The Strip Mining Era of LLMs—And Why It’s About to End | E2141

29:05What if five of them, I mean, if you said, hey, you can ingest all of this and every time you read the page, it's$10. If you want to, each of my articles is$10 to have in your LLM for all time. And there's 20 LLMs that pay you$10 each. You get$200 in incremental revenue per piece you write. By the way, that's when a piece gets paid in today's world. If you're Zuckerberg and you give$100 million to a developer to join your firm, you can start giving a million dollars each or$100 ,000 each to 1 ,000 different writers. Pick your favorite thousand writers. Now, will Zuckerberg ever do that? No, unless he gets sued.

29:45And that's really what has to happen. Substack needs to sue Zuckerberg and say, you ingested this stuff. It's clear you ingested it. and Substack plus the writers should be going to Created by Humans. And now you've got the writer, the platform, Substack, and Created by Humans all going to Zuckerberg and saying, hey, here's 2 ,000 writers that you ingested. Here's Substack, which is in partnership with them. And by the way, we're in partnership with them. Yeah. So F-Y-P-M. Frack, you pay me. me. AI is changing every aspect of the way we do business. We all know that. But lots of people, well, they're not getting enough out of it.

30:26That's my belief. Your AI apps need to connect to your other processes, your other systems, all that data you got sitting there. And you can do that with this incredible new tool called Retool, R-E-T-O-O-L. Now you can quickly create AI agents that will help you get work done, like real work done, and solve real work problems inside of your organization. Imagine you join a Zoom. After you had a dedicated AI assistant prep your meeting notes, then it sticks around to give you all the important real-time context and feedback that your colleagues are talking about. So now you're going to be able to design really sophisticated user interfaces, agents, and processes without sacrificing performance or customization.

31:09Retool is trusted by over 10 ,000 companies, including our pals over at Ramp. So check out Retool today and get your AI on, doing more than just talking. Go to retool.com slash twist to learn more. That's retool.com slash twist. The BBC is threatening to sue Perplexity. BBC is a British broadcasting corporation. And Perplexity, of course, is the very well-known AI search startup. Jason, we talked about how it crossed 100 million in ARR earlier this year. Hundreds of millions of searches done each month. and the BBC is like, hey, stop taking our stuff, delete what you have and offer us some money.

31:46And perplexity is saying that the BBC's claims are manipulative and opportunistic and that they, quote, have a fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law. The other thing here from the FT is that apparently the BBC is in talks with other AI companies, including Amazon. So my read here is that everyone else is going to pay. Perplexity didn't want to and so they're going to get sued. but I think that's a mistake. I think they should have just paid. Yeah, I mean, you and I are on the content side. It's fairly obvious, you know, if it's just the headline of the story and you're sending traffic, then, you know, FT and BBC and everybody else would have a different position.

32:27When you ingest it, put it into your learning, you know, you summarize it. If it's maybe behind a paywall, that creates another issue. So FT is behind a payroll. So here's the thing, though. What if your competitors aren't acting ethically and you want to? So for founders, let's say that their competitor is just scraping everyone's information without doing proper compensation. Where should you draw the line on maintaining your ethics, Jason, but also not getting run out of town by a competitor who might have a more fast and loose approach to, say, fair use? Oh, well, what happens is these competitors all will then go to those content providers and stir the pot.

33:07It's kind of like immigration. Here we go. The people who are most pissed off about an open border are the people who came in and waited in line. Yes. Which makes total sense. If you waited in line for your hamburger and somebody cut the line, you're like, that's effed up. I don't care if I've already finished my, if I finished my hamburger five years ago and you cut, I see you cutting the hamburger line, I'm not happy. And I think that's what you see here is like the fairness thing. And this is all, you know, when you talk about fair use, there are instances of fair use that people who are doing non-commercial projects or using small amounts of the original work or doing commentary on the original work, that perplexity is just not going to fall into.

33:47If perplexity used a human to summarize these articles, read them and summarize them, even if they're behind a paywall, you could do that. That is fair use. if a human does it. It is not fair use if you do it programmatically with a machine. Fair use means that somebody's giving their opinion, they're transforming the work, and they're making some commentary. So I could literally take the most protected image in the world, whatever it is, whatever it happens to be. Could be like, who protects their IP the most? Disney, Mickey Mouse. I could literally take a Mickey Mouse cartoon, do commentary over it, picture in a picture, and play the entire movie.

34:27And if you want proof of this, there's a Star Wars film where a guy does his own video commentary over a Star Wars film. This guy, who was not a fan of the prequels, speaks and talks over the prequels and does it. There's also a group of people who redid the prequels and took, like, Anakin's whining out and made it a little bit darker. And I think they took episodes one and two and made it—or maybe they took one, two, and three and made it into, like, a three-hour movie. but took out a lot of the whining and made it more like a hardcore. So anyway, long story short, people can do transformative works.

35:01This is not that. And if you want an example of a transformative work called business insider, business insiders, entire business was to subscribe to pay walls and to circumvent them. So every story on the information, you can go watch Topher Grace did this edit, did his edit of the Phantom Menace, the Phantom Menace. Yeah. There you go. Shout out Topher. Well done. And you know, if you do it non-commercially and you're not making money, it's transformative. You're making some sort of a statement. You might be able to get away with it. You know, you still can get sued, but you know, people will have a long-term debate.

35:32The thing that's very interesting about fair use cases, they all get settled. So to find a fair use case that got actually to completion is really hard. Okay. Let's keep going. All right. Jason, it's time for an office hours. I'm really excited about this one. We are going to talk to Jerem Taitina from Doc Tours. Jason, he is the co-founder and CEO. Doc Tours is in the launch accelerator cohort number 34. And while he comes up here on the screen, I'll just tell you their one simple sentence is that they are a medical tourism marketplace. Pronounce your name for us one more time so we get it right.

36:10It's Jerem. Jerem. G-I-R-U-M. Jerem. It is actually your name. You don't know this. It's a Greek name. Girum Topolis. It means to be wise and hardworking and return huge amounts of tributary to your investors. This is what it means. That's exactly what we're working for. Perfect. I heard you guys were talking about Greek pies before this. Yeah, absolutely. So, Girum, what a great idea. You know I love a good marketplace. Tell us the state of tourism. I know people love to go to Mexico to get... Breast augmentation, teeth. I don't know if it's a good idea or not. South Korea, amazing destination.

36:54Eastern Europe. It seems like cosmetic surgery is becoming people's passion. Maybe too much in some cases. Maybe too young. Putting it all aside, people want to look good. Okay. No shame in the game, I guess. I've been considering it since I got this ozempic jowl here. I got to figure out what to do. I need to get a little staple here or something, they tell me. My friends are now, they made fun of me for being fat. And now I'm getting made fun of for having a turkey thing here. I don't know. You tell me, Guillaume, what I got to do. But explain to me how big this market is. I want to start with market because you have a marketplace.

37:31The market size really does matter. So how many Americans are going and doing this? Where are they going? What are the top treatments? Yeah. So I'll answer this across the world and then just the U.S. Okay. So if you look at the American market, there's about 1.4 million American medical tourists in 2024. This number is up from 340K COVID. So the market is really growing. If you look at the global market, cosmetic surgery is the biggest category of medical travel, like you mentioned. But amongst Americans, it's actually dental. So it's dental globally is cosmetic surgery, dental, followed by fertility treatment, which is very interesting.

38:12and a bunch of long tail procedures down the line. If you compare the number of medical tours to the global elective procedure spend, it's not that big. It's actually a much, much smaller niche. So our vision is how can we dominate this niche and then grow it eventually to compete with the local elective procedure market. I see on the website, hair transplants are big, huh? They are. They're growing massively. So to speak. Yeah. So I don't know if you if you guys have access to our slides or anything. If you look at the Google Trends data, it's just exploding specifically in Turkey. If you all are on TikTok at all, you must have seen.

38:55I have seen this on Turkey in Turkey. The they make this joke about the airline flights. You see these guys have like their heads bandaged with people going there. So what does it cost to do that in Turkey versus the U.S.? And then what can people expect in terms of quality? Let me start with attacking the cost question first. By the way, there's good clinics in the US. There's good clinics abroad. There's terrible clinics in the US. There's terrible clinics abroad as well. But if you have a budget of, let's say,$10 ,000, you're going to the worst clinics in the US. You don't want to travel. The same amount of money will get you the top tier doctor, which would be comparable to the top doctor here in the US.

39:36So holding your cost constant, the quality that you get abroad is much, much higher. The second thing is the reason for platforms like Doctours need to be around is to protect the consumers from going to some basement and getting a treatment that isn't safe for them. We verify the clinic. We look at their local certifications, their global certifications, the number of Americans they see every single year, verifiable reviews, et cetera, before listening to them to our website so that the American consumer could trust that the quality of hair that they're getting is much, much higher. I was curious, how much work is it to actually go out there and vet these markets yourself as a company?

40:13Because I presume there's a lot of them. Do you have to go in person? How do you do the quality control on the recommendation side? Yeah, so so far, we've been asking them to submit their certifications. If you look at a country like Turkey, medical tourism is the national level priority for them. So they're quite strict, a lot stricter than the US is for hair transplant clinics here in the US. So they submit their certifications. We can verify it with the government websites. We also ask them to submit verifiable reviews, which are mostly videos. Our go-to-market is also TikTok. We partner with creators who have done their hair transplant abroad at the clinics we list on our site.

40:46So there's very direct proof of the quality available abroad. Do you remove people from the site if you get complaints? Is there some sort of standard? I'm curious as you grow this, because you're a year one or two startup, I'm not sure how long it's been around so we launched um in january so it hasn't even been a year yet got we haven't had any complaints so far uh but yeah we definitely take it down uh if if something bad were to happen yeah so i think that's like the interesting thing is how do you certify and do you have multiple levels because it seems like you've started with actually hand hair transplants is the first category is there going to be a certification level because airbnb now does like um i'm staying at an airbnb here i i find myself now superhost that's the thing yeah and then there's one fine stay and vrbo if you want it to pay 20 more and you know it's going to be incredibly great design and managed by a management company somebody's going to visit you maybe they pre-stock the fridge all that kind of good stuff so do you have that concept in mind for your marketplace?

41:53Yeah, certainly in the future, it's something that we'll have to do. Right now, we just look at their local certifications, but you can imagine doctors having a board of surgeons here in the U.S. that come up with standards, and then now we go around our partner clinics and ask them to get certified, and we can give them a special bad similar to the super host, given that they follow U.S. standards. This has two benefits. One, it's a guarantee safety for the American consumer, but also could be a great revenue stream for us as these clinics pay to get these certifications every single year. One of the most interesting things I've just learned by doing a couple of clicks on your website is that there are eyebrow and beard transplants.

42:34Correct. Stole my question. Where does the, wait, where's the donor hair coming for, because my beard does not come in like a beard. It just, like I have a really thick goatee. It's just, it's a mess. It's my irish and greek side competing with each other like my greek side's got this great goatee go and the rest is just patchwork how does that work yeah so uh the typical donor area is the back of your head okay uh and then the sides as well so if you've seen uh you know people that lose their hair like the top is gone but you'd still have like the crown over here yeah um at the back and the bottom it will still be there yeah that's typically where the hair comes from and um sometimes you can ask your surgeon to take it from your back or your chest hair um a lot of time surgeons will deny that but it is something wow it's like your back hair i was talking to a number of companies that were in psilocybin which is the active ingredient in what are called magic mushrooms uh or mushroom chocolates is how people typically ingest them at parties now in the united states but the psilocybin you can make synthetic psilocybin i actually think peter teal was an investor in this company um and i was like why don't you find a country send doctors, therapists, do it in a very controlled setting, have doctors ready.

43:49And that's exactly what started to emerge, which is psychedelic or plant medicine tourism. Have you looked into that, the psychedelic medicine and healing as a potential for doctors? So we're trying to stay away from the whole medicine side of things. A lot of investors ask us, will you import medication from abroad and do arbitrage there, et cetera? Like you said, have people travel for psychedelics. It's not something we're thinking about. Our growth plan is really winning in this hair transplant space. Figure out what is the next market, which you think would be IVF. And then launch dental shortly after that.

44:25Got it. And just stack verticals one at a time. Amazing. IVF is, I've gone through it with my spouse. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have two IVF babies. Amazing. Infertility. Very expensive, yeah. Well, as it turns out, in Rhode Island, it's mandatorily covered as part of health insurance. Which is a little state perk, yeah. So for us, it was actually incredibly affordable. What is it? What would you know? Did you ever look at the bills of what it actually cost your health care company? I don't look at bills. Do you remember how much you paid out of pocket? No, it was a zero. It was some amount of money between zero and 10K.

45:02I didn't care. So just for context, if you were to get IVF down here in the US, it could cost you 30K. If you have insurance, it could come down to 10K. going to a place like France or Spain, you can get the procedure done for under$5 ,000. So that's awesome. It's insane. And that's the first world. We're not talking about emerging markets, frontier markets. I mean, going to France or Spain sounds wonderful. People are going there every summer and going there for spring. It does feel like there's a lot more to IVF than a hair transplant. So do you think people would leave the country for a much longer period of time to do that kind of care?

45:40because that would raise the price just for living expenses. Oh, yeah, travel. Well, people are already doing it. So it doesn't matter what I think. Will it grow is an interesting question. So you can look at the Google Trends data on this as well. For IVF, it looks similar to what hair transplants did in 2022. So we think it's going to rapidly expand in the next few years. I was unaware of that. Yeah. Oh, you think it's a generational thing? Yeah. Well, Gen Z's turning 30. They're expected to be the biggest user of IVF. Um, also social media is how the quality of care abroad is really shared and they're the most influenced on, on what they see on social media.

46:17So we think 2030, um, you know, plus or minus one year would be great for IVF. So we're probably going to launch that market next. Any questions for me and challenges you have with the business? My question for you actually has to do with trust and safety. You asked this, it's the most commonly asked question from investors as well. And I shared with you what we're doing on the backend to verify clinics and have them on our platform. I'm wondering what you think we should do to better communicate this with our consumers today. It's not a huge concern, but as we scale into bigger and bigger markets, I imagine that'll be here.

46:51You've famously invested in low trust businesses like Uber in the early days, Robinhood even. How have you seen them grow past this and what advice do you have for us? Proactive communication, rating systems, mutual rating systems all played roles in those. Customer support plays a major role. Blog posts back in the day were great ways to communicate complex options. So here, even in this conversation, you and I, I asked you some questions about beards and you had like this incredible, then I asked you, hey, what about like, is eventually there gonna be gene therapies? You had a great answer. These discussions are not on your website yet, right?

47:36Because you're a young startup And or maybe they are, you know, I guess in your FAQ, you have some of them. So I think, you know, to the extent you can explain these things to where your audience lives, which seems to be TikTok, your Instagram, I would keep working on refining the quality of those. You're in health care. I think making them really tight and highly produced, maybe a high quality. Here's what a hair transplant is. I'm here at this clinic. Here's three people we interviewed about it. like really getting into it. And then some of those, you might be able to put advertising behind and actually convert into customers.

48:17I'm assuming you get paid hundreds of dollars per referral, low hundreds of dollars, something in that space, or each transaction is worth low hundreds of dollars. Am I ballpark correct? It ranges a lot depending on what clinic you go to, but we're aiming$750 per person all the way to$1 ,500 per person. Great. So you're getting 10, 20 % of the procedure, which is pretty common in this kind of space. I think investing, you know, five or$10 ,000 in a couple of short videos, you know, really well as an investor in the company, having that highly produced asset that builds trust and, you know, having a way to build that content on a regular basis that takes these questions head on or finding a great doctor from a couple of clinics and then you having the doctor speak to it or you interviewing the customer and the doctor and saying, tell me about recovery, the scabbing, the itchiness, highly produced videos with the actual customers, with the actual people doing that, tours of the facilities, all those things would build trust and consistency in the brand and the design of the brand does speak volumes as well.

49:25So if you look at both Uber and Robinhood, their design today, would be 10 out of 10, right? This is like world, world-class design. Their design started not dissimilar to yours. Your design's like a six or a seven, you know, in terms of aesthetics. And, you know, if you were to go to 10 designers and say, rate these websites, they'd probably give you a six or a seven in terms of, you know, 10 being Robinhood. Robinhood came out of the gate at eight and a half, nine. They really worked on it. I would, again, as an investor, say, if you told me I want to spend$5 ,000 with two different designers to make our design world class, invest$10 ,000 in this, and then throw it all away and then spend another 10 ,000 and do that in a year or six months later, and I'm going to drop$20 ,000 on design, I would say probably a good use.

50:13People do judge books by their cover and really world-class design, although it seems of low importance. Airbnb was another one that was eight and a half, nine out of, maybe a nine out of design so this is really an interesting thing you know i really appreciate your question design equals trust we can all remember the iterations of uber uh alex will show you the first landing page for uber it's very famous how terrible this landing page was so much so it's almost like a meme people share it all the time and i remember when travis was showing me like an early version we were doing like a little product review i said you know i've got a question for you about the cab you know we're calling this uber taxi or uber cab and i was like you know uber cab is a dumb name because it's not a cab it's so can we drop the cab and just call it uber.com and he said yeah we're doing that i said can i get credit for that and he's like i don't understand i was like can you tell the press that i came up with that idea so when they do the movie just like sean said drop the thigh i can get credit for that and he was like sure um but we've already made the decision i was like i don't care about the decision i just care about credit because it'd be funny um so here you go and i'm friends with 12 parker on demand car service via iphone and sms and it showed a cab and when the cab moved it hopped along the route as you can see in that image and it didn't change direction so when you see it at an intersection it looks like it's coming towards you off of a 2d map like it's going to like jump in the screen and fly into the air straight up whereas now it points the direction it's going obvious and i was telling about that he's like that's my number one piece of feedback it confuses everybody nobody understands it i'm like yeah but you could just make how many versions of the car are there you just have to do an overhead view it's like south northwest east and he's like yeah but then you have broadway which goes on an angle you got this street you know i was like ah yeah so you just make one version and rotate it's like i've had this conversation five freaking times jake how can we stop talking about it this looks like this is a five out of ten in design so you're ahead of Uber.

52:16This is a one. This is the worst thing I've ever seen. I mean, it communicates what it does. On-demand car service via iPhone and SMS. Book car in the app. So the checkbox is in the bullet point. Join for free. The call to action is good. Or learn more. There is some good stuff here. How it works pricing blog. They did think through objectively what people's questions are. And so you can kind of look in the history books. And design equals trust is, I think, something we are going to put in our founder university and launch accelerator curriculum so uh somebody make a note about communicating that back to my team please i want a design equals trust and then they can go to this clip and q a and and maybe build a little curriculum around it it's a very important tell us a little bit about your experience in the program and we'll wrap we did founder you i think for a different idea i don't remember how long ago oh really and that's how yeah yeah yeah and that's how we learned about lawn um favorite part is uh you know getting intros to the investors after the pitches every week.

53:15It breaks my heart not getting ranked because there are so many great other companies in our cohort. But it's very competitive, I think. And yeah, y 'all have introduced us to some amazing first-person world thinkers, investors who want to see what the future of elective procedures, and we're thankful for that. Awesome. Yeah, it's a device we have every week. We ask the investors to say after they see the presentations, hey, tell us one, two, and three, which was your favorite startup. And then we give two points for first place, one point for second place, a half point for third place. And then I create another device, third place and second place, you just say the name of the company, first place, you explain why you picked them for first place.

53:59So if you get first place, you get like an effusive couple of sentences from the person who picked you. What this device also does is, hey, you picked us as number two, was wondering if I can follow up with you and put us in our investor updates. Yeah. It kind of creates a little bit of a connective tissue with some number of investors. Also, if you don't get picked for three weeks in a row, you have to say, well, why are these other companies getting picked? And then you start to, because you're seeing why those people are getting startup investor or product investor or market investor or founder investor fit.

54:34And it could be any of those things, right? They just love the founder's presentation ability. And they'll say that. I just love the founder. Wow, so dogged, so funny, so clever, so insightful, great answers. They might just say that, right? You've experienced that, Garam, and they just love a founder. Other time, they're like, I love this market. This market's great. It's ripe for disruption. Oh, my God. Everybody's going to be doing more medical procedures. They're getting safer. Yeah, I love this market. You can get all those things that occur. but what's most important is the competitive nature of getting into an accelerator.

55:07Then I said, well, how do we make the accelerator itself have a little competition in it? Just to get people at the top of their game. When you're playing basketball and everybody shoots 35 to 40 % from three-point range, or 80 or 90 % from the free throw line, and you don't, you know what you're going to do? You're going to come to the gym an hour early until you do, because you want to make the team. So if your design sucks, your market sucks, your business model sucks, and you see other people solving those problems, you just fix it. That's the great part, I think. Exactly. Well, if everyone wants to check out what Doc Tours is up to, it's doctours.co.

55:40And you can take a peek around there. It's quite a lot of stuff on there. It was really easy to prep for the session. Where are you based, Jerem? I'm curious. Where are you based? I'm in Huntsville, Alabama today. Love it. And this is a co-working facility you're in or just a fancy background? This is the ground floor of our apartment building. Oh, wow. They have like a co-working space? Sweet. They have a co-working space, yeah. Awesome, yeah. and fundraising you're getting good feedback from investors yeah they have a uh what when they give you like really considered feedback any consistent feedback you're getting or feedback that you know is like they're just afraid to say i don't want to invest in this business i'm just going to give you like a bs reason and have you been able to learn to parse those things yeah the liability question is definitely number one um we've gotten some feedback from the launch team but also other investors to have the legal side be very robust and make sure that we're legally protected.

56:33I think that's what investors care a lot about. I just want to pause you on that. We have an investment in Gigster and Meowtow, Stone Algo. These are three very different marketplaces, Cat Sitting, Diamonds. Gigster figured out insurance in a major way. So if you want to meet Yuri and the team over there, just ask Jackie or Bianca to introduce you to Gigster. And then I think Meowtel got their insurance for cat sitting. That's a really interesting thing. You could say to the person who's doing the tourism, would you like to get insurance in case your trip gets postponed or canceled? That insurance exists in the world.

57:09I get upselled on it all the time. I never take it, but I should think about it. And then there's insurance, you know, for the other side, which I'm sure they have, but they could get it for Americans. And if you said to them, hey, we want you to pay$100 insurance, you know, as part of the SPF or whatever, or the affiliate, if people ask for it, will you underwrite it? If that's like the thing that is such a side factor for them. If you're in Turkey, it's required. The government requires clinics to have insurance for their foreigner patients. Interesting. But yeah, this isn't true for Mexico or I'm not exactly sure about South Korea, but it is something that we could offer both sides.

57:50I think you could become a blogging machine. And I think if you just spoke into a computer with somebody interviewing you, and then you had somebody who's a good writer write blog posts based on what you're saying and then put citations into it, you could start with just you have an FAQ, but a blog about this, and then put it on Stubstack, put it on Beehive, put it on LinkedIn. And then you make slightly different versions of it for different platforms. Now you're getting multiple swings at bat in the SEO slash large language model. So that one is like, tell me about the insurance. Do hair transplant insurance, Mexico versus whatever.

58:40Or a landing page for hair transplants or dental implants, Mexico versus Turkey. Turkey versus France. France versus Spain, what to expect, et cetera. What you'll see is in the SaaS companies, the savvy SaaS companies will make Salesforce versus HubSpot. HubSpot versus Salesforce. It's very interesting. On the Salesforce web landing page or whatever, Salesforce wins in their estimation. On the HubSpot landing page, they'll go back and forth and have this really objective shootout between the two products. Miraculously, HubSpot wins. AngelList did an incredible job of this. I send people, even though I have the syndicate, I just send people to AngelList.

59:20They got ahead of us. They wrote all this incredible FAQs about angel investing, QSBS. They took the risk of saying, hey, we're going to just put that information out there. Other people would be like, oh, don't give financial advice. Don't give advice on this. Don't give advice on that. They're just like, screw it. We're giving advice. We're going to just explain this stuff to you. Investopedia does a good job at that. Great job. Yeah. I would look at those two sites or those couple of sites as inspiration. and it could be very lightweight for you to hire a writer to do this. Like it might be a hundred dollars per page.

59:55You get interviewed by them over a zoom or you just talking to a microphone. They make the pages. You read them, approve them, read them, approve them, read them, approve them. Boom. Totally. All right. Another amazing office hours. I can't wait to see you in Texas. We're going to do some sort of Texas thing. You have to take, you like barbecue. Don't tell me you're a vegan. I love barbecue. You like barbecue. Don't tell me you're a vegan. great job doctors is it.com without us.ai it's.co we're working on the.com i mean it's a good name doctors i like it um it's very clever i wouldn't worry about it you could uh get get doctors or go doctors.com as blockers then when you negotiate with doctors.com you can say listen we don't need it we've already invested the seo in this but if we could get it it's nice obviously so it would give you this dollar amount and that's actually becomes true right um because the truth is like a great.com does build trust uber went from uber cab to uber.com and they bought that for a couple million bucks yeah good luck with it uh and i'm really excited i think you're going to have an amazing business going to cash flow great and uh great questions today awesome thank you all right we'll drop you off and uh anything else in our docket that we need to get to here any housekeeping any founder university stuff any dates we have to promote uh no all in.com summit all in summit september all in.com slash yada yada yada or you just do all in.com and just click on events but i like to say all in.com slash yada yada yada it actually i think redirects to the all in summit uh this week in startups.com slash docket and cautious optimism on Substack.

1:01:43And I'm like, Calacanis, I think that's Substack.com. Go sign up for email newsletters. I'm going to start writing again. I decided I got to unleash my superpower, which is writing and get back in the writing game. I'm so jealous of you writing every day. We'll talk to you. He's Alex. What is he? He's Alex Wilhelm. So that means on Twitter, X, he might be X.com slash Alex. Yes, sir. Ridiculous. I'm X.com slash Jason, equally ridiculous. and my Instagram is at Jason. So go over there if you want to get cheesecake photos of me. Now that I'm then, I'm starting to do these. I take pictures of myself with a sultry look and then I send them to my wife.

1:02:22Like me sipping a cup of coffee. I'm like, I do this. My little cute eyebrow up. And then I send it to her and you know what I say? What? You're welcome. You're welcome. I love that. Was that Moana that had the song You're Welcome? Yeah, it's sung by The Rock. If I did that to my wife, I love that song. It's so great. It's the worst, like most crazy thing in the world. All right, everybody. Oh, we didn't do the Tesla story. Lightning round it for me. Yep. Invites are out for the Tesla launch in Austin. This is their Robotaxi event. Yes. I believe they're still shooting for the 22nd. It's going to be a geo-fenced area with 10 cars to start.

1:03:02There's going to be remote safety people, which you and I both think is a great way to kick off the overall push. And as far as I can tell from social media, Jason, they are inviting Tesla-friendly influencers to be among the first people. And that's smart because that'll ensure there'll be TikToks, Instagrams, and otherwise tweets about what people are doing. So I'm stoked. I want more competition and self-driving. I want Waymo to be scared and in a hurry. So I can't wait and I hope it goes well. Yeah, it's going to go well. I got to ride in one of them with the cyber taxi, robo taxi, as I said, on Saturday in Palo Alto.

1:03:39Did three rides, all flawless. It's a bit more aggressive than the version I have is my perception. That may be just me projecting into it, but I actually sat in the driver's seat. And I think they're ready to slowly do testing with a safety driver. Now, the safety driver in this instance is going to be in the right-hand seat. I saw a screenshot. so when you do it you can bring an extra person with you according to there was somebody had tweeted like the um somebody tweeted all like the details geofence it's 6 a.m to midnight if it's inclement weather they're turning it off and there's a safety driver in the right passenger seat front right passenger seat so you can take the two back seats you can bring one person with you if they're 18 years old you can do social media the person in the right i saw an interface somebody had screenshotted it.

1:04:27There's two big buttons, pull over and stop. So the safety monitor, which is not a safety driver because they're not able to take over the steering wheel, can press one of two buttons. I think this is halfway to what I think they should do. I think they should have just put a safety driver in, just called it a day. But I guess they feel confident. And there is a big self-correcting mechanism here. If they get in an accident, they got big problems. And then I also saw that the state, I don't know if you saw this, the state had sent a letter to Tesla. Did you see this? I saw headlines about that as I was prepping the show.

1:05:04But yeah, so there's the state sent a letter like, hey, we have some rules here. We need you to, you know, dial us in. So lest anybody think that there are not self-correcting mechanisms here for the self-driving companies, there are. And there was a Volkswagen ID Buzz. Pull up that headline if you don't mind. No worries. Take your time, but I just want to give people the full context of what's going on here. So as you can see there, it's obviously geofenced massively. The Tesla bears are like, oh, didn't you say you can do it anywhere? Of course you can do it anywhere.

1:05:41Supervised FSD can work anywhere. Unsupervised FSD cannot. So of course they're going to. Now, that doesn't mean they can't quickly learn. They will quickly learn because it's a neural net. it's designed to simulate off of hundreds of millions of hours they've collected oh yeah um but it's geofenced and um you know just in terms of service and all that other stuff this is not like waymo which is ahead of them obviously in terms of deployment this is like kind of waymo this is somewhere between waymo having a safety driver in the seat in the driver's seat and only doing Google and Alphabet passengers and Waymo public.

1:06:20So it's just kind of right in between those. Seems very wise. And then here's the Volkswagen headline. So Volkswagen has its own self-driving group. It's called Moya, M-O-I-A. Been pretty stealthy. Like they don't really talk too much, but they're doing really consequential work. Zooks is also doing very consequential work in larger size vehicles. Yes. That the ID Buzz is an incredible car. It opens on both sides. So this is going to be good for the Uber pool lift line concept. I still believe five people will be up. If I had to take a guess, I think there'll be five operators in a major city in New York.

1:07:08In a major city in the U.S. five operators of robo taxis within two years in one city over under what do you got you obviously have waymo and austin already yep or yeah imminently let's just assume tesla figures out and next year q1 q2 they open it up to people so that would be two so three more got to be added i would put zooks the volkswagen volkswagen idbuzz and then probably one other. WeRide, WeChina, or Pony.ai. I'm bad at sports betting, so I want to be more aggressive than your timeline. Does that mean I'm taking the over or the under? Under. So you mean there'll be five in under 24. I'll take the over.

1:07:52I think it's under two, but maybe I set the line two. So if I said 18 months, would you be under 18 months or above 18 months? That's kind of where my equilibrium point is. So for the sake of being spicy, I'll say under, but that's probably... Okay, I'll take over on 18. That's it. Okay. So let's set a date in the notion to check back. And then anytime we see a city hit three unique providers, we do that. I got an inside piece of information from China on self-driving. Oh, hit me. And job destruction. I mean, talk about the Andy Jassy letter, which you can pull up. The Andy Jassy letter was pretty interesting for me.

1:08:25And I saw Andy Jassy at the CO2 conference. I got to ask him a question or two. So in China, I was talking to a major CEO, founder from China. This is a message from Andy Jassy about generative AI and its impact and that they're going to have less employees because of AI. And that's the white collar side of the business. But I asked him about self-driving, Zoox, delivery, drones, et cetera. I think the most impacted company by AI in the world is going to be Amazon. Positive or negative? Positive in that it's going to make their earnings go crazy. Yes. Negative for society in that they're going to hemorrhage delivery jobs and factory jobs and white collar jobs.

1:09:11Yes. They're going to up and down the stack, decrease their staff size by 5 % a year for five years, which net net compounding means they'll have 35 % less people in the company, something in that range. It's going to be a third smaller, or a third of the jobs are going to go away inside of Amazon in five years. Now, do they add jobs for other opportunistic things? It's possible, but I think of the current job mix, I could see a third going away because of these technologies. In China, there's deep concern inside the party, government, about jobs. Young men work as drivers. Yes. young men unemployed right in the streets we saw this in greece we started in italy we see it in the middle east from time to time whenever the number of young men 18 to 30 years old unemployment hits about 15 20 you get a little bit of uprising if it goes above 20 you get riots in the street you can look at greece employment riots spain employment riots um and other countries Middle East, I think maybe Lebanon, Egypt would be another one.

1:10:21I think Egypt, in that demographic, there's a lot of unemployment. And then those people have no time, have free time, and then they can become radicalized. Right. And what does the Chinese Communist Party really value above all, which is political stability and maintenance of control? Harmony. Harmony, sure. And so I think I'm showing a news article here showing that this is back from February, so the data's a little bit old here, Jason. but youth unemployment in China rose to about 17%. Holy cow, what a pull. That's shocking. Yeah, it's really high. It's much higher than the overall rate of unemployment in the country.

1:10:54But a problem that China has is simply that its economy cannot absorb the number of highly qualified college graduates that it produces. And so they have a surplus. And so if we're talking about white collar job destruction being a problem here in the US, well, it's gonna be twice as tough over there. India is another situation where they're taking full villages in India and transplanting them to Singapore, you know, Dubai, Qatar, et cetera, for healthcare work, nurses, doctors, construction, et cetera, restaurants. So they'll go to a village where there's no jobs and everybody's unemployed in India.

1:11:32And they're like, hey, here's an opportunity. So I was talking to, so when there's displacement like this, there's opportunity, there's cognitive and, you know, atom and bit-based moving surplus of energy. You can take this energy and use it. Athena's using it, right? Taking assistance, go to athenawow.com and get like a month or a couple of weeks off. I'm the first investor in that company and a partner. And so they're shipping$3 ,000 a month assistance, 36 ,000 a year, all in. No extra health benefits, taxes, hiring. They'll just swap them in and out And you get an assistant for half the price of the United States who really wants a job, who will work harder than anybody in the United States ever would or 90 percent of Americans ever would.

1:12:16And they call you sorry. It's quite charming. Anything else I can do for you. It's like really service based. There's an opportunity. Yeah, there's an opportunity there. Those folks in China who can't get jobs, what can the Chinese government use them for? Where could they be deployed? And every time you see that, and I think, you know, that's the thing I've been thinking about with job displacement in the U.S. And somebody challenged me, and I think it was SACS at this CO2 conference or whatever, and I said, well, what if we just double the number of teachers, doctors, nurses, and people who do elder care?

1:12:51Yeah. What if like all these, you can take those 16 % who are unemployed and you could say you now all work at nursing homes and your job is to watch TV with them, take them on walks, do a cooking class. Yeah. You know, basically be a camp counselor. It's a camp counseling job. Let's call it what it is. These people have nothing to do. They're retired, just like kids have nothing to do in the summer. You're a camp counselor. Keep them busy, make it fun. The end. So this is what I want founders to start thinking about. If there were 10 ,000 door dashers available to do something else, what would you have them do?

1:13:27Oh, interesting. So how to get ahead of the freed up labor force of people that are currently, ah. What could 10 ,000 door dashers do if it's not bringing you boba? They could make me boba in sushi. You know, I'm just kidding. They could, well, no, I mean, it's an honest question. And so is there a handyman job? Is there a butler job? I know this sounds crazy. do you want to start a community garden you know dog walking there there are other things that in society maybe rich people do uh-huh uh chefs personal chef rich people have personal chefs poor people like eat fast food and don't cook and you know then there's everything in between what if there was somebody you know who has one of these cooking marketplaces and they say hey hey, we're going to teach people to cook.

1:14:16They're going to cook a meal for 10 families. And those 10 families come and pick up from this community kitchen their 10 meals at a really reasonable price. It doesn't get delivered to them. They have to pick it up on the way home from work. But they get a healthy dinner, leftovers, and then a brown bag lunch and a breakfast for the next day for 12 bucks a person. And it's healthy and it's great. And they buy it for subscription. So start thinking like that. The businesses that didn't have employees or couldn't get employees? What if there were too many employees and people would say, yeah, I'll work for anything?

1:14:49That's what happened with Uber and DoorDash. There was a surplus of people who wanted to do gig work. I predict millions to tens of millions of gig workers coming on the market. Man, that is at once an incredibly exciting point and also a very scary one. I think I'm going to take the optimistic side of it, but we have a lot of work to do to rebalance the economy in a post-ChatGPT world. Never squander, never squander a crisis. chaos that's capitalism is a lot chaos is a ladder yeah all right everybody we'll see you next time bye bye