The 10M+ Bet on a Beanie That Reads Your Brain - Sabi & the Future of BCI | E2282

Summary

Jason Calacanis opens with a tactical-practical management lesson borrowed from LowerMyBills founder Matt Coffin: make every team member “the CEO of their domain.” He argues that if community, sales, or editorial isn’t someone’s number-one priority, it will never excel — so he’s appointed Lon, Ricky, Lucas, Bianca, Maddie, and Kabir as owners of their respective slices, and is now spinning up dedicated X group chats (the “Noty Gang”) to activate the top 1% of TWiST’s audience as a community flywheel.

The headlining segment is a skeptical interview with Sabi co-founders Rahul Chhabra and Atmadeep Banerjee, who are building a non-invasive brain-computer interface in the form of a beanie. Their pitch: 100,000 bio-potential sensors on the scalp plus a brain foundation model can decode thought-to-text without surgery — a “GPS for the brain” approach that Vinod Khosla has backed with eight figures. Jason repeatedly “calls cap” on the technology, demands a demo, and challenges them to make the system say “Calacanis” before he believes it, but acknowledges that if it works, it’s Professor X-level telekinesis.

The final act reviews three live submissions to Jason’s $5,000 bounty for an AI “podcast sidebar” with real-time fact-checking and persona-driven commentary. After demoing Armchair, Pod Commentators/SideCast, and BMD Pat, Jason narrows the contest from four personas to two — a fact-checker with citations and a cynic — and announces a second $5,000 bounty for Annotated.com, a Chrome extension for fair-use clipping and commentary on web media that he describes as “an enhanced multimedia Delicious.”

Highlights

”If nobody owns it, it’s never going to excel”

“If you want something to grow and be sustainable, you can’t make it number two or three on somebody’s list. It’ll never be prioritized… If nobody owns it, it’s never going to excel. So ownership means it’ll excel.” — Jason Calacanis, 3:00

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yt-dlp --download-sections "*3:00-3:43" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIHicFHtXE" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "ceo-of-the-domain.mp4"

”There’s no way to put a beanie on and then have it do transcription. Come on.”

“There’s no way this works. You guys are punking me. Is- Raul, is this guest a fake startup? It does not- there’s no way to put a beanie on and then have it do transcription. Come on.” — Jason Calacanis, 10:16

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yt-dlp --download-sections "*10:16-11:00" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIHicFHtXE" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "calling-cap.mp4"

”Exactly what we’re trying to do is building a GPS for the brain”

“How can satellites understand what is the terrain on the Earth, even through going through atmosphere? Exactly what we’re trying to do is building a GPS for the brain. When you have 70,000 or 100,000 sensors and your skull has some variability, you can figure out where exactly the neural activity happens.” — Lon Harris (quoting Rahul Chhabra), 14:44

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yt-dlp --download-sections "*14:44-15:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIHicFHtXE" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "gps-for-the-brain.mp4"

Vinod Khosla’s investment thesis: BCI must be non-invasive

“Here’s his quote. If you’re going to have a billion people use BCI for access to their computers every day, it can’t be invasive. So he’s thinking about if we’re all going to be think-typing on our computers and our phones, you can’t be surgery, it’s gonna have to be a solution like this where you just put a beanie on.” — Jason Calacanis, 18:22

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yt-dlp --download-sections "*18:22-19:05" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIHicFHtXE" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "khosla-thesis.mp4"

Jason’s Big Five wellness framework

“I always tell people my big five… Number one your sleep. Number two nutrition. Number three, uh, working out, exercise… I’m going to give you two more. Meditation and socialization.” — Jason Calacanis, 24:00

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yt-dlp --download-sections "*24:00-24:56" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIHicFHtXE" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "big-five-wellness.mp4"

A live AI fact-checker corrects the host on-air

“Gary confirmed the shooting April 25th, 2026, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton. Gunman breached checkpoint, fired shots. Trump and officials evacuated unharmed. It even names suspect Cole Thomas Allen was arrested.” — Lon Harris, 37:44

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yt-dlp --download-sections "*37:44-38:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIHicFHtXE" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "armchair-live-fact-check.mp4"

Key Points

Tactical practical: One person, one job (1:13) - Jason channels Matt Coffin’s LowerMyBills philosophy: make every team member the “CEO of X” so they think like a founder of their slice
Deputizing the team (2:30) - Ricky owns sales, Lon owns editorial, Lucas owns Founder University, Bianca owns Launch Accelerator, Maddie owns the syndicate, Kabir owns back office
Noty Gang and X group chats (3:45) - Nikita Beer’s new X Chat product is being used by Calacanis to build TWiST, This Week in AI, and AI Founders communities
The community flywheel and activating the top 1% (5:02) - Don’t chase reach; activate the most engaged 1% of your audience as a startup superpower
The streamer trick and parasocial risk (6:30) - Lon connects the community playbook to Telegram-driven streamer monetization; Jason warns against exploiting “whales”
Sabi: non-invasive BCI in a beanie (9:00) - 100,000 sensors decode thoughts to text using deep learning, no skull surgery required
From fMRI to bio-potential sensors (10:54) - Rahul Chhabra’s 2023 paper used fMRI + deep learning to decode what subjects were looking at; Sabi has since moved to bio-potential sensors that fit in a cap
fMRI vs MRI explained (12:00) - Functional MRI measures blood-flow changes across brain regions rather than structure
Current speed limit: word-by-word, ~30 WPM (14:12) - Users must currently think one word at a time; aspiration is thought-speed decoding before words form
Founder vetting: BITS Pilani, Stanford, autonomous drones (15:29) - Rahul’s thesis decoded EMG signals to predict athlete fatigue; co-founder Atmadeep was a deep learning lead at a satellite company
Vinod Khosla’s BCI thesis (18:22) - A billion-person BCI rollout can’t require surgery; this is why Khosla put eight figures into Sabi
Sabi.com pre-orders (21:33) - Device reservable now, planned release by end of year
Privacy concerns about thought-reading hardware (22:46) - Lon raises whether the beanie reads “everything” vs only shared thoughts; Jason argues for on-device, encrypted local models
Jason’s Big Five wellness framework (24:00) - Sleep, nutrition, exercise, meditation, and socialization as the five pillars to hit each day
Bounty #1: live AI sidebar contest (25:18) - $5K for an AI sidebar with four personas — fact-checker, troll, joker, producer — modeled on Howard Stern’s crew (Robin Quivers, Fred Norris, Gary Dell’Abate, Artie Lange)
Tech stack for live AI sidebars (28:43) - Speech-to-text via ElevenLabs, OpenAI Whisper, or Deepgram, with Gemini handling the persona-prompted analysis on rolling 50-100 word windows
Demo #1: Armchair by Mark Colebrook (36:41) - Highlights the transcript section each comment refers to; “Gary” and “the troll” personas perform well on the live political-violence test
Demo #2: Pod Commentators / SideCast (42:07) - Browser-window Zoom capture with persona “Rex” delivering cynical commentary in a side panel
Revised Bounty #1 spec: fact-checker + cynic (43:15) - Jason narrows the four personas down to two and sets check-in dates of May 1, May 8, and May 15
Bounty #2: Annotated.com (48:09) - New $5K bounty for a Chrome sidebar that clips and annotates web media under fair-use rules (90-second video, 100-word text), described as “an enhanced multimedia Delicious”

Mentions

Companies

Sabi (9:00) - Featured startup: non-invasive BCI beanie with 100,000 sensors, decoding thoughts to text
Khosla Ventures (18:18) - Vinod Khosla and firm backed Sabi with eight figures
LowerMyBills (1:13) - Matt Coffin’s company, sold for hundreds of millions; source of the “CEO of X” philosophy
OpenAI (20:22) - Vinod Khosla cited as first VC investor; tools (Whisper, ChatGPT) referenced for live transcription and audience fact-checking
Sun Microsystems (20:26) - Vinod Khosla co-founder credentials
Neuralink (referenced via “drill a hole inside the skull” BCI framing, 10:54) - Implicit comparison as the invasive incumbent in BCI
Calm (23:54) - Meditation app endorsed by Jason; suggested Sabi collab for equanimity
All-In Podcast (2:30) - Jason references his other podcast; later cites the Larry Summers / Chamath debate as a live fact-checking moment
Founder University (2:56) - Now operating on three continents (Japan, Saudi Arabia, US), led by Lucas
The New York Times (40:00) - Referenced for the “Opinions” podcast with Hasan Piker, Jia Tolentino, and Naja Spiegelman
Render (29:42) - Show sponsor; cloud platform for deploying apps and agents
Northwest Registered Agent (19:05) - Show sponsor; Delaware C-Corp formation service
LinkedIn Hiring Pro (9:17) - Show sponsor

Products & Technologies

fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) (12:00) - Foundation of Sabi’s 2023 thought-decoding research; measures brain blood flow
Bio-potential sensors / EEG (10:54) - Sabi’s wearable replacement for fMRI hardware
Brain foundation model (13:02) - Deep learning model decoding neural activity into text
X Chat / Noty Gang (3:45) - Nikita Beer’s group chat product on X, used to build TWiST community
ElevenLabs (17:00) - Text-to-speech in your own voice; also used for live speech-to-text in some bounty submissions
OpenAI Whisper (28:43) - Speech-to-text option for the AI sidebar
Deepgram (29:37) - Speech-to-text used in Armchair; produces timestamped transcripts
Gemini API (28:43) - Analysis layer for the AI sidebar personas
Armchair (36:41) - AI sidebar by Mark Colebrook; live fact-checking, transcript-highlight UI
Pod Commentators / SideCast (42:07) - Browser-based sidebar that hooks into a Zoom tab
BMD Pat (46:50) - Patrick Hughes’ submission at bmdpat.com/pod; zero-config URL-based sidebar
Annotated.com (48:09) - Jason’s new bounty: fair-use multimedia annotation Chrome extension
Delicious (51:04) - Old social-bookmarking site cited as conceptual model for Annotated
Viewbuds (16:57) - Visual ear-pod product referenced in the Professor X telepathy fantasy
Sig P365 (23:38) - Handgun mentioned in Jason’s gag thought-stream demo

People

Rahul Chhabra (9:00) - Co-founder and CEO of Sabi; BITS Pilani, Stanford intern, built autonomous drones
Atmadeep Banerjee (9:00) - Sabi CTO; authored the 2023 fMRI deep-learning paper; ex-deep-learning lead at a satellite company
Vinod Khosla (18:18) - Sabi investor; first VC investor in OpenAI; co-founder of Sun Microsystems
Matt Coffin (1:13) - LowerMyBills founder who taught Jason the “CEO of X” philosophy
Nikita Beer (3:43) - Built X Chat / Noty Gang community feature
Oliver (26:05) - Jason’s protege; runs This Week in AI demos
Mark Colebrook (36:41) - Built Armchair, the top contender for Bounty #1
Patrick Hughes (46:50) - Built BMD Pat / Sidecast submission
Larry Summers (36:00) - Cited via the All-In episode where Chamath was accused of looking things up mid-debate
Chamath Palihapitiya (36:00) - Same All-In episode reference
Megan Kelly (36:00) - Cited as a hypothetical interview where a live fact-checker would be helpful
Ben Shapiro (41:01) - Cited as a tightly scripted monologuer who doesn’t need live fact-checking
Hasan Piker, Jia Tolentino, Naja Spiegelman (40:13) - NYT “Opinions” podcast guests referenced in the political-violence fact-check
Cole Thomas Allen (37:44) - Suspect named by the AI in the 2026 WHCD shooting fact-check
Eric Ries (7:30) - Mentioned re: charity-lunch ethics anecdote

Surprising Quotes

“You can have axiom entrepreneurship in any job, any position. If you want to impress your boss, take whatever little narrow slice of the company and just act like the CEO of that. Just act like it’s your domain, your responsibility, and you’re just going to crush it.” — Jason Calacanis, 1:29

“This is either Theranos or it’s SpaceX. I am here for it, Raul. I am hoping you get to Mars.” — Jason Calacanis, 21:58

“You’re staking your entire reputations on a cap that allows me to dictate my words. Okay, this is a big risk here because if you don’t deliver Professor X level fidelity, I’m going to call you guys out in six months.” — Jason Calacanis, 15:29

“I think ‘these are just details’ was what he said to me on stage when I said how does it go from being a nonprofit to a for-profit. He said, ‘Oh Jason, these are just details.’” — Jason Calacanis, 20:29

“What I’m doing after this call is I’m taking this transcript saying, ‘make all Jason’s ideas’ and I’m entering the competition.” — Lon Harris, 54:24

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 Your staking your entire reputations on a cap that allows me to dictate my words. It does not work. There’s no way to put a beanie on and then have it do transcription. Come on. It is real. You would not believe the amount of engineering and effort that has gone into it to make it work, but it does work. This doesn’t work. I’m calling cap.

Lon Harris: 0:19 How can satellites understand what is the terrain on the earth even through going through atmosphere?

Jason Calacanis: 0:23 Exactly what we’re trying to do is building a GPS for the brain. You got metaphors, you got a killer idea. Congratulations, Lon, but this is this week in startups. Do you have a demo? All right, everyone, welcome back to Twist. That’s right. It’s Monday, April 27th. We are here in Austin, Texas, the great state of Texas, and we’ve got a full docket here. Things are growing so vibrantly, whether it’s This Week in Startups, our new show This Week in AI, Founder University now on three continents in Japan, Saudi in the Middle East, and in the US. We have so much community opportunity in a startup, and this is my tactical practical tip of the day, Lon, because we need to get these tactical practicals in here for people. Tactical and practical. One person, one job. One person is the CEO of X. There was a friend of mine, Matt Coffin, and his training philosophy when he did LowerMyBills in Santa Monica, sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. He did great. I don’t know if he ever took a job again after that.

Lon Harris: 1:28 I don’t think he did.

Jason Calacanis: 1:29 No, never full time, but he angel invests. Incredibly talented wife who opened up the store, and she’s an incredible designer. Putting it all aside, my guy Matt Coffin said, I make everybody the CEO of their domain. So it stuck with me, and getting people to think like a CEO, think like a founder, think like a founder is what you’ve got to try to inspire everybody. This is what I try to inspire Lon as my editorial director. Think like the founder of all editorial. What systems do you want to put in place? What goals do you want to put in place? It’s not easy to do because not everybody’s a lunatic founder. But you can have axiom entrepreneurship in any job, any position. If you want to impress your boss, take whatever little narrow slice of the company and just act like the CEO of that. Just act like it’s your domain, your responsibility, and you’re just going to crush it. Now community, it always falls to the wayside. It’s always number two or three on somebody’s list.

Lon Harris: 2:29 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 2:30 That’s my failing as a founder to not say, you know what, if this is important for me, I should put somebody in charge of it. So I said, you know what, the sales department’s pretty important here. These things are growing. I got Ricky in to be the Director of Sales. Boom. I said, you know, editorial’s growing a lot here. I got too many pokers in the fire: speaking engagements, podcast, All In, This Week in Startups. I brought Lon in. Lon, you’re responsible. Anything that’s editorial, Lon has to approve. And people still try to do end runs around Lon.

Lon Harris: 2:54 They do. Sometimes they try.

Jason Calacanis: 2:56 Nope. If it’s editorial, Lon must approve. Founder University, Lucas is in charge. Launch Accelerator… Bianca’s in charge, the syndicate, Maddie’s in charge. One after the other you’ll see me just deputize somebody, back office, Kabir’s in charge. They are the CEO of that. They are responsible. If you want something to grow and be sustainable, you can’t make it number two or three on somebody’s list. It’ll never be prioritized. So I am announcing that community is going to be our big thing. Why? It would be more interesting for me to be able to meet more fans on the regular. And I did all these different activities: Founder Fridays, meetups, live shows, but nobody owns it. If nobody owns it, it’s never going to excel. If nobody owns it, it’s never going to excel. So ownership means it’ll excel, and that’s what we’re going to do. Here’s an example: Nattila. Is it Nakila?

Lon Harris: 3:43 Oh, Nikita. Nikita Beer.

Jason Calacanis: 3:45 Nikita. La Femme Nikita. I got to remember. Labore Nikita. Labore uses the bore as his, uh, thing. He’s awesome. He’s on a heater. We should do like Labore Nikita corner like every couple of shows because I love how he manages that community. He came out with X Chat, and he hates Twitter groups. He wants it to be the chat metaphor as opposed to this weird hybrid that they made. So here is Noty Gang. We created a Noty Gang. And I just started inviting people. Uh, I publicized the Twitter handle, I publicized the group chat link, and people flooded in. I don’t… and then I did it for This Week in AI and AI Founders. So here is his inbox. If he goes to the Noty Gang on the left, yep, here it is. These are just Noty Gang members. And if you click on the management of it, like if you click on the actual title of it, this is really interesting. I think this is going to be a big deal. You’ll see the open group invite link and a number there, the fourth click down. There it is. Group invite link.

Lon Harris: 4:48 No, not that. Right above it. Group invite link.

Jason Calacanis: 4:50 There you go. And if you click that, uh, what you’ll see is you can share that group link and you can approve people. Now when you see approve, you see all the blue check marks. That’s great. When I see it, you know what I see? I see also an orange one for my subscribers.

Lon Harris: 5:01 Ah, okay.

Jason Calacanis: 5:02 So I added all my subscribers and blue check marks first. And you can just see there’s tons of people waiting to get in. So every couple of days I add 10 people. I don’t know how many we’re up to, but it’s becoming quite a nice little chat stream. This is what we’re trying to do, is just get consistent with the audience. We also created, um, one for, uh, This Week in AI, AI Founders, and one for, uh, TAD. So we’re just creating these groups. And then I did a nice… I was driving to a ranch and I just did a Spaces, and you can send the Spaces to the group. So then the group fills up with the people in the community, and this is the community flywheel that every startup has. Whether it’s just 10 people who use your product or service, 100 people who read your blog, 1,000 people who read your Substack, whatever it is. If you can activate the top 1% and get 1,000 people who really, really vibe with you, it can be a game changer for your startup. So just, I want everybody in the audience who’s a founder to start thinking about these two principles. One: if you don’t put a project as number one, it’s never… We’re going to break out, okay? You’ve got to make somebody the CEO of blank in your startup. Number two, if you can activate your top 1% of your audience, it is going to be a superpower in terms of when you have a question for your audience, you want to release a new product or service, you need engagement on a tweet, you think you’ve made a mistake and you want somebody to give you some advice. Just try to activate the top 1% of your followers as opposed to growing the big number, you want to grow the people who are deeply into your brand.

Lon Harris: 6:30 This is the streamer trick is what you’re talking about. Like this is all the big streamers, they keep telling you like, hey, if you want to hang out with me all the time, join this Telegram group. And then that’s where they do their like heavy promotion and that’s where they’re the most active and because those are the people that are going to click on everything, Clavicular shares, and check out, buy the merch, you know, like so that’s the funnel that the influencers are running.

Jason Calacanis: 6:53 And some of it’s dark. We were seeing with these guys like Clavicular who had like the incel nerd guy who was giving them thousands of dollars and he had him on a live stream and he was like, oh my god, this person, like why am I taking $5,000 from this person? It’s terrible.

Lon Harris: 7:13 Yeah, it was clearly like a person who, you know, like not getting out a lot, sort of a, you know, like not the person Clavicular wanted to be promoting as his hardcore fans.

Jason Calacanis: 7:23 Also he might feel like he’s taking advantage of somebody.

Lon Harris: 7:25 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 7:26 Let’s just leave it at that. So don’t take advantage of your fans, do the opposite, give them access.

Lon Harris: 7:29 Oh, right.

Jason Calacanis: 7:30 And a lot of creators are doing perfectly fine and above board. I didn’t mean to use Clavicular to sort of crap on the entire creator economy. There is something though about the whales in the system and just being careful that you are not abusing the fact that you might have a superfan or something. I have people all the time who are like, I’ll give you $5,000 to go to lunch with me or whatever. And I did it once or twice for charity, I did it for Eric Ries’s charity at some point or whatever, I did like two lunches, and then I just, I just… these people can afford it, but now there’s a reciprocity thing, they feel like they gave me the $5,000, it was for charity, so I don’t even do that stuff anymore.

Lon Harris: 8:03 Yeah, you have to be aware of the parasocial element of everything that we do when you’re online. Like people watch you all the time and they do start to feel like they know you and I’m not saying it’s bad, I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing, but you do have to be careful, there’s a weird balance.

Jason Calacanis: 8:19 It’s a nuanced thing, right? Let’s get to the word nuance. It’s nuanced. And the parasocial elements that we now live in from social media to streamers, it’s all different.

Lon Harris: 8:31 Yeah. Some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, some of it’s neutral. Just you got to be cognizant of it, especially if you’re, yeah, somebody who’s an influencer.

Jason Calacanis: 8:40 We have some news stories, we got some guests, where are we going to go first?

Lon Harris: 8:43 I think we should bring on our guest because it’s a cool product we spotted online and the moment Jacob and I saw this going through our feed, we were like, we gotta get these guys in. We’re bringing in Rahul Chhabra and Atmadeep Banerjee, they’re the CEO and CTO of Sabi. This is the beanie… that’s got a 100,000 sensors in it and it reads your thoughts and translates them into text without needing to get invasive brain surgery

Jason Calacanis: 9:09 No come on.

Lon Harris: 9:11 It’s a non-invasive BCI cap essentially.

Jason Calacanis: 9:14 Brain- BCI, brain computer interface.

Lon Harris: 9:16 Correct.

Jason Calacanis: 9:17 Adding a new member to your team is a crucial decision and you don’t want to rush into a hiring situation that you will regret. But if you’re a busy founder, you also don’t want to spend a ton of time in the trenches looking for that perfect candidate. Instead, you need a partner, and you need a trusted partner, and LinkedIn Hiring Pro is that partner. How do I know this? Because I use LinkedIn Hiring Pro. You want a real world testimonial? Alright, here you go. We recently hired a new customer success manager. They handle all the advertising accounts here on This Week in Startups and they ensure that we’re keeping all of our wonderful partners happy. LinkedIn helped us connect with an amazing candidate right here in Austin and he had exactly the combination of experience we were looking for. It’s magic, it’s alchemy, it’s everything for me to find a great team member. So, hire right the first time. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com/twist. Terms and conditions apply. That’s linkedin.com/twist. There’s no way this works. You guys are punking me. Is- Raul, is this guest a fake startup? It does not- there’s no way to put a beanie on and then have it do transcription. Come on.

Lon Harris: 10:26 It is real. You- you would not believe the amount of engineering and product effect- effort that has gone into it to make it work, but it does work.

Jason Calacanis: 10:33 Not trying to be a hipster, this is a functional beanie you’re wearing, correct?

Lon Harris: 10:38 This is not a functional beanie, but you would have something in the future.

Jason Calacanis: 10:41 Oh, okay. That’s actually a hipster beanie. Okay.

Lon Harris: 10:43 That is a hipster beanie. Yes, this is a functional beanie, but there is also a technical beanie.

Jason Calacanis: 10:48 All right, so maybe show us what you’ve got, how it works, and when we can all buy and for how much?

Lon Harris: 10:54 Well, it turns out that for a long time people believed that the only way to do BCI, or brain-computer interfaces, is to drill a hole inside the skull, put a chip inside the brain. But it turns out that like very recently we had like a paper or an academic work that came out, and I- it was actually authored by Atmadeep in 2023, where they used fMRI signals and used deep learning models to basically be able to decode what a person is looking at using just deep learning models and non-invasive signals. And I think the world before that and world after that are like just fundamentally different, where now you have this entire understanding that you have deep learning, you have great sensors, and now you can understand what a person is looking at, what a person is thinking, you can translate thoughts to text, thoughts to images, and we just figured out how to make it and package it inside a beanie and a cap.

Jason Calacanis: 11:45 Okay. fMRI. Explain what that is one more time so we understand what you’re talking about and how it works.

Lon Harris: 11:53 fMRI is a massive clinical-

Jason Calacanis: 11:55 Wait, say it again. Is it F-M-R-I? FM, Michael, RI?

Lon Harris: 11:59 F-M-R-I. fMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging. It’s like the MRI scans that you get, but it’s a slightly different from the standard thing that you would normally get, that is a structural MRI. This is functional, so it measures mostly the blood flow changes across different sections of your brain.

Jason Calacanis: 12:01 Got it. If I get an MRI, that’s magnetic resonance imaging, am I correct?

Lon Harris: 12:26 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 12:28 This is fMRI, and the difference is this is doing blood flow. It’s checking the blood flow around my brain, correct?

Lon Harris: 12:37 MRI was the initial work we did in 2023, uh that is a massive machine in a hospital but nobody wants to go in a clinic to get the brain read for like five minutes. What they want is basically a cap that they can wear in house. So we shifted from fMRI which was a massive machine to bio-potential sensors that could essentially fit in the cap. So now what we’re doing is it measures electrical activity inside your brain even from outside and has many, many sensors and a brain foundation model that work together to be able to decode what you’re thinking. So this is a massive change in the technology, uh and we had to do like tremendous amount of engineering to get here, but now we’re able to get it into a cap.

Jason Calacanis: 13:21 Okay. So you’re going to be able to wear a cap and then an AI model is going to study your…

Lon Harris: 13:31 Brain signals.

Jason Calacanis: 13:32 Yeah, those signals then the model will be able to translate into something that’s productive and what you claim, which you’re claiming here Raul, is that it’s going to be able to say words in a sentence.

Lon Harris: 13:47 Yep. Word by word.

Jason Calacanis: 13:48 Word by word. Now as the user do I have to think the, quick, brown, fox, and I just slowly think each word and imagine a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog or can I just be rambling and talking like I would on a podcast and you’ll be…

Lon Harris: 14:12 For now you need to do, for now you need to do word by word slowly, but I think we aspire to get to the point where you just think and even before you put it into words, it’s out on the screen.

Jason Calacanis: 14:22 This doesn’t work. I’m calling cap, I’m calling cap on the beam.

Lon Harris: 14:25 Well there are, I mean this is interesting Jason because what I was doing research for this a lot of people in this field are basically saying what you are that the scalp, the skull, it’s muffling these electrical signals too much and they can’t get through. So I guess that’s one of my questions. Raul, can you prove it to us right now? Do you have this cap or not? I’ll give you an example. How can satellites understand what is the terrain on the Earth, even through going through atmosphere? Exactly what we’re trying to do is building a GPS for the brain. When you have 70,000 or 100,000 sensors and your skull has some variability, you can figure out where exactly the neural activity happens when you… thought of Apple, which is when he thought of Fox.

Jason Calacanis: 15:02 Do you have? Okay, you got metaphors. You got a killer idea. Congratulations, Rahul, but this is This Week in Startups. Do you have a demo? Do you have a demo?

Lon Harris: 15:11 Not for this part, but we do have demos. We’ll show you soon.

Jason Calacanis: 15:14 Okay, that’s what I want to see from you guys. Well, I want to know where are you guys based? And what’s your background? I’m going to get a little—I’m going to vet this a little bit here. I’m doing a little on-air, just taking a little tactical, practical, I want diligence. Rahul, where are you based? Where’d you go to school? What did you do before this?

Lon Harris: 15:29 We’re in Palo Alto, we’re based here. I went to school in BITS Pilani in India, majored in math and electronics, interned at Stanford. Before that I built autonomous drones. And then worked at Stanford on early versions of LSTM that came before Transformers. And then eventually got to a point where my college thesis was essentially based on EMG signals, analyzing fatigue levels for athletes. Athletes get injured when they keep on training too much, but you can figure out at the right time when their body says that you should stop training. And so you prevent injury, you make sure that they train the best, right? And in those moments we realized that biosignals, which are time series data, they work and scaling laws with deep learning models work. And without getting inside the body you can still figure out what’s going on outside. And Atmadeep, who’s with me, he also went in college with me. He was a deep learning lead at a satellite company where we kind of realized…

Jason Calacanis: 16:25 So you guys are legit. You’re staking your entire reputations on a cap that allows me to dictate my words. Okay, this is a big risk here because if you don’t deliver Professor X level fidelity, I’m going to call you guys out in six months. I better see some serious fidelity. But Lon, do you realize how extraordinary this would be? This is basically telekinesis. Like, you put your cap on, I have my cap on. You have an ear interface like we had those visual pods on on Friday. What was that called?

Lon Harris: 16:57 Viewbuds, right, Viewbuds.

Jason Calacanis: 17:00 Viewbuds, right, Viewbuds. We had Viewbuds on. You put Viewbuds on. I start thinking, we connect over View, and then we have a text to speech in my voice with ElevenLabs now, you’re hearing in your ears, and I’m going like this.

Lon Harris: 17:11 Yeah, we would have to do this, because this is the Professor X move.

Jason Calacanis: 17:14 But yeah, and it would literally be like me being Professor X and you being Magneto. Let him go, you don’t need to do this.

Lon Harris: 17:22 Charles, you don’t understand.

Jason Calacanis: 17:24 You don’t need to—what’s Magneto’s real name?

Lon Harris: 17:26 Eric, Eric.

Jason Calacanis: 17:27 Eric and Charles. Release him, Eric. You don’t need to do this, Eric. He’s not the enemy. There’s a better way, Eric.

Lon Harris: 17:35 Charles, they’ll never let us live with them.

Jason Calacanis: 17:37 No, they—Eric, there’s good in humans. You and—

Lon Harris: 17:41 You and I playing Magneto and Professor X for the Halloween show would be hilarious.

Jason Calacanis: 17:46 Here’s what I was going to say, it’s—for now, it’s only 30—

Lon Harris: 18:00 100 words a minute, so like that’s a real limitation. We’ll have to get it, for us, what we’re imagining, it would have to go at like, yeah, the speed of thought, which is very fast. Faster than I can type, and I can type like 150.

Jason Calacanis: 18:14 Guys, did you raise money for this lunacy yet?

Lon Harris: 18:16 We have, yes. Quite a lot in fact.

Jason Calacanis: 18:18 Vinod, Vinod, your friend Vinod Khosla’s an investor.

Lon Harris: 18:20 Vinod Khosla backed this lunacy?

Jason Calacanis: 18:22 Yeah, here’s his quote. If you’re going to have a billion people use BCI for access to their computers every day, it can’t be invasive. So he’s thinking about if we’re all going to be think-typing on our computers and our phones, you can’t be surgery, it’s gonna have to be a solution like this where you just put a beanie on. Raul, next time when you get to the metaphor, say Jake, I respectfully Vinod Khosla put eight figures into the company. Do you respect Vinod and his track record? And I’d be like,

Lon Harris: 18:54 Yeah, Vinod’s pretty smart. I mean, I do think he took a little detour into, like, alternative fuels. What was the alternative fuel we were all going to use, ethanol or something? Sure, yeah. Okay, so you have identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in. So you’re all set to launch your new company, right? Uh, 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. I think he was part of the, like, little detour over there with John Doerr, that we’re going to have ethanol and corn everywhere and that was how we were going to drive our cars. Cellulosic ethanol and biofuels, that was the goal.

Jason Calacanis: 20:12 Was that Vinod?

Lon Harris: 20:14 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 20:15 I mean, listen, he’s a big swing guy. Advantage handicap it here on Twist. I don’t know if this is his next ethanol or if this is his next Sun Microsystems. I think he’s famous for Sun Microsystems if I remember correctly.

Lon Harris: 20:22 He was the first investor in OpenAI.

Jason Calacanis: 20:24 That too, yeah. I think he made a donation to the non-profit.

Lon Harris: 20:26 Yes. He’s the co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

Jason Calacanis: 20:29 First VC investor in OpenAI, yes. I think ‘these are just details’ was what he said to me on stage when I said how does it go from being a nonprofit to a for-profit. He said, ‘Oh Jason, these are just details.’

Lon Harris: 20:46 I was like, yes. I’m going to keep that answer in my pocket. The next time I get pulled over and they’re like, ‘Son, do you have a weapon and were you watching the Knicks game while you were on FSD?’ I’d be like, ‘Officer, these are just details.’

Jason Calacanis: 21:00 Those are just details. Yeah. All right, listen, Raul, I wish you guys the best of luck. You need to come on this show the moment you have it able to do one word. And that one word is Calacanis. If you can say Calacanis.

Lon Harris: 21:17 Not Lon or Jay. That’s not a common one.

Jason Calacanis: 21:19 Lon’s is two. If you can say JCal, I’ll give you two syllables. If you can say JCal, I’ll buy the first one. All right, great job. And where can people learn more of this lunacy that you’re doing here?

Lon Harris: 21:29 This is my type of crazy. What is it? It’s called sabi.com. You can reserve your device right now and through the end of the year, we’ll have something for you.

Jason Calacanis: 21:38 Sabi, S-A-B-I.com. Well, I’ll give you another professional tip here. If you get a four-letter domain name, that’s pretty credible too. So if this is, if you’re making all this up, Raul, you have set up the best amount of credibility. You have a four-letter domain, you got Padoca and you got a Stanford PhD. This is either Theranos or it’s SpaceX. I am here for it, Raul. I am hoping you get to Mars. I want you back on this program the second I can put a beanie on and tell Lon, you’re fired.

Lon Harris: 22:13 We’ll get on the Mars. That’s it. We’ll get on the Mars. That’s going to be your first beanie. My first thought is going to be trim your beard. That’s I’m going to be go to the barber. What’s the barber you go to over here? Brazo’s Barber Shop, right across the street.

Jason Calacanis: 22:27 That’s it. If it can make me go Brazo’s Barber and take Lon from his homeless era into his tightest-ride era, I’m good. All right, guys, great job.

Lon Harris: 22:34 Thanks, guys. Very entertaining. Very entertaining.

Jason Calacanis: 22:38 Thanks for being here. These are my guys. I am rooting for these guys. If they do this, you realize this changes the world.

Lon Harris: 22:46 I mean, this is a world-changer. As soon as we saw this go by on X, we were like, we gotta book these guys. That is a revolutionary technology if you figure out how to read my thoughts. There are, I will say, we didn’t get to talk about it. There are some pretty epic privacy safety, like a hat that reads my mind? Do I have to think I want to share this with Sabi or is it just reading everything that I’ve got going on in there?

Jason Calacanis: 23:08 I mean, this is going to have to be on a local model on your phone, encrypted, because Lon’s going to be like, here’s Lon’s Sabi. Ready?

Lon Harris: 23:18 Oh, no.

Jason Calacanis: 23:20 Gabagool.

Lon Harris: 23:22 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 23:22 Prosciutto. Way oh, gelato. Where am I going to go for gelato next week?

Lon Harris: 23:28 Pistachio gelato.

Jason Calacanis: 23:30 Here’s JCal’s.

Lon Harris: 23:31 Here’s JCal’s.

Jason Calacanis: 23:32 Who are the bulldogs?

Lon Harris: 23:34 Who are the bulldogs? I wonder how much powder is there of this week.

Jason Calacanis: 23:38 J-Pow. Bulldogs. Brisket. Yeah. Sig. Get a new Sig. Get a Sig P365.

Lon Harris: 23:46 I want to be able to strongly differentiate, here are the thoughts I want to share with Sabi, here are the thoughts that are just for Lon. And that’s…

Jason Calacanis: 23:54 I’ll be honest, they should do a collab with Calm and that would be really great for them to make this for equanimity and… Meditation, I always tell people my big five, you can do it infographic here. Like make this into a short. These are my big five. If you’re feeling like unbalanced, and be dead serious here. Number one your sleep. Number two nutrition. Number three, uh, working out, exercise. So sleep, nutrition, exercise, right? Those are obvious pillars of being healthy as a person. I’m going to give you two more. Meditation and socialization.

Lon Harris: 24:27 Mm.

Jason Calacanis: 24:28 Meditation, you just pop out the Calm app, shout out to Calm, and just meditate. 10 minutes, five minutes, 50 minutes, it doesn’t matter, any amount of meditation will reground you. And then five, socialization. Invite three friends to dinner, open up a bottle of wine, whatever you’re into, maybe 420, I don’t… no judgment, Lon… whatever, blunt rotation, and just, you know, enjoy life a little bit and socialization. Anytime you’re feeling out of sorts, take J-Cal’s big five, try to hit all five in one day.

Lon Harris: 24:56 Mm. There you go.

Jason Calacanis: 24:58 It’s not as easy as you think.

Lon Harris: 24:59 No, not really. Nutrition is the hard one for me. Nutrition and working out. I can do the other three, but those two are hard.

Jason Calacanis: 25:07 There’s an easy one for nutrition, order a goddamn salad and then just eat a chicken breast. I mean, is it going to kill you?

Lon Harris: 25:13 It’s not, it’s not. And I like, I like some veggies. I don’t mean to make it sound like it’s that hard. But, you know, sometimes you want a burger, sometimes you want a burger.

Jason Calacanis: 25:21 I mean, I love a burger, but here’s what I do. This is my very simple nutrition system. Uh, one for you, uh, two for your health. So you want the burger, that’s great, the next day just eat like a egg white omelet or something nice, and then have a salad for lunch. One for two, two for one, one for two. If you’re three for three, that’s a gavone situation. Yeah, if you just try to go from three, three, am I right in Pulp Fiction? Uh, not in, uh, Inglourious Basterds? Is this the three or is this the three?

Lon Harris: 25:48 This is the American three, this is the German three, according to Tarantino.

Jason Calacanis: 25:52 I’m going with the German, okay? Because the Germans are fit. So, just try to get, you know, one, two, three here. All right. What’s next on the show?

Lon Harris: 26:00 All right. Uh, so up next we’re going to have Oliver join the show. As you know, Jason, as you may recall, we are offering a 5k bounty and a guest spot on this very podcast that you’re watching right now for anyone who manages to build a live AI sidebar. There are a bunch of rules. The main idea, we want four active AI personas watching the show, making commentary, adding important tidbits. The idea would be like a AI panel of producers that we could consult throughout the live stream that would listen in to everything we’re talking about and make helpful suggestions. You were comparing it to Howard Stern’s crew. He’s got Robin Quivers there to read the news. He’s got Fred Norris with the sound effects and background. He’s got Gary Dell’Abate, the producer that has all the context. He’s got Jackie Martling and later Artie Lange as the cut-up who’s throwing out one-liners and being funny. Uh, and so we were looking for, how could you, could we use AI to simulate this whole thing? group without actually having all of these people in the studio. And a lot of people have submitted.

Jason Calacanis: 27:05 All right, Oliver, this obviously presents a number of technical tasks. We had about a dozen people participate in this, so we’ve decided instead of just awarding a winner today, that we’ll just put more work on your plate. Everybody knows you do the demos for This Week in AI. Go to thisweekinai.ai. Oliver is my protege. He’s my protege. He’s really great on air. He’s making great demos, so in between the roundtable for This Week in AI, which I host, he does great demos, explaining all the basics and even some intricate stuff that you can do with AI. So the application’s really hard. In this case, I can identify what’s easy and what’s hard about this. What’s easy about this is creating personas. Hey, you’re a fact checker, take this transcript, look for facts. I mean, we do that all the time with the newsletter project you’re working on. Fact checking is easy. But fact checking a live stream, usually our or our listeners will do that for us. You know, they’ll go to Claude or they’ll go to ChatGPT or Grok. They’ll ask a question, they’ll cut and paste the answer back or they’ll just tell us, ‘Oh, yeah, you know, here’s the, these are the 10 highest market cap companies from the nineties,’ whatever. But this is happening in real time. So what we’re asking people to do is to take a live stream, take a live transcript, and then figure out what’s the facts in it, and then check the facts in real time. Or what are the discussions and then make a joke about the discussions. Is that the hard part here, Oliver?

Lon Harris: 28:43 Yeah, I mean, so on a basic level, it’s a pretty simple task and what our, you know, the Note-E-Gang has built has been pretty simple on a base level. What is it doing? It is taking the speech to text, and then it’s sending, you know, 50 words to Gemini, for example, and it’s saying—and it’s including the prompt of the persona that it made. So if it’s a fact-checker persona, it’s taking the 50 words, saying, ‘Hey, is there any facts that you could quickly find that don’t line up here, or anything that Jason mentioned that we should correct him on?’ So on a simple level, that’s pretty basic, I would say. You just have to connect, you know, an API for the analysis. So on the one that I set up, I was using Gemini, and then you can connect ElevenLabs’ speech-to-text or OpenAI’s Whisper speech-to-text.

Jason Calacanis: 29:37 Or Deepgram.

Lon Harris: 29:38 Or Deepgram. Armchair uses Deepgram, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 29:42 Big cloud providers may offer you cheap compute, but you’ll end up paying the difference in engineering cost and hiring extra developers. You don’t want to waste time configuring virtual networks—none of us do—or your access policies. You want your team building your product. So it’s time to look at Render. Render Render is the all-in-one cloud platform for developers that allows you to deploy, scale, and secure your apps and agents with zero ops. Most cloud platforms ask you to split your focus between product and infrastructure or they force you into platform constraints you know you’re going to outgrow in six months. But just connect your GitHub repo to Render and you are live. Web services, cron jobs, the whole stack in one platform. It’s time to find out why five million developers are already using Render. Five million! Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render startup program. You’ll get anywhere from $500 to $100,000 in free credits depending on your stage and who your backers are. That’s render.com/twist. What is Deepgram? I’ve never heard of that.

Lon Harris: 30:46 It’s another option instead of ElevenLabs for a, or Whisper for a, yes speech-to-text. It makes transcripts basically.

Jason Calacanis: 30:52 Got it.

Lon Harris: 30:54 It works well, and if you remember the Clipper I made, which takes clips from the show, what that did is it transcribed the whole show with timestamps using Deepgram and then used a tool that OpenAI had that would cut it up based on those timestamps. So Deepgram’s great.

Jason Calacanis: 31:13 Got it.

Lon Harris: 31:15 But the issue that we’ve run into specifically, you know, for all three of the co-hosts that we’ve tested is that it’s taking it has limited context, which means that specifically for mine, which was the pod commentators, it would every hundred words it would send to Gemini to get the breakdown. And what that does is it just has the hundred words, it doesn’t have the full context of, you know, the whole topic we’re talking about.

Jason Calacanis: 31:38 Got it. So here’s what I think we might want to do just for the fairness of the contest. Go ahead Lon, give your comment.

Lon Harris: 31:51 I was just going to say I feel like there’s really two levers so far that differentiate the quality of the products, at least the twelve to thirteen I’ve been through so far. One is ease of use. Some of them, it’s a URL, it’s instantaneous, it starts working right away. Others, you got to massage it, you got to work with it, you got to set stuff up yourself. That’s sort of one. And then two is the quality of the personas. As you’ll see, a lot of them the personas are all pretty similar, they’re making kind of similar comments, and then some of them have done a really good job differentiating where it’s like this is the troll, this is the fact-check and they’re giving better quality. So like I feel like that’s where a lot of the variability is coming in so far.

Jason Calacanis: 32:30 All right, so listen, this is a contest, so it’s you know, and I just kind of threw it out there, it’s my money, so ultimately I’ll decide with the council of you two guys and the rest of the team. But I think in fairness, what matters most, the high order bit, is it doing great fact checking? Is it doing great trolling? And is it doing great jokes? Those are three very different things, right? Those are the three… personas that I think matter the most. The fact-checker…

Lon Harris: 33:03 Yeah, who’s just giving facts.

Jason Calacanis: 33:05 The trolling, who’s just roasting you, etc. Being cynical, being snarky.

Lon Harris: 33:10 Snarky. Okay, let’s call it the cynic.

Jason Calacanis: 33:12 Or no, I think the roast master is even better.

Lon Harris: 33:14 Well, I mean, a lot of them have gone with the troll is what a lot of them are using because that’s what we sort of described it as.

Jason Calacanis: 33:20 But what what would you say Lon then? Is it the cynic, what would have the most overall value for the show this week in startups, all in, whatever? The cynic, the troll, or the roast master?

Lon Harris: 33:31 I mean, I like cynic the best because I feel like that’s a clear role. Like a troll is just— it’s got a negative connotation. They’re just there to disrupt. A cynic is a helpful thing to have on a show like this because they’re exactly like what you were doing for Sabi. Like somebody to sit there and be like ‘this really worked’, challenging the framing.

Jason Calacanis: 33:51 All right, very— so let’s keep it simple. I think the joke and the troll thing is very hard to do because— so let’s take those off the table. And let’s narrow the contest down to the fact checker and the cynic.

Lon Harris: 34:02 Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 34:04 Because those two I think would have the most valuable— would be most valuable to us.

Lon Harris: 34:09 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 34:10 We’ll let everybody in the chat room know we’re reshaping it in some— they’re simpler characters because I think we’ve made the mission too big with four personas.

Lon Harris: 34:17 It’s- it’s challenging and you know, like we- as you’ll see if we show some of these off, some- some of them the differentiation’s not really there. It’s just a lot of commentary, it’s not very personality driven.

Jason Calacanis: 34:30 I just want to make it easier to judge the quality, Oliver, so I just think in judging the quality, ease of use of the product, so the fit and finish of the project, and then the quality of the output. Those two would be the weights we would use. Is there any weight I’m missing here, Oliver, in terms of picking a winner and being fair about it? And I could pick two winners and split it, you know, it’s my money, I can do whatever I want here. This is a rolling bounty here.

Lon Harris: 34:55 No, I think those two things are great, but I also just want to get two specifics that Lon and I found that I think would really help a lot of the submissions, which are speed: how could you increase the speed? So if we’re talking about a subject, how quickly is it going to give us the notes? So in our Slack channel, it’s me listening live and like quick typing as fast as I can like ‘oh Jason, what about this? Jason, what about this?’. Also, in the model- in the one that I tested, it would write something that was hard to read and I wasn’t sure what it was talking about if that makes sense. So you got- it’s got to- in one of the ones that Lon has, is it actually has the transcript and then the commentary right next to it. In one of the submissions, yeah, what our armchair- what armchair did a really good job is it highlights the section of the transcript that the commentary is about. So you can see immediately, ‘oh, the troll is picking on this thing Jason said. Oh, the the fact-check is about this thing Lon said right here’.

Jason Calacanis: 35:49 Okay, so this speaks to the fit and finish of the product, which is to say, for this to be useful to the hosts of the show… For the audience, cause I think this serves two roles. One, I could run this privately and just see when I’m on Megan Kelly what facts she’s getting right, what facts she’s getting wrong and I could be challenging her on a fact and say like, okay, is that actually true? And then I could go look at it, which by the way, everybody’s doing right now. There was a famous Larry Summers episode of All In where he claimed, you know, I think he said Chamath’s looking stuff up or whatever. That’s kind of all fair in love and war now in terms of, you know, a podcast. People are looking up stuff in real time. So let’s go into our demo here. So we always like to demo or die. Who’s going to lead the demo?

Lon Harris: 36:41 I’m, I’m actually I started sharing already. This is Armchair, the one of the first ones that we set up. It is by, I’m looking up his name right here, Mark Kolbruge set this up I believe that’s actually it. And as you can see, this is what I really liked about it. It’s highlighted this block of what we’re talking about, you know, your typical—

Jason Calacanis: 36:58 Be more specific here so that the audience listening to the podcast please.

Lon Harris: 37:02 Sure. The quote here is as you said, there was a famous Larry Summers episode of All In where he claimed that Chamath was looking stuff up. It’s highlighted that and then Gary, their producer with content—

Jason Calacanis: 37:12 Oh, we’re using this right now?

Lon Harris: 37:14 Yeah, this is live. I’m doing this live. Gary says in April 2025, All In had a tariff debate with Summers and Chamath Sacks using Grok ChatGPT live per Reddit Buzz. They couldn’t confirm whether Chamath was actually looking stuff up. And then here a little later, I mentioned Mark Kolbruge and Gary says, yes, he, he found it. Mark created Armchair. He found his, uh, you know, he found his URL. He corrected me on the spelling.

Jason Calacanis: 37:44 Wow.

Lon Harris: 37:45 Yeah. So as you can see, it’s actually it’s working live and—

Jason Calacanis: 37:46 Okay wait wait let me try using this now. This is incredible. Holy cow, let me do this right now. Um, let’s do it based on a political topic. I’ll do a political topic right now. Uh, obviously we know there was a, an incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend and the buzz online was which side of the aisle has the most extremeness? Is it the right with the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and what happened on January 6th where there was violence at the Capitol? Or does the left have the violence problem with the recent New York Times podcast where they were talking about soft murder or something and they were talking about micro-looting and stealing from the Louvre and then we’ve had the three assassination attempts including this weekend on President Trump all from left mentally ill, I think you gotta be mentally ill to do an assassination. So I’m curious of these instances, I mentioned a handful of them, but if you were to take political violence in the last 20 years, I’m curious which side would have the most notable actual violence. …behavior in the market, the Democrats or the Republicans. All right, so, as you can see, we’ve… I spoke slowly, by the way, Lon, and I gave the details as best I could, and that might be how you would hear me tee it up on All-In.

Lon Harris: 39:13 Yeah, not too different. So Gary confirmed the shooting April 25th, 2026, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton. Gunman breached checkpoint, fired shots. Trump and officials evacuated unharmed. It even names suspect Cole Thomas Allen was arrested. And it gave… it gave citations. It gave you the Wikipedia citation for the event. Yeah. And then the troll said, ‘Your framing assumes January 6th defines right-wing extremism, but you missed Antifa riots, the 2020 two billion in insured damages, campus cancellations.’ The troll says, ‘Your selective memory isn’t data.’ And then the troll also—

Jason Calacanis: 39:51 Hold on, pause there for a second, Lon. I didn’t bring up Antifa. That wasn’t on the top of my head because we haven’t had an Antifa situation in a little while, but during BLM riots, on campuses, there was a lot of Antifa violence. I think when Biden was in office or maybe the first term, I can’t remember all the things that were ascribed specifically to Antifa, but Antifa is a known violent agitator. So that’s great. That helped me.

Lon Harris: 40:13 Yeah, so, I mean, and as we keep going, the troll and Gary, they seem to be more active. I think there are other personas in here, but we’re hearing a lot from the troll and Gary, the producer. But yeah, here’s another one. It confirmed your talking about that April 22nd New York Times podcast with Jia Tolentino, Hasan Piker, and Naja Spiegelman. It mentioned micro-looting, the Louvre theft, social murder, and three more links that you could click to check out.

Jason Calacanis: 40:31 This is so great. I mean, this… I’ll tell you why this is great for me. I’m frequently saying during the show, ‘Hey, producers, get me this piece of information.’

Lon Harris: 41:00 You are.

Jason Calacanis: 41:01 Because I can’t remember everything. No one person can. Maybe Ben Shapiro, but he does monologues, so I suspect, you know, he’s so good at debating, he’s got such a narrow focus. Ben Shapiro is so good at, you know, doing these that he’s written a really great script for himself. Like, he’s a monologuer, so monologuers get to practice their monologue, take four or five takes. I’m live. You don’t get four or five takes, right? So this would be very helpful for people who are live, just to remember, I don’t know who the other co-hosts were on that New York Times podcast. This would have filled me in here.

Lon Harris: 41:26 Correct. This is very impressive, by the way. I think, for me personally, we were originally thinking we were going to pick a winner. So far, Armchair is my pick for the winner. It’s the best job of actually adding help for context in the personas that we’ve defined.

Jason Calacanis: 41:43 I want this, by the way, as a Zoom plugin or ODBC on my desktop. So Oliver, is that possible for me to set this up and just have it running when I’m on a Zoom call with a founder or I’m on a podcast, whatever I’m on, somebody else’s podcast? Can I have— And this is running and using the Zoom stream. How does it grab the stream? Just on a technical basis.

Lon Harris: 42:07 I can share my screen here. And this is actually how the project that I looked at is built. So this is a different one, of course. This is not Armchair. It’s called Pod Commentators. I also think it’s called the Cast Side, multiple names here. But you can see I’m looking at the Zoom through my Chrome browser window and I’m streaming into Pod Commentators so I can see what I would see in my Zoom window. And also it’s popping up here on… and I’m also getting takes from Rex, the cynical commentator popping up on the kind of side of the screen, so I can see…

Jason Calacanis: 42:43 Is that through Zoom or is that a plugin? How is that layering on there?

Lon Harris: 42:47 Oh, it’s a browser window. Yeah, it’s all through your browser. If you run the Zoom in a tab on your browser and then you link these tools to that tab and it just listens in and runs it live.

Jason Calacanis: 42:58 Incredible. It is incredible. Both of these are very strong contenders. You know, I have a lot of edits here, but man, I am just shocked at what you can get done with a bounty contest. These two are very impressive.

Lon Harris: 43:13 We got one more. We got one more from Patrick.

Jason Calacanis: 43:15 Yeah, let’s do a third and then we’re going to give… just so we’re going to… just so we’re fair, because I’m literally going to cut this $5,000 check. And I might give, you know, 3K to one person and then two honorable mentions for 1K each. I may give five to one person. But I think we should give everybody the ability to do two iterations. Because I don’t want to drag this on and be unfair. But since we didn’t have any rules, I want to be clear because I’m a man of my word. If I’m going to give $5,000 and I said I would pay five thousand for this, I want to pay the five thousand. But I want it to be my spec. Here’s my spec. I want to be able to run this either on a public stream or I want to be able to run it privately when I’m on a Zoom. Okay, very simple. Either way. And then I’ll narrow it down to… I just need… I don’t need four personas. I need one persona… I’ll take two personas: a fact checker with citations, facts, and then a cynic. I’ll take a cynic. I’ll take a fact checker. So I’m cutting that down by half. You don’t have to try to get the jokes right. That’s my job. That’s on me alone. I just want real-time fact checking and real-time cynic… you know, like giving me the other side of it. I love the idea of the transcript being shown and the addition. I think that’s key. Because that allows me to be scrolling up and down. So if the guest was talking or if I was being interviewed and being asked my next question, I could zoom up and down and say, ‘Oh yeah, you know, in that previous answer I gave, I mentioned this podcast, it was Hasan Piker and Gia and this person, one for the New Yorker, Gia works for the New Yorker and this person works for the New York Times.’ So I want to make sure I get my facts checked. So that real-time fact checking is so incredible.

Lon Harris: 44:46 Okay. And the possibilities are I think could go a little further even here, as these models have bigger context windows we can feed in our full docket and it can, you know, say, ‘Hey, this guest posted about this on X.’ that we already have in the doc and it can connect there. Okay, yeah definitely a lot of possibilities here.

Jason Calacanis: 45:04 Okay. Yeah, that could be in its memory. Yeah. Okay. I don’t want to be unfair and make it a never-ending, I don’t want to keep moving the goalposts, but since and I didn’t think anybody would build this, I just said it, you know, if somebody builds this, I’ll give him 5K. I didn’t think 15 people would come out here. So now we’ve I’ve got to do a little cleanup work for the next bounty. We’re going to announce our bounties with like a very specific process. So we’re going to do this two more weeks in a row. This is incredibly exciting. We’re going to do two more weeks in a row. So like maybe next Friday and then the Friday after. That way people have like essentially three weeks of refinement. So today’s Monday, April 27th, so we’ll do May 1st plus seven will be May 8th…

Lon Harris: 45:43 Well, that’s this Friday. May 1st is this Friday, then May 8th is the next Friday and then May 15th is the Friday after that.

Jason Calacanis: 45:51 Okay, so May 8th is the second week of the will be the second check-in and then the final winner will be whatever you get done for the 15th. Fair enough?

Lon Harris: 46:00 I think that’s fair. Do you want to check out number 3? We’ve got Patrick Hughes’ submission.

Jason Calacanis: 46:03 Please give me number 3.

Lon Harris: 46:05 Alright. Here’s number 3. I’m going to flip over to the tab right now. Sidecast, maybe it’s called. You can see I’ve already been filling in the transcript and the agents are on their way. Now, my one comment here, it works amazingly. This is no setup. You just go to this URL and I’m just it’s working all on its own. The one negative I have…

Jason Calacanis: 46:25 This is running right now? Or this is running on a previous episode?

Lon Harris: 46:28 No, this is running right now. You can see it’s transcribing us live right down there. The one back the one drawback of this one or drawback, all the personalities are pretty similar. They’re all very snarky. It’s sort of like having four trolls watching the show.

Jason Calacanis: 46:43 I think that’s the easiest thing to correct though. So just again, for whoever produces what’s the name of this one?

Lon Harris: 46:50 BMD Pat, I believe is what he’s calling it. This is Patrick Hughes, our viewer.

Jason Calacanis: 46:55 Fantastic. Can you scroll back to the political violence discussion? If you possibly could?

Lon Harris: 46:59 I think I started it after the political violence discussion.

Jason Calacanis: 47:03 No problem. Oh, so you actually fired this up. Okay. So this is fantastic. Anyone can go to bmdpat.com/pod and check it out. This is amazing. Fact-checking and cynic, we’re going to narrow down to those two. We’re going to put a notion link in the enhanced show notes for today’s show, in the description on YouTube, about the contest. So there’ll be a contest page with the rules, the dates. So if you’re listening to this and you want to join, you can join now and you can just beat everybody. But go ahead and join. If you don’t want the prize, you can donate it to charity. You pick the charity as long as it’s not something crazy and offensive. And the person gets to come on the show and get their flowers. We will give the twist cup, the twist cup to somebody on the show. It’ll be some sort of twist cup.

Lon Harris: 47:51 The Twist-ovation prize. Something like that.

Jason Calacanis: 47:54 Twist-ovation. Yes. We’ll do like a twist bounty. Twist bounty one will be that. So we’re going to put that in the link. links and we’ll link to all the existing submissions. This is fantastic. I’m going to announce another contest.

Lon Harris: 48:08 Right now?

Jason Calacanis: 48:09 I’m going to announce another one. This is inspiring to me. I think the audience is going to love this as well, because it shows what the tools can do. And this is adjacent. I own the domain name annotated.com. I had talked publicly that I’m looking for a developer or team. I’m going to narrow the scope because I want this person to actually put this in the world for all of us to use. I want an annotation tool.

Lon Harris: 48:30 Mm.

Jason Calacanis: 48:31 This tool is a sidebar Chrome extension. It allows you if you go to annotated to create an account, I don’t know, login with whatever service you want, X and Google, I think are like probably the two big ones. And X is important for a reason. Then you put in a URL or it uses whatever page you’re on. So if you’re on the New York Times and this story comes out, you know, or a podcast comes out or a YouTube page. So the two examples I’d like to see is a news story and a YouTube page specifically. You pick the YouTube page, you say, it asks you where do you want to start, where do you want to end? You say one minute in and out at three minutes. It takes that, pulls the transcript, pulls the video, makes a landing page annotated.com/lons L-O-N-S/ you know, YouTube video, the you know, like a intelligent title. It then puts the clip on that landing page. We rip the clip, because it’s fair use. Maximum clip size is let’s make it 90 seconds, that would be fair use. 90 seconds is your maximum clip size and it downgrades it to a smaller file size, right? So make it like I don’t know, 240 pixels, not even 480. So we’re not stealing content. We’re using fair use and you can look up fair use. Fair use would be I’m taking a small amount, I’m not using it in the original resolution, I’m not interfering, but you have to write a commentary on it. And the commentary has to be a certain length. So either text or audio, whatever, but I just think text is fine. So you comment on it and then there’s a button that says, you know, I’m going to do a fair use claim or you know, I believe you’re stealing the content and then we have to make a determination if it’s fair use or not. You can’t just use it to clip and steal. Or you take a New York Times story and you say, clip this section, you highlight a section, you say clip, and then you put your commentary on it. It links back to the original, it gives credit to the source, maybe it takes a screenshot. In other words, we don’t want to screw the person’s original content owners, we just want to let you annotate somebody’s original content. That’s it. That’s the contest. It has to be a live service. So you can make whatever you want right now.

Lon Harris: 50:49 So, is it like a social network? Like the idea is I have a feed and I’m looking at other people’s annotations? That’s the sort of community?

Jason Calacanis: 50:59 The annotations will be saved based on account. You can You can do an anonymous annotation and…

Lon Harris: 51:04 You know what it reminds me of Jason, in a weird way? Do you remember Delicious?

Jason Calacanis: 51:08 It is like a Delicious, like a bookmark system.

Lon Harris: 51:09 It’s like a - it’s an enhanced multimedia Delicious.

Jason Calacanis: 51:14 Correct. Yeah. And, yes, you have a stream of everything you’ve done.

Lon Harris: 51:19 Right. Because that would be Delicious. You would bookmark things that you wanted to read, but I could check out somebody else’s bookmarks and be like what’s Jason’s reading?

Jason Calacanis: 51:25 And on the annotated.com homepage, the annotated.com homepage is just download the sidebar and on the thing it just says, you know, it just gives like a feed of whoever posted last and then you can vote them up and down and you can comment under somebody else’s. So when you say this section…

Lon Harris: 51:43 A leaderboard would be cool too.

Jason Calacanis: 51:44 Yeah, but under your section where you’re fact-checking the New York Times or you’re taking a Ben Shapiro clip and you’re arguing the other side of it from his - oh, you could do a podcast too. So audio, video, or text. Then you do the audio of the Ben Shapiro thing, I can comment under yours. So it has threaded comments under everything.

Lon Harris: 51:59 Yeah, yeah. I mean, that would be the idea over time is people - like a leaderboard I think would be really cool. Like here are the 10 most annotated pieces of media.

Jason Calacanis: 52:08 Anyway, there’s a bunch of ideas. I’ll put this up for five grand, $5,000. Just like I just gave. That’s two bounties. I will do it over - we’ll do it over, yeah, five dimes please. I own the rights to it, so if you make it I own it. That’s it because I’m going to make this an actual public service. But I might hire you for 5k a month to maintain it for me. I’d have to come up with a business model eventually. But I might pay you to - if you’re good at this. But anyway this would be like show your work, worst case scenario you make 5k and worst case scenario for me is I throw it away and I burn 5k. Best case scenario I hire you or I partner with you to make it a commercial service. This is what I’ve always dreamed of building because a lot of times, I don’t know if you ever had this Oliver, you’re like that’s BS or that’s brilliant. And I want to clip it and then comment on it in fair use. That’s the key, it has to be fair use. So you can’t take the whole New York Times story. Let’s set the - let’s set each clip from text - let’s keep audio and video clips are 90 seconds or less. Text clips, what would you say Lon?

Lon Harris: 53:12 I mean, I think if you’re taking… Yeah, I was going to say 75 to 100 words. Beyond that you’re sort of pulling a big chunk of the article. But 100 words is like a few - two sentences, you know, three sentences that stand out to you particularly.

Jason Calacanis: 53:29 Let’s go with 100 words. And if you want to do more than 100, you just clip the next 100 and then you could thread that with the previous one. So let’s say you wanted to go through a New York Times article and correct five points, it’s just 100 words at a time.

Lon Harris: 53:49 Yeah. And the person still has to go to the New York Times to read the full story. I mean, that’s what I was going to say is you could take the most offending sentence, annotate that, and then just add your comments about the entire article. People would still…

Jason Calacanis: 54:00 will be able to get back to the article. Correct. And always a link to the original source. Oliver, what do you think of this contest? You like this one?

Lon Harris: 54:05 Yeah, I think linking back to the original content people love to see the top stories and I love it. I’m excited to get my clipper working for me, reviewing those clips, having a take and dropping it in my take.

Jason Calacanis: 54:19 Oh or Oliver’s gonna- he’s gonna work Sunday and he’s gonna just drop this in and he’s gonna take the 5k.

Lon Harris: 54:24 I’ll basically- I’ll just- what I’m doing after this call is I’m taking this transcript saying, ‘make all Jason’s ideas’ and I’m entering the competition.

Jason Calacanis: 54:33 There it is. Perfect. Yeah, you just tell your agent ‘Go make this’.

Lon Harris: 54:37 Yeah, J-Cal make him what he wants.

Jason Calacanis: 54:39 All right everybody, great job. Oliver, great job. Look in the show notes for bounty one. Bounty one is the real-time fact-checker SYNC. Bounty two is annotated. So now we have two bounties, we’ll have the bounty page. This is gonna be a reoccurring thing here on the show. Bounties for everybody. All right everybody, it’s been another amazing episode of Twist. Bye-bye!