engage with you and give you critical feedback. Now you… because… and I just did this, pull up the tweet I did. Now I have a mil… I actually looked up, I think I have over a million followers now. I think my follower count’s grown fast in…

Lon Harris: 10:14 You do. Oh, you’ve significantly over a million now.

Jason Calacanis: 10:18 I mean, I remember when it broke at, like, maybe six months ago, but it’s growing fast now. But I did this, um, pod me, deep link podcast listener, yeah. And so, um, and you like to go by Tibo, right? T-I-B-O?

Tibo Louis: 10:21 Yeah, TIBO_maker.

Jason Calacanis: 10:23 Every time you miss a call, that is another sale just thrown right out the window. Every customer matters, every lead matters. You need a reliable way to catch all that incoming business even if the calls are coming during off hours or weekends. That’s why today’s episode is brought to you by Quo, Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one top-rated business phone system on G2 and it’s trusted by more than 90,000 businesses. They’re going to bring all of your calls, all your texts and contacts together in a shared collaborative space. That means your entire team can use just one shared number, so there’s no more missed calls and no more disconnected conversations. And they’ve got AI to automatically log your calls, generate summaries and even recommend next steps. Money is on the line, always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/twist. That’s q-u-o.com/twist.

Tibo Louis: 11:26 But I think what you said, it… what you said is incredible because it… like, it forces people to switch from a selling mindset, like ‘I am in love with my idea, I want to sell it at all cost.’ It shifts people to a validation mindset. Like, it forces them to just try to validate their product, get the… the hard ‘no’ or the hard feedback in order to move from the learning to the next idea which is probably ten times more interesting to build on.

Jason Calacanis: 11:55 I know this to be true because I shared that I was… Greetings, I had a little bit of jet lag. I’m here with the fam, we’re having a great time in Paris, and I just decided, well, let me just share what I… I was like, you know what I really want? I was looking at my podcasting app and I was like, I want… yeah, here it is. So I explained, go ahead and click the button there.

Lon Harris: 12:16 And I think what’s important is you explain the why behind it.

Jason Calacanis: 12:19 But if you look at what I made, it’s called Podmeme, and I didn’t come up with the name, by the way. And I did this with Perplexity Computer and Grok, the new Grok. So Perplexity Computer is like the harness, Grok, the latest one, 4.5, built it. And I said, go through the top 25 podcasts—now I have it doing like 75—figure out all the segments because all podcasters do timestamps now.

Lon Harris: 12:44 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 12:45 Then I said, organize it not by podcast but deep link, and I want to play a deep link stream. So it named it Podmeme, and you can hit that ‘Play Deep Link Stream,’ and then it was playing all the stuff about China and went to the next one and the next one. It cost me $11. It has now 1.1 million views, this tweet. So this is incredibly tactile and practical. Establish yourself on Twitter as a builder, build something, and I think asking people for feedback—and people actually did ask me, ‘Can I use it?’—and I was like, ‘I don’t want to support this product, I made an $11 podcast product for myself.’ So, but then I was thinking, killer next feature would be to export the audio file. So imagine you have like the China, you know, I don’t know, GLM 5.2 gets released, 20 people comment on it. I said, ‘Make me one MP3 file and then in between each one say, next up, this.’

Lon Harris: 13:42 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 13:44 Yeah, and other people have done something like this. In fact, we invested in a company called Swell seven, eight years ago that Apple bought. Anyway, so this is the concept: build something and share it.

Lon Harris: 14:05 I love it.

Tibo Louis: 14:06 I love it, honestly. Imagine going to a meeting and having like a 15-minute condensed MP3 of all the best things that you can listen to from every podcast in the world. That’s amazing.

Lon Harris: 14:18 It’s also good for discovery. Every time you do this, you would probably hear one or two podcasts you hadn’t heard before. And if you were like, ‘Oh, this guy Lex Fridman has good thoughts on this. I’m going to go check out his show,’ you know what I mean? Like, it’s—you would find new podcasts to listen to by doing this probably.

Jason Calacanis: 14:38 Were there certain types of tweets that worked better than others?

Tibo Louis: 14:44 Most people think that they need the best tweets to sell their product. And what I did there, it can seem a little bit crazy, but on Twitter, I gave away 25% of the product to an influencer. And that seemed crazy at the time, but it’s totally what made us work. and what made the project super successful. So you that people people feel that they have to create this audience themselves, but they don’t. Like the I don’t see enough partnership between builders and influencers. And both from the from both sides, people are craving for this to happen. I don’t understand why this is not happening enough.

Jason Calacanis: 15:21 I just want to make sure I clarify here. You’re saying you gave 25% of the company, the equity in the company, to influencers?

Tibo Louis: 15:28 The company was multi-product, so it was not really equity in the company. It was more like a profit share, a revenue share related to a profit.

Lon Harris: 15:37 One thing you mentioned that I wanted to double click on a little was you were creating all of these different kinds of products that you were building in public and then every time you would sort of compound it, how do you keep people interested from two products ago in the next thing you’re going to build? Like what were you doing to create this make this into like an ongoing narrative that people felt compelled to follow?

Tibo Louis: 15:58 But that’s the thing. You don’t do this randomly. Like you what we did, which I think was uh like we didn’t really put some thoughts into this, but I think that was pretty smart, is that you just you pick a target, you pick a very kind of a very specific kind of people and you pick a problem that they have. And so every single one of your product is going to talk to the same people and going to try to solve the same issues that they have. In our case, that was creator economy uh and we we wanted to help creators selling more. And so every single product that that we have was relevant to the previous people that uh was following us before. If you work that way, you just compound your audience time uh over and over.

Lon Harris: 16:40 Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. The constant iterating. It’s not it’s not like totally new products like now we’re making a juicer, now we’re making a AI pendant that you wear. It’s like you’re aiming at the same audience and just coming at it from these slightly different angles.

Tibo Louis: 16:53 And you are choosing your uh customers. So you can choose very wisely, like you can choose the kind of customers that you know that uh have a high buying power.

Jason Calacanis: 17:03 You also employed influencers. I hear people talk about this a lot. We have a couple of companies we invested in, Captivate, which was purchased, uh Grin helps you manage uh bunch of influencers at scales and Statusphere, which works with micro and and mid-tier influencers. Um explain to us how you found the influencers, where do you find them, what’s your pitch to them, how do you reach out to them? Most of them are looking I think to get 500 bucks or 100 bucks, right? And then they just review your product. But how did you do it and and what worked?

Tibo Louis: 17:38 Most people when they are trying to work with influencers, they are working like they are trying to find the perfect deal. Uh they’re going to pay like 10k for this sponsorship and they are going to hope a lot that this is going to be successful. And this is really not how like what’s the playbook right now. Uh what I would do is seed your product to maybe like uh 50 or 100 And reach out to much much smaller influencers that you’re gonna pay up a small amount to for the for the for the creations and then a very high success fee on the results of their contents. And that way you’re gonna take advantage of where every social media out there is going, which is which is like every single person out there can go viral and you’re gonna pay for a small chance of them going viral.

Jason Calacanis: 18:28 Right, ‘cause it’s not about the follower count anymore. It’s about how much hustle you put into the video and if the algorithm picks you up. This is a real important insight, Lon. ‘Cause it used to be, you know, Kim Kardashian would sell something for $10,000, then $100,000, then $1,000,000 a tweet. But even if she sells that, she doesn’t get nece- she’s not guaranteed to get picked up and get viral. She’ll get a good number of views.

Lon Harris: 18:53 Yeah, the the shift is it used to be you built up your follower count and then everything you posted got shared to all of your followers and that was how you sort of had this locked-in audience. Now, even if you’ve got a million followers, if Grok is like people aren’t gonna be interested in this particular tweet, you don’t get shared on the for you and people don’t see it. So it’s a real shift in thinking that now you’re appealing to your audience, but also to this AI-driven algorithm.

Tibo Louis: 19:21 Exactly.

Jason Calacanis: 19:22 So let’s be more specific. We’re here at Tactical Practical. So what you offered them exactly, how much money to do their to do each viral video and then what did you offer them in terms of the commission per software download or sign up?

Tibo Louis: 19:38 What I would do is that I have multiple agents doing research on on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube trying to find accounts that have like an average of about a thousand views over their last 20 content as an example. And I would have my agents like reach out to a lot of them and suggest a base fee of something like 200 USD. And then if they break something like a 50k views on their content, talking about my product, I would offer a bonus of about 500. My my goal is run that and pick the the most successful of those partnerships and then recycle them and work much more with with those people.

Jason Calacanis: 20:21 This is awesome. Did you ever notice how you spend hours shopping online, then pause before you actually hit buy now? That tiny hesitation where you wonder if this is trustworthy can make or break a sale. And with AI changing how we discover and compare things, that split-second trust question matters more than ever. That’s exactly where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, PayPal has been a leader in online payments, and now they’re at the forefront of agentic commerce, making it work for business while letting them maintain control of their brand and their customer relationship. So even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most feels familiar and deeply dependable. Built for payments, built for— Growth and agentic. PayPal Open. Built for all business. Visit paypalopen.com to get started. I think you have the start of a really good startup talk for Founder University. What I want to encourage you to keep working on this. I think if you put some slides into it and you just started evaluating, like, this could be incredibly helpful for people. But this is the tactical, practical stuff I want to get into, you know, in 2026 and 2027. Any other tips you want to give to our founders in the audience or give yourself a plug for your product as well, the one that, whichever one you think is the best right now.

Tibo Louis: 21:35 Honestly, it’s very hard to do that, so I think people should not expect a quick win out of that. But I’m building revid.ai to help people build those videos and go viral on social media. And so if anyone want to check it out, that would be amazing.

Jason Calacanis: 21:54 Where can they find more information, follow you, follow up with you?

Tibo Louis: 21:58 Yeah, so I’m on Twitter, I just got banned on LinkedIn again, but you can find me there.

Jason Calacanis: 22:03 What did you do? You did automated DMs, you did automated InMail, weren’t you?

Tibo Louis: 22:06 No, I built this amazing SaaS called Taplio, but that was two years ago and so I think that they should not be allowed to ban me again for that, but it happened anyway.

Jason Calacanis: 22:14 Wait, what did the other—

Tibo Louis: 22:16 Taplio.

Jason Calacanis: 22:25 What did the one they banned you for do? You gotta tell us what it did.

Tibo Louis: 22:34 Taplio, Taplio, that was an all-in-one LinkedIn management platform to post, get inspiration, do DMs, like everything. This one got acquired by lemlist in 2022.

Jason Calacanis: 22:41 Ah, they—see, they’re very cutthroat about this. Even when you’re using an assistant, like if you use the comet browser from Perplexity or any of the smart browsers or you try to use your browser from Claude to, like, search for people or do anything, they try to kill it immediately. So what they’re doing now is people are just using third-party tools built overseas where the scraping laws are different. Israel, Philippines, Japan, a couple of countries are a little bit more robust in terms of doing this, but I think Israel and the Philippines and India are the ones that do a really good job of it. So they’re just scraping everything off of Instagram, off of LinkedIn, and then they just sell the data. So LinkedIn really should just let you, if you have the $50 a month account, they should build some automation into it. You should be able to say, every day give me five new leads that I should reach out to and, you know, let you connect it to your quad. Maybe not do automated InMail, that would be annoying, but they have to fix it.

Lon Harris: 23:40 I mean, they have to fix it. Like the fact that when we want to book somebody on the show and I don’t have contact info for them, it’s like ten times easier for me to go to one of these sales lead services and just get their email than it is for me to use LinkedIn, which is ridiculous. It should—I should be using LinkedIn. Like why are they discouraging me from being able to do this work on LinkedIn? it’s the perfect thing to do on their platform. I don’t understand.

Jason Calacanis: 24:03 They want you to go through InMail for some reason.

Lon Harris: 24:05 Yeah. And I think they have to realize they’ve lost that kind of race.

Jason Calacanis: 24:07 Exactly.

Lon Harris: 24:08 It’s okay fine, but if you have a $50 a month account, which is a decent amount of cheddar, but every business will pay 600 bucks, if they just said we’re going to allow you to have like an inbox that’s like jasoncalacanis@linkedin.com and we’ll just going to give you a straight up email and people can email that email.

Jason Calacanis: 24:27 Yeah.

Lon Harris: 24:29 And it’s lonharris@linkedin.com, whatever.

Jason Calacanis: 24:32 Would make my job a hundred times easier.

Lon Harris: 24:34 Which by the way, super huge and then people could decide, do I want to forward that to my main inbox? Do I want to have it a secondary inbox?

Jason Calacanis: 24:41 Exactly.

Lon Harris: 24:42 But I would be fine with having a LinkedIn email. By the way, that’s what Rahul from Superhuman, I understand, had pitched LinkedIn on and that was going to be their big thing. They would have like a billion people with email addresses. It would have been the greatest product ever. They didn’t do it.

Jason Calacanis: 24:59 They lacked vision at LinkedIn.

Lon Harris: 25:03 I think it was like too controversial at the time. But I would pay 50 bucks a month for that email.

Tibo Louis: 25:08 No one is in charge, I guess, in LinkedIn. It’s like they are losing everything.

Lon Harris: 25:13 It’s a money printing machine. Still is. I mean, it’s still the best place to post a job.

Tibo Louis: 25:16 Exactly.

Lon Harris: 25:17 And InMail does work. It’s great for sharing content. I just think they have to like… really, when you go into that web interface, it’s too slow. So since it’s too slow, I wind up giving up. I want to have like, make it a modern day Gmail Superhuman-like app so I can use quick keys, I can do filters, just make my LinkedIn email box work like my Gmail. Period. Full stop. There’s no quick keys, there’s no way to quickly sort stuff. It’s crazy.

Jason Calacanis: 25:43 It’s a mess, yeah. Anyway, great job. And uh, we’ll have you back on again when you have your next cool tactical and practical tip. If you have a tactical practical tip that you want to share with the audience, just email Lon. Lon@launch.co is your email, right?

Lon Harris: 25:56 Yeah, you can get me there, Lon@launch.co. You can also use producers@launch.co if you prefer. That one will get to me as well.

Jason Calacanis: 26:03 Thank you to Tibo. Great job. But I like this idea of like a little more structure to the show as we go into year 16. Tactical, practical, the interviews, news, and boom, a little off duty.

Lon Harris: 26:13 Okay. All right.

Jason Calacanis: 26:14 Before we go on, we should talk about one more thing, our friends at Ro.co, of course. Ro.co. Look at me… look at my…

Lon Harris: 26:24 And that’s eating chicken morels and beef tartare and everything he wants.

Jason Calacanis: 26:31 I… I was eating all this stuff. You know I’m on a GLP, thanks to Ro.co. Get your insurance checked. Uh, you can pay a simple amount every month. Uh, your insurance can pay for it. Anyway, easiest way to do it. I gotta be honest with you folks. I was out of control eating. Now, I still I eat whatever I want, but I don’t eat too much. It’s a… it’s not about necessarily what you’re eating, it’s the amount of eating and it’s also the snacking and the high pressure eating. That was my big one, stress eating. I’d be stressed out, I’m like…

Lon Harris: 27:00 A lot, let’s go get a donut and a latte. An extra 800 cal. I’ll tell you. I used to pound them donuts.

Jason Calacanis: 27:04 Go get velvet tacos or whatever, yeah.

Lon Harris: 27:07 Whatever, you know, whatever it is. But even now, you know, I’ll get two velvet tacos, call it a day. I used to go three. That’s what these GLPs did for me. I’m running around here in Paris. I get this, there’s a scale in my hotel—it wasn’t a hotel last week. I jump on and I see kilos, I flip it over, it’s got the pounds, I flip it over, I was 169. I was like, holy cow.

Jason Calacanis: 27:28 That’s pretty fantastic.

Lon Harris: 27:30 People are noticing it. They look at my face, they’re like, ‘you look good.’ Just give ‘em the code one more time. So there you go. So Ro will let you know if GLP-1s are covered for you for free. You just submit your insurance card, they do the rest. Go to ro.co/twist for your free insurance check. See if you can get on these GLP-1s. This has got to be the biggest story in tech right now, following what Bloomberg calls months of simmering tension between the two companies. Apple last week filed a 40-page lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company made a systematic effort to acquire and use confidential information to help them replicate Apple’s consumer electronics business. Suit alleges that OpenAI encouraged current Apple employees to study confidential materials prior to their interviews with OpenAI, and even take hardware components and prototypes with them to OpenAI’s offices. OpenAI has denied these charges and says, quote, ‘it has no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.’ A lot of this goes around, a lot of the controversy Jason is centered around one person, a former Apple executive named Tang Tan. He oversaw design of the iPhone and the Apple Watch, and then in late 2023, he told Apple he was going to go become the Chief Hardware Officer at OpenAI. But Cupertino kept him around through February 2024 as part of his transition, and during this time is when they said Tan was already working with Jony Ive and Sam Altman at OpenAI, and he was sort of like bringing Apple information with him and sort of moving that stuff between the two companies. Recall also that key Apple staffer Paul Meade also departed the company recently for OpenAI. In his case, as soon as he told Apple he was leaving for OpenAI, they were like, ‘thanks very much for all your hard work, there’s the door please leave right now.’ To me, this seems even by Sam Altman’s standards, this seems particularly brazen.

Jason Calacanis: 29:29 Sam Altman’s standards? You’re baiting me. That’s bait.

Lon Harris: 29:32 We’ve talked before about Sam Altman and he’s not maybe not the most reliable, but even by his standards, does this feel not a little brazen? Do you accept these Apple charges at face value?

Tibo Louis: 29:37 Yeah, I mean Apple wouldn’t bring this suit if it didn’t happen, so let me just start there. So they’re too professional, successful of an organization, just game theory it out. Would Apple file this lawsuit that they know is gonna be the front page of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the case is gonna be followed like the Waymo Uber, please… Burkae when

Lon Harris: 30:01 Yes, I also have that in the doc, talk about that.

Jason Calacanis: 30:03 Yeah so like you don’t have this happen these lawsuits unless it is they have them dead to rights. I don’t know that they have them dead to rights but given my 30 years in technology and that’s why you’re tuning in here it’s like I’ve seen this movie before they got them dead to rights.

Lon Harris: 30:21 Okay, so you’ve identified a real problem and you’ve put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in so you’re all set to launch your new company right? Not so fast if you want investors and potential customers to take your new business seriously you need to consider forming a Delaware C-Corp and that’s where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. They’re going to give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email, and of course a phone number. And that’s going to take just 10 minutes and 10 clicks. They don’t charge hidden fees, customer service is available around the clock, they’re not overwhelming your inbox with spam, and they make it easy to cancel at any time. So, get all the advantages of a Delaware C-Corp independent regardless of where in the US you’re operating from. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist for more details and the links are in the show notes.

Jason Calacanis: 31:15 Not only do they have them dead to rights, they have him like cats nine lives they got him like 90 times I bet. They and the fact I didn’t know this but good job summarizing it. They kept him around for a few months to wrap up and do a transition.

Tibo Louis: 31:29 Yeah like 2-3 months, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 31:31 Anytime that happens they were on him like white on rice. They were on him watching like hawks. They knew that he might do this is what I bet. Now I’m not saying that’s entrapment but you have to be incredibly brazen to give your resignation, stay around for a few months, and then use that as the time because once you know somebody’s leaving you know that that’s a possibility. I’ve talked about situations that I’ve been in either on companies I’m on the board of or an investor in where people do this kind of stuff or I had a salesperson one time that tried to abscond with the entire database and our editorial calendar for this very program. So, he’s dead to rights. The crazy thing here is ChatGPT had such an amazingly lead and they had such a halo around them, such a halo but a year ago 18 months ago that Apple did a major deal with Sam Altman specifically, Tim Cook and Sam Altman did this deal if you remember to make ChatGPT the opening default. I don’t know it wasn’t exclusive you remember but they were going to be the default LLM. So, instead instead of simply building a thoughtful deep and meaningful relationship with the company with the largest with the majority of… Smartphone users here in the United States, with the most well-heeled ones. Right, people don’t realize that iPhone is now the majority of smartphones in the United States. It’s not like a small thing with Android having two-thirds and Apple having one-third. Now it’s 55% Apple, I think, because they came out with the lower-end phones and the more accessible ones, and they have the best product compared to Android. You are going to poison that relationship in order to take them on and hire their team members, and supposedly they’ve hired like hundreds of Apple team members, and put salt in the wound to give Johnny Ive $10 billion? Johnny Ive I think has like billions of dollars in OpenAI equity. I think Johnny Ive has more equity in OpenAI and the value of that than he ever had in Apple. I think they got like some significant amount—

Tibo Louis: 33:54 When they bought his company I think it was $6 billion and I think it was equity.

Lon Harris: 33:57 $6.4 billion in an all equity deal.

Jason Calacanis: 33:59 Now, did they buy that at 100 billion and he has 6%? 200 billion he has 3%? So if we find that date and we just do a cursory look, I’m going to guess it was when the company was at two or three hundred billion in valuation. But even if it was at a $600 billion valuation, that means he has 1% of OpenAI. My Lord folks, if he’s got 1% of OpenAI—

Tibo Louis: 34:21 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 34:23 —and he’s owns 50% of his company, I mean oh my god, he’s sitting on billions of dollars, billions of dollars personally in OpenAI shares. So this was an example of them, I think, not realizing the big picture here. They got too cutthroat. They’re never going to beat Apple at hardware. They’re not. I’m sorry. I don’t see it. I think like there’s going to be a dozen new AI first products. I think Apple will have two of them, yeah maybe ChatGPT has one, maybe Elon creates one, you know, maybe Android has a couple, obviously we’re fans of Laudpane, obviously there’s like smart glasses like Meta’s doing. But let’s just pump our brakes here. The being the default on the iPhone and providing ChatGPT white labeled to Apple for their other products would have been a much bigger business. What happened then with Google? Google now is making a billion dollars a year off of the Apple relationship. They’re doing Gemini. So they lost the ChatGPT deal because of this. Talk about the worst decision ever. Now listen, Sam is brilliant as a dealmaker, but this is a serious miss. If I’m a shareholder, I’m on the board of OpenAI, I am livid right now, Lon, that we threw and we incinerated the relationship with the most important consumer technology company in the world, Apple.

Lon Harris: 35:42 Uh, it was about 300 billion was OpenAI’s valuation when they did that deal.

Tibo Louis: 36:00 They own 2%.

Lon Harris: 36:01 Yeah.

Tibo Louis: 36:03 Company becomes worth 2 trillion when it starts publicly trading, they own 40 billion dollars. He has to own a third or half of the company he sold at least. So he’s gonna make 10 or 20 billion dollars.

Lon Harris: 36:12 Doing alright. Thank you.

Tibo Louis: 36:13 They gave Jony Ive 10 or 20 billion dollars to make a hardware product that has a 5% chance of working. Not because there’s anything wrong with Jony Ive. The average person has a 1% chance of making a hardware product. Jony Ive has five times that. Hardware products are hard.

Lon Harris: 36:28 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 36:29 Very hard.

Lon Harris: 36:30 Yeah. What a disaster this is. This is an unmitigated disaster for Sam. I guess my final question would be: I feel like there was a time in my life that I could remember where the CEO of a very large soon-to-be public company having a reputation like this as being like a rapacious schemer would be bad. Is that still bad? Do people care about this in 2024? Does it matter that that is his reputation?

Jason Calacanis: 36:58 If you’re winning, you can get away with a lot.

Lon Harris: 37:05 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 37:06 Because you’re winning and everybody’s making money. And so when you have a lot of people on the cap table, they’re going to rally around you. I’ve seen this up close and personal many, many times. When a company goes through problems and you see like their VCs, their employees, their analysts, their partners rooting for them, you’re like, ‘Hey, yeah, we’re all on the team, we have equity, we have a stake in this, we’re betting on a certain future.’ Totally fine. But what they have to… what you have to realize is OpenAI, when they stumbled, which they have this year, when you stumble, if you’ve built up all of this bad karma, then the knives come out.

Lon Harris: 37:45 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 37:46 And so that’s the other problem. Somebody told me early in my career: enemies accumulate. Enemies accumulate.

Lon Harris: 37:53 Mm.

Jason Calacanis: 37:54 Be very, very careful, and this is I think what Sam’s learned. He had the huge lawsuit with Elon, huge lawsuit now with Apple, huge lawsuit with the New York Times. I mean, in all of those cases, those could have been partnerships. He could have worked it out with Elon, he could have continued to have the partnership with Apple teed up; he had won that, he fumbled that one. He could have a partnership with the New York Times. All he has to do with the New York Times is say, ‘Hey, we want you to be our primary partnership. We’ll give you a billion dollars in equity and we’ll do a 10-year deal for a hundred million dollars a year, for 200 million dollars a year.’ Just buy your way out of it and tell the New York Times they’ll be the only one getting this deal, and as part of getting this deal, we just want you to encourage other people to license their content to us, whatever, you know? They could have just paid off the New York Times. The New York Times isn’t worth that much money. The New York Times would love to have a billion or two billion dollars in equity.

Lon Harris: 38:44 Yeah, you can buy a newspaper, it’s not that expensive.

Jason Calacanis: 38:48 Come on man. All you gotta do is go in there and be like, ‘You know what? Let’s just assume… let’s just assume that you’re going to win the lawsuit and you’re going to win a couple of hundred million dollars…’ Let’s cut to the chase. How do we win together? Remember the guy from The Insider who’s like, “I will take his deposition! You’ve got lefts and rights! This absorbent state of Georgia!”

Lon Harris: 39:07 I believe it’s Bruce McGill. I believe it’s Bruce McGill, that actor, yeah. He’s fantastic.

Jason Calacanis: 39:11 Greatest scene ever.

Lon Harris: 39:13 He’s fantastic.

Jason Calacanis: 39:14 He had four minutes in that movie, stole the show. As a consumer and subscriber to the New York Times for 30 years, I am so sorry that we didn’t come to you and work on a deal. We respect you, we covet you, and we want to make this right, period, full stop. We’re going to assume here for this meeting, we’ll just do a little scenario here, you can still be hot under the collar over there, Lon. We’re going to assume here that you’re going to win the case.

Lon Harris: 39:41 I mean, well, of course we’re going to win the case. I have a mountain of evidence. It couldn’t be more clear. We’re going to put you in the poorhouse, sir.

Jason Calacanis: 39:47 Okay, we are going to be the number one AI company in the world. You are the number one journalism outlet in the world. If we work together, we can double the footprint of your business and we will be your number one advocate, and we would like you to teach us, teach us how to work with content creators. We want you to be customer zero, we want you to be partner zero for our firm.

Lon Harris: 40:04 Well, stop stealing our data. That’s step number one. Or am I not… am I coming around…

Jason Calacanis: 40:07 No, I think it’s fine. You’re irate. Okay. We assume you’re going to win a $500 million to a billion dollar settlement. We’re going to give you a billion dollars in equity right now and we’re going to give you $100 million a year for the next ten years to license your content exclusively, and we’re going to power your website with ChatGPT for free. How might that sound?

Tibo Louis: 40:26 All right, well, I’m getting a chunk of that as the lawyer, so I’m… I’m in.

Jason Calacanis: 40:29 There you go. Boom. Here we go.

Lon Harris: 40:30 I’m sold.

Jason Calacanis: 40:31 So that’s the way they have to approach these things is what’s it going to take? What’s it going to take for us to make your business double and to have you be so happy with us that you tell Washington Post and LA Times and Economist and Financial Times and CNN to work with us? We want to develop a standard with you.

Lon Harris: 40:43 It’s interesting. It’s exactly what Mark Cuban said these AI companies should do about the data centers is just literally just buy everybody in the town off. Like if they oppose it, just say, how much money do I have to give you for you to not oppose it?

Jason Calacanis: 40:50 Hey, you got 100,000 people in this town and 20,000 of them are kids. We’re putting a half million dollars in equity for those 20,000 kids.

Lon Harris: 40:54 Yeah, I’m just going to like this, write a check and make the problem go away.

Jason Calacanis: 40:59 And if you guys can get to 100% of the signatures, then whenever you hit 100% of the signatures, the money’s deposited in your account. So anyway, this is a disaster for OpenAI. And I think they’re probably dead to rights.

Lon Harris: 41:07 Probably.

Jason Calacanis: 41:08 We have a question, a viewer question from N-O-D-Y @sparker 770, bunch of numbers, I’m not going to read them all off.

Lon Harris: 42:00 What do you think the outcome will be of this lawsuit? What kind of restitution do you think Apple is looking for here?

Jason Calacanis: 42:06 I think Apple is going to go to the mat like New York Times is. When you have somebody like ChatGPT that’s such a powerful organization that’s firing on all cylinders, that’s going to be worth two or three trillion dollars, um, you don’t stop. And you—they had this experience with Google and you saw what happened with Uber. Uber I believe, uh, I—the person went to jail. I think that Uber didn’t get, uh, infected by this. But in this case, since he was a full-time employee for a while and he did the recruiting, I think they’re going to be infected. I think they’re going to go after the injunction, which is you can’t release a product and you got to like reverse this and then I think they really just want them to stop poaching as well.

Lon Harris: 42:46 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 42:47 So there’s probably all of those things. So they’re just going to try to exact maximum pain.

Lon Harris: 42:51 It was 18 months in jail for trade secret theft that that Google or Uber exec was sentenced to.

Jason Calacanis: 42:58 Yeah, million dollar fine and like 750 in restitution. So what happened in the Uber case, according to reports—I’m not—I don’t have any—I literally don’t have any inside information. If something like that happens on an investment, I don’t—I’m not like asking Uber ‘Hey, give me all the inside details.’ I was like, I don’t want to be touching that. I don’t want to get deposed. But in that case, when he showed up with the hard drive or whatever with all the data on it, they rescinded their offer and they said leave the building. In this case, they didn’t do that.

Lon Harris: 43:29 Now, and it sounds like they were encouraging it. Apple seems to believe that they have evidence that OpenAI was actively recruiting people to do this while they were in transition periods between the companies.

Tibo Louis: 43:43 Which is chaos.

Jason Calacanis: 43:44 That is a—that’s a very chaotic behavior.

Lon Harris: 43:47 That’s what I mean, it’s so—it’s so brazen, I’m almost taken aback, like maybe this didn’t happen because it seems so obvious that you would know not to do that.

Jason Calacanis: 43:54 I—I’ll be honest, I don’t think Sam knew.

Lon Harris: 43:57 Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 43:58 I think they made—‘cause I don’t—I mean, again, it’s like a fun thing for people to beat up on Sam and the lawsuits and all this stuff. I can’t imagine Sam would, with the experience he has, would ever in his right mind encourage somebody to do that.

Tibo Louis: 44:10 It’s literally not worth it. He’s too savvy.

Jason Calacanis: 44:13 Yeah, way too savvy. Honestly, there’s no way he knew, which means this guy went rogue. But here’s the thing: if you have an employee who goes rogue and they work for you, you still got some liability.

Lon Harris: 44:25 There is a new, newly proposed legislation in Washington D.C. itself. Uh, it’s an update to their Autonomous Vehicle Act of 2012, and it would allow driverless testing and commercial driverless operation. So currently in D.C., Waymo, Zoox, they can test vehicles out in the city, but they must have a human operator in the car. And so now there’s a new bill being debated that would allow autonomous vehicles to just start operating commercially in Washington D.C. itself. Uh, Uber has come out against it. Against the bill, Waymo supports it. So Uber is saying that you can’t have—they Uber supports a hybrid, they call a hybrid model.

Jason Calacanis: 45:17 Okay.

Lon Harris: 45:18 So you can offer robo taxi rides as part of an overall ride share service that also has human drivers because they argue that otherwise autonomous vehicles replace human drivers and they also say there’s a whole bunch of benefits to having human drivers that autonomous vehicles can’t do, like helping out the disabled or elderly when they want a ride and they argue that just a fleet of autonomous vehicles with no human drivers creates congestion because the cars are rolling around unoccupied or they’re stalling or they’re waiting around places. So that’s—that’s what Uber is saying. Waymo, on the other hand, says that this bill allows them to safely deploy autonomous vehicles while also supporting public transit and without restricting the, you know, ride shares that you could already use in the city like Uber. They’re saying it won’t impact Uber, you could still get a human driver from Uber if you want, Waymo would just be sort of a separate option. There’s actually a hearing today in DC about this legislation and both companies have sent representatives that are going to sort of pitch their view.

Jason Calacanis: 45:59 So I’m giving you my like raw reaction here. I haven’t read anything. I don’t know—we don’t know what’s exactly true here or not. But there’s also legislation going on in New Jersey and somebody started—you know, every time this happens, people are like, “Oh, well, J-Cal’s the chairman of the board at Uber, so let’s @ mention him.”

Lon Harris: 46:21 You own 30% of the company, Jason, so…

Jason Calacanis: 46:25 Nah, no, I don’t own 30% anymore. Come on, relax everybody. So, you know, we have this situation where one group of people are going to want absolutely no regulations for self-driving. They’re going to want to be able to put cars on the road anywhere with any sensor stack and they want federal legislation. So that would be Tesla, right? Tesla wants federal legislation. They want to override every state’s ability, every city’s ability to make their own decision. That is like, you know, I don’t want to say a Hail Mary, but it’d be like splitting the arrow type outcome because you do have local—we live in a union of 50 states and driving and roads is like one of the things that, you know, you have local control over and as you should, right?

Tibo Louis: 47:23 And as we’ve seen, I mean, localities, different regions have different challenges when it comes to things like ride sharing. Like it makes sense for a town in Colorado that’s in the Rockies to want to have different rules than, you know, Austin, Texas, nice and flat, easy to get around.

Jason Calacanis: 47:40 And how paradoxical that Uber fought that battle for a decade and now we’re going to fight it all over again. Instead of it being ride sharing and you can use your own car to give somebody a ride, it’s going to be I can use my autonomous vehicle everywhere. So, it’s going to be localized. What happened in China? China stopped giving licenses for automated cars. It is the wild west over there. There are 20 different providers in 10 different cities and there have been massive protests from drivers and there are 10 million cab drivers. I’m not even talking about truck drivers. There are like 10 million. And so if you look, China has suspended—this is from Reuters—what’s the date on this one?

Tibo Louis: 48:20 What’s the date on this one?

Jason Calacanis: 48:21 April 29, 2024. So this is—

Lon Harris: 48:22 Yeah, this is pretty recent. This April.

Jason Calacanis: 48:25 Yeah, the two months, three months ago. Um, so when you have these unrestricted and companies start YOLOing it, you will have protests in the street because drivers immediately start losing 10%. There’s like a 10% downward pressure on pricing. And so they’re going to… AVs are going to be licensed. They’re going to be limited by the number of them. And there are going to be rules for the road that are different in different cities. And you know, as much as it sounds great logically for there to be one rule for everybody, it’s just not how America works.

Lon Harris: 48:57 No, it’s not a top-down thing.

Jason Calacanis: 48:59 And as you can see in the top-down place, China, which has a lot of regional actual autonomy even though people like to think of it as top-down, they do have actually a lot of regional autonomy. The next phase is the unions and the drivers fighting it out with the AV companies. So you have the DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft over here. You got Waymo and Tesla and Baidu and WeRide and Zoox, you know, and Nuro and the Lucid Gravity. So you’re going to have… there’s at least 15 players here in the US right now and you’ve heard of probably 10 of them. Then you have the pure play non-AV and then you have in the middle these aggregators: Lyft, DoorDash, etc.

Lon Harris: 49:47 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 49:48 DoorDash has their own hardware now. But now think—let’s take Uber out of it for a second and just think from first principles about DoorDash. DoorDash has DoorDashers that are doing 99.99% of deliveries. And in some cases, they’re in unions and they’ve been fighting over it in every single locale: minimum wage and do they get paid for downtime?

Tibo Louis: 50:05 Percentage of their tips that they get, there’s all sorts of like ins and outs, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 50:11 And we’re 15 years into that for DoorDash.

Lon Harris: 50:12 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 50:13 Then you have DoorDash at the same time—they have their own robot that drives. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but it’s not a car, it’s like—it’s kind of like a motorcycle. I think it falls under the e-bike situation. We’ll play a video of it here. Take a look, see if you can find that for me.

Lon Harris: 50:26 Take a look, see if you can find that for me.

Jason Calacanis: 50:30 They are going to be fighting themselves. Their unions and everything are going to be fighting and there’s going to be a whole thing. So this is going to be a two, three-year battle in every city. Uber is in the middle of it as well. They have done all these concessions for drivers and insurance and healthcare and benefits. So they’ll have to be loyal to them. What do those people want? They want to keep their jobs, rightfully so. Uber has put 10 billion dollars into self-driving companies. So they—they know that this is how— So Uber, this isn’t about Uber versus Lyft. This isn’t about DoorDash versus Waymo doing deliveries or robotaxis or Zoox. This is about a civil war inside of these companies. They have to manage a crazy transition. So what would you propose if you were DoorDash or Uber or Lyft? And 99% of rides and deliveries are happening by humans, and it’s 1% robotics, and we assume it’s going to double every year. So it’s 1% this year, next year it’s 2, year after it’s 4, year after it’s 8, year after it’s 16. You want to give them some hope that they can keep their job for some amount of time.

Tibo Louis: 51:39 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 51:41 And that’s what all this is. Now people are going to say, ‘Oh, it’s hypocritical.’ It seems hypocritical from the outside, yes. What it is is DoorDash wants 100%—well, I don’t know if they want—DoorDash realizes 100% of deliveries are going to be robotic. Zipline, DoorDash, whatever.

Tibo Louis: 51:57 Yeah, but it’s—there’s a gulf between now and then that you gotta get through if you’re DoorDash.

Jason Calacanis: 52:03 So managing the transition is what’s occurring here. So everybody’s going to dunk on them and say, ‘Oh, they’re trying to be decels.’ I think it’s more like we’re trying to manage a, you know, millions of drivers in the United States from rioting in the streets and burning down Waymos.

Tibo Louis: 52:20 That’s it, yes.

Lon Harris: 52:21 I mean, I think it’s—there’s so many things to look out for. I mean, if you’re DoorDash next year, you still need humans. So you can’t have all the humans who are DoorDash drivers immediately go do other things because they realize robots are going to take their job. You just—like you said—you need a—there needs to be like a runway here to launch this. And so they’re trying to protect the economy they’ve already created. It’s—it’s fascinating you take that tack because there was also—I don’t know if you saw this letter today—the economists published about AI job displacement.

Jason Calacanis: 52:53 I did not. And this is after everybody is suddenly swung to the other side of the ship and is like—everyone’s like, ‘Oh, no, there’s going to be no AI displacement.’ I’m like, guys, the ship is like, whoop! Everybody’s opinion was massive job destruction, now it’s no job displacement.

Lon Harris: 53:07 So yes, so 200 economists including 15 Nobel laureates published an open letter today. It’s called ‘We Must Act Now.’ Warns that AI is going to radically transform the U.S. economy and that we have to have a plan to offset potentially millions of lost white-collar jobs. It was signed by the chief economist for both OpenAI and Anthropic. Also Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, friend of the show. Uh, so—but I think the point they’re making here, Jason, is almost exactly the one that you and I were just talking about. They’re saying eventually, if you take a long enough view, the—the accelerationists are correct. AI is going to radically transform the economy and we won’t miss those jobs. It’s going to uptake productivity, we’re going to find new jobs and new sectors we don’t even think about today, and—and we’ll be fine. But they’re saying in the—in the gulf between… between today and that future, it’s going to be a huge problem. And the transition is what’s going to be so rocky and that we need to manage. And it’s exactly like what you were saying, like eventually all DoorDash deliveries will be robots, or most of them. But we got to get there.

Jason Calacanis: 54:15 So do you think Uber should—do you think Uber and DoorDash should slow down through legislation on a per-state basis the deployment of self-driving in order to save jobs and ostensibly not have accidents and try to build these hybrid networks? Do you think they should do that or do you think it’s hypocritical?

Lon Harris: 54:34 I mean, I don’t think companies should worry about being hypocritical personally. Like I think they should just worry about, you know, what the most important thing is in the immediate future for themselves, their own health and the people that work for them. I definitely think that we should be thoughtful. And if that means pumping the brakes a little bit, obviously I don’t think we should not pursue the future where automation is happening. I think that’s coming, it’s inevitable. But I’m—I’m not against ideas like this of like, let’s slow down, let’s make sure that we still have a functional economy next year as we wait for 20 years from now.

Jason Calacanis: 55:09 Would you be agree with licensing and say New Jersey, if New Jersey has—I’m just going to make up a number here—250,000 DoorDashers, Lyft and Uber drivers, 250 drivers, we’re going to release 1% of cars per year, 2% next year, 4% next year. Would you be okay with that? And then they charge them $5,000 a year, $10,000 a year for that license and that money goes towards, you know, like maybe unemployment for those drivers or something. Would you be okay with something like that?

Lon Harris: 55:42 Yes. In fact, I like those kinds of systems. I think we were talking about another thing, there was a proposal for like we should put a tax on companies as they replace people with AI to offset, you know, like every time you replace another human job with an AI, that’s all right, but you put like an extra 5% in the—in the tank for other people who are getting laid off. Like I like ideas like that. I think managed capitalism, I don’t have an ideological problem with that at all. I think we should do more of it.

Tibo Louis: 56:04 By the way, we already have that in most states. You have to put money away as an employer into your unemployment fund.

Lon Harris: 56:10 Exactly.

Tibo Louis: 56:11 And then, yeah, people take that. I don’t know exactly how—

Lon Harris: 56:12 So this would just be like the AI version of the unemployment fund. But I think I’m not—like, I, you know, I used to be—when in college, I was like a socialist, full-on communist. Like I think I’ve adapted to where it’s like, you can have capitalism, you just regulate it carefully to make sure it’s not abusive to people. I don’t—I don’t have an ideological problem with that at all. I think we should do more of it.

Jason Calacanis: 56:34 Yeah, so I mean, listen, if everybody wants to know where I stand, I think we should have licensing and safety is the number one thing. The great paradox here is even if this gets slowed down and let’s say people are right, Uber and Lyft and DoorDash are going to slow this down in order to catch up with their products, like that’s kind of the insinuation. They don’t want to ban it, they just want to slow it down and they want to— manage their own employees during the transition. Okay, let’s say both of those things are true.

Tibo Louis: 57:04 And they might turn out to be.

Jason Calacanis: 57:06 I still think I would want to see, I still think the rollout is not coming that fast. I still think it’s going to be 1%, 2%, 4%, 8%, 16%. So let’s just do that number. And I think right now, ride-sharing is 1% of all rides that occur in the United States.

Tibo Louis: 57:26 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 57:28 And then I think of that 1%, so take now we have a 100% pie of rides, I think that like with the exception of like top markets, Los Angeles and San Francisco, of ride-sharing rides, maybe less than 1% are automated now.

Tibo Louis: 57:44 It might be two.

Jason Calacanis: 57:45 So if we assume 2% a year, 3% a year, okay, 2027 it goes to 4%. 2028 it goes to 8%. 2029 it goes to 16%. 2030 we hit our stride, it goes to 30%.

Lon Harris: 58:03 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 58:04 It’s still going to take time, right? And I think all these proposals are two-year proposals or three-year proposals. So I think the organic rollout as Waymo and Zoox and Tesla will want to do it is going to go relatively at the same pace as these proposals that are the transition.

Lon Harris: 58:18 That makes sense.

Jason Calacanis: 58:20 So it’s going to be moot at the end. It’s just people lobbying for something that’s going to be a paced rollout anyway. It’s going to take five years to get to 30% automated.

Lon Harris: 58:28 Right. Your numbers were really close. 1 to 2% of all rides in the US currently are ride shares and 0.2 to 5%. This is according to Gemini. 0.2 to 0.5% of those ride shares are in AVs currently.

Jason Calacanis: 58:42 Got it. Okay, so let’s say it goes from 1 in 200 this year.

Lon Harris: 58:46 And that’s max, it’s 0.2 to 0.5%. So 1 in 200, we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Jason Calacanis: 58:51 Exactly, exactly. 1 in 200 this year, 1 in 100 next. I’m saying doubling. So 1 in 100 next year, 1 in 50 in 2028, 1 in 25 ‘29, 1 in 12 in 2030, 1 in 6.

Lon Harris: 59:08 And that’s if it’s perfectly consistent.

Jason Calacanis: 59:11 In ‘31, 1 in 3 in ‘32. So maybe we have half in another seven years. I think that’s actually kind of realistic. I think we may be sitting here at this clip and be like, JCal nailed it.

Lon Harris: 59:19 Perfect, exactly.

Tibo Louis: 59:20 Again. I mean, I think it’s really like it jumps when it comes into a big new market because I think there are a lot of people like myself, the very first time you take a Waymo ride, you’re like, well, this is fantastic. I’m going to do this as often as I can.

Lon Harris: 59:37 Right.

Tibo Louis: 59:38 Like you see it, it sells a lot of people after one ride, I think.

Jason Calacanis: 59:43 It’s really a safety issue, and that’s actually what I’m very nervous about. Having seen this movie before, I think there is a very significant chance that all of this gets paused if just two people get killed in.

Lon Harris: 1:00:00 Yeah, two people, yes.

Tibo Louis: 1:00:00 Man, yeah, the video, if there’s a graphic video out there, yeah, that’s a problem.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:02 No, no, two people die in a quarter or one person dies on video because of a mistake or gets hospitalized. It is on video.

Tibo Louis: 1:00:06 It’s by default it is on video because these all have ten cameras.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:08 No, I mean if it gets out there in the world and we are all on social media watching a graphic video of a Waymo killing somebody, I think that’s how that would happen.

Lon Harris: 1:00:15 When there’s a lawsuit, there’ll be a FOIA, there’ll be a freedom of information when there’s a lawsuit, and a pixelated version of it or a version right before the person gets hit will be released.

Tibo Louis: 1:00:24 So it’s either going to be, you know, some grocery store’s camera, speaking of Flock, some grocery store camera, a Flock camera, whatever, somebody’s going to pick it up and we’re going to have it. There’s cameras everywhere, so, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:33 I am going to make two predictions. 50% of rides are automated 2032. Okay? 2032, 2033, okay? So six years from now.

Lon Harris: 1:00:44 I’m going to say seven years.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:46 Okay, so seven years to 50%. So all of this hand-wringing over this, oh my god, Uber’s de-selling, DoorDash and Lyft are going to de-sell. It’s going to be moot because they’re all proposing three-year, two or three-year transitionary periods, so, yeah, it’s going to be moot. Second thing, I think there’ll be a one-year pause in all of this, where I think it’s a greater than 50% chance that we might hit like a one or two-year pause during that seven years when something very bad happens.

Lon Harris: 1:01:21 I don’t want to see that happen, but…

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:23 There’s so much pressure on these companies, Lon. Like if you look at the Tesla bulls, they’re all these crazy Tesla accounts that are like, they’ve placed a bet on Tesla stock and then they release five videos a day pushing Tesla to go faster and faster and like they’re like, ‘I’ve never gotten an accident with FSD’ and it’s like, ‘Of course you haven’t, like you’re doing a ride a day’.

Tibo Louis: 1:01:42 And oh, the Waymo hasn’t had an accident.

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:47 Except they hit a kid in Santa Monica at seven miles an hour and like that could have been a lot worse.

Tibo Louis: 1:01:50 Yeah, and I mean, I think both sides, like you can see their point. Like statistically, these cars are so much safer than human drivers. Like if you were doing any kind of test of human drivers across US cities, like people hitting each other and they hit things and they hit other cars all the time, every day.

Lon Harris: 1:02:02 People die all the time, 30,000 a year.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:04 Every single day. So, yeah, it’s undeniable just if you’re looking at it as raw data, but the emotional impact of seeing an automated car hit a person invalidates all of that for people. The moment they see that, exactly, it becomes emotional, it stops being about the numbers and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, that robot car murdered a human, we have to stop this.’ And I think that that’s the mindset for a lot of people.

Lon Harris: 1:02:29 That’s exactly the mindset.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:31 Okay. Great.

Tibo Louis: 1:02:32 We got what… You want to talk about Flock real quick before we…

Lon Harris: 1:02:35 Well, you saw my tweet, yeah, so I’m happy to talk about it a little bit.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:38 So Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley did an interview where he called De-Flock a terrorist organization. De-Flock, of course, an open-source map of license plate cameras in the US. Anybody can report new cameras that they spot. Justine Bateman, the, the actress and filmmaker responded, she’s criticized Flock’s claims that they’re not forcing Flock on anyone.

Lon Harris: 1:03:00 You responded to Ms. Bateman, claiming that Flock has a PR problem. We can bring up the tweet here. “Flock is doing good work but their comms are sub-optimal at best. I’ve seen this movie before with Robinhood and Uber and it’s an easy fix. CEO founder owns the issue and walks people through it step by step over and over again until there’s no way for the issue to be debated in bad faith.” So you want to unpack this for us a little bit?

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:24 Yeah, so I think they took notes from Trump and said we have to go on the offensive, we have to go on the attack and say hey, these people who are burning down or taking down the Flock cameras and vandalizing them, they’re terrorists. Okay, they’re not terrorists. You know, like that’s… we all know what a terrorist is. So when you use that hyperbolic language and at the same time people have valid concerns, then you are going to activate people.

Tibo Louis: 1:03:43 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:44 And that’s what they’ve inadvertently done. It would be like Travis coming out and there’s surge pricing and he says “Deal with it. Stop being poor.” Right? If he were to say something that outlandish or that hyperbolic, it’s going to make people a concern. So here’s what you have to do. You do what Travis did. We worked on a blog post together back in the day about surge pricing. Because when he would explain surge pricing to me, it made total sense and I was totally for it. When the public talked about it, when he wasn’t talking about it, they would be like “Oh my God, they’re charging, you know, six times the normal price to take me and my child to the doctor.” And it’s like “During a blizzard?” You’re taking your child to a doctor during the blizzard?

Lon Harris: 1:04:21 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:22 Literally that’s what it was. It was a rich person, I can’t remember which reality TV star was like “They just tried to charge me six times as much to pick up my kid during the blizzard” and like “this is abusive.” And it was like, okay, there’s no car service to pick up your kid either. Everybody just shuts down. Uber happened to build a system that says we’re going to double the price until somebody takes the ride. Would you like to have Uber never give an incentive for drivers to come out, which means they’re not available on New Year’s, they’re not available during a snowstorm or rain, they just stay home because why risk it as a driver, or would you like to just have availability? And so the argument was not like price gouging, it was availability. But it took us a while to get there. Here, what Flock is saying is like, hey, don’t pay attention to what we’re doing. We have no culpability. We provide software to local jurisdictions and there’s a bunch of terrorists and they’re attacking us and we’re hurt. The reason people are attacking you is because there are a bunch of people who really value their privacy.

Tibo Louis: 1:05:40 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:41 Now, should they attack you? Absolutely not. But, you know, taking a bat or a paint gun or a shotgun to a, you know, a speed camera as an example or a license plate reading camera, that’s like a time-honored tradition at this point. Like people hate being surveilled.

Tibo Louis: 1:05:56 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:57 It’s also very European, in Europe they shot, or not shot, they… They vandalized all the cameras on the highways there, speed cameras specifically. People get the ick from this. So what you have to do as the founder is to explain it from first principles. And when I had him on the show, the founder, I was really walking him through this actually because I identified it back then. And what they said was, every time I asked him like, “What’s the data retention policy? How do you track who has access to this stuff? Like, if a rogue cop wants to track their, you know, their divorce and they want to track their spouse, can they abuse the system, right?” And they were like, “Well, the local community sets their things,” or whatever. And it was a much better answer to say, “We only allow a local police officer to use this software if they keep the license plates only for up to 12 months. They’re not allowed to keep them past 12 months.” Additionally, any time they track a license plate, they have to put their badge number in, they have to put their password in, and it tells us in a permanent log that we keep at our headquarters, not the police, that says Officer Crumpsky looked at Mrs. Smith’s license plate, and he looked at it again on this day. And if we see, and then all of that goes in an audit to the city council, and we only allow this product to be installed in places where there is a city council and a judge and an organization that looks out for this type of abuse. We do not allow facial recognition, we do not take pictures of that, and all data’s gone in 12 months. So if there’s a series of robberies and it goes on for two years, the police can only get one year of data. And if it gets leaked, you know, we know it’s going to get leaked. Now, if you said it the way I said it, and we only install when the community is 75% in favor of this. So if there’s a community that is 75% in favor of it, we allow them to put this technology in. If 75% is against it, we don’t want them to have the technology and you can’t have it there because the police can’t unilaterally put it in. They need to have community support. And all of the locations are publicly available, and we’re available if there’s an audit. Any judge can come to us, we will give them the logs of potential abuse. The end.

Lon Harris: 1:08:22 Yeah, I mean, I feel like they are, like your approach definitely comes from a place of, “I’m aware that there are very justified concerns about this, so we’re going to address them.”

Tibo Louis: 1:08:34 The end.

Lon Harris: 1:08:35 Yeah, I mean, I feel like Flock keeps coming in from this perspective like, “Why are you criticizing us? It doesn’t make any sense.” Like, like they had that Super Bowl ad that was like, “We’re going to use your doorbell cam to help spy on your neighbors and find your lost dog,” and then they were…

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:46 That was Ring.

Lon Harris: 1:08:47 Well, it was the Flock—it was Flock, they were collaborating with Ring on this, and then Ring cut off the collaboration with Flock after the negative backlash to that ad. And then I just feel like every time, like there’s a… There’s that… the refrain seems to be, ‘Well, if you hate safety… like, would you rather have a safe neighborhood or your privacy?’

Tibo Louis: 1:09:08 Yeah. Are you pro-criminal? Yeah. You’re either pro-criminal anti-Flock, or you’re anti-criminal and pro-Flock.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:16 And I feel like you just lose people right away with that. There’s no nuance. It’s not a binary. These are justifiable concerns and you just… people are going to shut down if that’s your response, I think.

Tibo Louis: 1:09:26 Exactly. And, you know, the way to say that is, hey, by the way… with AI, we know it’s a dog. When it’s a lost dog, if people in Flock want to add the lost children/lost dog feature, they can opt into it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:41 Yes. Right. I think it makes total sense.

Tibo Louis: 1:09:43 If you don’t want to have your Ring camera as part of this, and you have privacy concerns, you don’t have to. You can just record your property. But if a lost dog comes on your property, or a lost child, or a kidnapped child is kidnapped on your front lawn or your back lawn or whatever in a car in front of your house, you could have contributed that data. You didn’t. With AI, we know it’s a dog. We know it’s a child. We have 99% certainty in both those cases. And we only use this if a judge asks us. You have to get a judge to ask us or a police department and it’s… we’ll do it within 24 hours with an emergency order from a judge. But we don’t just do it willy-nilly.

Lon Harris: 1:10:23 So they just say, ‘Listen, we heard you.’

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:25 Yes. And I’m friends with Jamie Siminoff and he was like, ‘I can’t believe this. Like, we just want to help find dogs.’ And it’s really a communication issue. And we’re at a moment in time where people are like, ‘Wait a second.’ I’m like, ‘Wait a second.’ Though, I’ll tell you, on my properties, and I have a couple of properties, I use UniFi, U-N-I-F-I. I have facial recognition on all my properties. I have license plate readers on all my properties. I have license plate readers reading the street, by the way. So at my houses, I have a camera that looks out into the street. Any private citizen can do this. Everybody who drives by my places, I have them. And I keep it forever, by the way. So if somebody was casing my house and I have security concerns, I know. I know if the same car goes five times by my house in the same day.

Lon Harris: 1:11:11 I feel like it comes down to the authorities. Like, people know that their neighbors are filming them and one another. I think it’s like, ‘Are you going to give me up to the feds?’ is the concern that people have. And generally justifiably, Flock works with a lot of police departments and I feel like…

Tibo Louis: 1:11:26 What are we looking at here?

Jason Calacanis: 1:11:28 Yeah, I don’t know, I’m not sharing this. Oh, this is UniFi. Yes, this is a… this is a very sophisticated system I have. So as you can see here, with AI, it knows those are people, it knows that’s a car, it knows that’s a dog. So it knows animals, so on my ranch when deer or my bulldogs or whatever, it tells me that. I get alerts. I mean, and I have a large number of cameras. Like, a large number of cameras.

Tibo Louis: 1:11:51 Well, that’s a big ranch, you know, it’s a property.

Jason Calacanis: 1:11:54 I have spent tens of thousands of dollars building my security out, just on cameras alone, in my houses. Sensor. So like somebody hops the fence anywhere, we know it. Floodlights, cameras. And then what this protects us is, you might be able to find a screenshot of this. You can put license plates and faces into the database. And then if I— if somebody comes on— look at this. If— this is the facial recognition. And— if somebody comes onto the property, like I have the pool cleaner’s face in the database.

Lon Harris: 1:12:27 Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:27 Pool cleaner comes on the property, doesn’t send me an alert.

Tibo Louis: 1:12:29 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:30 I’m on the property, doesn’t send me alert: ‘hey, you’re on the property’. If there’s an unknown face on the property, I get an alert that comes to my phone and my security team gets an alert that is the picture of the person is on the property, nobody— this person has not been put in the database. It’s like— that’s an Amazon delivery.

Tibo Louis: 1:12:52 Yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:12:53 But I mean stuff like that is so much less controversial because nobody— the Amazon driver’s not worried you’re going to send his photo to the FBI. People are worried that their Ring doorbell camera’s going to send their photo to the cops or something— or ICE or—

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:05 Anyway, I think— I think Flock has good intent. I think they’re good actors. I think we’re at a moment in time where this software has gotten so powerful and it’s so effective that they just need to do a better job with the comms and they should not leave it up to the local jurisdictions to run amok.

Tibo Louis: 1:13:21 Fair.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:22 They shouldn’t let them run amok. They got to just tighten that up. And I think they actually have, I don’t have insider information— well I kind of do— but anyway. They’ve tightened that up from what I understand. They need to communicate it now. So, the way I said it, would you be in favor of having it in your neighborhood or not?

Tibo Louis: 1:13:41 Fair. Yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:13:45 I’m— I’m not a huge fan of being surveilled everywhere I go. I’ll be honest, like I accept if I go to somebody’s ranch or whatever that they’re going to be filming or whatever.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:54 Okay, so in your neighborhood?

Lon Harris: 1:13:56 But…

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:57 But if your dog got loose, if your new dog got loose?

Lon Harris: 1:14:00 She did already, I had to chase her.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:01 I know, and if you could have the cameras track her?

Lon Harris: 1:14:03 That’s not enough— that’s not enough benefit for me. I— I think I would go back to just asking all the ladies in the neighborhood if they could spot her from their backyard. That— that worked well enough and I didn’t have to give up my—

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:18 What about robberies and stuff like that? If you had 10 robberies in your neighborhood— let’s say— let’s say it was in Los Angeles, where you did have lots of robberies.

Lon Harris: 1:14:26 I did. I got broken— my house got broken into multiple times in Los Angeles.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:32 Okay, so you’re telling me after getting broken into multiple times you wouldn’t want Flock on your street to catch the criminal who did it? Really?

Lon Harris: 1:14:44 I’m— I got to be— I’m not a huge fan of a surveil— living in a surveillance state. It makes me feel—

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:44 Even if it was just the license plates? Really?

Lon Harris: 1:14:46 I’d rather— I’d rather— I’d rather— I’d rather double bolt my— I’d rather double bolt my door than— than be filmed around the clock.

Tibo Louis: 1:14:56 Yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:14:57 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:57 I mean, some people feel that way. And so I respect people who feel that way. You don’t have that choice in China, obviously. You don’t have that choice in London anymore. tens of thousands of dollars on my, you know, estates, and my compound—

Lon Harris: 1:15:03 Sure. And I totally accept that. When I’m on private property— No, you definitely don’t. In London, I feel like I was very aware of being surveyed all the time. The cameras are very prominent everywhere you go.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:07 To do this. The poor people, by the way poor people in my estimation, like I know this from Turk Street and when we had our office in the Tenderloin, they wanted cameras. The people who were in really high crime areas, they want—you couldn’t have enough cameras for them. They were like, “Yes, cameras everywhere, please.” Because my kids have to go to school. And I think once you—you don’t have kids— Rich people can afford— as I just said, I spent—

Lon Harris: 1:15:26 —you do have a dog and I saw you were thinking about it when I brought up the dog. What’s the dog’s name?

Tibo Louis: 1:15:32 Barry. My dog’s name is Barry.

Lon Harris: 1:15:33 Barry. Like the HBO show?

Tibo Louis: 1:15:36 Barry, like… like blueberry, strawberry.

Lon Harris: 1:15:38 Okay. So you, poor little Barry. I saw you saying, “Hmm, maybe…” for Barry I would—

Tibo Louis: 1:15:44 I mean, I’d be devastated if Barry got out. But—

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:46 Barry gets eaten by a coyote and you could have saved him by giving up your rights.

Tibo Louis: 1:15:48 Oh, oh, how dare you! This is the 50/50 I have to decide on.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:54 See, you’re close, you’re close. Barry or Big Brother. I don’t know, let me think about it. Barry gets eaten by… mauled by coyotes, God forbid. She’s a charming little girl, she’s so sweet. Here’s my Flock commercial. Flock is going to keep your community safe, and it’s going to keep little Barry from being mauled by a pack of coyotes. It’s going to keep your dog alive. Lon Harris is the terrorist who wants your dog to be eaten by a pack of wild coyotes.

Lon Harris: 1:16:19 No, I’m—I have to deal with the wild coyotes. That’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:22 You’re willing to—I’m not willing to—see, if you had kids, I think there’s nobody in the audience with kids who wouldn’t want a Flock system. Once you have kids you’re just like, “Yeah, I don’t want my kid getting kidnapped. If they do, I want that fucking license plate.”

Lon Harris: 1:16:35 Yeah, I understand. I think you’re probably correct about that. I think kids would change the dynamic.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:39 Right. Listen, if your dog dies, that’s on you. Flock security. Oh my god.

Lon Harris: 1:16:43 Don’t do that, Flock. Don’t listen.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:45 Lon Harris.

Lon Harris: 1:16:47 Oh my god, this is out of control. I want to say a quick shout out. We lost—we lost one of the greats, one of the acting greats this morning. Iconic New Zealand actor Sam Neill.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:54 Who?

Lon Harris: 1:16:56 You know him from playing Dr. Alan Grant—

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:00 Jurassic Park.

Lon Harris: 1:17:01 Dr. Alan Grant from the Jurassic Park series. He’s dead this morning at age 78. He had been treated for blood cancer for the last several years, but had been cancer-free since April. So this was unexpected that we lost Sam Neill today. Also a horror legend, Jason. In the Mouth of Madness, Event Horizon, Dead Calm, Omen III. I would really recommend 1981’s Possession. You can rent that on VOD now. An incredible, bizarre, very scary Polish-made horror movie from the early 1980s starring Sam Neill. So he will be missed. And the word is on him that he was a great guy. I never met him, but apparently Sam Neill, a charming and lovely man. So we’re gonna miss him.

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:29 I’ve heard about this Possession one. It’s quite controversial, isn’t it?

Lon Harris: 1:17:32 Yeah, it is. So the setup is that Sam Neill is some sort of international operative, diplomat, spy—it’s sort of left vague. He comes home after a long trip and his wife, played by the incredibly beautiful French actress Isabelle Adjani, tells him she’s leaving him. Please. Wife is acting very bizarrely and she tells him she hates him now and she wants a divorce. It causes him to sort of come mentally unglued and then things go in a variety of bizarre, terrifying directions. It becomes almost sci-fi horror by the end. I don’t want to give away too much but these are incredible lead performances from Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani. They’re both, it’s like when Klaus Kinski used to work with Herzog where they’re going to a level of insanity. They’re reaching this like fever pitch that few actors I think can ever get to.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:39 I gotta say, Event Horizon, I watched it recently, like in the last year, because I was like tell me some like interesting sci-fi, like intellectual.

Lon Harris: 1:18:43 I like that one, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:44 And Event Horizon has this scene which is this like kind of like going to hell type scene and they filmed it for like a week and it was out of control torture, adult contact, really bad.

Tibo Louis: 1:19:03 Yeah, it’s gross.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:04 Adult contact, really bad.

Tibo Louis: 1:19:05 Really horrific stuff is happening, yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:19:07 Yeah, like people’s teeth being pulled out, like dentistry, just all kinds of torture.

Tibo Louis: 1:19:11 Terrible.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:13 But, it was so bad that they decided to put it into like, it’s only like 30 seconds in the film in like a flashback scene.

Lon Harris: 1:19:21 The theatrical cut made it into a quick little montage so you only get a glimpse. There is a director’s cut where you can see more of the really gruesome stuff. No, there isn’t.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:27 Oh, really?

Lon Harris: 1:19:28 The director’s cut was never released.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:32 Ah, okay.

Lon Harris: 1:19:33 They were gonna release it. Then the warehouse where like all these outtakes were had had some problem or burned down or something. Like it was destroyed or they didn’t pay their bill, storage bill, something like that.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:40 All right.

Lon Harris: 1:19:41 Long story short, they made a comic book about the original Event Horizon ship that went through that torture and then there’s people online considering, considering using AI, speaking of AI, to recreate it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:57 Oh, to recreate it, yeah, yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:20:00 Correct, which is really…

Tibo Louis: 1:20:01 Interesting.

Lon Harris: 1:20:02 Oh there it is, that’s the Event Horizon, it’s basically with the devil kind of situation.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20:11 Yeah, it’s like it goes through a wormhole and they don’t know where it goes, and then it comes back decades later and then they find out the other dimension that it went to was like hell, basically.

Lon Harris: 1:20:25 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20:26 There is a fan cut version of, speaking of sci-fi, of Prometheus.

Lon Harris: 1:20:35 Oh, okay.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20:37 And I have a friend who is not me who has gotten a copy of it.

Lon Harris: 1:20:44 Oh, wow. Definitely not me.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20:46 Definitely not me.

Lon Harris: 1:20:54 Oh, wow.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20:55 And this friend who’s not me, it puts together Prometheus and Alien Covenant and like there was like…

Tibo Louis: 1:21:00 And it’s called the Alien Paradise.

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:04 Oh.

Tibo Louis: 1:21:05 It’s Prometheus plus Alien Covenant plus there were some like DVD specials, like a TED talk…

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:08 The online stuff. Yeah. The extras.

Tibo Louis: 1:21:11 Online stuff. And so that is going to be my pick. A friend who is not me, SWEM, someone who is not me.

Lon Harris: 1:21:21 Oh right, I did hear about this where it’s focused on David. It’s like it’s from David’s perspective through both of those movies.

Tibo Louis: 1:21:29 Now this got me down the rabbit hole. There is a website and a community that I just joined—or I’m sorry, a friend who is not me just joined. It’s a fan website, fan website. So I’m a fan of Superman 2. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Superman 2.

Lon Harris: 1:21:47 Of course! Yes, there are two cuts of that. There’s the Richard Lester and then the Donner cut.

Tibo Louis: 1:21:52 There’s the Donner cut. And so, and like I had this weird thing happen since we’re off duty here. This guy’s made somehow a long edit of this.

Lon Harris: 1:22:03 The unity cut, yes.

Tibo Louis: 1:22:05 And I think it includes some of Superman 3 and 4, yada yada yada.

Lon Harris: 1:22:09 I see, sure. It was the Richard Lester’s version of Superman 2 was very sort of jokey and the studio thought it was going to be too sort of jokey so they reconfigured a lot of the stuff for the final release.

Tibo Louis: 1:22:21 So I just want to put out there, I think this is going to be like one of the great things we’re going to see. These folks are doing it with collateral material. Oh, and then there’s one final one. Look up the Rogue One, the Andor cut. Rogue One, the Andor cut. And so, yeah, it’s on fan edit. Rogue One, the Andor cut. A friend who is not me, someone who is not me, has made Andor the Rogue One cut. And it has—it’s basically Rogue One but with a bunch of the Andor. And the friend who is not me who watched some of it, it’s really interesting because it uses a lot of the speeches and overlays, and they’ve made some unique images and collateral to put into this. So anyway, this is the future and the reason why I wanted to bring it up with you, Lon, is I wanted to ask you if you could take any series, TV show, or movie and fan edit it in some way to get a new experience, and use AI to make fill-in certain parts of the story and make a either—

Lon Harris: 1:23:26 Oh I already have it, I already have it in my mind, I know exactly what I want to do.

Tibo Louis: 1:23:31 Not Sopranos?

Lon Harris: 1:23:33 No. Uh, did you ever watch the TV series Hannibal? The NBC show that they made with Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter? So they did—the season three of the show Hannibal is Red Dragon. Or the movie—

Tibo Louis: 1:23:44 Ooh, really?

Lon Harris: 1:23:45 It’s the story, it’s the book Red Dragon adapted for TV with the characters from Hannibal. So the first two seasons are sort of prequel and then season three is Red Dragon, and then season four, the plan was Silence of the Lambs. But the show got cancelled. So we never got to see Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal Lecter do Silence of the Lambs, that’s what I would want. So you’d get an original actor to play your new Clarice, but then you’d CG AI Mads Mikkelsen as your Hannibal Lecter. There you go.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:20 Who now, which Hannibal was the one where he had a patient who he’d already eaten who was in a wheelchair?

Lon Harris: 1:24:25 I think you’re thinking of the movie Hannibal and it’s Mason Verger, the Gary Oldman character who was eaten.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:32 Yes!

Lon Harris: 1:24:33 Yes, he had a, Hannibal had him slice parts off of himself and eat them was the back story so he’s all scarred horribly.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:40 And then he wants to feed Hannibal to his pigs? Yes, yes.

Lon Harris: 1:24:43 Correct. That’s the movie Hannibal, the Ridley Scott one, the third one.

Tibo Louis: 1:24:46 I’m going to go back to that because I had watched the first couple of episodes of it and thought it was brilliant.

Lon Harris: 1:24:50 It’s great.

Tibo Louis: 1:24:51 I love the Hannibal series. I’ve read actually, I read Red Dragon. Red Dragon has who are the actors in it?

Lon Harris: 1:24:59 Well they did, Michael Mann did Manhunter in the 80s which is Brian Cox is Hannibal Lecter and William Petersen is Will Graham, incredible.

Tibo Louis: 1:25:13 And then they did, Brett Ratner did the movie version and it was Anthony Hopkins reprises his role as Hannibal Lecter and then you’ve got Ed Norton, Ed Norton. It’s not as good as the Michael Mann.

Jason Calacanis: 1:25:22 Watch this Michael Mann version. Manhunter is the one, Manhunter.

Lon Harris: 1:25:25 Manhunter 1986, I believe, is second only to Silence of the Lambs.

Tibo Louis: 1:25:34 Yeah, it’s really and Brian Cox is a very different take. It’s interesting to see, oh look, what’s that guy’s name? Go one picture back, that’s Chris Elliott.

Lon Harris: 1:25:42 Yeah, that is Chris. Is that? Yeah.

Tibo Louis: 1:25:43 I forgot Chris Elliott’s in that.

Lon Harris: 1:25:44 That is definitely Chris Elliott, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:25:46 Yeah, Chris Elliott is in it from Get A Life. Incredible.

Tibo Louis: 1:25:51 Alright, what else you got for us?

Lon Harris: 1:25:52 Alright, one more thing I wanted to tell you about, I don’t know if this is on your radar, I think you’d enjoy it on HBO Max, they have a four-part docu-series that just started called The Man Will Burn and it’s about, it’s about Burning Man. It’s the whole history, development of Burning Man, but it with a specific focus on 2021 when they had to decide are we going to do a Burning Man this year or because of COVID regulations, are we going to take a year off? So these filmmakers got incredible access into the Burning Man organization and they’re in all these meetings where they’re debating, you know, and Kimball Musk is very vocal that they should do it, but a lot of the other people in the organization are like, it’s still not safe, we can’t risk it. What if people, you know, there’s a health emergency in the desert? And it’s really, it’s really fascinating.

Tibo Louis: 1:26:27 I gotta watch it.

Lon Harris: 1:26:28 Yeah, it’s really fascinating to sort of counter, like it gives you the usual stuff you’d expect from a Burning Man doc like here’s people freaking out in the desert and all these people who love going telling you about their experiences, but then you get this look at like well it’s an organization too, it’s a company as well and it’s really fascinating to go back and forth. I really enjoyed the first episode.

Tibo Louis: 1:26:57 You know the first time I went was 20 years ago and…

Jason Calacanis: 1:27:00 They told me to not go because it was over. This is when I lived in Los Angeles.

Lon Harris: 1:27:03 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:27:04 And uh, there were I think 12 or 14,000 people there that year. Now it’s 70,000 people, 80,000 people.

Lon Harris: 1:27:11 Imagine a lot of that’s what this series is about is like how did this thing, how did this thing go from a few hippies hanging out on the beach burning a wooden thing to this massive thing? And then what does that mean for its meaning, its cultural meaning and what people are getting out of it that it went from being this like small collective of weirdos to like wealthy people.

Jason Calacanis: 1:27:31 A lot of I gotta tell you, I was very cynical about it as a New Yorker like and then I went and I was like if you like art, music, you know, costume design, whatever, it is extraordinary. The most amazing art and music you’ve ever seen. And it’s all free and you just drive around and experience it. It’s absolutely worth going to. I have been I don’t know five or six times. I don’t go—I’m not like so committed I go every year, but I go every couple of years and I always have a fantastic time. I go for a couple of days. But it has become very big and there is one problem now. It used to be that I could go there, nobody really knew who I was, it was like only some people in the tech industry, everybody was kind of cool. Now everybody’s going there and with Instagram and influencer culture combined with internet access, Starlink, you know there’s like a billion Starlinks out there, everybody’s got high speed, people are live streaming or taking pictures. That’s really against the ethos of it. And so when I go now—this is not like me in any way like thinking I’m a celebrity, but people do recognize me from the podcast.

Lon Harris: 1:28:07 I mean you’re on a very popular podcast. It’s not that surprising.

Jason Calacanis: 1:28:11 Yeah, This Week in Startups, two days a week.

Lon Harris: 1:28:15 And also All-In.

Tibo Louis: 1:28:16 Top one.

Jason Calacanis: 1:28:17 Yeah. And so literally I have people asking to take selfies with me. So now I go, one of the great things is people wear masks and stuff like that. I just mask up. And so when I’m wearing some kind of a mask or something, it goes down 90%.

Lon Harris: 1:28:21 Yeah. Just one of those Borat thongs and a mask. That’s it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:28:26 Basically, yeah, that’s what I’m doing. I’m wearing a mankini and that’s it. Alright everybody, another amazing episode of This Week in Startups is in the can. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Lon Harris: 1:28:34 Bye-bye.

Tibo Louis: 1:28:35 Bye-bye.