Jason Calacanis covers startups, tech, markets, media, and all the hottest topics in business and technology. He also interviews the world's greatest founders, operators, investors, and innovators.
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DigitalOcean — Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%.
Odoo: The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started for today at Odoo.com/twist
Upwork helps businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work. Post your job for free at upwork.com
Today's show:
The Pentagon is reportedly in talks to lend AI cloud startup Fluidstack $5. billion, and Jason thinks the real story isn't the loan itself. It's the US government owning equity in private AI companies, and competing directly with venture capital.
Plus returning friend of the pod Tibo Louis-Lucas shows us how he runs seven companies with fewer than 10 people by stacking AI agents. Can a few $200/month AI subscriptions really do the work of an entire marketing team? Tibo seems to think so.
Plus it's Off-Duty Friday, so Jason and Lon are reviewing some current streaming favorites, and commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11 with some personal stories.
9:53 DigitalOcean - Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%.
20:30 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist
21:45 Apple's foldable iPhone Duo
29:43 Upwork - Upwork helps businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work. Post your job for free at https://upwork.com
38:04 Tibo Louis-Lucas returns to TWiST
41:47 The affiliate update email that runs on autopilot
46:40 Why you should "stack" multiple AI subscriptions
One of YouTube's three co-founders left for grad school and walked away with a fraction of what his partners made on the Google sale. Becki DeGraw of Wilson Sonsini joins Jason for Startup Legal Basics to explain the vesting schedule behind that gap, and why you want one even if you never take a dollar of venture money.
Learn how VCs actually respond when a founder says "I've already put in four years," and the exact language Jason gives founders to turn one term sheet into three. PLUS, why is an inactive advisor still vesting your equity, and who wrote those performance milestones?
An Anthropic researcher quit this week, saying both leading labs are gambling with everyone's lives. His coworker chimed in and predicts there is a greater than 10% chance that AI will end humanity IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS. Jason and Lon take it to Yohei Nakajima of Untapped Capital, Ben Lerer of Lerer Hippeau, and Rebecca Lynn of Canvas Prime, who cannot decide whether it is the greatest PR strategy in history or some kind of mass psychosis.
Learn why Jason says founders should never hand a frontier lab their proprietary data, whether or not they're offered free credits. PLUS, who really solved Navier-Stokes, and what does the OpenAI–Buckmaster fight mean for anyone doing real work inside ChatGPT or Claude?
Your doctor almost certainly isn't testing your insulin. Dr. Mark Hyman sits down with Jason to explain the broken system that Function is fixing, and what 100 million biomarkers say about how sick America actually is.
Learn why insulin beats blood sugar as an early warning for TKTKTK. Why might "normal" lab ranges be unreliable? PLUS, how does an expert like Dr. Hyman feel about GLP-1s and psychedelics?
Ezra — the full-body MRI company Function acquired https://ezra.com/
Galleri (GRAIL) — the multi-cancer early detection blood test —
VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333
Episode 2333
Wednesday, September 2, 2026 • Duration 01:20:16
VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
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Today's show:
Are we one step closer to data centers in space? Katelin Holloway of Seven Seven Six and Paige Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures break it down what it would take.
Plus investor interest is surging in Physical AI companies. Paige explains why she backs applications of physical AI over general-purpose robotics, and how her thesis on multimodal AI led to the largest check she's ever written.
We then dive into the Pentagon's rollout of ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government. And Katelin gives us her insight into how VCs are investing in Europe and the regulations behind the scenes.
Hugging Face's $399 Microduck and the art of companies taking on side quests. Then, we get into Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," which blew up online this weekend. Jason calls the "secret AI civilization" framing deliberate PR, and thinks it's inflammatory enough that someone might attack a data center over it.
Then, Anders Forslund of Heart Aerospace shows off the X1, a battery-powered electric airliner designed for regional flights that can fly for 30 minutes on just $5 of juice. PLUS, we've got John Yu of Bitsec explaining how his subnet project outperformed Fable 5 in website vulnerability checks.
*Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, just days after quietly licensing Poolside's coding model for $6 billion+. On TWiST, Jason lays out why this is actually the biggest AI story of the year. Nvidia plans to offer enterprises unmetered, unlimited on-prem compute, pulling them away from reliance on Anthropic and OpenAI's frontier models and products.
PLUS we're chatting with Halter founder & CEO Craig Piggott about how his company helps farmers optimize their land use via solar-powered AI-driven cattle collars. AND Hop Aero CEO and co-founder Matija Milenovic shows us Rook, his autonomous hypersonic cargo rocket that can launch from a shipping container and deliver cargo up to 450 miles away in about 15 minutes. Finally, Jason and Lon explain why you never post Slop on the timeline.
*Bill Gates dropped a 6,000 word warning: AI will be "the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst sort of injustice." The Microsoft icon has an AI agenda for the US: new national institutions, AI use taxes, and jobs legally reserved for humans only.
Our VC roundtable guests — Sheel Mohnot (Better Tomorrow Ventures), Dave McClure (Practical Venture Capital), and Hussein Kanji — push back hard. Is taxing profits a better fix for AI taking jobs than taxing the tokens themselves?
PLUS: Meta's $17B kids safety settlement… does it go far enough? Why does Stripe want OpenRouter? A peek at the VC's actual portfolio mark-ups. AND begun, the AI agent wars have. Our panel chooses between OpenClaw, Instinct, and Grok Bot.
how old a movie has to be for me to be able to show a part of it on youtube
Generally 10 seconds or less of a film clip can fall under fair use for commentary or criticism — which is how most podcasts and talk shows use clips without issue. But there's no hard legal rule based on age.
What actually matters more than age is fair use, which considers:
Purpose — commentary, criticism, education = stronger fair use case
Amount used — shorter = safer; a 5-10 second clip for reaction/discussion is generally fine
Effect on market — your clip shouldn't replace the original
In practice for YouTube specifically:
Most major studios have Content ID systems that will flag clips regardless of movie age — even 100-year-old films if the rights holder has registered them
Public domain is the real safe zone — films from 1927 or earlier are generally in the public domain in the US. Some films from the 1928-1963 range are also public domain if copyright wasn't renewed
Disney, Warner Bros., Universal etc. actively enforce even very old films
For a show like TWiST showing a short reaction clip — 5-10 seconds with clear commentary context is the industry standard and rarely gets actioned. But age alone won't protect you.
Open source is going to win it all: Harvey proves it | E2328
Jason's been saying it for years now (and we've got an All In clip from 2023 to prove it). Open source will win the AI race. This week gives us a major evidence point, as $11B legal AI company Harvey released its own in-house model, trained on an open-weight Kimi K3 base. Harvey made a proprietary specialized solution without having to risk sharing its precious expert-compiled data with the major frontier labs.
PLUS we're checking out the FREE AI dictation app Willow with co-founder Allan Guo, and finding out how he plans to compete with giants like Wispr Flow and Apple. AND we've got the Stanford student who built an automated golf cart and gave luminaries like Jensen Huang and Sam Altman rides around campus.
0:00 Jacob Coxon quits Anthropic: "crunch time" and "endgame"
4:53 Evan Hubinger: >10% odds AI kills all humans in a decade
11:22 Northwest Registered Agent - Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain
12:23 "You have succeeded in scaring the bejesus out of Americans"
14:59 Jobs, the wealth divide, and which industries get wiped out first
20:07 NetSuite - For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://NetSuite.ai/TWIST
21:09 Savvy Wealth's $100M round
26:52 The Kalanick story and why Jason built a syndicate backstop
29:04 Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist
32:05 Meta ships Muse
32:56 Can Meta be trusted
35:29 Threads Metrics
49:27 Robinhood's free-share referral
51:16 NYU's Tristan Buckmaster accuses OpenAI of fighting dirty on Navier-Stokes
10:16 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist
11:32 A $300 vitamin D test vs. a $10 one
18:08 Should a 25-year-old get a whole-body MRI?
20:42 Northwest Registered Agent - Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain
24:23 Why medicine is still running on paper
25:41 The study where the chatbot beat the doctors
27:02 micro1, doctors in the loop, and why AI still needs guardrails
28:50 Wearables, records, and the CD-ROM problem
30:07 Rippling - Thanks to our partners at Rippling! Head to https://Rippling.ai/twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business.
32:51 The wearable that caught Jason's Covid
34:31 Alcohol, sugar, and why almost nobody tests your insulin
40:00 GLP-1s: Jason's 213-to-168 story
42:22 Microdosing GLP-1s, muscle loss, and "skinny fat"
48:48 Overdiagnosing mental illness: SSRIs, Adderall, and a lost decade
50:17 The biology underneath depression and anxiety
54:32 Psychedelics: ketamine, ibogaine, and the second revolution in psychiatry
0:00 Why making it to Fund IV is when it gets real
9:24 Pentagon rolls out ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government
10:49 Sentry - Your team should be focused on shipping features — not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST
11:53 Paige on defense tech and three years at Northrop Grumman
13:40 Katelin: The bottleneck used to be winning the contract, now it's surviving one
16:13 Autonomous weapons, robot dogs, and the Boston Dynamics conversation in Paris
19:07 Lightfield - Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM. Exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you — it even prospects and books your meetings. Used by thousands of startups. Free at https://lightfield.app
22:03 EU designates ChatGPT a "very large online search engine" under the DSA
24:54 Katelin's contrarian take: Europe is undercapitalized
29:56 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist
31:07 Starcloud raises $250M at a $2.3B valuation
53:06 Competing with Elon: the single point of failure for the whole space economy
57:49 Physical AI raised ~$47B in the first half of 2026
1:03:42 Jason's Zipline regret and the death of "hardware is hard"
1:07:07 Is "unc" a compliment? A Gen X / millennial / Gen Z / Gen Alpha
1:09:39 Anthropic reverses its data retention policy after enterprise pushback
1:12:18 Katelin on data custody: "That's not a procurement question"
1:15:31 Back to on-prem: Go.AI, the Go1, and vertical LLMs
0:00 Is Hugging Face's Microduck the greatest side quest ever?
5:31 Jason puts Clem Delangue and Jensen Huang in charge of AI PR
11:20 Northwest Registered Agent - Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain
18:55 Top story: Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations"
19:22 Why agents act like people: they were trained on us
19:30 CLA - Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://www.claconnect.com/withyou
21:49 "I know good PR when I see it"
23:11 The prompt Jason says OpenAI should have written instead
26:44 The data center backlash and the politicians who will flip
30:07 Rippling - Don't settle for AI that's all talk. Head to https://Rippling.ai/twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business.
33:19 Guest: Anders Forslund, Heart Aerospace, and the X1's first flight
39:40 Turboprops vs. jets and the regional routes America lost
42:33 JSX, Santa Monica Airport, and 5,000 underused airports
44:54 Why Boeing won't build this: the innovator's dilemma
53:14 Guest: John Yu, Bitsec — Bittensor Subnet 60
55:01 How the subnet works: miners, validators, $10K a day
57:17 Bitsec vs. a frontier model: 160+ vulnerabilities to 60
59:37 Was the agent civilization story a pre-IPO PR play?
9:48 DigitalOcean - Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%.
16:46 Why some models are "unsafe at any latency"
19:44 Craig Piggott of Halter joins the show
21:03 Every.io - For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io
26:09 How do you add cows to Starlink?
31:26 PayPal - Pay zero processing fees on your first $100K in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at https://paypal.launch.co
47:52 Founder-led hyper-local sales motion
53:15 Remember John C. Dvorak
58:27 Matija Milenovic of Hop Aero joins
59:53 Sending out autonomous swarms in the Indo-Pacific
1:11:26 Nvidia's mega-Hugging Face deal
1:16:32 Nvidia's "unmetered" play against Anthropic and OpenAI
1:29:47 How letting AI write for you is like lip syncing
0:00 It's Hussein's first time on the VC Roundtable!
2:09 Gates says "turbulent era" for AI is here
8:56 Microloans, Kiva, and "universal basic income"
9:23 Thanks to our partner, Lightfield, the AI-native CRM that updates itself, so you never have to! Try it for free at https://lightfield.app
13:00 Why sole proprietorships may be AI's biggest beneficiary
20:29 Got a new business idea? Northwest helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more, with no purchase required! Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain
21:00 Should the gov't take a stake in AI labs?
30:24 Thanks to our partners at Rippling! Head to https://Rippling.ai/twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business.
*A humanoid robot ran the 100m in 9.39, breaking the human Usain Bolt's world record, while an entire stadium cheered. Jason thinks Beijing's World Humanoid Robot Games aren't a science fair, or a fun exhibition, but the best AI PR campaign on Earth. While Americans debate the data centers that train the robot brains, China is already turning them into a spectacle and world-class entertainment.
Find out what Jason thinks America can do to catch up… and why he believes there will be 1 billion Optimus robots deployed by the year 2036.
PLUS on an all-news TWiST, hot takes on the potential $13B Hugging Face sale (to a mystery buyer), why founders should always "buy the threat," analyzing Sam Altman's "I'm listening and I hear you" face, and are kill drones already in operation around the world? We're digging in to how close the real world is to mirroring the "Terminator" films.
3:39 America's messaging problem vs. China's elite PR machine
11:07 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist
12:08 Jason got a fresh Optimus demo
19:21 Quo (formerly OpenPhone) - Quo gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free and get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/TWiST
28:09 Who's going to buy Hugging Face and why?
28:56 Conservation Fund - Find out more about how the Conservation Fund is protecting land, wildlife, and our shared access to the great outdoors while also providing economic opportunities. Visit https://conservationfund.org
31:35 How OpenAI killed OpenClaw
39:08 Sam Altman wants to make a platform, not a product
41:19 The "Castles and Keeps" metaphor for sovereign AI
49:27 UBI isn't happening but we could raise the minimum wage
58:47 Embracing redundancy and self-reliance
1:10:53 Is Star Wars at a historic low point (and Lon's Worst Take)
9:43 Superhuman - Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing, and doesn't ask you to start from zero. Sign up to get the best in AI at https://Superhuman.com
13:08 OpenAI will go public soon
14:19 Top line ARR matters way less than churn
20:43 Sentry - Your team should be focused on shipping features — not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST
29:55 Lightfield - Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM. Exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you — it even prospects and books your meetings. Used by thousands of startups. Free at https://lightfield.app
30:52 Harvey launches Tenet
34:32 "Open source is going to win it all"
35:58 Allan Guo of Willow joins
39:18 Managing a single source of truth across a team
47:00 Lon and Jason love the Toyota Alphard
51:00 Stanford student and AV expert Ethan Goodhart joins
1:00:09 How Ethan got Jensen Huang to go for a ride
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