China wants you to cheer for the robots taking your job | E2329

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29:44And this isn't just Elantra scooping up property and sitting on it. They're working alongside permanent stewards, who will find practical uses for these important spaces without destroying them. Find out more about how the Conservation Fund is changing the playbook. at conservationfund.org. All right. So Stripe bought Open Router. Correct. Right. And just so people understand what these platforms do is they have all the models and you can route your token usage. I've been talking for a couple of years. I thought open source would win the majority of the tokens, not the majority of the revenue because the frontier models are expensive.

30:21But people are increasingly saying, whoa, sticker shock when the Claude Bell comes in. I got a little we had a little sticker shock at our company because we put on claw tag it's on fable and everybody starts using it all at once and literally got a couple thousand dollars and they're like oh we're gonna give you twenty five hundred dollars in credits I'm like oh that's nice we turn on claw tag twenty four hundred dollars in the first six weeks gone wow and I'm like whoa whoa whoa pump the brakes what are we doing here why are we not using like the clawed app and now we're using it in slack and it's like burning through credits like a lunatic and now Now I've got to spend on top of the$2 ,500 per employee I'm spending.

31:01So that's like times 20 is 50 grand a year. Now they want to get another 50 grand out of me. What these platforms do is they let you route to the cheapest platform, the cheapest. That's why it's called Open Router. Yeah. And Hugging Face. They let you route to the latest version. And then underneath it, they might have multiple providers. Anyway, what this means is a lot of developers and increasingly prosumers who are using Hermes, the incredible luxury bag company. They also went into AI. They did a pivot. It's scarves, bags, and AI models. Yeah, that's it. And a harness. Yeah. Which is like harnesses are kind of right next to bags.

31:43I mean, it's like a bag, a harness. There was a, yeah, 90s. it was very chic those like harness yeah so who would want to then capture the open source early adopters well remember sam altman bought essentially bought soft bought the gentleman who created open claw i was like peter steinberg yes and i said to myself if you buy the founder you buy the vision and you kill the existing thing now i don't want to be a party pooper here and say, I told you so. How much did you hear about Open Claw after Peter went to Open AI? When did the Open Claw surging momentum dissipate? When did it dissipate? It was almost immediately after he joined.

32:32And I mean, I think you could make the argument that, well, so many other entrants came into the field. Maybe that was inevitable. But it does seem like Open Claw suddenly was no longer part of that conversation. Because the founder secured, what I'm going to guess is a quarter billion dollars. I think, and this is like, I'll give credit to Sam Altman. Master dealmaker. Too good of a dealmaker. To the point at which, you know, you remember he did like an NVIDIA deal and then like two weeks later did an AMD deal. Then he's doing this deal. And then Jensen's like, Like, well, we don't have to invest$10 billion into OpenAI.

33:14That's at our option. We have an option, right? And you could tell Jensen's a pretty chill dude, public-facing. But he was, my interpretation, Jensen, take it for what it's worth. He's chill. But I think he was a little perturbed that those announcements happened back to back. And I don't know if he put the$10, whatever it was,$5 or$10 billion. and I don't know if he took his option to invest that in OpenAI. The purchase of OpenClaw's founder killed OpenClaw. Let me just say it clearly, folks. I predicted it. OpenClaw is not part of the dialogue anymore. Not really, though. There's an OpenClaw foundation.

33:57My friend Dave Morin is running it. They're hiring people. But I just kind of feel like if you take the founder, if you took Elon out of SpaceX, if you took, you know, Zuck out of Facebook, what happens? What happens? The soul. Right. So Sam Altman rips the soul out of Open Claw. And now we're talking about Hermes. Now we're talking about Perplexity Computer. Now we're talking about GrockBot. Right. You do the math, folks. You don't like my interpretation? You do the math. They were first. Open Claw was the first arrival that was like, here's what you can do. This agent is going to plug into everything and it's going to have all the context.

34:32And then they didn't keep up. They did like all of these other entrants came in. There were suddenly rivals. They were easier to set up and that they were faster, more intuitive. And you never there was never that next open claw update that was like, OK, here now we're going to keep up in advance. We're going to take it even one level further. They just didn't stay in the race. They're still stopped innovating. Yeah, exactly. Let's go back to Hugging Fist. Who would buy? Well, obviously, if Anthropic and OpenAI are going public and people are telling them over and over again, open source is their biggest threat.

35:06Oh, have they not been saying that? Right. It became the whole dialogue. Absolutely. I said it two years ago on All In. You did. From my ski house. We have the clip. I have the receipts. It's January 2024 was that clip. You're in Tahoe. You can see the snowy back. I mean, you should have that clip right. I tried to pull it last week. Let's keep that top of mind, that clip, because I need to do a victory fact. Jacob, can we pull up that clip? I know I sent it to you on Friday. Okay. So I did that victory fact for a reason. I was right. Everybody else in the world was wrong. And, you know, listen, sometimes you got to listen to J-Cow.

35:42And I'm not saying there's some people saying. Some have said. J-Cow was right about everything. Many people. Many people are saying this. Many people are saying it. Somebody made a t-shirt. Jake, I was right about everything. I've seen it all over. This is the thing I was right about. I said, there's a chance in this clip. I said, there's a chance I think open source could win the whole thing. And the reason I said that was because AI is too important for one person to own. Developers are going to want sovereignty. It was just kind of obvious to me because I saw it happen with databases. People were like, I want my sovereignty with a database.

36:18Give me Hadoop. Give me my SQL. Give me something where I control my destiny. we'll put it all aside for a second. The master stroke to your original question is who would buy Hugging Face? The master stroke would be a frontier model company buying it. Why would that be a master stroke? Because then they have two ways to win. You want to use Kimmy, you want to use Quentin, great. Go to our Hugging Face, go to, you know, if they had bought Open Router. it would be insane for Anthropic or OpenAI or SpaceX AI to not buy it. Just because it's a threat vector. And if you are Google and you're selling ads and you see YouTube growing like a weed and it would be perfect for ads and video ads are wonderful and make a big business, you want to get rid of that threat vector so you buy it you know facebook's growing nicely but instagram's growing faster you want to buy it facebook messenger's doing well but whatsapp's growing faster you want to buy it you always buy the threat open claw was growing people loved open claw over open ai what did sam do he bought the threat you always buy the most threatening thing to your business, either to kill it or to get the data and control it.

37:41So now if Anthropic owned Hugging Face, they get all that data, they're watching which customers are using which models, then if they're watching which customers are doing which models, they can insert their model at a lower price and say, yeah, oh, I see you're using Quinn. Oh, you're paying, you know, a dollar per 10 million tokens. We'll match it. will beat it by 20%. Just, you know, hey, the option's there for you. You're a great customer, boom. They just insert themselves on the menu. That would be the master stroke. I don't think it's going to happen. But I do think AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure will buy this in a heartbeat for that amount of money.

38:22Anybody who has a web service, including Elon Web Services, anybody with a web service will buy this because you, or Caruso Cloud, you know, pick your Scalar because you can then send traffic to your cloud. Right. That makes sense. It's a no-brainer. It's a no-brainer for either a hosting company to buy it or for wildcard, seems crazy, a frontier model to buy the open source leader. It's interesting that you say that. I'm going to jump ahead to a different news story. Sam Altman was on David Senra's podcast over the weekend. I believe the full episode goes up today. There was a lot of some of the other clips got the most focus.

39:03But here's a moment that I'd like to have Jacob maybe pull up. It's the first one under some more interesting moments. Altman says he doesn't want OpenAI to be a product company. He thinks they're a platform company and he doesn't want to compete directly with his customers on the application layer. So let's pull up that one. And it's basically him talking about exactly what I think you're sort of saying. What you described to me is a direct shot at Anthropic. Anthropic created Claude Code and Claude Design. They specifically went after their customers. Here's Sam Altman. People talk about different ways, a new utility, a new commodity, whatever you want to call it.

39:44People want to use a lot of AI, and they want it at a low cost, and they want it to be fast and to work well and have their contacts and be smooth. We got you. And then there's a single product, which is, I need to ask the AI something. eventually maybe it's the ai should proactively offer me things but you will have this interface which started as a chatbot and now also has coding agents and i think at some point will feel like a more persistent agent to this ai that is running on whatever you need it to run on but that's it i don't think we should go build every product category i don't think we should like go try to compete with all our customers i don't think we should try to like subsume the entire economy, I think we should offer this platform and try to have 100 million new businesses and 8 billion people use it in all kinds of new ways.

40:29To me, that sounds like he's pitching what you're talking about, that you'd go to OpenAI, they're the marketplace for all intelligence, and then you're building on top of that. That's what I... The AWS of intelligence is what he's referring to there. That's a good vision for him, especially when, as we saw just recently, Harvey, and I don't know if we talked about this last show. We did, the Harvey tenant. Yes. Yes. Harvey has forked, I believe it was Quinn. Kimmy. Kimmy K3. Kimmy K3 to make their own legal AI sovereign. They control it. Yeah. It's on their servers. They control it. nobody has access to the innovations, the updates, the usage, the utilization, the output, the problems, the thumbs up, the thumbs down, any of the signal, they control it.

41:20And that's their castle now. They got their castle. And then I use the metaphor of the keeps. Keeps are like the little areas outside around the castle with a little bit of a smaller wall. Those keeps are their customers. So now their customers, whatever law firms Harvey is going into, they can say, hey, I don't know, Wilson Sincini or, you know, Orick, whatever the Sherman Sterling, they can say, hey, Sherman Sterling, we know you have a bunch of documents. They're not our documents, they're your documents. We, and you keep them in your keep, they don't come back up to us and they certainly don't come up to us to open AI or Anthropic and they certainly don't go up to us and back down to Wilson Sincini.

42:05And then Wilson Sincini, you got your little keep And if you have a bunch of secrets and a bunch of great documents, you're working on a bunch of case law, it's not going into our system. It's going to be on-prem, on your site, in your database. It's all yours. That's what the world has realized. That's what I realized a couple of years ago when I made that famous thing. I think open source could run away with it because it's just so obvious. And now Sam is having to play catch up and say, yes, we're not going to compete with you. Why? Eleven Labs, huge customer of the Frontier Models, and Lovable, who I had both of those on the all-in interview show.

42:45And Lingora, is that the other, Harvey? Ligora, yeah. Ligora, I had the founder of Ligora. All of those app levels. And then you have Figma over here, Dylan. Sure. I'd love to have Dylan on the show, by the way. Please book Dylan. We've reached out. For an hour? We'll reach out. Yes. And if somebody has to get back, then I got to come in and do the invite. But we'll have Dylan on. Figma, Claude Design, people are starting to realize I just can't trust the frontier models not to steal my business. They're going to steal my cheese. So I like this vision. Personally, I'd love to see Elon buy it. Or I would love to see a Microsoft GitHub.

43:25Microsoft owns GitHub, right? NVIDIA would be a great... NVIDIA is probably the no-brainer. Microsoft, GitHub, Google Cloud, NVIDIA, you know, like a Salesforce might want, you know, Mark Benioff's pretty aggressive. He might want to do this to restructure what he's doing as more AI first. Yeah, well, and it puts he's getting his ass kicked in the markets because he's viewed as a SaaS company. So he has Slack plus hugging face. Maybe then he's in the AI game and he can move from the framing of Salesforce as part of the sasspocalypse, and then it would be part of the AI revolution. It speaks directly to the criticisms of him, which is like that they're bolting on, like, oh, they're just buying all these AI companies and then bolting those on to the core Salesforce product.

44:14This would shift the conversation to, well, now you come to Salesforce first and it's what's your infrastructure that's powering all of your AI. So it would speak to that. That's an interesting theory. I mean, listen, if you want to be extra spicy, Stripe should buy it. Ooh, on top of Open Router, yeah. Yes. Well, they are different. Why not? I made the comparison, but they are different. I mean, Hugging Face is more like a repository. It's where everybody is going to sort of communicate. It's almost got a social network aspect to it, whereas Open Router is much more like I have a workload. Utility.

44:47Yes. But they would be interesting to them. But how different are they? How different are they then? Yeah. There's like a lot of overlap. that there's a lot of overlap yeah if open router were to add comments and a little bit more community features or hugging face were to do a little more routing it's the same product they both host llms and data sets and allow you to deploy directly from the platform yeah uh should we keep do you want to take a look at a few more of these sam altman clips i mean if they're relevant or it's interesting there was one more that was getting a lot of attention that i think we should discuss.

45:19He's talking about how he agrees with the popular public sentiment that the industry has not done a good job of talking and communicating about AI and data centers and a little bit for what he thinks that conversation should be. This is the very top clip on there, Jacob. Let's play it. Man, this thing is going to be really terrible and there's going to be 50 % of the jobs are going to go away in the next year and hope you all are okay, but it seems really scary. Like we have not as a field done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated.

45:53And we certainly have not done a good job. Even if people have had answers like, you know, saying, well, there's going to be universal basic income or work will be optional or whatever. There's been very little discussion from people about how and why it's important that people have more power and personal freedom in the world, not less and that matters a lot to most people yeah um if you look in his eyes right there i think the message has been received loud and clear and revenue there it is see that yeah look that's the i get it look there was a famous venture capital capitalist jerry colonna i had him on the program two or three times good friend of mine um and and i knew him in new york in the 90s and then he became a buddhist and a coach so now he's like coaches ceos you can take sam off the screen And so he said, Jason, the question we must ask ourselves is, what have I done to create, I think it was, what have I done to create the suffering that I'm experiencing?

46:58What have I done? How have I contributed to the suffering that I'm experiencing? Sure. So if you were like tired and depressed, you might say, okay, well, why am I tired and depressed? Like, well, I'm not sleeping. I'm drinking too much booze, you know, and I'm wallowing in it and I'm out of shape. Okay, great. You contributed to it. I think what Sam is doing right here in this moment is, and I don't think it's performative at all. I think it's actually very sincere. He's like, when he says we, I think he should say I. It would have been stronger if he said I. He said, you know what? I have talked a lot about UBI and I did a UBI experiment.

47:36And then I said that a lot of these jobs are going to go away. And I should not have said that as my lead in to why you should use ChatGPT. What I should have said, what I should have said was you're going to learn any skill, anytime using this for free for life. We're always going to have a free tier and whatever you want to learn, whether you're a 12 year old with a single parent and you can't afford a tutor, but you want to learn a new skill. You could have the same, you can have a better tutor than the person on the other side of the tracks with the rich parents who have a personal tutor coming over every day for 250 bucks and they're spending$50 ,000 a year on extra tutors so you can get into an Ivy League school.

48:28You know what? OpenAI is gonna be that free tutor for you for life. And you're gonna be on a level playing field with the rich kids on the other side of the track. And when you go to your doctor and your doctor's only got seven minutes for you and you're on the cheapest, worst healthcare plan, we're gonna let you put in your labs, we're gonna let you ask questions and you're gonna have as much information as your doctor. And when you go to that doctor, you're going to know every single possible medicine drug modality to help you to help you get healthier and my commitment to you is that we will always have a free unlimited tier for every human on planet earth that's the chat gpt promise all human beings have access to all intelligence for all time yeah i mean i think that's a it's more effective i think than what they've been doing.

49:21I have to say, and I tweeted about this over the weekend and a lot of people reacted. I just I get why people don't believe there's going to be universal basic income. It just doesn't. It seems they keep promising it, but that I mean, it doesn't seem like it's very American. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing Americans would actually pass or want or be into. We don't like handouts. We don't like free lunches. There's all this debate about every socialist policy that comes out. It makes me very cynical to hear people talk about universal basic because it just feels like a thing that there's no excitement for among America's elite and ruling class.

50:01Like they don't want to. Nobody wants a nobody wants a hand. You don't want to give these companies don't want to give their stock away for free. The government, they don't want the government giving things away for free. So where is this UBI coming from? UBI is a path to an idle mind. My grandmother used to say, idle mind, devil's playground. And so if you give people enough money that they don't have to work, their minds are going to look for problems to solve or other things to do that are unhealthy to fill their time. People do not want handouts. Now, what would be a way for us to increase the standard of living and opportunity for all humans?

50:46I've been talking about this for a couple of weeks. The minimum wage, federal minimum wage, seven bucks and change, has not changed for decades. It was five bucks. It doesn't keep up with inflation, doesn't keep up with anything. And every time they do a study of just raising the minimum wage, just a little bit, dollar a year here and there, Australia, New Zealand, Seattle, New York, the number of jobs lost, a pass along inflation to consumers when they buy their hamburger, it winds up being you lose less than one or two percent of jobs, you lose less than one or two percent of jobs to automation, and the price of a burger goes up one, two or three percent.

51:22In other words, it has no impact, but everybody has to agree to raise that wage or one company that does raise it, like Starbucks, is now at a disadvantage to Dutch Bros or whatever other company doesn't. So my continued plea and instructions, and this will be another Jake Al was right about everything, if you want to have an esprit de corps, if you want to have a spirit that we're all in this together, all the corporations in the world, all the rich people in the world should say, you know, there's only 15 million Americans making under 15 an hour. Let's get them all to 20. We don't have to do it.

52:01We don't have to shock the system and go from seven to 20. We're just going to make a commitment, a dollar a year for 10 years. And let's just raise the bottom up a little bit. A hundred percent of the money people spend when they're at that tier lawn, they, all that money they make, if they go from seven to$15 an hour, they're just going to spend it. There's no savings going on with the bottom 15 million workers in America. It's the bottom 10%. We've got like 150 million people working in the country, 67%, 62 % of the country is employed. Just free your mind for a second as a capitalist. I am a rabid capitalist.

52:36I have changed my position based on new information. Please take the time to follow me on Twitter, x.com slash Jason, while I argue this with my fellow capitalists who will not even consider for a moment what this would do for the spirit of America. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Obviously, I agree we should raise the minimum wage. It's like$7.50 an hour right now. The federal minimum wage is insane. I mean, I can't imagine trying to survive, let alone support another person on that paltry amount of money. But I have to say, I don't necessarily think universal basic income wouldn't work. There's a certain chunk of the population that they're lazy.

53:20They're not going to want to work. they're just going to take the money and, and, and, and, and you know what? Fine. Rather better that than them being a drain on their parents or a drain on society or doing crime or whatever to make up the gap. But I think most people would be, uh, you know, like they're okay. This is a, this is a bare minimum. This is going to cover rent. I don't have to sweat it. What can I do with my time now that is going to be fulfilling for me and productive? I'm going to create things. I'm going to make things. I'm going to start my own business. If you freed people up from having to work whatever job they could find to pay for their rent and food and health care, and you just had that as a baseline and then they could go be.

54:00I think I think you'd see amazing things. And I think there would be whole new discoveries of industries and and businesses. But I just don't think it would ever happen. I just don't think America doesn't have the appetite for it. We don't like giving things away for free. UBI is a road to nowhere. Take it out of your mind. Right. It's about the minimum wage. That's what it's about. And here's the other great thing, Lon, that people don't know and I didn't know. I've been doing this research. I've been finding every study. I've been tweeting about it. I've let my tweets be open. Everybody tells me I'm a libtard.

54:33I go look at their profile. They created the account in July of 2026, and they've got 14 followers. Okay, great. These are all like spam accounts or whatever. But if you make that$20 an hour and you get to 2 ,000 hours a year, 20 bucks an hour, let's say you just work a nine to five now you're getting to 40 000 that level of income now takes you out there's like a benefit cliff you now no longer are going to be trying to get food stamps or uh other stuff from the government housing subsidies there's so many government programs that you wouldn't need to tap so then you have to ask yourself wait a second how did we structure society?

55:16We structured society so corporations, and listen, I am the most capitalist person you could imagine. I invest in 100 startups per year and lose 100 % of my money on 90 of those 100. I am a capitalist capitalist. But I think it's profoundly unfair for a company like Amazon to be able to pay DSPs, delivery service partners, and push the minimum wage down, and then those same people who are delivering Amazon. So Amazon can print money and be this incredible organization. And I'm a very large shareholder in Amazon and I'm increasing my ownership in Amazon because I think it's one of the best-run companies in the world.

55:56What they're actually doing is they're paying people a substandard wage in some cases in order. And then the subsequent impact of that is that the rest of us paying into the tax base are then giving Amazon delivery workers food stamps because Amazon just won't pay them 25 bucks an hour. Come on, people. Just open your eyes to it for a second. Just steel man the other side. Steel man the other side. It's only 15 million people. It's only 15 million people. And if everybody raises it at the same time, would anybody care if their latte that was$4 added 4 %? I'm going high, 4%. Now your$4 latte is$4 and 16 cents.

56:42Would you rather have them sharpening the guillotines and firebombing CEOs' houses and shooting CEOs in the back of the head gangland style? Would you rather pay$4 and 16 fucking cents for a latte? That's my message. I think there's something just deep in our character that we don't like the idea of other people getting more fair treatment or money. We want everybody to be in this cutthroat competition. That's why I just don't believe. I don't believe UBI would ever pass. I just don't believe these. No, I'm talking about minimum wage. We're in strong agreement on UBI. I'm only talking about minimum wage.

57:15Even that, like we've been fighting over the$750 minimum wage for so long. And$750, that's crazy. That's what I was making in like, you know, 20, 25 years ago. Like that's, and it was hard to live then. I mean,$7 time. And there's not that many people making$7. No. Because there are a lot of people making$10. Well, right, because that's the federal. A lot of states and cities have already adjusted, so it's much higher in a lot of places. That's the federal state. Enough with socialism corner. All right. Now everybody thinks I'm a socialist. I'm not a socialist. I actually think it'd be good for capitalism.

57:47I'll tell you why it's good for capitalism. I'll end on this. That person goes from 7 to 15. They can buy another latte. They can join Amazon Prime. They can get their own Netflix account and not be sharing a Netflix account. Instead of stealing stuff, you know, pirating stuff, whatever, they can go buy it themselves. It's good for capitalism. It's good for monetary velocity. What else is in the news? All right. Let's talk about there's two sort of military AI stories in the news that I think we should discuss. The first one, hackers from Iran apparently shut down a UK power plant last week. According to the Telegraph, a small UK power plant was shut down for, oh, this is July, not last week.

58:28According to the Telegraph, a small UK power plant was shut down for four days in July. following a cyber attack linked to Iran. Here's a UK government spokesperson. This story refers to an incident impacting a small-scale energy generator. At no point was there a risk to the wider energy system. The UK has a highly resilient energy system. The FBI has also warned about cyber attackers targeting US water facilities across at least seven states. These are also believed to be linked to Iran. I mean, at this point, how vulnerable do you think we are, Jason, to a large scale destructive cyber attack?

59:05Do we have the best models? Does that make you feel safe or what? We need distributed systems that are redundant. And if you look at anybody of any means, anybody of any means is now, and I'm talking about middle class now. the middle class especially here in texas where we had uh some power problems they have i was just listening to a podcast middle class person was talking about i got solar and batteries spent you know whatever 10 20 grand on it uh after we had this big freeze out and i think it was 21 or 22 here in texas i wasn't here yet and they bought the solar and battery and they said explicitly i bought this in case that happens again so i can keep my refrigerator and my computers and my internet running just to sustain ourselves in these kind of situations.

59:53Then you look at water. Here in Texas, people are putting water tanks on their properties. If you got a half acre, an acre, you can do these things quite easily. They put a water tank and then you take all the gutters around your house because we get these crazy storms here and they just flow, cost you a couple grand to have it flow into a tank. The tank fills up. Now you got extra water. that's on an individual basis we need to just keep making all systems that are required redundant in capitalism we like to build one system because it is more affordable so okay let's make all the medicine in china because this is the cheapest place to make it let's make all the you know um you know ppe the personal protection stuff let's make it all in you know And then we realized what not having a redundant supply system can do when things fail.

1:00:54The American rugged individualism and self-reliance is the solution to a lot of these problems. And we did a little document, you and I, we just remembered it. There's something called porch solar. And find the IKEA page for me and throw it out. Porch solar, and maybe you can even find the document we wrote for that shorty we never did. There's going to be example after example, example of redundancy added to our lives. And the one from India and other places where like you want to talk about the electric grid not being stable or reliable, you know, in emerging cultures, in frontier countries, you can have a lot, a lot of issues with electricity.

1:01:41So what people do now is they get porch solar, porch solar. Here's a picture of it. Ikea has gotten in the game. Ikea is a very smart company. These people are, dare I say, a brilliant company. And if you look at the screen right now, plug-in solar panels make the most of every sunny day. Small systems, big impact. With portable solar, I'm reading from this Ikea, with portable solar panels, you can take your first step into solar energy. Turn your balcony, garden, or terrace into a mini power station. Simple, efficient, and sustainable thanks to powerful stream storage and easy plug and play installation at the core of this and it it doesn't look ugly it doesn't look pretty but you can fold one of these or put it on the side of your home without ever calling an installer you don't have to rip your roof up you just literally put this on your um porch or you can put it in your backyard somewhere yeah and they call it SVE Solar.

1:02:42It's V Solar and IKEA. S-V-E. And you get a little battery pack. And what people are using these for, this is the page I want to see right there. Look at these. And these are in euros. But, you know, it ranges from 500 bucks all the way up to, I can't see it's too small. But you buy these little battery packs, like the ones you might put on the back of your phone, but bigger. It's like the size of like a suitcase. You get a couple of these solar panels. The battery is constantly filling up. and you see they have stands there like this little holders that you might use to like have a tv this is an example of what we need to do as humanity is just keep building redundant systems and then when there's no central place to attack yeah okay you turned off the main energy but everybody's phone's running their the refrigerator's running and then we can take load off of the main system.

1:03:40And that's one of the keys here is the grid is constantly going to be challenged. Every time somebody installs one of these things, they just take a little bit of drain off of the system and you're protected in the case of an outage. In California, San Francisco, we have rolling outages all the time. People get a Genentech is the company, I believe that makes these external power that uses nat gas or kerosene. Those are, I think, about 10K installed, 20K installed. These solar panels and batteries are$1 ,000. You install it yourself. Just keep making more of this stuff, folks. Get yourself a water tank.

1:04:20Get yourself a protein supply. You get a couple chickens. When I was living in the Bay Area, people in the suburbs were raising chickens. I'm talking about rich people, Juan, were putting chicken coops in, having their own eggs. And if things really hit the fan, you can eat the chickens. There you go. If we really are in the post-apocalyptic, which brings me to my next story, actually. Perfect segue. And by the way, if you're Iran,

1:04:49don't make your situation even worse by dragging another country into the war with you. I mean, the last thing they need is another country dropping bombs on them. Like, why on earth would they start hacking the uk i feel like they're calling our they're calling our blood they've realized that we don't want to go and send troops in there we're not going to do it and so now they're like oh we can get away with let's see let's see what we can get away with got some navy and like maybe the people of the uk are like well if you're going to shut down our electricity yeah maybe we'll send a ship or two to the horse that's true they're there they can be pretty intense they're with the stiff upper lip and all that i wouldn't i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily poke them but i think iran's feeling their oats right now they're they're feeling what do we got that we an off-duty?

1:05:29We haven't done an off-duty. We can do, we can do. There was one, let's do one more, one more kill drone story that I want to talk about. So this incident happened in Zuparizhia in Southeast Ukraine last month, a small Russian drone resembling a model airplane. It was trying to navigate to blow up a gas station. Instead, Jason, it crashed into a wall. It exploded. It sent out shrapnel and killed three people, including a 19-year-old university student. And now drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders and a forensic team have examined the wreckage, and they believe this was a fully autonomous drone.

1:06:06They think that Russia gave it a overall target, hit somewhere near this gas station, and then the drone piloted itself there, chose a target, which was the propane tanks at the back of the gas station. It missed, but that's what they believe it was sort of aiming itself for. Here's a quote from Ukrainian Air Defense Minister Colonel Sergei Meneyev. In a few years, we believe we will be living in a Terminator movie. It's no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike. So I think the question on my mind is, is this inevitable now? This is the future of warfare. We're under attack by autonomous kill drones.

1:06:44And do you think Anthropic, now that we're looking back with the benefit of hindsight, did they have a point? Was this something maybe we should have avoided instead of now ushering in the era of autonomous kill drones? There's plenty of laws about adding weapons to robots that some people are following, etc. The really interesting thing is that Ukraine, which has severe technical talent in it, before this whole Ukraine-Russia conflict, many startups I know had dev shops or offices in Ukraine. and in fact they then had to try to figure out i think it was riverside or one of those streaming platforms in fact had majority of the was it the stream deck or riverside somebody can look it up had the majority of their developers i believe in ukraine and then they had to get some of them out of ukraine to keep their service up and running basically um ukraine has now got the most

1:07:44drone capabilities of any country, I believe, maybe with the possible notable exceptions of US and China. And they are now exporters of drones. And you may not know this, but now people are investing in drone companies. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, is now in the drone business. American entrepreneurs, billionaires are now investing in companies in the Ukraine to build drones and anti-drone technology. This is a booming industry, no pun intended. Yeah. I guess it was Restream. Restream is faced in Kiev. Yeah. In some ways, there will be a silver lining to what is happening in Ukraine and Russia, which is the good people of the West are going to increase their ability to use drones and have anti-drone technology.

1:08:39You know what one of the greatest ways to stop drones is? Nets. It turns out people are putting netting over buildings and putting netting over streets, and the drones are flying into netting and exploding. I saw that. There's a Ukrainian like town that did that where they have all these like tennis it looks like tennis nets up above the buildings that catch the drones as they go by yeah i saw that yes um incredible what to think of that like we're now in the um well and this is interesting too what we're seeing on their firing nets at drones yeah this is like yeah this is some like batman utility belt thing uh i don't know which startup this is, but it's basically shooting a net at a drone.

1:09:27Okay, fine. I don't think that this is the ultimate solution. The really interesting one is Kimball Musk, a friend of mine, brother of Elon, has a drone company that does those beautiful drone shows. Sure. Very tiny drones, coordinated. Right. The other really great way to do anti-drone technology is you use AI to watch for drones, and then you send out these little tiny drones to just kamikaze them. Just zip and run into them. So drones running into drones is the other great countermeasure. And yeah, it's the next war. You know, like if this Taiwan thing happens, God forbid. I have a feeling like it's going to be a bunch of humans in container ships running AI drones and robots against each other.

1:10:20It's going to be very strange for us to comprehend. In the same way, when you and I were growing up and we watched Desert Storm and Desert Storm 2 and all these things, we're like, wait a second. We're fighting the war from, you know, Boise, Idaho with container ships, with pilots doing the original drones, you know, sending missiles. Yeah, like the Predator drones and all that, like 90s and aughts technology. Yeah, exactly. Here we are, folks. Okay. All right, let's go off. Let's go off duty. You told me there was something going on in the Star Wars universe that was particularly close to me.

1:10:54So there was a viral tweet the other day, Jake, if you could pull it up, that I responded to. That guy was saying, it's unthinkable how Star Wars seemed to be this massive, unshakable franchise. And then Disney came along. And this is a sentiment I've seen a lot. To me, I feel like this is not—all of Star Wars history is an up and down. It's in. It's hot. Everybody loves the most recent thing that came out. And then it's out. The fans hate the most recent thing that came out. It's never been worse. And we're always on. If you take the long view, I think Star Wars fandom is always like that. You know, people loved Empire.

1:11:31Then they hated Return of the Jedi. People hated Phantom Menace. But then they loved Revenge of the Sith. You know, people hated a lot of the Disney Plus shows. But then they loved Andor. You know, we're always on this ride. So I feel like it's a narrow view to be like Star Wars is at its lowest point. right now. But I got, I got, I'll tell you, Jason, I got a lot of pushback. I got a lot of angry response from people who do feel like we are in the nadir. Some of the evidence points, Mandalorian and Grogu, that new one that came out this summer, only grossed$345 million worldwide in theaters. Even Disney concedes it came in below expectations.

1:12:07It was a budget of$145 to$165 million before marketing. And it was the first theatrical Star Wars release since Rise of Skywalker all the way back in 2019. Also, a lot fewer shows coming out now on Disney Plus than we had. Ahsoka, which I know you're a fan of, now the only active, ongoing, live action Disney Plus Star Wars franchise. It's back in January for season two, but we had stuff like Skeleton Crew, The Acolyte, which failed to make an impression, and Andor is over. There's a new Star Wars movie coming out next year with Ryan Gosling, Starfighter from Sean Levy. That's May 2027. But I'm curious as to what you think.

1:12:45Are we at a historical low point for the Star Wars franchise? Or is this just, you know, Mandalorian and Grogu didn't hit. Maybe this Gosling one did. It's just sort of an up and down thing. The sequels were a disaster. Just straight up. They should have just gone with George Lucas's vision. Instead, they had no plan. They had no plan. And they made three incredibly sloppy, disjointed, you know, trio of films that if you're going to make a series of films, there should be some cohesiveness to it. There was like a sprinkling of wokeness to it. But the main problem was they didn't use the characters that we all wanted to see.

1:13:34We wanted to see what happened to Han, Luke, and Leia. And they wouldn't give us just the finishing of that story, the Jedi temple and the Jedi school being recreated by Luke Skywalker. They decided to go off on this crazy tangent with this new character that may or may not be a Skywalker, who knows who they are. They screwed the whole thing up. They need to take those three, retcon them out, just burn them to the ground, and then give people what they wanted, which they're kind of doing with the Ashoka, and they wanted to see Luke Skywalker rebuild the Jedi Temple. When they did the Mandalorian, spoiler alert, and Luke Skywalker comes back as peak Jedi, and he's getting Grogu to become one of his first students, that's what people wanted.

1:14:20They wanted to finish that story. They totally screwed it up. But there is redemption for them. The Clone Wars, which I've watched with my children is exceptional. And there's so much story there that somebody made their own film. It's called the ultimate edition. I think I've been trying to get it because it's like one of these, um, fan edits. It's a five hour version of revenge of the Sith that includes the battle of Mandalore. It includes stuff from the bad batch, the clone wars inter dispersed into revenge of the Sith. And then they found the deleted scenes, anything. It's like a four or five hour thing.

1:14:55that whole time period is the most interesting period like in star wars it's it's arguably more interesting than the original uh trilogy they just need to do that live action with you and mcgregor and hey hayden christiansen and hayden christiansen and padme natalie portman natalie portman just do that take the clone wars make it a tv show do five seasons 10 episodes a season everybody will help you which is kind of what they tried to do a little bit with the obi-wan series which takes place between three and four that's what they did with andor which takes place between three and four that's what they did with yeah the what was the film that everybody loved rogue one the one that sorry rogue one the one that leads it rogue one or the random that's all anybody yeah that's what everybody wants give them what they want well it's interesting you bring i mean the guy who created the clone wars dave feloni he's he's the new kathleen kennedy running the whole thing creatively now so we are going to see i think a lot more clone wars references and that's going to be much more central i think to the vision because it's feloni's stay feloni's just give it i mean feloni we'll figure it out i that in feloni i trust hopefully he has a better taste in spinoffs than hats i think that the cowboy hat he's the guy he's always in a cowboy hat dave Filoni of his age.

1:16:15Yeah, he's great. Filoni's great. Because he's a super fan, and he literally went to George Lucas and said, here's what I want to do with the characters. You tell me if this makes sense in terms of your vision, and he had this proper respect for it. And then you go over to Kathleen Kennedy, and she was like, literally took the treatment that Lucas made and threw it in the garbage. Kathleen Kennedy destroyed Star Wars for a decade. Dave Filoni's going to make it great. Kathleen Kennedy's a legend. That's a baseball cap. I'm talking about the cowboy hat, Jacob. You see it on the right. There it is.

1:16:51Come on. The t-shirt cowboy. Take that hat off. It looks ridiculous. No. He's a genius. Dave Filoni is going to. Kathleen Kennedy. Disgracia. Kennedy produced so many of everybody's favorite movies. And then she ended her career. An icon. She was an icon. She destroyed her career with the sequel. That's my position. that's Ben Shapiro's position. That's all. You like them. I like Last Jedi. Sequels? No, I don't love the other two. I don't like the first one, or Force Awakens, it's okay. I really like Last Jedi, and then I don't like Rise of Skywalker. I don't think J.J. Abrams got it, but I like the Rian Johnson one.

1:17:33Yeah. You're like one of one. Anyway. I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it when I saw it. There's a bunch of fan films that are fantastic. You mean the AI? There's a guy who does something called. No. Oh. There's a guy who does Star Wars Theory. He's got over three million. Oh, sure. He's in sync with me and everybody else. Yes. He's the guy who cried when Luke Skywalker showed up. Very famously. You can find like the meme of him crying. Anyway, he has been doing a Vader series. And it's like a nonprofit fan series. You can search for Star Wars Theory. Yeah. And the stuff. He's made two of these episodes.

1:18:10they're just absolutely fantastic he's got three million views already this thing came out three weeks ago the first episode of vader he did um i don't know maybe five years ago or something like that he he gets all of the people who watch his channel to donate to this he does it as a non-profit and he sells sabers he is fantastic i think it's like fan service is not that's never been what Star Wars was. It was always about challenging and pushing to the net. Like, it's easy to make things that, you know, people are going to like as you're just recalling what they've already seen. But that's not interesting in an artistic way.

1:18:47That's just, you know, endless merch and fan service. And sure, I mean, that Star Wars for most of our lives, there weren't new Star Wars movies. It was just merch. It was just comics and books and video games and stuff about the movies. Like, I like when the movies take chances and move things in different, interesting. That was Andor. Andor took a chance. Exactly, exactly. That's what makes it interesting. And that's what Last Jedi does too. And like no fan film is ever going to do. Because family are like, oh, what if this guy fought this guy? And I'm not knocking. Like fan films are fine and they have their place and it's great.

1:19:20But like. All right, folks, there you have it. Here's room for Lon's worst take. We got there. We were waiting for Lon's worst take ever. Now we have Lon's worst take. The reason this is your worst take is because they made Luke Skywalker like they just destroyed Luke Skywalker's character. When he takes the lightsaber and throws it over his shoulder and he doesn't want to do anything, that's the opposite of who Luke Skywalker was. He was brave. He was bold. If he doesn't have any more things to learn, if he doesn't have any more to grow, if he's just like the ultimate greatest warrior of all time, that's not dramatically compelling.

1:19:55You can't make that. That's just, there's no change. Stories are about change. It's about you face the obstacle and it changes you. So he had to start from a place of weakness and grow back into his strength. Stop digging, Lon. All right. Literally, you and Kathleen Kennedy are on an island. She and Ryan Johnson were right. They were right. They were right all along about that one. All right. Well, we'll agree to disagree here on This Week in Startups, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.