This Week in Startups - Disney and OpenAI sign landmark deal… and we saw it coming! | E2223

Episode Date: December 13, 2025

This Week In Startups is made possible by:LinkedIn Ads - http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartupsDevStats - https://www.devstats.com/twistCrusoe - https://crusoe.ai/buildToday’s show: FINALLY, you can hang out with Kylo Ren and Olaf the Snowman… thanks to the magic of AI.On TWiST, we’re digging into the mega OpenAI-Disney deal. Mickey is giving Sam Altman a $1 billion investment AND will allow is copyrighted characters to appear in Sora and ChatGPT images.Of course, Jason predicted this would happen WAY BACK during the summer months and even showed off his “Darth Calacanis” creation on the “All-In Podcast.”PLUS Amazon has been launching and pulling AI features from Prime Video… what gives? Jason’s predictions on the coming AI blowback and who’s on what side. Why he’s so focused on Education, Health Care, and Housing as issues. AND why founders should always take calls from Big Companies, even if it might just be a fishing expedition.It’s a new Friday TWiST! Check it out!Timestamps:(00:00) Lon joins Alex and Jason to talk about the big Disney-OpenAI deal bringing Disney characters to Sora(03:10) Jason totally called the Disney-OpenAI stuff on All-In(9:42) LinkedIn Ads: Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit.(18:59) DevStats - DevStats integrates your dev work and your business goals into a shared language that everyone can understand. Get 20% off, plus access to their dedicated Slack channel. Just go to https://www.devstats.com/twist.(20:15) Why Amazon Prime Video pulled its AI recaps and anime dubs(24:44) Who gets to set the rules around AI: The Debate Continues(26:13) Jason’s predictions on the AI blowback coming in 2026… with clips!(30:11) Crusoe Cloud: Crusoe is the AI factory company. Reliable infrastructure and expert support. Visit https://crusoe.ai/build to reserve your capacity for the latest GPUs today.(31:21) Is AI here to help people or replace them?(35:55) It’s all about EHH: Education, Health Care, Housing(40:47) How all of this and MORE will be impacted directly by AI automation(45:35) Why Alex wants to lower the temperature around AI Doomerism(51:19) JUST FOR FOUNDERS: When should you take a call from a BigCo?(53:45) Why Jason thinks just about everyone in media will lose to TikTok and YouTubeSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/Check out the TWIST500: https://twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/lons*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/*Thank you to our partners:(9:42) LinkedIn Ads: Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit.(18:59) DevStats - DevStats integrates your dev work and your business goals into a shared language that everyone can understand. Get 20% off, plus access to their dedicated Slack channel. Just go to https://www.devstats.com/twist.(30:11) Crusoe Cloud: Crusoe is the AI factory company. Reliable infrastructure and expert support. Visit https://crusoe.ai/build to reserve your capacity for the latest GPUs today.

Open AI is partnering with Disney. SORA was a potential IP catastrophe for OpenAI. Litigation concerns, worries about payments. Well, they've ironed it out. So Disney's going to invest $1 billion into Open AI. It's going to have warrants for future purchases. And I think this is a big damn deal. If you're not part of one of these deals as Disney sent a cease-a-disc letter to Google the day before the Open AI deal was announced, you cannot use these IP.

So it's really, I think, the first attempt to figure out a sort of third. formalize this whole process. Like, here's what these collaborations will look like. And if you don't have one of these collaborations, you don't get to use these characters. So the most important thing here is now that there's a commercial relationship, every other lawsuit that's going on will be able to point to this, the New York Times versus Open AI, Disney versus Google. They'll all going to be able to point to this commercial arrangement and say that there is a cost to people stealing their content because this is a new business opportunity. It was. essential that somebody get a deal like this done. Now that we have a major deal like this,

every single LLM is going to have to do this. This week in startups is brought to you by Crusoe Cloud. Cruzo is the AI factory company, reliable infrastructure and expert support. Visit cruzo.com. A.I. slash build to reserve your capacity for the latest GPUs today. DevStats. DevStats integrates your dev work and your business goals into a shared language that everyone can understand. Get 20% off plus access to their dedicated Slack channel. Just go to devstats.com slash twist. And LinkedIn ads. Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 free when you spend at least 250. Go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. There's a lot on the news. I've got Alex Wilhelm and Lon Harris with me. What's the first story? Let's get to it within 15 seconds. Open AI is partnering with Disney. We talked about on the show that SORA was a potential IP catastrophe for open AI. Litigation concerns, worries about payments.

Well, they've ironed it out. So Disney's going to invest $1 billion into Open AI. It's going to have warrants for future purchases. It's going to be a three-year deal to use. certain Disney IP inside of SORA. And I think this is a big damn deal. Lon, what did I miss? Oh, there's a lot going on.

I mean, I think we're seeing the first effort to sort of codify this relationship. Here's how it's going to work. Here's how the deals will work. And if you're not part of one of these deals, as Disney sent a cease-a-diss letter to Google the day before the Open AI deal was announced, you cannot use these IP. So it's really, I think, the first attempt to figure out a sort of formalized this whole process. Like, here's what these collaborations will look like.

And if you don't have one of these collaborations, you don't get to use these characters. Who could, Lon, have ever seen this coming? Well, who could have seen this? Well, notably, over the summer, it was back in July that Jason made a very similar pitch to this. He made it here on this week at startups. We talked about it on all. Or he talked about it on All In as well.

I believe we do have Marcus this clip, if we could show it of Jason making his Disney prediction. Here I am on the All In Podcast talking about it. I was speaking at a KPMG conference where I do my No Screcanis, my predictions for the next year. And one of those predictions was somebody would create licensing. And when I always talk about licensing and respecting IP, especially on the All In podcast, where it's three other technologists, they always give me a hard time because they're like, we don't need to respect IP, essentially, a paraphrasing. And I said, well, here's what it could look like if OpenEI licensed the Disney characters and you authenticate it. your Open AI app with Disney.

40 seconds or so from the All-enbuyer. The Disney Plus channel, imagine you could make yourself into a Jedi Knight, and you could then upload your photo. You know, kids might really get into this. You upload your photo. You talked about this freebie a couple of times of the future of narrative storytelling, you up your photo, and then it makes you into a Jedi night.

There's Darth Calacanis. So. Are you infringing on their copyright? This is fair use. This is fair use. This is a perfect example of fair use for editorial. You're also infringing on some OZembek. That's a good.

Absolutely. Okay. So what you're definitely infringing us. What you're witnessing here is anytime I make a great point on the All In Pockets, they personally attack me and they make it ad hominin, which is when you know you've won, because all they can do is make fun of your weight or make this false claim that you're infringing on it when you're doing an example. Can you explain that, though, Jason?

I think it's an important point. Why was that fair use? And what does now open AI, what are they able to do that is more interesting with this deal? If I were to show on a podcast, here's an example for education or commentary purposes. That's totally allowed under fair use. For example, I could take a clip from any TV show right now, play the clip for 30 seconds, 60 seconds, just a portion of the show, and say, here's what I think of the lighting or the dialogue from that show. It's not infringing on their ability to make money, and it's commentary. So commentary is protected under fair use.

That's why people can, I don't know, do a song reaction video. It doesn't interfere with the ability for that person to monetize their money. Parodies. Like what we do on honest trailers is allowed because we are creating something new from the trailer. It's not just a claim. And that would be parity. There's another section of fair use that's for parity. Anyway, you know, David is the AIS are.

The AI companies don't want to pay for IP. they want to get a free pass. So it is not surprising that anybody who is in the AI space doesn't want to see these things happen. But I did predict that this would be an opportunity and that one of the savvy companies would jump the fence and say, and I think I said this many times on this pot as well, if you've got a $500 billion, a trillion dollar company, what's a billion or $2 billion here to license some content? In fact, I said 30% of consumer revenue should go, 40% of consumer revenue, in these systems to content creators, which will then make the content sustainable. What's great about this deal is now Sam Altman, because he has a commercial arrangement with Disney,

if anybody else uses those Disney characters globally, where there's IP protections, he can go to Disney and say, Disney, remember we're paying you for it to license these? And I didn't see in the deal how much Open AI is paying for three years of this. I did see that Disney has the opportunity to invest a billion. They didn't specify it, but there is a payment. Yeah, Iger said specifically that, you know, they're not using any human faces. They're not simulating any actor voices. So you could put, you know, you could put Kylo Ren with his helmet down in there,

but you couldn't put Adam Driver as Kylo Ren. Right. Or Adam Driver's voice as Kylo Ren. No Adam Driver's voice as Kylo Ren either. You can use the image. So that's a separate issue, which we'll get into. which is protecting the artists. Yeah. So he's also saying, as part of that, he was also saying, and if you are a creator who say, you designed Elsa from Frozen, you will also get paid

via this licensing fee that they're going to charge. But we don't know exactly what that licensing fee is. So the most important thing here is now that there's a commercial relationship, every other lawsuit that's going on, will be able to point to this. The New York Times versus Open AI, Disney versus Google. They'll all going to be able to point to this commercial arrangement and say that there is a cost to people stealing their content because this is a new business opportunity. It was essential that somebody get a deal like this done. Now that we have a major deal like this, every single LLM is going to have to do this.

Now, the counterargument by the people in Washington, D.C., the law AI lobby, and the other AI companies is they're going to cry, we have to beat China. under no circumstances do you get to say I get to steal IP in order to beat China? The American way is to respect IP. Once we lose that, we lose everything. If you lose IP protection in this country, you will lose everything. It's in the best interest of our country not to try to beat China or use China's stealing of IP as some weapon against ourselves. We want to have a united front with China and other countries.

This is where long-term thinking is critically important for David Sacks as the AIs are, for NVIDIA, for GROC, for Elon, for Claude, for everybody to think long-term. Do we want our IP protected in other countries? If we do, you got to protect Disney's if you want to protect Open AIs. So Sam doing this is a gift to America, and Bob Eiger doing this is a gift to American exceptionalism in protecting our IP long-term. That's fantastic about this deal. it was obvious this would happen.

And I got lucky by just picking the best IP in the world, Disney's, or the most recognized, as an example that within 100 days it actually happened. I got lucky on this prediction. Well, the owner of Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, it makes so they have the most AI text-to-image-friendly catalog of any company on Earth. If you're selling a business-to-business product, you're looking to reach professional customers who are doing business. And the question you have to ask yourself is where do those business leaders spend their time? And the answer is obvious, LinkedIn. And these are the real decision

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And they should go to Sergey and Google and say, Sergey, would you like to license for Nanobanana all of the IP or these 200 characters from Pixar? These 20 Pixar films are now available. Then they should take the Marvel characters and they should go to Claude and Anthropic and say, we have the Marvel characters available. Would you like the Marvel ones? As you go around. Open AI's deal is over 200 Disney Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters.

So they're not opening the floodgates. They've got a custom set of characters that they've contracted. So presumably there would be a ton left that aren't. Disney has way more than 200 characters. So, Lon, maybe you could explain Hollywood's concern. So we just went through the chess board here in Silicon Valley and how everybody doesn't want to pay for IP. And now we have dollars to donuts.

20 more of these will happen. I'm going to predict it right now. We'll have 20 IP deals in 2026. Put that on slash bets. I'll put the over under on 20 major IP deals by the six or seven LLMs against the IP. I think there's two really outstanding big questions that remain after reading this that are going to be a concern for everybody in the creative sort of field. The first is what do these license fees look like? and how are creatives being compensated?

There's a long, long history in Hollywood and media of promising that creators are going to get a little piece of the pie and then they don't actually get cheated. We've seen this a ton with Marvel movies. We've seen this a tonne with Marvel movies. You know, like Steve Ditko's estate, isn't making millions every time a new Spider-Man movie comes out. Because they were full-time employees who signed work for higher agreements,

which, by the way, was an economic decision they made to have full-time employment to not be independent creators. Yes. I mean, it was very hard to make a living in comics unless you were getting a contract with one of the big players. But you're correct. That their deal was, look, Marvel is going to own the Hulk. I don't own the Hulk anymore. And so that's why, like, Jack Kirby's estate doesn't make a killing every time there's a fantastic four movie that hits theaters or what have you. So that's one concern is like, are these license fees going to be, you know, like pennies every time, every year for the rights to these characters? or is it going to be a meaningful payout to creatives? So that's definitely like a huge big picture deal.

I think, you know, there's a lot of sort of vagueness. I think the guardrails would be the other one, that OpenAI and Disney are both saying, we are going to have guardrails, we are going to have protection so that you can't do explicit things, inappropriate things, things that would violate the IP. But I think that's a, how are they going to do that? Is that going to be effective?

And especially as we start integrating more and more work, creatives. I mean, for now, it's not that huge of a deal because, yeah, you can't get Daisy Ridley as Ray in Sora. So you couldn't violate Daisy Ridley's, you know, privacy. Correct me if I'm wrong, Lon. The person who voiced Darth Vader, his estate. James Earl Jones sold, James Earl Jones, sold in perpetuity his voice as Darth Vader, and they can clone it now. So that deal has also occurred in the world. And we've seen a lot of those kinds of things like, Sir Michael Cain's recent deal with 11 Labs is the same way. Like they're going to be able to use him and his likeness, his voice likeness for whatever

projects they like moving. Okay. So that's between him and 11 Labs, but not the characters he played. Disney did one specifically. They don't get James Earl Jones in all uses. They get him just for Darth Vader. So what we're going to see now is the second wave of these deals, which will be different artists might have in their contracts already that their voice can be used.

they might not. But a voice performance is critically important. And we saw this first in Back to the Future, too, where Crispin Glover was used without the permission, somebody who was a lookalike, not. Yeah, they found a lookalike and they had an impersonator do a voice that made it sound like it was Crispin Glover, but it was not. Skiske. Sketchy, sketchy, sketchy, and he won a lawsuit for that. Okay, Alex, what else do we need to know about this deal? And then we can move on. Yeah, a couple of things. So Disney will invest a billion dollars, as we said. It will also get warrants Jason into OpenAI.

So if it wants to purchase more shares down the road at whatever price they've decided, that's going to be in play. It's a three-year deal, one year of exclusivity, which means that I don't think another company can land a similar contract with Disney in the near term. And I will say that I think the timing of this announcement and the suit against Google is rather interesting. I wonder what Google's going to do to get out of the penalty box here. Did we describe the suit with Google? Google yet?

Lon brought it up. So essentially, I'll just give everyone a quick summary here. There's a cease and desist letter sent by Disney to Google. Before this opening idea, it was announced. The actual letter was reported it a little bit afterwards, but it's all pretty contemporaneous. And what they say is that Google is doing copyright infringement on a, quote, massive scale by copying a large corpus of Disney's copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop generative AI intelligence.

They're exploiting our information. And they said, quote, Google operates a virtual. vending machine capable of reproducing, rendering, and distributing copies at Disney's valuable library of cooperated characters. Google, I think, in an attempt to lower the temperature, said we have a long relationship with Disney. We're going to sort it out with them. But reporting also indicates that Disney's been beating down their doors and, hey,

you're not doing this right and Google's tried to dodge. I just think that maybe Open AI and Disney came to such a helpful, healthy, and positive agreement here that down the road, no company is going to be able to say, oh, we can't afford to do this or it's too punitive, Jason? Correct, which is what I said earlier. Now you have the precedent. And Google is a good actor. And this is different than indexing the web, taking a small snippet and using it, the output is now protected IP. It's indisputable. If you make a character and you make a profit building that character, you're now infringing on Disney's ability to do that. So every single IP holder needs to do a deal like this.

They need to plant a flag so that if you're the New York Times and you have wire cutter, wire cutter needs to immediately do a deal with GROC or Claude. Consumer Reports needs to do this deal with somebody. And consumer reports as a nonprofit makes probably low tens of millions of dollars, I believe. I was thinking about buying it at one point. I was informed. It's a nonprofit. They'll never sell.

although we've seen some nonprofits go for-profit, if consumer reports did a deal with GROC or Claude or perplexity or somebody, they could then say to anybody else who outputs consumer reports data, no matter where you got it from, that they are breaking their ability to do commerce. It is the IP holder. The IP holder has the right to monetize new forms and new media types. So you don't have to anticipate what those are. If VR becomes one, if AI becomes one, if Neurrelink becomes one, and just that will be the next one. Incepting a Jedi story in your brain using one of these and you ask Noralink or one of the other people doing this, like, is that an infringing? Well, yes, because Norrelink will become the new Disney world.

And so in five years, Disney will do a deal with NeurLink that you will be able to, experience any of the Star Wars movies. I know I'm sounding like a crazy person here, but doing this with AI would be considered crazy like 20 years ago if you said, oh, you can put yourself and make yourself a Jedi. You're going to be able to play Luke Skywalker in your mind, and that will be incredible IP to be licensed for it. And in fact, that is the premise of the incredible film by Catherine Bigelow, Strange Days. Keeping your business and engineering teams in sync can prove to be a considerable challenge. Trust me, I know.

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Go to devstats.com slash twist for your 20% discount. That's d-E-V-S-T-A-T-S dot com slash twist. This is one reason why I'm so excited about BCI's or brain computer. interfaces, Jason, because it does unlock an entirely new form of interactive entertainment that I don't think we can really do right now because we're not using our brains to generate scenes. We're just kind of using... Strange Day is kind of a dystopian take on it. I feel like there's like Ready Player One, sort of the more fun. Absolutely. Yeah. Before I drop off, there's one more story from the world of AI and streaming that I thought was very interesting and I wanted to bring up before I leave you,

folks. So in two weeks, Amazon Prime Video has introduced AI features and then almost immediately pulled them due to backlash and them not working correctly. Last week, they were automatically dubbing anime films and shows into various languages using AI. But it wasn't working very well. The AI performances were very poor. Sometimes the dubs would go beyond the parameters of the scene that they were in, so it didn't really make sense.

Audiences did not like it at all, so they pulled it all back. And then this week, just the other day, they uploaded. AI recaps for a lot of their most popular shows. So Fallout, that video game adaptation is coming back next week for season two. So they uploaded this AI generated season one recap. The problem is it was full of errors. People noticed a lot was wrong. It described one scene as taking place in the 1950s.

It was taking place in the year 277. It actually misdescribed the final scene of the season, which is a super important thing to get right if you're a recap, getting people ready for season two. So after all these complaints, they've now pulled back the second wave of these AI recaps. So they're all gone. They had one for Jack Ryan. They had one for the rig.

They pulled them all back. And it leads me to wonder, why is this happening? Why is Amazon pushing these AI apps forward that don't work right? I think we've been given permission and society and consumers have accepted that AI is imperfect and it gets 80% right, 90% right. which then leads people to say, all right, let's go for it. And people are overtrusting AI. Here's a clip that I just shared in X.

And you can see an example of this. Yes, this is from the anime Banana Fish. This was the most famous example. I need space to move. I said, I need space. You overgrown sin of a bitch. Three, this way. Come on.

After him. I read all your move. I saw right through you. Huh. Seemed okay to me. I wouldn't have known. Yeah, I mean, the performances are a little flat. They're not synced correctly, so it's a little hard to tell who's talking.

If you're used to a professional editor and voice actors doing this, it's lower quality than anime fans have come to expect. So I can give a judgment on this. There are times to do this and times not to do it. in high art, which anime, you know, would be for people who consume it, it's important that it be right. For an article in The New Yorker, I just heard the editor of The New Yorker talking on the semaphore podcast, I believe, and they were talking to him about a debate they had at The New Yorker. And the New Yorker had a similar debate. We want people to be able to listen to articles. A lot of people like to listen. People have gotten used to this with audible and podcasts.

So, to get a voice actor and to do one of those New Yorker 7,000 word articles, you know, 4,000 word articles, it takes weeks. And then you have back and forth. Did you pronounce this word right? You pronounce, even the voice actors pronounce words wrong. They get context wrong, grammatical stuff, pauses, et cetera. And they said, well, the AI is going to get some of those things wrong too, but if we put this as AI generated and we have it on the page when we publish it, consumers will be okay with that because they're doing it themselves. In fact, I love Speechify. And one of my hacks is when there's a long story, you know, in the mornings, if I'm going rucking on the ranch, I tell my team, hey, any of the long stories, just throw it into my Speechify.

I open my app up and I'll listen to, for example, the executive order. And if it mispronounces something, I don't care. I want the convenience of it. So it's a lot of it. So it's a going to be up to people to make a judgment call and then inform consumers. I feel like disclosure is number one and judgment is number two consumer. And it's going to get better. So we're going to be talking about this for, I don't know, three months, three years, but we won't be talking about it five years from now. Thank you. Thank you, Lon. See you folks. Next up on the docket, Jason. Let's talk for a minute about this executive order. I think it's very important that people understand what's in it, what's not, and what impacts it may or may not have on the national

AI conversation. So really briefly, everybody, after a lot of signaling, the president did sign an AI-focused executive order this week. And what matters here is that it's going to do a couple things. One, it's going to shape future congressional legislation. So the EO demands that we put together a framework for what Congress may or may not pass down the road, essentially kind of guiding Congress towards what it thinks is the correct way to regulate AI, light touch approach, et cetera. It puts pressure on states that are currently or have already regulated AI. This takes a couple of different forms, one of which is the formation of an AI litigation task force that will challenge laws that don't comport with the EO.

And we're also going to have the Commerce Secretary go in there and figure out which of those laws might fall afoul. Then we're going to have a lot of authority for the special advisor for AI and crypto, which is David Sachs. He's going to have a way to weigh in across these procedures, plans, whatever you want to call them. going to do is put an industry ally, a former industry member, kind of in the driver's seat for dictating which states need to be argued against and so forth. So it's a really big win,

I would say, for folks who think that the technology industry has the right of this. And if you don't agree with that, you're probably a little bit bummed out. But Jason, the temperature that I've seen in and around social media is pretty excited from tech folks. Tech folks will be excited about this because, yeah, it's a pain in the neck. To have gambling laws across 50 states has been a bummer for online poker, for prize picks, for, you know, other wagering sites. It is nice to have a national law. That being said, we are the United States of America, not America. And so we do have to recognize that states have specific rights and can interpret laws and deploy them in the best interest of the people living in those states.

So, SACS did point out four areas where this would not apply. Child safety, I guess they're saying, hey, child safety is a state issue. Communities, you know, maybe they don't want to put data centers and have their energy spike potentially or pollution from them. Okay, great. Creators, copyright law is already federal. I'm reading from Saks's tweet, so there is no need for preemption here. it's already, so that's great.

And it's already playing out in the court, as we discuss in the first two stories, censorship. I'm torn because AI is everything. AI means everything. What I think is more interesting than my opinion or yours on any specific ones here is what's going to happen in 2026 at a meta level. And we are shaping up to see the fight of our lifetime between AI companies and the technology industry and rank and file Americans. We actually had a big discussion with Tucker Carlson sitting in for Freiburg. We had a big debate on this in the MAGA world. And MAGA was essentially created by

Steve Bannon and Trump. They're the architects of it. When the MAGA originalists look at what, when they see Invidia and Google and Tim Cook and everybody in Washington, D.C., you know, cozying up with the administration, they say, well, what about us? Where's the working man? Where's the working woman? Where's our jobs? Where's Generation Toolbelt, et cetera? And you're going to hear this play out in 2026 into the midterms and certainly into the 2028 national election. And I pulled a couple of clips here. I think it's worth us getting ahead of the curve here, like we did on the IP issue on Twist. Let's get ahead of the curve here. And you could maybe tee up these two clips. I'm interested in your take as well.

So first up, we're going to hear from Joe Allen. He is an author of a book. You think he argues against transhumanism. And this is a book that Steve Bannon wrote the intro for Jason. So clearly they're Sympatico here. This is him discussing the issue on, I believe, War Room, which is Bannon's podcast. I'm not a listener, but I believe I have that right. Let's take a listen. What is the objective of the companies that people like David Sacks and Ted Cruz are running cover for. What is this supreme intelligence that the president is talking about? These companies are driving towards artificial general intelligence. And whether you believe that's possible or not, what it shows is they are willing to create

something that would replace every worker on earth. Whatever percentage of that objective they achieved, it will be a, net negative for any working American or any worker across the world so what are we fighting against we're fighting against people who not only don't care about your well-being other than to use you for training data or to use you as a pet after their singularity these are people who actively want to replace you they want to mine your data replicate you in silico and replace you.

These are the people we're fighting against, and we'll fight against them the rest of our lives. Launching a new company is all about finding your first customers and then just learning how to solve their problems. And that is going to put you on a relentless pace. And that means you're going to be releasing new products and features, hopefully at a brisk pace or better. But my lord, the complexities of working with AI,

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NVIDIA G-B-200 NVL-7-2 on Crusoe Cloud, pending availability, okay? That's C-R-U-S-O-E-E-D-I-S-B-BIL to apply and get those $100,000 in credits. So the argument here, Jason, that people are being forced to essentially submit their information, their training, and then become replicated by computer systems and then replaced by them, that does not sound like conspiracy theory to me. That sounds like it's dead on. On the Wednesday show, I joked that AI fixes the problem of wages because it replaces people. So my question to you is when we have these conversations, you and I are pretty aligned on this, why is this a controversial perspective amongst the people that are currently praising the AI EO?

So there is a strong group of accelerists and there is attacks on decelerists. People have called me a desal at times, but my whole life in technology investing in companies, You know, objectively, I'm an accelerist, obviously, based on what I do every day for a living. And I take pitches from founders. And for 20 years, founders, when they pitch their companies, you know, I'd say 10% of them 20 years ago would talk about eliminating jobs. Or they would talk about 90% of the time they would be talking about productivity gains. 90-10. These days, it's 50-50.

50% of folks say, hey, we've got a technology. that's going to make accountants, lawyers, salespeople, five or ten times more efficient. And we're going to do that with AI. We're going to make designers more efficient. We're going to make writers more efficient. Grammarly makes writers more efficient. Superhuman makes cleaning your email box with AI faster and reclaims time for executives and business people.

But a full 50% when I get pitched say, we're going to replace the customer support department. We're going to build one amazing pilot that replaces all pilots. We're going to make one driver that's so good, the Nuro driver, the FSD driver, the Waymo driver, that singular driver will be so good trucking driver that it replaces all of them. And what's happening now is the 47th administration is avoiding this topic at all costs. And the MAGA movement is so upset about this, that they are vocalizing it. And so you have a civil war happening within conservative circles where Steve Bannon and J.D. Vance, let's say, who might be very pro-individual worker and very concerned about these things, are now being pitted against, you know, the technologists

who are in the White House, who are pushing for a national regulation. So that, let's say, self-driving or, you know, teachers could be replaced with this technology. The fact is, that will happen independent of all this hand-wringing. Go back to last year, you and I are talking about Trump, we're talking about immigration, we're talking about what technology wants. And I was saying at the time that I think, you know, I think Bannon and MAGA are pretty much on the other side of a lot of these issues. And it was going to be interesting to see who was going to win out. At the start of Trump, too, you know, we have Doge going on. We have, you know, Sachs getting the gig. It really seemed like the technologists were running the show. Now, that's temperatures come down

a little bit. And we're seeing, I think, more dissent in the GOP about these issues, governors like the governor of Florida, governor of Arkansas, saying, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't you take away our ability to set things up the way we see them fit? You're talking about for states having rights. Yes, the states will reclaim their rights independent. Like the Republican states are going to say, hey, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, we want to decide if cannabis is legal here. We want to decide abortion. We want to decide AI and self-driving. So if states get to decide, right?

And the Trump administration said, we're going to overturn Roe v. Wade. We're going to make a state issue. So you have this, okay, Roe v. Wave will become a state issue, but we want to consolidate power federally for AI. They make a strong argument for it. Here's what will happen in 26 to 2028. Okay, because this is what I'm really curious about. You're going to have this debate, and we're going to need to see concessions.

When I run for president, it's going to be based on three things. AI is going to be fantastic at solving these three problems. Education, healthcare, and housing. Education, healthcare, housing. Education, health care, and housing. E.H. Okay, how does it help education? That's the easiest one.

Custom tutor. You go online. language, he teaches you a guitar, teaches you how to fix your dishwasher, now you're a dishwasher repair person. Literally, I could take any person with a GED, give them chat, CPT, and a phone, teach them how to use it, and they will solve 90% of dishwasher problems and have a really great job. The 10% they can't, they've got to call in somebody else. But you'll be able to send, you know, a first-line dishwasher repair person, refrigerator repair person, and because AI is going very quickly, find the manual, find the model number, find the fuse box, the reset codes,

whatever it is, you can do that. So education is going to help, and we're going to lower the cost of education, and we're going to come up with ways to make it free or close to free, and the market's just going to do that naturally. Healthcare, we need to figure out ways to use this technology to make health care cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. How do we do that? Well, full body scans, Daniel Eck has a company, I forgot the name of it. They're doing three or $400 body scans. Pranovo is like two or three thousand, does a much better one. Daniel Ecospect, NECO body scan.

Okay, NECO body scan is like the more accessible, $300 version per novo, the one I use, a little more expensive, a little more, much more comprehensive. But between those two, lowering the price of those and making sure every American can get a g-l-P-1 and can get a body scan for free and can get their blood work done for free and can put that into a large language model and get advice the free market is doing that can we accelerate that can we say every American gets to have their blood work done every year a body scan done every year you know and a g-lp-one every year paid for by the state if you're under a hundred thousand dollars in household income whatever it is so we start down that path and then for houses

can we use this technology? 3D printing of homes. You know, it's a little harder to find the AI angle here, but it could also be training construction workers back to education and can we use new materials, et cetera. That's a little bit more of a hell, Mary. If we solve those three problems, the cost of living will go down so dramatically and people will live longer that we can start to say AI will do something for the every man, the every woman in America, every child. So So that's my hope is that somebody takes that position. There's another vector that's coming in here, which is immigration and the anti-immigration movement that's going globally.

There's multiple reasons for the anti-immigration movement, primarily its jobs, sometimes it's culture. Both of these are valid arguments to have. And by closing the border and decreasing the number of people in the United States, then businesses will have to pay $30 an hour to have a deal. dishwasher, not 13. They'll have to pay $40 an hour to have somebody work as a nanny, not 20. Which will be robots effectively much cheaper in comparison, yeah? Well, there'll still be robots. That'll be cheaper, sure. But we can stem the tide of job loss and keep it at 4% and increase

salaries. This may become less of an issue. So my prediction is people like J.D. Vance, when they run for president, are going to lean into this. Closing the border and deporting people who are here illegally, increases salaries of Americans, and those jobs go to Americans. They're not wrong. That is what happens. You can disagree about immigration. So this is all coming together. And at the end of the day, it comes down to hope. And a man without hope is a man without fear. That's the key that people have to remember. And people in this country are starting to feel helpless. And when two or three thousand trucking jobs and cab jobs go away when two or three thousand housekeeping jobs go to robots whatever the quickest jobs to go away from the entry level one this is going to become the debate

of our lifetime the debate of our lifetime will be jobs automation immigration it's all around the same thing the hope that you could own a home the hope that you could have a family and we are as the technology industry inserted right into the middle of it. If you wanted to know a little bit more about AI and how it will impact house building, we did have monumental, a Twist 500 company on the show, Episode 2217, all about robot brick lane. Super cool company. Just throwing that out there. So what's your take on the sort of field I've played out here and independent of political party,

what are we going to need to do as leaders in technology, leaders in government, to assuage people's fears and deal with the reality of automation. So I do think that we are going to see AI automation have major impacts on education and housing and health care. I also think that we are going to see more job loss than people like David Sachs are allowing. Today, for example, he said that today we're seeing more job creation from AI than job destruction. Maybe. But I think you and I are on the same page of where we're going down the road.

I think the question becomes, who is the next champion of the GOP and what's their take on this? and are they tarred with this particular feather if what we just put into place in this executive order becomes as unpopular as you intimate it may be? So, for example, when I was watching the coverage of this and I saw actually one half of the All-In podcast standing next to the president, I don't think that I saw JD there.

I don't think he was in that lineup. Double-checked me to somebody. But my thought there was, JD's making a little distance between himself and this particular policy because- So that's the political landscape. But what do you think should happen on a practical basis. Should we do more deportations so Americans get more jobs? Should we tax these robots

and use the tax from that? You know, that's one thing people have floated tax robo-taxies and use the money from that for education or retraining. I use the word re-education on the podcast, which Tucker, we don't mean re-education. We mean education opportunities for, you know, getting a new skill. what would you do practically putting aside all the shenanigans of politics and Trump's a despot and the liberals are woke put all that aside if you can all that cruff all of the characters just practically I laid out practically what I think should happen right and I'm trying to see if I can move the dialogue from everybody's hand-wringing about these personalities and labels just to some common sense so let me give you the one common sense when that people are floating should we put attacks on each robot and

each Robotaxy of, I don't know, 10 or 20 percent. So you're a Robotaxy company. Every time you do a $20 ride, you give $4,000 of the ride to a retraining pool of capital for cab drivers. Every trucker, every automated trucker is a dollar a mile added to it. And the billion miles that get done, a billion dollars gets put into a fund to train people who lose their jobs as truck drivers. What do you think of that as a practical solution? I think it's too cute by half. So I think that if we start to apply a per robot or per job taking away cost, we're going to end up just dickering about that forever. So what I would do instead is I would say, look, we know where technology is going. We know historically as technology has impacted the labor market, we've always gotten back to full

employment. So what I would do is pretty simple. I would tighten up the corporate tax code. I would raise the rates a little bit. And I would just ensure that we have enough money in the central pot using normal taxation methods to help retrain people and support them in the transition point. I don't think we need to get too complicated here. I think if we try to come up with a specific solution, then we're going to see people like, I don't know, Tramoth say on the island podcast, hey, we're taxing innovation. Why are we trying to slow down the improvement of our economy? Well, let's not do that then. Let's just ensure there's enough money to take care of ourselves as we reinvent ourselves. Yeah. What do you think of deporting more illegal aliens here in the

country in order to raise the job prospects and the salaries of Americans. For or against? I'm going to answer that in a more nuanced fashion. I have worked on farms. I have worked with migrant labor. I have worked night shifts with migrants' labor. And let me tell you about people who work on farms. It's not Americans.

So when we talk about specifically illegal immigration, we're not really talking about people coming in taking white-collar jobs, for example. but we're talking about people working at the absolute bottom of society. But if we need those jobs, if let's just, I'll make it even easier for you to give an answer, if we got to 15 or 20% unemployment in the country, then, and if Americans wanted those jobs, and those jobs were 20 or 30, 40 bucks an hour, would you be in favor of deporting more illegal aliens working on farms or as dishwashers in order to reclaim those jobs for the 15% unemployment rate? If we got to that particular situation, Jason, sure.

But I think if we get to 15% unemployment, there's going to be pitchforks and burning down building. So we've got other problems. We have had it happen. We have had it happen. And it led to political change. I mean, think about the new deal, the timing of it, and the Great Depression. So I just, I think that there's a middle ground here that no one is seeming to hit

in which we don't have to be full ban on opposed to changes in how we execute labor across different strata of the economy. and we don't need to be so willfully blind to it that we just say it's not going to happen. I just think that if we could lower the temperature a little bit here and come to some reasonable middle ground here, because I do think that an economy where we can use AI to reduce human drudgery and free us up to do more intellectual work, that's amazing and a really great future. So I can see rays of sunshine here instead of just two differing kind of doomish environments that people are offering. It's really simple.

You know, I always like to put people back to like metrics and statistics. If we look at the per capita income in the country and we look at the quality of life and we look at the unemployment rate and you just look at those numbers and then you say, let's have immigration in some way tied to those and then have, you know, really targeted immigration where you say, hey, we don't have enough doctors. let's this amount in in order to fill the gap. But if we hit 8% unemployment, 12% unemployment, okay, then things need to change and tying those two things together. Nobody knows exactly how many jobs will be lost and how many new jobs will be created. And even if you're like, hey, we get through this every time. Okay, great.

We do get through it. We have traditionally gotten through it every time. But there could be pain and suffering. So we obviously want alleviate that. All right. Yeah. On the data point, though, you make a really solid point. But a couple of things we've talked about on the show in the past,

something that you've said a number of times is we're at the lowest unemployment of our lives. And you and I both agree, we're at 3, 4% and that's fantastic. 4.5. Yeah. Well, now, but at the time, this was kind of more of a last year conversation. But, yeah, good point. At the same time, we're coming off of a simple, enormous wave of illegal immigration during the Biden years. Yeah.

And the unemployment rate was... Still low. Lowest of our time. So that's kind of where I'm sitting. I'm a little worried about immigrants getting dragged into this. And I think we should more focus on just what we're doing at a state and federal level. Can I ask the question, though, before we move on, Jason, about this? So, steel manning, the contra position here.

So I wanted to make the argument that the Democrats and part of the GOP here are making about the state-level AI regulation, AI regulation. When we talk about self-driving cars as a success now in the United States, spreading across the country, growing well, and I think we're leading the world there. And that is something that does have to deal with a patchwork of state-level. level laws, even local laws, and it's going just fine. So what makes AI sufficiently different from applied AI, self-driving, that it needs a special carte blanche that other technologies have successfully matured and won under? Yeah. So there would be a moral imperative to save

more lives with self-driving. And if there were states that were deep, sells and they wanted to stop self-driving to protect jobs, but then you had the counter argument of saving lives. This becomes a, you know, talking through each other kind of issue. And then on top of it, you have, well, who's getting rich from eliminating five million drivers or ten million drivers? So you wind up having like three discussions going on concurrently. We've had this before. When we wanted to put airbags in cars, you know, know, there was like the cost of it when we wanted to do cafe standards and get rid of smog. There was a debate about it.

And then speed limits. You know, in Texas, you might want to go 75, 85 in Utah. In other coastal cities where it's more crowded, you may want to keep it to 55 or 65 or 65 because you want to lower the debts. But if you're driving between Houston and Austin or Dallas and San Antonio, you know, it's pretty okay to go 75 or 85 in a modern car. It's flat and straight. Like, come on now.

Exactly. So, you know, we've had those discussions before. This one is going to, I predict, the driver, the perfect driver concept is the one that will become the first one up the hill. Why? Because it's ready and because there's a lot of jobs and because those are entry-level jobs or gig work that are supporting many families. And in China, there's been rumblings and protests.

and the government has indicated or intimated that they are going to give licenses to robotaxies, and they're going to do it in small numbers at first in order to not have very quick job displacement. So I bet you in a year or two, Steve Bannon and this bulldog he's got there going out, talking about this cult of AI and AGI happening. You know, this is an AGI. It's verticalized AI, to your point, and it's going to eliminate all driving jobs. Who wants to drive? It's tedious, I mean, maybe around a track and going fast, but most people don't want to drive.

Most young people don't want to drive. And most people want their Uber to go from, you know, $3 a mile down to a dollar, right? It would be going 10 miles for $30 to the airport versus $10. everybody can afford 10, you know, half the people can afford 40, you know. Yeah, the reason why I ask this is I don't actually have a well-defined view on state level AI regulations versus one federal standard because I'm not quite sure about the Commerce Clause versus the 10th Amendment and we're going to sort it out in courts. But I can really see both sides of this.

And I'm a little bit uncertain. So I'm just trying to think it through as we go through this because not everything is super, super cut and dry. But yeah, it's going to be a fun, fun, fun next couple of years politically and technology is going to be all over it. Because Jason, I know you love to hear from people who share your first name. And so why not turn to our dear friend, Jason Lemkin, from Saster, asking about what you should do when a large company reaches out to your startup.

He writes down on Twitter, one of the weirdest calls you get as a founder is when a big co, out of the blue wants to talk about acquiring you, literally out of nowhere. He points out that sometimes these are real, sometimes these are not. But he thinks that you should take the meeting, at least to listen, even though, yes, sometimes this will be a fishing expedition. But we're talking a lot on the show about how there's going to be more emanated next year. So I presume more founders are going to get this call. So I want to know that Jason Calcanas advised to founders for dealing with interest from larger companies.

Yeah. So there are departments, corporate development departments, and they have been asked to stand by down under the Lena Khan regime and just not even pursue M&A because what's the point? Now you see Netflix wanting to require Warner Brothers and you see DoorDash acquire three or four international companies. Of course, you don't just have to get through the M&A filter here in the United States, as we saw with Adobe trying to purchase Figma. It was, I believe, the UK that put up the biggest fight. So it's on like Donkey Kong. We're going to see massive M&A, and as I said, I think we're going to see a hundred billion

dollar company get bought in 2026. And I think we'll see multiple 10 billion dollar companies get bought as well. So it's coming, folks, and that's a good thing for the playing field. Consolidation is good. It creates disruption. It creates opportunities. The only time it's really bad is if it limits consumer choice or, you know, it creates a monopoly position, where that person's able to raise prices. That's really the only two things you have to think about. Netflix, buying HBO, you know, yeah, that has a detrimental impact on directors and the catering companies and the lighting people.

Sure, you know, they have less parties to negotiate and less customers. Fragmented markets better for them. But the truth is, these are just magazine companies buying each other, cable companies buying each other, is equivalent of magazine companies buying each other, studios buying each other, studios buying each other as the equivalent of newspapers buying each other. In other words, they're all going to lose to TikTok and YouTube or are losing to TikTok and YouTube. Or have lost to TikTok and YouTube. To a certain extent, you know, they have lost a lot of audience to those platforms, but they've still built a great business with 100, you know, 100, this 300 million plus

subscriber bases for streamers. Put that aside, people are going to knock on your door. Yes. And typically the way this goes is partnership to purchase, partnership to purchase. You do some sort of partnership. That's what happened to me with Weblogs Inc. and AOL. They came to me and said, hey, we want to invest. We want to learn from you. I took the meeting. And then it went from them putting an investment of a million dollars into buying 49% of the company, buying 51% of the company, to just making a $30 million offer. We'll buy the whole kit and caboodle. And so that was great for me. We decided to do it. And that all happened over like a six-week period that they went from according us to buying us. And last minute, News Corp came in, was like, hey, can we put an offer in?

I was like, yeah, you know, we're already down the road. And they wanted to put in a low ball offer anyway. You're not obligated to tell the corporate dev people all the top stuff. You just say, hey, yeah, tell me what you're thinking. And they say, oh, yeah, tell us about your business. And yeah, you can actually talk your business down. You could tell them the opposite of reality. You could tell them, yeah, we're figuring. What I would say is things like, we're figuring it out. And they say, well, what's your average cost per content? And say, you know, we, you know, we pay the bloggers well and, you know, tens of dollars. But I didn't give them the data.

I didn't give them the list of bloggers. They could get that off the website anyway. Take the meeting. Don't be overly specific. That makes good sense to me. Just ask them questions. Let them talk. Ah, okay.

So make them pitch you essentially. Yeah. Why are you interested? So that's what I said to them. And they said, well, our content cost is $300 per content object on AOL to a $300. And we said, oh, yeah, that's pretty high. And they said, yeah, you know, we have full-time people. They get, you know, a story done for AOL finance every three or four days.

And so, you know, the $60,000, $70,000 writer is costing us, you know, $500 per piece. And we're like, okay. And they were like, what do you pay bloggers? And, you know, we're like, well, they get paid the equivalent of like $15 an hour, which 20 years ago for a writer was pretty good, to be honest. Like salaries haven't moved since then, Jason, for a lot of folks. No, no, they have. You know, I think maybe they would get, what would a blog post, a 400 word,

block post might get you 50 bucks today or 100 bucks today in the age of AI. So, you know, I'm not saying for your level of writer. I'm just saying for like the average writer. And so you take the call if you want to sell your company. If you don't want to sell it, you just say, yeah, you know, we're not interested in selling, but I appreciate it. Or you can take a brief call and you just ask them questions and you collect information. You can ask them, who are you talking to? Who else are you talking to? What are your goals? Are you releasing any new products that would be competitive with ours? What's your strategy here? And you just ask them those questions. And they're in all likelihood making a decision to buy one of your competitors or you. So they're going

to meet with all 10 competitors and then figure out which one they want to buy. Or they're going to meet with all 10 competitors and then decide to build anyway. And the other thing you can do is look at their track record. If it's Google or meta, you know, they do build their own features into their products and they both also have a track record of buying. If you look at Apple, They don't buy stuff. They do. They buy enabling technologies, but they're not in the business of buying YouTube, WhatsApp. They had the opportunity to buy those things, I'm sure, Instagram.

They didn't. So know your buyer. I knew AOL had bought tons of companies. They had a history of buying two dozen a year. They were constantly buying companies. They were an acquisitive company. Zuckerberg, acquisitive and build. So if he wasn't able to buy Snapchat, he just stole the feature.

So know your buyer. And it's totally fine to take the initial meeting and pump them for information and to, you know, treat them like mushrooms, which is keep them in the dark and feed them shit. That's what most people would say is the best thing to do. It's been another amazing episode of Twist. And have a great weekend, everybody. We'll see you on Monday. Bye-bye.