This Week in Startups - Behind the scenes at the ALL-IN AI SUMMIT w/ POTUS, JD Vance, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, and more… | E2156

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

Today’s show:Jason’s back and filling us in on his experiences in Washington DC, at the All-In AI Summit, including getting a Trump shoutout from stage, debating immigration with VP Vance, and calling out Sec. Wright for dismissing solar power.THEN Jason and Alex talk about the immense promise of open-source robotics and check out Hugging Face’s Reachy…PLUS picking apart the White House’s new AI-related executive orders, why Jason is afraid of China repeating its Huawei success, a free exchange about tariffs vs. free trade, AND a pressing query from a founder on Reddit: how bad is it to add AI to your product too early?Timestamps:(0:00) INTRO, Alex updates Jason about all this week’s TWiST 500 interviews(03:33) Inside Jason’s experiences at this week’s All In AI Summit with POTUS!(05:33) Jason’s back and forth on solar power with US Energy Sec. Chris Wright(09:56) Inbound - Use code TWIST10 for 10% off your General Admission ticket at [https://www.inbound.com/register](https://www.inbound.com/register.) (Valid thru 7/31)(11:02) Promo end(16:54) Jason asks AMD CEO Lisa Su about reaching “superintelligence” and whether it could trigger an unemployment crisis(19:51) Bolt - Don’t be left behind. Build apps quickly without knowing how to code with Bolt.new. Try it free at https://www.bolt.new/twist.(20:44) Promo end(23:42) Jason says… any time you have to wait days or weeks for a service or product, there’s a MASSIVE opportunity.(26:16) What do Trump’s new AI executive orders actually say?(27:27) Which EO’s are red meat for Trump’s base, and which ones are likely to become laws and have real impact?(29:50) Public - Take your investing to the next level with Public. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn 4.1% APY on your cash—with no fees or minimums. Start now at https://public.com/twist.(31:05) Promo end(35:17) How Huawei went worldwide and why Jason doesn’t want that to happen again with AI.(38:32) Jason and Alex have a little tariff vs. free trade debate.(47:03) VP Vance complained about US tech companies laying off Americans, then hiring immigrants; Jason gives his take(53:35) Jason answers a Reddit question: Is adding AI to your product too early a TRAP?Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpThank you to our partners:(09:56) Inbound - Use code TWIST10 for 10% off your General Admission ticket at [https://www.inbound.com/register](https://www.inbound.com/register.) (Valid thru 7/31)(19:51) Bolt - Don’t be left behind. Build apps quickly without knowing how to code with Bolt.new. Try it free at https://www.bolt.new/twist.(29:50) Public - Take your investing to the next level with Public. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn 4.1% APY on your cash—with no fees or minimums. Start now at https://public.com/twist.*Disclaimer:All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA & SIPC. Public Investing offers a High-Yield Cash Account where funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks where they earn interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance; Public Investing is not a bank. Cryptocurrency trading services are offered by Bakkt Crypto Solutions, LLC (NMLS ID 1890144), which is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the NYSDFS. Cryptocurrency is highly speculative, involves a high degree of risk, and has the potential for loss of the entire amount of an investment. Cryptocurrency holdings are not protected by the FDIC or SIPC.Alpha is an experimental AI tool powered by GPT-4. Its output may be inaccurate and is not investment advice. Public makes no guarantees about its accuracy or reliability—verify independently before use.Rate as of 7/18/25. APY is variable and subject to change.

Here's the thing about H-1B visas versus American college graduates. H-1B visa are going to get paid 30, 40% less. And because you have, they essentially become indentured servants. If they don't find a new job within 30 days of being laid off, they're kicked out of the country with their family. It's incredibly cruel and unnecessary. They should have at least six months to find a new job. A minimum, minimum. Like, it's ridiculous.

So the people I know who are abusing the H-1B visa system and other systems like this, I have heard people explicitly in my career say, we're going to get these people because we can work them harder and they don't have any recourse. You know, to call them indentured servitude or slaves, maybe a little bit hyper, it's obviously hyperbolic. But they are less empowered workers. And I would say significantly cheaper and less. empowered. So J.D. makes a good point. This week in startups is brought to you by Inbound. Connect with visionary leaders like Dario Amaday and Amy Poehler at Inbound 2025, September 3rd through the 5th in San Francisco, the epicenter of tech innovation and transform your business strategy for the AI era.

Use code Twist 10 for 10% off your general admission ticket at Inbound.com. slash register, valid through July 31st. Bolt. Don't be left behind. Build apps quickly without knowing how to code with bolt.new. Try it free at bolt.new slash twist. And public. You take investing seriously. Public does too. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn an industry leading 4.1% API on your cash with no fees or minimums. Learn more at public.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups, Alex Wilhelm, Jason Kalakanis, here on the ones and the twos. I just got back from D.C. after being in New York,

we're supposed to have a little vacation to see my family, and then my friends decided 10 days ago during the middle of my New York vacation to see the family that the president needed to do a summit with All In, and we had to actually make some big announcements. So we'll start with that, I think. Talk about those executives orders. I'll give you some behind the scenes, of course. And then there's a ton to talk about. And we've got a lot of great founder questions and stories to process because, hey,

I haven't been here for two days or for two shows. You did six excellent interviews, which was the highlight of the interviews? I think X-Tropic. Now, Jason, you're familiar with the Twitter account based Jeff, based Jeff Bezos. whatever that guy. He's the founder. So we had him on and we got to talk about thermodynamic computing, future of AI chips and power. It was just one of those interviews in which I didn't know much about the deep science, but I got to learn a lot. So it was just an absolute treat. We're trying to make these 20-minute interviews, not like to take up a ton of your time, but you need to know

about these companies and get the update. They're also very busy. So three 20-minute interviews, and we want to get into the business models and looking at these through the business lens. You know, companies can spin what they're doing, their mission, all that. I want brass hacks included in these. They can give their spiel about their mission. All right. Let's get to work here. I think, I don't know if you got to catch all the announcements, but it was a pretty

exciting day. Many of you may have seen. The president gave a talk. He went massively off script. It was a very interesting, surreal moment to be in the first row. first time I've met the president, took a picture with him, got to see J.D. Vance on stage. We did a little round two on our immigration debate. He loves to debate, so that was awesome. We went a little off script, you know, going into the immigration stuff. It was tangentially involved with AI,

but he wanted to have a freewheeling. He decided at the last minute he just is a fan of all in. So he wanted to come and just, you know, chew the fat with the team. And that was a lot of fun. Had a little debate about energy, which got a little spicy, which was great. great spicy moments can kind of give you the roadmap to what's important for folks who are wondering, like, All In is not endorsing Trump. All In is a podcast with four members. Each person has a different opinion. I would say three of the four people are very much in the Trump camp and super big supporters. And then you have one moderate moderator me who, you know, as I've said many times, I think whoever wins, I want to root for them. And I will give my exact percentage of agreement with this

administration every week if you all want it right now. about 80% in agreement with them, which until the Democrats or an independent puts up a better product that I can agree with half of what they're saying, hey, I got no choice but to support this administration. And what they're doing with AI and crypto is a lot more than the last administration, which wouldn't even meet with us. So important note for the Democrats, you might want to meet with the business leaders in the world and at least give them a seat at the table.

And this was an unprecedented seat at the table. I will say that. Lisa from AMD showed up, and we also had Jensen from Nvidia. I mean, this was big guns came out, and it was quite surreal. Where do you want to start? I'm sure you have questions for me. All right. So we are going to watch a video here.

This is with the Energy Secretary Wright, with Jason debating solar power, intermittentcy, and kind of the future of the grid. Let's take a listen. And just a crazy love affair with intermittent, unreliable energy. sources. You're talking about solar. Why are you so down on solar? This is the cheapest thing you can install. Batteries are here and they're being produced at an incredible rate. Why are we so anti-solar? Why are you so anti-solar? I'm not anti-solar. Why do you keep saying then that like this unreliable solar? If you put batteries on it, it's totally reliable. If you take all the batteries

in the United States, you can store five minutes of power, five minutes. Of the entire country, but if we've had many days in California and in Texas where solar has been the majority, of it. So why are you so down on solar? It can be the majority on a sunny day in the summertime. That's not what matters. In PJM, where we are right now, at peak demand

this year, 97% of electricity, wind, solar, and batteries delivered 3%. That's when it matters. If you're 20% on average... Wait, you cherry picking DC? All right. So this is so interesting to me because it feels like

you're making a very obvious point, which During the daytime, there's sun. We can collect that power. We can put it into a thing called a battery. And then we can use it later on. Yep. This is basic stuff. And the response from this guy is, well, currently it doesn't power DC, therefore, that's just, that to me is not.

I think in fairness to him, he was probably expecting no pushback. And that maybe he would just be able to give, you know, a standard spiel. But, you know, I'm paying attention. And I wasn't trying to be super adversarial here. year, but he wasn't expecting to push back. You know what, I'm not saying my job at all in is to give pushback, but the spirit of the podcast is free dialogue, unconstrained, we're going to mix it up. And so whenever I hear somebody like with a little too much spin, and I felt like if you're going to give Solar this big dig without actually saying why, I need to know why. The audience is wondering

why. So we had to get into it. He says later, he circled back around later, as you may have seen, and said, I just want to let everybody know. I'm not. anti-solar. These guys are just, I think, very pro fossil fuels. And so we probably had too much emphasis and too much of the government for many people's taste, spending money massively on solar and wind and not doing enough drilling. And now we're kind of got the other group in office. They're going to be like trying to get more gas out of the ground, et cetera. And it's all of the above. Let's call it what it is. We need all of it. If you're going to look from this from first principles, solar is the best solution for the short and the midterm. Nuclear and eventually,

fusion is the like the 10 year, five, 10 years from now, we might have more nuclear online. For now, you do need net gas for sure. And you do need a lot more solar. And solar, you can just lay solar panels on the ground. And when you need more power, you lay more. You lay more. on the ground and you don't need to put them on roofs in a, as long as you're not in a populous city where there's no space, it is the best solution. It's obviously the best solution. If you look at the cost to install coal, even and clean coal, I think a significant premium on top of coal, or to do net gas, those new plants are much more expensive than solar. And worse for the environment. Yeah. Yeah, you know, and if you bring up environment, I think you have to bring up two different pieces

because it is a trigger. Some people don't believe in global warming. So if we just take the global warming debate out of it, right? Let's say, for argument's sake, that there was this grand conspiracy and global warming is a non-issue. And it was a, the whole thing was made up. Okay? Now, I certainly think it's been exaggerated. I don't think it's made up, you know, like you can see the global warming.

We can have that debate. But if you put the debate on the side, nobody wants to live next to a coal plan. That's not good for your lungs. to your kids. Nobody wants to rip the environment apart. Of course not. But we do want to compete with China and other places. Inbound 2025 is almost here. This is not just your standard user conference. No, you're going to get opportunities to check out the latest HubSpot updates and demos, of course, but you're also going to hear inside-level insights from visionary leaders and personalities. Dario Amode will be there, the CEO of Anthropic. They may clawed. And I am obsessed.

with that product. And this is how you're going to level up as a startup founder. You're going to level up by going to inbound 2025. Work from home is over, folks. It's time to get back in person. You need to meet new people, interesting people, kick around these big ideas, do a jam session. So if you want to hear from these experts like Dario, like Victor Riparbelli of Symthesia, Hobbesma founder, Darmesh Shaw, my favorite guy and many others, we're going to see you there. Inbound 2025. It's all happening, September 3rd to 5th in my old stop. the ground where I am right now, San Francisco. Use the promo code Twist 10 at checkout for 10% off of your GA ticket at inbound.com

slash register. Inbound.com slash register. And so pollution is the better way to say it. So if you just say pollution, forget about the word environment, triggering for people. On a pollution basis, nobody, 100% of people don't want to pollute. So that's, I think, the way to frame this. There's pollution and there's global warming. I just say take global warming off the table.

We're going to solve it with technology. And we're well on our way. And the people who have to solve it, frankly, is not the United States because we have great standards, whether it's Democrats, Republican standards, or somewhere in between the two. It's India and China. That's the, no matter what we do in the United States, it'll have zero impact on this long term if China and India don't get their stuff together.

And they're going big time solar in China and big time nuclear. So they've already got the memo. So this was, I think, just a little. little bit of a political statement from him. I think this administration is anti-renewables. Generally speaking, they don't want to give them subsidies.

Okay, fine, don't give them subsidies. Solar still wins. Now, wind, you do have a pretty good case for wind is not actually very efficient. It's very expensive. You have to maintain these things. It does kill birds. It is an eyesore.

Nobody wants to live next to a wind farm. I get it. Yeah, you do? I do. Yeah, hell yeah. I think wind turbines are gorgeous. Oh, really? Okay.

I think you're aesthetically, if I'm driving over like the rolling hills of northern California, I don't want to see a bunch of windmills. I don't mind it in the desert, I suppose. Yeah, I don't think they're good looking. But just cost-wise, everything comes down to dollar and cents. Solar's already won. It's a meaningless debate. But I'm glad we had it because it kept people very entertained during a very boring panel.

Let's be honest. Energy can be very boring. A lot of people came up to me and said, hey, thanks. Thanks for making, you know, making that interest. and speaking up about that. And you know what? It builds their credibility. So whenever the administration faces some good fastballs,

which, you know, I think I'm uniquely qualified to do, my background in journalism, and also I'm not part of either party. I'm a moderate. I'm an independent. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. I am a full on independent moderate. So a couple of those about this.

One, if you go back to May 13th, 2025 to Twist episode 21125, We had the CEO of Terra Base on. Terra Base is a company that's helping people do mass solar installs. And if memory serves Jason, they built a on-site robotic factory to actually finish the construction of these panels so you can do even faster, even cheaper updates to them. So that's one thing. So cool companies are out there working on this now. And just on the count of people that want to drill more, the market is talking right now. The market is saying that what we are not going to do is keep drilling at the pace we have been.

And this is a chart from Y charts, and it shows just the number of oil rigs that are currently active. And as you can see, it peaked in 23. And then this is not a regulatory point because this is 2025 starting here, and it's been dropping pretty quickly. So I think... I wonder what the driver of that is. I guess it's just the economics. If you have... If oil goes down below $60 a barrel, it's not worth activating certain mines or certain plots because...

Or rigs because it's just more expensive. to clean it, et cetera. That's where, like, the oil sands come in in Canada, is just too expensive. Oil sands is very expensive. And the direct opposite of that is what Saudi Arabia has had, which I believe is light, sweet crude, that essentially if you stuck a straw on the ground, it just came shooting out. So it wasn't hard to produce, as they say. Anyways, all this is to say that I think you're dead right about solar, and I thought that was a funny clip, and I was like, why are we arguing with the past? This is a thing about the future. Oh, you know, we live in contentious times, and I look at how it's all framed. And what

is the truth. You know, I think as a person listening to this podcast are all in, just go to chat, GPT, go to GROC, go to Gemini, and say, what is the cost of a solar installation? And what you'll see is solar installs now are so much cheaper than coal to install a new plant that even the retrofitting of an existing coal plant is more expensive. You can ask producer Claude, and he'll tell you, and she'll tell you, they'll tell you, they'll tell you. Producer Claude, they will tell you. They'll tell you. The truth is... A sign agenda. They're going to call us and be like, what's that?

No, it's them. It's they. Pretty sure is it they. And they will tell you very clearly that, you know, unless you're right on top of the gasoline, you know, right on top of the gnat gas, much better to just install solar. There is, you know, a challenge with who makes the solar panels. And that's China. So there is a little geopolitics sprinkled in here, I think.

Sometimes you've got to tease this out. There could be many things at work. There could be lobbyists who want more natural gas. There could be people who want to stop the subsidies. Okay. They feel like the left went too far. But end of the day, we have a ton of oil, but we need more demand. And we're going to need all sources.

The biggest win, and I'll say, listen, you could give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize or whatever prize you want to give them. I told some of the folks who I met in the agencies when I was there and some people, working on nuclear. I said, if you guys stand up a nuclear reactor before he's out of office or within a couple of years or, you know, he wants to do dozens. I was talking to Lutnik, who spoke at the event and I was talking to him offline. He said they're going all in on nuclear. They want to get dozens. So if they do that, I got to tell you, that makes them heroes to me, because if we can get more nuclear on, oh, my Lord, that's going to be amazing for the abundance of this country and the AI race. Okay, moving on.

Hard agree with that. You did mention two CEOs that drop by Jason, both Jensen and Lisa. Do you want to take a look at those clips real quick? Sure, yeah, QS up whatever you got. All right. So we are going to hear from Lisa Sue. She is the leader over at AMD.

And we're going to talk about the potential for AGI. Jason's clip is about one minute and let's give it a listen. The best case scenario for this technology and this trajectory on, which is accelerating. you're enabling, what could the world look like in 10 years? Let's say, it's pretty obvious we're hitting artificial general intelligence at this moment. I think we'd all agree, we're starting to see that. But super intelligence can't be far behind that.

I assume you agree with that. Soon we hit that super intelligence, what would the world look like in 10 years? In the most optimistic scenario, if we do this right? Well, I think the exciting part about it, and I can say this very sincerely, I mean, this is the most transformational technology. sort of in our lifetimes. I mean, that's the way we should think about... Orders of magnitude.

And the reason is it's not just going after one aspect, right? You can actually take AI and make science better. You can take AI and make medicine better. You can take AI and make manufacturing better. You can take AI and make every aspect of your business better. And so, you know, in my mind, ten years from now, we'd like to believe that we are really leveraging it leveraging it to solve some of the world's most important problems. I like to say, like,

you know, AMDers get up in the morning and they say, you know, how can I use technology to solve some of the most important challenges in the world? And, you know, AI is really our mechanism for doing that. I have a business strategy question. If we went back 20 years and we were Okay. So I think that's very optimistic because she's drawing a very wide picture, Jason, where AI could impact. Yeah, you know, this is the natural tension of any discussion with AI. We're in the industry, I think we have a bias in the industry towards having seen almost every technology make the world better. On the margins, you know, how people use technologies up to them. So we are now at the lowest unemployment of our lifetime while people have become more efficient. So in my 50 years

on the planet 54, unemployment's at the lowest. And I remember every discussion about, oh my God, job displacement, job displacement. Microsoft office, the internet, bike messengers were going away. FedEx was going away. The mailroom was going away. Operators on the phone. You know, every career you could imagine was going away. Yet here we are with the most unbelievable, robust employment of our lifetimes.

I know that's unpopular for people to recognize that. So then we're left with the discussion, you know, is there going to be job? displacement. That came up a bunch of times. I do think everybody agrees there'll be displacement, and I don't think anybody, you know, knows if it's going to be comparable or not. The five coding revolution is here. The days of needing a team of developers to build your mobile app are over. With bolt.new, anyone can build web applications quickly and without knowing how to code. Getting started is as easy as visiting bolt.new and then telling their AI, powered system what you want to make in plain simple English. And this is not some template or

WordPress blog. No, you can use bolt.com to design a stunning new landing page for your company. You could upgrade your CRM, build a consumer facing app, and more. This is the future, folks. Your competitors are already using cutting edge tools to ship their products faster than ever. Don't be left behind. Try bolt.com new for free at bolt.com. New slash twist. That's right, bolt. New slash twist. Yeah. I want to just underscore your point,

Jasing, because I think this is actually a useful thing for people to see kind of in chart form. So if you're on the audio version, what I have here is a historical unemployment chart from the United States, tracking the unemployment rate over time.

And if you're looking at the video version, the shaded areas are recessions. And so if you take a look at this, Jason, here is the 90s and the first internet boom in personal computing. And unemployment went down. And then we here have the post- great financial crisis,

great financial crisis. Falling. This unemployment spike was the pandemic cheer point and now we're back down to 3.6, 3.5. But it doesn't matter what era of the country's

economic change you look at, we get back down to 3, 4% unemployment and the only thing that really spikes it is a recession. So I think you're correct insane that yeah,

all this time we have seen consistently a return to full employment. It would be a change in historical patterns to actually end up with mass and open for me I'm long-term

bullish, short-term scared? Yeah, I mean, if you look at self-driving and you look at humanoid robots and factories, I gave a statistic, and people ask me, what did you get that statistic from? And I said, well, I did it in my head. For every robotaxy on the road, which will work 20, 22 hours a day, that's basically two shifts, isn't it? Two eight-hour shifts, maybe two and a half shifts. In New York City, the taxi drivers rent taxis for 12 hours.

That's why they're so exhausted and on the margins. Sometimes they're a little cantankerous. You can give them some grace and empathy. A 12-hour shift in a New York City taxi in traffic. I mean, come on, give these people a break. It's a hard, hard job. But if we think of like a basic 10-hour shift, there's two shifts there. That means there's seven shifts a week.

That's 14 shifts. It's basically three jobs. Three full-time jobs, right? 15 shifts, five shifts, eight, 10 hours each. Okay. Each robo taxi takes three full-time driver's jobs. Now, most people drive half-time for Uber or Lyft. So it's taking six gig economy jobs, three full-time equivalents.

Now you go to a factory. You can't work somebody 12 hours in a factory. It's just too much. It's eight hours. Maybe they get seven hours out of them, you know, with breaks or whatever. So now you're talking about three shifts of hard labor times seven. It's 21. It's really four jobs.

So humanoid robots will take four jobs. When they hit scale, and they're like in an Amazon facility, sorting packages or delivering them. Self-driving car, let's put it at three. So maybe it's like, you know, it's going to happen fast, folks. I think it will be slowly than fast. And if that is the case, you're going to see millions of factory workers, drivers, and maybe some painful chore jobs come on the market. Those people will be able to be deployed into other jobs very easily, I believe.

Construction, we need more homes. Education, we need more teachers. Healthcare, we need more nurses, doctors, orderlies, EMTs, you know, just pick anybody at a hospital. Anywhere, I had this epiphany, Alex, during the programming, anywhere you have a wait time in week. Days to weeks is an incredible opportunity. So just think that through. When's the last time you had to wait two weeks, three weeks for an appointment? When's the last time it took two or three days to get through to somebody?

Healthcare, education, construction, renovating your home, you know, pick one of those categories. That means there's demand. You try to get a plumber to redo your hot water heater. You know, they might say, check with me in two weeks. I might be able to fit you in in August and August, right? that's where all those jobs are going to emerge. And those, by the way, super high-paying jobs, super well-paying jobs. So how quickly can somebody learn to put up drywall if they were working in a sorting facility?

If they're driving an Uber or a taxi, how long before they could work as a nurse or an orderly in a hospital? I mean, I don't think these are terribly different jobs. I think they're well within people's capability. So then it just becomes re-education and training. All right. And so at the AI summit, we also had, I think three things got past. Maybe we can just get into, before we wrap up here. We can get into the details of what the administration is proposing. Some of it I agree with. Some of it I'm unsure of and some of it I definitely don't agree with. So I can get into all of those points. And by the way, I had no idea what the platform would be. I mean, I know David's positions, David Sachs are AI cryptos are. I know some of his positions on this because we've debated them. before, like training data, states rights, training data, woke AI, and yeah, so maybe we'll get into, an executive order, by the way, you know, presidents give these things all the time, then they have to somehow go become law.

And so I was talking to somebody who's on the inside of all this, and they were like, by the way, it's like, that's the starters pistol. That's like somebody doing a spec and saying like, okay, now you guys have to do a ton of work. So some of these executive orders never materialize into law or into a policy. This one is going to. This is, I think, signature legislation. So let's get into it. All right. So there were three executive orders that came out, Jason. In the order from our notes, the first one is preventing woke AI in the federal government. I gave this a read. And it essentially sets rules for AI models procured by the federal government to not include or not focus on certain things. Just

keep in mind, this is not saying that you can't make an AI model to your own spec. It's just that if you're selling to the federal government, these are the policies that they are going to put into place. This is the one that I was most curious about how they were going to phrase it. And just to cite the actual text a little bit here, one of the most pervasive and destructive of these ideologies is so-called diversity equity inclusion, DEI. In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex, manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs. And this is the part that really threw me.

Incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism. And to me, incorporation is a weird word to turn on. So I'm curious if you can elucidate what they're trying to say here. I don't know. I didn't talk to them about this. I think this is the least important part of all this.

I think this is just red meat for the base. Let's call it what it is. When, you know, politicians get elected, they have a base, right? And the base helps them get the nomination. We all know the horseshoe theory, two extremes, woke lunatics on one side, maga lunatics on the other, socialist, communists on one side. We're going to have breadlines and we're going to have, you know, whatever mom done he's talking about with like supermarkets. Like, that's an example of feeding the base.

When he goes into office, you always move to the middle, right? And the middle is like, maybe we can create more housing supply. Maybe we can make it more affordable to take the subway, right? There are things you can do that are easier to execute. So I see, like, whenever they do the ice raids in Los Angeles, that's performative. It's not productive. This is another example of, I think, performative as opposed to productive. I don't think any of the folks who are in, who are building these models are saying,

how do I sneak in, you know, gender identity, politics? And by the way, you can prompt them. So I could put a prompt into any of these large language models, say, my politics are X, Y, and Z. You can just put all that. Your crazy ideology, whatever you like. I think that Mexican food is better than Japanese food. It's not. It's not.

True. No, it absolutely is. No. See, and here we go. So that's your, you could put in your model that I think the seven, the same five ingredients mixed 20 different ways is an incredible cuisine. And I can say, you know what? I want Toro. I want incredibly refined uni and Vive a la deference.

So a person could tell their AI to do this. You could tell it to be woke. You could tell it to be anti-woke. So it's kind of all meaningless. So let's put that one on the side. I think it's performative. It's for the MAGA base. It's like the ice raids at Home Depot.

It's performative. And it's not like the real thing, which is closing the border and having and not letting criminals into the country. Everybody agrees on that. What else is in there that we should discuss? Every time you turn on the news, it's about AI getting smarter and smarter. these models are writing perfect code. They're acing the world's most difficult exams. And it turns out they're also pretty good at making money.

That's why there's public.com, the investing platform for people who take their money seriously. What really sets public apart are their AI-powered tools and features. Check this out. You can ask public a question about any stock in plain language and get a straightforward answer. If you want to see why a particular stock's price jumped or crashed, they've got a clickable AI-generate summary right there in the performance. form a chart, you can build multi-asset portfolios on public, stocks, bonds, options, obviously, but hey, maybe you want a little crypto in there, some ETFs. I will advise you to try public.com and access industry-leading yields like 4.1% APY on your cash, but no fees or minimums.

Plus, for a limited time, earn 1% match on all IRA deposits, IRA transfers, and 401K rollovers. Never too soon to get that retirement dialed in. So go to public.com slash twist today, to fund your new account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash twist. Disclaimer, pay for by public investing, full disclosures in podcast description. Yeah, so the next one is, quote, accelerating federal permitting of data center infrastructure. This is kind of meat and potatoes. Three things that I think really matter, Jason.

There's work inside of this to ease regulations. The quote here is that the EPA shall, quote, assist in expediting permitting on federal and non-federal lands by developing and modifying regulations. promulgated under the Clean Air Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, and the toxic substances control act. Then they also want to make federal land available for construction,

essentially opening up public land for data center buildouts. And then there's also, and this surprised me, the potential for subsidy from the public purse. So the text reads that the Secretary of Commerce, who you were speaking to, shall, quote, provide financial support for qualifying projects,

which could include loans and loan guarantees, grants, tax incentives, and off-take agreements. So essentially, we're going to cut the red tape. We're going to let you use federal land and we may even subsidize it. Great. Let me think that through.

Is there any, if you believe AI is a race and America needs to win it, then using some federal land and subsidizing it is what China's already doing. So this is all us versus China. Let's be honest. China is pulling out all the stops. If you want to build, like, next to this hydro dam, they will block, you know, the equivalent of what's the most important river in the United States.

Like, the Colorado, say. They would literally, in China, block the Colorado River and be like, sorry, sorry, we need to win AI and put all that power into a giant data center that ran across the most important wetlands for any creature. So we're not going to do that here, but easing up the regulation is probably a good idea. Devils in the details. And I think probably a decent amount of what's hidden in there that's important is AI data centers in the short term are going to use natural gas. There's no way around it. There's just not enough time to get solar batteries, nuclear and other sources on. And they have to be off-grid.

You're going to have to bring your own power. You're going to have to move your data center to where the power is. And so that seems to me to be wise. And I do think we have to win this race. I do think there'll be many winners. And so, and I don't think there should be any, by the way, I'll just say one final thing on that. I don't think you should give grants to anybody. Everything should be in the form of a loan.

It should be a senior debt device. The taxpayers get paid back before anybody else, plus they get warrants. So whatever amount of money you take from the government, 10% of that amount, should be given to you in warrant. So if we give a billion dollars to Open AI or Google to build the data center, they should pay market rate or some percentage of market rate from the loan. It could be half market rate. It could be 1%.

Who cares? The interest isn't the thing. They should give, if it was a billion dollars, they should give 20%, 200 million in options. How's this for a framework? Then if Open AI goes from 350 billion valuation to $3 trillion, which it probably will or could, then we would 10x that 200,

we would get $2 billion back plus the original billion plus some interest. That means it would be profitable for the American taxpayer. I just get a little heapy-jee about using public funds to support these companies because I feel like putting aside all the worries about government intervention

in the market and all that. I just don't want to cement the current winners as the governmentally selected long-term winners because if there's a company that's going to come next year and builds me that blows Open AI out of the water, I don't want Open AIs to be able to lean on the fact that the government gave them cheap land regulatory credits and whatever to build out their data centers and then use that to quash other.

Sure. And so that's where the details come in. It's a great punch up. Again, executive orders are the starting pistol. It's not even the RFP. So here we go. I think we're in alignment. Let's keep going.

All right. The next one is the promoting the export of the American. AI technology stack. What this does is, quote, build an American AI exports program. And this is a package of things like AI hardware, AI models that you can sell as a unit to countries around the world that we are friendly with. There is a little bit of public money here as well. The EO says that the Economic Diplomacy Action Group, didn't know we had one, quote, shall coordinate mobilization of federal financing tools in support of priority AI export packages. So essentially, if I don't know.

Ukraine wants to buy the American AI stack. We might subsidize that by offering a loan in some capacity. That's more of an import export action, so I'm a little bit less worried about use of public funds there. But to me, this makes pretty good sense, Jason. Let's create a unit we can sell out to other countries because not everyone's going to have the kingdom's budget. Yeah, this all comes back to Huawei.

If you look at Huawei, which is a company that builds like 5G infrastructure, infrastructure for telecom. They are a Chinese brand. They went around the world and they were really cheap. And countries, you know, China, UAE, Africa, Latin America, and even in Europe, a lot of countries use Huawei's 5G. This is a significant issue because the Chinese are, don't have everybody's best interest at heart.

And you can be sure every piece of Huawei equipment has a backdoor. for the Chinese government. So if you are Germany, Italy, Spain, like, and you're using this stuff for your infrastructure, well, you are basically saying, please spy on us. And if you don't, then you're naive. So I think American, this is the equivalent that could happen with AI. We don't want to see all of Europe using Huawei chips, Huawei AI models, because then all of that power would crew to the Chinese Communist Party, not United States. So that's really what we're talking about here. And it starts in China. If China has an incentive to make, you know, chips that compete with NVIDIA and AMD, and we don't let them on those, and we don't let them have access to this technology,

they will. So we want our platforms to win, but we don't want to give them the latest and greatest. And as Howard Lutnik said, you know, part of this like negotiation that they're doing is like, oh, we'll give us your top hypersonic missiles, China. China's like, are you crazy? Like, we're not giving you our best hypersonics. Oh, just sell us like 10 of them so we can deconstruct them, you know? Yeah. And every time China wants to open a business in the U.S.,

they should have to form a JV entity and only own up to 49% of it and commit to technology trans-oh, they don't want to do that. Exactly. So, I mean, just reciprocity is what we're looking for here. It's a no-brainer. I've had this conversation a hundred times here and on all-in. the tariff concepts that the Trump put out there to begin with were shock and awe. And right now, the ones that are being executed on Bae, Lutnik and Bessent and the whole crew over there are boring and mundane and effective and in America's best interest.

So you're a tariff guy now? No, I'm a reciprocity guy. I'm not like we should do. Oh, are you referred to China in particular or the overall package of tariffs around the world? countries that we trade with, they equal 99% of the issue. It's a major power law here. It's a big Pareto principle. We just have to work it out with the top trade imbalance folks. And even Trump during his speech, he conceded that. He's like, I don't know if we need to do with many more of these. Like, I don't know if the 108th country, which I don't know the name of and I've never heard of. We need to have a trade agreement with. So again, how Trump does business, just

boom, explosive, crazy. Everybody covers it. And then, you know, whatever, 72 hours later, it doesn't seem as crazy. And then six months later, the people who are executing it are going to execute it in a very mundane, realistic fashion, which is reciprocity. That's where we found up. So again, you may not like the style, but at the end of the day, reciprocity. No, I don't agree with that. You don't agree with reciprocity? No, I'm a Chicago school of economics guy. I'm a free trader. Okay. I mean, if you, so you think they should be able to put a hundred percent tax on cars going into Japan or China and Korea, and then we allow their cars here with no strings attached. If they want to have a less effective trade policy than free trade, sure. They're willing to,

they're able to hurt themselves. But if you want to think about why you might want to agree with me here is that Miele down in Argentina made very compelling arguments before he was elected president discussing why protective terrorists for domestic industries lead to more poverty, in your nation. So no, I'm going to stick to the current Silicon Valley favorite outside of the United States, Miele, and stay to my free trade principles. Okay. Yeah, I just, if they're going to put this huge tax on cars coming in to China, Japan, and Korea, I think they should face. Whatever they give us, we'll do the same thing, you know. And that's why if you look at Japan or you've been to Korea or even China, like there's nobody buying American cars except once in a while you'll see it.

I saw like three Teslas in Japan, you know, this is years ago. And it was just rich people who paid, I don't know, what is, what was the current tariff on American cars in Japan? 50%. It's very high, yes. I think it might be 50. So just how do you ever compete? Because you've got to ship the car there too. There's like that cost and there's like the, you know, maintenance of the car.

So who buys when I was in Singapore? Like, who buys American cars there? somebody was showing me their Jeep and their and I was like, oh, you have a Jeep. And I said, yeah, you know, it cost me like $150,000 to have this tricked out Jeep Wrangler. I'm like a Jeep Wrangler is like a $50,000 car in the United States. It's tricked out $70,000. So there have it. Okay.

Anything else in there? I think the only thing I can remember is the content and the training one. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly where I was going. This was not in one of the EOs, but it was in Trump's speech. And we don't spend a lot of time on this, Jason. We've talked about it a lot on the show. But a couple of quotes from the Trump riff on this.

Quote, you can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for, skipping the head a little bit. When a person reads a book or an article, you've gained knowledge that does not mean you're violating copyright laws and have to make deals with every content provider. China doesn't do that. And I really kind of, I don't think Trump actually has a viewpoint on this. I think this is what his speechwriters have put together for him. And so this to me is one industry setting the rules for everybody here. So let's break down the statement, right? Let's break down the statement nice and slow.

So first he said when a human being reads a book, right? They're not breaking copyright if they learned from it. Okay. That's true. And China doesn't respect IP. Also true. What's not true is what's not said in there. What AI is doing is taking somebody's book and then making it so nobody ever has to buy it again

and that they can make money from it. That's what's left out of it and that they didn't have permission. And when Open AI was stolen by Deep Sea, Sam Altman was not happy. And you can be sure anybody who has their IP stolen, if you were Google and your algorithms were stolen, you might not be too happy about it and you might file a lawsuit. we need to look at this issue and say, this is something new. So how do you solve something that's new? Very simple.

You come up with a new plan. And the new plan that I put out is super simple. If you want to explicitly use somebody's content, make a deal with them. And then you can have it be an exclusive deal or not. And you can very easily have somebody authenticate their New York Times subscription when you log into any of the, uh, any of the different language models, right? They already asked you to log in with Google,

and they already asked you to log in with Google so you can search your Gmail. So why can't? I log in with my New York Times or my Disney Plus account, and then it says, okay, you have a Disney Plus account? Now you can make Jedi's. Now you can do generative art, right?

And so we all agree on the output. So that's good. I always look for where we have consensus. We all agree on the output. You don't get to make Disney characters if you're not Disney. You don't get to leverage. You don't get to take my entire book

or this podcast and republish it. Okay, so then what could you do? You could talk about what we talked about on this show, but I don't think you can make a super clip of it or use the entire archive. So, but if somebody said, hey, this week in startups is going to get paid,

they have a subscription program. It's a subscription podcast. Great, pay for it. I pay for financial times. I pay for the economist. I would love to be able to, go to the economist and have the economists say log in with GROC, log in with chat GPT, log in with Claude.

Can you imagine if I can log in with my Claude account to those services and then use Claude against the FT and E? Then that's really actually where this will wind up. And the people who do that in a reasonable way will have an advantage against the people stealing. That means it's an opportunity. It's a business opportunity for everybody. That means the financial time and the economist Disney. can invest more in content and get more out of it. And so that, yeah, and that's where we'll wind up.

Another option is what, I asked to have him on, what's Cloudflare is not letting you crawl. I don't know if you saw this story. Yeah, paper crawl is the new cloudflare. And he came out and said he's against what Trump is proposing or the administration, I should say, we should just say the administration, because this is a full effort. The administration's position, he disagrees with and he's going to block crawlers and he's going to have them pay and the crawl is going to be in there as well. And these two ideas, what's the guy's name, Prince? Is it Matthew Prince? Matthew Prince's idea can stand alongside mine, which is you could have your website. I could take the This Week in Startup's website. You could take cautious optimism. You could put on there. You can crawl this.

It's a dollar a page. Every time you come, it's a dollar a page. That's it. And they might say, We're not crawling under a dollar, but if it's somebody with a $200 account, then $24, they could say, yeah, we'll crawl up to X amount. And now you've got a royalty system. So I call bullshit on 100% that this is not technologically possible. It is 100% technologically possible. And is it possible to unravel it and be China? No. So since that's also true that you can unravel it and that you have to be China, then that means,

we all have to work together, not run over each other. Let's move on to how to sell your company. Or Jason, as I like to put it, how not to sell your company. Okay. Do you recall the windsurf open AI fiasco that turned into the Google buying part of windsurf and leaving the ash spot? Oh, by the way, we should do the one thing was the JD and I talked about immigration. I don't know what's worth covering here.

Was there any piece of it that was worth covering? about it. Oh, we did get into Microsoft. Let me just, I'll just tee it up. I don't know if you have that there. The Microsoft discussion. I don't have that clip. So there was a moment where, uh, I was talking to JD about like, hey, let's put the border aside. We all agree on that. We're never going to agree about dragging 20 year immigrants out of the country that we're letting here under Bush or Clinton. Like I'm, I'm going to hold the line on that. They should be given a path to citizenship. Sorry. We brought them in here. We had a bunch of joking. But the one where we had like an interesting debate was,

Well, what about recruiting talent here? And JD made a very good point. Hey, I was, I got wind of like this company laying off thousands of people, like 9,000 people. And I was like, oh, that's Microsoft he's talking about. And then they're also filing for a bunch of like high skilled immigration visas. What's going on here? I need to look into it. So he didn't say he had it all wrapped up.

Of course, Microsoft's layoffs were across a number of countries. It wasn't just America. It wasn't just high-skilled. It was salespeople, right? Product manager. So it's not necessarily high-skilled, but he does make a great point. And it goes back to the static team size or doing more with less. If you're laying people off, do you really have the ability to then lobby for high-skilled immigration?

I do think that's a valid point, even though I believe in recruiting the most high-skilled people here. What did you think of that moment? I don't know if you saw it or not. I think the important thing to keep in mind, because I've seen people make that point both online, and, of course, at the AI summit, I think these are not one-to-one replacements for the people that were laid off. These are often an H-1B being re-upped for another term. So it's not like Microsoft is out there going to be like, we're going to fire 9,000 people and bring in 9,000 other people that we can pay less. But I do think this conversation is becoming toxic enough for Microsoft's brand that Sautian Nadell, the CEO, had to yesterday put out a memo entitled, Recommitting to our why, what, and how.

And in this, he discusses this exact thing. I think they're getting beat up pretty badly in the media, in political circles, for being so, what would we call it? They're just shedding people as they make record amounts of money. And here's the interesting quote. You see some Silicon Valley technology firms, especially the big firms, this is JD, say that they're desperate for workers. They can't find workers, that they have to use oversee visa programs to find workers. And yet at the same time, the college educated employment rate for STEM graduates in this country seems to be declining. Well, wait a second. If you're not hiring American workers coming out of colleges for these jobs,

then how can you say you have a massive shortage in these jobs? And by the way, you see some of these tech companies where they'll lay off 9,000 workers and then they'll apply for a bunch of overseas visa. It doesn't make sense to me. That displace and that math worries me to bit. He makes a good point here. And I wonder, and I kind of know from being an insider for so long, here's the thing about H-1B visas versus American college graduates. H-1B visa are going to get paid 30, 40% less. And because you have, they essentially become indentured servants. If they don't find a new job within 30 days of being laid off, they're kicked out of the country with their family.

It's incredibly cruel and unnecessary. They should have at least six months to find a new job. A minimum, minimum. Like, it's ridiculous. So the people I know who are abusing the H-1B visa. visa system and other systems like this. I have heard people explicitly in my career say, we're going to get these people because we can work them harder and they don't have any recourse. You know, to call them indentured servitude or slaves maybe a little bit hyper, it's obviously

hyperbolic, but they are less empowered workers. And I would say significantly cheaper and less empowered. So, J.D. makes a good point. I would say. There was an interesting interview on a show called All In back before the election. And one of the hosts, I forget who it was, asked the then-presidential candidate, what should we do about high school immigration? And I think the thing was, I'm going to staple a green card to everyone's diploma. That is my vision. Yeah, now I know that that has not yet manifested in current policy,

but I think that you're right. I think it's everyone that I've talked to who hires people, or it's been an age who will be worker, because I have a lot of friends that have had those visas. confirms what you say. So what's the solution? Well, take away the stick that companies hold of these people's heads and give them more ability to come here or work at a fairer market rate and stay. Because I think we should have every freaking smart person in the world here. And that's my policy. So I think JD here makes what I would call a classic JD point of

not actually saying we shouldn't have H1B visas, not actually saying Microsoft is bad, but appearing like a populace that won't actually do anything once in office because he's currently the vice president, baby, do something. if you don't like this. You know, the vice president is, as we've seen, it's hard to, you're not the show,

but we'll see. I think he's gonna be president. You have influence. You had him on, you had him out for a reason. You didn't invite a nobody on stage. Actually, he wanted to come. I think he asked to come if I,

if I understand correctly. I think he's like, hey, you guys are in town. Can I come on and we'll talk, you know, and continue the discussion. I think, but I wasn't involved in the invite. I just, I don't like it when the,

the problems and inequities in the H-1B visa program become a cudgel to argue that we should restrict high school immigration in general to this nation? Yeah. Because I think we should not. That's, but again, my personal politics, yours, everyone not listening may be different. Yeah. I mean, probably 80%, or 90% of the country agree on immigration. We just don't talk about it in buckets.

If you said we're going to bring 25,000 high school people here a year who start companies. and if they don't start a company and create 10 jobs, then within two years they lose their visa, their golden visa, and it had that condition on it, you'd be like, okay, sounds reasonable. And if I said, hey, we should close the border, so coyotes are not, you know, sending bad guys and charging people $10,000 and, you know,

all this horrible stuff that happens, you'd probably say, okay, and that'd be 90% of the country. And if I said, hey, you want to deport the, like, felons from the country who are here legally, but yes, I agree. So there you go. Like, it's like 80, 90% agreement, on 99% of the issue.

And the only disagreement is on what to do with people who have been here for over five or 10 years and have made a life here. And that's probably 50-50. So from our friends over on the startups subreddit, which I read each and every single day, this is a question from a person

who has worked at a couple of early stage companies and they want to know, is it possible that adding AI to your startup too early actually slows you down? And they write that having worked at a couple of companies that rushed to add an AI feature, either to attract investment or to stay current with trends, but it actually slowed them down. So product decisions became more slow. MVP's became bloated.

And I think that this question boils down to, Jason, when should you add something hot, in buzzword terms, to your startup to ensure that you maintain your place in the conversation and at the investor tables, but also avoid wasting your time and shoehorning crap you don't need? A couple of different pieces here that are important. One of them is, should I frame my company as an AI company? Should I market it? Should I pitch it as an AI company? Well, absolutely, because VCs are looking at the market and they're saying, you know, these are the companies that are growing the fastest. Now, if it's just AI dressing, if you're AI greenwashing, then, and there's no substance to it, well, you wouldn't actually get the gains. Therefore, why are you doing it?

doesn't make any sense. So you should authentically be thinking about that. And if you have a previous company that was a SaaS-based company and you were pitching it as such, reframing it and in fact figuring out how AI would disrupt you and, you know, going there, not a bad idea. Let me give an example. Let's say you had a sales automation tool, Salesforce, HubSpot, something that does marketing in sales in a company. Well, you go and try to raise money. for that concept, people are going to go, well, that exists already, and it's going to get disrupted by AI. And they say, well, how is it going to get disrupted by AI? And you say, well, I'm an investor. It's your job. You're the founder. Tell me. So they have 10 people coming to them saying, we're going to do to Salesforce and HubSpot,

what they did to legacy client server enterprise software before that. We're going to make a better version of that than the per seat model. Here's how it works. So you should absolutely be thinking about that, take your legacy product making five or ten million dollars a year, let it cook. You don't have to change it. But then you launch the AI interface, the version, et cetera, in parallel, and you start marketing that immediately, which, by the way, is all Beninoff's doing. All Benningoff does is go on TV and talk about agents and how, you know, a third of the work at Salesforce is being done by agents. There is some truth that AI is not ready to do certain job functions. We saw that with, I think it was Klarna that said they were getting

rid of all their customer support going 100% AI and six or 700 people were losing their jobs and it was incredible. And then they said, oh, you know what, we need to have some humans in the loop here. So you can jump the gun on it. And that's your responsibility as a founder is to actually assess if the technology is ready. I looked at a lot of these AI solutions to make versions of podcasts in different languages. Not ready. To translate essentially to us to Swahili or not ready. You could do it as a proof of concept. I don't think it's ready yet. I don't think the people listening to us in Japanese as done auto-dubbed is ready yet.

Now, it might be ready later this year, but it wasn't ready last year when I took the pitches. I don't know where it is now. That's such an interesting idea. I love that. Who doesn't love it? We should have a this week in startups in the top 10 languages. Yep. And they should automatically, and you can be sure YouTube, I know they are working on it.

YouTube already dubs, if you go and type in Mr. B. in Spanish, you can find the dubbed version of Mr. Bees officially done by YouTube. People don't know this, but YouTube is doing that for Mr. Beast. I don't have any inside information here. I just have what some YouTubers were telling me. So maybe I do have inside information. What? Some YouTubers were telling me that they were not using AI for this.

They were using voice actors. Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but let's play it and see if you found it. Did you find it? Yeah, so, yeah, so this is Mr. Beast in Spanish. How did you find it, by the way? Is it on the YouTube Español site? Or is it in the drop-down menu and you just changed the language? So I literally just said, Mr. Beast in Spanish.

Okay. And this was the first thing that came up. And it's completely translated. So the descriptions in Spanish. This is, I lived underground for 50 hours. And listen to... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll pass 50 hours enterado vivo in this ataute.

Talves it's the most tontta I've done. Chico, see it. So this is not just a translation. I don't think Jason, this does feel more like voice acting to me. It's voice acting. So that's how big of a franchise Mr. Beas has is that YouTube is apparently paying for this experiment. And I guess for YouTube it's super important for their growth in those countries.

Therefore, and type Mr. Beast in Japanese, Mr. Beast in French. I wonder if that even exists if they're up to Japanese and French because those would be culturally very different markets and much smaller markets, sub 100 million, or way under 100 million because it would be the subset of people in those countries is 100 million people in Japan and France might be 70 million French speakers. I don't see anything similar for French or Japanese. I think it's just because Spanish is such an enormous language. Yeah, so I don't know if it's public or not, but there you have it, folks.

So to this person, back to this great question, you could. look at the solution from first principles, test it with customers, and then just decide. You can just decide if the market is ready for that feature. I do think there's another point he alludes to here, which is distraction. As this AI comes in, it is so distracting, because an intelligent person can look at what's happening and very easily extrapolate that it will work. The way I got to podcasting early, the way I got to blogging early, the way I got to zines early, and the way I got to Angel investing early and syndicates early in my career

is that when presented with a new idea, and this is my big unlocker hack for people, sometimes I just say yes to an opportunity, and I assume it's going to work. Now, I said yes, friend feed. I spent a lot of time on friend feed by Paul... Brett Taylor. No, Paul Boucher.

Bouquet. Like, boo height. Boo height. Thank you. like Fahrenheit. Paul Buhite, who created Gmail, worked out Y Combinator, he created friend feed, he sold it to Facebook. It was like Ajax. The page would automatically be updating as you would be posting to it. I spent like a ton of time on that for a year. I did a ton of time on Google Plus. As those things grew, they fizzled out, they didn't work. Google Buzz, I spent a lot of time on that.

Google Buzz could have beat Facebook. They weren't so concerned about the privacy issues and they were a little more freewheeling Google, but they folded because they got too many privacy. issues and Zuckerberg Jim Carrey privacy. The people at Google rightfully were like, oh, yeah, this is crazy. There's all these fringe problems with Google Buzz. And so you just have to think these things through. But if you assume something's going to work, you could hit, but most times you won't. AI presents the ability for you to believe anything is possible. We're sitting here talking about these robots. Like, are those robots going to go pick up your lunch and bring it back to your house right now? If they,

If you said, I want an ice coffee, that robot you were showing earlier, the $5,000 one, is that going to go get it and successfully do that? No. Not this year, but. But you immediately assume next year it would, but it might be five years from now. So the timing for entrepreneurs is so critical. Is it one year? Is it five?

Can your company survive for five years? Oh, by the way, scholarships are open. A lot of people have been asking me to come to the Allens Summit. As is tradition, I set up the scholarship program in the early years. and the team agreed to keep doing it, you can go to the website and apply for one. If you're one of my founders and you know me, I might have a little juice and be able to help a friend

or two get their scholarships approved. It's probably a one in 10 chance that your scholarship gets approved because it's a limited number of those tickets. But if you are one of my peeps and you did apply for one and you can't afford the full price ticket, I might be able to help. So if you're one of my founders, go ahead and apply for a scholarship and let me know you did.

What is the scholarship? Is it like 80%? I think it's like 80% off. I think it might be $1,500 instead of $7,500. So the event loses money on the scholarships because I think, yeah. No, I'm not surprised. But it probably it's profitable overall. You and I know the events game, and this is probably an overall good event for the business.

All in some, it has been profitable since year one, and it's significantly profitable. And then all in plus the tequila plus the other events you see us doing. We don't have advertising on it, but it's a significant business. And this week in startups, and I'm going to probably do two more podcasts on the This Week and Startups brand in the next year. So stay tuned for that, folks. He's cautiously optimistic. Cautiousoptimism.

Dot substack.com? Dot news. Oh, you have your own domain. Yes, sir. And you're still on Substack, not Beehive. I'm on Substack for a little bit, but I'm working on some cool stuff behind the scene, so that might change in the next couple months. What? I mean, you're thinking of your own platform or being part of something?

Let me sign some contracts first. Oh, okay. Awesome. Then I'll tell you. Excited for you. There you go. I sign up. It's $100 a year. You give me a little support. Let's get him $100. Or it's free if you want to just not pay. I think you should make it not free. I think you should just make it only pay because you've got good insights. And it's better to have 1,000 people paying $100 and to have 10,000 people paying nothing and, you know, whatever. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. We're moving that direction.

We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye. X.com slash Alex, X.com slash chasing, x.com slash TWA startups. Bye-bye.