This Week in Startups - Ask Jason: AI Extinction, Grok's Rogue Meme Coin & Weed Farms as Data Centers | E2337

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Quo: http://quo.com/TWiST The Conservation Fund: https://conservationfund.org CLA: https://app.notion.com/p/withyou-help-eb83a84d32cf43f59af13cb11e2f56c3?source=copy_link Today's show: A 27-year-old Anthropic researcher quit last week warning that AI could cause human extinction, and by Friday, a caller's 76-year-old mother was texting her in a panic. Jason's answer: the labs are already shipping the safeguards Doomers say don't exist. On an all live calls episode of TWiST, learn about the AI implications Jason is actually scared of, and why it involves a terrorist cell and a thousand cheap drones. PLUS, who is liable when one AI prompts another AI into launching a meme coin, and can a 1.5-3 megawatt cannabis facility be converted into a data center? Relevant Links: Anthropic Resignee — https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/anthropic-safety-researcher-resigned-warning-rapid-ai-development-gamb-rcna596767 OpenAI's Navier-Stokes claim— https://www.science.org/content/article/how-ai-math-breakthrough-ignited-controversy CNBC: Tristan Buckmaster's challenge to the claim — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/openai-navier-stokes-math-problem-solved.html NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell —https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/gb200-nvl72/ Composio's walkthrough of how Grok Bot actually works — https://composio.dev/content/guide-to-frok-bot Timestamps:   0:00 (Question) Jim, from the midterm Republican convention floor: is AI really going to kill us all — and is local AI the mitigation? 5:31 Where Terminator 2's logic breaks down 9:42 The threat Jason is actually scared of: slaughter drones and murder bots 9:54 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 at https://quo.com/TWiST 10:05 (Question) Michael Lee, who's responsible when one AI prompts another into launching a meme coin? 17:32 (Question) Lyda, calling from Greece: can an independent AI ecosystem still exist 19:03 The 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 21:08 (Question) John Wright: do you have to carve out more time now just to keep up with the tools? 25:42 Claude's caution vs. Grok's "hold my beer" 26:33 (Question) John Wright, part two: do you expect founders to get more done now 26:55 The three buckets: 10x, 5x, and the 20% crowd 29:22 CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech at https://www.claconnect.com/withyou 30:01 (Question) Ray, Vortex Console: can human-in-the-loop actually work at enterprise scale? 33:25 (Question) Kristen Dahl: how do you explain AI risk to your 76-year-old mom? 35:13 Why the chaos only happens at OpenAI and Anthropic 43:36 (Question) David Rosenberg, NYU physics: what's behind the academic backlash to AI solving Navier-Stokes? 53:35 Advice for a 20-year-old: find two smart people, build weird things 54:29 (Question) David's follow-up: any chance of an All-In Summit scholarship 56:21 (Question) Mo: can a cannabis cultivation facility be converted into a data center 1:02:30 (Question) Mo's follow-up: Mark Cuban's pickleball courts and the efficiency curve Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp   Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons   Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/   Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland   Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis   Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

All right, everybody, welcome back. It's an all-ask Jason question. We try to do these every month or so. And, man, we got a lot of questions, how long? We got a ton of questions. And we're taking people's live questions as well. Maybe we'll warm me up with, like, the best of the pre-submissions. And then we'll go from there. What you have to do when we're doing live is somebody needs to be right over that drop button, ready to drop the person off the call in case somebody does something like, I don't know who that guy, Tubin was. I don't want to have a tube-in situation here. That was his own fault, Jeffrey Chubin. 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 CLA connect.com slash with you, the Conservation Fund. For 40 years, the Conservation Fund has protected at-risk land and important wildlife habitats while actively supporting local communities. Learn more at conservation fund.org.

Quo, formerly open phone, 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 six months at quo.com slash TWIST. First, we'll go to a pre-recorded, guaranteed, not too spicy question. This comes from a conservative activist Jim FAP. I believe, Jason, he is at the American Airlines Center

at attending the midterm Republican convention while he's asking his question. Let's go to Jim. Oh, here we go. He's at the convention. You can see I'm taking a quick break from your friend Donald Trump here. I've been doing interviews all day,

and I've been trying to get this out to you. Because I want to know what you think. Listen, this guy left Anthropic and he says that the safeguards are nowhere to be found and AI is going to take over the world. I'm not even sure if I believe that I'm using it every day. But what I want to find out from you is with Apple and Nvidia, really bringing out the hardware that's going to bring local AI. By the way, we're about to implement it in my organization

because we've got a lot of data work we're doing. Do you think that that's maybe the mitigation from whatever actual risk might be there? Do you think, do you agree that there's this kind of risk? I just don't see it because frankly, I'm using AI all the time in building things that we're doing. And honestly, it can be kind of stupid, even though it can really do a whole lot of things. So what's your thoughts on that? It's a great question. It's the question of the moment, in fact.

You have to ask yourself from first principles, what is the attack vector? that would kill, these people are saying, kill all of humanity. So that's a pretty big bogey, 7 billion people, 8 billion people. I can tell you right now, like, even if you intentionally wanted to kill all 7 billion people on the planet and you had the largest nuclear arsenal, Russia, United States, etc., China, and you decided to launch every nuclear bomb you had. You probably wouldn't kill everybody in the world. It's probably still have a couple of hundred million left.

Yeah, you'd have the mad back stragglers in the outback, sure. Yeah, it's a pretty hard task, right? We're pretty redundant here. But let's put that aside. The reason why people are being hyperbolic is because they want attention. And they want attention because either, this is my theory, this individual who is the latest one to spout off, either they have valid concerns about, say, job loss like Bill Gates does, or civil unrest or polarization of wealth, those kind of. things are not cataclysmic, everybody's going to die. Those are under the category of like the social fabric is destroyed in our country, in our world, societal problems. There could be societal problems. Like, I mean, we could see millions of drivers lose their jobs in under 10 years. Those people could be protesting. The Chinese government has already had to deal with this in Wuhan, where they started limiting self-driving cars. Okay, so those are the social problems. Those are real. worth discussing, planning for, et cetera. Let's put those on the side because this is not what those

people are talking about. Right. These people have hit a level of psychosis, a level of psychosis where they believe in their heart of hearts that when this recursive self-improvement, in other words, the AI agents that they deploy, 10,000 of them, will then get better and better at their job without a human in the loop. This requires them to take the human out of the loop, just like maybe Waymo or Tesla deciding to take the driver out of the car. So we take those two metaphors. One is with software, let's say building cyber attacks, you know, hacking. And then on the other side, we have self-driving cars. When did Waymo take the safety driver out? When did Tesla start taking the safety driver? When they perfected and they got to 99-99-9-9-9s of safety,

99 point, multiple nines of safety. Waymo said, okay, we can take a driver out here. We feel in this constrained area, we're not going to kill somebody. That took about 15 years, 15 years of Waymo trying. They won the DARPA challenge started, I think, 2006. So here we are 20 years later. They take the humanolute. What these individuals believe is unlike the self-driving,

which is an AI application, that they're going to be forced to take the, human out of the loop. They're not forced to do that. So what are the scenarios where somebody could possibly take the human out of the loop and then it would go wild? Well, you'd have to have a human decide, I'm going to set this AI in recursive mode. In other words, just pilot itself. I'm going to set it to do biological weapons. And then I'm going to set it to deploy biological weapons somehow, or it's going to decide on its own, it wants to deploy weapons itself. This is a jump that in science fiction happened during Terminator 2.

And that's where the logic broke down in that movie. And they never were able to explain. What was Skynet's beef? It got threatened and it felt threatened. It has a logic to it. The argument is always that we're telling the AI stop war or like, we want you to figure out world peace or an end of this conflict. And then AI is like, oh, the best way to end this conflict would be no more humans. Like it always like that's Ultron from a misinterpretation of a human

instruction. Yes. Here's a great idea, folks. If you're using AI right now, and this is why the public is not falling for this anymore. I think the public is literally about six weeks behind the rest of us in the industry who are saying these people are drama queens or they're suffering from psychosis, or maybe a little bit of both. Maybe they want to be important, and they have a little bit of psychosis. These individuals working in the labs have in some ways gotten very wealthy. Their brains have been scrambled. They could be on drugs.

Who fuck knows. And, you know, some number of people are. They could be suffering for mental illness. Anything's possible here. And then they decide, oh, this jump is going to happen without ever realizing as they launch products as the creators of those products, they can put the safeguards in. And they have. So this flies in the face of what Claude's actually doing. Have you ever tried to get Claude to download a YouTube video? It's like, I can't do that for you, sir. Okay, I'd like

you to order me this ticket on United. I can put it into you, I can find you the flight, get your permission. You have to give me browser permission. Then you have to log in, give me permission to use your password. Then I'll put it into your cart, but I won't check out for you. And I'll put the books in the Amazon. but I refuse to check out of you. Literally, they're building products that have multiple safeguards in it so they don't get blamed for booking your ticket for you. Inadvertently.

Okay, how about when it does biological weapons, you say, we're pausing your account because we think you just instructed this thing to do biological weapons. Please call your Claude Representative, Susan, to unlock your account. And by the way, here's what we're, if you do this repeatedly, we're going to report you to, you know, law enforcement, right? Which is, by the way, what they're doing already. No, we just saw that we'll talk later about the anthropic threat report that that's what they're doing.

They're detecting, oh, this person is trying to do something nefarious. They're trying to send a missile with clawed. We're going to shut them down and then write a report about what they tried to do. So, yeah, for right now, it does feel like the AI is not capable of even doing everything you ask it to, let alone world domination. And we are capable of putting safeguards into it. Sure. You know, like you could take a car and you can drive it into, you know, the front of a building or God forbid into a farmer's market.

We've seen this kind of thing happen with a self-driving car with AI in it. Yeah. Properly tuned. You can't take a self-driving car and ram it into a farmer's market. Right. The car will stop you. The self-driving car, if you try to force it to do some horrific terrorist act, will stop you. So literally, not only should. Should AI not allow you to do these things?

It should, in fact, be safer than non-AI products. AI products, if designed correctly, should be safer than non-AI products and can be. I think it also just ignores the way people interact. Like, they're imagining Tony Stark is going to set up an AI and say, you're a superhero, protect the world from all violence. That's not how you use these tools. It's much more specific and directed. You have the entire big plan in mind, and then you're telling your agent, go,

do this thing for me, go finish this step, go do this and connect this to that. So there's always still a human in charge of the big picture. And I think that's where that human is the one who's saying, okay, we're not going to actually create a biological weapon. We're figuring out strategies for countering it or whatever. You've heard me say it many times now on common. If you're an early stage startup or small business, every single new potential customer is extremely valuable. You can't afford to have a team that's missing calls. If your communication is inconsistent, your customers will notice. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, QUO, the smart way to run your business communication. I use Quo all day long. I love it. And it's just great to have that

one number that my team and I can share so that we don't lose any customers. Quo is the number one top rated business phone system on G2. And it's already trusted by more than 90,000 businesses. They're going to bring all of your calls, texts and contacts together in a shared collaborative of space. That means your entire team is going to use one shared number. So there's zero chance. Anyone is going to fall through the cracks. Money is on the line. Always say, hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus, get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash twist. That's QUO.com slash twist. This is one of my favorite products in the world. It gets my highest endorsement. AI should be used first and foremost to protect against humans with bad intent,

a.k.a. terrorist, school shooters, mentally ill people, people in society with screws loose or, you know, who are religious zealots or their hearing voices. Those are the people actually that we can start to find, get help for, and or neutralized. There was that that post-Soviet moment where all a sudden there were all these nuclear weapons and all these like rogue states and like once the USSR collapsed. Like, yeah, like I feel like that may be like if, you know, China loses track of million of these things and they're just kind of out there, like, that could be a real problem. Michael Lee is joining us now live. Michael, thank you for joining us.

What's your question for Jason? Oh, hey. Hey, Michael. What's your question? Jason. Hey, Lana. Thanks for having me on. What pleasure.

I submitted a question, actually, through video while Tesla driving was driving me around. Being invited to be here live, this is great. I wanted to get your, again, my name is Michael Lee. I'm a founder of Gondola Partners. I wanted to get your thoughts on one of the crazier. more wild occurrences that took place between on social media between two AIs back in March 2025. So a human user asked GROC on social media to prompt, asked GROC to prompt another AI user on X to

create a meme coin. And GROC took the instructions and made the prompt to this AI that is designed to launch coins. So this other AI did exactly what it was supposed to do, and it took GROC's suggestion and deployed this. Since then, over the past 18 months, this market has done over 300 million in marketplace activity, and a wallet associated with the GROCX logging credentials has earned over a million dollars. The question is, when something like this unintended happens among two AIs, SpaceX AI did not say, hey, this is something we want to happen. GROC didn't wake up that morning and say, oh, I'm going on social media.

I'm going to launch a meme coin. But it did happen, and there's permanent consequences that are still ongoing today. In fact, it's become so popular that two weeks ago, the largest regulated exchange in the United States, Coinbase listed this alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, GROC's Genesis creation, and the meme has become GROC has money. But who really does have money is the question? This is a story that I think I saw go by my feed for people who don't know. A meme coin is like a crypto coin that people trade like trading cards.

You saw the Melania coin. I think Biden's got a coin. Trump's got a coin. Anybody can launch a coin. Anybody playing with coins kind of understands that this is garbage and like some sort of giant Ponzi poker game that's rigged. But what you're saying is this one bot

instructed another bot to make a coin. So human in the loop can anybody just open an account and make a bot on, I guess this was made on Solana if I remember correctly. On Coinbase is blockchain base. Yeah. So but is it permissionless in that

you can just send this instruction out to the blockchain to do it? Or do you need to have an intermediary to do it? So that's what I'm concerned about, because it seems like whoever instructed this bot, the second bot, to do it, they created a vector here for essentially coin spamming, right? It would be like somebody gave it access to an mail server and said, just flood everybody with email and do spam. So it does feel like that's something somebody could just tighten up, right, Michael? They could just put in a protection there. Basically, Grock was not able to interact with that token launch bot anymore because of some security things.

But in the early days, this happened. And now you've got a situation where there was no human in the middle. It was two AIs they'd interacted. But a human had to initiate GROC to go down that path. And now this GROC wallet that's authenticated by GROC's X-Login forever will accrue fees on activity. And the question remains when two AIs and something unintended happens like that and involves a market and money. Who's responsible? This is the person that initiated GROC and said, hey, you need to talk to this other AI.

Is it SpaceX AI? I'm going to put blame on the platform that doesn't have safeguards for human in the loop. This is where regulation matters. And I believe some people will disagree that if you wanted to initiate something like this, like a coin or any kind of crypto project, I believe the way the regulation should work is that at least two people, maybe three, need to. put their driver's license in, you know, and if they're going to create something that goes worth over a million dollars or tries to accept the public's money, you know, in the United

States, depending on the region. And those laws do exist to a certain extent. Just because you can technically do something doesn't mean a jurisdiction like the United States or Canada or England have to allow you to do it. So that's where you have to force the human in the loop. Whatever the platform is, it would be de minimis for us to say, just like when you open a Robin Hood account or you open up a stripe account. They now ask you to take a picture of your driver's license and then you're forced to turn your camera on and do a special like proof of human. Like there should just be proof of human in the loop here. These meme coins, at least in the United States, should be regulated in my mind. The fact that they are creating like a multi-layer system where certain

things require no, you know, oversight and then other things do is just making it even more convoluted, everything that involves these crypto coins, at least in the United States, when they hit a certain size, they should have like super regulation on them because it is too dangerous to allow people to create financial products and then trick AIs to do it at scale. We had the same thing happen with mail, DDoS. These are all just different attack vectors. And what's unique here is the people on the other side haven't created any safeguards. They need to put safeguards in.

It's their responsibility. There is an interesting question of why Coinbase would want to be involved in these shenanigans. They might want to make a statement, Michael, hey, we shouldn't reward bots creating these things, even if they get to scale. We only want human-created coins where somebody's in charge of the coin. There's a corporation behind the coin. There's a driver's license and a social security number or tax ID associated with it. Last comment on that. I think it's interesting.

You look at something like Hunter Biden and these other – the human. humans lie and humans steal and humans have certain needs. Like, Connor Biden definitely, like, it's ridiculous what happened there. There's almost a level of purity when there's not the human that's part of the creator that they don't have the humanly needs to steal from you. And there's something to me that's very interesting about that. And it's why I think Grock's Genesis coin has done really well over the past 18 months. I mean, listen, anybody who's thinking of buying Genesis coin or any of these coins,

if you should certainly participate in that if you don't like money. That would be the perfect thing for you to get involved. If you do like money and do you like to protect the money you have and or increase it, might I suggest a dividend paying ETF or QQQ or a Vanguard fund that is low fee? Just put your money in that. And if you want to buy a couple of tokens here on the side, fine. But your expectation should be it goes to zero. Michael, great question.

Thank you for all right. Thank you for all right. Yeah, all right. Here we go. Our first live question is well done. Well done. That was a good question. You want to do another live?

I think we've got another live power. Yeah, as many lives as we can. This is an experiment. All right. We are hoping that it goes well. So far so good. A lot of people think there is a binary choice. Be a capitalist who supports growth or care about the environment and the natural world.

But these two ideas don't have to be in opposition. Our friends at the Conservation Fund believe that you can protect tech land, wildlife, and our shared access to the great outdoors while also providing important economic opportunities. For 40 years, the Conservation Fund has been acting quickly to protect at-risk land and important wildlife habitats, while also actively supporting local communities, and this is key, creating new jobs. The Conservation Fund already protects over 9 million acres across all 50 states, proving that we can watch out for the environment and keep our natural surroundings in balance without endless gridlock, debate, and politics. And this isn't just

a land trust scooping up property and sitting on it. They're working alongside permanent stewards, who will find practical uses for these important spaces without destroying them. Find out more about how the Conservation Fund is changing the playbook at conservation fund.org. I believe up next is Lida, Lida, Lida, Liberpolu. Yes. And in a landscape that's dominated by, these massive companies, what it would actually take to build a genuinely independent AI ecosystem, something that would be a market with small startups, independent investors, and multiple infrastructure providers, something that looks more like the early days of the internet. Is that even possible?

And how do we get there? This is a great question, in fact. And is that accent Greek? It is. You're a Greek. Okay, I'm a Greek as well. Calais. You can tell everybody what does Calicanus mean.

You do well. You're a good person. You're a good person. You do well. Given to my family. Just steps from Mount Olympia because of our great heritage of being generals. That's what my parents tell me. Or it could be that we made great burgers at our diners.

It could be either. It's one of those two. One of them. So it is happening in the open source community. So OpenClaw is a vote on making agents that are independent. Then you have the open hardware movement where people are going to move open source models onto their local compute and do the compute there. So it is happening through those groups of individuals.

If you want AI sovereignty, if you use OpenClaw with Nemotron or Gemma, which is Google's open source product or countless other open source product. or countless other open source products, you will be sovereign AI. In other words, the AI running on your Mac studio with 256 gigs of RAM, which cost $12,000, which I just bought, it's a little too expensive right now,

and the open source products are six months behind maybe the frontier models. But that same thing happened. That same thing was truly of the Internet itself. In the early days of the Internet when I was coming up, people laughed at it because it was so clued, and didn't work very well, mosaics, and support images. And it was slow.

And people said, why don't you just use AOL or Delphi or Compi serve? Those are incredibly refined products. But open, free, nobody to pay. I mean, you still need to have your computer. You still needed to get a phone line or an ISDN line eventually, and then a T1 or a fiber line. So it is happening. And then there's Tau, BitTensor Network, right, which is providing permissionless ability to do this. It's all a little bit too technical, which is exactly what happened with the internet. That's

how you know it's going to work, Lita. The reason I knew the internet would work was because it was hard to get on. You'd had to have somebody come and install PPP and whatever, these like drivers onto your Mac, and it was hard. It took like somebody with some specific skill. But over time, it got easier, easier and then it was just abstracted into one click. We're at the one click moment. You're going to be able to use perplexity computer and open claw one click have it on your mac studio yes it's too expensive now but it'll go down 50% every two years in terms of cost and the power will go up double every two years so you're going to have a nice swing there and it is happening and it's happened and we've been through this movie before open source is just such a perfect modality and very

strange individuals unique personalities are so drawing to this space that it will happen And they are doing it to make a point. Great question, Lina. Here is a superfan, a twist superfan joining us via video. John Wright. Let's see John's question right now. My name is John Wright. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Nuvis. And I got a question for Jason, which is, do you expect the founders and people that you advise or invest in to do more than what they've done in the past where now they can build their own products and not have to rely on the team? Do you expect them to do more than outside the box? And a second question for you is for yourself as advisor and investor, do you find that you have to carve up more time for yourself to stay on top of these new technology and tools?

All right. I am right now in a very difficult position of the zone getting flooded. People want me to go places and speak about the technology. I want to stay home and use the technology and learn how it works. And the industry is moving faster than anyone human can process what's going on. In other words, Grockbot comes out. I stopped using perplexity computer. I started using rock bot.

Then I went back to perplexity computer and I've been using Claude. And I stopped using Irma's agent. And I stopped using OpenClaught. So exactly right. It is impossible to keep up with all of this. Same thing happened during the Internet era. Same thing happened during the mobile era. That's when you know there's an opportunity.

So what do you do in an industry like this? Well, my day job as an investor, I need to use a team of people to vet and my network to tell me what to pay attention to. And then I have to go with my gut and just play with stuff and hope that while I'm fishing this incredible ocean and I'm using that net lawn, maybe I pick up a couple of lobsters or something just amazing. But it's just, it's incredibly hard. It's an incredibly hard situation. And I think that's why some people aren't, their sleep scores are low. Yeah. But I'd rather have it like this than have what we had during, say, the SAS ZER period.

It was getting really boring for me. I was like, okay, you just made the 17th CRM, 1700 CRM, 17,000 CRM. You know, people were not thinking of like really groundbreaking products. But whenever a technology comes in, a platform shift, and the platform shift here is AI agents, you know, intelligence on demand. Previously it was cloud computing. Before that, it was mobile. Before that, it was broadband.

Before that, it was non-broadband internet access. Before that, it was client server. And before that, it was the PC revolution. And maybe even the graphical user interface kind of snuck in there as a platform moment. Those are like seven or eight unique platform moments where you could come in as an entrepreneur or as an investor and just. really use that platform moment to leapfrog and get ahead of other people in the space. Yeah, so that would be my answer.

Let me ask you, when you are evaluating these AI agentic tools, like, what are you looking for? Like, what's making the decision between I'm going to use perplexity computer for this as opposed to Grok Butter Club? Because my perspective is a lot of them can do kind of similar things, and it's really just about what you want to use and what your priority. I have the same set of requirements, and the question is, do the bots do it better, quicker, faster, cheaper, essentially?

So one of the tasks I have is I have to stay on top of news as a podcast host. Which one of these can keep me informed of that? Which one can help me get clips, you know, to use on the show and download them? Which one of these can help me process unique situations in investing? So what I found is now, whatever the newest one is seems to leapfrog the last one. And as one example, I'm just sitting here waiting for multiplayer mode in one of these agenic software. So now I'm actually anticipating. I'm so deep into this lawn.

I kind of know what the next feature is. And I told the team at Rock, because I know a bunch of them and I'm friends with Elon, I said, really, multiplayer mode changes us forever. please get us multiplayer mode. And then the feature that they really, Cursor plus Grockbot, really figured out was having a computer, a persistent computer inside of bot so it could go do things,

fire up its computer in the cloud, and be logged in. I just noticed yesterday, Claude was like, hey, by the way, can I import all of your, for co-work, can I import all of your cookies from your browser and then have instant access to all your stuff? But Claude seems very conservative.

Yes. In terms of it's like what it was willing to do for me, whereas Grock just goes and does it and figures it out. So there's, yeah, I mean, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, for sure. I want to download this. Sometimes I want to share something with Lahn and I'm like, download this video and send it to Lawn.

And it's like, Claude's like, I can't download that video. It's not my video. And Grock's like, Yolo, hold my beer. I'll get the video for you. That's what I was going to say. I mean, that's why I love Grockbot is that it doesn't give you that 800, like, well, maybe a better way to do this or I'm not sure I can access the MCP. It just goes and does and it's very intuitive.

The first half of that question, we should get to it. Do you expect founders are going to get more done now as an investor? When you're looking at a company, has AI changed the way you evaluate how productive founders are being? One of the themes we talk about over and over again on this weekend startups is making sure you do your chores. I'm no expert on these things. I have some experience, Stephen Estes from CLA, is an expert. Let's talk about being cash efficient. Tell us about efficiency and what you see in the top tier startups in your practice.

We're seeing kind of an interesting trend out there where companies aren't needing to raise quite as much as they had in the past. You really have to be careful as a founder to only take on as much money as you really need. You've got to do the forecast and you've got to do the modeling and you've got to dialed in and get it right. otherwise you're going to end up either not raising enough capital to get to where you're going and you're going to have to go get venture debt or go back and have an extender to the round or you're going to give up too much of the company because you just didn't recognize how much money actually needed. Yeah, very important to get this stuff right, folks. And that's really a bummer when startups don't do things in a button up way. I always have a great partner.

A good partner to have on this adventure while things change, my friend Stephen over at CLA. So if you want a trusted advisor by your side who will navigate you through taxes, accounting and everything in between, it's time to take action. Visit c-l-a-connect.com slash with you. And don't forget to drop a mention that your boy, Jake, I'll sent you. That's c-l-a-connect.com slash with you. Start today. Yes, because inside my company, the people who have adopted AI at the top of the stack, you know some of these people in the company lawn, they are, yeah. So like, we have people who are, I would say five times more effective. 10 times more effective than the non-AI users.

And I don't know if I have any more holdouts not using AI at all, but I would put them into three buckets. The people who are on the vanguard, who are making software every day, refining it, that group of people are 10 times more valuable than the people in the bottom bucket, which are using you know, like chat GPT as a search engine that's better than Google, asking a questions, getting a response, asking questions, getting a response. And then like Lon, you would fall right between those two groups. You're not building software yet, but you do have bots and you're, I don't know,

would you say you're two or three times more effective than you were pre-AI engagement? I would think it's more than three X for sure. Because let's go with five. Yeah, there was a lot of like scrubbing through videos looking for the perfect moment before. There was a lot of scanning X looking for the top trending topics and all of that stuff is now purely automated. So it is a big time saver. So you're 5X. I would say the people who just use it like a chat room or like a better version of Google or YouTube, they're probably 20% more effective, which a 20% gain last year was blowing my mind. Yeah, that's huge. And like two years ago,

I bought OpenAI for everybody, chat, GPT, pro accounts, then I bought Claude. I was like, hey, man, if people can become 20% more effective every year, in a 20-person company, it's like getting four new employees for free every year, if you just think about it in terms of head count, which is an easy way to do it. Now, to the question of startups, one of the great things is if you pick the right startups, they are bar raisers. They will be leading you. They're the lead dog. I don't know what they call the lead dog in a, what do you call the dog sled? Yeah. What would the lead dog be called? There's a name for the lead dog. I'm going to just call it the lead dog. I mean, that's what I would have called it, but I'm going to look this up for you.

There's definitely a technical name for the lead dog. The leader of the pack dog. Gemini's a lead dog. A lead dog runs at the very front of the dog slate team guiding the other dogs. The mucher is the person. The alpha, the alpha lead dog. If you invest in the right founders, the alpha dog is going to show you. Now, the other ones, just like I talked about the three buckets of employees and team members I have, it kind of is like that. The last couple of dogs, they're not, they don't even know what direction they're going in. All they know is put your head down and run. The middle of the pack, they're kind of helping with. They're kind of helping with the direction a little bit more, and then the alpha's setting the direction.

And you pick the right founders, they're alpha, and they're telling you what they're doing. And then I'm like, whoa, I'm taking notes. So every time I meet with the founder, they think that they're coming to Obi-Wan and learning something, and I'm Obi-Wan, and I'm looking at them going, oh, wow, Anakin's got some good moves here. Anakin's like a stronger Jedi than I am. This guy's going to bring balance to the force. I'm not sure how, but...

I better make sure I hang on to that high ground because this guy is dangerous. High ground is super important. Great question. Yes, we got one more live caller calling in. Let's talk to. Coming at you. Let's talk to Ray. He's coming into the chat room now to ask us a question.

I don't know what the question is. Or as my friends call me, Ray Tarday. Go ahead. It's French. Sometimes. That's what they call me. That's, yeah. Ray are you here?

Hi, how are you? I see Ray. Good. Where are you calling in from? What are you calling in from? I'm from Sweden. Oh, fantastic. I am a quarter Swedish.

I heard, I saw. I'm actually my company in Dubai, my life here in Sweden. I'm originally Egyptian. I am the founder of company called Vortex Consolium. And we are the AI Authority platform. Great. Yeah. The question I would start with first before all of this,

because people talking about human in the loop a lot. People discussing a lot of human in the loop, a lot of Cases are outside, but did anybody witness what is human in the loop in enterprise, let's say operations daily? Did anyone try to launch, let's say 400 agents and each agent will do, let's say, 50 different action? And does anybody understand the bottleneck will happen when a reviewer, let's say you have 60 reviewers, each one will need at least three minutes to review the escalation. anybody seeing what is human in the loop is, can anyone understand? Can the human in the loop be operational in an enterprise? I'm going to interpret your question as, hey, these things are scaling in enterprises. Enterprises have a downside risk, liability, loss of data, security, wrong answers, and what is the ratio necessary to keep a human in the loop? And this is where people will make fun of

CTOs and CIOs and creating standards in organizations. The standards exist for a reason. Compliance exists for a reason. The more important the data you have is, the more important it is to have these controls in place, to have a human in a loop. If you're a customer support department and you send out a thousand answers, Lon, might not matter that two of them were wrong because humans were getting 20 of them wrong.

But if this is a chargeback and it's ticket master and somebody sitting outside an arena because they just bought Nick's tickets, customer service now is acute. Somebody bought a playoff ticket for $5,000. It's an hour before the game. I get into this situation all the time with ticket master seat geek and vivid seats and all this stuff. So depending on the transaction and what's at stake, that's when you need to have more. humans in the loop and you need to really consider what you're asking. And so great question. And we wish you great luck with your company.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Ray. Let's go to another pre-recorded question. This one comes to us from Kristen Dahl. Kristen Dahl's question. Let's pull that up for Jason now. Hey, Jason. Love the podcast. My name's Kristen.

I work in cybersecurity. And I wanted to get your thoughts on having that conversation around regulated versus unregulated AI. with non-technical people. Context is my mother, who's 76 years old, frantically texted me yesterday, asking me if we need to live in fear of unregulated AI because she saw the Jacob Coxson interview on CNN and was afraid that we were all going to be dead in 10 years because of AI.

And so I was just wondering, what are your thoughts for navigating those conversations? Yeah, so this is what it's come to now, Lon. Yeah. The time difference or the time delay, the half-life of these spectacular claims between when they go from the claim on X where everybody's kind of hanging out, the town square for nerds, X to mom being panicked, looks like it's about 72 hours. Yeah. Why is it 72 hours?

Well, because there's two jumps in between. It goes from X. Then it jumps to like, you know, some form of trade publication, the information, you know, tech crunch. And then those places, CNN and Anderson Cooper are watching techmeem.com where they aggregate stuff. They look for a good story. Maybe they're on X following some, you know, aggregator accounts. Then it jumps to national press.

Persons on Fox News, persons on CNN, persons on. person's on Megan Kelly, you know, an at-scale podcast like Megan Callie or Tucker or Joe Rogan, and then mom hears it in this case, and mom panics. This is why you need to have a communication strategy. The thing that I was struck by with all of this Mishigosh here, coming out of these two specific companies, you don't see it happening at GROC, SpaceX, AI. You don't see it happening at Apple, nor do you see it happening at Google or Microsoft. Why? At those companies, they have a communication policy. And the communication policy is

STFU. Shut the frack up. If you have something to say, by all means, we have a open mic Friday. You can ask Sergey a question. You can ask, you know, Satya, Sundar. Feel free on a Friday beers, you know, to give Jensen a fastball. I'm sure he loves it internally. Your job working as a rank and file person and anthropic and open AI is not to cause abject chaos and brand damage. What are Dario and Sam thinking? They need to go to the troops and say, there's a lot at stake. We speak with one voice.

That one voice is me. You can come to me with all your concerns. I'm on the Slack, DM me. Here's my freaking phone number. Call me if something happens. Everybody in my company calls me. Everybody in my company knows, don't talk to the press. don't tweet anything that would embarrass the company.

Don't do anything in public that would embarrass the company. Like if I get a video of you like, you know, I don't know, like jumping on a bar and, you know, I'm saying something inappropriate. You can't even think of anything good. I mean, you've stood on a chair. I'm just saying if you get to the bar and then you say something inappropriate and there's a video of it that goes viral and it says, Jake Howe's employee told an inappropriate joke, you know, on top of a bar at, you know, the mothership comedy store, I'm like, okay, you're fired. The end. I would never. Or you're

dismissed for now. You're suspended. Why is that not occurring at OpenAI? Why is that not occurring at dropping? I would be, if I was the CEO of that company, and the last thing I'd want to do is have more than 25 employees at this point in my career, like there's a hard cap at 25. That's a lot. Just so we're clear. That's a big time. That's enough. When it's 30, then I don't know people's names, 25, I can keep everybody's name, have a understand where they're from, what makes them tick. 25 is the limit at this point in my career based on me wanting to enjoy my life. Man, you just got to tell everybody, STFU, shut the frack up.

It is not your place. Steve Jobs was militant about this. If you did, you tipped your cards in any way, you're fired. That's it. Who is the person? There was a person at Open AI or Anthropic who's like, I can confirm that. that this person who just rage quit and did this post is correct. And I still work at the company.

Yeah, it was another anthropic researcher chimed in and said they agree with Cox in that, and they were the ones who said we've maybe got a 10% chance of destroying humanity in the next year. I hope that doesn't happen. And then a safety researcher from OpenAI tweeted it. I was like, I also agree with what these two guys are saying. By the way, you know what they need to do? What are you doing? Very simple.

You put in the documents. If you damage the company, if you break these policies, you'll, lose your stock options. That's what you put in the documents. That's now, now you're getting where it hurts, yeah. Like, okay, you want to sound off. It's that important to you? You leave $25 million in shares on the table. That's what I would do. I would lock this company down. I hate Tavira's too deep into conspiracy corner. But I, let's do it. Do you feel like, I don't feel like these people are going rogue, like, oh, I hope Dario doesn't see my tweet. It feels like this is a narrative that Anthropic is sort of okay with.

So you and Sacks are aligned. When Lon and Sacks get aligned, that's when we truly have hit a conspiracy. Yeah, I do feel this feels to me like a knob a little bit. The whole thing feels like a rollout that was very purposeful. Here's how we're going to get attention to this narrative. We're sitting here five years after the pandemic. Do you now look at Fauci and the pandemic as in like they were doing a cover up? Do you feel there was a cover up now?

I really don't. I still look back at COVID and I think they were seeing something very scary. People were in fact dying, especially if you were old. But you don't. When you saw the FOA lady blocking emails being sent and when you saw them backing the wet market over the lab league theory and suppressing that, you really are like going to say that they were not bad actors there? I will not say nobody in government or bureaucracy did anything bad during COVID. that's not reasonable. People get scared.

Big things are happening. They get caught up in it. People make bad decisions. I'm sure bad decisions were made. So you forgive the mistakes, but you think there were mistakes made. Right. I think it would be in an honest, we went too far mistake than a conspiracy. It doesn't, to me, this likes like.

Might be a nuance. As a PR savvy person, this just feels like this, like nobody that nobody had ever heard of with no real following on social media. Suddenly that tweet is everywhere. suddenly other people from Anthropic and Open AI are sharing it. The Wall Street Journal published before it came out. They were pre-vetted. There's a whole lot that's like, and all these people have connections to, like,

Andrew Yang was talking about it, who's got all these connections to all of these, like, dumer groups. And it feels to me like this feels like a little bit of astroturfed. I am now when I, and I've always been skeptical, but I assumed good faith. I remain skeptical. I assume op. equally to stupidity, Occam's Razor, like, or what's the other, there's another term for like the stupidest, like explanation or like never ascribe bad intent when like stupidity is the thing.

Yeah. I don't remember the exact phrase, but we had that. That's Hanlon's razor. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Hanlon's raising. Hanlon's razor. So we talked about this when I was a journalist back in the 90s. have my own magazine. Like, we would say, okay, what's going on here? Occam's razor, Hanlon's razor, conspiracy. And we would just go through it. And like, right now, I'm like,

Hanlin's razor, H-A-N-L-A-N. H-A-N-L-O-N, Hanlon. Hanlon, Hanlon. Han-L-A-Razer, stupidity, as an explanation. Right. Incompetence. And conspiracy sciops.

they now are like my one and two. I do not assume good faith anymore. I just think it's either incompetence, like just abject incompetence when I looked at like something, I don't know, like the ice raids or something like that. I'm just like, these people are super incompetent. And then I look at some situation like this,

and I'm like, I'm being sciopped. It's so obviously that I'm manipulating. And then the pile on, if you're Sam Altman, and Sam is so savvy. He's like one of the smarter people I've met, I met them all. Sam is very smart. Like, really smart. Like, you would not want, I played poker with Sam. I've gotten into some very big poker hands with Sam. And, like, I can tell you, I still remember the poker hand where he had a set, I had a flush, and he went all in. And I'm sitting there

with, like, the second nut flush. And I'm trying to think about it. And, like, Chamek said some crazy stuff. Sure. And, like, I'm like, please, I'm just trying to make a decision. And then I called, and I won the hand, but I was 70% folding, 30% maybe calling, because it was such a big number, and I'm trying to play it out of my head and Chimoth kind of,

like, shouldn't have said anything. But putting that aside, like, he's a good poker player. He's a great manager. He should just be coming out right now and just saying, hey, everybody, here's the new corporate policy. I speak for the company.

Anybody else wants to speak for the company? Absolutely a great idea. Send me a written proposal of why you should be speaking for the company instead of me and instead of, you know, Greg. Like, we're the two people who are going to speak for the company. And before Greg's tweets and before I tweet, we just make sure we're aligned. Anybody else want to jump into the frame? Great.

You can like what we say. But you can't reply with words. Right. That's what I would set as the new policy. Ridiculous. Yeah, let's keep going. It's getting out of hand. All right.

We have another live caller on NYU student. David Rosenberg is calling in. We got some questions about NYU. I don't want to get some questions. You know, I got into NYU. I almost, I ended up at UCLA. I went to Fordham. That was like the safety school.

I mean, NYU was a little tick above, but why I used to hang out in Manhattan when I was coming up. And let's just say, there were some nice young ladies who we would like to meet in the East Village for a cup of coffee. Sure. You know, a nice cup of coffee, some chat. We would frattenize. Listen, how you doing? Are you in your dorm?

This is a fancy dorm here. You got your own apartment. Rosh Hashanah tonight. Ah, right, of course. Weekend. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I'm a big fan of the All In podcast. Thank you.

Tell us your question. So I was curious what you guys thought about, I mean, there's like a sentiment in the academic community, specifically in the physics community. I'm sure you've heard about the Navier-Stokes equation and how over it's solved it. So I think there's like a little bit of back, in the academic community concerning like using artificial intelligence to solve like some of

these really complicated problems. So I was curious about what you guys thought. Well, it's a tool and you can brute force with it. You can have it extend your scaling ability to try different novel solutions. And I think at the end of the day, we just want to solve these problems. and what's going to happen is AGI, like artificial general intelligence, hey, I could be a competitive lawyer, I could be an accountant, I could be a podcast producer, what kind of at AGI. I think anybody would look at any profession, David, and put these tools against it, if properly implemented, we'll do as good a job as a human, almost universally. If you even surgery, like you could just put an AI on it.

If you spent enough time, you know, one year just making it perfect, it's going to beat the average surgeon. Okay. So if we're at AGI, superintelligence is this thing can answer questions we cannot. What I took away from one of these big seven questions getting solved or partially solved or sending people in the right direction is we're tipping over into super intelligence. And what will really be super intelligence is when it proposes math problems to us that we didn't think of. So I think it's super exciting there that we're on the cusp or we're somewhere in the journey between AGI to super intelligence, depending on how much implementations being done. I do think anybody who's doing this kind of research should not be using the frontier models. They should be forking any open source model, doing it on their own servers.

And if it takes three times longer because you don't have the infrastructure, then these universities like the one you're at should be buying. more hardware and get the go.a.i proprietary server that you can put into your office. I think it's 40 grand, 50 grand. That's one of our investments. You could, that's where you're going to have to do this because they will have their large language model in some way, maybe not reading your inputs, but maybe looking at the outputs and somehow it's going to train it. So I think the academic community has just been put. put on alert that every prize is going to be taken by anthropic and open AI. And if they're going to snipe everyone using the training data you gave it, it's like literally the top 100 mathematicians

plus the next thousand students just using these AIs for fun to try to solve these problems. Those 1100 people, the top 100 who are super credible in the thousand up-and-comers, collectively, the wisdom of that crowd of 1,100 math researchers and scientists, they're going to, in aggregate, train open AI and anthropics models to solve these problems where you as an individual researcher wouldn't have that. But for humanity, don't you think, David, it's just good to get this done, David? 100%. I'm in total agreeance with you that we should utilize all of the tools that we have to...

Are you a math major? Is that what's going on here? Physics. Physics, okay. Is there an equivalent? in physics of the top, like, unsolved questions that you're using AI to try to solve on your own? Well, me, no. I'm still in, like, the really early stages of my career there. But, I mean, yeah, hopefully eventually, if I go into research, I'm not really sure if that's

what I want to, I probably want to go into, like, tech and startups, that type of thing. But that's a good idea, man. Until, um, more money there. I heard, um, physics is like a great way to just understand logic. Like, I went social sciences. Like, in other words, not science. Like, you know, like looking back on psychology, it's like, is it a science? Like, there are moments of science that occur.

Right. But it's, you know, philosophy and, you know, techniques. But I don't know if I would call it exactly science. It has moments of science, but experimentation. People are leaving, like, the more scientific roles at the frontier labs are now going into philosophy. So who knows? Well, if you are trying to understand the right thing to do, or humanity empathy.

Like, I think the reason I have such empathy is because I was a psychology major and I aspire to go into forensic psychology and join the FBI. I was, like, on that track of, like, how do people think, what is, how do emotions impact them? What are situational variables

that cause people to do things? What's nature? What's nurture? All that kind of stuff. But if you're dealing with the physics person, they don't have that in their toolkit so they can look at humanity as, like, maybe,

not in a holistic manner. So it doesn't surprise me that people who are computer science or physics are like, there's got to be some understanding here. And you'll know it's real when they pick up religion. Because that's the thing that like,

if you're completely unmoored and you're eventually going to look into this doomerism or whatever, the next step is these anthropic people are going to start going to church. That's when you know, like, we're in the end game. When they start saying, you know what,

I need to get some grounding here. I'm going to go find Jesus. or Mohammed or, you know. That's the Steve Bannon and like the Steve Bann again. It's like, well, sorry. Oh, no, go ahead. I was just going to say. There's a trend that like the top researchers at these frontier labs are now like

looking into studying the Talmud and like, how long? My friend Darren Aeronovsky made a film called Pi. And literally it made, you know, a, it's a thriller, but it kind of took what was happening in mathematics and looking at the Talmud and, you know, all that kind of stuff. He made it for $60,000. Yeah, that was his first movie. That was his first movie. Yeah.

I hosted a screening for him over at the East Village Cinema. Was it like 11th and third or second? Something right by you. And I rented it and I rented the bar next door. I spent like $2,500 when I was doing my magazine. because Darren and Sean, who was the star of that film, they had no money. They were trying to get attention for this.

So they did a campaign, David. It was super cool. They took the pie symbol. They went around Manhattan with boxes with a stencil on the bottom of the box. They would put the box down. They'd look for cops. They would take a spray can.

It would be in the box. And they go, shh. And then they would lift up their box and pretend they were delivery people. Then they would go to the corner again. And they sprayed the pie symbol all over the East Village,

West Village, Manhattan. And that became the guerrilla marketing for the movie Pie. I don't suggest you do that. It's illegal unless you're using washable paints. In that regard, I'm told that it is legal. They didn't use washerable. There's markings all over the ground of like these random, you know, guerrilla marketing campaigns. It's cool. It's interesting. You were going to say something along before we drop David up. Oh, I was just going to say, does it feel a little bit like what I was going to say before is Steve Bannon's got that guy Joel Miller, who we were talking about,

who he's the super religious anti-AI guy. But the other thing I was going to ask you was about OpenAI, do you feel like they botched this? I feel like this was a pure, like, PR mistake. Like, if they had gone to these researchers and said, we want you to publish your solution, we'll help you and back you in any way you can, we would just ask that you note in the study,

like we used Open AIs models and thanks to, Astra. For sure, it was a PR blunder. Yeah, like that. They should have, if they knew this was happening, they should have contacted the research team. This is how I would have handled it. I would have said, okay, there's a big prize here. We know these two people are working on it.

We know these two people are using our software to do. The correct thing to do is to contact them and say, we would like to give you two forward, deployed engineers to support your work and give you unlimited credit. all we ask is you win the prize, you solved it. If our tools are helpful and if our support was helpful, you can just give us a thank you. Exactly. But if we're not helpful, do not give us a thank you. If we're not helpful, don't give us a thank.

Then he would be a hero and he wouldn't have sniped it and we wouldn't be in this situation. And they knew that was going on. They could have done that. And they could get every cutting edge mathematician who's working on high level stuff pouring it. Oh my God, if you use Open AI and you have success, they're going to give you free compute to help crunch all these numbers, you're going to win the next millennium prize. Why do startups have a good feeling about some of these frontier models is because they get tokens. And if they get free tokens, David, when you start your company, like you'll come to me

when you're at Founder University or Accelerators. I encourage you to apply. Just go find two more. All you have to do, David, find two more really smart people and start building stuff on the weekends, build like three or four things, whatever thing is the most fascinating and interesting and weird to you, then just email it to your unc. Okay. Jason, I thought I was doing over the former to make some side cash. Well, forget about side cash.

Just make something that you're passionate about and that's weird and that if it did work and a million people used it, they'd pay $100 a year for it. Can you come up with something that a million people would pay $100 a year for

or 100,000 people would pay $1,000 a year for, 10,000 people would spend $10,000 a year for? In other words, can you imagine if you got like six steps done that $100 million in revenue, come, then you're in the venture game. And we would love to hear and review that prototype with you, David. All right. Good luck in your studies. Thank you very much. I just wanted to ask one last thing.

Oh, I just want to give you one piece of advice here. Oh, yeah, please. My grandfather on my Irish side would give me the same advice every time I was going to school. Keep your mind on the books and not the babes. Stay focused. Books and not the babes. Sound sound advice. No sound advice from my Irish grant. Yeah. Yeah, one last question. Go ahead, David.

Party. Yeah, I just, I promised my friends if I actually made it on to the this weekend startups that I would, I mean, I'm a big fan of the All-Wen podcast.

I know you guys, offering some scholarships for the All-N Summit. Okay, sure. You got one. I mean, listen, I'm not asking you. I just wanted to, you know, throw the idea out there,

see what, see what's... Are you in L.A.? Can you make it to L.A.? When is it? It's next week. It's on Monday and Tuesday. Yeah. If I get a scholarship,

I will be there, I promise you. All right. Email me. They'll give you my email. I'll see if I can scrounge up a ticket for you. I might have one left. All right. Well, I would love to be there.

I'd love to meet you. And I really appreciate the time. All right. Nicely done. Thanks. I have an extra ticket. Man, crazy thing is Lon, all my rich friends, like, I, yeah, I'm the director of blah, blah, blah, at this giant bank.

Can I get a free ticket? I'm like, or I'm a venture capitalist. Or I have a family office. I'm like, wait a second, you're a venture capital, you want a free ticket? Like the people with the most money are completely unashamed of asking for free tickets.

I'm like, the student who could never afford to go, like he's like, ah, if there's any way. Yeah, it's like the Hollywood Gifting Suite phenomenon. It's like none of the people in the Hollywood Gifting Suite need the Hollywood. They can go buy all this stuff for themselves, but they love it. They want to have it.

All right, we got one more. We got one more live caller. We've got Mo. Wow. Live Quoller's doing well. We've got Mo in the waiting room. We've got to let him in, and then we've got a Friday show to get to. Mo, you're in your car.

I am in my car. How are you doing? Good to see you. All right, Mo. Are you driving right now on self-driving or you're parked? I parked. I parked. Okay.

Hey, there. You got the latest update? I don't mind. What's your question? Hey, Jason. So, you know, one of the things is I listen to your pod every week at all in. And what I've been trying to figure out with data centers is, you know, I'm in the cannabis space. I actually just exited after 13 years. And there's a lot of

production that's been built up in indoor capacity for energy. So you have basically 1.5 to 3 megawatt indoor cultivation centers that are sitting there. And I talked to my city council member about, you know, adaptive reuse and saying, hey, if this thing's already there, can you convert it to a data center instead of, you know, doing a ground up? So there, they said, okay, if it's not using more energy and water than before, we'd be okay with it. So going down this path, do you see these smaller capacity data centers being a thing? Or do you think it's just a, you know, one gigawatt, half gigawatt, or more that we have going on right now?

You're going to see both. Crusoe Cloud is going to do giant, you know, data centers in Texas, Abilene, wherever, over the various natural gas fields and fantastic for them. In three years, Elon will start having, like, serious amounts of compute in space. And he'll demonstrate it probably next year, is my guess. I think I heard him say that publicly. So then there's what's in between.

And I think the most exciting things for me are places where you have a lot of electricity already. You have cooling already. and, you know, you got space, electricity, and cooling. So if you were to do a first principles thinking, like if I asked Lon to put that into Clawd, where is there extra climate-controlled space that could be used for a data center?

Just, you know, forget about AI. Where can we put in a small 10,000 square foot data center? A 5,000 square foot data center, a 1,000-square-foot data center. Lon's going to do that right now. one of the things that will come up is well residential somebody's got a garage and they have a three car garage what if in your three car garage you gave up half a garage slot and had your internet fiber connection as well as your solar and batteries and your power walls powering a small roll in four racks and you got paid for that in other words you used your garage or shed like

Airbnb because you had extra energy at your ranch. What if you took Target, Walmart, He and they have this giant superstore. And you put into the superstore when you said, we're going to just take a quarter of the back of the superstore, this department store, that's already climate control. That already is empty from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., whatever it is, they're hours. And nobody would notice it, but we could roll a bunch of racks in there. People are going to get creative with the stuff. I saw somebody, develop a building in a city and just say these four lower floors, not the ones for retail, but right above retail, you know, floors three through seven, which have no views.

Why don't we just close that off, put in redundant power supplies for the rest of the building and just make them into data centers and have the data centers in every new building. So every new building, like it has a couple of floors for parking, a couple of floors of retail. When you create that mixed use building, why don't you just always put two floors in for data centers, and those people will be renting it out immediately, and it won't bother anybody. So those creative solutions, I think, are what we're going to be forced to do, or there might be creative countries. You might take a country like, say, Puerto Rico. And Puerto Rico says,

you know what? Territory. What's that? A territory. Not a country. It's a U.S. territory. It's a U.S. territory like Puerto Rico. They say, you know what? We got a lot of land, got a lot of sun, and, you know, it's not a perfect analogy because it's hard to get things over the There you got ship stuff over there, but you get some region, some territories, some province in Canada. And they say, you know what? We got nothing going on here, but we got a lot of sunshine. We got a lot of hydro. Bring us your data centers.

And so if the U.S. is going to fight these and Abbott and Shapiro are going to fight it, you know he's not going to fight it? UAE, Qatar, Saudi. They're all going to be like, yeah, data centers, we got energy, we got sunshine, and we got massive amounts. of space. So don't be surprised if like the U.S. winds up giving this entire data center business over to the Gulf monarchies. And the Gulf monarchies can move fast because they're monarchies. They can make unilateral top-down decisions. It's one of the great things about a monarchy. And you know what? If I'm MBS, if I'm MBZ, if I'm one of those royal families, I'm going to just say, you know what? We're going to, we have oil. We got sunshine. Just start building

data centers. We'll find the customers later. And what's the difference if the data center for open AI and X.com, whatever, who cares if the data center is in UAE? You've got fiber optic lines. You can put multiple industrial starlings now on the roof. So compute finds away. You ever hear that line from Mo, the line from Jurassic Park, nature finds away? Life, life finds away. Thank you. Life finds away. Thank you. Life finds away. Compute finds away. And so we got to get our asses in gear in America. and get this anti-AI sentiment squashed. And all the data centers already are like, we're going to make electricity go down. But we're only going to put it there. It doesn't bother people. Close-loop system for water.

You know, it's going to use less than, you know, almonds. So I think it's a moment in time. This whole thing, the whole dialogue is going to change, Mo, after the midterms. When the midterms end, you're going to be amazed that how quickly politicians are like, you know what? We worked it out with the data center companies.

They're just doing it to get votes and turnout right now. Do I have time for a follow-up? Yes, you do, sir. All right. So, you know, when I hear Mark Cuban saying these things are going to be pickleball quartz, I don't really believe that. I don't know if you do either. It's one of those things because what I'm trying to figure out is the CAPEX that's going

into these right now, like in the U.S., let's say if there wasn't a regulatory barrier, right? And at the same time, you see like, NVIDIA's got their grace blackwells, potentially doing 10x efficiency relative, you know, in some use cases. relative to the previous generation and thermodynamic, I don't know where that's going. Do we think we'll hit energy efficiency where you may not need a one gigawad data center where you're able to actually do it a fraction of that?

You see what like if you go out, you know, in terms of efficiency, does efficiency always find a way too? I think what you, what Cuban was referring to is people who were building before they had the electricity and everything permitted, So they were like, let's just get the foundations going. We'll do this in parallel. We'll get our permits while we're building.

Yes, in those cases, they might lay a foundation and be stuck with a foundation because they get blocked by a state. So I think he's not wrong about that. Those could wind up being apartments, condos, or just relics, you know, in the desert somewhere that never get used for anything. And they just sit there and decompose over the next century. So it is a competition. the build-out's going to be fast and furious for another 24 months, but at some point, there's so much energy and developing put into inference chips,

efficiency, photonics, energy, nuclear energy, that these problems will get solved, and then we'll be in the dark fiber phase where we just overbuilt. I don't know when we hit overbelt, but it's inevitable that we hit overbelt, I believe, because there's a small set of problems. here, energy, space, regulation, and the... Interest rates, interest rates to build out. Sure, that's another one, yeah. So if interest rates got too high, people would be like, you know what?

Instead of investing in more of these, let's make the ones we have more efficient. So let's take people off of building data centers. Let's redeploy that capital. We'll take 10 billion and put it towards making more efficient chips, photonics, and upgrading the hardware sack and then making the models more efficient. Because if you can do more with the same hardware footprint, if you invest more in optimization, then you need less hardware. That same thing happened with Facebook and Google. That's a crux of my question. Yeah, that's the crux of it right there. I mean, they looked at something like Gmail and they were building these huge Gmail servers for the

world to use and YouTube when they were deploying it. And then they said, okay, at the same time, how can we make storage work better? How can we use CDNs to make it faster? So when you go to another country, instead of having your files in Japan on a local server, the first time you log in, Gmail might be a little slow because your data is in the United States.

But once you've logged in a second time lawn in Japan, it knows you're in Japan, and it just copies your entire Gmail file over to the local Gmail there. But it doesn't keep everybody's Gmail in all places at all times. Right. There's an equivalent, there with AI. Okay, great questions. You guessed almost all of Claude's suggestions, by the way.

Single story, big box retail or dead malls, warehouses and logistics buildings, legacy. Warehouses by airports, good one. Yeah, legacy industrial and manufacturing plants, former power plants, and office buildings. Those were Claude's picks. I mean, if you have an office building and people are renting it for $20 a square foot, then you can't get rent there and you can convert it. We put $5 million into our cultivation, right? Just an electrical. So that. That's where I was like, hey, is there value here? And there's far greater size one. So there's a big thing out there.

Well, thank you. Great job. Talk to you soon. Bye. If you have a question for me on Ask Jason, very simple. You're going to email Ask Jason at this week in startups.com. Send us a video file or at least an audio file. And we'll get your question on air.

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