This Week in Startups - China wants you to cheer for the robots taking your job | E2329

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the master plan. Instead of telling everybody, you're going to lose your jobs. Sam Malman's doing UBI studies. The Chinese say, let us entertain you. You have to entertain people. You have to make them root for the robots before the robots take everyone's jobs and then murder everybody. This is the key. This is a siops.

Starting point is 00:00:24 This has nothing to do with capitalism. These are murder bots. and startups is brought to you by 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. Odo, the all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free. Get started today at ODO.O.com slash twist. All right, everybody.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Welcome to Twist. TWI-S-T. That stands for this week in startups. It is August 24th. Summer is ending. Thank God. I'm dying. Talking to my friends,

Starting point is 00:01:11 I hate to name drop, but I was talking to Elon. I saw two things. I saw two things that my brain is now broken. Once in a while, he says, hey, Jake out, check this out.

Starting point is 00:01:22 He showed me the Roadster 2.0. It's finally. It's been a long time. He showed me the latest optimist. I'll talk about it at the end of the program. To the extent. I can. Anyway, we got to talk about the Beijing. We do. Robot Olympics. Let's get to it. I was seeing clips of all this. I saw a bunch of robots running into a wall and smashing into pieces.

Starting point is 00:01:42 But I was out of pocket for a couple of days. I'm not exactly up on it. Tell us, Lon, what is going on with the World Robot Olympics? Well, there were two events over the weekend in Beijing. The first was the World Robot Conference. China's annual flagship government-backed Robotics Showcase held every year since 2015. That event ran from the 19th through the 23rd. That's forums, exhibitions, showcases, pavilions, the usual sort of conference stuff. And then there was also the world, hang on, let me pull it up. Then there was also the World Humanoid Robot Games, which are also held in Beijing.

Starting point is 00:02:23 51 events, more than 1,000 competitions. It's held in the national speed skating. oval that Beijing built for the 2022 winter games. So we saw a lot, as you're seeing on the screen now, if you're watching the video, robots that are boxing one another, robots that are playing tennis and

Starting point is 00:02:40 table tennis, with humans and with one another, robots that are doing all kinds of sort of Olympic sports and events. We actually set J-Cal to world records, or what would have been world records, if these robots were human during the game. Humanoid

Starting point is 00:02:56 robot. Oh, look at that. This robot just all over is being carried off in a stretcher. Stretcher, yeah. Bolting it down. I got to give the Chinese credit. The Chinese understand what this is about. You have to entertain people. You have to make them root for the robots

Starting point is 00:03:11 before the robots take everyone's jobs and then murder everybody. This is the key. If you look in those stands, people are cheering robots playing ping pong, which you referred to as table tennis, which is an accurate description. And then they're running.

Starting point is 00:03:35 And then they're doing all kinds of gymnast. This is the master plan. This is what the Chinese do great. They are awesome at PR. America sucks at AIPR. We are full on retadares when it comes to, I wouldn't use the word, but I will say retade. It's a French word for idiots.

Starting point is 00:03:56 We're effing idiots when it comes to AI PR and the Chinese are next level when it comes to PR. Instead of telling everybody, you're going to lose your jobs. And Sam Olman's doing UBI studies. Why would Sam Malman be doing a UBI study? Universal Basic Income? He knows the writings on the wall. He looked inside the black box. And when these people look inside the black mystery box, that answer,

Starting point is 00:04:26 all questions and solves all problems, they all seem to come to the same conclusion, which is humans equal unnecessary. But the Chinese do instead is the Chinese say, let us entertain you. Let us entertain you. We're going to show you some robots doing fun stuff. And here they are, a stadium full of humans cheering on robots. We had this idea in America. There was battlebots.

Starting point is 00:04:53 There's that movie with Hugh Jackman, Real Steel. The idea of like rockam-sockham fighting robots or whatever, that's our idea. That was our idea. But now we've gotten so stressed out about AI that, yeah, it wouldn't be fun for Americans at this point to watch it. Whereas, yeah, it does. And also, I was thinking about, you know, in Star Wars when they go into, I believe it's in the prequels when they're in in. Clankers, the Joy. And they're watching drone sports on like an ESPN type.

Starting point is 00:05:23 Like George Lucas saw droid sports coming. We've sort of taken this turn, this anti-AI turn now, and it feels like America's just aren't receptive to it anymore. But I was going to say we got two actual records set during the games. Two robots from ex-humanoid. One finished the 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds, besting Usain Bolt's World Record. And then another one bested the human record in the standing high.

Starting point is 00:05:53 jump with 2.88 meters that's higher than any human has ever jumped. The record was set in 1993 by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba, 2.45 meters. So we're at the point. And these are human size, right? So we're not making 12-foot robots. No. To jump higher. These are human five-foot nine robots. Here's the standing high jump. It's a pretty tall robot. Let me see. High jump. He jumps. Oh, and he does a leg split. Right. That's like Jean-Claude von Dau. Yeah, that, that... Look at me, can I hear the commentary? This is unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:06:29 2.884, 3m, also 2m, 8,000 more. Jiangcin'clock. Yes. Look at the crowd. They got thunder clapping sticks. And I can translate this. You didn't know I was studying.

Starting point is 00:06:44 Yeah, wow. Play it again. And can you put it on half speed? And I will actually live translate, Lahn. I'm going to live translate this. Okay. Ready? Go. I gotta really listen here. Okay, because my Chinese little love.

Starting point is 00:06:57 Okay. Your robot overlord is about to show you how your job is over. Yes, you have no need to go to work anymore. This robot will grab everything off the top shelf at Costo and bring it to your car. for you. And in fact, it will run to your house with your milk and break Usain Bolt's record when it runs to your house with a pint of milk. That's literally what she said, Lon.

Starting point is 00:07:41 Yeah. I know you've been working on your Mandarin. I know you've been working on the... Getting there. It's a little... It's a little rusty, but you'll get there, yeah. I'm going to make a prediction here. There were 51 activities and robots one too. Mm-hmm. next year. No, no, it's all robot competitors for the most hours. Yes, but they broke humans.

Starting point is 00:08:00 They broke human world records, correct. The two of 51 broke human records. Correct. Next year, I'm going to say 48 of 51 categories will be broken the human record. There'll be like three where they don't. Yeah, I mean, and this one, by the way, this sprinter, it runs, it hits the wall. Yeah, and that it sparks. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:25 Yeah. And adding the exploding battery, bang. That exploding battery was done on purpose. There's another person who said, you know what, it'd be great. Let's make it even more entertaining. When it lands, hit the explosive, boom. This is all choreographed. This is a sci-ops.

Starting point is 00:08:45 This has nothing to do with capitalism. These are murder bots. This is a message to the rest of the world that we can send a million of these to Taiwan and take the fabs. This is literally a message

Starting point is 00:09:03 to Donald Trump. We are going to create one billion murder bots. They're going to leave the factory lawn. The factory is going to be at the beach. There's going to be a secret tunnel.

Starting point is 00:09:15 They're going to roam right out of the factory. And they will be walking. It's actually probably happening right now. There are probably 10,000 robots. in the South China Sea on the floor, on the floor of the ocean, slowly walking to the beaches at Taiwan. And one million of them in sync are going to emerge from the ocean and take Taiwan. That's what this is, Lon.

Starting point is 00:09:43 I hate to tell it to you. Welcome to Conspiracy Corner. Your previous theory, I liked that it's about engendering sympathy for them. That would be a good reason to show them like sparking up or catching fire when they failed. Like, if we want them, if we want to think of them as more sympathetic

Starting point is 00:09:57 and less like faceless, looking it's waving at people. Yeah, I mean, that is definitely, I think if you watch enough of these clips, you see,

Starting point is 00:10:04 there is definitely an overt, they're trying to make them feel relatable. They're anthropomorphizing them. They're giving them human qualities. They're making them feel like, oh, this is comfortable, this is familiar.

Starting point is 00:10:18 I, I'm rooting for this robot, right, as opposed to, oh, this is terrifying. this is like a this thing could destroy me and I will say I do feel like there's an inherent limit to how interesting robot sports can be because the robots don't have to work at it like

Starting point is 00:10:35 if you're a sports fan and you're watching football or basketball the appeal is like these guys have to train or these ladies have to train so hard you know like we know the effort we can all appreciate how hard it is to play football basketball at a professional a level. And that these robots, they're just built to do it. Like, they're not, there's no discipline. There's no, there's no grit or drive. It's not a, it's not a good story in that way. I feel like that holds you back. If you've got a company, you probably have a tool for invoicing and one for running your website. And then finally, you got one for your CRM. Of course. And somehow, even with all these time savers, you're still moving data around by yourself at 10pm.

Starting point is 00:11:18 That's why here at Twist, we recommend O-D-O-D-O-O, the all-in-one management software that's already serving 16 million users across more than 170,000 companies. Think about that. They're bringing everything you need into one platform. That means your CRM, your sales tools, accounting, manufacturing, your website, inventory, and of course your point of sale, if you have a point of sale, all right where you need them. And they're all in constant communication with each other. No more logging every change order or new sale across three different apps. And the Reddit spreadsheet as a database. No, you make a sale and your invoice gets created instantly, while your inventory gets quickly updated. So if you're still cobbling together, your back office across five different tools and apps, get started today at odoo.com slash twist. And your first app is free. That's odio.com slash twist. Yeah, there's a lot to say here about these bots. As impressive as all of these are, these robots will not hold a candle to Optimus. I saw one of the latest Optimus demos.

Starting point is 00:12:25 I teased it at the beginning of the show. Can't say what I saw. But I can tell you what I saw is better than anything I just saw at these world games. Optimus is going to be the greatest product ever made by humanity. It is next level. It's being built by Tesla. You know, they ripped out the Model X and the Model S factory lines, and they're building these. Optimus is going to, if Optimus came to these games, I would predict Optimus wins 35 of 51

Starting point is 00:12:58 contest. I mean, what's specifically like why, what puts Optimus so far ahead of like Unitry or ex-humanoid or these companies that were showing off at Beijing? I think, you know, in addition to the whole. hardware that I think is one and a half generations beyond these, I think the brain is like five generations behind these. This is not to diss anything happening in China. They're building legit stuff. But I think Optimus is going to be the greatest selling product in the history of humanity. It will sell and provide more value than the iPhone. I would say iPhone is the greatest

Starting point is 00:13:36 product made in the history of humanity up until this point in terms of pocket. popularity, usage. You know what I'm saying? A lot? Like utility to the large, you know, you could say the smartphone, but if you had to pick of the smartphones, you'd say iPhone.

Starting point is 00:13:50 Yeah. Of the robots, optimists, I will guarantee you, we will be sitting here in 10 years, and there will be 1 billion optimists in the world. I didn't say 1 million. I didn't say 10 million.

Starting point is 00:14:03 I didn't say 100 million. I said 1 billion. I think there'll be 1 billion optimist robots in 20, 36. Wow. That's it. That's all I'm saying.

Starting point is 00:14:14 I'm not saying what I saw. Yeah. Well, I'm not saying any details. I'm just saying the fidelity is so much better than these. I will say this. I don't always see eye to eye with Elon in terms of branding. Like the Tesla Robotaxy cybercabs you see driving around Austin with that weird cursive like punk rock font.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Like I don't like. Okay. In terms of branding, not for me. But Optimus as the. name for your robot, 10 out of 10. The best possible, the best possible name, what could make you feel better about owning a robot than having it be named after pop cultures, number one, kindest and most respected robot? I feel like, he nailed that one.

Starting point is 00:14:55 All right, yeah, and listen, I got somebody leaked to me. Somebody leaked to me a video of a secret underground version of these Olympics. Is this a twist exclusively buried? He's a twist exclusives. I'm going to email me this. This is happening in Alabama. And the people who's like, oh, rednecks, whatever, they're in on it. They've been importing.

Starting point is 00:15:19 You should play the tape, Jacob. Boom. See, here it is. This is a celebration of life. Wow. They're calling this the flesh fair. Now, this is an arena that's hyped up. But they are not long.

Starting point is 00:15:31 Wow. So we have a whistleblower. Describe what they're seeing here. We got a source into the flesh fair where, yeah, it looks like, robots are fighting. It's it's it's sort of backyard fights, but with robots on a much larger scale. These robots do not seem to be willing participants. No, I would say, yeah, this is definitely a situation where they're putting a robot in a cannon. This is anti-clanker violence. I think we're witnessing here. He's trying to fight his way out of the cannon. They're forcing a clanker into a cannon.

Starting point is 00:16:01 Yeah. Against his will. You know, did you know, this is pretty sadistic. That that robot sounds a lot like Chris Rock weirdly. I don't know if you know. It might be doing an impersonation. And there's a fan, and they got the fan going. And there's a bunch of other robots in a cage. This seems like quite an elaborate. I wonder if the local authorities were tipped off about this or maybe got a little cash on the side to look the other way.

Starting point is 00:16:28 This is the American PR version of this. Remember I said the Chinese made it like very world positive? Yeah. Oh, my God. This is how Americans feel about AI technology, They just took that poor robot and shot it through a cannon into blades on fire. You know what? I never realized before.

Starting point is 00:16:47 This is, it's the Thunderdome. They created the Thunderdome for Mad Max, but for robots. Poor robots. Poor robots. These humans seem to be taking delight in destroying the robots. Yeah. All right, well, there it is, folks. There it is, folks.

Starting point is 00:17:00 There it is. The flesh fair. I don't, we don't condone robot violence. Human-on robot violence. We do not condone here at this week in Star Wars. Terrible. Makes you sad. Just makes you sad.

Starting point is 00:17:10 For those of you wondering, people who work for me, this is a film called AI, done by somebody named Steven Spielberg, written originally by Stanley Kubrick. It was a Stanley Kubrick concept. Of course. Kubrick died. Was murdered after he released the film Eyes Wide Shot. His wide shot, yeah. Because the Illuminati felt it hit too close to home.

Starting point is 00:17:36 It was faking the moon landing, too. They were always afraid he was going to come out and reveal that he faked. Yes, they forced Kubrick to do the moon landing. Welcome to Conspiracy Corner. Then he did Eyes Wide Shut. You can go down that rabbit hole. He got whacked. It literally murdered him.

Starting point is 00:17:53 Crazily precedent, prescient, when you go back and watch Eyes Wide Shut. Now, he was talking about stuff way before the mainstream was talking about that stuff. Absolutely. Thank you to my friend Alex Jones for educating me. All right. Should I do the Alex Jones show on? Would that be funny for me to be on Alex Jones? Is this a sincere question? Like Alex Jones invited you, oh my God, I think you have to, I think you have to do it just for the story. I have to do it for the for the, for the LOL. The experience. I mean, also an Austin legend. Like people don't know this.

Starting point is 00:18:23 Like Alex Jones was infamous in Austin for like a decade before he was nationally famous. So. Consider it. Okay. I think so. I mean, that would be very entertaining for me. Let's keep doing the news. Let's keep doing the news. Well, before we go on, Jason, I do want to talk about our executive assistance and how helpful they are here at launch. You know, we love our sponsors here at Twist. We love being in constant communication with them to make sure that they're getting the most out of these partnerships. But that we make a lot of content. We're all very busy. So it's great to have your Athena EAs.

Starting point is 00:18:56 They're very clutch as sort of the middle layer here. They can watch all the stats and the analytics, the numbers every day, keep everyone up to date on all the viewership and the membership and the. metrics that matters most of them. And if a partner does need the attention of someone on the team, they're the first line of defense to find out who they need to talk to and route those questions to them. So we love our Athena assistance. Stephen, AJ, tremendous asset to our team. They do a great job. 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

Starting point is 00:19:34 customers will notice. That's why today's episode is brought to you by 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, techs and contacts together in a shared collaborative 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

Starting point is 00:20:15 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. Here's how I explain it to people. They say, oh, well, don't you automate everything with Grop Bot, which is exceptional? You've been using it. A clock code, perplexity, all these great things. Yes, you can automate some things. And then you could give a human here in America some tasks to do. But there are some tasks that the AI can't get done or a human using AI can get done, but a human still needs to be in the loop.

Starting point is 00:20:46 One of those things is managing customer success. Customer success, there's, you know, a hundred units of work in customer success. I would say the first 50% of that, the first 50 full units are things that the AI can crap, like, how many views did this clip get? And how many people clicked on this? And who was the advertiser? And, like, let's give them some reporting. Great to have the AI queue it up. But a human needs to do the last little polish, fit and finish on it, make sure it's tight before it goes to the partner. Because we don't want to send AI sloaf to people. That's the perfect use of an Athenae assistant. Go to AthenaWW. If you go to AthenaWW. If you go to Athenaww

Starting point is 00:21:28 dot com you're going to get a couple of weeks off i have an athenia assistant chabath has talked about his esthenia assistant i was talking to freebird his chief of staff and his assistant have two athena assistants they're rocking it i don't i can't speak for david sacks but i can tell you three out of four besties are using athena at this very moment athena wow dot com go check it out or or you can go to athena dot com slash j cow either way and find out more the athenow wow dot com forwards to it and we get credit for it. There you go. I was the first investor in Athena.

Starting point is 00:22:03 Sincerely, these Athena assistants are so good and they all know AI now. They all know AI now. I would say the Athena assistant that I paid $3,000 a month for, $36,000 a year, full in, fully baked, is as good as $80,000 assistance I've had here in the United States. And they don't quit. And if they do move on, Athena says, here's your new assistant. Try them for a couple of weeks. And if you like them, great.

Starting point is 00:22:33 If not, we can swap out another person. The hardest thing about getting like operational people, Juan, is every American looks at an operational job. And they look at all those chores and they say, I will do this for a full six months. But then I want to be, I want to raise, I want to promotion. I want to do more interesting stuff. And then you're just chasing your tail. I told you my hack for Abby Jane Bakery, right?

Starting point is 00:23:01 Yes. I think we talked about that at a previous Athena productivity hack. Oh, this is... You know Rockman Bakery in the East Side? I don't. I don't know that one. Okay, there's a Baker-Go-Ropman.

Starting point is 00:23:12 Go ahead, pull it up, boys, and show the pastry counter there. I like a little pastry. He doesn't love a little pastry. Road. Road.com slash twist. I lost a bunch of weight. You've been losing weight.

Starting point is 00:23:22 But I love a chocolate croissant. have a bagel once in a while. This is Rockman. If you ever... I had that... So Rockman is just a great place. Now, Rockman, it's all the way on the east side. I'm all the way out in Hill Country.

Starting point is 00:23:38 And this woman, who runs Rockman Bakery, is like a master at pastries. I've been wanting to try it. But, you know, I like to treat my daughters to some pastries. She sells everything out. Like any great pastry person, They sell everything out.

Starting point is 00:23:55 And then you know what happens? These lunatics on TikTok say this is the greatest pastry I've ever had. And then it sells out even faster. So I went there with my daughters. I get there at like 1130. There's no pastry left. Wow. Zero.

Starting point is 00:24:09 They're like, I can make you a cup of coffee, but there's nothing left. They open at 8 a.m. See that right there? 8 a.m. Yeah. So what's what my teen assistant does? They're not doing delivery. You're not getting like these elite purveyors on DoorDash or Uber E's.

Starting point is 00:24:24 or anything. So my AJ or Stephen, my Athen assistants, thank you guys. They call. They say, hey, it's Jason Cali-I'm Jason Calacanis's assistant. We're doing a pickup. Can we get, you know, four pan of chocolate, a couple of bagels, and then four random pastries that you think are the best ones that are new this week because she rotates new stuff. Sure, of course, yeah. We'll be there at 830 to pick it up. So we're the first in line. They literally call it 801, 8 o'clock they call. Yeah. Phone picks up.

Starting point is 00:24:58 They get it. Then they send an Uber courier. Wow. The whole courier is super cheap. They're not expensive Uber Corrier. They pick it up. They bring it to the ranch. Systems over gold.

Starting point is 00:25:12 You got a pastry system. I hacked the pastry system with my Athena system. Now, if I did that with an American assistant, and I said, hey, can you do me a favor? Can you get me some fresh pay? I would seem like a lunatic rich guy doing something super oppressive, making their assistant go pick up their quassons. It would be like I'm the king of France, right?

Starting point is 00:25:34 I was going to say it's one of those like Silicon Valley shows where they're trying to make the tech execs look as like vapid and obnoxious as possible. That's what they would have that guy do. And like the old, like send the person an hour away to the bakery. They like to get their favorite pan of chuk a lot. Yeah. So now I don't have to be an obnoxious aho. no Athenawild.com.

Starting point is 00:25:56 There you go. Great. How's it doing with your weight loss, by the way? You started your weight loss journey. You went to row.com slash twist. This is a dual sponsorship. I went to row. dot co slash twist. It's amazing.

Starting point is 00:26:06 It is so easy. It is so fast. That's what I couldn't believe. It's like you're within a few days of going and checking it out for the first time. You've got your prescription. It's in your hand. You're starting the medication. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:26:18 So I've already, I'm on 1.5 milligrams. the starter would gobi pill. I've already dropped about eight, nine pounds, but it sort of stalled out there. I dropped eight nine pounds right away, and then it's kind of plateaued. And I was getting a little like, well, maybe that's it.

Starting point is 00:26:35 Maybe that's the magic of GLP once for me. But then my doctor from row. dot co got back to me the other day and explain that, no, no, you're just tapering on. So next month I'm going to be on the four milligram pill. If that goes well, then they put you on the nine milligram pill. And then they're saying nine and above, that's where the real weight loss kicks in.

Starting point is 00:26:55 So for now... But 8%... Wait, hold on a second. Eight pounds is like 4% of your body weight. Eight pounds is great. No, and it's only been like... Seating your face. It's only been like two and a half weeks.

Starting point is 00:27:04 So how are you tolerating the shot? Oh, I'm doing the pill. I'm not on the shot. But... You're doing the pill? I'm on the Wagovi pill. The pill's out? The pills out?

Starting point is 00:27:13 Makes it even easier. Yeah, the only rule... It's a tiny little pill. The only rule is you take it for a first thing when you wake up and then you don't eat or drink anything for 30 minutes. That's it. And they act like, they tell you this like it's like a huge, like listen, we got the pill, there is a pill, you could take the pill,

Starting point is 00:27:33 but you're not gonna be able to eat for 30 minutes. You can't eat or drink for 30 minutes. They tell you this like it's like, how have you survived? Like it's like you gotta remove a limb. And it's like, no, you take the pill, you take your shower, you do your morning routine by the time you're done. You call your Athena assistant, you get four chocolate ques. Okay, for judgment, but like, yeah, by the time my call-outes done brewing, it's great.

Starting point is 00:27:55 So I'm on my way. Let's talk about some other news. Hugging face, I don't know if you heard about this, Jason. Maybe up for sale. Business and side reports, hugging face has been approached for a sale at a valuation of over $13 billion. It's a mystery buyer. We don't know who Hugging Face has been in these talks with, but they are apparently taking it seriously. They are mulling over the sale and I've been talking with banks about evaluating these bids.

Starting point is 00:28:21 Hugging Face, the open source platform that allows developers and researchers to share, find, test, deploy, AI models and data sets. They were the ones who are famously attacked by hugging, by open AI's bots during that recent cybersecurity kerfuffle. Stripe also recently acquired a sort of similar product, OpenRouter for $7 billion, just a little bit of context here. Hugging Faces, last raise was in 2023, $4.5 billion post money valuation. So, I mean, I think the first question on everybody's mind, who do you think this is who is trying to buy Hugging Face?

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Starting point is 00:29:36 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. All right. So Stripe bought OpenRouter. Correct. Right. And just so people understand what these platforms do is they have all the models and you can route your token usage. I've been talking for a couple of years. I thought open source would win the majority of the

Starting point is 00:30:17 Not the majority of the revenue because the frontier models are expensive. But people are increasingly saying, whoa, sticker shock when the Claude Bill comes in. I got a little, we had a little sticker shock at our company because we put on Claude Tag. It's on Fable and everybody starts using it all at once and literally got a couple thousand dollars. And they're like, oh, we're going to give you $2,500 in credits. I'm like, oh, that's nice. We turn on claw tag. $2,400 in the first six weeks, gone.

Starting point is 00:30:45 Wow. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. What are we doing here? Why are we not using, like, the Claude app, and now we're using it in Slack, and it's, like, burning through credits, like a lunatic. And now I've got to spend on top of the $2,500 per employee I'm spending. So that's, like, times 20. It's 50 grand a year. Now they want to get another 50 grand out of me.

Starting point is 00:31:06 What these platforms do is they let you route to the cheapest platform, the cheapest, that's why it's called Oberrouter. And Hugging Face, they let you route to the latest version. And then underneath it, they might have multiple. providers. Anyway, what this means is a lot of developers and increasingly prosumers who are using Hermes, the incredible, but, you know, luxury bag company. They also went into AI. They did a pivot. It scarves, bags, and AI models, yes. And yeah, that's it. And a harness. Which is like harnesses are kind of right next to bags. I mean, it's like a bag, a harness. Same. There was a, yeah, in 90s, it was very chic.

Starting point is 00:31:47 like harness. Very she, harness. Yeah. So who would want to then capture the open source early adopters? Remember, Sam Altman bought, essentially bought, soft bought, the gentleman who created OpenClaw. I was like. Peter Steinberg. Yes.

Starting point is 00:32:06 And I said to myself, if you buy the founder, you buy the vision and you kill the existing. I don't want to be a party pooper here and say, I told you so. How much did you hear about OpenClaw after Peter went to Open A.I.? When did the OpenClaw surging momentum dissipate? When did it dissipate? It was almost immediately after he joined. And I mean, I think you could make the argument that, well, so many other entrants came into the field. Maybe that was inevitable.

Starting point is 00:32:39 But it does seem like OpenClaught suddenly was no longer part of that conversation. Because the founder secured what I'm. going to guess is a quarter billion dollars. A billion. I think, and this is like, I'll give credit to Sam Altman. Hmm. Master dealmaker. Too good of a deal maker.

Starting point is 00:33:01 To the point at which, you know, you remember he did like an Nvidia deal and then like two weeks later did an AMD deal, that he's doing this deal. And then Jensen's like, well, we don't have to invest 10 billion into Open AI. That's at our option. We have an option, right? you could tell Jensen's a pretty chill dude, public facing, but he was, I, my interpretation, Jensen, you know, take it for what it's worth. You know, he's chill, but I think he was a little perturbed that those announcements happen back to back. And I don't know if we put the 10, whatever it was,

Starting point is 00:33:36 five or 10 billion. I don't know if he took his option to invest that in opening. The purchase of OpenClawn founder killed OpenClaw. Let me just say it clearly. Folks, I predicted it. OpenClaw is not part of the dialogue anymore. Not really, though. There's an OpenClaw Foundation. My friend Dave Moran is running it. They're hiring people. But I just kind of feel like if you take the founder, if you took Elon out of SpaceX, if you took, you know, Zuck out of Facebook, what happens? What happens? The soul. Right. So Sam Altman rips the soul out of OpenClaw. And now we're talking about Irmez. Now we're talking about perplexity computer.

Starting point is 00:34:18 Now we're talking about Grockbot. Right. You do the math, folks. You don't like my interpretation. You do the math. They were first. OpenClaw was the first arrival that was like, here's what you could do. This agent's going to plug into everything and it's going to have all the context.

Starting point is 00:34:32 And then they didn't keep up. They didn't like all of these other entrants came in. There were suddenly rivals. They were easier to set up and that they were faster, more intuitive. And you never, there was never that next OpenClaw update that was like, okay, here, now we're going to keep up in advance. we're going to take it even one level further. They just didn't stay in the race.

Starting point is 00:34:51 They're still... Stopped innovating. Yeah, exactly. Let's go back to Hugging Fis. Who would buy it? Well, obviously, if Anthropic and Open AI are going public and people are telling them over and over again, open source is their biggest threat. Oh.

Starting point is 00:35:07 Have they not been saying that, right? It became the whole dialogue. Absolutely. I said it two years ago on All In. You did. From my ski house, we have the clip. I have the receipts. It's January 2024.

Starting point is 00:35:17 that clip. You're in your, you're in Tahoe. You can see the snowy back. I mean, you should have that clip ready. I tried to pull it last week. Let's keep that top of mind that clip because I need to do a victory fact. Jacob, can we pull up that clip? I know I sent it to you on Friday. Okay. So, I did that victory fact for a reason. Um, I was right. Everybody else in the world was wrong. And, you know, listen, sometimes you got to listen to Jacob. And I'm not saying, there's some people saying some have said Jay Cow was right about everything

Starting point is 00:35:51 many people are saying this many people many people are saying it somebody made a t-shirt Jake Al was right about everything I've seen it this is the thing I was right about I said there's a chance in this clip I said there's a chance I think open source could win the whole thing and the reason I said that was because AI is too important for one person to own developers are going to want sovereignty which is kind of obvious to me

Starting point is 00:36:13 because I saw it happen with databases. Yeah. People were like, I want my sovereignty with a database. Give me Hadoop. Give me my SQL. Give me something where I control my destiny. We'll put it all aside for a second. The master stroke, to your original question, is who would buy Hugging Face?

Starting point is 00:36:29 The master stroke would be a frontier model company buying it. Why would that be a master stroke? Because then they have two ways to win. Right. You want to use Kimmy. You want to use Quentin? Great. Go to our hugging face.

Starting point is 00:36:42 go to, you know, if they had bought open router, it would be insane for anthropic or open AI or SpaceXI to not buy it. Just because it's a threat factor. And if you are Google and you're selling ads and you see YouTube growing like a weed and it would be perfect for ads and video ads are wonderful and make a big business, you want to get rid of that threat vector, so you buy it. You know, Facebook's growing nicely,

Starting point is 00:37:17 but Instagram's growing faster. You want to buy it. Facebook Messenger is doing well, but WhatsApp's growing faster. You want to buy it. You always buy the threat. OpenClaw was growing. People loved OpenClaw over OpenAI. What did Sam do? He bought the threat. You always buy the most threatening thing to your business, either to kill it or to get the data and control it. So now, if Anthropic-owned, hugging face, they get all that data. They're watching which customers are using which models. Then, if they're watching which customers are doing which models, they can insert their model at a lower price and say, yeah, oh, I see you're using Quinn. Oh, you're paying, you know, a dollar per 10 million tokens. We'll match it. We'll beat it by 20%.

Starting point is 00:38:07 Just, you know, hey, it's the option's there for you. You're a great customer. boom, they just insert themselves on the menu. That would be the masterstroke. I don't think it's going to happen. But I do think AWS, Google Cloud or Azure, will buy this in a heartbeat for that amount of money. Anybody who has a web service, including Elon Web Services, anybody with a Web Service will buy this because, or a Caruso Cloud,

Starting point is 00:38:29 you know, pick your scaler, because you can then send traffic to your cloud. Right. That makes sense. It's a no-brainer. It's a no-brainer for either a hosting company. to buy it or for wildcard seems crazy a frontier model to buy the open source leader it's interesting that you say that i'm going to jump ahead to a different news story sam altman uh was on david senra's podcast over the weekend i believe the full episode goes up today uh there was a lot of some of the

Starting point is 00:39:02 other clips got the most focused but here's a moment that i'd like to have uh jacob maybe pull up uh it's the first one under some more interesting moments altman said He doesn't want OpenAI to be a product company. He thinks they're a platform company, and he doesn't want to compete directly with his customers on the application layer. So let's pull up that one. And it's basically him talking about exactly what I think you're sort of saying. What you described to me is a direct shot at Anthropic.

Starting point is 00:39:32 Anthropic created Claude Code and Claude Design. They specifically went after their customers. Here's Sam Wotman. People talk about different ways, in a new utility, and new commodity, whatever you want to call it. Like, people want to use a lot of AI, and they wanted it a low cost, and they want to be fast and to work well

Starting point is 00:39:48 and have their context and be smooth. We got you. And then there's like a single product, which is, I need to ask the AI something. Eventually, maybe it's the AI should proactively offer me things, but you will have this interface, which started as a chatbot and now also has coding agents, and I think at some point will feel like a more persistent agent

Starting point is 00:40:08 to this AI that is running on whatever you needed to run on. But that's it. I don't think we should go build every product category. I don't think we should like go try to compete with all our customers. I don't think we should try to like subsume the entire economy. I think we should offer this platform and try to have 100 million new businesses and 8 billion people use it in all kinds of new ways. To me, that sounds like he's pitching what you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:40:33 You'd go to Open AI. They're the marketplace for all intelligence. And then you're building on top of that. That's what I... The AWS of Indolns is what he's referring to there. That's a good vision for him, especially when, as we saw just recently, Harvey, and I don't know if we talked about this last show. We did.

Starting point is 00:40:54 The Harvey Tenet. Yes. Yes. Harvey has forked, I believe it was Quinn. Kimmy. Kimmy K-3. Kimmy K-3 to make their own legal AI sovereign. They control it.

Starting point is 00:41:08 It's on their servers. They control it. Nobody has access to the innovations, the updates, the usage, the utilization, the output, the problems, the thumbs up, the thumbs down, any of the signal. They control it. And that's their castle now. They got their castle. And then I use the metaphor of the keeps. Keeps are like the little areas outside around the castle with a little bit of a smaller wall.

Starting point is 00:41:30 Those keeps are their customers. So now their customers, whatever law firms Harvey is going into, they can say, Hey, I don't know, Wilson Sincini or, you know, Oric, whatever the Sherman Sterling, they can say, hey, Sherman Sterling, we know you have a bunch of documents. They're not our documents. They're your documents. We, and you keep them in your keep. They don't come back up to us, and they certainly don't come up to us to Open AI or Anthropic, and they certainly don't go up to us and back down to Wilson Sincini. And then Wilson Sincini, you got your little keep.

Starting point is 00:42:07 And if you have a bunch of secrets and a bunch of great documents, you're working on a bunch of case law, it's not going to be on-prem, on your site, in your data, it's all yours. That's what the world has realized. That's what I realized a couple of years ago when I made that famous thing. I think open source could run away with it. Because it's just so obvious. And now Sam is having to play catch up and say, yes, we're not going to compete with you. Why? 11 Labs, huge customer of the frontier models,

Starting point is 00:42:40 and Lovable, who I had both of those on the All In interview show. And at Lingora, is that the other? Lagora, yeah. Ligora, had the founder of Ligora. All of those app levels. And then you have Figma over here, Dylan. I'd love to have Dylan on the show, by the other, please book Dylan.

Starting point is 00:42:56 We've reached out for an hour. We'll reach out. Yes. And if somebody has to get back, then I've got to come in and do the invite. But we'll have Dylan on. Figma, Claude Design, Like, people are starting to realize, I just can't trust the frontier models not to steal my business. They're going to steal my cheese.

Starting point is 00:43:11 Yeah. So I like this vision. Personally, I love to see Elon buy it. Mm. Or I would love to see, like it's a Microsoft GitHub, like Microsoft owns GitHub, right? I believe so. Invideo would be a great. Invidia is probably the no-brainer.

Starting point is 00:43:32 Microsoft, GitHub, Google, Cloud. Nvidia, you know, like a sales force might want, you know, Mark Benioff's pretty aggressive. He might want to do this to restructure what he's doing as more AI first. Yeah, well, and it puts... Because he's getting his ass kicked in the markets because he's viewed as a SaaS company. So he has Slack plus hugging face. Maybe then he's in the AI game and he can move from the framing of Salesforce as part of the SaaSpocalypse.

Starting point is 00:44:02 And then it would be part of the AI. revolution. It speaks directly to the criticisms of him, which is like that they're bolting on, like, oh, they're just buying all these AI companies and then bolting those on to the core Salesforce product. This would shift the conversation to, well, now you come to Salesforce first, and it's what's your infrastructure that's powering all of your AI. So it would speak to that. That's an interesting theory. I mean, listen, if you want to be extra spicy, Stripe should buy it. Oh, on top of OpenRouter, yeah. Yes. Well, they are different. I mean, the comparison, but they are different. I mean,

Starting point is 00:44:35 hugging face is more like a repository. It's where everybody is going to sort of communicate. It's almost got a social network aspect to it. Whereas OpenRouter is much more like I have a workload directed. Utility. Yes. But they would be interesting. But how different are they? How different are they then?

Starting point is 00:44:52 There's like a lot of overlap. There's a lot of overlap. There's a lot of overlap. If OpenRouter were to add comments and a little bit more community features or Hugging Face were to do a little more routing, it's the same product. They both host LLMs. And data sets. It allow you to deploy directly

Starting point is 00:45:10 from the platform. Yeah. Should we keep, do you want to take a look at a few more of these Sam Altman clips? I mean, if they're relevant or it's interesting. There was one more that was getting a lot of attention that I think we should discuss. He's talking about how he agrees with the popular public sentiment that the industry has not done a good job of talking and communicating about AI and data centers and a little bit for what he thinks that conversation should be.

Starting point is 00:45:36 This is the very top clip on there, Jacob. Let's play it. Man, this thing is going to be really terrible and there's going to be 50% of the jobs are going to go away in the next year and help you all are okay, but it seems really scary. Like, we have not, as a field,

Starting point is 00:45:47 done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated, and we certainly have not done a good job, even if people have had answers like, you know, saying, well, there's going to be universal basic income or work will be optional or whatever. There's been very little

Starting point is 00:46:02 discussion from people about how and why it's important that people have more power and personal freedom in the world, not less. And that matters a lot to most people. Yeah. If you look in his eyes right there, I think the message has been received loud and clear. And revenue, there it is. See that look, that's the I get it look. There was a famous venture capital capitalist, Jerry Colonna. I had him on the program two or three times. Good friend of mine. And I knew him in New York in the 90s.

Starting point is 00:46:37 And then he became a Buddhist and a coach. So now he's coaches, CEOs. You can take Sam off the screen. And so he said, Jason, the question we must ask ourselves is, what have I done to create, I think it was, what have I done to create the suffering that I'm experiencing? What have I done? how have I contributed to the suffering that I'm experiencing? Sure.

Starting point is 00:47:04 So if you were like tired and depressed, you might say, okay, well, why am I tired and depressed? Like, well, I'm not sleeping. I'm drinking too much booze, you know, and I'm wallowing in it and I'm out of shape. Okay, great. You contributed to it. I think what Sam is doing right here in this moment is, and I don't think it's performative at all. I think it's actually very sincere.

Starting point is 00:47:24 He's like, when he says, we, I think he should say I. Yeah. It would have been stronger if he said I. He said, you know what? I have talked a lot about UBI and I did a UBI experiment. And then I said that a lot of these jobs are going to go away. And I should not have said that as my lead in to why you should use chat GPT. What I should have said, what I should have said was you're going to learn any skill, any time using this for free.

Starting point is 00:47:59 for life. We're always going to have a free tier and whatever you want to learn, whether you're a 12-year-old with a single parent and you can't afford a tutor, but you want to learn a new skill, you can have a better tutor than the person on the other side of the tracks with the rich parents who have a personal tutor coming over every day for 250 bucks and they're spending $50,000 a year an extra tutor so you can get into an Ivy League school. You know what? Open AI is going to be that free tutor for you for life. And you're going to be on a level playing field with the rich kids on the other side of the track. And when you go to your doctor and your doctor's only got seven minutes for you and you're on the cheapest, worst health care plan, we're going to let you put in your labs.

Starting point is 00:48:46 We're going to let you ask questions and you're going to have as much information as your doctor. And when you go to that doctor, you're going to know every single possible medicine drug modality to help you. to help you get healthier. And my commitment to you is that we will always have a free unlimited tier for every human on planet Earth. That's the chat, GPT promise. All human beings have access to all intelligence for all time. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:17 I mean, I think that's a, it's more effective, I think, than what they've been doing. I have to say, and I tweeted about this over the weekend and a lot of people reacted. I get why people don't believe there's going to be universal basic income. It just doesn't, it seems, they keep promising it, but it doesn't seem like it's very American. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing Americans would actually pass or want or be into. We don't like handouts. We don't like free lunches. There's all this debate about every socialist policy that comes out.

Starting point is 00:49:50 It makes me very cynical to hear people talk about universal basic income because it just feels like a thing that there's no, excitement for among America's elite and ruling class. Like, they don't want to. Nobody wants a, nobody wants a hand that. And the rich people don't want to give, these companies don't want to give their stock away for free. The government, they don't want the government giving things away for free. So where is this UBI coming from?

Starting point is 00:50:14 UBI is a path to, um, an idle mind. My grandmother, you say, I don't mind. Devil's playground. And so if you give people enough money that they don't have to work, Their minds are going to look for problems to solve or other things to do that are unhealthy to fill their time. People do not want handouts. Now, what would be a way for us to increase the standard of living and opportunity for all humans? I've been talking about this for a couple of weeks.

Starting point is 00:50:48 The minimum wage, federal minimum wage, seven bucks and change, has not changed for decades. It was five bucks. It doesn't keep up with inflation. doesn't keep up with anything. And every time they do a study of just raising the minimum wage, just a little bit, dollar a year here and there, Australia, New Zealand, Seattle, New York, the number of jobs lost, a pass-along inflation to consumers when they buy their hamburger, it winds up being you lose less than one or two percent of jobs, you lose less than one or two percent of jobs to automation, and the price of a burger goes up one, two, or three percent. In other words,

Starting point is 00:51:23 it has no impact, but everybody has to agree to raise that wage or one company that does raise it, like Starbucks, is now at a disadvantage to Dutch bros or whatever other company doesn't. So my continued plea and instructions, and this will be another Jake Al was right about everything, if you want to have an espreed to corpse, if you want to have a spirit that we're all in this together, all the corporations in the world, all the race, rich people in the world should say, you know, there's only 15 million Americans making under 15 an hour. Let's get them all to 20. We don't have to do it.

Starting point is 00:52:01 We don't have to shock the system and go from seven to 20. We're just going to make a commitment, a dollar a year for 10 years. And let's just raise the bottom up a little bit. A hundred percent of the money people spend when they're at that tier lawn. All that money they make, if they go from $7 to $15 an hour, they're just going to spend it. There's no savings going on with the bottom. 15 million workers in Americans. The bottom 10%.

Starting point is 00:52:26 We've got like 150 million people working in the country, 67%, 62% of the country is employed. Just free your mind for a second as a capitalist. I am a rabid capitalist. I have changed my position based on new information. Please take the time to follow me on Twitter, x.com slash Jason, while I argue this with my fellow capitalists who will not even consider for a moment

Starting point is 00:52:52 what this would do for the spirit of America. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Obviously, I agree we should raise the minimum wage. It's like $7.50 an hour right now. The federal. Federal minimum wage was insane. I mean, I can't imagine trying to survive, let alone support another person on that paltry amount of money.

Starting point is 00:53:11 But I have to say, I don't necessarily think universal basic income wouldn't work. There's a certain chunk of the population that they're lazy. They're not going to want to work. they're just going to take the money and and and you know what, fine, rather better that than than being a drain on their parents or a drain on society or doing crime or whatever to make up the gap. But I think most people would be, you know, like they're, okay, this is a, this is a bare minimum. This is going to cover rent.

Starting point is 00:53:41 I don't have to sweat it. What can I do with my time now that is going to be fulfilling for me and productive? I'm going to create things. I'm going to make things. I'm going to start my own business. if you freed people up from having to work whatever job they could find to pay for their rent and food and health care and you just had that as a baseline and then they could go be, I think I think you'd see amazing things and I think there would be whole new discoveries

Starting point is 00:54:04 of industries and businesses and, but I just don't think it would ever happen. I just don't think America doesn't have the appetite for it. We don't like giving things away for free. UBI is a road to nowhere. Take it out of your mind. It's about the minimum wage. that's what it's about.

Starting point is 00:54:21 And here's the other great thing, Lon, that people don't know and I didn't know. I've been doing this research. I've been finding every study. I've been tweeting about it. I've let my tweets be open. Everybody tells me I'm a libtard. I go look at their profile. They created the account in July of 2026, and they've got 14 followers.

Starting point is 00:54:38 Okay, great. These are all like spam accounts or whatever. But if you make that $20 an hour and you get to, you know, 2,000 hours a year, 20 bucks an hour. Let's say you just work a 9 to 5. Now you get into 40,000. that level of income now takes you out. There's like a benefit cliff.

Starting point is 00:54:57 You now no longer are going to be trying to get food stamps or other stuff from the government. Housing subsidies. There's so many government programs that you wouldn't need to tap. So then you have to ask yourself, wait a second. How did we structure society? We structured society. So corporations, listen, I am. the most capitalist person you could imagine.

Starting point is 00:55:23 I invest in 100 startups per year and lose 100% of my money on 90 of those 100. I am a capitalist capitalist. But I think it's profoundly unfair for a company like Amazon to be able to pay DSPs, delivery service partners, and push the minimum wage down and then those same people who are delivering Amazon

Starting point is 00:55:46 so Amazon can print money and be this incredible organization and I'm a very large shareholder in Amazon, and I'm increasing my ownership in Amazon because I think it's one of the best-run companies in the world. What they're actually doing is they're paying people a substandard wage in some cases in order. And then the subsequent impact of that is that the rest of us paying into the tax base

Starting point is 00:56:06 are they giving Amazon delivery workers food stamps because Amazon just won't pay them $25 an hour. Come on, people. Just open your eyes to it for a second. Just steal man the other side. Steel man the other side. It's only 15 million people. It's only 15 million people.

Starting point is 00:56:28 And if everybody raises it at the same time, would anybody care of their latte that was $4 added 4%. I'm going high, 4%. Now your $4.00.16. Would you rather have them sharpening the guillotine and firebombing CEOs houses and shooting CEOs in the back of the head, gangland style, would you rather pay $4 and $16 fucking cents for a latte?

Starting point is 00:56:55 That's my message. Yeah. I think there's something just deep in our character that we don't like the idea of other people getting more fair treatment or money. We want everybody to be in this cutthroat competition. That's why I just don't believe, I don't believe UBI would ever pass. I just don't believe these. No, I'm talking about minimum wage.

Starting point is 00:57:12 We're in strong agreement on UBI. I'm only talking about minimum wage. Even that, like we've been fighting over. over the 750 minimum wage for so like in 750 that's crazy that's what I was making in like you know 20 25 years ago like that's and it was hard to live then I mean seven dollars time and and there's not that many people making seven dollars just to be clear because there are a lot of people making 10 well right because that's the federal a lot of states and cities have all already adjusted so it's much higher in a lot of places that's the federal stuff enough with socialism

Starting point is 00:57:42 corner all right now everybody thinks I'm a socialist I'm not a socialist that's your I think it'd be good for capitalism. I'll tell you why it's good for capitalism. I'll end on this. That person goes from 7 to 15. They can buy another latte. They can join Amazon Prime. They can get their own Netflix account

Starting point is 00:57:59 and not be sharing a Netflix account. Instead of stealing stuff, you know, pirating stuff, whatever, they can go buy it themselves. It's good for capitalism. It's good for monetary velocity. What else is in the news? All right.

Starting point is 00:58:13 Let's talk about there's two sort of military AI stories in the news that I think we should discuss. The first one, hackers from Iran apparently shut down a UK power plant last week. According to the Telegraph, a small UK power plant was shut down for, oh, July, not last week. According to the telegraph, a small UK power plant was shut down for four days in July, following a cyber attack linked to Iran. Here's a UK government spokesperson. This story refers to an incident impacting a small-scale energy generator.

Starting point is 00:58:40 At no point was there a risk to the wider energy system. the UK has a highly resilient energy system. The FBI is also warned about cyber attackers targeting U.S. water facilities across at least seven states. These are also believed to be linked to Iran. I mean, at this point, how vulnerable do you think we are, Jason, to a large-scale, destructive cyber attack? Do we have the best models?

Starting point is 00:59:06 Does that make you feel safe or what? We need distributed systems that are redundant. and if you look at anybody of any means, anybody of any means, is now, and I'm talking about middle class now, the middle class, especially here in Texas where we had some power problems, they have, I was just listening to a podcast, middle class person was talking about, I got solar and batteries, spent, you know, whatever, 10, 20 grand on it, after we had this big freeze out, and I think it was 21 or 22 here in Texas. I wasn't here yet. And they bought the solar and battery, and they said explicitly, I bought this in case that happens again.

Starting point is 00:59:47 So I can keep my refrigerator and my computers and my internet running just to sustain ourselves in these kind of situations. Then you look at water. Here in Texas, people are putting water tanks on their properties. You know, if you got, you know, a half acre, an acre, you can do these things quite easily. They put a water tank. And then you take all the gutters around your house because we get these crazy storms here. And they just flow, cost you a couple grand to have it flow into a tank. The tank fills up.

Starting point is 01:00:16 Now you got extra water. That's on an individual basis. We need to just keep making all systems that are required redundant. In capitalism, we like to build one system because it is more affordable. So, okay, let's make all the medicine in China because this is the cheapest place to make. Let's make all the, you know, you know, PPE, the personal protection stuff. Let's make it all in, you know, China. And then we realized what not having a redundant supply system can do when things fail.

Starting point is 01:00:54 The American rugged individualism and self-reliance is the solution to a lot of these problems. And we did a little document, you and I, just remembered it. There's something called porch solar. And find the IKEA. page for me and throw it up. Port solar, and maybe you can even find the document we wrote for that shorty, we never did. There's going to be example after example example of redundancy added to our lives. And the one from India and other places where, like, you don't want to talk about the electric grid not being stable or reliable, you know, in emerging cultures, in frontier countries,

Starting point is 01:01:36 You can have a lot, a lot of issues with electricity. So what people do now is they get porch solar. Porch solar. Here's a picture of it. IKEA has gotten in the game. IKEA is a very smart company. These people are, dare I say, a brilliant company. And if you look at the screen right now, plug in solar panels make the most of every sunny day.

Starting point is 01:01:59 Small systems, big impact. With portable solar, I'm reading from this IKEA, with portable solar panels, you can take your first step into solar energy, turn your balcony, garden, or terrace into a mini power station, simple, efficient, and sustainable thanks to powerful stream storage and easy plug-and-play installation. At the core of this, and it doesn't look ugly,

Starting point is 01:02:22 it doesn't look pretty, but you can fold one of these or put it on the side of your home without ever calling an installer. You don't have to rip your roof up. You just literally put this on your... porch or you can put it in your backyard somewhere. Yeah, and they call it Sve Solar. It's V-E-Solar and IKEA, S-V-E.

Starting point is 01:02:45 And you get a little battery pack, and what people are using these for it, this is the page I want to see right there. Look at these. And these are in euros, but, you know, it ranges from 500 bucks all the way up to, I can't see it's too small,

Starting point is 01:02:59 but you buy these little battery packs like the ones you might put on the back of your phone, but bigger. It's like the size of like a suitcase. You get a couple of these solar panels. The battery is constantly filling up. And you see they have stands there, like this little holders that you might use to like have a TV.

Starting point is 01:03:20 This is an example of what we need to do as humanity, is just keep building redundant systems. And then when there's no central place to attack, yeah, okay, you turned off the main energy. But everybody's phones were on. running, the refrigerator's running, and then we can take load off of the main system. And that's one of the keys here, is the grid is constantly going to be challenged. Every time somebody installs one of these things, they just take a little bit of drain off of

Starting point is 01:03:50 the system, and you're protected in the case of an outage. In California, San Francisco, we have rolling outages all the time. People get a Genentech is the company, I believe, that makes these external power that uses gnat gas or kerosene those are I think about 10K installed 20K installed these solar panels and batteries

Starting point is 01:04:14 are a thousand dollars you install it yourself just keep making more of this stuff folks get yourself a water tank get yourself a protein supply you get a couple chickens when I was living in the bay area people in the suburbs were raising chickens I'm talking about rich people on were putting chicken coops in having their own eggs

Starting point is 01:04:32 and if things really hit the man, you can eat the chickens. There you go. If we're, if we really are in the post-apocalyptic, which brings me to our next story, actually, perfect segue. And by the way, if you're, if you're Iran, don't, don't make your situation even worse by dragging another country into the war with you. I mean, the last thing they need is another country dropping bombs on them.

Starting point is 01:04:59 Like, why on earth would they start hacking the UK? I feel like they're calling our, they're calling our blood. they've realized that we don't want to go and send troops in there. We're not going to do it. And so now they can, oh, we can get away with, let's see, let's see what we can get away with. The UK has got some Navy. And like, maybe the people of the UK are like, well, if you're going to shut down our electricity, maybe we'll send a ship or two to the horse.

Starting point is 01:05:19 That's true. They're, they can be pretty intense. They're with the stiff upper lip and all that. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily poke them. But I think Iran's feeling their oats right now. They're feeling. What are we got off duty? We haven't done an odd duty.

Starting point is 01:05:30 We can do, we could do. There was what, let's let's do one more, one more, uh, kill drone story that I want to talk about. So this incident happened in Zuparigia in southeast Ukraine last month, a small Russian drone resembling a model airplane. It was trying to navigate to blow up a gas station. Instead, Jason, it crashed into a wall. It exploded. It sent out shrapnel and killed three people, including a 19-year-old university student. And now drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders, and a forensic team have examined the wreckage. And they believe, this was a fully autonomous drone.

Starting point is 01:06:06 They think that Russia gave it a overall target, hit somewhere near this gas station, and then the drone piloted itself there, chose a target, which was the propane tanks at the back of the gas station. It missed, but that's what they believe it was sort of aiming itself for. Here's a quote from Ukrainian air defense minister,

Starting point is 01:06:25 Colonel Sergei Meneyev. In a few years, we believe we will be living in a Terminator movie. It's no joke. machines are making decisions to strike. So I think the question on my mind is, is this inevitable now this is the future of warfare? We're under attack by autonomous kill drones. And do you think Anthropic, now that we're looking back with the benefit of hindsight,

Starting point is 01:06:47 did they have a point? Was this something maybe we should have avoided instead of now ushering in the era of autonomous kill drones? There's plenty of laws about adding weapons to robots that some people are following, etc. The really interesting thing is that Ukraine, which has severe technical talent in it, before this whole Ukraine-Russia conflict, many startups I know had dev shops or offices in Ukraine. And in fact, they then had to try to figure out, I think it was Riverside or one of those streaming platforms, in fact, had majority of the, was it the stream deck or Riverside, somebody can look it up, had the majority of their developers, I believe,

Starting point is 01:07:30 in Ukraine, and then they had to get some of them out of Ukraine to keep their service up and running, basically. Ukraine has now got the most robust drone capabilities of any country, I believe, you know, maybe with the possible notable exceptions of U.S. and China, and they are now exporters of drones, and you know this, but now people are inventing. investing in drone companies. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, is now in the drone business. American entrepreneurs, billionaires are now investing in companies in the Ukraine to build drones and anti-dron technology. This is a booming industry, no pun intended. Yeah, I guess it's re-stream.

Starting point is 01:08:23 Restream is based in Kiev, yeah. In some ways, there will be a silver lining to what is happening in Ukraine and Russia, which is the good people of the West, are going to increase their ability to use drones and have anti-drone technology. You know what one of the greatest ways to stop drones is? Nets. It turns out people are putting netting over buildings and putting netting over streets. Yeah. And the drones are flying into netting and exploding. I saw that. There was a, there's a Ukrainian like town there. that did that where they have all these like tennis, it looks like tennis nets up above the buildings

Starting point is 01:09:04 that catch the drones as they go by. Yeah, I saw that. Yes. Incredible to think of that like we're now in the, well, and this is interesting too, what we're seeing on their free news. They're firing nets at drones, yeah. This is like, yeah, this is some like Batman utility belt thing.

Starting point is 01:09:21 I don't know which startup this is, but it's basically shooting a net at a drone. Okay, fine. I don't think that this is the ultimate solution. The really interesting one is Kimball Musk, a friend of mine, brother of Elon, has a drone company that does those beautiful drone shows. Sure. Very tiny drones coordinated.

Starting point is 01:09:44 Right. The other really great way to do anti-drone technology is you use AI to watch for drones and then you send out these little tiny drones to just kamikaze them. Just zip and work. run into them. So drones running into drones is the other great countermeasure. And yeah, it's the next war, you know, like if this Taiwan thing happens, God forbid, I have a feeling like it's going to be a bunch of humans in container ships running AI drones and robots against each other. It's going to be very strange for us to comprehend. In the same way, when you and I were growing up and we watched

Starting point is 01:10:27 Desert Storm and Desert Storm 2 and all these things. We're like, wait a second. We're fighting the war from, you know, Boise, Idaho with container ships with pilots doing the original drones, you know, sending missiles. Predator drones and all that, like 90s and odds technology. Yeah, exactly. Here we are, folks. Okay.

Starting point is 01:10:48 All right. Let's go off. Let's go off duty. You told me there's something going on on the Star Wars, you know, which is particularly close to me. So there was a viral tweet the other day, Jake, you guys. and pull it up that I responded to. That guy was saying it's unthinkable how Star Wars seemed to be this massive, unshakable

Starting point is 01:11:04 franchise, and then Disney came along. And this is a sentiment I've seen a lot. To me, I feel like this is not, this is, all of Star Wars history is an up and down. It's in, it's hot, everybody loves the most recent thing that came out, and then it's out. The fans hate the most recent thing that came out. It's never been worse. And we're always on, if you take the long view. I think Star Wars fandom is always like that.

Starting point is 01:11:30 You know, people loved Empire, then they hated Return of the Jedi. People hated fandom menace, but then they loved Revenge of the Sith. You know, people hated a lot of the Disney plus shows, but then they loved Andor. You know, like, we're always on this ride. So I feel like it's a narrow view to be like Star Wars is at its lowest point ever right now. But I got, I'll tell you, Jason, I got a lot of pushback. I got a lot of angry responsive for people who do feel like we are in the nadier. some of the evidence points,

Starting point is 01:11:58 Mandalorian and Grogu, that knew one that came out this summer, only gross $345 million worldwide in theaters. Even Disney concedes it came in below expectations. It was a budget of $145 to $165 million before marketing, and it was the first theatrical Star Wars release since Rise of Skywalker all the way back in 2019. Also, a lot fewer shows coming out now on Disney Plus than we had.

Starting point is 01:12:21 Asoka, which I know you're a fan of, Now the only active ongoing live action Disney Plus Star Wars franchise, it's back in January for season two. But we had stuff like Skeleton Crew, the Acolyte, which failed to make an impression and Andor is over. There's a new Star Wars movie coming out next year with Ryan Gosling Starfighter from Sean Levy. That's May 2027. But I'm curious as to what you think. Are we at a historical low point for the Star Wars franchise? Or is this just, you know, Mandler and a Grogu didn't hit?

Starting point is 01:12:53 maybe this gozzling one did. It's just sort of an up and down thing. The sequels were a disaster. Just straight up. They should have just gone with George Lucas's vision. Instead, they had no plan. They had no plan. They did not have a good plan.

Starting point is 01:13:08 And they made three incredibly sloppy, disjointed, you know, trio of films that if you're going to make a series of films, there should be some cohesiveness to it. There was like a sprinkling of wokeness to it, but the main problem was they didn't use the characters that we all wanted to see. We wanted to see what happened to Han, Luke, and Leia. And they wouldn't give us just the finishing of that story,

Starting point is 01:13:43 the Jedi Temple and the Jedi School being recreated by Luke Skywalker. They decided to go off on this crazy tangent with this new character that may or may not, be a Skywalker, who knows who they are. They screwed the whole thing up. They need to take those three, recon them out, just burn them to the ground, and then give people what they wanted, which they're kind of doing with Ashoka. And they wanted to see Luke Skywalker rebuild the Jedi Temple. When they did the mandoloring, spoiler alert, and Luke Skywalker comes back as peak Jedi, and he's getting Grogu to become one of his first students. That's what people wanted. They wanted to finish that

Starting point is 01:14:22 story, they totally screwed it up. But there is redemption for them. The Clone Wars, which I've watched with my children, is exceptional. And there's so much story there that somebody made their own film. It's called the Ultimate Edition, I think. I've been trying to get it because it's like one of these fan edits. It's a five-hour version of Revenge of the Sith. That includes the Battle of Mandelor. It includes stuff from the Bad Batch, the Clone Wars, interdispers, into Revenge of the Sith. And then they found the deleted scenes, anything. It's like a four or five hour thing. That whole time period is the most interesting period, like, in Star Wars.

Starting point is 01:15:00 It's arguably more interesting than the original trilogy. They just need to do that live action with Ewan McGregor and... Hayden, Christensen. And Hayden Christensen and Padme... Natalie Portman. Natalie Portman. Just do that. Take the Clone Wars, make it a TV show.

Starting point is 01:15:22 do five seasons, 10 episodes a season, everybody would be happy, which is kind of what they tried to do a little bit with the Obi-Wan series, which takes place between three and four. That's what they did with Andor, which takes place between three and four. That's what they did with the,

Starting point is 01:15:35 what was the film that everybody loved? Rogue one. The Dead Star. Rogue one, the one that leads in Andor. Or the Randor leads into. That's all anybody. Yeah. That's what everybody wants. Give them what they want.

Starting point is 01:15:47 Well, it's interesting you bring out. I mean, the guy who created the Clone Wars Day Faloni, he's the new Kathleen Kennedy running the whole thing creatively now. So we are going to see, I think, a lot more clone wars references. And that's going to be much more central, I think, to the vision because it's Falonis. Dave Filonis, right? Just give it, I mean, Faloni, we'll figure it out. In Faloni, I trust.

Starting point is 01:16:08 Hopefully he has better taste in spinoffs than hats. I think the cowboy hat. He's that guy he's always in a cowboy hat, Dave Faloney. Yeah, he's great. Faluny's great. Because he's a, you know what, he's a super fan. And he, like, literally. went to George Lucas and said, like, you know, like, here's what I want to do with the characters.

Starting point is 01:16:26 You know, you tell me if this makes sense in terms of your vision and he had like this proper respect for it. And then you go over to Kathleen Kennedy and she was like literally took the treatment that Lucas made and threw it in the garbage. Kathleen Kennedy destroyed Star Wars for a decade. Dave Filoni's going to make it great. Kathleen Kennedy's a legend. That's not, that's a baseball cap.

Starting point is 01:16:47 It's I'm talking about the cowboy hat, Jacob. You see it on the right. There it is. Yeah, that's, that's, come on. That t-shirt, cowboy. Take that hat off. It looks ridiculous. No.

Starting point is 01:16:57 He's a genius. Dave Filoni is going to Kathleen, Kathleen Kennedy, Desgratia. Kennedy produced so many of everybody's favorite movies. And then she ended her career. An icon. She was an icon.

Starting point is 01:17:10 She destroyed her career with the sequel. That's my position. That's Ben Shapiro's position. That's all. You like them. I like last year. Sequels? No, I don't,

Starting point is 01:17:19 uh, I don't, uh, I don't, love the other two. I don't like the first one, or Force Awakens. It's okay. I really like Last Jedi and then I don't like Rise of Skywalker. I don't think J.J. Abrams got it, but I like the Ryan Johnson one. Yeah. You're like one of one. Anyway, I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it when I saw it. There's a, there's a bunch of fan films that are fantastic. You mean the AI? There's a guy who does something called, no. There's a guy who does Star Wars theory. He's got over three million. Oh, sure. He's a he's a, he's a, he's a,

Starting point is 01:17:50 sync with me and everybody else. Yes. He's the guy who cried when Luke Skywalker showed up very famously. You can find like the meme of him crying. Anyway, he has been doing a Vader series and it's like a nonprofit fan series. You can search for Star Wars theory. Yeah. And the stuff, he's made two of these episodes. They're just absolutely fantastic. He's got three million views already. This thing came three weeks ago. The first episode of Vader, he did, I don't know, maybe five years ago or something like that. He gets all of the people who watch his channel to donate to this. He does it as a nonprofit and he sells sabers. He is fantastic. I don't think it's like fan service is not,

Starting point is 01:18:34 that's never been what Star Wars was. It was always about challenging and pushing to the next. Like, it's easy to make things that you know people are going to like because you're just recalling what they've already seen. But that's not interesting. in an artistic way. That's just, you know, endless merch and fan service. And sure, I mean, that Star Wars for most of our lives,

Starting point is 01:18:53 there weren't new Star Wars movies. It was just merch. It was just comics and books and video games and stuff about the movies. Like, I like when the movies take chances and move things in different, interesting. That was Android. Andor took a chance.

Starting point is 01:19:08 Exactly. That's what makes it interesting. And that's what Last Jedi does do. And no fan film is ever going to do. Because family would be like, Who would if this guy fought this guy? And I'm not knocking. Like fan films are fine and they have their place and it's great.

Starting point is 01:19:21 But like, all right, folks. There you have. Ron's worst take. We got there. We were waiting for Lon's worst take ever. Now we have Juan's worst take. The reason this is your worst take is because they made Luke Skywalker like they just destroyed Luke Skywalker's character.

Starting point is 01:19:38 When he takes the lightsaber and throws it over his shoulder and he doesn't want to do anything, that's the opposite of who Luke Skywalker was. He was brave. He was bold. If he doesn't have any more things to learn, if he doesn't have any more to grow, if he's just like the ultimate greatest warrior of all time. That's not dramatically compelling. You can't make that.

Starting point is 01:19:57 That's just, there's no change. Stories are about change. It's about you face the obstacle and it changes you. So he had to start from a place of weakness and grow back. You just stop digging, Lon. All right. Literally you and Kathleen Kennedy are on an island. I think she and Ryan Johnson were right.

Starting point is 01:20:14 They were right. right all along about that. All right. Well, we'll agree to disagree here on this week in startups, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

This Week in Startups - China wants you to cheer for the robots taking your job | E2329

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