This Week in Startups - Why AI has no taste and how to fix it (w/ Thais Castello Branco) | E2319

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by: YSecurity https://YSecurity.io/TWIST MongoDB https://MongoDB.com/ai Odoo https://Odoo.com/twist Today's show: AI models can solve PhD-level math equations and code an app in minutes… So why does everything they design look like identical slop? Thais Castello Branco, founder of Taste Labs, raised $18.5M in seed funding to teach frontier models about aesthetics and outputting quality content. She talks to Jason and Lon about why even frontier models regress to the mean on subjective tasks, how paid "TasteMakers" can improve output quality, and whether AI accelerates or destroys the half-life of "what's cool." PLUS Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI hedge fund liquidated its public stock portfolio, but it may be too soon to count this 25-year-old completely out. Google Earth adds AI generation and turns into a misinformation factory. LinkedIn and Substack join the AI slop crackdown. And why does every venture capitalist seem to have an opinion about the Ceuta border crisis? Guest Thais Castello Branco on X: https://x.com/thaiscbranco_ Taste Labs: https://tastelabs.com/ Amplify Partners: "Kill the Slop": https://www.amplifypartners.com/blog-posts/kill-the-slop-announcing-our-investment-in-taste Relevant Links Leopold Aschenbrenner's essay "Situational Awareness": https://situational-awareness.ai/ CNBC on SA fund collapse: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/31/leopold-aschenbrenner-situational-awareness-fund-fire-sale.html Henk van Ess thread on Google Earth + Nano Banana: https://x.com/henkvaness/status/2082912544394498228 Substack CEO Chris Best: "Against Claudefishing": https://post.substack.com/p/against-claudefishing NPR on the Ceuta crisis: https://www.npr.org/2026/07/31/g-s1-136507/morocco-spain-migration Ethan Goodhart's self-driving golf cart post: https://x.com/EthanGoodhart/status/2082136189998682598?s=20 "Wind" app on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/zZqmhhwf TechCrunch: "Gritt exits stealth": https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/gritt-exits-stealth-with-34-million-for-robots-to-build-solar-plants-then-everything-else/ CA Gov: Project Nexus solar-covered canal announcement: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/04/29/governor-newsom-announces-the-completion-of-first-of-its-kind-solar-covered-canal-in-the-central-valley-piloting-a-new-way-to-save-water-and-reduce-costs/ Molly Wood's "Everybody in the Pool" podcast: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/ Timestamps:   0:00 Coming up on today's show… 1:23 Thais Castello Branco on teaching models to have good taste 10:45 YSecurity - The on-demand security team for startups. Need enterprise-grade security without hiring a $400k CISO? YSecurity gives you 40+ expert engineers, matched to exactly what you need, by the hour, with your first six hours completely free. Go to https://YSecurity.io/TWIST 15:19 The "TasteMaker" community of paid human curators 20:37 MongoDB - AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start building at https://MongoDB.com/ai 24:40 Jason's personal "cool hunter" prompt 30:16 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at https://Odoo.com/twist 37:36 Situation Awareness lacked situational awareness 46:59 Claude models hacked three external organizations 50:54 Google Earth adds Nano Banana for some reason 54:24 The AI Slop crackdown spreads 57:54 Too many opinions about the Ceuta migrant crisis 1:04:05 Self-driving golf carts and also cars 1:09:53 Robot arms are installing solar panels   Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp   Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons   Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm   Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis   Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/   Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland   Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis   Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

You have models that can solve cyber hack and solve PhD level of math problems and they can't write a good tweet or make a good design. The average is that thing that you're going to kind of not even take a second glance at that you've seen a lot. The people who build these things have no taste. Let's be honest. They don't have taste. Most design, most tweets, most blog posts are average. I haven't replaced that function yet. I don't feel like we have figured this out yet. Everyone I know who used to work in media as this kind of cultural, Curator class, curator, curator. We're all struggling to find work. The more you have of this mass production of things,

the more I think the peak of the peak of the peak becomes valuable. This weekend startups is brought to you by Odo, the all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at Odo.o.com slash twist. That's Odo.com slash twist. MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start building at MongoDB.com slash AI.

And Y Security, the on-demand security team for startups. Need enterprise grade security without hiring a $400,000 C-So? Y-Security gives you 40 plus expert engineers matched to exactly what you need by the hour with your first six hours completely free. Go to y-security.io-slash-Twist. That's the letter Y, security.com. All right, everybody. Welcome back. It is Friday.

It's July 31st, 2026. I'm in New York City, World Tour, Hawaii, Paris, Tokyo, New York. You've been everywhere. Austin next week and get ready for the big school. Everybody says, school starts at August 15th now, Lon. Did you know that? I think they added more holidays for the kids during the year.

When I was going to school, it was September, second week of September, you go back. This seems shockingly early to me. I broke out of the Matrix a while ago. I told these schools, like, listen, we live a non-traditional, like, situation. We're going to take the kids on a ski week. We're going to start, you know, Christmas a week early. We're going to come back two days later. And, you know, they get put all this kind of pressure on you. And I'm like, but we're going to have a tutor and we'll keep up with the stuff. And I want

them to see the world. And I was really excited because my three daughters came with me to Paris and they came with me to Tokyo. But they came to found a university, Japan, and got to see some of the content. So I'm really excited about that. Because how do you raise kids, Lon, in this new world? in this new AI world where like you could be taking a class and never put it to you. We already were in that situation. We're like, is this class going to be applicable? Now it's like, is anything applicable? What is the skill of the future?

Do you need to read Hamlet at this point? Like, I don't know. I'm glad I did, I guess. Or maybe you do, and that's what makes us uniquely human is our, you know, artistic ability and other things, which we'll get into today. Read Hamlet. It's good. It's good. I'm not saying Hamlet's not good.

You should read it. I'm just saying. And I mean, all the jobs are going away, except for the six open job wrecks I have right now. Twist producer and editor. Growing. Not going away. We need newsletter writers, but most jobs are going on. Well, if you're ambitious, now it's the best time ever.

All right, we've got a lot of news, but we also have a guest. We do. So we're going to do guest and then news. What's in the news to tease it a bit? Sure. Well, we got to talk about situational awareness. That's Leopold, Oshon Brenner's fund. He's only 25.

His public portfolio has been sold off to Citadel. But there is more to this story. I think everybody initially... We're going to get into it. Yeah. And everybody initially was like, ha, ha, Wall Street. This kid got blown out. He's done.

There's a lot going on here behind the seeds. And I have strong feelings about it. What else is in the news? Well, there we got to talk about Google made this insane decision to add... They added nano banana to Google Earth. Did you see this? So you could use their AI image-generated. to manipulate images from Google Earth,

I think you can immediately see why that might be a questionable idea. Shenanigans might ensue. Yeah, so we'll have to talk about that. Anthropics models. Last week we talked about Open AI's models escaped their sandbox and went wild on hugging face. They hung out there for a whole weekend. So that inspired Anthropic to investigate

what their own models were up to. They found some surprising things. So we've got their report on the three incidents. Okay, so now it wasn't enough for Open AI, Anthropic had to catch up and say, no, no, we're committing grand theft as well. We're breaking into other people's. We're cyber hacking. We are also a devastating cybersecurity threat, okay?

Everybody, listen, it's not just to be clear. Yeah, so we'll talk about that. And we're going to go off duty at the end. We are. And we got, you've used through a ton of docket suggestions at us. We've got some rapid fire news. We are going to go off duty. It's a patch of, Jayf, all right.

Let's introduce our guests because I think this was a suggestion from J-Cal. This was. You saw her launch video on X-C. and we're like, book this lady, and we always listen to you. This is Taise Castello Bronco from Taste Labs. She is designing a, it's a system. It's a two-pronged system for generating better quality stuff with AI. She feels like AI has cracked the objective domains like coding,

but subjective domains that require taste judgment. You need another layer of preference data on top of that. That's what they are building at Taste Labs. Tice, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Welcome to the show. Tai Is, T-H-A-I-S, the first time I've ever heard this name. But it's a Greek name.

You're not Greek. But you have a Greek name, which scores you immense points with this Greek kid from Brooklyn. Welcome to the show. I'm already up on the other side. Yeah, you're starting from a very, very good position. Good start, good start. So why do most large language models have no taste? Because when I design something or a founder comes to me,

and they show me their design. I'm like, yep, that's the intranet from how that is the canonical, you know, tasteless Facebook-looking, you know, intranet with the sidebar and the shadowing. And it just always looks not like slop, but it looks the same. Same. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Why does it suck like this?

Because it's a known problem. Well, and we keep hearing about how smart these models are. That's exactly, I think, people's frustration is you have models that can solve cyber hack and solve PhD level of math problems and they can't write a good tweet or make a good design, which, and I think a lot of this honestly goes back to like, how are these models trained, right? I think a lot of the logic is how do you arrive at the most likely answer of something that should be the correct answer. And in math or coding, that's kind of exactly the behavior you want. But then for something that's more subjective, what's considered great, right, like in real life, like things that you encounter that are like, hey, this is really great writing or really good. great design, they tend to be things that are a bit more unique, that are a bit more, like out of distribution, right? It's not the average. Like, the average is that thing that you're

going to kind of not even take a second glance at that you've seen a lot. And so I think that variety is one of the core things that are missing, but also that duels, right? I think the other piece that's very weird is the fact that, like, both of you could, for example, prompt to, for two completely different things, but then the end output would like look the same. And why? Like, I'm asking for a totally different use case. Like, why should this be, like, why should this look the same? And so I think this almost like fits to the prompt and fit to the user intent and almost like personalization is almost missing from the model. Well, and it makes sense in two ways to me. Have you been ever tie us to Palo Alto or Atherton? Yeah, you know,

driven up and down, El Camino Real. It is a wasteland, architecturally, design-wise. Have you ever gone to a rich person's $40 million house? They all look at the same restoration hardware. Descratsy, odd. You can barely keep a Michelin Star restaurant below San Francisco. The people who build these things have no taste. Let's be honest. They don't have taste. They have taste in like private jets and then it's a big drop off from there. Like they know which private jet is the best one. They could talk to you about it for hours, but they can't do anything else. Like that's it. I mean, they have no taste. And then second, if you were to take everything as opposed to skimming the cream, most design, most tweets, most blog posts are average. In fact, when you take

everything, you're guaranteed to have regression to the mean. That is like the term that exists. So I guess how do you reverse that? And then who are your customers and how are you working with them? Both great points. And by the way, I think quickly on the first point of like kind of who has taste or like how to develop taste. I think this it's very hard, right? Like, this is such a rare skill because I think it takes this combination of like seeing many things and having that exposure in whatever domain it is. And I think it's impossible for every human to develop taste and everything. There might be one area you pick that you're like, okay, I'm going to obsess over this specific thing. And like, for example, half my family are like architects. So the side of interior

design, they're obsessed over. They have great taste in. They might have less good taste in code because they didn't spend their life like perfecting that. And so this process of like developing really strong opinions and intuition for like what is good or what is right when there isn't a clear right answer. Just like takes a lot of work and trial and error. And so yeah, I think it's, we have to find the people that have it to help us go and then train these models and like determine what good is. And yeah, I think a lot of our challenge now. So we, we work in two ways. We work half for the frontier labs on how do we benchmark their models, eval their models, understand where they're breaking and figure out exactly how do we pull them more out of

distribution into this direction of greats and how do we both fix it from like a capability, in terms of more like mistakes that they're doing or inability to do things like vision or 2D reasoning, which are more foundational, but then also these higher order things of like creativity and style and like aesthetics. And then on the other side is like, okay, great, let's assume we're making these foundation models better. How do we work with application layer companies and agent companies that aren't necessarily touching the model layer, but that wants to still make the outputs better, right?

So what can we control there? And I think a lot of our answer there is both context of like how do we, We help the generation be better before it even starts by like feeding it the right context. So most users nowadays that are using things like, I don't know, lovable or cursor, codex or Claude or Figma design to create are not experts, right? They're not designers professionally. They're regular people just wanting to make interesting great things. And of course they're not going to know how to express what they want in the exact right

terminology or right really good problem. You know what kills more enterprise deals than bad products? Security concerns. One question from a customer's IT team, and suddenly your whole pipeline is frozen in place. What happens if you get hacked? How will you protect our data? But relax. There's no need to panic. This is why you brought in Y security. Why security is your on-demand security team. They're providing you with 40 plus engineers who've been in the trenches at places like Apple, Uber, Microsoft, Robin Hood, and Brex. Hey, I invested in two of those six. But you're not hiring a full-time CSO at 400K a year, are you?

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The data labeling annotation companies. Are you like those or are you something different? How do I put you in a box and understand this? It's hard because we kind of don't like boxes. So I would say we like, so half of our business. maybe it looks more like that. Like half is more like data, our environments. But the other half is tools. It's API. So I come from Axop before I started ataste. And so I love this infraside of like, how do you build the tools for agents? What needs to be true in the world? What needs to exist for agents to do great work? And we're also building those very opinionated tools and products that look more like infrastructure or like API shape things. So yeah, it's both.

Multiple things I was going to ask you a question along here. Because I think one of the things an observation I've had is we used to have a curator class and the curator class were restaurant reviewers. We had Lon was part of it. I was part of this. We had incredible reviewers of movies. Elvis Mitchell

A.O. Scott. And then who was the one from the 80s that like Brett East and Ellis was a from the New York Times? It was a very famous movie critic in the 80s and 90s. You look it up on Claude or something. Yeah. That's producer Claude. I'm not sure. I'm thinking of a few

different ones. I'm not sure which one you need, but I'll see. Something Maslin? Oh, Janet Maslin. Sure. Janet Maslin was like a real critique. And then you had the New Yorker. Pauline Kale, Roger Ebert, the list goes on it. But these were intellectuals who made it their lives work, you know, to go to restaurants, to study food, to study art, to go to art exhibitions, to study the opera. Sure. And they have been hollowed out along with the newspapers and the magazine class

and what's the first thing to go? You know, you're like, hey, listen, there's other people who can review books, there's other people who review this. And so they just got gutted. And social media. I mean, now that I can just go on X and see what does everybody think

of the new Spider-Man movie, maybe I don't need a guy who saw it early to tell me in a 200-bird review. That's my question for you, Lon, is that's been lost, right? Is there, because when you go onto X or Instagram, like, I haven't replaced that function yet. Is it been, is it still chaotic and they're just all losing their jobs? Yeah, I mean, I don't feel like we have figured this out yet.

Everyone I know who used to work in media as this kind of cultural critic or thinker, curator class, curator. Those people are all struggling to find work. And, you know, here I am. I mean, honestly, I'll just talk, here I am talking about AI and tech with you lovely people right now, not movies, not pop culture. because we sort of phased that function out. I don't think we have replaced it with anything solid. I think people just now use AI or Rotten Tomatoes or social media as sort of a or TikTok. Well, this is an opportunity for you, Teas.

Why don't you just like, we've got an incredible company, you've got incredible customers. Maybe you could create this class by hiring these folks, but then we lose them in the public and they're trapped in some AI box somewhere. So what's your thought on this creator? class because I'm going to give you my secrets of how I very quickly figure things out. I'm going to give you my stack and then I want to compare it to your stack and your process. Because you hire humans, right, to help you. I was going to say, we actually, and we call them tastemakers.

So we have this awesome community of about like a thousand tastemakers of different domains, like different specialties in terms of design, different media types, different styles. And we purposely wanted to bring folks from like very distinct style buckets to so that we can have that diversity. And I think it's worked in a really good setup because you have folks that have, to your point, spend years, like, honing their craft, developing very strong opinions, developing that, like, critic sense. And honestly, a lot of what they do with us is literally like being a design critic. And that they get to both think be a part of this and be a part of changing. And I think they have the same frustration as we're talking about in terms of slopp and being like,

I don't want to live in a world where all of it looks the same and feels. And these are pay. They get pay 50 bucks an hour, 100 bucks in a hour. or something like that? So we pay them, of course, for their time, but I think we've also been exploring some more interesting ways to collaborate with them, both involving them more deeply in the company. Some folks have been joining full time, actually.

Oh, great. We've been testing some different things. So even like partnerships are like buying this new concept of equity for poor workers. No, not that. Not that. Like we're testing almost like allowing them to contribute their designs to our index. Because part of it is like we're building this design index. So if they can contribute their portfolios or things that they've done in the past.

And get credit? when the LLM does output? Not necessarily that, because that's like a hard attribution, but more so are search engines. So this like API product that I'm telling you about, that's something that we're testing or, yeah, having these assets also be a part of like lab projects and so it monetizes a little bit different. Yeah, I suggest money. For sure. Money, money seems to work pretty well for this class.

All right. So. I have one. Can I take it in a little bit of a philosophical direction? Sure, why not? Let's do it. So to me, when I, when I'm. I think of taste, when I think of like the people in my life, well, they have great taste,

part of it is the uniqueness. Like, well, they told me about a band I'd never heard before. They turned me on to this obscure TV show from the 70s. It was so cool. And so I wonder, once you're commodifying taste, what you're saying, we're going to teach this AI how to have taste. Doesn't that go away? Don't you lose that?

And now the AI is recommending the same kinds of things to all sorts of people. and it loses that rarity that made it special? I think that would be my fear. That's why I think we're trying not to do. I think it's more so about execution of us doing it well. Okay. But I don't, yeah, that's definitely not the goal. I think because part of it right now is the bar is so on the ground.

And the first job is just let's lift the bar off the ground and even get to place where these models can output like high quality things. Then I think it becomes more a problem of like personalization. But I don't think we're there yet. I think it's like we have to first fix just quality. and I think there's elements of quality that more people would agree on in terms of just like craft and polish. And then there's things that people would more disagree on depending on like style or fit or audience. Sure.

But yeah, I think quality is the challenge first. But yeah, definitely don't want to end up with that scenario. So this is an interesting philosophical thread. And let's keep going and pulling and see where it leads us to. If everyone knows in 1982 that you two is this really cool band before. you know, the Joshua tree comes out and, you know, then all of a sudden everybody knows about it. We kind of all feel like it's been commodified, the knowledge of it. Right. So it's a never-ending task. And, you know, this is happened very acutely in Japan. I go to Japan twice a year.

Have you been, by the way? To Japan? No, I actually have it. Oh, I mean, if you're into, if taste is your thing, I brought lawn for the first time. It's neat. If taste and refinement and Kai Zen, the constant improvement concept that comes from Japan, is like, get you excited. Oh, my Lord, you're going to blow your mind to watch people kind of just operate in the world. But there's a problem. TikTokers, Instagram influencers. I can't stand these people now because what they do is there's places I've been. Like I started talking about Naseko where I ski like seven years ago, I guess.

And now everybody knows about it. I can't get a hotel room. I can't get a reservation. Then in Japan, somebody finds out that this noodle shop that's 150 years old is like the best one. And then everybody who goes there feels the need to go there and TikTok it. And now those places have crazy lines. Some of them now, and I'm making the X here. This is what the Japanese people do when they say no.

They don't allow Americans, no tourists. So they change their menu all to Japan. they changed their Google listing, all Japanese lawn. Oh, my God. And then they make it hard to find the place. So they make the signs. And this you may have experience. Tokyo is hard to find.

Everything. You go to the building and you're like, I'm at the right building. And it's like, oh, no, it's three floors underground. Or like, oh, no, it's at the top of this thing. And you've got to go around and down the hallway. Now imagine they put it in Japanese in a tiny sign around the corner when they used to have it in the front. I was the dumbest, most o-fish person in every room I was in for two weeks. It was crazy.

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Literally, I can't use the actual words they said in the sad. So let's just call it a really great database. The MongoDB for Startups Program is here and it makes it easy for eligible startups to get started with free credits. Apply now at MongoDB.com slash startups. Once again, that's MongoDB.com slash startups. So your thoughts on this particular issue, which is, you know, there's a half-life to cool? I think yes, but I don't think that's the function of a guy. I think that's always been true, right?

You've always had this class of curators or like the tastemakers that are at the wharf, and they kind of pick the thing that is the cool thing next or they're at the avant-garde, let's say. And once it starts getting more ubiquitous and, like, more people start knowing about it, it loses the cool and then they move on to the next thing. But I think that's always been true, even before social media, even before AI. I do think, though, that social media accelerated the speed of that cycle, let's say, and AI could have that potential, too.

I think so far it honestly hasn't just because it's still so bad that I don't think, like, the actual tastemakers are being like, oh, yes, this is the exact thing I want my side step to look for, or to look like. And so I don't think we've seen that effect yet, but. I think as long as we push for that diversity where it's not meant about it having like one correct answer, but it's about it having both breadth and the ability to execute well in like all those different directions, then I think actually could help the problem in a good way, like of pushing people towards actually more directions rather than compressing to the mean further. Let me tell you, my stack.

Tell me. Yeah. I don't want. I'm reticent to share this. Because this is going to cause the other problem I have. Okay. I have a number of curators that I trust. I'll give you but one.

Monocle magazine is a magazine out of the UK. Have you ever read it or seen it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you should subscribe to it and support them. And so I was having my Athena assistance last year, take Monocle, and about 15 other sources where I find things and specific searches I use on those places. I'm not going to say anything else. I gave you one.

Then I would tell them, hey, aggregate what I'm looking for when I go to Singapore. I went to Singapore for the first time. I like design hotels. I like hip. I like funky, et cetera. And so if you were to put in Singapore here, put in Singapore hotels. And that's how I picked my hotel for Singapore. It's beautiful, like, cyberpunk hotel that had, like, trees on the side of it.

I think I showed it to you on if you search for Singapore hotels. and I find it there. And yeah, let's see if it's there when you pull it up. It's like a garden hotel that's like really tall. And it looks like something out of like a positive version of Blade Runner. Anyway, you're just seeing like Singapore pictures. That's not it. But there's like a ton of things that are like this where they make it like a rainforest.

Incredible. So then they did a really good job of finding the places I like to eat food, which I'm looking for things that are. I'll just say Anthony Bourdain-esque, you know, street stuff, one dish they're known for, et cetera. So then I programmed my own cool hunter and I said, you are a cool hunter. You're looking for things that would appeal to these specific people, you know, in these categories that have these specific design elements, et cetera.

And it works. That's all I'm saying is it. I want to test it. But it's a super mega prompt. And then I have it go out and I have a cool hunt for me over and over and over again. And so every week I get a cool hunting report of like trends, et cetera, just because I'm like interested in the world or whatever. So how do you do it? You actually get to hire people to review output from LLMs and then have them rated on some vectors.

So there's a mix of things. So there's rating things. There's also this like concept of almost like a critique. So imagine if someone's actually like a design critic or a senior designer who's like teaching a junior designer on their team. So how would they almost like critique every single thing they're doing and explain why it's it's wrong or good? There's also this aspect of actually curation. So like choosing examples of things that are good and choosing examples of things that are bad and explaining why. And yeah, or also actually creating things from scratch of like, hey, here's a example of like what a perfect version theoretically of this thing would be compared to what like an LLM was able to generate.

So yeah, there's all these different data shapes that are helpful in different ways for model training. And then they are also helping a lot of these internal products that we're building. So the index, for example, is something that had a lot of like curation from experts and this judgment system that we're building of like, how do you verify also if something is, for example, like staying on brand involved a lot of experts, like making those judgments and be like, hey, this. How do the experts feel about this work? Do they have this sense like I'm giving away my curation and what makes me special and I'm going to get myself out of a job? And then how do you handle that? Because AI is scary to people. So if you came to somebody who's a movie review and you're like, or you're an art critic and we're like, we're going to show you art, we're going to give you the providence of it.

And we want you to describe it. Are they like, are you trying to take my art critique and eliminate me from the world? So they must be thinking that on some level and you must have an answer. for that? What is that answer? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think it, by the way, I don't actually fundamentally believe that tastemakers are going to go away by any means with AI. I actually think it's the opposite. I think they become more valuable because the more you have of this like mass production of things and kind of creation of outputs, which is just going to happen, right? Because everyone now in the

world can click a button and create something. The more I think the peak of the peak of the peak becomes valuable. Similar to what you're describing about the specific restaurant in Japan, right? It's like those really specific things that become really good, I think become more valuable, not less. And so, and I think we're infinitely far of having the power of like a true, like, creative direction and choice and this kind of craft. And so I think, yeah, being a tastemaker kind of becomes more valuable. In terms of like how they feel in terms of the work, we actually ran this survey with

the community a couple weeks ago of asking like kind of why you're here, like why are you excited about working with us. And it was really cool to see how a lot of responses were almost around like curiosity. I was like, I am excited about the problem. and I hate soft and I want to help. It was like very motivational in terms of purpose of why they were interested in the work. And so I think people want to be a part of the solution maybe as the conclusion I've gotten. Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. That would make sense to me. Here's the artisan hotel I stayed at. Check this out. This is going to blow your mind. And so like I stayed a little bit off the beaten path. But this place was kind of new.

I think I think my room was like only five or six hundred bucks. but if you zoom in on this thing, and you'll see there's like cutouts where it's green, those are actually double-story green atrium salon. Oh. And so those are seating areas common to everybody. Like, you can't get them as a suite. Right.

It looks like the whole place is, like, are there rooms in between the jungle? Yes. When you look at the jungle area, like if you look at any jungle area, there's rooms to the left of it. There's rooms above it, like typically in like eight. And it was, and then on the roof,

There's an infinity pool. Go to the roof. That whole area up there. That's an infinity pool type situation. And there it is. So you go up to the roof. I would go up there and work. And I would have never found this if I didn't have my system because it didn't come up

anywhere. It's not like this is a giant hotel. It's got like whatever, probably 50 rooms. It would be in the boutique hotel, not a chain. Art is in art, Y, Z, E, N. You know what it looks like? I find these things so consistently. It looks like in the post-apocalyptic movie when nature.

has reclaimed the building, but people are still, like, huddling in it, like, children of men, you know? Check this out. Yeah. The last of us. Cut out there. That's beautiful. No, by the way, half of my family are architects.

So I feel like the side of, like, interior design and hotel house brutality, like, I love. I got to give you some Brazil tips for next time you guys go to Brazil. You know, I've never been. I feel so ashamed. What are we going to do? Founder University. South Paulo or something. Oh, and Sao Paulo has a huge, huge, like,

Found the community. There you go. Yeah, yes, definitely go. Make that happen. So do you have aspirations to do anything public facing with this collection of people? Or have you thought about buying? And this is the idea I had. Because I think you raised money at a pretty decent valuation, yes?

Yeah. Yeah, we did. Do we have that in the notes, lawn? We do. I have that it was a. And who the investors were? Yes, I have an $18.5 million seed roundco led by CRV and Amplify. That's what I have.

Oh, CRV. Yeah, I know the team over there. Oh, okay. Congrats. Founders are scrappy by nature. And many like you like to dig in and get started building without worrying about admin. They run the whole business on Excel, then keep adding on more random tools as needed. But here's the problem.

None of these tools and platforms know how to talk to each other. So you wind up playing go-between with a cluster of different systems. It's a Franken business. It's a Frankenite. And it's a huge waste of time. of time. But now there's Odo, the all-in-one management software that's serving 16 million users across more than 170,000 companies in over 120 countries. Now your CRM, sales, accounting, manufacturing, website, inventory, and point of sale, they're all in one easy-to-find place. And most

importantly, every app talks to every other app. Sell a product on your website and the invoice gets created instantly and your inventory gets updated automatically. So if you're stitching together spreadsheets and keeping track of five different logins get started today at odoo.com slash twist. That's O'DOO.O.com slash twist to level up your business. What it would cost to buy Monocle magazine or to say I want the exclusive license to Monocle magazine would be a fraction of what, you know, these large language model, frontier model companies, or even like the mid-tier ones, have you considered maybe acquiring

some of those assets and putting them together or the archives of them? like paper magazine got sold in a fire sale, I think, sadly. And that it was just like this incredible, I used to write for them back in the 90s, like incredible archive of like history and art and taste. Like somebody could actually own that and get the writers involved in one of those. And it could be like the rebirth of the magazine business, which was the ultimate coalescence of taste. Yeah.

So I think right now we're very focused on like visual design. And so yeah, we're thinking, we're going very deep on the visual design. side of things. And so we've been more doing these types of relationships actually with creative agencies or like epic designers that we want to like take a look at what kind of never saw the light of day in their portfolio that they may be worked on. Oh, very nice. But yeah, I think when we eventually get to something like creative writing, it would be really cool to explore some of these these partnerships. Because to your point, it's like it's one of one, right? Like you don't have, you don't have magazines. And so yeah, yeah, totally. All right, listen,

this has been incredible since you just raised money. I know you're hiring. what positions you're hiring for? Where's the company based? Every single position you can think of. We're based in San Francisco, but I think we're hiring a lot across like engineering research operations. And we actually have this really cool like design researcher role. So if you're a designer,

but that really wants to think of the problem of design almost as like a theme to be studied and how do we like break down what does good mean and evolve this, then yeah, that's a really cool role. Sounds like you'd hire a professor. The website is tastelabs.com. And yeah, look at the careers, A lot going on there.

Hey, just give us an update as we wrap here. I know San Francisco's on fire. I might have to have a loft that I rented, and it was like underwater for four years. But now I think it's probably a good time to sell it. What's it like operating in San Francisco with no housing stock? It's crazy. Yeah, say a little bit.

Explain to the audience, people who aren't there exactly how crazy it is and hard it is for employees that you try to hire. No, it's nuts. I lived in New York before. So New York, also was not easy by any means, but no, I've become very SF-filled and I love it. And we are very, like, in person. And so a lot of folks have hoped here. But yeah, it's like you have to show up to the apartment visit with already, like all the documentation to like pay them up front.

Crazy. And like, it's insane. And so, yeah, I think this, the housing side has been tough. But the energy of the city really is incomparable. And it's very worth it here. So we have this great thing in New York City. It's the subway. And then we have bar. And so you can live in Flatbush and take the subway for an hour and get a $2,000 a month apartment and live a little closer and it's three or four. But in San Francisco, I mean, what's a one bedroom now, four or five K? It's like bonkers. Yeah, it really, it really is bonkers. But I do think that this like concentration of people in one place just creates the type of magic you can't reproduce. I had a dozen great years there. And now I'm in Austin and love it there. But. But it's something you should think about. Like, imagine if you were running in, you know, Austin, you, the housing stock has gone down three or four years. They're like, hey, y'all, first three months free, no rent.

Come stay here. That's what's like, it's crazy. They built so much in. It breaks a New Yorker or somebody from the Bay or his brain when they first moved there. Jacob looked it up a one bedroom in San Francisco cost an average of 3,500 to 4,600 per month right now, Jay. That's what that's our ladies. If you got in for 4K, you'd feel lucky. All right, listen, continued success, and we'll check in with you in a year.

Thanks so much, Tice. Yeah, that's right. I'm curious, after design, I wonder if they're going to try to go comedy. Because I feel like that's the one area where we all know LLMs aren't funny. They're not good at writing jokes. Everybody seems to have sort of given up. Terrible at Twitter threads. Right.

Like they don't understand Twitter. Right. I mean, GROC is on Twitter and it kind of understands it a little bit, but not good enough to hit public. Grockapedia can be very useful, but Grock is not funny. And that's what I mean. Like, I feel like we've all kind of even given up. Like, it's never going to be funny. It's never going to write a good joke.

But I don't know. That's also a taste. Good for brainstorming, though. Great for brainstorming. Great for brainstorming. Useful in a million ways. I'm not trying to go there. I just say, this one area, like, write me something funny.

You can explain jokes. You can feed it a million jokes. Claude isn't funny. Claude many things. I'm really feeling good about my annotated. com. I bought this because I love the bookmarking. and curation.

But we're going to have to, I think I should launch annotated as, instead of my bookmarking service, like have that available. But I think I should let anybody put a task up there to rate stuff and fact check stuff. So you're collecting data. Correct. Like, I didn't think about it, but like it all is data collection. So consumers did this, and then you could sell it to the micro ones or heart. Nothing more valuable right now.

than preference data. That's that's the goal. You could also put it out there like if you had annotated.com slash hotels and you could just send to people who were hotel officinados. Hey, what do you think of this offering? What do you think of this price? What do you think of this room design? What is this missing? What's good about it? And you could actually get them to maybe vet other people's curation. Anyway, we're going to do it as a bounty this week in startups.com slash bounties. and we should put some fresh dates on that that maybe we'll push that contest to finish in September or something. There was some travel.

There was some delays. But now that you're back around and in the mix, we'll definitely get that back to go. And the software is great right now, right? Yeah. Software's great. So I want to build this app. You know what I'm going to work on

is try to get somebody who has a tool like a, you know, perplexity computer or Claude Code or a lovable. I'd like to get one of these people as my partner on this and put up like some serious bounties. That's what we have to do now. There you go. But go ahead, check that out. All right.

We got a lot of news to do. We got so much news. All right. Well, we got to talk about situational awareness or lack thereof. So famed AI-focused hedge fund was led by 25-year-old former Open AIer Leopold Oshend Brener. It was founded in 2024. He started out with a few hundred million, Jason. He amassed over $45 billion in assets under management by July.

In June, Wall Street Journal said $20 billion. So it went wildly up. The fund had a 439% net return through during 30th. He was placing very large leveraged bets. No professional investing experience prior to launching this firm. Early backers included the Collison brothers from Stripe, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman from Meta, many others investments included SK Heinex, Micron, Sandisk, Bloom Energy, Corweave Nebius Group. There was a, there was a paper that he wrote in 2024, also called situational awareness.

The argument, the thesis was basically. like we know AI is going to explode. We know the demand for compute is going to increase exponentially. So he was- Let's place our bets. He was placing bets in the infrastructure and the hardware that was going to allow for this build-out to happen. So then what happened, he compared it to a bank run.

He got margin called by a number of his biggest investors, Goldman B of A. And so eventually he had to, in order to access cash, He sold the public portion of his stock portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel. Everything that had been financed with borrowed cash is gone. However, private investments he's still holding onto. It's going to just continue on as a fund for his private investments. That includes what Financial Times tells us is $5 billion of anthropic stock. So TBPN this morning published the letter Leopold sent to his LPs this week.

Yes. He took ownership of it. Yeah, we let you down this month. We came closer to permanent capital impairment that is acceptable to us. He took full responsibility. He said vulnerability was be getting more vulnerability. And we took decisive action to protect LP Capital. That's why they will carry on with the Anthropic shares and other private investment.

Got a question for me at the end there? I got a drop. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were going to jump in. So I guess my big question to you is this kid is 25. He did not have investing experience before this. Do you think that a more seasoned pro would have seen this coming and been able to navigate around it? Or is this a classic, no crying in the casino, you take a big risk, there's a chance you're going to get crashed out, could have happened to anyone?

No, this is, I guess, the folly of youth and the lack of experience for sure. That played some sort of a role here. He was running, according to the report, something like 4x leverage, which means for every dollar he held in a share, he was then ballooning it up by 4X of the market. goes down 25% or 50%, you basically get four times that kind of, you know, volatility, I guess, and down draft. So that was a mistake. And then there were other things at play here. The South Korea stock market was having a crazy run where like a million different levered accounts, again, having leverage, aka debt, is it's different when you have a home and you have debt than when you have equities or when you have crypto. When you have a home, they have to

foreclose on it, which means they've got to kick you out of it. It's a process. It's emotional to kick somebody out of their house. And there's laws around it. And it's a slower process. You can miss some payments. You can get some penalties. You can do a partial payment. What happens when you're on margin, you know, either for crypto or for stocks, is you get margin called. What does that mean whoever your banker is that gave you that loan, then start selling your equities automatically. Now, they may give you a correct period as a grace, you know, in a grace period, hey, you got 24 hours, 48 hours to put up the collateral. But generally speaking, they will just liquidate you. This happens in Bitcoin all the time. People lever up their Bitcoin. You know, they own a million dollars in

Bitcoin. They're like, okay, give me another $500,000. I'll buy another $500,000 in Bitcoin and go long. I'll pay $7,8 percent interest on that. But I believe Bitcoin's going to go up $100,000. percent this year. Then Bitcoin goes down. They got to sell Bitcoin to cover it. Yeah. And those lenders. So that's what's like technically happening here. Chattainfroid is really, really high in finance, especially in hedge funds and stuff like that. If you ever watch the TV show Billions. Sure. There is a pile on that occurs. So he kind of outlined this, uh, in his, uh, letter where when this occurs, people know that you're, you know, experiencing this down draft and that you're going to get margin called.

So what do they do? If they have the same positions, if we all own, let's say it was pick a public company that's in AI. Invidia. Invidia, Micron, you and I sell all of our position so that it makes it go down more. So we're flooding it with stocks. So there's more supply available to put pressure on them. Then we short it.

We came more pressure and just more pressure, more pressure. And then at the same time, you're talking to that person about buying their position. So Citadel was talking to them about buying the position. Other people, and I don't know if Citadel was involved in this, but this is what they do on Wall Street. They are just like knives out. Somebody starts falling. You just push them in the back. Like if they're stumbling, you don't want them to recover.

You want to buy the asset from them. I will tell you this. I mean, one of those conspiracy theories that Citadel sort of purposefully did this, they were predicting a surprise rate hike from the Fed, which is stories. would have tanked the market. That did not materialize. So people are coming up with these theories that, oh, this was all sort of like purposeful. I don't know how you feel about that. Seems a little far-fetched to me. This is not SBF, Sam, Bankman Freed. This is not the same situation. Sam was making great bets, and he would have been one of the great betters of all time, because he also bet on Anthropic, et cetera. And they wound up selling his positions for peanuts

when they liquidated FTX. He was stealing money, allegedly, went to jail for it. Yeah, yeah. He was involved in real fraud where he was taking people's assets that they put in their essentially bank accounts, in their accounts, and he was investing it. Right. And giving it to celebrities. That would be like Bank of America goes into our accounts and then sponsors the Super Bowl

and invests in, you know, SpaceX and Uber with the money. He was doing it. You're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to do that. Crypto Exchange and the investment fund and intermingling funds. in ways that the SEC says you absolutely cannot do. But, you know, this young gentleman is obviously pretty bold. And getting your ass kicked this publicly, this brutally, is going to either break him.

And I was a little concerned with the pile on. I'm like, this is the kind of thing that could psychologically break somebody and they commit suicide. God forbid. People were taking a little bit of glee in it. I mean, he's a very young guy. Shout in Freud. Yeah.

He's a very brash guy. He's a good looking guy. I think there was a little bit of like, I don't know if he's good looking. You don't think so? Pull up, pull up one of the memes. Anyway, the memes are coming, but I think it's also a slow news. No, wait a second. Come on.

That's him as Mitch McConnell. But that's not cool. That's an objectively good-looking guy. You don't think so? I mean, sure, like as a German or Scandinavia, whatever he is. You're a preppy German guy. Sure. I mean, it's okay.

Listen, I'm nice. Not Brad Pitt. People were taking a little bit. I think people were taking a little bit of excessive glee in this guy. He does have a little bit of excessive glee in this guy. Yeah. He does have a lot. a lot of layers in that photo, so like layers are from players. I'll give him, the layer game was pretty

good there. Look at the layer game in the brown. Yeah. He definitely had the layer game going. He was playing the role. Looks like clavicular. He was, yeah, I don't know what he was. He was leverage maxing. He was leverage maxing. He was leverage maxing. Anyway, the lessons here are. Spiked his cortisol level. Yeah, he was cortisol maxing for sure the last week. But this is not an example of like something fundamentally wrong with the industry. If you have leverage, it's just not something anybody with any experience does at this level. If you want to have a margin loan against like 5% or 10% of your stocks, so you got like a billion dollars in stock and you have 50 million, you're not going to get called until it comes down to like one to one or something. Like

you have plenty of room. This was the opposite. This would be like somebody who's got a billion dollars trying to put $4 billion to work. Very, very dangerous. But he's going to come back stronger, as my prediction, if it doesn't break him. He's got $5 billion in Anthropics still. He's sitting on plus other investment. I wouldn't be too worried about this guy. Now, there were other memes, so I don't want to pile on, but I do want to see the best memes. Jacob's got a few more memes for us.

Okay, let's see. Yeah, there's a surprising memes from me. I put my glasses back on for these. And I think it was a slow news day, and then people are kind of sick of AI, and nobody likes a young successful person. Exactly. I think to, I think to me it feels like this is bubbling over people just. dislike AI and they dislike AI people and this young punk was trying to make all these billions of dollars place in AI bets. I think that's what fueled the backlash.

Sure. All right. Here's your next one. Next one, Jacob. Let's take a lawyer. When you beg a client to accept a great settlement offer and they end up getting zeroed out at trial instead. Okay. Not funny. Not that funny. Next one. Not funny. So your account got liquidate even though the S&P is only 3% off its highs. Okay. It's Jonah Hill from Wolf of Wall Street there. Yeah. He was a Great. He should have. It's a great performance.

Did he get a, did he get nombed? I believe he got nominated. I don't think he won. But he, I believe he was. I wonder who he lost against. I'd have to, I'd have to look at it.

I think Wolf of Wall Street, by the way, just not to go off duty. I don't want to pre-off duty this. But I think during that moral panic when the Overton window was really closed, worked against this film. He was,

that's my hot take. Yes, he was, he was nominated. That movie didn't win any Oscar. Any, any. And this, I was that the year of, like, Moonlight and other woke stuff? Oh, Moonlight is a terrific movie, but I will. I will look up what, what the movie is.

I literally fall asleep four times. You're wrong. You're wrong about Moon. You're wrong about Moon. Okay. That was, that was La La La Land Moonlight Year? Do terrible picks. Go ahead.

Yeah, no, let's see. Best directing went to Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity. I'm on the Oscar sites. No. No. Gravity? No. Yeah, Matthew McConaughey won best actor for Dallas Byers Club.

Oh, here we go. Jared Leto beat him. Jared Letto won for Dallas Fire's Club. Okay, it's a perfect example. I think Dallas Byers Club was great. And those two guys, well, I thought those two guys had great performance, but I do think Oscars go, if Oscars are given a choice, a bunch of debauchous 80s cocaine taking stripper paying debauchery from the 80s or 90s, versus people dying.

of AIDS. Yeah. Well, that was, you know, and a tragedy. We know what the Oscars are going to go for. There was a lot of weird discourse around Wolf of Wall Street, too. Like, is Marty praising these guys? Is it pro Jordan Belfort? There was a lot of that stuff.

That might have heard of Oscar chances. Same thing with the goodfellas. It's like, are we praising these guys or are we just telling a story, folks? It's just aesthetics and a story. And if you look at the test of time, you know, Dallas Barrow's Club, moonlight, whatever, gravity. Nobody's going to remember those compared to Wolf of Wall Street in 20 years. Gravity is awesome.

Gravity is so good. It's okay. It's not, you're telling me. Wait, hold it. Who's your best picture then? Of 24. Let me see. All right. Let me look at the 2020. I'm going to force you on this one because you know I'm right. You're definitely, you're definitely, 2014 best picture nominee. Run me through this. I might have been a, I might have been a Wolf of Wall Street. Let's see. Of course. Gravity over Wolf of Wall Street. Nobody even remembers gravity. Who's in it? Sandra Bullock. Oh, you know, you know what? Google's AI here really awful. Like you would think this is such an easy thing to look up, like what were the movies that were nominated.

All right. Here are your 10 best picture nominees for this year. It was the 2013 movies. It was the 2014 Academy Awards. Okay, go ahead. Give me. The nominees that you want to hear the winner last? I'll do the nominees first and then I'll give the winner.

Sure, sure, sure. The nominees were American Hustle, Captain Phillips. Remember, this is the 10 nominee's years. American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Bires Club, Gravity, her, Nebraska, Philomena, the Wolf of Wall Street, and your winner was 12 years of slave that year. 12 years of slave won. You know, it's just, that's not, there is no contest there. I mean, I did like Nebraska.

I thought artistically great felt. I like our films. I have to say, to me, her and Wolf of Wall Street, it was between those two. Yeah, that's a jump ball. That's clearly a jump ball. Of those nominees, it's between those two. But, you know, this is just the problem with the Oscars is they go for Max Suffering and, you know, whatever, put your hand over your heart. Her did win best original screenplay that.

Yeah. This is why the Oscars are meeting less to me. I just hate the Oscars. Okay, let's keep going through the news. All right, we got, yeah, we got to talk about this. So Google Earth, Alphabet embedded their AI image generator, nano banana into Google Earth. Which is great.

Yeah. Nano banana amazing. Google Earth amazing. Now you can go to Google Earth and with a simple prompt, you can change things, the way things look on Google Earth. Visualized streets and intersections as they might have looked in here. history. Oh, no. You can even make an infographic based on anything you can pull up in any street view. But people have already discovered- You got to describe what's happening here. You got to describe

what's happening here. So here's an image. You can do nefarious things too. Like here is a spot along the U.S.-Mexico border that we see from above. There's nobody really there. It's a totally normal image. But if you tell it, hey, put a huge refugee camp and people pouring all over the border. Oh, my God. You can create that image. Like what's going on. on in Spain, right? Like what's going on right now in Spain. And so here is, it's Hank Venn S created this fake refugee camp near the Mexican border. There's a second example as well that we were looking at. This is he put in Gaza a bomb crater next to a fake hospital. This is a fake image, folks. This is not real. And so obviously the potential here for creating misinformation and

visually appealing, inaccurate things is massive, which led a lot of people myself, included to wonder, just why even do this? Is the utility? I'll tell you what happened here. What is the use case here? Like, why is this useful? No, no, it's very simple. Everybody at that company is going, hey, AI is the next big thing.

Sprinkle a little AI on everything. So Google Local, Google flights, you know, Gmail. Just put some AI on it. Just get a little AI on there. Just a dab. Just a dab. It's a little dash. Let's see.

And then if it's good, maybe we just code it in AI, maybe we deep fried in AI, whatever it is. So somebody was like, oh, would this be cool to say, hey, here's my lot. What happens if I put a five-story building over here? Which, like, on an architectural basis, I can come up with 100 uses for this. That would be really, like a city planner might look at this and say, hey, let's put bike lanes in instead of doing something nefarious. The problem is. You can do fun stuff, too. Like, to test it out, I pulled up downtown Austin.

right where we produced the show, and I made it like, what if this looked like the lunar surface? Like, you could do fun stuff like that. Okay, yeah. So there's goofy stuff. There's practical stuff. And then there's nefarious stuff.

Now, anybody could take these images already. Put them in nano banana. They just close the loop here. I'll tell you what the problem is here. When you do close the loop like that, like if you were to take, I don't know, Instagram and then be able to, on the top level, say like,

Instagram, this person and put them in a big case. You know, which is what people do with Grog all day long and you get the images of Grock. Yeah. Like, please don't make me do it. Yeah. Rock now is like refuses to do almost anything with the real picture because it got in trouble. So this is the problem with a tech every time there's a new technology that accelerates stuff, you're going to have these bad uses of it. And because it's adjacent that does lead somebody to believe or lead somebody to rightfully criticize, like, did you think this through?

That's why you can't, to the best of my knowledge, Zuckerberg hasn't said on Instagram, you know, long press, you know, your Instagram post and then I put in an AI prompt and repost it to my site or comments. Yeah. Well, we got a related story this week. Actually, I wasn't sure we were going to get into, but I don't know if you saw LinkedIn added a report AI slot button. Yes. And they've gotten rid of the let AI help you write your post button. That they put in that originally. that's gone. So there's no more like enhance your LinkedIn post with AI because so many people

were just hitting that button and lazily posting AI slop. And I don't know if you saw last week's Substack added a bunch of anti-AI tools. And Chris Best, this is going to be a big trend. Yeah, of course. Chris Best, the CEO in his blog post explaining the new tool was like, we don't want substack to turn into LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn has become the definitional like this is a place where everybody posts a assop. Yeah, well, I mean, if you are a busy salesperson and somebody tells you, hey, if you write your five secrets to sales, you're going to like get more sales. And so, you know, there is, you know, and then back to being AI being pushed by the boss, and I'm one of these pushy bosses saying, hey, let's use AI, let's use AI. You know, you're going to have

situations where people don't do it thoughtfully, right? They're just, I'll go, I'll just produce slop. I've had that happen. I had team members here who are like, okay, Jay Cal wants to use it and they just made a full business plan that they haven't even read or they, you know, scanned. And they presented to him and I'm like, uh, no, no, I'm paying you to write the plan. I've had a few newsletters submitted that we were like, uh, I don't, I don't think this is original. This feels like, Claw. Interesting you say that. So there is this company, Pangram that we were talking about on Wednesday show. These are the guys who design substacks anti-AI tools. Yeah. And so what

substack should do is when you actually publish it, they should tell the writer, hey, our AIS, you know, Checker says it thinks this is a 92% chance. It's, you know, not, you know, whatever. It's AI produced. You're going to be, you will not, because it's AI, we're going to put a label on it. And we're not going to feature on the homepage. And this is what has to happen on social networks. Is this stuff.

It's now doing this. If they think you're posting AI, they flag it and they say, hey, maybe consider rewriting this so that it sounds more human. Okay. So they do it at the moment of publishing. I think what they should do is if anything scores over 90% over 50% on AI, they should gray it out in the feed, not put it in the feed. They should, what was the term? They should shadow ban it.

Shadow ban posts, yeah. So anyway, this is good. This is a good moment in time. I like this. And everybody's going to have to make a decision. Do we want to live in an AI slop world or not? And it's screwing up my feed because I like to show my daughter is really into sharks and I like to show her shark videos in my Instagram feed. And now they're all like, oh my God, here's a great white shark taking three.

rebytes out of a person. I'm like, that's never been recorded. I've had this exact, my nephew Dougie loves trains. And so I had, we had YouTube up, but we were just pulling up, you know, videos of trains going by, trains pulling in. Trains are great. But who doesn't love trains, right? But there's tons of AI slapdown. So it's like fake train. He doesn't want to see fake carc street trains. He wants to watch real trains. Like it's terrible, terrible experience. This is why young people hate AI. Like my daughters, when I say, hey, use AI to find a place to have dinner, you know, I use Gemini and put it on a Google map. They're like, no AI.

We don't want to use AI. AI is lame. Like that's what 10 to 15 year olds think right now. All right, let's keep going down the docket. All right. Well, let's get to some of these rapid fire items because I'm worried we're not going to get to everything. All right. So first one that you share with the, so Suta is a Spanish controlled territory on the northern tip of Morocco in North Africa.

I pulled a screenshot from Google Earth, not doctored, folks. This is the actual image. So that's where it is. You can see it's essentially a small city on the North African coast right next to Morocco, across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, but it is considered Spanish territory. So what's going on is thousands of migrants are attempting to cross into Shuda from Morocco. The border fence has been breached. 18 migrants or so, it's very chaotic, so we're not, it's very chaotic, so we're not sure.

They think about 18 migrants have died so far from either being drowned, or being crushed in a stampede of people trying to get across this border. I mean, it's not much of a border we're looking at here. It's a fence along an urban beach. So that's a beach. There's a border fence, but it is... You can swim around it in 10 minutes. You can swim around it.

You can push your way through it. It has been breached. It's open now. Spain's government is deploying their civil guard to keep the peace. They have not yet declared a national emergency. Here are some numbers. The Spanish government says 60,000 people have now... entered Suda for Morocco. It's just a city. The entire population is 85,000 residents.

So that's a wonderful one almost. That's a 70% jump in their population since this start. Was there a inciting event here that I'm, because I am trying to catch up on this. And my entire feed is venture capitalists retweeting this. Yes. Elon must be tweeted. Like, you're a venture capitalist. Nobody cares your opinion on migration, but I guess people have strong feelings about Elon is one of the people who really started this trend that made it sort of go bigger and viral in the U.S. A lot of people are talking about that. It's the number one account. Yes.

NPR, I looked it up. As far as we could tell, we don't know, there have been breaches along this border before. It's not like this has never happened, but we're not exactly sure why all of the sudden tens of thousands of people seem to have all gotten the same idea. They did. NBR did talk to some of the people who are pushing their way across the border. and almost all of them were talking about economic hardship. There's no jobs. They're looking for employment.

Yeah, but it's coordinated. Okay, so if it was economic, this must have been coordinated on socials for group chat. So that's what's got to come out. I think there's some sci ops going on here because, like, you know, there, you know, the CIA and other three-letter, or other intelligence agencies from the round world do this kind of stuff to create, you know. Absolutely. Long history of the CIA creating civil unrest in other places. for all kinds of reasons. All kinds of reasons.

You could argue propagandistically that this backs up a lot of the kinds of stories that we hear scary stories about migrant invasions and migrant crises. I mean, this is a literal migrant invasion. I've never seen anything of this scale. Like, if you have boats show up in Italy, you know, okay, there's 50 people on a boat. I think you said the number 60,000. That's like four Madison Square Gardens, five Madison Square Gardens. with a lot of people.

That's what the Spanish government is saying. 85,000 people in the whole town, 60,000 are now trying to enter the town. But that's the other thing is this is not, it's a Spanish-controlled territory. But even if you get from Morocco into Shuda, you're just now in this city. You're not across the Strait of Gibraltar and in mainland. This has nothing to, I mean, in some ways there's nothing to do with Spain because this is a territory of Spain. It does. Yeah, it does also make you, if you want to get colonialist about it, like, why is there a little territory in Morocco that's still owned by Spain? Like, shouldn't this just be Morocco at this point?

I guess. I mean, we have that kind of situation. We have Alaska. I mean, we've got all kinds of little islands and stuff still. Yeah. Puerto Rico is what it is. But I just want to say, if you're a founder and your VC is tweeting about this more than once, like probably not the right VC for you. I don't understand why VCs are spending their entire day, losing their minds over this. Like, this is Spain's issue. You don't have to, this is my message to VCs. You don't have to comment on everything. We don't need 20. Literally one.

You get one tweet on this if it's like the new story of the day. But like, I don't know. How do you make this go back to venture capital and startups and nothing to do with it? There is one venture capitalist. I'm not going to name me. names. There is one VC. There is one VC that I feel like I don't know how this man has time to invest in companies because he is so unbelievably active on X constantly. No matter what the trend is, he's on top of it. He's like way more than me and I make podcasts. I won't mention

names. I bet a lot of you can already. I mean, there's a number of that. I might know which one. Jacob, Jacob already guessed in our chat room, which guy was talking. Hold on. Let me take a look in the chat room here. Oh, no, I was going to go for, yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, I think there's a few, there's a few names up there at the list, but this, I mean, he's an amazing investor, an amazing founder in his own right, like, not, I'm not trying to crap on the guy, but I honestly don't know how he has this much brainpower for X. It's unbelievable.

There's two other guys. I agree with that one, but there's two other guys who, you're, we're all thinking about the same guys, I can tell. There's a few of them, which is like, how are you doing this? I don't know how you have time to attend a board meeting while you're, you must be in the board meeting. I mean, if you're doing that and you're commenting on those stuff, I wonder if a founder is waiting for you to email them about something. Like, they're like, uh, dude. And you're like, anyway, I think this goes to show that VCs have a lot of spare time.

Okay, let's keep with it. All right, let's keep going. Next up on our list, we have Ethan Goodhart's self-driving golf cart. He's a Stanford computer science grad, autonomy expert. He created his own self-driving golf cart. This is utilizing entirely cameras and vision models, no LIDAR. He's had some beta testers. So he's offering rides on his autonomous golf cart around the Stanford campus.

Some of his early beta testers, we have a photo here, includes Sam Altman, Andre Carpathie, Jensen Wang. They've all given it high marks. And actually, there's an iPhone app. If you want a ride around the Stanford campus, it's called Wind. It's in test flight right now. So they're getting ready to sort of open this up in a beta test situation so people can get automated golf cart rides. Okay. So the reason I wanted to share this was, number one, everybody hangs out at Stanford, obviously.

Yeah, cool. That's the place to be. These guys are good at intercepting them. Yeah. But I think what this shows is how commoditize self-driving is getting. And, you know, my thesis has always been 20 people would get there at the same time. I think my thesis is going to be correct because Tesla's at the double-nines, way most clearly ahead of everybody with more double-nines, B-YD, Baidu just launched, I guess, Nuru, Zooks just got

2,500 units federally approved for no steering wheel, which is really important. Now they still have to go through all the local community. Zooks is those two-sided. It looks like a little mini-bus thing, but there's no like, front to the car. It's just like no driver seat at all. And with no driver, he's no steering wheel, no paddle, no nothing. So I think, you know, if students can start to build this on their own and hack it together, doesn't mean it's like ready to compete with Waymo. But if students can start building this, what we're going to see is a plethora, a plethora, an unbelievable number of people with these. So what is the self-driving race going to come down to? It's going to come down to scale.

build and manage and get licenses for this. And there's a news story, and you can look it up, and I just want to talk about it. And everybody assumes I'm talking my book here with Uber, but I can assure you, I am involved in probably got investments in over 10 self-driving companies. A lot of them are public. And the reason I say that is I'm not just talking to the Uber book. There is very quickly going to be a lot of bad feelings about something. self-driving because people are going to, the first wave of people losing their jobs to AI is going to be drivers. And like when I say wave, I mean like they're not, they're literally going to lose their

jobs and the pay is going to go down. And this would be both Uber and Uber eats, like the people driving people, ride sharing and delivery. Yeah, yeah. This week, Stanley Tang, friend of mine, debuted the Zipline, which I'm an investor in Zipline, and I'm an investor in Doordash through a venture fund I was in that invested in Doradesh. I've been a shareholder of Doordash.

They did their drone company. And we had another drone company from Ireland on the program recently here. So there'll be like three or four drone companies doing, would be four or five drone companies doing this. So that gets rid of like burritos or just coffee, small things. Larger order is obviously going to go in cars or small things. The reason I bring this up is in China where, you know, they embrace technology at a pretty rapid pace and they have a top-down government, they have stopped allowing licenses for self-driving.

So you can look that up. There's many stories about it, but China is freezing the number of self-driving cars on road. Why? It's not about safety. It's about protecting jobs. Right. What's going to happen? And I asked this on this week in A, what did I ask on this week in VC this week when we did the

VC show? So here it is. China suspends new autonomous vehicle permits after Bidu outage, Bloomberg news reports. It's nothing to do with by-do outages. It's nothing to do with Pony AI, nothing to do with anything other than they don't want thousands, in fact, millions eventually of self-driver, of drivers protesting this. So get ready. In America, we've seen there is anger at self-driving cars, people calling waymoes that they

don't need and getting them all trapped in a parking lot together. You know, like there is some already. sort of resentment, I think, building up. And there's been, like, this has been brewing. So that story we show was from April, but there's some more recent stories in June and July of this cabosh being put on it. So be prepared for that, folks. And I think I am in favor of, and I'm going to be called the Lipport for this,

but I do think some licensing of these, collecting of revenue to smooth out for society the unemployment and or retraining of those individuals would not be out of line. And I think it would be smart for self-driving companies to offer that so that they can deploy the technology. It just seems obvious, right? Like, why wouldn't you try to soften the blow for people? It'll make them feel better about this technological change that you want to introduce. Yes. I don't know why that automatically goes to Lib Tard for people.

Well, I think it's just it's not a free market solution. but I consider it an easy way for Waymo or Uber, Neuro. They could just say, listen, we know this is going to impact people negatively. So we're going to pay $10,000 a year, $1,000 a month or whatever, for each self-driving thing. That money is going to go to that driver or like every self-driving car. I estimate. It's what Mark Cuban said to do with data centers. It's just like pay people off to get them to accept what you do.

Free electricity. Very simple. Okay. Next. All right. Well, we got to let you go in just a few minutes. You've got a heart out. What about the automated solar one? All right. This video was crazy. We'll pull this up. Robotics podcaster, Leo Karen, shared this.

Grit robotics of San Francisco is the company. Now, they don't build the robot arms. That is an off-the-shelf. That is an off-the-shelf Kawasaki robot arm. They designed the AI that teaches robots how to handle utility scale solar panels. Now, it unloads the panel. And this is real or this is AI? No, no, this is real. The robot, they have trained the robot to be able to unload a solar panel.

It can transport it to where it needs to go and it begins the installation process. You do need a human in the loop. The human then comes and fastens it into place. The robot can't do that precision work. But it drops it, as you can see, right where it needs to go. So the human just needs to come along and boom, boom. Zip, zip, zip. Right, zip it into place.

Until they make an R2 detail. that goes underneath that giant and does the zip, zip, zip, or they build a system that has clamps in it. So this is, you know, it's very interesting. I'm sure that's the next problem they're solving is how to get that human out of there entirely. Well, it's super easy. Like, if the thing drops into place and in the factory, it has a clasp that fits into a hole and locks in place, you don't need to put bolts on it.

So obviously they're using like the classic system that wasn't designed for robot deployment. What I found really interesting about that video, and if you can queue up this one moment, is they show a very long field of them. Yes. There are very long fields being built. Just recently in California, we hit 51% of energy coming from solar and batteries. That's also happened in Germany on a couple of sunny days, and it's happening in Australia, continuously, and some places in South America.

We can build a factory in the desert that has the ability to build solar panels, and then out of the back of it, have a robot place them. Yes. And then it would just become this fade accompli. Is that the right word? Yep. You got it. Fade accompli.

The robots keep making them. And then the distance they have to drive, maybe it gets to three, four, or five miles. Who cares? The robots driving it. You place this one factory in the center, and then you just have solar panels go in all directions. Now, somebody will complain about the cacti, but let me tell you something, losing some cacti. and, you know, a couple of rabbits get more shade. I think it's going to be okay.

If you drive right now from L.A. to Vegas, there's a huge solar farm like three quarters of the way when you're almost in Vegas. But it could be, I mean, it's really big, but it could be 20 times as big and nobody would really notice because there's nothing. There's like three guys out there, you know, in a trailer most of the time. There's like, you know, Walter White burying his meth and that's about all that's out there. Well, and then what I will say to add to this is, break by reference. You know, there's very few nimbie people to complain and you don't need a lot of space. And there are bodies of water and tracks of water when you drive from San Francisco to L.A. There's like these canals of water. They're putting solar on top of them. They started

by covering them so they would get rid of evaporation. But you could now take this, and I've talked about this maybe a thousand episodes ago with Molly Wood, when she was co-hosting. Shout out to Molly. Everyone in the pool is our new podcast. Go subscribe to it. A hundred bucks a year. Well worth it. You could, you could, there it is. So I don't know what date this is, but this is California roof these June 27th this month. Okay. So California roof, two irrigation canals with solar panels that makes electricity and cut the evaporation off the water lawn by 70%. There you go. So this is all within our ability. Now, what you could also do is you could do desal, desalization, powered by the solar panel and batteries, end in a canal, and all of this fighting over water and electricity

would end, and there's nobody to complain. Because if you're complaining about the solar being put over a canal and it reduces water, then you are a certified idiot. You're a moron. Now, there must be people protesting this. Please, somebody has produced. Claude or producer GROC or producer Deepseek, is anybody protesting these solar farms and these solar on top of rivers? This is like, there must be, I just can't wait for somebody. Somebody's going to, you know it's Trulon. Somebody's protesting this.

I'm sure there's some animal in there. People like to, Native Americans use that water canal for some. I'm sure you could come up with a reason. I mean, poltergeist or some Native American burial ground. It was a burial ground. Yes, yes. I'm sure you could. If you gave me sufficient time, I could come up with something.

This is this week in hope. Last week in hope. I'm just giving a little hope here. Everybody's angry about immigration, Trump, this, that, AI, dumerism. You've soaking up all the water for your data centers. This is great. This is great. You can stop complaining people.

We're about to solve energy. If we solve energy, we solve water. If we solve energy and water, we solve agriculture, good things are happening, folks. See you next week on this weekend startups. Bye bye-bye. Bye-bye.