Anthropic wants to slow AI down and Bernie wants 50%: JCal Reacts | E2297

28:52And then on the enterprise side, we do offer kind of more customized solution in terms of enabling enterprises to get the tier of features and security they need. And those are kind of based off of sales led growth. And you raised 30 million from my pal, David Sachs over at Kraft? Yes, yes. Not that he did it because I know he's been pretty busy. The UIs are David Sachs. UIs are David Sachs. memes are uh yeah i i was fortunate to meet him once uh but yeah uh we raised from craft and most recently uh 30 million round at 500 million post amazing yeah so i think on that end we're pretty excited and looking for um cracked engineers and you know operators to join our team all right yo and great job everybody can go to comfyui.com am i do i have the domain correct What do you got?

29:51Comfy.org or Comfy.org. Oh, love it. And so it's comfy. And, you know, sometimes the founder has first name at the domain name once in a while. Big cloud providers may offer you cheap compute, but you'll end up paying the difference in engineering costs and hiring extra developers. You don't want to waste time configuring virtual networks. None of us do. Or your access policies. You want your team building your product. So it's time to look at Render. Render is the all-in-one cloud platform for developers that allows you to deploy, scale, and secure your apps and agents with zero ops. Most cloud platforms ask you to split your focus between product and infrastructure, or they force you into platform constraints.

30:36You know you're going to grow in six months, but just connect your GitHub repo to Render and you are live. Web services, cron jobs, the whole stack in one platform. It's time to find out why 5 million developers are already using Render. 5 million. Go to render.com slash twist and apply for the Render Startup Program. You'll get anywhere from$500 to$100 ,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and who your backers are. That's render.com slash twist. Who do you need to hire right now? I see you got a bunch of people actively working in the set from Office Space. Is that the film? What was the film, Lon?

31:16I think you're thinking of office space. That's the one about engineers, and they're in Austin, and the guy gets - The red stapler? Yeah, that's office space. In your nondescript office with the drop ceiling. Is that a video you made with Comfy? Or is that the actual office? That's the actual office. Where are you guys based? We are right next to the bridge. You can't see it. The Bay Bridge. Yeah, the Bay Bridge. Great location. Amazing. If you want to be right in the heart of it all, we'll work for Yoland. What are you looking for? What's the top hardest position you need to fill? I think all across the board, definitely on the most urgent need on our end is scaling up our sales team and also our front-end development team.

32:06So you have a go-to sales motion that you need to get going. Yes, we are actually only able to process above 100K inbound requests so far because of the... Let me give you a tip. You're trying to do this in San Francisco, build the sales. Big mistake. It's just you're up against so many lunatics right now who are going to overpay salespeople because a lot of these sales executives have families. And a lot of them have worked at Google or Uber or Salesforce or Oracle, you know, like major comp places. And so they tend to, I'm not going to say entitled, but they have high expectations. You know, this is my best piece of advice.

32:51Are you a first time founder or second time founder? Uh, first time to get to this stage. Got it. Okay. So congratulations. Number one, number two, um, what a lot of savvy founders do is they open a remote office in a place where other people have already done so historically and added salespeople who are grinders. What's an example of that? Somebody like HubSpot, Spotify, Yelp. And I remember the place they loved to do it, Lon, was a place where you can golf, you can raise your family, it's got great weather, and there's people who are college educated but not so educated with graduate degrees that they want to be the CEO of the company and take your job, Yolen.

33:35That place is known as Phoenix, Arizona. Oh, interesting. Or Salt Lake City, Utah. Or, you know, pick up Austin, Dallas, Houston. There's tons of salespeople, grinded out salespeople who are awesome. And instead of wanting to get paid$300 ,000 and 1 % of sales, they would prefer to get 75K and 8 % of sales. In other words, they'd rather bet on themselves than force you to pay a huge salary because their home costs$500 ,000 and it's already paid off. That's my best advice is to explore that. And the way one of my companies did this, the way they did it, they told the story here on This Week in Startups.

34:21And now that we have AI, we can go into the 2 ,000 episodes and find it. What they did was, it's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard. They put out ads in four different cities for salespeople. They put a range of positions. They put a range of salaries. Then they set up in the airport Marriott. And they said, hey, we're going to be in town at this day. I'm just picking the easy airport. So they just landed there in the morning. All afternoon into the evening, they did recruiting where they, for the previous couple of weeks, said, hey, we'd love to interview you. Come anytime on this Tuesday and Wednesday.

35:02The next day, so let's say they started in Salt Lake City. Next day, they went to Boulder. Next day, they went to two cities in Arizona. Next day, they went to Austin and Dallas. And then they just collectively looked at the resume flow and who they met, and they said, you know what? This town, and I think it was an Arizona town, is the most amazing fit because Yelp was paying people a 50K base with a 50K package, which 100K, and this is 15 years ago they did it, it was one of the most brilliant ideas I ever heard. Most CEOs who are not of action would be like, I'm going to hire a consultant. This one was like, F it.

35:38Two weeks of time, sent the COO, parachuted in himself, said, we have to get this working. Give me five cities, two days in each, and I want to see the salespeople. I want to get the vibes. I want to understand how hard. And they lost their mind. don't tell anybody this technique and don't spend more than 48 hours in Phoenix not recommended that's the max it's max out of 48 hours no Vegas was one of them too actually and my friend Tony Hsieh rest in peace with Zappos he did a similar thing where he was looking for where to play Zappos and he found all these people who as customer sports agents were completely thrilled with a$40 ,000 salary this is in 2005 Right.

36:22He had that whole plan. He was going to build a whole tech hub in downtown Vegas, I remember. Yeah. And rest in peace, Tony Hsieh. But Tony Hsieh was a genius, and this was his big secret. He wanted people to be happy. And what he realized was people were profoundly sad in a lot of cities that had extremely high cost of living. When he found downtown Las Vegas, he found an abandoned city next to the greatest home developments, downtown, leisure, gambling, shows, restaurants, a boom town. And in the middle of boom town was a just dilapidated old town with these gorgeous buildings. And he bought the old city hall and put Zappos into it.

37:13Genius. It was so close. This was the genius of Tony. He knew how to make people happy. He optimized for the happiness of his staff, not his own. He didn't want to live in Vegas. He was a billionaire. He could live anywhere he wanted. He could place the home and live in Kauai in Hanalei Bay. Instead, he said, where can I make 40, 50K customer support people happy and give them a 10K bonus and have them be like, whoa, this is significant. Las Vegas. All right, everybody. Yolen, great job. Yeah, really appreciate it. Really excited. This is a type of tool, Lon, that makes me want to stay up all night and try it.

37:50This is the problem with this moment in time. That was my exact experience with Comfy UI when I first started using it was, yeah, you suddenly realize, because you could type things directly into Stable Diffusion and see what you'd get. It was not a great experience, especially in 2021, 2022. But as soon as you start using this tool, you start playing around with it. Oh, my God. I could start to get better images. I could start to get more fidelity for what I'm looking for. And it is, it was that kind of tool that you would stay up till 4 a.m. like playing around with just, just to see what you could do with it.

38:20Hey, what's the poly market for today? Cause you and I, I did a hit on a Jesse waters last night on Fox. You were helping me prep and getting me up to speed on what's going on with all these elections in my, both of our previous hometown of Los Angeles. You want to, you want to take a look at that Los Angeles mayor, the election odds on poly market. I just want to understand what's going on here because they had the results of the runoff primary or whatever they call that. It's the primary. Yeah. The California governor race. There's the mayoral election. We were talking. This is what I want to know.

38:52I want to know if they're going to let Karen Bass burn the city down or Spencer Pratt's going to have a chance to save it. Well, I mean, things are things are looking not so great for for Spencer Pratt right now. I'll look up the most recent Bass Ramon. This doesn't make sense to me. I'm going to go put money on Spencer Pratt just because if he wins, I'm going to have a great sense of joy that an outsider won who actually cares and who had his home burnt down. I like the narrative. This is Karen Bass who burnt the city down. What I'm seeing right now, the most updated numbers. Now, that's the poly market.

39:27The actual numbers right now. And the poly market says 66 % chance of Karen Bass. Bass eventually becoming L.A. mayor with Nithya Rahman at 31 percent, Spencer Pratt at a measly 4 percent. Now, the actual numbers right now, Bass has the lead, 35.1 percent of the vote. Then Pratt, 29.4 percent and Rahman at 23.4 percent. The thing to remember about California elections is that they are their laws are designed to get the most number of ballots in possible. So there's all kinds of like you can mail your ballot and as long as it's postmarked election day, it counts. So think about like the mail might take an extra four or five days to get that ballot to the counting center.

40:15They still have to count it. And there's other rules, too. Like if you if there's a signature mismatch, like when they're looking at the ballot and your signature doesn't match right, they don't just throw that ballot away. They send you a notification and you then have 10 days to resubmit. So all of these rules end up pushing back the deadline. That's why it takes so long to count votes in California and why things seem like they're so back and forth. So I got to tell you, go ahead, Lon. Tell me. Four percent chance. Spencer Pratt, I might have to put five dimes on this. I think we were talking about this.

40:49Here's like when you're talking about California, you're talking about it's so heavily weighted to Democrats. There's so many more Democrats per capita. that Republicans have to do exceptionally well. Like they have to go way over the top. But he's a Democrat. Spencer Pratt? He's a Democrat. I mean, he's been appealing to. I think you want to know what I think the other big problem for Spencer Pratt is, is that a lot of the neighborhoods where he has the most appeal, they don't actually get to vote for L.A. mayor. Like if Santa Monica and Beverly Hills got to vote, we probably see a lot more support for Spencer Pratt.

41:27But they're not part of Los Angeles, the city. Technically, they have their own mayor. So they don't get to vote. So I think that would make a big difference, too. Listen, I can tell you about California. There's like a it's the opposite of it's inverse of Texas. We have like a little drop of blue called Austin or purple. I was like and then Rick Perry's like you just drip. Orange County is a drop of red. So it turns like orange. But everybody there is a Democrat. Texas politician Rick Perry describes Austin as, it's the blueberry in Texas's tomato soup. I always like that. All right. That's disgusting.

42:03But I would say it's the blueberry in the... Somebody dropped a blueberry in the strawberry rhubarb pine. Let's lightning round some news here. In big news this week, we're going to talk about this. Anthropic, in a blog post on Thursday, they said they want to slow down global AI development. An odd thing for Anthropic to say. What? Yeah, their heads of internal research and policy wrote that slowing down the pace of global AI development would, and I'm quoting, likely be a good thing. They warn that AI models are showing the capacity to self-improve, recursive self-improvement as they call it, without human intervention.

42:39Here's another quote. We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. Listen, I've been traveling, Knicks Games, Liquidity, Napa, Yonville, French Laundry. I've been living the life of J-Cow for the past week, which is a crazy life. I saw your photos from Bouchon. I'm very jealous. I'll take it. It's incredible. Anyway, I'm a bit exhausted. I saw this go by my Twitter feed. I didn't understand exactly what was going on here. Wait a second.

43:15Why are they doing this now? Didn't we just all go through this, that they withheld mythos? They're doing their thing. They're acting responsible. Now they're calling for a global pause? Do you realize that Bernie Sanders is going to make this into a campaign ad to combine with his desire to seize 50 % of the equity in Anthropic? The timing is bizarre. It seems crazy. It's also they're on the verge of like an IPO, right? Like part of me feels like if Anthropic genuinely thinks that AI is too dangerous and we need to slow down, it's like, well, you first, buddy. Like you're leading the like shutdown club then if it's too dangerous.

43:58If not, what are you doing? You're the ones behind all of this development. It just seems like I don't know how you square that circle. I really don't. Okay. They have the ability to slow down, and they did. And they did it correctly, apparently. We interviewed Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks at Liquidity, and he said they were one of the early companies, obviously cybersecurity space. they looked at it and were able to, in their using of mythos, they were able to find a lot of internal attack vectors and close them, he said. And I said, is it the real deal? And he said, absolutely. This was a level of performance to find bugs that we had not seen before.

44:47So they did exactly the right thing. They don't need to call for a global thing. Now, please combine this story, Lon, with the other story I'd asked you to put on the docket. I don't know if it made it because we've had a couple of package shows. Yeah, we had a few missed shows. Yeah. Do you remember the Bernie thing that came out, I believe, on Monday that I commented on? Bernie Sanders released a video. This is a completely insane, deranged concept. He wants to seize 50 % of the shares of the AI companies. And he doesn't say like these three companies, it just says AI companies. So does that mean, you know, everybody, NVIDIA shares, whatever.

45:28Let's play a little bit of this on 1.5 speed, please. We got to speed up Bernie Sanders because he wants, if you put them on 1.5 speed, that's the speed that some of these entrepreneurs talk at. Hello, everybody. I probably don't need to tell you. You guys can't hear it. artificial intelligence be the most transformational technology in the history of the world. It will profoundly affect the lives of every man, woman, and child in our country and in fact, throughout the world. It is already bringing significant changes to our economy, our democracy, our emotional well-being, our environment, and how we educate and raise our kids.

46:04There is also a very real fear that as AI becomes smarter than human beings, it could eventually function independent of human control with potentially catastrophic consequences. The question is not whether AI will change the world. It will. The question is who will own and control that future. Who will benefit from it and who will be hurt by it. Will AI be used to make life better for working families? Will it help us eliminate poverty, extend life expectancies, and help us solve the climate crisis? Yes it will. Or will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have developed AI to become even richer and more powerful than they are.

46:42That is the fundamental choice before us. And let us be clear, AI was not created out of thin air. The foundation of AI is our collective human intelligence. Let me repeat that. The foundation of AI is our collective human intelligence. Our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images, and ideas spanning generations. As Sam Altman himself acknowledged, AI models were trained on our, quote, collective experience, knowledge, and learnings of humanity, end quote. Yes, that's true. The reality is that big tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their AI models without permission, acknowledgement, or compensation.

47:22In other words, the creative work of millions and hundreds of millions of people has been stolen by the wealthiest people in the world. The time has come to reclaim what was stolen from us. Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Elson and other billionaires, or the venture capitalists and Wall Street firms who see AI as the next great wealth extracting machine. And that is why in the coming weeks, I will introduce the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America through a one-time 50 % tax not on profits but on stock.

48:06It would do two extremely critical things. First, it would give the American people a direct role in determining the future of this technology. Like the Invest America. No longer would the future of AI be dictated by a handful of big tech oligarchs while the rest of the world sits back and watches them do what they want. Secondly, it would guarantee that the trillions potentially created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us, not simply to make the richest people on earth even richer. And I have to tell you, this is not - So basically he advocates for 50%. This is one of the great arguments that I think will play with the American public.

48:43Why will this play with the American public? Everybody knows that AI companies stole people's IP to train their models. How do we know that? There are an infinite number of lawsuits and settlements that have occurred and are still underway. Yeah. And you can see it. Like, if you ask, you know, OpenAI, give me the plot of Wuthering Heights, like it knows it. It read that book and knows what's in the book and can spit it back. Or it read a summary of the book from the open crawl, et cetera. Right. So the fact is this has already been done. Now, the New York Times has a big lawsuit. Other people have had lawsuits.

49:23Settlements have occurred. so he has the high ground on this one with the american public the american public understands this and if you're going to scare the bejesus out of us and say over and over again we're taking your jobs with ai for him to combine it with not only are they taking your jobs but they stole all of humanity's knowledge in order to steal your jobs in order for personal enrichment I'm not saying I agree with this argument. What I'm saying is the public's going to agree with this argument and it's going to have an, it's going to get consensus from the left and the right and some moderates because it's plain as day that they took everybody's content without permission.

50:12That's a true statement. Now, is it legally permissible to train your II on somebody else's content without their permission? The courts are going to adjudicate that issue. They have started to adjudicate it. It looks like some amount of training on people's content is going to be allowed. Right. That's where the courts are signaling. So far, the precedent seems to be you're not allowed to steal copyright material to train AI. So like, you know, Anthropic found like that vast archive of like bootlegged books and then they downloaded it and used it. That's against the law because those were bootlegged and you're supposed to pay for content.

50:48But if you legally access copywritten material, you're allowed to train your AI. So if you bought the book, ripped it apart, scanned it, you're allowed to do that expense. You can. You're allowed. And it's the output so far. That's what courts have determined is if an AI output infringes on a copyright, that's actionable. But if you trained it up front on a copyrighted material and then it reconfigures it and comes out with something original, that's allowed. That's what so far. I mean, we there are certainly a lot more lawsuits working their way through the courts that could change that. But that's the precedent so far.

51:22This is this appeals to people who feel the rich aren't paying their taxes. It appeals to people who believe intellectual property should be protected. This appeals to people who feel like jobs are going to go away in a large part in order to enrich other companies. and it's going to unite America first, America only, you know, the sort of most MAGA of the MAGA. Right. But I think it's kind of a separate movement now. I think it's going to appeal to them. And I know it's going to appeal to the left because they are elitists who make content. There's a real split going on in the political right.

52:02On the left, basically everybody is against AI. On the right, it feels like there's this very direct split between like the pro business, the big tech side of things, your J.D. Vance's, your Peter Thiel's, your David Sachs's. They're very pro-AI. They're pushing this very accelerationist agenda. And then you do, you have the Steve Bannon sort of more traditional MAGA side, and they do seem to have a lot of doubts, both sort of ethically, morally, and, you know, the same kind of stuff that Bernie's talking about. Like, is this just going to take everybody's job and funnel money exclusively to the wealthy and sort of kill the free market?

52:40I got a prediction. I'd love to hear it. I think Anthropic and OpenAI are going to sit down with Bernie Sanders and say, we're willing to put 10 % of our equity into Invest America account, Trump accounts, or dedicated to public service in some way, job retraining, et cetera. And that would be a non-trivial amount of money. It's trivial in a$40 trillion of debt for the country, right? If you just seized all of these companies combined, it would equal 25 trillion, right? If you took every, all the top public companies, just literally seized SpaceX, seized Tesla, seized NVIDIA, seized Google. Like a South American communist.

53:21That would be 20, it wouldn't even be 20 trillion. So you cut that, yeah, if you nationalize it, you take 20 trillion. And of course that would crater the stock so you wouldn't have 20 trillion. But anyway, it's ridiculous. It's not going to it's insane, but it's going to play. It's going to play. I think it's directionally correct. And I think that's what most people get like. And I think this is an opening salvo, you know, like Bernie's opening at 50 percent of the stock. I think it's a negotiating position. You open at 50. The other side says 10. Well, now we're in a dialogue. But I think directionally, I think most people agree this is something Americans would like to see.

54:00And I think it has the extra benefit of Americans are so negative about AI. They're so dubious about AI. There's so much anti-AI sentiment. Well, if everybody started feeling a little bit more of an ownership stake, if we felt like if AI companies do better, I get more money or my local school district gets more money or my city gets more money. I think that makes it a lot more compelling for people to have a little exposure to it, a little taste of their own. And here's the challenge. If you were to go through the top three AI labs, Anthropic is going to be in Bernie's camp to a certain extent.

54:40They're not going to agree. I think, correct me if I'm wrong here, Anthropic has done licensing deals and settlements with publishers before. I believe OpenAI started doing some. So they have tacitly, through their actions, agreed with Bernie Sanders' position that it was trained on copyright materials without permission, because they've done settlements, and they've done deals, and they sought after deals to get AI, at least for the output. I mean, in fact, I got paid$2 ,500 for my book, Angel, I believe by Microsoft licensed it for four years or something. So that's underway. OpenAI has a nonprofit that's going to own some percentage of their trillion dollar market cap.

55:25I don't know the exact percentage that they own, but they actually have the vehicle to do this. They could just say, okay, Bernie, we have this OpenAI vehicle. We're going to take X percent of our revenue and we're going to put it into job retraining, universal healthcare, UBI, some version of that. Sam Altman ran a UBI test, a long forgotten UBI test he funded with Y Combinator in Berkeley. So you have Sam Altman believes in UBI and in fact did the largest test of it, I believe, outside of like, say, Alaska giving money to their citizens. So he did the most recent, most strongest test run of it.

56:08Then Elon has tweeted. Universal high income by checks issued by the federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in the money supply. So there will not be inflation. OK, so this is Elon Musk's belief. Elon's belief, OpenAI's belief and Anthropik's belief is there'll be job displacement to some extent, right? They're all predicting it. Right. So who are you going to believe? And these tweets and these positions are well-known. Bernie Sanders is going to be able to say, Anthropic believes in job displacement is going to be massive and we should pause it.

56:53Open AI's founder, Sam Altman, ran a UBI test. I asked for that. Please pull it up. Open AI, NYC, under Sam Altman, ran a UBI test. He believes that we're going to need to get universal income. Elon believes that jobs are going away and they'll be optional and they'll be a universal one. So here it is. Sam Altman puts$14 million into studying universal income. And what's the date of this story? This is from May 7th, 2026. So just a month ago. Now says it's really useful, but not what we're going to need for this next phase. He did this study through open research in 2020. There we go. Scrolls right past it.

57:29No, I got the details. The three-year study gave 1 ,000 low-income adults$1 ,000 a month, while a control group of 2 ,000 people received just$50. Researchers expected to see whether steady cash would reduce motivation to work. Instead, they found something different. Participants actually reported valuing work more. Belief in the importance of work rose slightly, and many agree with statements like, quote, work is a duty towards society, and people who don't work turn lazy. At the same time, people worked fewer hours on average, but they did not stop working. They used the financial cushion to make decisions about their careers, like going back to school, pursuing certifications, switching into jobs that have more long-term potential.

58:15One participant said the extra money allowed her to take a temporary pay cut for a role with better growth opportunities. So the research ended up concluding it's not about laziness the reason that people worked a little bit less. It's the flexibility of being able to make larger picture decisions about how and where they wanted to work. So what Sam Altman's study proved, and it was a small study but not an insignificant one, was if you give people a small amount of money, not enough so they can quit their jobs, but a small amount,$1 ,000 a month, that might cover half their rent, I'm guessing, that gives them more flexibility.

58:55And they might make a career choice that is more long-term as opposed to short-term. They might be working as a waiter or bartender at a great restaurant where they make$300 a night, but they're never going to have a career, but they're going to make this$75 ,000 a year. Whereas if they joined, say, an associate in training program like we run here, they might get paid$60 ,000 or$70 ,000. They might be$10 ,000 less to start in year one as a researcher, but you're learning and you're in the room where it happens. This is all to say that there is going to be a reckoning, and the reckoning is going to be 2028, because by 2028, that election, I'm predicting now, the 2028 presidential election will be the AI job displacement election.

59:42Let me state it again. 2028, the number one issue in the election in 2028, the number one deciding issue, it's not going to be inflation. It's not to be wars. It's going to be AI. And is AI a net positive for Americans or is a negative? And the attack vector for the 2028 election will be these companies became worth trillions of dollars while jobs went down. A small number of elitists in Silicon Valley benefited venture capitalists, the workers at these companies, of course, the founders and co-founders. And the way that we're going to resolve that issue, I predict, is with the ability to take all of these social programs and have a grand bargain.

1:00:30I believe it's time for a grand bargain. What should the grand bargain be? I believe the grand bargain should be anybody making under $100 ,000 a year,$75 ,000 a year. Maybe it's under 50 pays nothing, under 75K pays a$750, 1 % token amount to the government, flat rate, no deductions, no nothing. Just send your 750 in, you're good. And then something similar from 100K and under, maybe it's like$2 ,000. You pay a token 2 % of your salary to the government. If that were to happen, that's one concession on the K-shaped recovery. The rich doing better in the top of the K, the poor doing worse, the non-equity hold.

1:01:14Second, we already have one solution, which is Invest America, aka Trump accounts. That has said, hey, your kids are going to have a stake in this equity. Then another grand bargain emerges. And this grand bargain is the hardest to do, but could be a revolutionary one. If we said, here's what all the social programs cost, food stamps, unemployment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Give me that number, whatever that number is. Anybody making under 50K a year gets a percentage of that pool. Everybody making under 40K a year gets a percentage of that pool. 30K a year gets a percentage of that pool.

1:01:58Is it UBI? Kind of. But what we're saying is get rid of those programs. Stop operating food stamps. Just give people the money. Yeah. Just give them the money. I think you get Democrats and Republicans to agree on on that as a principle. Like, I don't think anybody's married to these elaborate bureaucratic nightmare systems that we all have had bad experiences with. They're mostly everybody knows somebody who's been screwed over by one of these agencies. We know how wasteful they are. I mean, in Los Angeles, you hear about all the time the groups that are supposed to be helping the homeless, but it's just graft and they're just losing half the money.

1:02:35I think most people would understand just if you gave everybody a check, you wouldn't really need to worry about those programs. I think we get so caught up in the sort of merit-based idea of it. You know, every time Democrats want to pass a social welfare program, it's like, well, it only goes to people. You have to make less than this and you have to apply this way and you have to meet these five criteria. Or just think about when you're paying your taxes in California. Do you qualify for any of these 2000 extremely complicated exceptions that nobody knows if they actually qualify for? If you forgot all of that and just gave people money, I think that would be an obvious solve for a lot of these issues.

1:03:12It makes total sense to me. SNAP, SSI, all these means-tested programs is, I think, the fancy way of saying it. There's housing, there's unemployment, Medicare, Medicaid, everything. And it's all means-tested, and it's all very complicated and convoluted, and the people who need help don't necessarily get it. Other people are defrauding the system or taking advantage of it. If we just got rid of those systems or the government just passed AI profits on to the American people, I think that solves a lot of problems. and it simplifies everything, which is obviously better. Here's my big idea. You take all these social programs.

1:03:50They're all means tested. They're all complicated. They all take a ton of paperwork and they take a ton of administrators. Millions of people are figuring out how to give billions of dollars to Americans. There's a much simpler solution. If you didn't make any money this year, if you make no money, you get a percentage of all those social programs. If you made$20 ,000 or$10 ,000,$20 ,000,$30 ,000,$40 ,000, maybe it's up to that number,$40 ,000, let's say, maybe$50 ,000 max, you just get a percentage of that pool. And so we take that pool and we just give it directly to people in a simple UBI check.

1:04:25But if you make more than that amount, you come out of it and it's done on a scale. Then, in addition to that, you would be able to get rid of the 30 % of waste, fraud, abuse, and then probably another 30 % in administration. I'm guessing it's less than 50 cents of a dollar that actually gets to people. Yes, of course. Those two things. Right. And that's what, oh, anytime you go back and pick apart like a well-intentioned social welfare program years later, that's what you figure out. It's like, oh, we spent 70 % of the total budget just on the people counting up who gets what and dealing with the paperwork and operating the office that needs to be open.

1:05:06Like, you know, if you think about, like, I don't know if you've ever had to go to the Social Security Administration office. I had to get my. No, it's a joke. I had to get my card replaced one time. And it's hours of waiting. There's 18 people working there. It's like, what are we doing? What are we doing? I'm doing the SNL Tucker Carlson. What are we doing? What are we doing? Anyway, so anyway, I think this is kind of a very interesting moment in time. Yeah. We got Kevin O 'Leary agreeing to shrink his data center project. It's kind of similar to what we just talked about. And then we've got Brian Chesky's new AI lab that he's found.

1:05:39Hit me with Brian Chesky. All right. So Brian Chesky, of course, Airbnb co-founder and CEO. He's going to remain on as the Airbnb CEO, but he's also founding a new lab that is going to develop AI models. The focus, at least for now, is user interaction and design. He won't serve as this new lab CEO. He's going to stay on at Airbnb and just sort of dip a toe into this. So here's the big argument. He argues that AI for travel specifically is going to need a richer interface. It's going to need better designs. He thinks people don't just want to go to like a chat bot and have a conversation about their trip.

1:06:17They want a more bespoke, designed, customized experience. And so it looks like that may be what some of these models are going to sort of play into. Of course, Chesky, notably, was a design major in college before founding Airbnb. Yeah, we had a company early on, even before, I think, ChatGPT 3.5, and it was called Roam Around. It was in batch 28. And if somebody can find... I think we looked for that before, and it's already gone. We did this in a previous episode, and I don't think Roam Around still exists. Let me finish presenting. Sorry. If you check YouTube, you'll find it because we have the demo day of it.

1:06:57And I just did a search for it. So we had a company, Roamaround. This was an AI travel planner. It went through our accelerator batch 28. I believe it was before ChatGPT 3.5 came out. So this is when you had, I think, 2.5 and you could use it as an API, but not as the public. it was an incredible, incredible pitch. Everybody loved it. It was like number one. And the team, I think wound up giving memory source credit. They gave us the money back because they were like, oh, you can just do this in chat GPT. And I was like, you know, I still want all the great parts of this. Let's see if we can scrub to the moment when they demoed the product here.

1:07:39And this is a very tactical and practical, important lesson we're going to talk about when you're a founder, should you persevere or not? Should you persevere or pivot? Here is the Rome startup that was in an early accelerator class pitching. What date was this long? This would have been September 20th, 2023. Roll the tape. Hey, everyone. My name is Shai. I'm the CEO of Rome Around. Rome Around is an AI concierge in your pocket. So you ever feel like you need a vacation from planning a vacation introducing roam around rather than spending days planning a trip enter two days in barcelona will create a complete and actionable itinerary for you if it's not perfect you can say something along the lines of it's our anniversary and we'll iterate the itinerary to recommend it was so impressive in hot air balloons etc with all that time saved you can say add a beach day you can see day three and costa brava has been added Now that it's perfect, you can request it to be translated to Spanish.

1:08:45And then once it's done, you can share via SMS, WhatsApp, email. Multiplier mode. You're probably asking yourself, aren't you just a ChachiPT rapper? Well, leveraging our first mover's advantage, we've accumulated millions of... Lon, this was like me going back and forth with the founder, begging them to keep spending our money, to raise money. and I just said, you know, yes, you're going to be accused of being a rapper, but don't let that get in your head. There's so many things around the model and there'll be so many twists and turns on this journey that there is a business here in doing this.

1:09:20And now Brian Chesky is like, you know what? There's so much of a business in AI with travel. I need to make a dedicated model. Roamaround probably would have made their own vertical model based on an open source one, or they could continue to build features and a wrapper is not a bad thing. The Corvette or the, you know, a Cadillac, a Cadillac is a wrapper around the Corvette engine today. Right. Yeah. It's the Corvette's engine in their high-end Corvettes. Right. In the high-end Cadillacs. Does it make it a wrapper or not? Like Jaguars and some other cars have other components in it. It's a wrapper, but it's also a brand and it also symbolizes something.

1:09:58It has a look and a feel and a texture and a brand value. Yeah, of course, people use ChatGPT, but what if there's other features in here like a human in the loop? Beg them, please, please, please don't give us your money. Please keep going. Because it was such, you know, it's like we're talking about 500K. I'd rather see the founder go for it, but they did what I think is also a mature decision. If they don't have the want, desire, stamina, belief, and they have a different belief than me as the investor that, hey, it's just not worth it, and it's not worth my time and the opportunity cost, I have to say, okay, it's not my choice.

1:10:33But anyway, this was heartbreaking for me. Yeah, it's kind of the same thing I would say before. It's the magic for me, I think, is multi-model. Like you use different models and different tools for the different parts of the trip. And so one service that could pull all of that together would probably be the magic rather than just going to ChatGPT and asking, what else should I do while I'm here in Rome or whatever? That being said, if I'm Airbnb and I'm a shareholder, I'm on the board, I'm an institution with a large holding, I'm going to ask Brian, hey, can Airbnb put the first$100 million in and buy 10 % of the company in the case you figure this out and have a perpetual license to it for Airbnb to use?

1:11:18But then the question becomes for Brian, and this is like, you know, no conflict, no interest. If this actually works and it's great and he put his cycles into it and Airbnb didn't collect it or Expedia wants to use it or Uber wants to use it and one fine stay wants to use it or Hilton wants to use it. Okay. Are they going to let Merritt and Hilton use it if they're competitors or not? so just all kinds of conflicts all kinds of interesting things will emerge and he's gotta get some skin in the game for the airbnb shareholders i think but he's super smart he's an incredible designer a design first llm uh frontier language model whatever it's going to wind up being a verticalized one i'm here for it go for it i mean smart if it's even a language model i mean we don't even know if it's an llm or if it's something else i mean there's at this point i think we're we're reaching the point where a lot of people are feeling like the llm has sort of we know what it can do and we've sort of worked out most of it.

1:12:17And now we're sort of picking around with world models and other kinds of models. So I don't even, you know, I don't know for sure if this is an LLM or something else. Yeah. Layla, a travel discovery and booking app purchased Roamaround. There. Yes, that's right. RIP Roamaround. I go mental every time I go down history like this. This is my gift and curse as an investor and support our founders. I believe in them so much that when they give up or they fall, they collapse shop, you know, which is their decision, as I said, it's my decision. I always think, oh God, have we just persevered for six more months or one more year?

1:12:52Travel is so tough. I feel like that's one of the tough, everybody wants to do a travel app. But they were added in 2023. This was three years ago long. We had them in the accelerator. Can you imagine what the roam around would have done in three years? If the founder came back to me tomorrow and say, can I come back to the accelerator? I have another spin on travel. I like that guy, Shea. He was great. I remember talking to him in the parking lot at Buck's after our closing dinner, closing lunch. Had J. Cal's onion rings. Might have even predated J. Cal's onion rings being on the menu officially.

1:13:24Might have been an off menu item. And I'm just talking to him and talking to him in the parking lot. And he's struggling with this, right? This tension. And I was like, just stay the course, stay the course. you know like if there weren't questions there wouldn't be an opportunity so it's a tactical and practical moment here as a founder persevering in an important category is i believe the the correct decision 90 of the time if it's a big market if you got a lead if you got cash in the back you can do pivots of course but i think you should persevere and and pivot your way to success as opposed to give up and giving the money back.

1:14:06I always appreciate a founder who's like, hey, this isn't here, but we're going to give the money back. Or these are my next two ideas. Would you vote in favor and be supportive of me pursuing either of those or both? That's this moment in time. If you raise money, and this is a message to founders and investors, if you've invested in and the founder has raised money for one vision and you believed in them for that vision, and they have the maturity to say, that vision I don't believe is achievable, but I want to pursue this one. I believe that is how great startups are built, which is trusting the founder's instinct, letting them collect information and let them make a hard pivot or a micro pivot or a complete, we're shutting this down and we're going to try this with the money that's been invested.

1:14:53Why? The money's already in the company. By the time you return it, everybody's getting back 10, 20, 30 cents on the dollar. The money's already been POC committed. Let's play the hand. Let's see if the founder can figure it out. Yeah. I love a great pivot. So many great companies are built around them. So that's just my little tactical practical summary. There you go. Roam around. RIP. We'll miss you. Should we go off duty? I feel like it's time to go off duty. All right. So there's a ton. Jacob wanted me to ask you your thoughts on Mandalorian and Grogu. I know you wanted to talk about this HBO series you've been watching.

1:15:31Take your pick. I got a dog that beat me up. You can take your pick where you want. Mandalorian and Grogu was a great season of excitement and fun without lightsabers, without getting into the Skywalker saga or the Disgraciad sequels, episode 7, 8, 9. Just a lot of fun. A lot of great characters. A lot of great Easter eggs for the fans. Just great summer fair. You bring your family, you know, a six, seven, eight, nine, ten-year-old's going to love it. And, you know, the Gen Xers are going to love it. Everybody in between. Incredibly well done. Jon Favreau is a genius. And the guy who took over Filoni.

1:16:12Dave Filoni. Dave Filoni. Yeah. He's also a genius. And I love these characters. And it's a lot of fun. Sigourney Weaver piloting an X-Wing is just, like, incredible. Now, some people might think it's like a season of Mandalorian. And they're correct. It was literally the season of Mandalorian. They made it into a movie. I don't mind it. My bigger idea is that I think all these series should come out in movie theaters, in extended versions, or two weeks before they're on. So if you have a nine-episode Mandalorian series, I think you should be able to watch it two days before it comes out. on the streaming service.

1:16:54So if it comes out on Monday on the streaming service, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you should be able to go see it in theaters, and then Monday you can watch it. This would create a way of having community. That's what I want to see them do. Imagine if they did that for The Sopranos or a peak television show where you could go buy a$15 ticket and go see Breaking Bad on Friday, Saturday night, and then it came out Sunday night. Incredible. People would pack the theaters. I have done some stuff like this. Stranger Things. You could go see the finale of Stranger Things. Netflix played it in cinemas.

1:17:29Before or concurrent? It was the night. Like the night that the series finale debuted on Netflix. That night, you could also go see it in your local movie. Yeah, I got a better idea. Two nights before. Well, there you go. And the community would go crazy. So what I think you do is you play the previous episode with like five minutes of bonus material you can only get in theaters. Then you play the new episode, five minutes of bonus material, you can only get it. So you're getting 10 unique minutes. So you can show up 60 minutes into this double header and watch the previous episode with a little more in it or maybe an interstitial between the two episodes.

1:18:05And then you watch the new one. It would bring back theater because, you know, secession, industry, all these ones have great communities and people want to go share their fandom. Severance. People would have gone to see the Severance finale in theaters for sure. No, but do it for every episode and add five or 10 minutes. Well, I like where your head's at because I do, I mean, part of my whole thing has been you save movie theaters by mixing it up. Like it's some first run things. It's some classic things. You could show all kinds of stuff in movie theaters. It doesn't just have to be original first run movies.

1:18:37And I mean, we're already seeing like if you have YouTubers that start to make movies, those can also become huge hits, back rooms. Okay, well, take me off duty with that. My understanding is there's a movie, there's two movies in theaters that blew past Mandalorian and Grove. Mandalorian and Grove. The first one is Obsession. I actually saw this one the other night. It's by a guy, YouTuber named Curry Barker. He and his friend Cooper Tomlinson, they used to do sketches. They were doing YouTube and TikTok sketches. And then they started doing these horror shorts. They did one called Milk and Serial, like serial killer, S-E-R-I-A-L, that was pretty well received.

1:19:14And they just built up it and then they made this hundred thousand dollar movie obsession or maybe maybe a little bit more than that. I'll have to look it up. That's making, you know, Ted's the number one movie at the box office has become like a, you know, cultural sort of phenomenon now. I want to see it. It's really good. It's really it's really well done. The concept is very simple. This guy finds in a magic shop this like device that you can make one wish on. he's in the friend zone with this girl who's in his friend group that he's got a crush on and so he just offhandedly makes the wish i wish she was more in love with me than anyone else on the whole planet and he breaks the thing oh no then it turns out it's real obsession really has magic and she becomes terrifyingly over the top obsessed with him in a psychotic and frightening way and the the actress indy navareti who plays the the girl who he makes this wish about it is an incredible performance.

1:20:09I mean, she goes to places that are genuinely very scary. And then the other one is this movie called Backrooms, which is, this is a, going back a few years now, YouTube, one of those like creepy pasta online things that this guy Kane Parsons made, who's now, I believe, the youngest director in history to have a number one film at the box office. He's like 21 or 22. So he just made a big screen version of this online meme trend. It's about people who get caught in this sort of liminal space, the back rooms where it's yellowed and it's just sort of endless hallways and it's kind of creepy and unsettling in a way.

1:20:45And, you know, I haven't seen the movie. I'm sure there are monsters and things that pop up. But yeah, taking these ideas from the internet, you know, like the idea used to be IP. We always thought about IP, but I think our thinking about it was very narrow. It was like, well, Transformers is IP and Star Wars is IP and Severance is IP. But what I think especially backroom shows is IP can be a popular YouTube video if enough people have seen it and feel enthusiastic about it. Like Gen Z will show up to a theater to see something they like, but it doesn't have to be this like very pre-established IP like we think of them.

1:21:22Yes, I mean, listen, we're going back to Easy Rider days of the movies, which is a young generation who has not been at the helm of movies before gets the helm and starts delivering. And their contemporaries say, you know what? I'd like to hear some new stories. This could be the revival of the movie industry. If these YouTubers can make something for a million and have it generate a hundred million in revenue, which is, is that what Obsession is going to do? It was 750 ,000 was the budget. It's so far grossed over 166 million globally at the box office. So now I want to know what the, what their take is of that.

1:22:05Cause you can self-distribute that crazy. It's Blumhouse. So they're sharing it with Jason Blum. Yeah. Okay, so he made 50 % of every dollar, I'm assuming. And so this is pretty amazing. And Blumhouse has now figured it out. A24 has started to figure it out, which is there's a place for$1 to$20 million budget movies. I think their largest one may have been$50 or$60 million. This is the future. And you don't need to get everybody to go see it. There was a product called Blair Witch Project. Back in the day, that cost$100 ,000,$200 ,000 to make and also did something similar. Incredible. Yeah. 166 times the production cost.

1:22:46This feels like a business I want to get into. I would love to start a movie studio. I've talked about that before. I have a syndicate. I have my own money. I would love to independently distribute a film like this. Yeah, I mean, that would be the interesting thing. Because the people, what's the one of the crazy clown? Oh, Terrifier, Terrifier. Terrifier. My understanding is Terrifier self-distributes. Art the Clown. Yeah, the art the clown, right. Right. They're a small production company that sort of has been, they started doing like roadshow things and then they grew it out sort of organically.

1:23:18But they control the means of distribution and own that terrifier, Arthur Clown, which is disgusting. And I tried to watch one and it was just way too gross. Oh, yeah. No, they're brutally, the gore is like the whole thing. They're really brutally, gleefully violent. I mean, it's like beyond gore. It's like it's unrealistic, but it's just too much. Yeah, it's really intense. Yeah. So Damien Leone, that's the creator. writer, director of these movies. And yeah, he has his own independent production company, Dark Age Cinema. But they distribute it and their idea is to go directly to the movie venues and say, hey, we'll come up with a deal that's bespoke for us.

1:23:56They don't have to go to Blumhouse or Paramount or wherever you go to. They partner with Screambox, which is like bloody disgusting, that website that's their streamer. But that's still I mean, they're a small independent company compared to like the Blumhouses, which has a universal deal, you know. There is a great documentary called The Dark Wizard. Have you watched it yet? I have not. I was going to try to watch it last night because I knew you wanted to talk about it, but then I have this new dog at home. You can play it in the background, the trailer while I talk over it. It's about an artistic, autistic guy who climbs and does free soloing.

1:24:38You all know Alex Honnold. This was Alex Honnold before Alex Honnold. And he's a challenging character, not always likable in his pursuits. And the trailer has him jumping off of a mountain while free soloing. You'll notice he has a backpack on when he does that. And then they show later in him doing base jumping, which is when you jump off a clip. So he's free soloing, he's bass jumping, and then he also does slacklining. He's a true artist. He's a sensitive guy. And he's obviously, like Alex Honnold, probably on the spectrum, which makes you able to do things like hang off a cliff without a rope.

1:25:28and it gets into the competitive nature of these two individuals where Alex Honnold comes out and he starts taking all the routes that the principal character in this film I'm forgetting his name right now Dean Potter Dean Potter Dean Potter so Dean Potter's 10 years a senior basically Dean Potter has been doing all these things that are making people love him and sponsor him and then this guy, Alex Honnold, comes in and takes all the things that Dean Potter wanted to do and just crushes them. It's just unfairly stealing all his records, doing all the things people predict Dean Potter's going to do, but Dean Potter is not the athlete slash performer that Alex Honnold is.

1:26:15So this kind of overemphasizes their competition, which they were friends, but it does show commerce coming into art and making people do unnatural acts and competition leading to suffering. And something I've always talked about with Alex Honnold, which is, I think, a lot of what he was doing would be just as notable if he used a top rope or, you know, some amount of safety gear. There's no need to do this without safety gear. Um, and I guess people have the gimmick. Yeah. It's like, it's, that makes it exciting because maybe he'll die. You know, I don't like that as a gimmick because life is precious.

1:26:56I just like, I don't like these people, um, Ocean Ramsey, uh, swimming with the great white sharks and the bull sharks in Hawaii and like taunting them in my mind, riding them. They're not meant to be ridden, Ocean Ramsey, and you're not meant to chum the water and jump in with them. Yeah, I understand that this is the hook, but I don't like the hook personally. I'd like to see them use some basic, basic safety. Pull this one up too, Jacob. Speaking of commerce sort of coming in and intruding here, I saw this from Pump.Fun. They've got a new Pump.Fun, you know, PumpFun, they're the meme coin sort of service.

1:27:36Oh, gosh. They've got a new thing called Go, and it's basically you can pay people to do crazy things anywhere around the world with this service. I compared it to like that movie Money Plane or like Squid Game where people are betting on these people doing dangerous things or unwise things or crazy things. Yeah, it's a little bit like Rent-A-Human, but to put people in purposefully disturbing or difficult or crazy circumstances, do things they wouldn't normally do with the offer of these payouts. It's dystopian. I feel like this world feels, this world that we're creating now, bounties for, you know, doing things in the real world that you might not want to do.

1:28:20It unsettles me. It really unsettles me. All right. So PumpFun is letting people put bounties on behaviors that are silly and or extreme. An all-encompassing bounty platform where anyone can create or complete bounties for any task for unlimited rewards. It's the any task part that strikes me as like the funny, the weird. This is kind of running man, Black Mirror. And is it anonymous? So like, because it's a crypto group of people, you can say, I want you to pay you$10 ,000 to hang off the Golden Gate Bridge and nobody knows you put the bounty there. Yeah. I mean, I'm assuming like they don't say specifically, but yes, how to create a bounty.

1:29:06Connect your X account and wallet. Create your bounty. Set a description, time frame, and deliverables. Submit your bounty payment into escrow. Pump fund reviews bounty submissions. So that's it. There's no public face disclosure. It's just if you have an X account and a crypto wallet, you're in. Listen, we have things like Fiverr or the other places where you can hire people Upwork, et cetera. Yeah, Rent-A-Human, we had them on the show where your agent can rent a person and have them do something. There have been other platforms that do this. You have Fiverr, you've got Upwork, you have Rent-A-Human, which we had on the program where you can Rent-A-Human to have your agent do different actions for you or check work.

1:29:51Great. What's challenging about this one is I know which way they're going. They want people to do disturbing things in public. Now, If it was streaking, okay, that's illegal. Or, I don't know, you run around in your mankini and you do something like Borat or Borat. Like, okay, maybe it's funny, whatever. But it always goes too far. And then there's always somebody who gets hurt in this equation. So the people who make these platforms have to be very thoughtful about it. And it does dovetail with Alex Honnold and Netflix, having him climb a building without a rope. I thought this was negligence on Netflix's part because nobody in their right mind wants to see him die.

1:30:34Yet everybody's tuning in and they're promoting it because he might die. We don't want people dying. The human spirit, I mean, the human life is so precious. Don't do these crazy stunts. What they should have done with him is they should have had him do it and had a net that was, say, 10 floors below him, that just rose with him. And they say, listen, he's doing it without a thing, but if he falls, he's going to take a 10 story and he's going to get caught by the net. It's still exciting. It's still exciting. And you know what? Then he can fall. So he could do more challenging things. Would that be the worst thing in the world to watch him scale one of these crazy buildings and make it even more extreme, have three people do it and have it be a race and have them fall and the net is following them up the building yeah and then if they fall they can jump back on the building and they're five stories behind i do think part of it is as sick as it is i think there is that human impulse to like like people looky looky lose on the freeway if there's an accident like i think people are more curious because there's a chance this guy might actually bite it if he falls i think alex honnold even he's got kids now so i think or he that last i heard.

1:31:51So, all right, listen, this has been an amazing episode of This Week in Startups Twist. We'll see you on Monday. Bye-bye. Bye, everybody.

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