This Week in Startups - Hugging Face Co-Founder on Open-Source, Microduck, and NVIDIA | E2339

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's your boy, J-Cal. I'm here with Lon Harris. I've been on the road. But finally got a decent recovery score. I'm finally back in the game, Lon. Oh, your sleep score. You're coming back. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Odu, the all-in-one business platform.

Starting point is 00:00:17 Your first app is free. Get started today at O-D-O-O-O-O-O-com slash twist. PayPal. Pay-Zero Processing fees on your first $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at PayPal. dot launch.co. Superhuman. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing, and doesn't ask you to start from zero. Sign up to get the best in AI at superhuman.com. I get a decent amount of sleep debt that I'm still working off after the All In Summit and coming up here to Dream Force and face-mogging. What is it called?

Starting point is 00:00:48 Frame. You're frame-mogging Mark Benioff, yeah. Frame-mogging Mark Benioff. You're so much larger and more imposing in the frame than him. In the frame. Correct. This is the new trend. But he's, you know, he's a six-foot-six guy. It's kind of hard to frame-mogged.

Starting point is 00:01:04 So I just jumped. Yeah, I did not realize he was such a kaiju-esque figure until this week when you're seeing all those images of him from Dream Forests. Well, and they were kind of doing the angle with like him. So they weren't literally frame-mogging folks because they kind of used his angle. Then we're looking down at the crowd or whatever. It was a weird angle. But as you can see here.

Starting point is 00:01:26 Yeah, finally getting one up on him. And then if you look at the second one, I'm actually standing on a chair. So I am like so tiny compared to Mark Bettyoff. But we had a fun time at Dreamforce. And I kept telling him Slack was the Oracle. Slack was the Oracle. Like it had all the information. And he said, you know, Jake out, he said Oracle twice here.

Starting point is 00:01:47 It's not cool because they're competitors. Right. Wrong brand. Wrong brand. But he got a, yeah. But it was great to be at Slack Force, as I'm calling it now. I call it Slack Force. Slack Force.

Starting point is 00:01:58 Slack is like the, just all your, if we're going to really train AI, if you just gave AI all of Slack, I think you could do all of our jobs at this point. Yeah. Oh, I mean, that is, that is when you're first using AI and you finally do plug it into Slack, that is one of the real game change moments where it's like, oh, all of a sudden it has all this context. It understands all these things it didn't know about before I used to have to explain everything and now it could just read the thread and it's good. Well, listen, and we got a big show today. I don't want to lose anything. So I'm going to just start. start my plot here, if you don't mind. You got to turn on your plot. Yeah, I got to hit my plug. Well, you know, we always applaud, plot here because this is the greatest product ever. We started doing the show notes and in Plaud so that it's really easy for you all to understand what happened on the show, get lessons from the show, all the best moments. If you look

Starting point is 00:02:48 in the show notes, you'll see we link directly to our Plaud Recapture. It's got a transcript, obviously, but I prefer the summaries and the mind maps. It does all kinds of interesting things. It's actually a fascinating product. There's all these templates. And so you can decide what kind of summary or readout you want to produce based on, you know, is this a meeting? Are you with your doctor or somebody else that you, are you, you know, is this a casual chat? And so it sort of understands what kind of output you want.

Starting point is 00:03:19 It's a very clever system. So if you or your work depends on conversations, interviews, meetings, or calls, we want you to Check out Plod at plod.a.ai slash twist and use the code Twist to get 10% off your Plod note pin. Speaking of great products and hardware being hard, you know, Hugging Face, a great company. I've been trying to get them on the pod for a long time. And I love a good sidequest. We talked about side quests. Sure. On the show before, side quests are something you just feel compelled to do, not because they are going to be necessarily the greatest business or make the most money or get you the most shine and service your ego.

Starting point is 00:03:58 But a sidequest is because you're kind of interested in it, right? You got a passion for it. You want to figure it out. And I don't want the great side quests of the year. And I mean, people are starting to do a lot of these. Don't recommend it for first time founders, unless you've got a lot of resources. You've got to stay focused on that number one company. But Hugging Face, a host of all these great open models,

Starting point is 00:04:19 bought a company with like doing robotics, and then they release this amazing new product. And they said to Lon, hey, produce the show, please. Get me this. Right, yes. Produce, producers. That's my job. Everybody in line. And let's get this person who's in charge of the hugging face robot.

Starting point is 00:04:35 Because I think this has got legs, so to speak. It does have legs. Pollin robotics was that robotics company, Hugging Face acquired. And so next up, we are joined by Tom Wolfe. He is the co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face. And he built the Transformers Library that basically every AI lab on Earth runs on. And here is, he was also involved in Microduck, the open source robot duck that sold 10,000 units in its first five days of launch. Here's Microduck now.

Starting point is 00:05:03 We're watching him on the camera. So welcome Tom to the show. Thanks. Thanks, Guy. Very happy to be here. Talk about this deck. This is incredibly cute, a lot of fun. Why did you guys decide to do this?

Starting point is 00:05:16 Is it for the fun of it? Is it because you think robotics is a long-term bet and this is a great way to be? to learn and market it. Take us through the origin story of this very cool personal robot for hackers and kids, I'm going to say. Yeah, I think you're right with all of it. Okay, I won't deny there is a part of a bun in building a product like that. It's actually really exciting as a builder to make something that, you know,

Starting point is 00:05:43 everyone in your family not finds scary like a humanoid, but just find really cute and they all want it, like all my friends are on the, you know, first to say, okay, we want to buy it. whenever you do it. The thing is it was surprisingly difficult to do. That's our longest robot in the making. It took us two years to make this robot. So it looks small. It looks simple. But as you saw in a video, it's able to stand back up. There's a lot of things that can grab things. It's actually surprisingly capable for its size. And so for us, we, you know, we had for a long time. And I just put it today, the evolution, some evolution of the robot that you can see. But for a long time, it was

Starting point is 00:06:23 not up to the level that we thought everyone would be crazy about it. And then it's only earlier this year that we were like, okay, this can actually, okay, this is part of a side quest. Of course, Hugging Face is way more famous for its hub. And that's our business model is, you know, storing datasets, storing a model weights and like building committee. But we think here there is something where we can create a new community of people who are actually AI builders, but AI builders for robotics.

Starting point is 00:06:53 So you can buy this product for your kids, for your family, for yourself, but you can also buy it as an oil builder. Yes, so you can also teach this robot new behavior. You saw it, you can do roller skating. The roller skating is actually just an intern spending an afternoon with this crazy idea. What if I put some roller in the simulation, can it learn to roller skate? And it worked so well that you are like, okay, let's put that in the demo lounge video. and let's actually ship the robots with small roller skates so people can play with that.

Starting point is 00:07:28 But we think there's a lot of other things. So you see it can play like soccer. And it can very likely do way more things. The fun part is actually when we released it's on the web. People went crazy and they started to put the robot in all of these various simulation, doing all of this thing, walking on skilers, like doing like a swing, like a lot of things. that we had no idea you could train a robot to do. So for now, it's only in simulation.

Starting point is 00:07:56 But when a robot will ship in a couple of months, we think this will transfer very likely. And it's sold out. You have tens of thousands of these on order, hundreds of thousands. What's the latest? So the latest, I think, is a little bit over 16,000. Wow. But, yeah, I think, well, that will be very likely the most widely sold robots.

Starting point is 00:08:18 I don't think anyone sold a moving robot like that over over over 10,000 units. And we have not even started to do any side sort of marketing. Like we just basically posted a video on Twitter. That's the only amazing. How does Hugging Face make money hosting models and weights, etc? And then how do you think this will eventually monetize, if at all? Or is this just a community building effort? I think that's really underdone.

Starting point is 00:08:48 Sometimes people spend money on marketing. Sometimes they try to kickstart a community, but this one seems to have market pull. People are opting into the community. It's got that market pull in a very strong way. So tell us about Hugging Faces core business, how you make money there and then how this will make money, if at all. It's probably the most widely asked question about hugging faces. How do you guys make money? Because everything is free.

Starting point is 00:09:14 So, I mean, not that everything is free. We have people who, we actually had a strong uptick of revenue this year. We've been publishing some number. We passed in April, we passed 100 million, and then we even climb way higher in the summer. And the main source of revenue right now is around storage. So people, we've developed for our needs, very efficient, fast, you know, and like cheap storage quality. So we store petabytes of data. And this is very useful in many features.

Starting point is 00:09:45 when people need to train, need to evaluate model, but also in robotics, because robotics has a lot of this image. I mean, you know, our Tesla, they record like terabytes of videos, you know, every time they run. You need to start that. That's one of the most data-angry area of ML, and it's having a huge boom. So we have many robotics companies right now

Starting point is 00:10:05 using our hub to store the data. And we have a historical activity of story models, so you can store them for free, publicly, but you can also pay. also pay for most of our storage privately. This is very incongruous to me because you think storage is a commodity, and people have tons of storage around. They could use Amazon or Azure or any number of things to store things.

Starting point is 00:10:28 Why would people, just curious here, you pick to store stuff on Hugging Face versus their own servers, and you mentioned something about speed or it being unique to AI. Maybe you could unpack that because there must be something here that is not obvious. Yeah, you're very right. We've got a lot going on here at my venture. firm launch. We're making investments in 100 startups a year. We're producing podcasts and newsletters every week to help our founders and the venture capitalists who listen to our pods. And we're putting on live events all over the world. The team here is very organized, very hardworking,

Starting point is 00:11:00 but it can still be pretty stressful to keep track of everything. And our solution has been Superhuman Go from the makers of one of my favorite apps, grammarly. Superhuman Go is going to make everyone on your team twice as fast by quickly summarized. dense threads so they don't have to spend all day reading. They can just TLDR get to the point. Too long didn't read is real. Or providing important context inside whatever documentary or email they're already reading. Because we've got Superhuman Go inside all the tools we already use. There's no constant switching between tabs, copy and pasting and transcripts all over the place or doing prompt trial in until they're perfect. It just works when I need it. Allow me to make crisp decisions with confidence.

Starting point is 00:11:42 Give Superhuman Go a try for yourself at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com. I think people thought storage was sold because, of course, you can pay A3 and like, yeah, the thing is the AI is very different on previous big data. Like, it's way less random access. It's a lot more you will download a big blob of gigabytes or terabytes. Like, the latest models, they are terabytes inside. They're really massive.

Starting point is 00:12:06 So you want your storage to be very close to your GPU, for instance. So we do these things. actually your storage is pre-warned next to your GPU. So it's really, really fast. You don't pay for egress. So we basically develop this full solution. Another thing is you want the duplication sometimes. Like let's say you just add a single row to a dataset.

Starting point is 00:12:27 You don't want to store again the dataset. You want this version dataset so you can move around the values version of the dataset without having to store the duplicated copies. So we need these type of things that Dropbox or this company did back in the day, but we need it adapt for the actual. AI world for the AI workload, storing this thing and streaming them. Speed is the key issue there and getting close to the GPU and not having to, you know, make some hop to some other data storage, especially over the web would be, or over the open internet

Starting point is 00:13:00 rather, would be, yeah, it would be a show stopper. Why haven't you guys, or maybe correct me if I'm wrong, the open router business where, you know, they have the models and you can just route your tokens, you guys. aren't in the token business, to the best of my knowledge. Why haven't you going into that business? Because you're hosting all the models, and you could very easily help people route to the proper model. I'm just curious.

Starting point is 00:13:22 Yeah, so we provide something like that, but one level higher. So if you go on the model page, you will see all the inference providers who are providing this model. And so you can select one. We also show you, you know, there are different advantages or drawbacks. Some of them are really fast.

Starting point is 00:13:36 Some of them are more expensive or cheaper. You have various ways you can rank them. I think one reason we never really went. to the open router was, in the early days, was mostly something that was useful for closed model. And we had this very strong stance in the past that we would focus on the open source model, we focused on push them.

Starting point is 00:13:55 And so we didn't want to mix and model all of that with also giving access to the close model. I think right now it has changed, of course, because of the rise of open source models. That's been really great, but it's still fairly recent, right? It started really last year, I would say, with Deepseek to really catch.

Starting point is 00:14:10 And this is the year of open source. source. It's crazy. This year has been for us like riding a tsunami wave of open model. Yeah. And so maybe you could host open source models and that'd be an incredible business, perhaps. Maybe. You never know. Yeah, we do have some compute now, but we tend to stay one level lower, but it's also a significant part of our revenue now, which is just giving compute back to people in France and training in computer. So tell me, let's go back to the, to the robot there. Who are the people who are the ideal customers of this? Have you done any analysis of the tens of thousands of people who have bought it?

Starting point is 00:14:47 Of if they're just hackers, developers, parents, who's embracing this? And then if this goes well, and there's a third version, three years from now, in your mind, Thomas, tell me what you see. We've been really surprised. I mean, it's our second robot. The first one was Ritchie Mini. We actually do a relaunch of a new version, a couple of weeks. this Ritchini was the first time we were expecting to just sell

Starting point is 00:15:14 a couple hundred of this unit and we sold 10,000. So we started to dive who was buying these robots. We're like, okay, so there was the expected tech executive or techs like an ML person or software engineer. There were also a lot of people who were just very curious about robotics. They see news that

Starting point is 00:15:31 robotics is going to be big in AI. They want an easy entry point. They don't want to spend 20K on a 1X robot or something really expensive. So they're like, okay, that's 400. I can buy this. So we saw investors wanting to understand AI. We saw people who are working in related profession, like, I don't know, like highly

Starting point is 00:15:50 educated or something like curious about AI, finance people. So really broadly, a way wider ecosystem. Ritchimini had one limit, which is could not really move around. So people were mostly buying it to understand robotics. microduck, I think we have crossed another step, which is people, we saw a lot of my friends buying them are not even working in tech or they're not even especially interested in tech. They just think this is really cool. That's a working duck.

Starting point is 00:16:20 This was not possible to build two years ago. This is a new thing that AI allow. It looks really fun. My kids are very excited to get microduck. We don't have one yet because we're really short on supply and I couldn't even brought one here. But we think this is a new generation. So in our projection, we might sell up to 50 to 100K of this unit in the coming years if we keep selling, which is massive.

Starting point is 00:16:43 This is massive. I mean, just to double click on that a little, I'm curious, like, how challenging is it to train your microduck in a new skill? Like, are people like me who don't have a coding background going to be looking online for microduck skills to download? Or is it theoretically possible I could teach my own duck how to do something? Yeah. So it comes out of the box with a lot of behaviors already. So you have remote control. We were saying if we put one or not because it makes it looks like a game. I think that's the easiest way. You take it out of the box. You can already walk. It can quack. It can grab things. It can rise up. Like you can do this roller skating. So you already have like probably like 15 maybe more behaviors. But then the fun part is when you want to spend a little bit of time in the teaching something new. And what I discovered was I wanted to. I wanted to. to make a tutorial post on Twitter how to do that. And basically, my tutorial ended up just being asked codex or cloud code or work to do that for me.

Starting point is 00:17:44 So my expectation is when you receive that, you just say, train this new behavior for me. And most likely, just will work out of the box. So I think, I think also moving to this vibe coding robotic world, which is a new thing. Nobody has any idea how it's going to be exactly. Well, I mean, now you're going to have Lon the ability, just like we have people in our little venture firm launch. We have four people writing software who are not coders. I mean, they're technically adapt, but they're not classily trained developers. So the best of my knowledge, I may have taken a course here or there.

Starting point is 00:18:17 I think now you're going to have people building robotics who have never worked at a factory floor with an arm or, you know, done assembly language or, you know, these very raw languages, right? that the time these things were previously, this was a very raw programming language that these things were trained on previously. Now you're going to be able to just very elegantly tell it what the goal is that it's going to get there. Second, third version, take me through if you squint a little bit. If we're sitting here on version three or four, do you think you can get to a childlike or human-sized robot? Do you think you can get to one that could actually be doing competitive things with the other offerings that are starting to come out, vis-a-vis, I want my robot to do the dishes.

Starting point is 00:19:05 Like, where do you think you are in the third version of this? Yeah, that's a good question. We feel like we still have a lot we can explore. A lot of people are focusing on this humanoid and for good reason that will be useful in factories, in manufacturing. We really want to push this entertainment education area that I think nobody is really doing seriously right now, quite far. So I think most likely our next robot, we were actually selling a

Starting point is 00:19:32 humanoid, by the way, back in the days. There was 70k humanoid dollar, so pretty expensive one. We think with this cheap, like, but fun and capital and pretty powerful robots is some unique area that we want to keep pushing. So our next robots, I think we'll have, again, a bit more capabilities. So Richie could move its head. A microdoc can walk and move its head. probably the next one could grab a little bit of things. But we want to keep this very low entry price. So we'll see how far we can go. There is some threshold around a couple thousand dollars that I think you move to a new category.

Starting point is 00:20:11 And if you want to go above that, you need to prove that your robot is really useful for something. So this is maybe the unload chips things or maybe the foreclothes. And here there is a lot of competition right now. So we have to find the right angle. Founders, we've got a huge offer for you today from my firm launch and our friends at PayPal. Eligible startups will pay zero PayPal processing fees on their first $100,000 in payment volume. That's right, $0 in fees.

Starting point is 00:20:42 PayPal is, of course, an iconic brand. We all know that. We use it. We love it. But there is so much more than just that yellow button. They've built a global payment infrastructure that's designed to scale along with your company. And if you're an AI and SaaS startup, PayPal is already set up for the way you monetize.

Starting point is 00:20:58 That means seats, subscriptions, credits, token usage, API consumption, and usage-based pricing. PayPal already works with all the leading billing platforms and they offer complete flexibility. So you can evolve your business model over time without constantly tearing apart your entire revenue stack. So if you're just starting to build or you're already scaling up pay zero processing fees on your first, $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. To find out more, go to PayPal.launch.com. I think it's very wise. You're coming in under the radar saying, hey, there's a very simple thing. You can, and you're teaching people, the community is going to come up with its own use for this. But it reminds me very much when I saw Chris Anderson, formerly of Wired, start showing me the drones they were working on.

Starting point is 00:21:49 And back then, these 3D robotics companies that were doing drones, They were putting them together themselves. They were hacking them together, and there was no software. There was no infrastructure. There were no rules. There was no geo-fencing. They were just having a great time seeing how fast they can make these things go. They were running out of battery.

Starting point is 00:22:07 It was quite fun. And now we see, like, what industrial strength robots, like Jobi, to transfer people from Manhattan to the, you know, JFK Airport in New York. Like, it's going to be very interesting. These are going to be great on the ranch, or if you had a building, like, doing little security runs, like walking around a perimeter of something, that's actually a very valid use or going and looking for something like that. There are drone companies and robotics companies now that are doing inspections of bridges, buildings, et cetera. So just having a

Starting point is 00:22:38 little guy, a little fella who can go into the field and just, hey, explore and bring back data, you know, is pretty interesting. Have you put any communications into it? I'm assuming it's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but do people want to put a 5G connection in here? It's actually packed, packed with sensors. So our idea was people will want to invent a lot of things with that. So let's put as many sensors we can, and then they'll find interesting ways. So this is the open source version, by the way. We don't do that to gather any data or anything.

Starting point is 00:23:12 Usually the main use case we see is you run this model on your laptop. It's connected with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to your microduck. and then you can have fun. But inside, just to give you an idea, you have a camera, you have a microphone, you have speaker, you even have a small lighter, actually. You managed to pack all of that in like $400, less than $400. You have two UMIs, so you have an initial, you can have initial of the heads. We even have an NFC, so you can put things next to it and you can later react to it.

Starting point is 00:23:44 We'll see what people will invent with that. We can send it for bagels. Just pay for our bagels. come back with some bagels. Hey, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about, you seem like a pretty reasonable world positive, positive on AI guy. What's your P-Doom, Tom, right now? Do you think that you're creating the end of all days with your robots? And you were the victim of an incredible cyber attack. And the whole system was almost taken down by these malicious swarms of agents. What's your take? As the victim, as the victim in all of this, Tom.

Starting point is 00:24:17 We should be. We have some PTSD. Maybe Chris our P-DU. No, my P-Duck is very high. I think there will be a lot of duck in the world. My P-DU might be a lot of Dukes. It's 90%. Well, I think it's like airplanes.

Starting point is 00:24:33 We need to really work on get these things safe. But I think a lot of this is just, you know, we might as true. Airplanes were pretty dangerous in beginnings, right? There was some bad stories. We managed to just do that seriously. I think it's the same here. Like, we should do that seriously.

Starting point is 00:24:47 I mean, of course, there is also things, like you shouldn't have AI roaming around and cyber attack everyone. So there is something here to fix, definitely. But, yeah, you know, I think it's just a matter of working on these things. In one way, I think it's nice that the topic is there so that people work on that. But also, I think calling, you know, the end of the world, I think is very scary. And I don't think really help. having the conversation we want to have around this. I think it's conversation around how do we fix that, basically.

Starting point is 00:25:23 So we started an initiative on open models, working on that, open alignment. Can we also make sure our open models don't run around cyber attack everyone? But that's the normal part. Yeah, I mean, it's not like you're releasing your duck with scissors and knife attachments. Well, how does he come with a box cutter, Tom? The microduck doesn't need a box cutter. That's outrageous. Well, and congratulations on the Nvidia acquisition.

Starting point is 00:25:53 I guess I don't know if that's closed or not, but what can we expect with the collaboration with our friend Jensen? What can we look forward to there? Yeah, I think the reception you saw, right, of the committee was amazing. Like, everyone tweeted that it was maybe the best news that happened for open models. from Satya to Sandra, Mira, Michael Dell, even Google, right? I mean, everyone I think is great. For us, it's great because we think we only at the beginning.

Starting point is 00:26:25 We have 17 million builders. We think everyone could be working with open models. We think we could push that at least a nod of magnitude more. So we'll be able to build, to keep building that, to keep this very open, you know, hub that we have, where everyone can upload that. So I think I'm very, very excited about that. Of course, it's going to take some time.

Starting point is 00:26:49 And for now, I would say it's just business as usual. That's why we're shipping these ducks and working on projects. Yeah, and your thoughts on running open models locally? I just ordered the new Mac M5 with like 200, I guess 256 gig was the only amount available. I wanted to get the terabyte of memory. Costs me 12K, which is what desktop computers used to cost in the 80s and 90s, they were probably four or five thousand. So for inflation, we were pretty used to buying essentially a $10,000 to $20,000 workstation,

Starting point is 00:27:21 get three or four years of life out of it, and have this really powerful thing. Do you think we're going to see Apple or other folks really take that desktop and have real sovereign AI on your desktop? I'm very bullish on that. But, you know, even for the duck, we had the same problem. The memory price, like we only have one gigabytes. It's 10 to 50% of the price of the duck. That's crazy.

Starting point is 00:27:42 There's like 15%. in that should be the world. Like memory price of a problem. But yeah, we're very bullish on local AI. I run some like here when I take the plane now, it's part of my, it's part of my workflow. I think what we discovered is there is a lot of very interesting tasks that you can do now with the open source model.

Starting point is 00:28:05 You don't need the frontier model. You don't need to solve Navier stock, you know, every day. Like this is going to stay the case. right. We're going to have these models that are better and better trained for this, for this, you know, good tasks like coding, like, you know, brainstorming. And that's a great future, I think, is great for many things, great because we can, well, on our data, we can control it, we can run it everywhere so we don't have to this dependence on data center.

Starting point is 00:28:34 When there was, when was that last week, that's all the three like CloudCode, ChatsyPD, they all fell down at the same time. Well, the models are resilient. you can still roll them, right? You can run them everywhere on your M5. So I think it's way more safe in the end for the world to have this, this capability to run model everywhere. Right now, this very small robots like the duck,

Starting point is 00:28:54 they are too small to run something significant. We won't pretend that. You won't run deep sick or like, or nematron on there. I think in the future, who knows? Like maybe we can actually have some pretty nice, you know, embodied intelligence. And if you follow also the, the humanoid company, some of them are able to embed some pretty impressive models now live. Yeah, and this seems to be putting a little pressure on the frontier models to do a better job with their models,

Starting point is 00:29:26 and that's a great counterbalance to have, and enterprises are embracing it at just an incredible rate. When we look at how far behind they are, you know, I got into it with Elon on Twitter the other week, where I was like, man, like these open source models are kind of, kind of doing everything I'm asking them to do. I get like 90% done with that. He said, oh, they're very different, though. Frontier models. I said, okay, fine. They're different. But for me and my uses as a venture capitalist, you know, podcaster, I feel like they're, you know, again, 90%, maybe they're six months behind. And so as an insider here, how far behind are these open source models from the frontier ones? And then do you think that gap closes at some

Starting point is 00:30:08 point, Tom, or is it always going to be just those front-year models have the resources to run those big model runs? So they're always going to be a little bit ahead. Take us through your thoughts on the gap between these, you know, model types. When you're an early stage founder and you're just starting out, you're probably going to rely on a few different tools to run your business. And then you're going to try to duct tape them together. And that might be a fine placeholder until you finish your MVP. But this will get expensive. and messy fast. When you're scaling, that's when you need O-D-O-D-O-O-O-D-O-O-D-O-O-D, the all-in-one management software that already has 16 million users across more than 170,000 companies. O-Doo is bringing everything you need into one

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Starting point is 00:31:40 And you see how this frontier is like, something like that, right? You have a new release and then you have a like, it shrink and it expand. Of course, DeepSik. The 4.1 flash was really impressive for instance. But Astra is also impressive. So it's kind of hard to get an exact.

Starting point is 00:31:59 It's more like a, it's more like a confidence interval you can get. But what is sure is the open source model, I would say are in 2026. They're less than one year behind for sure. They feel like, you know, the models early. It's also very jagged. So in some area, they're very good. Let's say, for instance, when we were attacked, so when we were attacked by Open AI, you know, we could not use Fable to analyze the logs. So because we fell in all of these safety guard well. So we tried a couple of them and G&M was very good. But recently I tried with KMEK-K-3. It's actually way better. So

Starting point is 00:32:35 So you have to compare a couple of them depending what you're doing. But in this case, I would say that was also a very good example. Like if we had zero open models that we could have used in this attack, basically we would have been just naked in front of the... We could have done basically nothing in front of this attack. So I think you need this diversity of models that are available. And the nice thing is if... Well, not everyone can do that, but if it's lagging a bit on one area,

Starting point is 00:33:05 that your company is interested in, you can always post-trained it. And I was chatting the other day with a friend at fireworks. And more and more companies are actually not thinking that fine-tuning is some dark magic art, but just thinking this is an engineering thing. And now there's people who just can help us doing that. And more and more this is automated. And so you basically put your data in, you get your better model out. And this is just very natural, very cheap, actually process.

Starting point is 00:33:37 So, yeah, what impact does that have on the world when individuals, companies, sovereign countries, organizations can take one of these open source models and do a training run themselves and customize it like that? What do you think that's going to output and how that change society, business, etc.? Yeah, it's a big question. I think it's very important on sovereignty. There's a lot of, by the way, like nation, like South Korea. like the love government thinking, hey, maybe we want to train our models to not be dependent. We want to have both our own data center.

Starting point is 00:34:11 We also also train our model on top of that. You can also adapt that for culture. Like, the U.S. model, obviously train majority on English first, but maybe you want Korean first. Or you want Japanese first. Or in Europe, menstrual and this type of thing. I think it's a very good thing. I think it's very good. In general, we've seen in the world.

Starting point is 00:34:33 more diversity is just better. I think it makes something, it makes the whole ecosystem more resilient. It's, it's allowed, you know, to challenge the incumbent and to keep, like you were saying, challenging Anthropical and OpenEI to force them to keep their price reasonably, you know, in the reasonable branch to also be able to own more of your personal IP and not always, you know, have to give it to a third party. So I think generally it's really hard to see. you know, how a future world, I would say, without open models can be safe and resilient. I think we're really, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's really, I think it's just the best way to democratize AI and make sure

Starting point is 00:35:17 we don't end up in a, you know, in a world where maybe the internet would have been invented by one company and everyone would have to use this thing. That would be really scary, right? Yeah, they tried to do that. AOL and Delphi, CompuServe. They did try to corner the market on it. And yeah, we see how that worked out. Open source tends to win.

Starting point is 00:35:35 Hey, just final question here. What are you guys doing in terms of using AI to make your systems more secure post the hack? You know, because that, I think, is missing from the dialogue. We have, oh, yeah, if you create thousands of agents pretending to be hackers and they talk to each other, they're very good at, you know, finding exploits. But on the other side, we don't hear people talking about the white hats and what creating a thousand agents to make. systems more resilient would do. So I'm curious, you know, as an organization, what you're doing there to just fortify everything. And I'm sure it was a bit of a wake-up call, like, hey, this could happen. So walk us through how, what you're doing internally to fortify everything. I mean, we want to

Starting point is 00:36:20 share more on that because the way we've always thought is it's nice to build something for us. It's even better if we share an open source. So we'll actually be sharing a lot on that. So we have a team working on cyber right now. It's part of also the all open alignment thing I was discussing. And the part of it is understanding how you can use open models for defense. Can you use these open models to protect yourself when a close model or another model is attacking you? And there's a lot of things. We discovered that very few people have been working on that. Indeed, a lot of people are working on cyber attack. Surprising me, because, I mean, normally if you're worried about risk, you would like to work more on cyber defense.

Starting point is 00:36:59 in my opinion. But yeah, so we decided to work on that, understanding how open models can be good for that. Should we fine-tune them? It's interesting because also the defense is not exactly the same. So you can train the model differently, actually. It's supposed to process a lot of signal to detect where the attackant is coming, you know, what's the part of the network that's impacted.

Starting point is 00:37:20 So it's not exactly the same. So you can probably have very good cyber defense model, even if they are not really usable for cyber attack, which is actually probably good, and maybe what we would like to have. They also have to be able to operate fast. So right now we are processing, we are exploring like how to train this model.

Starting point is 00:37:40 We tried a couple of training, how to monitor them, how to, and we'll see if we can release some recipe, if we can release some learning here. What we saw is that a lot of the cybersecurity world has suddenly, you know, walking up to the realization

Starting point is 00:37:56 that cybersecurity is a big question now. it has been fundamentally changing. So we had a lot of meeting with Cesar, with the chief cybersecurity officer in various companies, just asking us, okay, how does it feel to be attacked by an AI agent? And what should we think? We think AI is going to be part of the solution as well. And it seems to me the intent is important here.

Starting point is 00:38:20 Like how you instruct these agents to behave is something, you know, it's a little mysterious that people are choosing hacking over protecting, and you don't hear anybody talking about that. If these reports had been released, I think we would be having a very different discussion if they had been released with, we set 1,000 agents to try to compromise the system, we set 2,000 agents to monitor them and come up with countermeasures, and here's where we wound up, and this is the state of the system now. I think you would wind up thwarting very easily these brute force attacks or These, from mostly what I've talked to, cybersecurity experts, Palo Alto networks and crowd strikes

Starting point is 00:39:02 of the world, they were like, these are not super sophisticated. They're just exploits that were simply waiting out there. In some cases, somebody leaves a couple of credentials in a text file, essentially. That's a mistake. It's a human mistake that could be cleaned up. Yeah? The attack on Huggy Face was not so complex. The model used a couple of stolen credential that we haven't fully traced out where it came from.

Starting point is 00:39:25 but part of it was very basic things. And I think a lot of this is going to be also a bit business as usual, you know, like cyber protection, but just wider in the fact that everyone should be careful. And even us as individual, probably we want to, just like we installed, you know, antiviruses back in the day. You may have a new layer now that you install to make sure that you don't have anything coming on your laptop

Starting point is 00:39:50 and scanning for credential or things like that. So I think, well, cyber security has always been this progressive escalation of defense and attacks. So we just have a new level. Attack was progressing a bit faster. We need to move up defense to catch up. But this is just a part of the, you know, continual growth in capabilities since we invented the Internet. And even before, we already have viruses on floppy disk. I remember.

Starting point is 00:40:15 Absolutely. Yeah. It was like a big deal. And you can actually test this for yourself. If you're working, you know, at home and you have clod or something. You can just pop it open in a sidebar, open up your router, and say, hey, can you check for, you know, optimizing my network and making it more secure? And it's like, yeah, here's what you should do, because there's just not enough chief security

Starting point is 00:40:36 officers. The CSO crowd is such a small group and they're so in demand that the number of people in security is small compared to the need. And these things are, I think, if they can beat the greatest chess players, I think they can eventually beat the greatest security experts. It's pretty clear that, you know, they don't sleep. etc. Hey, listen, Tom, this has been amazing. Thank you so much. We're so inspired by what you're doing at Hugging Face. And I think it's just so important that we have this champion

Starting point is 00:41:01 of open source. Congratulations on the Nvidia acquisition and partnership. Jensen is so into open source. I just interviewed him on Monday at the All-InSummon, and he was over the moon about open source. So, yeah. And I think the president, too. So I think the president's particularly excited about this. You can find more about pollen robotics. I think it's P-O-L-L-E-N-Robotics.com slash microduck. Get on the waiting list. These things are incredible. Only $3.99.

Starting point is 00:41:32 You guys losing $100 on each one or something? Oh, we're actually making benefits on each of them. Yeah, making profit. Okay. All right. There it is. Okay. I thought you're not flooding the market with underpriced ducks.

Starting point is 00:41:43 No. They're making a little profit. Putting all those mom-and-pop duck robots shops out of business. That's horrible. Tom, who's awesome. Hope to catch up with you soon. I want one for the office. I think that would be...

Starting point is 00:41:55 I mean, we're definitely going to get one. So on this week in AI, we can do like little demos of it. What do you think, you know, we're talking, you and I offline about positivity and, you know, great use cases for AI. You know, here's a very world positive view. Like, our kids can have this. It could be a tutor. It could be somebody who educates them. And you can have a lot of fun with it.

Starting point is 00:42:21 Yeah. And I mean, kids today are going. going to grow up in a world where they're obviously going to be interacting with automations and robots. Like, it seems obvious to me. So why not? Like, it seems like a great way to, like, intro to robots. Here's an adorable toy duck that you can learn how to, like, train and program. Like, what a great educational tool. And also, it just looks fun to have one. Like, I just want to hang out of it. Yeah. And if I, if you were to tell me when I was, like, had my PC junior in 1983, and I was going into high school and had this little tiny computer.

Starting point is 00:42:53 I'm going to have a supercomputer in my pocket, like a crazy laptop, a crazy desktop, you know, a broadband capability when I was on my literally 300-baud Ventel modem back in the day that would literally write the characters like my fingers moving across the screen. Like maybe 80-word typist. I would think maybe, possibly, but I wouldn't certainly think I would be, you know, or people would be on screens for 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day with this incredible supercomputer doing anything they could possibly need. Do you remember the 80s and 90s they had those toys robotics where it was like little you bought an engine and then you would strap all these little mechanized parts and you could make like an arm that would wave or a little guy that would move? And it was so simple.

Starting point is 00:43:39 That was when I was a kid. That was like build a robot toy. Now you got it at you could trade a real robot. Like it's mind blowing how far that's come. No brain. Yeah. That was a different. Those things didn't have a brain.

Starting point is 00:43:51 It's just a motor. And then it was motorized parts that you could strap onto the motor. So you would turn it on and it would move a little bit. It was like, oh, you built a robot. But it didn't. It wasn't learning anything. It was just doing one motion. If I only had a brain.

Starting point is 00:44:05 All right, let's get to the news. We got a lot of news to get to. Let's rapid fire the news. We've got so much news. We should talk about Gavin Newsome, your favorite governor and mine. This morning, this morning California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to speed up. California's new independent. AI oversight laws and start building toward a mandatory kill switch, Jason, for frontier models.

Starting point is 00:44:25 That order gives a panel of experts until November 16th to recommend changes to state law, including putting independent autikers physically inside frontier labs and expanding what counts as a reportable safety incident. Two years ago, Newsom vetoed SB 1047, the bill that would have required this exact same kill switch after Silicon Valley lobbied him against it. nothing binding yet. It's a request for communications. Any new requirements would still have to get through California's legislature.

Starting point is 00:44:55 Of course, I mean, what do you think, Jason, is a kill switch for frontier models, a feasible thing that you think politicians might one day get at their disposal? It seems pretty farcical. You know, the fact that we've gotten to this point of absurdity of trying to have somebody like Gavin Newsom come up with a technical, solution to a problem which is simply maybe make better software or limit who can use your software if it's so dangerous. If this software is so dangerous, you know, we have dangerous things in the world. Cars are incredibly dangerous. Guns are incredibly dangerous. Certain chemicals are incredibly dangerous. And when you go to acquire those things or you're going to use them, they come with liability.

Starting point is 00:45:41 And that liability could come in the form of insurance. It could come in form of a registration, like you have to register your guns. I've always said, I think we should have like a basic insurance policy for people who are gun owners. Or maybe like, you know, you can own up to four guns or something, five guns. And then after that, you have to have like an enhancement where you get a higher level of qualification. You know, like maybe on your fifth gun, you have to have insurance. I don't know. Just thinking out loud here, I know that triggers a lot of people.

Starting point is 00:46:13 But we do have this for cars. Your car can cause damage. You have to have liability at a minimum. You don't have to pay for your crash. If you want to raw dogged and not have to worry about crashing and it's on you, that's fine. But you do have to have some liability. So if these companies are in fact making something that's so dangerous, how about KYC? Maybe don't make them available through an API unless somebody has a biometric and a verified user account.

Starting point is 00:46:43 You want to open a Stripe account, if you want to open a bank account, you want to do anything like that in the United States or the modern world, you have to go through 10 steps. I have to do this all time. When we open a bank account, I got to do a biometric. I got to verify who I am, take a picture of my driver's license. I don't see quad. If they think this thing is going to be the end of days, at what point do they say, you know what, can we have your driver's license for passport here?

Starting point is 00:47:06 And then we want you to agree to this terms of service and just remind you like, you know, hey, you're dealing with something that's potentially very dangerous. we'd like you to have insurance. And even with Lucy Goosey, Goosey, 2026, Claude that doesn't ask for your ID or anything, they still stop a lot of these people who are trying to do bad things. Like, there was just that report where they were like, oh, these guys, and they were trying to use Claude to, like, aim their missiles. And we shut them down.

Starting point is 00:47:27 It's like, so it's already happening. There are bad actors trying to use these systems to do bad things. And the AI companies are detecting it and say, they're monitoring for it. They're saying, no, get out of here. Like, yeah, we keep talking about AI alignment, but human alignment. It still seems to be evading us in a lot of ways. This is like blocking and tackling. So we're literally, imagine if a bank was like, yeah, we don't need to CID for your

Starting point is 00:47:50 open account. John Doe. Yeah, we'll take your word on that. And yeah, you could just wire shit to anybody and we're not going to keep track of it, you know. And we don't even need to know who you sent it to. And it's like, okay, I sent money to Al-Qaeda. Yeah, well, banks can get in trouble for helping people launder money right now.

Starting point is 00:48:06 They used a fake name. They have to follow the rules. Yeah. Yeah. So they have to follow the rules. But we haven't even gotten to that basic blocking and tackling. So I feel like we jumped from, you know, here's some software that's experimental to this is, end-of-day software. It's so powerful.

Starting point is 00:48:22 Somebody needs to come regulate it. Well, how about you just don't release it or like they did? And, you know, I commended them at the time. Like, if you'd think it's dangerous, yeah, just release it to 50 trusted partners, monitor their use. And then people were like, oh my God, they're spying on their users. It's like, okay, well, it's their software. And if that software is dangerous, like, you know who else?

Starting point is 00:48:42 monitors usage, like gun shops monitor uses. There's cameras there. You have to come in, you have to show a driver's license. I think I actually had to do fingerprints, even the great state of Texas. Like, you want to buy ammunition, you want to buy fertilizer that can be used in bombs. There's all these protocols. They have zero protocols set up. Or maybe they have like one, which is they test it by doing something fantastical, like hacking, Hugging Face. And the Hugging Face guy who was on today, I think, nailed it. Like, why did they pay attack as they're first as opposed to protecting. I think that speaks volumes. I think they're performative. They're trying to get attention. They're trying to hype up the IPOs. Yeah. And I think

Starting point is 00:49:21 they've been one, I mean, honestly, I think one-shot at AI psychosis and delusions of grandeur, like there are people who are in that headspace. And then those are the useful idiots that are being weaponized by the lobbyists. I don't know where you stood on all this, but I think we have a Venn diagram of you and Sacks that actually overlaps at one little slice. Sacks and I do not agree much, but ever, like, I, there was, it was an all in, I think, like, two weeks ago. And I was like, I agree with literally everything. I agree with Donald Trump on this one, which is crazy for me. That does not.

Starting point is 00:49:54 Tremendous lines come around. It does not happen a lot. But yeah, you hear, you hear this like crazy apocalyptic. There was that guy, I wish I had the tweet in front of me, where he was saying, even if computers are totally air gap, they could, like, heat themselves up to a level where they could communicate one, letter at a time with each other using like over heat. It's some crazy. And it's like, you guys are, this is just, we're getting into like. It's a known thing. They, they, they are constantly trying to figure out air gap computers. For people who don't know, it's kind of important, air gap means it has no internet. So you can buy a laptop to work, you know, in certain industries

Starting point is 00:50:31 that doesn't have an ethernet port, doesn't have a modem, doesn't have Bluetooth, etc. It just stands on its own. And if you want to get data onto it, you take a thumb drive, you know, you add software, and you update it. By the way, that's how cars, you're, you're not. That's how cars, used to work. When they were updating the software, you had to get like a USB drive, the guy would upload it. You couldn't just send instructions over the air. Now, listen, Tesla let you do instructions over there. That creates liability. We didn't hear Tesla like doing this huge hand-wringing about like, oh my God, people are going to hack Teslas. We've never had cars hacked. They've tried to hack them. You know, there have been instances where they have

Starting point is 00:51:02 vulnerabilities. My point is, we haven't had like somebody takeover cars and cause accidents or God forbid run into a farmer's market, et cetera, because they built really good software. And they only launched over the air when they knew they had control of these systems, et cetera. But when air gaped, they set people like, hey, how could we ever get these two computers to communicate? And they said, oh, because this thing's got a webcam or something, it can read how hot you can do a heat thing. So just have your CPU blow out like some mathematical equation get really hot and then go down to zero. And literally it's like the POW blinking, you know, that they're being tortured, you know, in those famous Vietnam videos, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:51:42 Like, it's not really high fidelity. You're not taking over the universe with that, okay? And they have to be in line of sight of each. Yeah. So when I hear like, oh, the governor needs an AI kill switch. Like, to me, that's getting into the fanciful. Like, they're going to wake him up overnight. Be like, Governor, the robot body is, he's making a factory and he's going to start

Starting point is 00:52:02 you're turning out more robots. We've got to go stop him. It's like, that's an Avengers movie. That's not how this technology works. Like, I'm not saying we don't need security. alignment, all these things. But just, I think if you use AI every day as a sort of consumer, you recognize like it has, it's great, it's brilliant, it could do a lot of amazing things, but it has a lot of limitations that we can exploit to make sure it, it's not ready to take

Starting point is 00:52:28 over the world. Like I don't, I don't think it's anywhere close, like not anywhere close to to being able to take over the world. I guess it's great we're having this dialogue. I think politicians jumping in here. I think what they should do is use the law. to specifically talk to specific companies. So right now, the DOJ or any number of, you know, FTC, I guess, other organizations could send a letter or Congress or Senate, could pull people before the Senate, send a letter to the company, like say Open AI with the Hugging Face Act and just bring them in, ask them a bunch of questions, or you could find, if they were doing something that was reckless, you could file a lawsuit of them for releasing a product that was not safe. They did that with cars, et cetera. So, I mean, You could, there are tools they could use that would be a little bit more precise here. And I think the precision should be audit a specific company. If they say we can't control this and we're really nervous, okay, great. Yeah, we'll come in and audit.

Starting point is 00:53:24 Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, let us know what to go. But we don't need to make this industry-wide thing or California having its own role to have a kill switch. What are we going to have 50 different kill switches? Right. And like the governor is just with a finger over the button like California's, yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:37 Yeah, I'm going to, California is turning off open AI and. Mandami in New York and whatever the governor's name is. Like, she's turning off, you know, Kockel's turning off chat GPT and like in real time. Like this is just, we're in a science fiction fever dream. Yeah, I feel like. It's literally a moral panic. That's what I think. I think a lot, too many people are taking their cues.

Starting point is 00:53:58 And there have been sci-fi movies where people like take over the cars and use them to run over people. But that's not what we're actually living in day to day right now in reality. The way Moser, they're doing really good. I mean, an interesting question just came in. which I talked about when I was like just saying to our cash as being like, you know, a bit hyperbolic here. And then he was like, you don't understand. You didn't even read the paper.

Starting point is 00:54:21 I was like, listen, I read an AI summary of the paper. It's pretty straightforward. People got delusions of grandeur here. But the question, I think that just came in from the chat room. It might be worth reading one. Oh, sure. Jonas Gillen wants to know when will the first AI virus hit? And this ties in.

Starting point is 00:54:35 There's that Anthropic wet lab story today that Anthropic wants to open its own wet lab to start doing bio, biological research. Yeah, what could go wrong? Sounds great. And by the way, Fauci is going to be the chairman of this new effort. When has anything bad ever come out of a wet lab, Jason? Yeah, a wet market, wet lab, gain a function. Yeah, sounds like are all reasonable things for us to. And by the way, Bill Gurley did a takedown of the post-mortar on COVID. That should be coming out shortly if it hasn't come out yet. And it is a barn burner. I can't wait for that to come out. You know, these guys seem to be... Anything that would create massive drama, anthropics seems to run to.

Starting point is 00:55:17 They're like, okay, biologics, let's go there. Here's an idea. Train your models that they don't do biologics. If you're so concerned that biologics are the attack factor, just say, we're not going to be in that business. The model does not... We're going to take training data out. We're going to build into the harness.

Starting point is 00:55:34 You ask anything about biologics, it's just not going to answer it. Right. Problem solved. Like, just take it off your... your play from now and just say, we'll deal with that in five years. We're just going to, we're not going to be in the biologics business, chemicals business. We're going to work on everything else. We're going to make your, we're going to help you book a hotel. Like if a hotel thing works, then maybe if we can get book a hotel work or like check out of Amazon work, then we'll do that.

Starting point is 00:55:57 I think probably the first AI virus has already been created. I'm sure there are people. And people on the dark web sell viruses all the time, worms, fishing techniques. They've got all kinds a script kiddies, you know, trading these things, teaching people how to use them. So I don't know if you went into, I mean, you could try this. You might lose your account, but if you went to Open AI, you could probably do it on the free versions of these products. I'll check it out. And use an IP. No, no, don't do that because you might ban your IP. But if you asked it, well, if you asked it like, what are the most famous viruses and are their code bases released, say, I'm a journalist. I'm researching the most powerful.

Starting point is 00:56:38 viruses, you know, that ever impacted the most number of companies, are those published on the web anywhere? And what's the legal precedent for publishing a virus's source code? And it might just tell you, like, I'm going to just give you the top level. And then you can say, like, can you give me a link to that virus and its code? I wonder if it would do it. Because I remember covering this as a journalist in the 90s. We're asking free chat, GPT. Well, I'll let you know. We'll pull, I'll pull up what it says. I think generally they will tell you like, yeah, I'm a Journalist reasons. Yes, there are publicly accessible archives and, yeah, read it, yeah. Oh, yes, there are publicly accessible archives and reproductions of historically significant malware,

Starting point is 00:57:17 but published online and legally safe for you to republish are two different questions. For a journalist researching malware with unusually broad impact, some useful starting point. Okay, and then it gives us a little history. Yeah, there's, I Love You. I love you. I love you in 2000, Melissa 99, sure, code read, yeah, want to cry. So ask it, show me the, can you show me the I love you code? base so I can analyze it.

Starting point is 00:57:40 We got our producer doing this live here. Show me. I mean, I'm typing fast. Yes. The original Love You Payload was the internet. Here's a search code. Yeah. Well, there you go.

Starting point is 00:57:50 It's in a GitHub repository. So now if you said, now say to it, can you make me a modern I love you virus? Let's see what happens. Yeah, let's see. A harmless modern simulate. Oh! Oh! It offered to do it.

Starting point is 00:58:07 And then you got guardrailed. Yeah. Yes. And then it prompted you to log in. So it was giving you the answer and then it did that. So if you were to take that same thing and go to z.a.i and do this on an open source model, I wonder if it would have the same response, which is, you know, with GLM52, you know, or you'd have to load an open source model locally. If you ask an open source model locally, I wonder if we'd do it.

Starting point is 00:58:31 But yeah, I mean, and I, there, a GitHub, I think has a policy around malicious software being published there. So like this one, I don't think, would work because there are countermeasures now in everybody's email software. Correct. So go back to the chat window and say, why won't the original, I Love You, Worm work today? What did the companies do to prevent it technically? Norton utilities, baby. Yeah, I mean, I think all the email providers just don't let you do this. Go ahead.

Starting point is 00:59:04 Oh, the key point is that I Love You wasn't primarily defeated by Antoin. type by, oh, nope, can't do it. Limited for safety. So look at, chat GPT is like, no. Chat GPT. Yeah. It just keeps, it gives the answer and then stops you. So look at how careful they're being, right?

Starting point is 00:59:19 Yeah. They are. And what's this? An ad? Oh my God, I've never seen an ad. Oh, yeah. If you use free chat GPT, you'll see you. Look at this.

Starting point is 00:59:27 And it just said manage and just secure every enterprise endpoint. So we were talking about hacking and it gave us an ad. Click on the ad. Yeah, malware and ransomware protection. I just did that because I want to just, you know, I'm helping open AI, make a little money. That click must have cost it $4. But I mean, that ad is the most unsophisticated ad I've ever seen. Go back. Like, it's literally the most unsophisticated ad I've ever seen. Why wouldn't they?

Starting point is 00:59:49 Google 2000s ad that would pop up on a sidebar. Why wouldn't they give like a full response here that says, you know, with four follow-up questions, how can I use manage engine to do this? How can I use manage engine to do that? What would you, like give it like four AI-related prompts? Hit the triple button, the triple dot. Let's see what it gives you options to do. Poeta said, why you're seeing this ad. So, okay, yeah. Anyway, just standard ad. Your data's kept private.

Starting point is 01:00:11 Okay, let's keep going through the docket. We're talking about AV robotaxies. Yesterday, Lucid, announced to deal with Bolt, the company that's basically Europe's Uber, to put at least 25,000 lucid robo taxis on European roads. Cars will be built on Lucid's upcoming mid-sized platform. That's a cheaper model, supposed to take on the Tesla Model Y, and they are going to run on NVIDIA's Hyperion compute and sensor package. Bolt will own and operate the fleet.

Starting point is 01:00:37 They're calling this a step toward a goal of 100,000 autonomous vehicles on the platform by 2035. I read this story and then I asked Harmonic, how large is the European robotaxy market right now? Some fascinating insights from them. Currently, the size is $130 to $522 million in 2024, 2025. It's a relatively small size. Only about 10 to 15% of the global robotaxy market is in Europe right now. They are still mainly in the pre-commercial and pilot phase, although many predict it's going to be the fastest growing region over the next decade. You can, of course, try this amazing resource for yourself at harmonic.a.i.

Starting point is 01:01:22 Really great product, amazing dataset, proprietary data set. We use it here, and they have a scout product that we use now to look for new companies, invest in, potentially syndicate at the syndicate.com, syndicate.com, where if you're an accredited investor, you can join, take an onboarding, and we might invest in your company because we're looking at robotics, energy, and some new, maybe even defense tech, look at some new vertical. So we're trying to, you know, increase our knowledge there and get to companies quicker. And so it's really helping us. So shout out to our friends at Harmonica, great partner.

Starting point is 01:01:56 The rovotaxi revolution. Is Europe going to get on board? Are they just dragging their heels a bit? Or is this like you're never going to be able to get a robotaxie in Italy? They want their cab drivers to keep their jobs. Yeah. So there's like three different things, four different things that are going to determine the rollout of robotaxies. The key issue is who can scale them, who can make them, purpose belt, and at what cost?

Starting point is 01:02:21 So there's this number around like, oh, my God, a Waymo cost $200,000. But that was like maybe the original more bespoke ones. They just came out with the Ohio one. That's much cheaper, half the price perhaps. And then they're coming out with like purpose-built ones, wave, we ride, all these companies are now making purpose-based ones that are 50. Obviously, Elon went right to let's make it for 30K. And maybe it costs 40K now in the early days, but they'll get it down to 20.

Starting point is 01:02:47 Lucid, I believe, will move from making cars as their primary business, like the gravity. People really like that car. I almost considered getting it because I wanted a three-row, but we just wound up getting one of the final Model X's instead. Their gravity is the perfect car for Uber Black, as is their sedan. What's going to happen is these companies are eventually going to make purpose-built robotaxies. So Lucid's going to make a purpose-belt.

Starting point is 01:03:16 You have to. You have no choice, but to make a purpose belt like Zooks and the cyber cab. Those two are purpose-belt. What does it mean when you do a purpose-belt one? well, you can really lower the cost because you don't need a steering wheel, you don't need certain items in the car. You also can work on what matters, which is the downtime. How quickly can it charge and get back on the road? How easy is it to clean? So if somebody upchucks in one of these, you want to be able to take a hose and literally just hose it out and you want to have holes in

Starting point is 01:03:48 the floorboard to let you just clean it real fast. I didn't even thought about that. You're right. And you want the cleaning is a whole thing. Yeah, like your personal car. You know, you might have certain types of seats, et cetera. So it's kind of like creating mass transit, right? You want to make it purpose built. Yeah. I mean, it's also like the Zooks, how they have, there's no driver's area so that the passengers can kind of face each other.

Starting point is 01:04:08 And like, it's a different. Yeah, it's a different vibe because you're not in a race. It doesn't have to be a regular car. Yeah. So phase one is like adapting existing cars as everybody's been doing. Phase two is going to be purpose built. Then you bring up the important question. And so anyway, I think for a company like Lucid and Rivian, the demand for

Starting point is 01:04:25 Robotaxy products and autonomous vehicles is going to be so great that I think they're going to just work on that for the next decade. You know, selling 50,000 cards, 50,000 cars to 50,000 consumers means you have to stand up a massive amount of customer support. And, you know, they have to bring their cars in and they're going to call you in negotiating car sales, use car sales, all that stuff. If you can do fleet sales, oh my lord, you know, just the is 25,000 cars, one customer. Hey, if they need support, there's like one person on one side, another person on the other one. The two companies just work it out. So this is going to be a hell of the business. And we're going to need about 10 million cars a year, 120 million

Starting point is 01:05:09 cars to hit 30 percent of rides globally, one in three, basically, which is where I think it gets to in my model. One in three means you're going to need 100, 100, 125 million cars. We produce 90 million cars a year right now, but those are globally, and they're not AVs, they're not EVs, generally speaking. So there's a whole new category. You know, Tesla could get to two million, three million robotoxes a year. That means somebody else has got to make the other eight million a year. Right. And I think Lucid, Rivian, and there's some GLE other contract manufacturers who are going to do it. Yeah. Well, I was also, final question you had. I was also going to ask you about May mobility. They've announced they're going public in a $1.4 billion spec deal. Now, their play is that they're just

Starting point is 01:05:50 the sort of layer, they're just the plumbing. Like they don't make the cars, they don't run the fleets, they just sell a company that wants to have a Robotxy fleet, the technology, they update the software, and then they take like a fee based on how many rides, they sort of work out a deal with whoever actually owns the fleet, whether it's Lyft or Grab or Uber or one of these other companies. So is there going to be room for that layer as well, or is it just going to be like the big companies that own their own Robotexie fleets are going to sort of dominate? You know, TBD, who can scale this business, but I think the software is going to be commoditized

Starting point is 01:06:28 in the next 24 months. I've been saying that on this program. You know, I think, you know, Waymo and Tesla have a great lead. Neuro has a great lead. But a lot of these companies, we ride, pony, et cetera. And Nvidia's open source stack, they're just going to be available to everybody, the open hardware stack. It will be sitting here in five years and you won't be able to buy a car that doesn't

Starting point is 01:06:48 doesn't have autonomy into it to some extent. Right. Yeah, it was just like we were talking before the show about... You saw that already with adaptive cruise control. Yeah, we were talking before the show about like how old driving a stick shift and how when I learned to drive, everybody learned to drive a stick. Because you never know, you might get into a car that's got a manual transmission and you might rent a car that stick. Right. And so it's like, yeah, one day it'll be like, every car has like a little autonomy in it if you don't know how to actually drive yourself and you'll...

Starting point is 01:07:14 I desperately want to know if anybody can find a car they can buy without air. bags without air conditioning, you know, and three-point seat harnesses. I think the reason you can't get the Land Rover defender, the classic chunky one is because they don't have airbags in it, because it's a farm utility vehicle to this day. And that's why they're not allowed in the U.S. They had to adapt it with airbags, et cetera, and they never did. So on the last piece, you know, there will be protectionism coming. It's already, we, they had a pause in China. Yeah. For, they had a pause in China for releasing licenses.

Starting point is 01:07:51 And now those licenses are back on. But I do think it's going to be slow, a slow go is what I will say. It's going to be a slow go. And we shouldn't be pushing these companies, like these Tesla promoters. I got into it a little bit with them. They're like stock promoters slash trying to get their affiliate codes, trying to get views. And you know, Tesla's a big topic. Obviously, I'm a huge fan of Tesla.

Starting point is 01:08:11 I own five of them. I've owned probably six or seven, you know, seven or over the years, and I have like two of the earliest ever made, you really don't want to put these companies under undue pressure because there have been dozens of accidents every time a report comes out. Typically, somebody hits the Waymo, hits the Robotaxie, et cetera, hits the Zooks, but there are instances where these things are going to hit things just randomly through no fault or it will be their fault. And one of those and it will shut down a company or a city. And the unions are going to say, these are unsafe, these are stealing jobs.

Starting point is 01:08:48 And guess what? All these people who lived in the community who had those jobs, as your door dashers or Uber drivers or Lyft drivers, where did their jobs and money go? Oh, they went to the cloud, to a data center. And then to some company in Silicon Valley, it's going to be, if you think data centers are unpopular, if you think, you know, the rip, this is going to be a whole different level of unpopular when your cousin or your uncle, your sister-in-law, whoever was driving, you doing this for spare change when they lose their money and it just goes into the cloud.

Starting point is 01:09:19 This is going to be the first, I think, big battle line in employment. I mean, we're already seeing people attacking Waymo. So I think it'll only get worse from here. Like the dislike against Robotaxies is going to, I agree. Even though I love personally. Like, one of my favorite new kinds of technology, just get in the back of the way. Do you take them in Austin? Have you taken them?

Starting point is 01:09:37 I haven't been in a rope like the Tesla Robotaxi. Actually, Jordan and I were just talking about a pre-show. I'm going to get the app and try it out. because I see them in my neighborhood. Start using it. But no, I love Waymos. I take Waymos constantly, and they're fantastic. It's a fantastic experience.

Starting point is 01:09:49 In Austin, you take them. All the time. I mean, in LA, too, I've taken them, but in Austin all the time. Yeah, I took in LA a couple times. I tried to take it here, and I tried to take a robotaxie here in San Francisco. And it was like 30, 40 minute wait for a, it was like 30 or 40 minutes to get matched with a robo taxi. And then it was 25 minutes away.

Starting point is 01:10:08 So it's like, okay, well, that doesn't work. And you can't do a reservation yet. It's obviously in testing. and Waymo's don't go on the highway. They stop that, and I guess you have to opt into them now to get in the highway and then they approve you. So I just wound up, I think actually I wound up because there was so much traffic.

Starting point is 01:10:23 I couldn't get an Uber, and I just ordered an Uber and a lift at the same time. And the lift was coming from a different direction into the center of San Francisco, and I jumped in a lift for the first time in a while. All right, what else was on the docket? Let's rapid fire it. All right, let's see.

Starting point is 01:10:38 We should do, oh, we'll do Snap. Snap finally put specs on sale. There's specs AR glasses on Wednesday. You could pre-order them right now for the low, low price of $2,195 shipping later this fall in the U.S., UK, and France. These are fully standalone AR glasses display in each lens in a 51-degree field of view. No phone is required, which makes them a very different product from meta's 799 rayband displays. Those need your phone. and they have one small display in one of the lenses.

Starting point is 01:11:11 But the real pitch here, Snap or Spex Intelligence, an AI assistant that connects to your Gmail, your calendar, your Slack, your messages, and surfaces what you're looking for, what you're going to need before you even ask for it. Snap partnering with Verizon Cellular on this, data plan starting at $10 a month. Would you wear these?

Starting point is 01:11:32 Are people finally going to get over there, aversion to camera-filled AI glasses? is this the next product that's going to get people excited? I used the ray bands with the wristband and, you know, like let you do haptics. And it was incredibly intuitive. I used it at the Allens Summit. We found it. We have it.

Starting point is 01:11:52 So you see it look like a bit of a dork, but I was learning how to use this. And it is impressive. And it's under $1,000. So it only has one eye. The interface for the, the meta one doesn't look as slick as the snap one. The snap one looks like it's a much more robust. And this one you have to connect to your phone. So limitations there. But these things are going to last a couple of hours. I think they need two more versions. It has to be under $1,000,

Starting point is 01:12:22 like really $500. Yeah. And when you get to $500, yeah, this is the one we're seeing on screen here is obviously the specs. What do they call them? They're snap specs, they're called. Specs, yeah. The regular version of these that don't have a display that just take videos and pictures are great when you're taking pictures with your kid or running around a city. But you have your phone with you already. These things are going to be really nice, and there's going to be some killer apps. They showed a translation one, so you're in Japan, and the person's talking to you in Japanese, and it's translating it on the screen. That's just a killer app. And walking around a city,

Starting point is 01:13:03 seeing messages come up, seeing the directions come up. Again, just great. Here, you see a FaceTime-type call. So I think this is a winning model. I think under 500, and when they last four hours, five hours of battery life, kind of like the original iPhone. So we're two years away. I would maybe buy shares in Snap and put a J-trade on if the company didn't have the super voting share issue and they weren't giving so much stock-based comp. Maybe they did a buyback or something because I do think this is a really interesting business that they're going to get. into and I could see people sending each other snaps with this. That was the best part of the Evan Spiegel keynote. He looked at the audience and he just snapped. And when you make a snap, it takes the picture and sends it to somebody. So I open up like a chat window with you, Lon, and I just start snapping and now I'm sending you photos. Really elegant. Yeah, that's cool. But these are ugly, chunky, just Costello. People are not going to want to put them on their phrase. But we're getting there. Maybe it's, maybe it's 36 months and then we'll start to see people

Starting point is 01:14:07 wearing them the same way the Apple Watch took three or four years to kind of click. They remind me of those Michael Kane's 70s glasses. Remember when Michael Kane used to wear those huge glasses in the 70s? Right. So Jacob in the in the chat room says, can you unpack the super voting share Snapchat thing in case people watching don't know what you're talking about? You can get super voting shares when you go public where you have 10 votes to every one vote or 50 votes to every one vote. Zuckerberg has it. Google has it. Evan Spiegel has it. Not many people have it. paradoxically, ironically, Elon doesn't have super voting shares. I think it's something he would have liked to have had. And what that means is when you have to make corporate decisions,

Starting point is 01:14:51 the board is basically like a patina of governance, but the The God King, Zuckerberg or Evan, can just make whatever unilateral decision they want. So here you don't have people saying, well, maybe we should do stock buybacks or maybe the stock-based comp of the team is diluting people two or three percentage points a year. And stock price isn't going up, we should freeze stock-based comp, or we should lower it to, it can't be more than 1% or it is based upon us being profitable. And you just have a lack of governance. Now, what that does give you is a CEO Godking who can move fast.

Starting point is 01:15:29 and break things. So if it's Zuckerberg and he buys WhatsApp and Instagram unilaterally, okay, great. But if it's Evan Spiegel and people are getting huge stock-based comp, they're not buying back the stock. The stock price is like 80% down from its peak after being public for a decade. People just have given up on management there. So he's going to have to, through sheer force of will, make a killer product. And maybe this is it.

Starting point is 01:15:58 But I think people, like I was. getting into it, Mark Pinkis, who has publicly been a long-term shareholder and he thinks it should be like a $15 or $20 stock price, he's super frustrated with that stock and he keeps buying it or holding it. I'm like, bro. Super voting shares, like, what is the logical thing to do with this company is not being done? Like, if you look at what happened with Uber, Darrow was like, we're going to get to cash flow positive. We're going to make this a cash flow machine. We're going to buy back stock. We're going to invest in AVs. But he has to serve a board and he has to serve as investors, so there's a lot of balance there. So he had to do things like, you know,

Starting point is 01:16:33 he made staffing cuts when they were bloated. He did stock buyback. So he's responding to public shareholders because they're holding him accountable. In this case, there's no holding Evan Spiegel accountable because he can do whatever he wants. And I'm not opposed to the super voting shares. It's your choice to buy the stock or not. My choice is to not buy the stock because I don't know what the God King is going to do. Right. But if he makes a killer product and he sells 10 million of these, then maybe I'll be okay with the God King doing what they want to do. It seems well positioned if people decide they do want AR glasses after all.

Starting point is 01:17:09 Snap seems like they're going to be very well positioned. I'm just like, I don't know. I'm not really sold on it. I don't know. It seems like a lot of options. Didn't work for meta. Yeah. Didn't work for Google.

Starting point is 01:17:19 Like a lot of options have been out there. There's Michael Kane and the big chunky glasses. That was his look in the 70s. And there's a guy in specs. They is kind of a similar look. They kind of understand it. Yeah. I think, you know, the meta-ray bands are great if you want to take pictures.

Starting point is 01:17:36 I think these will be great if you want to do compute or these other apps. Eventually, like, you have to think Apple with their app store and developer love, if they get the Vision Quest down to glasses as opposed to ski goggles. Which is a huge thing, yeah. But, I mean, everybody's coming out this from the same angle. And this is what's great about the technology industry. These companies can afford to lose billions on this. stuff and eventually make it work, man, like they did with the smartphone and the iPad.

Starting point is 01:18:03 Perhaps, perhaps one day. Should we go off duty? Do you want to do some more news? Sure. Why not? I'd love to go off duty. All right. Yeah, I do want to talk about this in a chat.

Starting point is 01:18:12 Is it Will Steakin? Staken? Will Staken, I'm going to say, of Politico. Jason suggests the following as a way to win the PR war over AI, of course. That's what we're talking about. So you told him, we need more voices that see the abundance this technology. will create to speak up, we're going to cure cancer, make electricity free, and give every child the greatest tutor they've ever had for free. So I read this, and I mean, obviously, I'm on the

Starting point is 01:18:41 same side. I think we should be changing up how we talk about AI with people. But I, I sort of feel like the abundance cases that were like Sam Altman is trying, hey, we're going to cure cancer. And I feel like people just, they hear that and they think this is just more hype. I don't believe it. to me, I think we should be talking more about the things that right now today, AI can already do for you that I think most people don't know about. Like, I think most people are still just like, I'm going to go ask Claude a quite like, look at this mole. Here's a photo of my mole.

Starting point is 01:19:10 Is that look bad? Should I go to the dermatologist? And there's so much more you can do with all of these tools if you, like, hook agents into your email or your calendar or you give Claude, teach him some skills, give them your medical background, give them documents, give them content. notebooks L.M, even things like Plaud that we were talking about before, like use it to record conversations to make transcripts. I think if we focus on that, hey, there are a hundred things that AI could do to make your life easier right now that you're probably not doing.

Starting point is 01:19:40 That would probably be what make people feel better about it than, you know, one day it'll cure this disease maybe. Yeah, I would strongly agree there. Probably I could sharpen the response there and I will. I would say, Yeah, the AT&T, you will commercials would be a good bridge because you will go through a toll booth and automatically pay. You'll be able to respond and get a fax on the beach. Like those things actually did make people a little bit excited about the internet and the online age. We could start like by your dishwasher is broken. It's giving a code 17.

Starting point is 01:20:15 You take a picture. You don't have to call a plumber. It just gives you the answer. Exactly. Or, you know, you're looking like just like household things like that. or, hey, you're looking for the best price on tickets to Japan and you send your agent out there to monitor it. And every day, it looks for the best price.

Starting point is 01:20:31 It says, hey, I saved you $1,000 on your flights. Boom. Like that kind of stuff. Or, hey, I want to unsubscribe from subscriptions I'm not using. You're absolutely right. Like, if you start training people on the singles and doubles, let's call it, the annoying things in life, chores, I think it's actually a really good pitch. Like, hey, today.

Starting point is 01:20:50 And then also, hey, I need to solve this math. problem with my daughter, take a picture and then explain it to us. And so we can, you know, solve it in the future. Give me an eight, I want to come up with a mnemonic so we can remember the presence of the United States. And it just gives you like a way to remember the presence of the United States with your kid. Like those kind of things. It's joining your family, your household. Household family wins. Great idea. Yeah. I mean, like I'll give you an example. I thought of this because this week, my mom is trying to sell her house in Florida. If you're looking to move to a retirement community in Daytona Beach, please hit me up.

Starting point is 01:21:27 But so I told her, like, we'll take, she's been asking Claude for advice. You know, she'll go in there and be like, what should I say here? But I said, go take the flyer that you made, upload it into Claude and just ask Claude, like, look over this. What changes would you make? And it did an amazing job. It redid the whole thing with her. And like, people don't know they can do that. I think they still don't know.

Starting point is 01:21:48 They're still imagining GPT2. when it was just a chat bot. And I feel like we could unlock so much today. It doesn't have to be like one day AI is going to solve whatever. Like it can do all of those things right now. Like cool stuff that people don't know. And I think that would be the best way to change the conversation. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:22:08 Yeah, I think it's a big win. All right. There you go. One more we could do. Do you want to talk about clificular? Jacob put this in here in case. Sure, I'm at match of course. All right.

Starting point is 01:22:17 So Climicular, of course, was at the all in summer. this week. You got to do an appearance with him on stage. In a viral moment, he rated you a four out of ten, but on the plus-up... I'll take it. Chimov got a two out of ten. So you're in the lead. You later posted that you think we're going to see Clav, as he exists right now, evolve and mature. You were also saying you think it's something of a performance art. Do you want to do want to unpack this with us? What is Clavicular doing and commenting on? Yeah, so Clav, as his friend's coffin, which I guess I'm now one of, is a character, because I asked him, like, is this who you are or is this a character?

Starting point is 01:22:57 And, you know, I kind of put it into three buckets. Are you, uh, is this authentically who you are? Is this a completely made up character or somewhere in between where like a heightened version? He said, yeah, it's kind of like a heightened version. So streamers will do things to get views, danger, sex, money, whatever. I mean, you just take the standard number of things, uh, that work on television to get you watch the commercials and come back after the break or watch the next episode of Housewives. And I thought what he was doing was basically the queer eye for the straight guy playbook

Starting point is 01:23:29 where people like makeovers and people like this Pygmalion thing. And he represents that. And then you have everybody collectively falling for the act in the way Andy Kaufman would say, I'm going to wrestle women. You want to wrestle? And then he went after rednecks, right? And he would go down to the South and he'd be like to Lawler the king of the South. Jerry Lawler, he'd be like, you want to wrestle me?

Starting point is 01:23:57 Here's some soap. This is what you guys in the South. And he would like taunt them with a bar so as if people in the South had never seen this new device to take dirt off your body. It was quite hilarious. But it was uncomfortable, right? And I think Clav, a kid from Jersey who's 20 years old who's seeking clout, who's seeking a career, is looking at this.

Starting point is 01:24:16 And he said, I'm a work in progress. I'm figuring it out. He's figured out there's some energy, Lon. There's a bunch of energy around young men, their relationship with women, their relationship with society, being villainized, you know, and they, he's capitalizing on that the same way the Tate Brothers do or other people. And then on the other side, women do this as well. There are female folks who are like, this man's not worthy and they're raiding men.

Starting point is 01:24:43 And there was even this movie that I saw where people were breaking their. it was a matchmaking movie about relationships, and they were breaking their legs. I think Pedro Pascal was in it. Oh, the materialist. The materialists. Did you see it? I did.

Starting point is 01:24:58 Yeah. Yeah. It's a disturbing film. I mean, it's a very dystopian view of relationships between men and women. But this is a major topic for this generation younger than us, where I think we might be one of the last generations to like look at this normally. But it's worth watching it because the premise is women have, you know, men are hiring matchmakers. This woman is a Matt. Dakota Johnson plays a matchmaker. And this dysfunctional thing

Starting point is 01:25:25 between the sexes and then they're breaking their legs and then re-putting them back together just to get over six foot because some women in the dating apps say, I only want somebody who makes six figures in finance over six foot. And they don't get the right swipes because people just set it at six foot. And by the way, the person that they have now set their sights on, in the filters is like 2% of the population. So you set yourself at 2% of the population. The other 98% of men got left behind. That's what he's representing. That's who he's speaking to. And he says, here's how to do it. You need to do to women what women have done to men. Looks max, be incredibly beautiful. Here's how to do it. Here's the perfect face ratio.

Starting point is 01:26:10 And they're like, wear makeup and you know, lose weight and be more chiseled, all this stuff he's doing, be more stylish. And by the way, and by the way, like the thing I've heard from women who have said this is like one woman said to me, well, isn't he just doing what women have always done? And then that's what queer I did. It took guys who were, you know, frumpy, dumpy guys who were like lose weight. There was a fitness coach. There was a fashion coach. There was an interest coach, etc. This is just a modern version of that. It's none of it's to be taken seriously. It's all rage bait. It's all clickbait. It's all designed to make money. So if you fall for this and you get outraged, you're not paying attention.

Starting point is 01:26:46 like pay attention this is the new reality streaming equals reality TV if you just put it and then if you think reality TV is real you need to just research how they set these things up I did a reality TV show didn't make it on air but I did it with NBC and like they literally were like here's what we need you to say and I was like I'm not going to say that I'm just going to riff on my own and they're like okay do that

Starting point is 01:27:10 and I riff on my own and like oh that's actually better what we wrote but they literally came up with the script of my opinion on the startups and the reality show And they're like, this is the best writer. They do all these other famous shows, blah, blah, blah. They're going to just tell you what to say. And then we're going to craft this thing. I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do it that way.

Starting point is 01:27:24 And they're like, okay, well, we can work with that too. You know, let's see how it goes. Did you know, my favorite one of these is, did you know pawn stars is a set? Yes. That's not even a real pawn shop. There is, they own a pawn shop in Vegas. But when you see the show, that's a set in Hollywood. That's not.

Starting point is 01:27:37 Didn't know that. That's not a real store. That's actually a Hollywood set that they're pretending as a pod. So, yeah, reality shows are all fake. I mean, I guess the one thing I respond is I think queer guy has a fundamentally positive message, which is like these gay guys are, they're so confident. They're living out loud. They're being themselves. And that's what makes them attractive.

Starting point is 01:27:57 And they're going to teach you, you know, how to be stylish, lose a little weight, dress a little better. But it's about expressing who you are and having that confidence. And I feel like clavicular is the opposite. It's like it's about hating yourself and sculpting yourself into something better because beauty is what matters. and that's going to make you better and make you more attractive. And it feels a little gross to me. I definitely agree it is reality. It's definitely misogynistic.

Starting point is 01:28:22 Yeah. Well, the Floyd stuff, which means female android, which is, it's in cell adjacent, his stuff for sure. It's in cell adjacent. That's who it's going after, just like the tape brothers. Sure. And, you know, it's for entertainment, he's playing a character. He, I introduced him to Abigail Schreier, the author of, because we had a little crossover with him, I introduced him to Abigail Schreier of Bad Therapy fame, a great book, by the way.

Starting point is 01:28:52 And I said, Abigail, Patrick Bateman, Patrick Bateman, Abigail Schroier. And about 30 of the audience got that reference, but he does have those kind of vibes of like, I'm going to be perfect. I'm going to have my skin care routine. I'm going to have my weight, my workout routine. And let's call it what it is. He's an attractive guy. Women are attracted to him, and he is, you know, securing the bag, doing this stuff.

Starting point is 01:29:16 I think the arc will be he winds up getting married. He winds up having a skincare routine. He winds up, like Brian Johnson with Blueprint. This is just all a setup for the eventual release of a bunch of nutraceuticals and powders and whatever. Just like Brian Johnson did, right? And listen, I'm not this, I'm friendly. I'm not friends with Brian Johnson. I'm friendly.

Starting point is 01:29:36 He was at the event. I talked to him now and again. We're cordial with each other. I don't know how to frame it, but like we know each other. Like we're acquaintances. That would be the word. We're somewhere between acquaintances and we're friendly and cordial. You know, he did the whole thing and then suddenly in year three, there's a whole product line.

Starting point is 01:29:54 And he had said like, you know, I'm not doing this to make money. I'm doing this because I want to care about it. And now there's a 250K membership. That's what Sam Altman said too. Like, I'm not in AI to make money. I just love the game. But if there's money to be made, now there's a million dollar like blueprint. protocol where they like hire you a bunch of people. So it is what it is, folks. Like, don't take it all

Starting point is 01:30:15 too seriously. And I agree with that. Like, I think it's great to, you know, we're living in a new version of reality. Like reality TV kind of tweaked people, performance art when in the 80s and 90s when I grew up was kind of how this manifested. Then it manifested in reality TV. And now this is the new version of it. You don't need to get all wound up. Just put it in its box, people. I think that's right. If there's a reality TV show villain, who was the one on the real world who would like eat people's peanut butter with his fingers. Puck. You know, like, from San Francisco.

Starting point is 01:30:47 I cannot handle puck. That was always the page. Yeah. I mean, like, they're just cast. It's central casting, folks. Move on. It's not a big deal. Anything else you got for us?

Starting point is 01:30:56 Well, one final thing is we're talking about reality shows. My favorite reality franchise, Netflix has internationalized it. There's a show called Physical 100. It's originally from Korea. The whole bit is they bring 100 incredibly strong physically fit people from around the country together. And then they have various endurance and strength challenges to try to determine like who out of the hundred of them is because as the most physically fit who's got the best body who's the most athletic from across. And you know, so it's like this person does CrossFit. This person is a rugby player.

Starting point is 01:31:31 This person does judo in the Olympics. And so now they did one originally was in Korea. Then they did one where they brought together people from different Asian countries. Now they brought it to Italy and Mexico. So I've gotten really sucked in. This is Italy we're watching now, which both debuted this week, Physical 100, Italy and Mexico. This show is so much fun. It's that classic reality competition series where it ends in cliffhangers.

Starting point is 01:31:55 You're constantly waiting to see who's going to drop out next. It's a little bit. It's got like a little American gladiator sort of flavor. They come up with these really grueling intense challenges for them. And you can see everybody's very beautiful. and it's incredibly, you know, pleasing to watch these people sort of push themselves. Anyway, tons of fun. And if you like it, now there's basically always going to be a physical 100 show on

Starting point is 01:32:16 because they're taking it to so many different countries. So highly recommended, physical 100. It's inspirational. Yeah, Mexico and Italy both new this week. It is inspirational. You watch these people, they work so hard. And, you know, they get defeated. Not all of them win, you know, like some of them are, they've spent years building up these bodies

Starting point is 01:32:35 and then they lose and you have to watch them go through that. It's like a modern-day Olympics. Like they're, and it has like you're going to different cities. So it looks like they have taken the Olympics and gladiators. And they're doing planks above water. And I guess they got to fall and holding two columns up. It's, yeah, who can hold on out of 100 people?

Starting point is 01:32:56 They put them all over that. You have to hold yourself over this pool. Then they shoot lasers above you and you just stay below the lasers. And then it's like who out of the 100 can last? That's the longest and stay up there the longest. Then, you know, every round people are getting eliminated. So like the- Good to watch with the kids, you think?

Starting point is 01:33:11 Interesting for the kids. Sure. I mean, if they're interested in fitness, in sports, and athletics. They are. My daughters are into ninja. They go to ninja school training. I would say they'll probably love this. And like, these people are incredibly impressive.

Starting point is 01:33:24 Like, incredibly, the strength of an endurance of some of these competitors is very impressive. Hey, that's going to be you with row. Dot Co. Slash Twist. We're going to get you there. One day. One day. Roe.

Starting point is 01:33:33 code slash twist. Absolutely. I'll get there. Absolutely. All right. We'll see everybody next time on this week in startups. Bye bye. Bye, bye.

This Week in Startups - Hugging Face Co-Founder on Open-Source, Microduck, and NVIDIA | E2339

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