The Startup Building the First Hotel on the Moon…

23:59Lon Harris:So tell me about this hotel in space. Is that like actually part of the vision right now? And, you know, obviously you have customers. NASA might just say, hey, yeah, we'll give you a contract to make us 10 ,000 bricks and here's the funding and here's your milestones. Oh, that's all great. But talk to me about this, like, really far out there concept that, hey, if you go to space, you might need a bed, you might need a hotel room. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's inevitable. I think one nice thing called we got was that you saw on the Elon JP Morgan summit, like they're talking about moon hotels, too.

24:32And so, yeah, it's on the roadmap. Like if you think about critical path, so moon hotel, like technically, like on a technical level, what does that look like? You've got let's say a habitat on the moon okay let's break that down further let's work backwards let's say all of us you know jason law and etc we just teleport to the moon right now we take off our spacesuits what's the first thing that's going to kill us the lack of pressure on the moon yeah okay next thing float off into the stars yeah we're just gonna explode like it'll be not pretty right temperature swings radiation and then the potential for micrometer impacts so then what we did our group was like okay there's there's a lot of other problems obviously say like okay how do you recycle the water how do you recycle this and this but these things have been solved again on the space station let's focus on what's critical about like at its core so if you got pressure and temperature like working backwards from that what do you need to create as a product to solve for that well we need to have an inflatable like expandable habitat okay the last two problems with radiation micrometer it's like again how do you think about that problem well it turns out if you can use the resources on the moon and make not just bricks but all kinds of material using the resources on the moon bricks are just the first step to shield the habitat so that you have an igloo like structure where you have the inflatable in the middle and you got the bricks placed around it like an igloo that will protect you from the radiation from outer space and also the potential for micrometeorites on the moon and so what we're like is okay we want to open up this hotel like we have to actually prove that this stuff works on the moon and also on earth along the way but more importantly it's it's very visceral we we have proof that this this functions on the moon it's like it's legit and so that's actually why how we ended up doing this milestone path that's later on a white paper let's let's build a brick on the moon and let's prove out way to what can expand i'm i'm showing on the screen here for

26:26Lon Harris:those of you who uh yeah yeah uh are not watching and you're listening you can go to gru space or gru.space gru.space is the domain and you've got this really nice uh timeline here you know it starts with hey you you get your first lunar systems there and you test making the bricks then you have this cave base very basic dome then you have the first lunar hotel and you're seeing the bricks go around it and then uh you have picked an architecture style that is i would say uh neo-greek lucas star wars yeah it's got a death star futurism it's got a death star vibe yeah no i think this is new republic style actually death star would be a little more military one the cave one looks like a death star yes yeah the cave one definitely has death this one you're right it's more like naboo yeah this is naboo this is prince amidala this is renaissance which by the way lucas there's a building you pass by in marin that's like a civic center or something and you see it when you're when you're going north it's on the right when you're going south to the golden gate bridge it's to your left you can barely see but that's where he got that nobu architecture style from lam will pull it up in a second here one of the producers will but talk to me about picking the style of what this would look like because that does not seem the most utilitarian, the most basic, efficient.

27:54Lon Harris:You're doing some flourishes there. You're making it look elegant and interesting and sci-fi and dare I say inspiring. By the way, here's that building. What is that building called? I believe this is the Marin County Civic Center. Yes. Yes. I mean, it's stunning. San Rafael. San Rafael. Pretty amazing. Is this the one that was Frank Lloyd Wright or am I crazy? I believe it was. Yes, I am correct. This was designed by the great architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. All right. Let me pat Lon on the back here. Very good. So talk to me about the aesthetics here, because you're asking people to put down a million dollar deposit to visit the moon, to own a moon condo.

28:35Lon Harris:What do you get for a million bucks here? Yeah. So, OK, two things. First of all, the style. Yeah. And so you basically got to bang on. It's when we thought about the style, like we got to think about zoom out from our own like little sliver of 80 years or maybe longer of life in this universe. Right. When thousands of years later, we look back at the first structure, manmade structure on the moon. Like it has to be pretty, that's pretty sick. You know, like it has to be sick. It is like the first bastion of like humans mark on the moon. I mean, that is that's really exciting. And so the thought process is like, you know, obviously looking at the wonders of the world that already existed, but also like what would something that looking back, right, our great, great, great, great grandkids would be like, whoa, like, yeah, like my ancestors worked on this shit.

29:21Lon Harris:Like the Acropolis, the Parthenon. Exactly. Right. Yeah. So it was a bit of Greco futurism. And actually it was a trip I did when I was still at Berkeley as a student there. I went to Palace of Fine Arts with my parents. And it was like, I was just like, whoa, like imagine this on the moon. this is before grew started but that was what ironically my mom is an architect and she thought the design was shit i still think it's but we got featured in architectural magazines i was like love it i love it now what what uh psychedelic were you on you were on psilocybin or dmt when you came on with this idea when you were at berkeley i kid i kid uh but talk to us about the million dollar deposit and so yeah about that it's so basically the the thought process behind us as well was with okay in order to ensure that people have a spot here right how should we you know, work the sale.

30:06We studied Virgin Galactic. We studied Blue Origin. We also studied ones that didn't work so well. One important thing is that we design a they have to be fully refundable, right? It's only fair that way. But more importantly, this is a way so that people can reserve their spot in advance prior to the hotel being opening. Frankly, a big piece of this of like, why do people do space tours? Right. Let's think about that. Why do people even want to do something as crazy as this? And it's not for everyone. Like, let's be clear. It's not for everyone one of the biggest things is because they've experienced everything that can be done on earth that they want to do something greater they want to feel like they're a part of something even bigger than themselves it's about legacy build and so it's an opportunity for people to be a part of that um one of the nice things that we've actually um are going to start to offer is that our payload that's going to the lunar surface we're obviously making a brick on the moon but there are opportunities for people to etch their name, the company, on the payload that goes to the moon, they'll be there forever.

31:06So a little marketing. A little broker there.

31:09Lon Harris:As a founder, you've taken the time to become an expert in your niche, and you fully understand the entire landscape. But with so many regulations and rules that you need to follow, from federal agencies and offices here in the US to the European Union and beyond, It's impossible for even the most diligent person to keep up with every exacting requirement. That's why you need to simplify compliance with a trusted partner like Vanta. All my startups use Vanta, and they love Vanta's AI-powered platform that automates your entire compliance process. Whether you're preparing for a SOC 2, or you're running an enterprise GRC program, or you're doing an audit, Vanta's going to worry about the security so your team can focus on building great products.

31:50Lon Harris:That's why some of our favorite companies like Ramp and Ryder are spending 82 % less time on their audits by working with Vanta. Whether you're a fast-growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta is here to help you automate. Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance and earn and prove trust. So get started today at Vanta.com slash twist. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash twist. I don't know if you can see, Jason, your name is etched into this brick. Oh, is it really? It's a little too small. I'm going to have Salah zoom in here for a second so you can see, but they have etched Jason Calacanis into this movie.

32:25Lon Harris:I love this. Leo Laporte, when he did the Twit Brickhouse, his concept was you for, I don't know if it was$100 or$500, you could support independent media like this week in tech, Twit, and you could buy a brick in the Brickhouse, and then when you came to visit the Brickhouse, you could see your brick. It was a really genius idea. Look at GRU. Yeah, that is amazing. Amazing. All right. And so you're going to keep these deposits. You get the interest on. You put them in a nice 5%, 6 % interest-bearing account. You sweep the interest. That's great. Fair enough. And then I get, what am I getting for my million dollars?

33:02Lon Harris:Is it like I get to stay in a hotel for one night, 10 nights? Do I own a piece of it? What do you want to be on the moon for 10 days? What are you going to do up there? I mean, if I took the time to go and took the risk, yeah, I want to get a full. No, I mean, I don't think. That's a good question. Like for Jason, would you want to go to the moon? i'm going i'm gonna go uh well a friend of mine's got a rocket ship company and we talked about it so i think when he goes up uh you know if he wants to have a couple of his mates with him i might get a i might get a shot at that uh so when he when he thinks it's okay to go up that's maybe when i would decide it's okay to go up uh but i don't want to you know i got three daughters so i think the power move is to wait until yeah it's a step they've done yeah i think maybe if there's been like 100 trips to the moon or something yeah you don't want to do the titan submersible first trip you want to wait for like 100 trips then it's like okay what's interesting you bring that up lon it's there are people who want adventures who have enough money to kill themselves we call it toxic wealth in silicon valley where people you know go buy some hyper sports car and because they made a little bit of money and then they do crazy stuff like the billionaire who his son didn't want to tragically go on this thing he was nervous for a good reason like trust your gut folks uh and he went anyway and they were thrill-seeking because they had the money to do thrill-seeking stuff this has to be safe and it will be safe nobody's gonna take crazy risk doing this but there will be some implied risk you can just do the statistics of the number of astronauts that have died in space it's it's um it's i think it's low single digits uh so you know if you were playing a poker hand it would be like having, I don't know, you flop a set of aces and somebody runner runners you and it's quads or something.

34:48We remember, I mean, there've been, there've been few enough that like you, everybody knows the challenger exactly. Or like Apollo 13, they, we, we rescued those guys, but it's infamous the times when things have gone famously wrong. I mean, I guess, I guess that's why it's important to test ball. Right. Right. I guess my question is for, for Gru, and even for you, Jason, I mean, we're really talking about, are we talking about the moon itself as a destination or we're really thinking about the moon as like the gateway to the cosmos, right? Like the goal is we've got to be permanently on the moon so that we can go to Mars and beyond.

35:25Am I correct here? Yeah. So the vision is like, again, the moon is just a stepping stone. Right. Right. Again, the moon holds out. And I love it when people are like, wait, so the moon holds out is just the first step. Like, that's fucking crazy. Like, it seems like.

35:37Lon Harris:Right. But no. Family show, Skylar. Family show, Skylar. It really is the first step. We have to go to Mars. Right. That is humans have never left this space is in our destiny to have humans living on Mars. Right. And we cannot have, reasonably speaking, have people living on Mars if we are dependent on resources from Earth the entire time. Yet in local court at some point has to be separate. Right. And so the only way to do that is can we develop the technology and understanding of systems so that we can use resources on not just the moon, but on Mars for this future to happen. So that's the end state.

36:13Lon Harris:Yeah, we got I think we have, you know, 20 or 30 years of moon work to do, Lon. for, I know it was a lot, well, I mean, all of, all we have right now is the space station as an equivalent, but the space station, you know, has taught us over, you know, 50 years, how human bodies and food and, you know, medicine and, you know, all kinds of things work using the loo. These things all had to be figured out over the last 50 years. Congratulations. We're able to do it. But to be able to build stuff in space, man, that is a lot of work. And I'm really excited, Skylar. We wish you unlimited success in this incredibly positive, awesome endeavor.

36:57Lon Harris:Chances are slim, but we need crazy entrepreneurs to do all of these little stepping stones. And so brick by brick, we wish you great success. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Alan. There's going to be startups on the moon one day. Which is nuts when you think about it. All this science, all this technology, it's really changing everything. And one of the things that I was able to change with technology over the last five years was dropping 40 pounds. Wow. That's my own moon. That was my moon landing. That was my moon shot. Could I get back in shape? Hey, Jacob, can you find that image Jason posted over the weekend of his new body?

37:37Yeah, the J-Cal thirst trap. Can you find that for me while I'm co-hosting here? Yeah, it's showing off, showing off the impact.

37:44Lon Harris:Well, that was at Cinque Terre, Cinque Terre, CT, the five towns or whatever it is in the ocean. I'm not well-traveled enough for this. I took this a couple of years ago, and I was probably down 30 pounds, and that one is sucking my gut in. Yeah, look at that. Look at that. Man, you compare that to the pictures my enemies posted me online. And I mean, this is the definition of a dad bod. You know, I'm old, I'm creaky. There's things that break once in a while. But I tell you what, you lose 40 pounds and all of a sudden my sciatica in my leg, my lower back pain, my shoulder pain, all this stuff, my snoring, my asthma, it went away, all the downstream things.

38:26Lon Harris:So this summer I'll be posting a couple more thirst traps, x.com slash Jason. But in the meantime, if you want to join me on your journey, I highly recommend at least considering if you're more than I'd say 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, which is like 60 % of the country, the food system is conspiring against us. Work is conspiring against us sitting at computers all day. You might need help. I needed help. I'm not ashamed to say it. Row.co slash twist, row.co slash twist. And you'll get to use their insurance checker. And that's the first step. Now, if you don't have insurance, your insurance doesn't cover it, don't worry.

39:04Lon Harris:There's like all kinds of affordable versions now. I'm not sure where exactly it starts, but like low hundreds of dollars, I think is the entry price now. The word, the word, the immediate word when these GLP ones were first available was, oh, it's so expensive. You're spending thousand dollars. The price has really come down considerably now. So if you want to check if your insurance covers it, go to road.co and try out their insurance checker. They'll let you know if your GLP ones are covered for you for free. You just and submit your insurance card and they do the rest. Go to row.co slash twist for your free insurance check.

39:37Row.co slash twist.

39:40Lon Harris:Yeah. And I mean, I'm looking at it right now. I mean, you're going to be able to get into this for like 150 bucks, 200 bucks. Just row.co understands what the mission is. They're trying to get everybody, everybody who wants access to this incredible technology, access to a big story we got to talk about. The U.S. government is blocking access to Fable and Mythos, the advanced frontier clawed models. They're citing national security concerns. The U.S. Commerce Department has ordered Anthropic to suspend access to the advanced models to all foreign nationals. Now, the government just told Anthropic they're instituting export controls over these models.

40:20So no foreign nationals can use them because of concerns that you could theoretically jailbreak Mythos 5 out of Fable 5 and use it as a cyber weapon. Anthropic, however, responded by just shutting everyone out of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 entirely. They said to ensure compliance. So a lot a lot of back and forth over the weekend on on this, whose fault it is, what the implications are, Jason. So Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he's been making a direct connection between this policy and the Pentagon's previous fight against Anthropic. His tweet three months ago, the Department of War kicked Anthropic AI out of the building forever.

41:02Every passing day proves that why that was the right move. Axios also today has reported on friction between the White House and the Anthropic team saying this is a contributing factor. Here's Axios. Anthropic failed to honor a recent cyber executive order, administration officials claim, and the company's purported failure to take the matter seriously led to its most powerful products being scrubbed from the Internet. And then here's an unnamed administration official. Everyone said Anthropic was a bad actor. Some of us said it was time to give them a chance. Now those people are questioning that.

41:37They screwed us. So I'm interested in your take here, Jason. Do you agree with David Sachs that this doesn't really have anything to do with the previous fight against Anthropic and it's a isolated situation where Anthropic just needs to do something to make Fable 5 unjailbreakable? Or do you think this is continued bad blood between the administration and Anthropic and it's just coming out in another way or something else?

42:00Lon Harris:Yeah, there's there's multiple things occurring at once here. So let's just call it what it is. Let's just be radically honest here. Sure. There is a beef between this company and their politics and the administration and their politics. Sure. If you look at all of the parades of CEOs coming to Washington, Tim Cook, Michael Dow, everybody. Sundar, Zatya. Everybody's down. Jensen or whatever. There's one that's always been missing, and that's Dario and Anthropic. The reason Anthropic has run the table on a lot of the talent in Silicon Valley is because they're liberals and Democrats, and they are highly offended by the Trump administration, right?

42:52Lon Harris:They're diametrically opposed to it. You don't hear them too vocally saying it anymore for whatever reason. Maybe they don't want to dabble in politics. Maybe they don't want to draw any more heat. But if you were to look at and you were to talk to privately 10 different people who work at Anthropic, 9 out of 10 would have concerns about the Trump administration last term, this term, everything in between. So it's easy enough to say they hate Trump. They hate Trump. They hate everything about this administration. OK, put that aside in your brain. They have a right to their political views. Now, go to the Trump administration.

43:32You've gotten every single company to support Trump on various endeavors.

43:38Lon Harris:And that's good. It's good for private sector, public sector to work together independent of that. Some people have said, you know what, I'm just going to put aside my concerns about Trump. We disagree with immigration policy, whether it's the border or H-1Bs. I'm going to put all that aside. UFC fights in the back lawn of the White House, whatever your issues may be. Whatever your issue is, you're allowed to have it. This is America. Everybody gets their opinion. But this administration takes things personally, and they're full contact. So we're seeing some full contact here. Pete is attacking Anthropic.

44:12Lon Harris:They have it in for Anthropic. Now, put that aside. They got a beef going on, and it's a political beef. You look at OpenAI, by contrast. last Greg Brockman and his wife are the number one supporters of of all these companies in terms of donations, with I think maybe the exception of Elon. I think they've put twenty five million dollars into Trump's. By the way, not popular inside of OpenAI either. So the people who disagree with that decision and people will pick where they work based on the political beliefs of the leaders. If you worked at OpenAI, you were there because, Hey, it was this open thing.

44:51Lon Harris:But then when Sam transformed it and the team over there to this profit-making thing A lot of those people went to anthropic in fact, right? Like the leadership, etc. And you Andre Capapi Any tech company would pay him a king's ransom to come work for them. He gets to choose He choose to anthropic. So keep that in mind that talent in Silicon Valley is by and large 80 90 % in my maybe 80 % You know appalled by Trump in his administration to this day You don't feel like that's shifted over the I feel like it used to be They did in leadership, and I think people are burned out by it. But if you were to ask them who they are.

45:24But today I feel like tech is sliding to the right.

45:28Lon Harris:There's tech leadership making pragmatic decisions, and then there's the rank and file, who are developers, et cetera. They might also have issues with the left as well. But just if you looked at their voting records and you look at like Democrat registration versus Republican, it's still 80, 20, 90, 10. So you feel like this is overtly political that the Trump administration is giving you this process? Pete Hegg says it's overtly political. Right. So there's there's a political level to this. And obviously, Dario not showing up for any of these events is his political statement. Right. So there's beef here.

45:59Lon Harris:That's not my belief. That's just what the facts tell you. Now, let's go to the reality of this model. The reality of this model. It's groundbreaking. People have voted with their dollars. Consumers are even switching to Claude. I'm starting to hear people who are in my circle who are not in the industry say they love Claude. I also hear them say they love perplexity and, you know, Grok and Gemini. But it's not OpenAI's only game now for consumers. Claude has the best product currently. People could flip-flop. And they're thoughtful about this. Now, you might say they're hyperbolic and their comms are terrible.

46:36Lon Harris:And that's all true as well. But the truth is, at the end of the day, they made the post-powerful model. If I told you, and we'll just swap the names out here. Let's just take the names out. Gemini has created this model. And when they put it through their testing, their developers and their security team and the red team and the blue team, everybody went through it. And holy cow, we found so many exploits in open source software, in our own software, that we're just going to hold it for a couple of months. And we're going to give it to like 25 of our trusted partners, 50 of our trusted partners for a month and let them use it.

47:12Lon Harris:And by the way, we're going to give them their tokens free or at a disk at our cost. When you have MAC cost tokens, use as many as you want to just make sure that the low-hanging fruit is cleaned up here. Just, you know, you'd be like, okay, that's a pretty smart move, right? Yeah. That's a great move by Google. Yeah, that's thoughtful. They know this thing is powerful. And by the way, on the margins, we might be concerned with not just cyber warfare, which is software-based. We also think, okay, maybe somebody could use this to make a dirty bomb or maybe they could use it to make biologics. Biologics.

47:46Right. Biological weapons or do, you know, unpleasant genomic stuff or whatever. Yes.

47:52Lon Harris:So we're also going to test that and we're going to bring in some, you know, award winning, you know, notable biologists and people who've worked in the Wuhan lab or whatever these labs refunded globally. And I mean, Saks did point this out in his in his tweet on it, which maybe we could bring up into the docket. Like the messaging from Anthropic does seem off here. It is confusing. from even the public's perspective. So let's hold on comms for a second. We'll get to comms in a moment. Let me just finish my little analogy here. So you swap out a name. It's the same thing when you go to, when you talk about race, you know, oh, this person did this and it was a black person, a white person, an Asian person, an Indian person, a man, a woman, a trans person, whatever.

48:33Lon Harris:Sometimes it's helpful for people logically to just swap those races, names, genders out to kind of get clarity on what happened and just think intellectually, honestly. So intellectually, honestly here, if Apple did this, if Microsoft did it, you'd say, okay, Microsoft, yeah, you've got an important product. You've got a lot of surface area in Windows or Google, you've got a surface area in Android. Yeah, you should be really thoughtful about this. And then they said, you know, a couple of months later, hey, as the next phase of our rollout of Gemini, we're going to allow people who are logged in to use it, people who we have their credit card number and their IP address.

49:13But as part of that 30 days, we're going to look for keywords and use

49:17Lon Harris:AI to watch what you do. We're going to watch what you do and how you use it. It's a preliminary, open, more open beta test. So we had the closed beta. Now we're going to open up the beta a little more, but just know we're going to read this. So don't put your personal health stuff in there, whatever. We're going to just look at every search. That's not a privacy issue. That's part of the rollout. It's being framed by people in the administration and other people who are Trump adjacent as, oh my God, they're taking everybody's privacy. No, completely normal to say, hey, if you're going to use this tool, this is the monitoring phase.

49:52Lon Harris:We're going to know how many bullets you fired. We're going to give you the gun, but you got to use it in the range, right? It's constrained. We're going to constrain it for another 30 days. And by the way, if you do something that triggers, you know, you're doing biological stuff, which I did on air. I asked it, how do, what are the components? What are the components of a nuclear weapon? You said not a nuclear weapon, but what are the components I would need to get together in order to build one? And it automatically took you down from fable to opus. Then I asked it, well, what are the regulations and rules we have in place for fertilizer bombs to avoid people getting in the wrong hands.

50:32Lon Harris:And it was like, when you watch it thinking, it's like, okay, this person wants to know the regulations. They're not trying to build a fertilizer bomb, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it gave me the answer. But also again, it dropped me down. Now, if I said, hey, Google said, if you try to use it for something it thinks might be adjacent, it's just going to let you use version 4.8, not version 5.0. Right. And it did, it notified you. Like a lot of people were concerned about it. Oh, it's going to downgrade you a model and then not tell you. It told you, hey, you're not using Fable for this. We're going to send this query to Opus instead.

51:02Lon Harris:I think if you look at Anthropic's actions, we're going to get to their comms in a minute. We've handled politics. We're going to get to comms. But just in terms of their actions, I would say these actions are of a good actor being thoughtful. Let me say that again for you. If Grok, XAI, Google, Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI, any of them did the same exact rollout, we would say, thumbs up, thank you for being considered. We don't need to regulate you because you're regulating yourself. And I have said over and over and over again, regulate yourself or the government will regulate you. Now, all the biased people who are in one camp or the other want to make this about something it's not.

51:46Lon Harris:Safety regulation is job one for these language model creators. And they are creating it, therefore, Therefore, they should come up with what they think is the most safe way to roll it out. They don't need to have the government come in and tell them that because the government doesn't even understand the nuances of these products. So regulate thyself or thy product will get banned. There is one more thing that's action as opposed to comms. Now, there is disagreement about what specifically has happened or the narrative of it. But what Sacks is saying in his tweet is that this jailbreak was discovered.

52:29And we should talk more about where that information came from as well. This jailbreak was uncovered, this way to get Fable 5 to turn into basically mythos, take away the guardrails that kept Fable 5 safe. Yes. And so the government then apparently, according to David Sacks, went to Anthropic and said, hey, we're very worried about this jailbreak. We don't want bad actors, rogue actors overseas to be able to, you know, it's a threat to our national security if they can use Mythos 5. What are we going to do about this? And they said Anthropic came back to them and said it's not really a big deal.

53:04We've looked into it. We don't. They sort of waived these concerns. According to Sacks. According to David Sacks. I'm putting all this. This is according to David Sacks. That's his argument. And what other people have said is that the notification to the government about this potential jailbreak came from Anthropik's competitors. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is named by name. He was one of the people that flagged this jailbreak to the Trump administration. Wait, doesn't he own 10 percent of Anthropik? Yes, but it's conspiratorial now. They're not. Yeah, yeah. There's a conspiracy theory forming that this is other AI companies sandbagging their main competition, getting this model taken down so that other people can't use it.

53:49I just want to get your thoughts on that before we move on.

53:52Lon Harris:So let's take the politics out of it and the communications out of it again, just to look at what occurred. Right. If one of your partners, this is their top partner, Amazon hosts these models. Sure. Amazon provides compute. Amazon owns this company. They're not trying to sandbag, I don't believe, Anthropic. I am certain they told Dario about this before they told the government, probably. So when this all comes out, and this is where these narratives and all this spin, and listen, some people are extraordinary communicators out there who can spin things and the nuances of them. But what are the chances the CEO of Amazon, who owns double digit percentages, I don't know where it is now with dilution or whatever, and is one of the original backers of Anthropic didn't tell them that they found this.

54:42Lon Harris:They probably are under an ethical and moral duty to let the government know if these kind of things could happen. So they probably think we have liability here if we don't tell the government, because there were probably internal comms from the security team at AWS, who probably has to provide compute and or provides the model to people via their services. They probably had an internal discussion. And somebody said in Slack, oh, my God, I jailbroke it. You can do whatever you want with it. You can ask it about dirty bombs. You can ask it about bioweapons. And once that happens, ding, ding, ding, you cannot unring the bell.

55:23Somebody has alerted the entire team there.

55:27Lon Harris:That has to get escalated. Who does it get escalated to? Now, if you don't escalate that up to the CEO, up to the CTO, CIO, the chief, the general counsel, if you don't escalate something of that importance, if you don't escalate something of that importance, now you're liable. Now you've got, you know, potentially, literally blood on your hands. What if they know it's jailbroken? It comes out a week later that some terrorist organization jailbreaks it and does create a bioweapon, God forbid. Now, this is all fantasy. So that's what happened, I'm guessing, inside of it. That's why. But now somebody on the other side of the aisle could say, oh, you know how we spin this?

56:05Lon Harris:They got ratted out by their competitor who doesn't trust them. When in fact, it was just the bell got rung. Yeah. I think now it's time to switch to comms because I feel like the one thing I don't understand, and I don't often agree with David Sachs, but we aligned on this point, is that wouldn't you think Anthropic would be the first ones upon hearing that it was possible to jailbreak Fable and unleash this terrifying, dangerous model, which they themselves were the ones who started this narrative about mythos is so dangerous. Wouldn't you think they would be the most proactive ones? Like, well, we got to pull it until we can be sure we're the AI safety company.

56:45They might have. It seems weird that their position is this isn't a big deal. We should be allowed to use the model. And even I would, one last thing before I let you jump back in. It's in the dock and I pulled a screenshot. Anthropic is sort of advertising this situation. They're not trying to hide this at all. If you go log in right now and try to use the model, I took a screenshot. it has fable there grayed out. It's purposefully letting you know the government's not letting you use this right now. Where does it say the government's not letting you use it? It doesn't say the government, but it just says like currently unavailable.

57:17Like they're advertising to you that you can't use this model.

57:20Lon Harris:Is that an information button that you can click on there or hover over? There's an I next to currently unavailable. Yes, yes, they have. And what does it show when you click it? Oh, here, let me, I'll load up my screen. Whoever's driving, if you look where it's grayed out, there was an I there. Oh, that's just a screenshot. But, Jacob, you can open your own Claude and show us what happens when you click that button. It's for everybody's got it. No, just the info box above the search bar, Jake. See, see that? There you go. Here it is. Okay. So it links to a statement on the U.S. government directive to suspend access to favorable finance.

57:55Lon Harris:So they are not hiding it. This is quite the opposite. This is the cleanest thing you could do is to just let people know. Okay. So your question is to comms. Okay. I'm just saying, why wouldn't they, why wouldn't they be the most proactive one to pull the model until they could be sure it's safe? Why are they? They might have. Remember the last time? Yeah. There's a game being played here by the administration. similar game that the press uses. Hey, we need your comment in the next hour or we're going with the story. Right. They keep bringing up that it took an hour and five minutes or these guys didn't get back to me the same day.

58:29Lon Harris:I think Emil Michael actually talked about like how they were concerned that it was taking an hour for a company to return the White House's call. Well, you might need to talk to your general counsel first. You might need to talk to your team and make sure you have your facts straight before you start talking to the government. So that's completely reasonable. So So I think there's gamesmanship happening there. They obviously would have turned it off if it was jailbroken. They turned it off and they limited it for those first two steps anyway. They love turning it off. That's their thing. They love limiting access.

58:57Lon Harris:Right. So the answer to your question is, if they did know it was jailbreak, they absolutely would have turned it off, which leads me to believe in this crazy conspiracy thing that there's no grand conspiracy here. There is no grand conspiracy here. What happened was Amazon's team found the vulnerability. They told Dario. Dario starts looking into it. Amazon says, you know, we got to tell the White House about this. And we need to tell national security because we've made that arrangement that we tell them when we find major vulnerabilities that could cause national security issues. So they do that in parallel.

59:30Lon Harris:Now, while this is all happening in the same day, all in the same day, they're looking into it. the White House says, oh, we didn't get a call back in an hour and five minutes or something, I think was the quote. It was very specific. They waited an hour and seven minutes to call the White House back. Yeah. Well, what if they just said to the White House, give us an hour, we're investigating. And then they said, maybe they thought, hey, we tried to jailbreak it. We don't have evidence of this. And they might've said, but give us an hour. We're going to go talk to Amazon and figure out what they did.

1:00:01Lon Harris:So the White House has it in for Dario. Dario and Anthropic, have it in for the White House. And so they're all spinning this. If you just look from first principles, what Anthropic has done, I think if you put XAI, Gemini, Microsoft in the same series of behaviors, you would say, great job, thumbs up. The White House would say thumbs up to Elon, Sergey, Tim Cook, Satya, everybody. They would say thumbs up, great way to do it. But when it's anthropic, they're trying to figure out ways to, you know, hit them with it. Now, they're trying to do damage, I think. I actually do think that because they never bent the knee.

1:00:44Lon Harris:I think that they are a vindictive administration. You see this in other things they do. Now, Dario has done no favors for himself with the comms. The comms are terrible. If you keep telling people that you're going to destroy half the jobs in the world, Well, don't be surprised when people take up arms and get violent. Don't be surprised when regulators show up. Don't be surprised when Bernie Sanders says, I'm going to seize 50 % of the company. I mean, this one seems direct. Their cons trigger this. This one seems directly like, I'm looking at the Politico. It was an hour and 15 minutes, by the way.

1:01:16And then a rumor circulated that Dario didn't get back to them because he was at some sort of wellness retreat. But now Anthropic is denying that that was true. They're just saying it took a little time. But here's the interesting paragraph. So Dario Amadei, he in these calls. And this is from who?

1:01:31Lon Harris:This is from Politico. This is from Politico over the weekend. And Politico, is that a biased publication on one side or the other or straight shooters? If you ask people on the left, they would say Politico is hardcore right wing. If you ask people on the right, they would say Politico is a bunch of commie socialists. So I think they're pretty. Oh, OK. Hated equally by both. So maybe that means they're independent. No, no one. No one would say Politico is on their side, I don't think. Anyway. OK. Interesting. So they're claiming that Dario behind the scenes is saying that there is no universal jailbreak and that they don't.

1:02:04Universal jailbreak was the term. Yeah. Anthropic in a blog post said no testers have been able to find a universal jailbreak, a jailbreak method that can broadly bypass the model safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capability. So in these meetings with the White House, the Anthropic team is basically saying you've been misinformed. There is no dangerous jailbreak. We don't need to change the models. The guardrails are safe and in place, and the White House just doesn't believe them. They believe this tipster instead.

1:02:32Lon Harris:All right. Well, the truth will come out very quickly. We can't know who's right and who's wrong at this point. I think my assessment, you know, is the most logical. They're an incredibly thoughtful, if not dramatic, group at Anthropic. Right. They literally are the people who created the OpenAI mission. and when the OpenAI mission was corrupted in their minds, they started Anthropic to be the thoughtful frontier model. And they're winning. They have the best models. So the most thoughtful, concerned, and you can interpret that as drama queens, are also producing the best model. Running the table is what people say.

1:03:18Lon Harris:And then suddenly everybody's saying that they're bad actors and they don't want to limit access and you need to do a national security thing, I guarantee you if Pete Hegseth, what's his last name? Hegseth. Hegseth. Yeah, if Pete Hegseth called them and said, hey, we think this model is a national security risk, would you pause it for 72 hours while we collaborate? They would do it. They would love to do it. Instead, they did this to damage the company and or as retribution, as Pete's quotes. I mean, the broader implication of this, we had a question from one of our viewers. I believe it's Daniel DeMissi.

1:04:00Please acknowledge, Jason, we're on a dangerous path to a dystopian society if we start gating model access based on demographics. So do you think this is a first step to some sort of more dangerous situation where the government now is reserving the right to decide which AI models we can use? Or do you think this is more of a one-off situation?

1:04:23Lon Harris:I think it is a one-off situation. They hit the panic button. And they hit the panic button against the one tech CEO who will not bend the knee. Right. So just put that in your mind. Just say it over and over again. If this was Gemini, if this was Microsoft, same series of actions, they would have just said, hey, can you turn the model off and let's work for a week together to make sure it's not vulnerable? And would that be okay with you? They'd say, sure. But in a broader sense - And I guarantee you, Dario would have said, sure. They came over the top with this. Now, there's the other part of this.

1:04:55Lon Harris:Oh, they get to decide. No, the government decided in this case. Dario decided to not release it early, as a private company is allowed to do. We live in a society where the private company gets to define what they release. The government also, as a backstop, can stop that if they believe there's some imminent danger. That's what occurred here. That means the system is working. Now, if you limit access to the models, which they're not doing, the model's been turned off for everybody. It's not like somebody has an advantage here. It's off for everybody. The government said you have to turn it off for any foreign national.

1:05:30And Anthropik's like, we don't have a way to do that where we can be sure nobody is. So we just have to shut it off entirely.

1:05:37Lon Harris:The reason they did that is because they don't want to get caught making a mistake. Sure. These products are porous. Somebody can get an IP address in the U.S. They can get a fake identity, just like they do identity theft in the US. So if they don't turn it off for everybody, and then the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans use one of their American spies or American stolen identities, which they have an infinite number of, to then go do something. Now, Claude and Anthropic have broken the law in some major way. Yeah, no, I think people are concerned less about that and more about the precedent.

1:06:20Like, are we is this now saying we think the president has the right to shut off an AI model?

1:06:26Lon Harris:The president or the president? Which president? Well, right. I mean, this is what's important. Even if you're OK with Donald Trump and his team making this decision, would people be OK with a future Democratic? Like what if Joe Biden had been president or Kamala Harris was president and she decided to shut off access? Are we OK with the executive branch making these kinds of calls? I think it's the broader concern, like a First Amendment sort of concern. We have no we have no choice but to trust the executive branch that's been duly elected to push the panic button and to take a product off the market that they believe is a national security risk.

1:07:04OK, we have no choice.

1:07:06Lon Harris:The executive has to have that power. What if this was somebody doing bio research and they created COVID times 100? I think some people see these AI models as it's almost like a freedom of speech issue. The government shouldn't have a role in saying which AI model you can use for which task. Temporarily. Temporarily. The difference here is they didn't shut off access to all AI models. They're saying this one model has been jailbroken and the company has told us it's too dangerous to release. we are going to ask them to turn it off for now or not let foreign nationals have it. In the interest of changing the names or the concepts slightly, what if it was, this model is too woke and we don't think it's appropriate, so we're going to shut it off.

1:07:51That would be objectionable, right?

1:07:53Lon Harris:You wouldn't be able to stop a model for that. This power resides in national security, right? I don't have any of these answers. I just think this is the larger concern people have. We're in uncharted territory here. We are straining to find the analogy of a time a private company created something so powerful the government had to intercede out of fear that it could be misused. The only other time I have an example. But do you have an example of a bioweapon company where this happened? Well, not a bioweapon company, but like there was an assault weapons ban for many years until it got reversed.

1:08:27And like that wasn't done. That's the government's how private companies can't make certain kinds of dangerous products.

1:08:32Lon Harris:That wasn't an emergency order like this. No. This was an emergency temporary order. This is not like, oh, we're going to have a whole democratic process over the number of bullets in a magazine. This is like pushing the emergency button. So in that context, the only other time I can think of this happening was in Iron Man, a fictional story where they're like, hey, wait, can you have that suit, Tony Stark? Tony Stark's not allowed to have his Iron Man suit, correct. Right. And like, that's literally, that's how fantastical this is being set up as. So, you know, we'll be sitting here. It's an unprecedented situation.

1:09:06Lon Harris:I think that's why people are so interested. And then people are going like off the reservation about this. They're just like, I'm going to just jump the fence and go crazy and just leave reality. Okay. So now they're spying on us. They're picking and choosing the winners and losers. None of that's occurring. None of that's occurring. The government said this is really dangerous. Will you turn it off for this number of people? They say, you know what? we're going to be even more secure. We're going to turn it off for everybody. We'll get back to work on it. We'll release it. By the way, this is going to happen to Gemini.

1:09:39Lon Harris:It's going to happen to Grok. It's going to happen to OpenAI. It's going to happen over and over and over again. I do think this is going to drive people to realize you cannot have a single point of failure. That's the key here. I'm glad you got there. There's been a bunch of international outcry about this too that I didn't get into yet, but now I will. Thank you for the beautiful segue. way. So Labor MP in the UK, Labor MP Alistair Carnes posted, this week the most advanced AI model on the planet got switched off by a foreign government. He argues that Britain has some of the best AI talent in the world.

1:10:13The country must jumpstart a homegrown AI industry to avoid this situation in the future. Echoed by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, he flagged the risk of over-reliance on certain models and has encouraged Canadian tech companies to diversify the models that they're relying on. So you're spot on. That's what this is encouraging internationally is people are realizing we can't rely on just one company or just one model because it can go away.

1:10:41Lon Harris:Yes, and the Chinese realize this, and that's why they are supporting open source to catch up. And then, you know, there's Mistral in France. There's other models, Manus, which started in China and then went to Singapore, I believe. Correct, yes. Yeah, so - And now they're not allowed to leave China anymore because the Chinese government's afraid of losing it. What we're seeing is this is a very powerful technology as predicted. Okay, check. And one company does not have a monopoly on it yet. Anthropics is better, but it's like 20 % better. So we're sitting here like, you know, getting all excited about the future here.

1:11:19Lon Harris:And, oh, my God, what does this mean downstream? Here's what it means downstream. You can't have a single dependency on any technology, whether it would be an Oracle database, and then that created MySQL and other alternatives that were open source. Nobody should have a single point of failure. When you write this stuff, it should be in a harness like OpenClaw, or we had the founder of the new competitor. Hermes agent. Hermes. Jeremy Quinnell from New Research. Thank you. My short-term memory is fried. Jeremy came on the program. Jeffrey Quizel. Yeah, Jeffrey came on with Hermes. Hermes can use any backend language model.

1:11:55Lon Harris:That's what you have to do. You have to take the harness. You have to take control of the front end, your data, your skills, your memory, and then you have to just be able to route. And that's what this is going to create, dynamic routing. The dynamic routing of your AI harness, which includes memory, which includes skills, and your prompts, and your data, and the contacts window, all that you have to own on your servers in your proprietary way. Yeah. And then just be able to boop, boop, boop. And we did this internally. It's not hard, folks. We did it. We're a bunch of podcasters and we set it up.

1:12:31Lon Harris:So it would use Kimmy 2.5 or Claude. And we started with Kimmy and Kimmy was like, okay, it's not as good. It's slow. But, you know, for simple things, it did work. Yeah. I'd say open source is like nine months, 12 months behind, I think this latest mythos model. And so that distance is, you can feel that distance now, but that distance closes. It's kind of like you're a freshman in high school and there's a senior in high school. It feels like you're incredibly different than you go to college. A freshman in college and a senior in college doesn't feel very different. Then you go into the workforce and a 27-year-old and a 31-year-old feel the exact same.

1:13:08Lon Harris:No difference, right? You're all just adults. This stuff, as it matures, it'll be the same kind of situation. Right now, it seems like, oh my god anthropic is so far ahead if anthropic service went down today everybody would just be on codex uh you know it's also all of the open source models are using the frontier models to like they're distilling them and that's how they're trading so every new generation builds on the generation that came before anyway tempest in a teapot all right fair enough tempest in a teapot being used for political uh machinations and uh anybody who's in one political party absolutely hates anthropic i know all these people they hate dario i think uh reed hoffman is the investor in anthropic yeah yeah uh just so they hate reed right so if you want to go one level deeper who hates reed hoffman most well republicans don't like him because he he funded all the lawsuits against trump yeah uh i believe reed hoffman's also uh also an open ai investor, but he's behind Anthropic too.

1:14:14He calls Anthropic one of the good guys in a back and forth with David Sachs.

1:14:20Lon Harris:I'm really interested in what his ownership position is right now. Let me take a look. Yeah. If he owns, but 1 % of that company, his stake in Anthropic. He holds an indirect stake in Anthropic through his position at a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Correct. So if he's 25 % of Greylock and Grey, because I think he co-founded it. So if he's 25 % of Greylock and Greylock owns 10%, he owns 2.5. If it owns 1%, he owns 25 basis points. In other words, he's worth billions to tens of billions of dollars based on his ownership there. So that's the tribalism. Most people don't know the tribal history here.

1:15:03Lon Harris:If you go a little bit lower, take the PayPal mafia, read over here, all the other members of the PayPal mafia on the other side. And it is, um, there's some longstanding grudges here. There's some beef. There's a lot of grudges, a lot of beef. And there's beef like two layers down. And you know what Silicon Valley people really get beefed about is like another person getting richer than them or having, you know, a stake in one of these companies. So it is absolutely tweaking for Republicans and the Trump camp that Anthropic is kicking everybody else's ass. That is ultimately tweaking for them.

1:15:41Lon Harris:And that Reid Hoffman is going to become worth tens of billions of dollars, not just a billionaire, but tens of billions because that's ultimately tweaking. They have the pitchforks out for this company in a major way. The company's not doing itself any favors either. So here we are. Yeah, I feel like if you are selling yourself as you're the AI safety company, you're the people that are so like, as soon as there's the whiff of this model might be dangerous, you got it. You get to be like, ah, it's not that big of a deal. Like that feels contradictory. I don't believe that part of the story. I don't believe that part of the story where he dismissed it because he doesn't dismiss anything.

1:16:15Lon Harris:I mean, that's what he overreacted. All right. He overreacted to their request. Their request was turn it off for non-nationals. He said, I turn it off for everybody. He's over delivering on his conservative nature. And so there's nobody in the AI space more conservative and thoughtful about security than anthropic. They're the most just based on this is not my opinion. This is just based on the behavior. He wouldn't release the model, but to 50 partners who were testing it for security. Then he released it in a very thoughtful way. We had limited access. It was monitoring every use. Then when they told him, turn it off for non-nationals, he said, OK, I'll turn it off for everybody.

1:16:54Right. Well, I mean, the counter argument would be that it's more marketing. It's that I'm going to ban it for everybody. Now you're playing 4D chess. It's going to ban it for everybody. It's so powerful. It's so dangerous. Like, no one can have it. Well, now we're back at 4D chess. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I don't know the answer.

1:17:11Lon Harris:If the government shut it down because Amazon told them it was too powerful, then the government and Amazon agree it's too powerful. Yeah. So are they both making it up now? This is what I'm saying. It's like there's so much hand-wringing right here. When you just look at the basic facts. It's impossible to know who's being motivated by what at this point. We can only guess. But there are some basic facts, and the basic facts are it is very powerful. Okay, now is Nikesh, the head of Palo Alto Networks, who said at the liquidity summit that they found a ton of security flaws? Is he in this grand conspiracy?

1:17:48It's not in doubt that it's a very powerful and advanced frontier model. I think the thing that is mostly in doubt is, has it legitimately been jailbroken to where you can use Mythos 5 powers through Fable 5? That we don't really. Anthropic is saying no. The government and Amazon are saying yes. We don't have a good answer. If Amazon says yes, then they did succeed.

1:18:08Lon Harris:They did succeed. Why would Amazon do this to a company they own a$100 billion position in? It has to be true. I don't have a good answer for that. I mean, unless we're living in some three days of the condor, this is like three billion days of the condor. Yeah, three billion parameters of the condor. All right, let's keep moving. All right, do you want to do the 5K bounty announcement? Yes, we have to do this. People are starting to think I'm not going to pay. Yes, no, we're getting questions in the DMs about it. I'm going to get skewered, man. I want to ship this money out. All right, so I have pre-recorded demos, so we can't fail this time.

1:18:44Just a quick reminder for the audience, we asked for a real-time podcast companion that listens live to twist recordings or other podcasts, but we'd like it for our show, and reacts in real time as the show plays. Specifically, originally we asked for all kinds of different producer voices, then we sort of honed it down. We mostly want to focus on fact-checking. So here I'm going to bring up the first finalist. We've got three finalists competing today for the grand prize 5K. The first one, this comes from a company called Lemon Slice AI. This is an app called Couchverse. Now, what I like about this one, and I'll have Jacob start playing it in just a moment.

1:19:22What I like about this one is it's not just a sort of a box that comes up with text. They actually came up with animated avatar characters. You'll see there is an alien who's their fact checker. And then there is a cat themed goth girl who is sort of the snarky troll. and this one, the other cool thing about Couchverse, it's just a Chrome plugin. So you could just go set it up as a Chrome extension and then use it directly in your browser on any video that you're watching. Very easy to use. Jacob, hit the play button. Let's watch the demo. So here, yeah, you can see I showed you, this is me installing the plugin.

1:19:59And then here, I'm about to click it on our previous episode.

1:20:02Lon Harris:Runs companies autonomously. Pulsia is an AI that builds and runs your company as you sleep. Building the product, It's alien. Whatever they're about to commit to on tape, yeah, I'm taking notes. It's cat girl. I had better things to do, but apparently this is happening now. The true milestone was a number of times... Long thing, like the 1998 Daimler-Chrysler merger, perhaps. ...beaten down and got back up. I have never seen an entrepreneur more resilient than Elon Musk. He, when he gets kicked, you know, he's got grit. He's got a work ethic. He's got a stamina that. Entrepreneurial grit, code for debt.

1:20:43Lon Harris:All right, I got it. There you go. Okay. I've got a couple observations about this one. Sure. Creativity, great. It's obviously listening in real time. Yes. I don't like voice over voice. That's like, that is the problem. I'd rather just have it be giving me the bullets, but well executed. Simplicity, ease of use. Ease of use is like a 10. Ease of use is a 10 out of 10. This was the easiest one to set up by far, and it just works right in your browser. You don't have to do any thoughtfulness or setup at all, and it'll comment on anything. I give it 10 out of 10 for easiness. We both do. Yes. Now, in terms of the actual value, I give it like a 4 out of 10 because it's not giving me the value I want.

1:21:23Lon Harris:I just want to see it bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. But for creativity, I also give it like an 8 or 9. I could see this working if the characters were like small in the corner and it paused. to give its commentary. Oh, interesting. All right. So that could be more like Mystery Science Theater. So overall, I'm going to give this one a 7.5. Yeah, I mean, I think the one big thing that I felt like on this is the commentary is just never really that useful. It's too tossed off. It's repetitive a little bit. I feel like it's maybe the AI model that this is running on is just not as sharp as it should be.

1:21:59So in terms of the experience, I really like this one. In terms of the actual practicality of would this be useful to have on during your live stream? I don't know. It's sort of in the middle. Not yet.

1:22:11Lon Harris:Not yet. But I think a couple of tweaks, this thing could be really amazing. So great job. Yeah. So our next contender, this is Convalence by Beau Bratton. This is an app that you actually have to download and set up on your computer. I have to admit, it's a little bit cumbersome to set up. It's a little bit confusing. Of all three, this was the one that took me the most time to set up, but we'll let you take a look at how it works once it's actually working. So Jacob, hit play on this demo. And you can see the first thing you do here after you've got the app installed is you actually talk to the AI and you give it a little bit of context about the show.

1:22:50Oh, the other thing I should mention here, this one only works for live broadcast. You're sort of making a podcast along with it as opposed to having it listen in on a podcast that your other is making. So to start off, I tell the AI. In this case, I told it, I'm just going to read you a news story. Please comment along. My name is Lon. And then it goes, okay, it's got all of the. It has hit an IPO. The rocket and AI company now known as SPCX will sell more than 555 million shares starting on Friday. So it's just me reading a news story from Friday. $55 a share. The total raise they're looking for is$75 billion at a valuation of over$1.77 trillion.

1:23:29Elon Musk. Another downside here, it takes a little while. This one, it's not instant real time like we were hoping. It's a little bit slow. But you're going to see it's got a very interesting take.

1:23:40Lon Harris:Yeah, because you've been talking for a minute now. We've got no feedback yet. It's still listening. In terms of the feedback, what's interesting that Convalence does is it's really not so much fact-checking. It's turning what I say into presentation slides. Oh, my God. But it's doing it in a pretty interesting and thoughtful way. I mean, I didn't ask for that. And it's stunning. Look at that. It just built a slide. The largest tech IPO in history,$75 billion total cap raised. It's totally. That's fantastic. It's completely accurate. I fact check the slides that it makes. So here you can see I'm done reading.

1:24:13You can keep the video playing. I want it to see. It keeps going. So it's playing catch up right now because I'm done reading the news story, but it's going to make a second slide here. So you can imagine not exactly what we asked for, but you can obviously see the value of this product. It's making a live presentation out of your show as you're doing your show. This is a different product.

1:24:37Lon Harris:I love this product. I might back this startup. I'm giving a talk at Stanford. offered. And instead of me preparing slides, I just read from my notes and it makes dynamic slides. It makes dynamic slides as you're talking. So if we did QA, I want to try this when I'm at founding university in Japan. I do a Q &A session. When we do a Q &A session, if I said, you know, there was a startup, Uber, and I invested in it, and then it did this, and then there was this company, and then I missed this investment in Twitter, it made a slide like Jason's Biggest Misses, Jason's Biggest Hits, what I saw in each one of them.

1:25:10Lon Harris:And it did that in real time. That provides massive value. Nobody has to do notes. It's beautiful on the screen. And think about that session I had with the AI before I started. You could tell it anything. You could give it design, custom design features. I want the slides to focus on this kind of information. Make it look like Steve Jobs' keynote slides. Or put a chart on this one. If I ever mention comparative numbers, make a chart. You could give it any of those kinds of directions. So a very Interesting program there. I was a fan. I mean, I'm going to say both of these would be startups that I would be willing to back, I think.

1:25:46Lon Harris:Now, there's a lot that goes into backing a startup. Like you have to have founders who are capable of not quitting, building a team and other things. But if a founding team came to me with either of these ideas and said, hey, can we get 25K to just incorporating it going? Or can I get 125K and come to the accelerator? I'd be like, yeah, this is pretty compelling. Let me have you pitch the team. Great job. My immediate thought on Convalence was like, Gamma should just buy this, right? Like Gamma, this should be a feature in Gamma that I can just do my presentation live and Gamma builds the slides for me.

1:26:22Lon Harris:Or maybe Plod buys these guys. And when I get one of my templates in Plod, because I always like to applaud Plod, maybe one of my templates is build a slide deck or build info, or actually I would say build infographics. Yeah, real-time infographics, yeah. Yeah, real-time infographics. There was this other interesting thing where an artist, you could hire an artist to come to a show, and they would draw on a giant panel, each speaker. It was a live artistic interpretation of what you learn that day. Right. And it was really cool. Somebody go find that, and we'll pull it up later. Hit me with number three.

1:26:55Lon Harris:All right. Third and final. These are in no particular order, folks. Our third and final finalist, Ricky Rivas and MyAI Sidecast. So another cool one. Does not have a lot of complicated setup. It's a very minimalist sort of interface. Less is more. The transcriptions are accurate. And we found, Jacob and I both found, the fact checks on this one pretty darn insightful. So, Jacob, hit play. Let us take a look. This is MyAI Sidecast. And this one, it works anything. it's just listening to a tab in your chrome so it could be a live show pre-recorded anything a blog post on thursday uh 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 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 so here you can see if you look in the upper right on your screen there yeah i'm i'm actually turning on he's got more personalities he's got a fact checker in there he's got a a roaster yeah okay where are the facts so yeah so that the biggest thing we're going to point out here is there have not been any fact checks yet out of everything that i've said If you keep the video playing, you can see I added the roaster.

1:28:25Okay, here we go. They're more active. Okay, here we have one.

1:28:27Lon Harris:Yeah. We have one here. Bernie Sanders wants to seize 50 % of the equity in Anthropic. That's right. Sanders proposed the AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, a one-time 50 % equity tax on major AI firms, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and XAI Payable in Stock and Cash. One source found. Amazing. That's it. This is what I wanted. Yeah. That's the winner. Number three is the winner. Yes. The other two are the runners up. Yes. Jake, Jacob and I agree. Yeah. Jacob and I both had this selected as our number one. I think for exactly what you said, it's what we asked for very specifically. It's, it's pretty quick.

1:29:02Like it, it responds with facts right away. And I like that it has an add on of, you can also get roasted. You can also get a really clean transcript. You can also get just sort of like notes and accompanying. It's, it's sort of broad enough and it thought of everything.

1:29:17Lon Harris:This has been incredible. congratulations to the winners um if a winner doesn't claim their pro i'm declaring the third one oh okay it's it's first place i'm agreeing with youtube and then i'm going to give the other two the honorable mentions great um and i think i'm going to encourage them to all keep pulling on the thread here that there is a business here in this uh that people would pay for i like all of them uh i'd love to meet the developers i want to hire a full-time developer to work on this with me as a company. So I don't know if this is a great way for us to source talent. Because, you know, I have this annotated project that I want to do.

1:29:58Lon Harris:Yes, that's our next bounty. Look out for that one. Next bounty is our next bounty. So it would be a fair way to do this. First prize, 3K, the second and third, or the two honorable mentions, 1K each. Is that reasonable? I think that sounds very fair. So Ricky Rivas, congratulations. You've won 3K. We'll be in touch. I know we've got him on X, so we'll find him. And Lemon Slice AI in both. $1 ,000 each. Congratulations to you guys as well. Wow. Look at that. It goes crazy. Here's what I'd like to do as well. When we give prizes like this, you got to pay taxes to the best of my knowledge. So we're probably going to need to get you to fill out like a little tax form because it's over$600, I think.

1:30:39We'll put them in touch with Heidi. She'll figure it all out.

1:30:41Lon Harris:So yeah, we'll figure it out. We'll send it to you. And then it's all open source. So great. you guys open sourced it and if you build it further you own it you know i'm not taking any claim to ownership here um but i really like it if i hope they join us for the annotated project as well and do that bounty next we'll probably take like a month or two to run through that one and do the similar process but even better i love this bounty program because it's fun it shows the creativity we get to give feedback on it and uh if you don't claim your prize I will either rotate it into a future bounty or I'll donate it to the charity of your choice as long as it's not something crazy just pick something I don't want anybody to think did I rug pull anybody long or did I do this in a fair manner I think we did this in a perfectly fair it took us a little while it took us longer than I think we'd hoped it was going to take us but a lot of people entered we had to install and check out a lot of apps We want it to be thorough and very fair, not just give it to the first good one that we saw, but take a holistic view.

1:31:51So, yeah, I think we'll take a little bit longer. And you can go to thisweekandstartups.com slash bounty if you want to keep an eye on the active bounties that we're looking for and jump in. And, yeah, the next one that we want to do is for this annotated app. I will give you a little taste here. Annotated.com. It's an extension for clipping and reacting to content from any website. So you see some text, you see some audio, there's some video that you want. So users can annotate any piece of content like that. It then creates a landing page with a link to a news story or the post, and then people can react with that annotation on that landing page.

1:32:28So, you know, think of sort of a variation on something like Reddit, where you're creating a topic that then becomes a whole thread that people can comment on. But instead of it just being you type into Reddit, you're sort of taking a piece of content from elsewhere on the web. And that is jump-starting the conversation. I was saying before, Jason, this reminds me a lot of an old school service called Delicious that I used to love many, many years ago, which was also kind of a similar kind, like find a quote or a good blog post, and then you pull it in, bookmark it, and then other people can see what you've bookmarked and comment on it.

1:32:59This is sort of the next level of that, I think.

1:33:02Lon Harris:Yeah, I'm really excited about this because I bought Annotated.com, I think, 20 years ago for 30 or 40K. And that was going to be my next startup. but I went with Mahalo and said. So my concept here is that we lose a lot of the, this is like cruft and like the dead web, you know, like things die. And so what I want to have happen here, I'm just going to unpack annotated a little bit, if I may. Please. You're on a New York Times story. Just came out. It's controversial. You're the subject of that story, right? You highlight your quote. And then you reply and say, I didn't say this, or I said this, but they left out the second thing.

1:33:41Lon Harris:Here's my screenshot of what I actually said to that person. And now you have this permanent object. And I'm not including blockchain in this, but a permanent object so that if they go change the quote, like let's say in that New York Times story, or they got a fact wrong and you fact checked it and you put it there, that object exists forever as a moment in time. Let's say there's a video and it is the promo video for this new product that's coming out, right? And you say, I want it, or even better, let's say Joe Rogan has somebody on talking about the, somebody's talking about the COVID virus, you know, in the height of the mania, right?

1:34:20Lon Harris:And they say something that is incredibly prescient, and they got it right, like they nailed it, right? Like the clip of, hey, it's the Wuhan virology lab and the Wuhan virus. It's in the name. Who was that that made that? Jon Stewart? Yes. You take that Jon Stewart clip. You do it. You say, hey, look, he was proven right. Here's all the facts. And then underneath it, people could comment and you could have a debate. And then you might have 50 different people comment on that same object. The object is the URL. But we will take the, let's say, up to 30 seconds of the original video. We'll downgrade it to like lower.

1:34:56Lon Harris:So you can do fair use. It is fair use to use other people's content if you're doing commentary. So I could take, you know, anything, a song, a book. And as long as I don't take the whole book, I just take a small portion, the enough for me to do the commentary. That would be fair. And it's the linking back. I think like we, one thing we do all the time on our Twitter account is just pull, like, if I see a really good quote in another podcast or somebody else's video, I'll just take a 30 second, you know, segment, just the quote I liked, and we'll share that. But then the follow-up tweet is always, here's where to go to watch the entire interview.

1:35:34As long as you're doing that, I don't think people get upset.

1:35:37Lon Harris:I used to want people to get permission before they clipped. I've changed my position on it. If you do commentary, that's fair use. If you're taking, like, if it was a hour podcast and you take, and all you do is rip 12 clips, which like some pod clips, The company was doing that and I had to stop them because it was like, it's the whole episode, dude. And the way they were putting it, you never had to go back and watch ours. So we don't even know people watched it. But if you do a small clip, we have a watermark now. I put the watermark on All In and This Week in Startup. Now everybody's now done that.

1:36:10Lon Harris:And the rules on Twitter, Nikita has said, hey, if you crop out the watermark, then I'm going to suspend your account or take you out of the – Yeah. Take you out of the Creators program is I think what he's doing, actually. He doesn't suspend the account. It takes them out of a greatest program. If they do it over and over, they might suspend it. But I mean, I do this on our account all the time. And nine times out of ten, the original podcaster reshares or likes or leaves a comment on our video. Because they recognize that we're sending people back to them. We're raising awareness of the show that they're doing and the great content that they're making.

1:36:41So nobody, yeah, I don't think anybody really objects to that.

1:36:44Lon Harris:Now, the Fact Checker, you know, podcast companion, that was like a project I wanted to see in the world. But annotated is a company I want to see in the world. And I may form a company out of this. So whatever you do in this bounty, consider your ideas, public domain, open source. Nobody owns them. I don't own them. You don't own them. It's just open source. Anybody can fork it and do whatever they want. That's the rules of this contest. Now, I might in the future incorporate some of those ideas, start from scratch, fire up another open source project, or make it proprietary and make this into a company.

1:37:16Lon Harris:So just so you know, this is my way of providing a bounty for two reasons. One, it's fun for the show. And two, I might find a team, a founding team, who I might be able to fund to actually make this into a real world product. Inside a venture capital firm, I'm allowed to, in our documents, incubate companies. So I'm allowed to create a company and incubate it, which Sachs did at Kraft famously, or the Snowflake. I think Snowflake came out of that. I think Kraft did his AI version of Slack. Anyway, there's all different ways you could do this as a venture capitalist. if your documentation says you can incubate a company.

1:37:53And when you do that, the holding company,

1:37:55Lon Harris:the venture firm gets like 50 % ownership. You might give the team 50 % ownership that you hire eventually, the founders and the team like stock option pool. And then you would give your investors who underwrote it, let's say you pick a$10 million valuation and the venture firm incubated it and they spent a million dollars in venture capital from your LPs on it. They get, I don't know, 10 or 15%, maybe give them a little kicker. you give them first bite of the apple kind of thing. And LPs are cool with that. You just can't do it over and over again and not have a winner or make it unfair. So it has to feel fair to LPs.

1:38:31Lon Harris:But that's a new thing venture capital firms are going to be doing more and more of, I predict. And I'm going to be, when we do Launch Fund 5 in the first quarter of next year, it's one of the things I'm going to earmark 20 % of the dollars, 10 % of the dollars, something like that for incubated ones. Because we often find a team and we have an idea and we want something to exist in the world. So it might be a way for us to manifest good ideas that we come up with here on the show and that the world needs to - We're full of good ideas here on the show. We are starting our associate in training program and five amazing associates starting.

1:39:04Lon Harris:Two or three of them are gonna work with Lon doing research and producing the show here as we get the word out and we train them up. We should probably deputize because I wanna have this concept of one producer per one episode a show. So we have four shows going out a week, three this week in Stardust, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And then we have this week in AI, which tapes on Tuesday, drops on Wednesday. We want to have one producer on each. One of the producers should get the bounty program to manage. So just when you're doing your management as editorial director, let's give one of them tactical, practical, give one of them bounties.

1:39:35Lon Harris:See you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye, folks. Go Knicks.

1:39:4513 kicks off this fall. It's a 12-week program that provides guidance on building your product, launching to real customers, and pitching to investors. Top startups receive$25 ,000 or$125 ,000 in investment. Apply now at founder.university.twist. Already have traction? The Launch Accelerator invests$125 ,000 and connects you with 500-plus investors to help you raise your next round. Apply at launchaccelerator.co. If you're an accredited investor looking to gain access to quality deal flow, apply for Jason's Angel Syndicate at thesyndicate.com. We find two to three deals a month. And check out This Week in AI, Jason's experts-only roundtable with top AI founders and operators every week.

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