Why AI has no taste and how to fix it (w/ Thais Castello Branco) | E2319

19:48Lon Harris:And then everybody who goes there feels the need to go there and TikTok it. And now those places have crazy lines. Some of them now, and I'm making the X here. This is what the Japanese people do when they say no. They don't allow Americans, no tourists. So they change their menu all to Japan. They change their Google listing, all Japanese line. Oh my God. And then they make it hard to find the place. So they make the signs. And you may have experience this. Well, everything in Tokyo is hard to find. Everything. You go to the building and you're like, I'm at the right building. And it's like, oh no, it's three floors underground.

20:21or like, oh no, it's at the top of this thing and you got to go around and down the hallway.

20:25Lon Harris:Now imagine they put it in Japanese in a tiny sign around the corner when they used to have it in the front. I was the dumbest, most oafish person in every room I was in for two weeks. It was crazy. AI is writing code, reviewing that code and then shipping that code. But it's important to remember your workflow is only as fast as the slowest thing that it touches. And for most of you, it's going to be your database. Hey, with today's tools, you can generate a new feature in 90 seconds, then spend three days bending it to fit your rigid decade-old schema. But this is where MongoDB can help. MongoDB gives you the flexibility to ship at the speed of AI.

21:04Lon Harris:The asset compliance guarantees you get to actually sleep at night while it scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. And the best part is developers swear by it. Literally, I can't use the actual words they said in this ad. So let's just call it a really great database. The MongoDB for Startups program is here, and it makes it easy for eligible startups to get started with free credits. Apply now at mongodb.com slash startups. Once again, that's mongodb.com slash startups. So your thoughts on this particular issue, which is, you know, there's a half-life to cool? I think yes, but I don't think that's a function of a guy.

21:44I think that's always been true, right? You've always had this like class of curators or like the tastemakers that are at the forefront. They kind of pick the thing that is the cool thing next or they're at the avant-garde, let's say. And once it starts getting more ubiquitous and like more people start knowing about it, it loses the cool and then they move on to the next thing. But I think that's always been true, even before social media, even before AI. I do think, though, that social media like accelerated the speed of that cycle, let's say, and AI could have that potential, too. I think so far it honestly hasn't just because it's still so bad that I don't think like the actual tastemakers are being like, oh, yes, this is the exact thing I want my sidestep to look for or to look like.

22:28And so I don't think we've seen that effect yet. But I think as long as we push for that diversity where it's not meant about it having like one correct answer, but it's about it having both breadth and the ability to execute well in like all those different directions, then I think actually could help the problem in a good way. Like of pushing people towards actually more directions rather than compressing to the mean further.

22:50Lon Harris:Let me tell you my stack. Tell me. Yeah. I don't want and I'm reticent to share this. because this is going to cause the other problem I have. Okay. I have a number of curators that I trust. I'll give you but one. Monocle Magazine is a magazine out of the UK. Have you ever read it or seen it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you should subscribe to it and support them. And so I was having my Athena assistants last year take Monocle and about 15 other sources where I find things and specific searches I use on those places. I'm not going to say anything else. I gave you one. Then I would tell them, hey, aggregate what I'm looking for when I go to Singapore.

23:36Lon Harris:I went to Singapore for the first time. I like design hotels. I like hip. I like funky, et cetera. And so if you were to put in Singapore here, put in Singapore hotels. And this is how I picked my hotel for Singapore. It's a beautiful cyberpunk hotel that had like trees on the side of it. I think I showed it to you on, if you search for Singapore hotels and I find it there. And yeah, let's see if it's there when you pull it up. It's like a garden hotel that's like really tall and it looks like something out of like a positive version of Blade Runner. Anyway, you're just seeing like Singapore pictures.

24:12Lon Harris:That's not it, but there's like a ton of things that are like this where they make it like a rainforest. Incredible. incredible. So then they did a really good job of finding the places I like to eat food, which I'm looking for things that are, I'll just say, Anthony Bourdain-esque, you know, street stuff, one dish they're known for, et cetera. So then I programmed my own cool hunter. And I said, you are a cool hunter. You're looking for things that would appeal to these specific people in these categories that have these specific design elements, et cetera. And it works. That's all I'm saying.

24:55I want to test it.

24:57Lon Harris:But it's a super mega prompt. And then I have it go out and I have a cool hunt for me over and over and over again. And so every week I get a cool hunting report of trends, et cetera, just because I'm interested in the world or whatever. So how do you do it? You you actually get to hire people to review output from LLMs and then have them rated on some vectors. So there's a mix of things. So there's, there's rating things. There's also this like concept of almost like a critique. So imagine if someone's actually like a design critic or a senior designer who's like teaching a junior designer on their team.

25:31So how would they almost like critique every single thing they're doing and explain why it's, it's wrong or good. There's also this aspect of actually curation. So like choosing examples of things that are good and choosing examples of things that are bad and explaining why. And yeah, or also actually creating things from scratch of like, hey, here's a example of like what a perfect version theoretically of this thing would be compared to what like an LLM was able to generate. So, yeah, there's all these different data shapes that are helpful in different ways for model training. And then they are also helping a lot of these internal products that we're building.

26:04So the index, for example, is something that had a lot of curation from experts. And this judgment system that we're building of how do you verify also if something is, for example, staying on brand, involved a lot of experts making those judgments and being like, hey, this -

26:17Lon Harris:How do the experts feel about this work? Do they have this sense like I'm giving away my curation and what makes me special and I'm going to get myself out of a job? And then how do you handle that? Because AI is scary to people. So if you came to somebody who's a movie reviewer and you're like, or you're an art critic and we're like, we're going to show you art. We're going to give you the providence of it. And we want you to describe it. Like, are they like, are you trying to take my art critique and eliminate me from the world? So they must be thinking that on some level and you must have an answer for that.

26:49Lon Harris:What is that answer? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think it, by the way, I don't actually fundamentally believe that tastemakers are going to go away by any means with AI. I actually think it's the opposite. I think they become more valuable because the more you have of this like mass production of things and kind of creation of outputs, which is just going to happen, right? Because everyone now in the world can click a button and create something. The more I think the peak of the peak of the peak becomes valuable. Similar to what you're describing about the specific restaurant in Japan, right?

27:15It's like those really specific things that become really good, I think, become more valuable, not less. And so and I think we're infinitely far of having the power of like a true like creative direction and choice and this kind of craft. And so I think, yeah, being a tastemaker kind of becomes more valuable. In terms of like how they feel in terms of the work, we actually ran this survey with a community a couple of weeks ago of asking like kind of why you're here, like why are you excited about working with us? And it was really cool to see how a lot of responses were almost around like curiosity.

27:43I was like, I am excited about the problem and I hate SOP and I want to help. It was like very motivational in terms of purpose of why they were interested in the work. And so I think people want to be a part of the solution maybe is the conclusion I've gotten. Interesting.

27:57Lon Harris:Yeah. That would make sense to me. Here's the artisan hotel I stayed at. Check this out. This is going to blow your mind. And so like I stayed a little bit off the beaten path, but this place was kind of new. I think my room was like only five or 600 bucks. But if you zoom in on this thing and you'll see there's like cutouts where it's green, those are actually double story green atrium salon. And so those are seating areas common to everybody. You can't get them as a suite. Right. It looks like the whole place is great. Are there rooms in between the jungle? Yes. When you look at the jungle area, if you look at any jungle area, there's rooms to the left of it.

28:38Lon Harris:There's rooms above it, typically in eight. Then on the roof, there's an infinity pool. Go to the roof. That whole area up there, that's an infinity pool type situation. There it is. You go up to the roof. I would go up there and work. I would have never found this if I didn't have my system because it didn't come up anywhere. It's not like this is a giant hotel. It's got like whatever, probably 50 rooms. It's like a boutique hotel, yeah. It would be in the boutique hotel, not a chain. Artisan, art, Y-Z-E-N. You know what it looks like? I find these things so consistently. It looks like in the post-apocalyptic movie when nature has reclaimed the building, but people are still like huddling in it, like children of men, you know?

29:19Check this out, Tez. Or The Last of Us. Look at the cutout there. That's beautiful. No, but by the way, half of my family are architects. So I feel like the side of interior design and hotel hospitality, I love. I got to give you some Brazil tips for next time you guys go to Brazil.

29:34Lon Harris:You know, I've never been. I feel so ashamed. What are we going to do? Found a university in Sao Paulo or something. Oh, and Sao Paulo has a huge, huge family community. There you go. Make that happen. So do you have aspirations to do anything public facing with this collection of people? or have you thought about buying? And this is the idea I had. Because I think you raised money at a pretty decent valuation, yes? Yeah. Yeah, we did. Do we have that in the notes, Lon? We do. I have that it was a - And who the investors were? Yes, I have an$18.5 million seed round co-led by CRV and Amplify. That's what I have.

30:12Lon Harris:Oh, CRV. I know the team over there. Oh, okay. Congrats. Founders are scrappy by nature. And many like you like to dig in and get started building without worrying about admin. They run the whole business on Excel, then keep adding on more random tools as needed. But here's the problem. None of these tools and platforms know how to talk to each other. So you wind up playing go-between with a cluster of different systems. It's a Franken-business. It's a Franken-site. And it's a huge waste of time. But now there's Odoo, the all-in-one management software that's serving 16 million users across more than 170 ,000 companies in over 120 countries.

30:51Lon Harris:Now your CRM, sales, accounting, manufacturing, website, inventory, and point of sale, they're all in one easy to find place. And most importantly, every app talks to every other app. Sell a product on your website and the invoice gets created instantly and your inventory gets updated automatically. So if you're stitching together spreadsheets and keeping track of five different logins, get started today at odoo.com slash twist. That's odoo.com slash twist to level up your business. What it would cost to buy Monocle magazine or to say, I want the exclusive license to Monocle magazine would be a fraction of what these large language model, frontier model companies, or even like the mid-tier ones.

31:33Lon Harris:Have you considered maybe acquiring some of those assets and putting them together or the archives of them? Paper magazine got sold in a fire sale, I think, sadly. I used to write for them back in the 90s. Incredible archive of history and art and taste, like somebody could actually own that and get the writers involved in one of those. And it could be like the rebirth of the magazine business, which was the ultimate coalescence of taste. Of curation. Yeah. So I think right now we're very focused on like visual design. And so, yeah, we're thinking, we're going very deep on the visual design side of things.

32:10And so we've been more doing these types of relationships actually with like creative agencies or like epic designers that we want to like take a look at what kind of never saw the light of day in their portfolio that they maybe worked on. Oh, very nice. But yeah, I think when we eventually get to something like creative writing, it would be really cool to explore some of these partnerships because to your point, it's like it's one of one, right? Like you don't have magazines. And so yeah, totally.

32:35Lon Harris:All right. Listen, this has been incredible since you just raised money. I know you're hiring. What positions you're hiring for? Where's the company based? Every single position you can think of. We're based in San Francisco, but I think we're hiring a lot across engineering research operations. And we actually have this really cool design researcher role. So if you're a designer, but that really wants to think of the problem of design almost as a theme to be studied and how do we break down what does good mean and evolve this, then yeah, that's a really cool role. Sounds like you'd hire a professor.

33:04Lon Harris:The website is tastelabs.com. And yeah, look at the careers page. A lot going on there. Hey, just give us an update as we wrap here. I know San Francisco is on fire. I might have to, I have a loft that I rented and it was like underwater for four years, but now I think it's probably a good time to sell it. What's it like operating in San Francisco with no housing stock and people, yeah, say a little bit, explain to the audience, people who aren't there exactly how crazy it is and hard it is for employees that you try to hire. No, it's nuts. Like I lived in New York before. So New York also was not easy by any means.

33:40But no, I've become very SF-filled and I love it. And we are very like in-person. And so a lot of folks have moved here. But yeah, it's like you have to show up to the apartment visit with already, like all the documentation to like pay them up front. Crazy. Get it and like, it's insane. And so, yeah, I think the housing side has been tough, but the energy of the city really is incomparable. And it's very worth it here.

34:04Lon Harris:So we have this great thing in New York City. It's the subway, and then we have boroughs. And so you can live in Flatbush and take the subway for an hour and get a$2 ,000 a month apartment and live a little closer, and it's three or four. But in San Francisco, I mean, what's a one-bedroom now? Four or five K? I don't even want to think about it. Bonkers. Yeah, it really is bonkers. But I do think that this concentration of people in one place just creates the type of magic you can't reproduce. I had a dozen great years there, and now I'm in Austin and love it there. But it's something you should think about.

34:40Lon Harris:Like imagine if you were running in Austin, the housing stock has gone down three or four years. They're like, hey, y 'all, first three months free, no rent. Come stay here. That's what it's like. It's crazy. They built so much inventory. It breaks a New Yorker or somebody from the Bay Area's brain when they first moved there. Jacob looked it up. A one bedroom in San Francisco costs an average of$3 ,500 to$4 ,600 per month right now, Jason. That's our latest. If you got in for 4K, you'd feel lucky. All right, listen, continued success, and we'll check in with you in a year. Thanks so much, Tice.

35:14Yeah, that's right. I'm curious. After design, I wonder if they're going to try to go comedy because I feel like that's the one area where we all know LLMs aren't funny. They're not good at writing jokes. Everybody seems to have sort of given up.

35:25Lon Harris:Terrible at Twitter threads. Right. Like they don't understand Twitter. Right. I mean, Grok is on Twitter and it kind of understands it a little bit, but not good enough to hit public. Grokopedia can be very useful, but Grok is not funny. And that's what I mean. Like, I feel like we've all kind of even given up like it's never going to be funny. It's never going to write a good joke. But I don't know. That's also a good for brainstorming, though. Great for brain search. Great for brainstorming. Useful in a million ways. I'm not trying to go there. I would say this one area like write me something funny.

35:57You can explain jokes. You can feed it a million jokes. Claude isn't funny. Claude's many things, but he's not funny.

36:03Lon Harris:I'm really feeling good about my annotated.com. I bought this because I love bookmarking and curation. But we're going to have to, I think I should launch annotated as, instead of my bookmarking service, like have that available. But I think I should let anybody put a task up there to rate stuff and fact check stuff. so you're collecting data correct like i didn't think about it but like it all is data collection so consumers did this and then you could sell it to the micro ones or nothing more valuable right now than preference data that's that's the goal you could also put it out there like if you had annotated.com slash hotels and you could just send to people who were hotel aficionados hey what do you think of this offering what do you think of this price what do you think of this room design What is this missing?

36:54Lon Harris:What's good about it? And you could actually get them to maybe vet other people's curation. Anyway, we're going to do it as a bounty this week in startups.com slash bounties. And we should put some fresh dates on that that maybe will push that contest to finish in September or something. There was some travel. There was some delays. But now that you're back around and in the mix, we'll definitely get that bounty going. Yes, and the software is great right now, right? Yeah. Software is great. So I want to build this app. you know what I'm going to work on is try to get somebody who has a tool like a perplexity computer or a cloud code or a lovable I'd like to get one of these people as my partner on this and put up some serious bounties that's what we have to do next but go ahead and check that out we've got a lot of news to do we've got so much news we've got to talk about situational awareness or lack thereof so famed AI focused hedge fund was led by 25 year old former open AI Leopold Oshenbrenner.

37:49It was founded in 2024. He started out with a few hundred million, Jason. He amassed over$45 billion in assets under management by July. In June, Wall Street Journal said$20 billion. So it went wildly up. The fund had a 439 % net return through June 30th. He was placing very large leveraged bets. No professional investing experience prior to launching this firm. Early backers included the Collison brothers from Stripe, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman from Meta. Many others investments included SK Hynix, Micron, Sandisk, Bloom Energy, CoreWeave Nebius Group. There was a paper that he wrote in 2024 also called Situational Awareness.

38:31The argument, the thesis was basically like we know AI is going to explode. We know the demand for compute is going to increase exponentially. So he was - Let's place our bets. He was placing bets in the infrastructure and the hardware that was going to allow for this build out to happen. So then what happened? He compared it to a bank run. He got margin called by a number of his biggest investors, Goldman, B of A. And so eventually he had to, in order to access cash, he sold the public portion of his stock portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel. Everything that had been financed with borrowed cash is gone.

39:12However, private investments he's still holding on to. It's going to just continue on as a fund for his private investments. That includes what Financial Times tells us is$5 billion of Anthropic stock. So TBPN this morning published the letter Leopold sent to his LPs this week. Yes. He took ownership of it. Yeah, we let you down this month. We came closer to permanent capital impairment than is acceptable to us. He took full responsibility. He said vulnerability was begetting more vulnerability. And we took decisive action to protect LP Capital. That's why they will carry on with the Anthropic shares and other private investments.

39:51Got a question for me at the end there? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were going to jump in. So I guess my big question to you is this kid is 25. He did not have investing experience before this. Do you think that a more seasoned pro would have seen this coming and been able to navigate around it? Or is this a classic no crying in the casino? You take a big risk. There's a chance you're going to get crashed out. Could have happened to anyone.

40:16Lon Harris:No, this is, I guess, the folly of youth and a lack of experience for sure. That played some sort of a role here. He was running, according to the reports, something like 4x leverage, which means for every dollar he held in his share, he was then ballooning it up by 4x. So if the market goes down 25 % or 50%, you basically get four times that kind of volatility, I guess, and downdraft. So that was a mistake. And then there were other things at play here. The South Korea stock market was having a crazy run where like a million different levered accounts, again, having leverage, a.k.a. debt. is it's different when you have a home and you have debt than when you have equities or when you have crypto.

41:03Lon Harris:When you have a home, they have to foreclose on it, which means they got to kick you out of it. It's a process. It's emotional to kick somebody out of their house. And there's laws around it. And it's a slower process. You can miss some payments. You can get some penalties. You can do a partial payment. What happens when you're on margin, either for crypto or for stocks, is you get margin called. What does that mean? Whoever your banker is that gave you that loan then starts selling your equities automatically. Now, they may give you a correct period as a grace, you know, in a grace period, hey, you got 24 hours, 48 hours to put up the collateral.

41:36Lon Harris:But generally speaking, they will just liquidate you. This happens in Bitcoin all the time. People lever up their Bitcoin, you know, they own a million dollars in Bitcoin. They're like, okay, give me another 500 ,000. I'll buy another 500 ,000 in Bitcoin and go long. I'll pay 7, 8 % interest on that. But I believe Bitcoin's gonna go up 100 % this year. Then Bitcoin goes down. They got to sell Bitcoin to cover it and those lenders. So that's what's technically happening here. Schadenfreude is really, really high in finance, especially in hedge funds and stuff like that. Have you ever watched the TV show Billions?

42:08Lon Harris:Sure. There is a pile on that occurs. So he kind of outlined this in his letter where when this occurs, people know that you're experiencing this downdraft and that you're going to get margin calls. So what do they do? if they have the same positions, if we all own, let's say it was, pick a public company that's in AI. NVIDIA. NVIDIA, Micron, you and I sell all of our position so that it makes it go down more. So we're flooding it with stocks. So there's more supply available to put pressure on them. Then we short it. We create more pressure and just more pressure, more pressure. And then at At the same time, you're talking to that person about buying their position.

42:53Lon Harris:So Citadel was talking to them about buying the position. Other people, and I don't know if Citadel was involved in this, but this is what they do on Wall Street. They are just like knives out. Somebody starts falling, you just push them in the back. Like if they're stumbling, you don't want them to recover. You want to buy the asset from them. I will tell you this. I mean, it's one of those conspiracy theories that Citadel sort of purposefully did this. They were predicting a surprise rate hike from the Fed, which historically would have tanked the market. That did not materialize. So people are coming up with these theories that, oh, this was all sort of like purposeful.

43:28I don't I don't know how you feel about that. Seems a little far fetched to me.

43:31Lon Harris:This is not SPF, Sam. Bankman freed. This is not the same situation. Sam was making great bets and he would have been one of the great bettors of all time because he also bet on Anthropic, et cetera. And they wound up selling his positions for peanuts when they liquidated FTX. He was stealing money, allegedly, went to jail for it. He was involved in real fraud where he's taking people's assets that they put in their essentially bank accounts, in their accounts, and he was investing it and giving it to celebrities. That would be like Bank of America goes into our accounts and then sponsors the Super Bowl and invests in SpaceX and Uber with the money.

44:12He was doing crypto exchange and the investment fund and intermingling funds in ways that the SEC says you absolutely cannot do.

44:21Lon Harris:But, you know, this young gentleman is obviously pretty bold. And getting your ass kicked this publicly, this brutally is going to either break him. And I was a little concerned with the pile on. I'm like, this is the kind of thing that could psychologically break somebody and they commit suicide. People were taking a little bit of glee in it. I mean, he's like he's a very young. Shout in Freuder. Yeah, he's a very brash guy. He's a good-looking guy. I think there was a little bit of like— I don't know if he's good-looking, but maybe. You don't think so? Pull up one of the memes. Pull up Jacob.

44:51Anyway, the memes are coming, but I think it's also a slow news day. No, wait a second. Come on. That's him as Mitch McConnell. That's not cool. That's an objectively good-looking guy. You don't think so? I mean, sure.

45:03Lon Harris:Like as a German or Scandinavian, whatever he is. You're a preppy German guy. Sure. I mean, it's okay. Listen, I'm nice. Not Brad Pitt. I think people were taking a little bit of excessive glee in this guy. He does have a lot of layers in that photo. So, like, layers are for players. I'll give him the layer game was pretty good there. Look at the layer game in the brown. Yeah. He definitely had the layer game going. He was playing the role. Looks like clavicular. He was, yeah, I don't know what he was. He was leverage maxing. He was leverage maxing. Anyway, the lessons here are. Spiked his cortisol level.

45:40Lon Harris:Yeah, he was cortisol maxing for sure the last week. But this is not an example of something fundamentally wrong with the industry. If you have leverage, it's just not something anybody with any experience does at this level. If you want to have a margin loan against 5 % or 10 % of your stock, so you got a billion dollars in stock and you have 50 million, you're not going to get called until it comes down to like one-to-one or something like you have plenty of room right this was the opposite this would be like somebody who's got a billion dollars trying to put four billion dollars to work very very dangerous um but he's going to come back stronger is my prediction yeah if it doesn't break him he's got five billion in anthropics still he's sitting on plus other investment i i wouldn't be too worried about this guy i think now there were other memes so i don't want to pile on but i do want to see the best memes uh jacob's got a few more memes for us.

46:35Lon Harris:Okay, let's see. Yeah, this is a surprising memes for me. I put my glasses back on for these. And I think it was a slow news day. And then people are kind of sick of AI and nobody likes a young, successful person. Exactly. I think to me, it feels like this is bubbling over people just dislike AI and they dislike AI people. And this young punk was trying to make all these billions of dollars place in AI bets. I think that's what fueled the backlash. Sure. All right, here's your next one. Next one, Jacob. Let's take a look. When you beg a client to accept a great settlement offer and they end up getting zeroed out at trial instead.

47:06Lon Harris:Okay. Not funny. Not that funny. Next one. Not funny. So your account got liquidated even though the S &P is only 3 % off its highs. Okay. It's Jonah Hill from Wolf of Wall Street there. Yeah, he was great. He should have. It's a good performance. Did he get nommed? I believe he got nominated. I don't think he won, but I believe he was nominated. I wonder who he lost against. I'd have to look at it. I think Wolf of Wall Street, by the way, just not to go off duty. I don't want to pre-off duty this. but I think during that moral panic, when the Overton window was really closed, worked against this film.

47:38Lon Harris:He was, that's my hot take. Yes, he was, he was nominated. It did. That movie didn't win any Oscar. Any, any. And he, and this, I was actually like Moonlight and other woke stuff. Oh, Moonlight is a terrific movie, but I will, I will look up what, what I felt. I literally fall asleep four times. You're, you're wrong. You're wrong about Moon. You're wrong about movie night. I thought that was La La Land, Moonlight Year. Two terrible picks. Go ahead. Yeah, no, let's see. Best directing went to Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity. I'm on the Oscar sites. Of course, they don't have it. Gravity, no. Yeah, Matthew McConaughey won Best Actor for Dallas Buyers Club.

48:20Oh, here we go. Jared Leto beat him. Jared Leto won for Dallas Buyers Club. Okay, it's a perfect example.

48:26Lon Harris:Listen, I thought Dallas Buyers Club was great. And those two guys, well, I thought those two guys had great performance. But I do think Oscars go, if Oscars are given a choice, a bunch of debaucherous 80s cocaine taking, stripper paying, debauchery from the 80s or 90s versus people dying of AIDS. Yeah. Well, that was, you know, in a tragedy, we know what the Oscars are going to go for. There was a lot of weird discourse around Wolf of Wall Street, too. Like, is Marty praising these guys? Is it pro Jordan Belfort? there was a lot of that stuff that might have heard it's same thing with the good fellows it's like are we praising these guys or are we just telling a story folks it's just aesthetics and a story and if you look at the test of time you know that was barbers club moonlight whatever gravity nobody's going to remember those compared to wolf of wall street in 20 years it's awesome gravity is so good all right it's okay it's not you you're telling me wait hold on who's your best picture then of 24 let me see all right let me let me let me look at the 20 i'm gonna force you on this one because you know I'm right.

49:26You're definitely - 2014 Best Picture nominee. Run me through this. I might have been a Wolf of Wall Street. Let's see. Of course. Gravity over Wolf of Wall Street? Nobody even remembers Gravity. Who's in it? What is - Sandra Bullock? Oh, you know what? Google's AI here, really awful. You would think this is such an easy thing to look up. What were the movies that were nominated? All right, here are your 10 best picture nominees for this year. It was the 2013 movies. It was the 2014 Academy Awards. Okay, go ahead. Hit me. The nominees that you want to hear the winner last, I'll do the nominees first and then I'll give you the winner.

50:04The nominees were American Hustle, Captain Phillips. Remember, this is the 10 nominee years. American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena, The Wolf of Wall Street, and your winner was 12 Years a Slave that year. 12 Years a Slave won.

50:25Lon Harris:You know, it's just, that's not, there is no contest there. I mean, I did like Nebraska, I thought artistically, great. Her is also, I have to say, to me, Her and Wolf of Wall Street, it was between those two. Yeah, that's a jump ball. That's clearly a jump ball. Of those nominees, it's between those two. But this is just the problem with the Oscars is they go for max suffering and whatever, put your hand over your heart. Her did win Best Original Screenplay. Yeah. This is why the Oscars are meaningless to me. I just hate the Oscars. Okay. Let's keep going through the news. All right. Yeah. We got to talk about this.

50:56So Google Earth, Alphabet embedded their AI image generator, Nano Banana, into Google Earth. Which is great.

51:03Lon Harris:Yeah. Nano Banana, amazing. Google Earth, amazing. Now you can go to Google Earth and with a simple prompt, you can change things the way things look on Google Earth. Visualize streets and intersections as they might have looked in history. Oh, no. You can even make an infographic based on anything you can pull up in any street view. But people have already discovered. You've got to describe what's happening here. You've got to describe what's happening here. So here's an image. You can do nefarious things, too. Like here is a spot along the U.S.-Mexico border that we see from above. There's nobody really.

51:35There, it's a totally normal image. But if you tell it, hey, put a huge refugee camp and people pouring all over the border, you can create that image. Like what's going on in Spain, right? Like what's going on right now in Spain. And so here is, it's Hank Van S. created this fake refugee camp near the Mexican border. There's a second example as well that we were looking at. This is, he put in Gaza, a bomb crater next to a fake hospital. This is a fake image, folks. This is not real. And so obviously the potential here for creating misinformation and visually appealing, inaccurate things is massive, which led a lot of people, myself included, to wonder just why even do this?

52:21Is the utility? I'll tell you what happened here. What is the use case here? Like, why is this useful? I'll tell you what happened. No, no, it's very simple.

52:29Lon Harris:Everybody at that company is going, hey, AI is the next big thing. Sprinkle a little AI on everything. So Google local, Google flights, Gmail, just put some AI on it. Just get a little AI on there. Just a dab. Just a little dab of AI. Let's see. And then if it's good, maybe we just code it in AI. Maybe we deep fry it in AI, whatever it is. So somebody was like, oh, would this be cool to say, hey, here's my lot. What happens if I put a five-story building over here? Which like on an architectural basis, I can come up with a hundred uses for this. That would be really like a city planner. might look at this and say, hey, let's put bike lanes in instead of doing something nefarious.

53:07Lon Harris:The problem is - You can do fun stuff too. Like I, to test it out, I pulled up downtown Austin, like right where we produced the show and I made it like, what if this looked like the lunar surface? Like you could do fun stuff like that. Okay, yeah. So there's goofy stuff, there's practical stuff and then there's nefarious stuff. Now, anybody could take these images already, put them in Nano Banana. They just close the loop here. I'll tell you what the problem is here. When you do close the loop like that, like if you were to take i don't know instagram and then be able to on the top level say like instagram this person and put them in a bikini you know which is what people do with grok all day long and you get the images of grok yeah like please don't make me do it yeah it refuses to do almost everything with a real picture because it got in trouble so this this is the problem with a tech every time there's a new technology that accelerates stuff you're gonna have these bad uses of it.

54:02Lon Harris:And because it's adjacent, that does lead somebody to believe or lead somebody to rightfully criticize. Like, did you think this through? That's why you can't, to the best of my knowledge, Zuckerberg hasn't said on Instagram, you know, long press, you know, your Instagram post. And then I put in an AI prompt and repost it to my site or comments. Yeah. Well, we got a related story this week. Actually, I wasn't sure we were going to get into, but I don't know if You saw LinkedIn added a report AI slop button. Yes. And they've gotten rid of the let AI help you write your post button. That they put in that originally.

54:40That's gone. So there's no more like enhance your LinkedIn post with AI because so many people were just hitting that button and lazily posting AI slop. And I don't know if you saw last week's Substack added a bunch of anti-AI tools. Yes. And Chris Best, the CEO. This is going to be a big trend. Yeah, of course. Chris Best, the CEO in his blog post explaining the new tool was like, we don't want Substack to turn into LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn has become the definitional, like this is a place where everybody posts. Yeah.

55:10Lon Harris:Well, I mean, if you are a busy salesperson and somebody tells you, hey, if you write your five secrets to sales, you're going to like get more sales. And so, you know, there is, you know, and then back to being AI being pushed by the boss. and I'm one of these pushy bosses saying, hey, let's use AI, let's use AI. You know, you're going to have situations where people don't do it thoughtfully, right? They're just, I'll just produce slop. I've had that happen. I had team members here who were like, okay, J-Cal wants us to use it. And they just make a full business plan that they haven't even read or, you know, scanned.

55:44Lon Harris:And they presented to me and I'm like, no, no, I'm paying you to write the plan. I've had a few newsletters submitted that we were like, I don't think this is original. This feels like claw. Interesting you say that. So there is this company, Pangram, that we were talking about on Wednesday's show. These are the guys who design Substack's anti-AI tools. Yeah. And so what Substack should do is when you actually publish it, they should tell the writer, hey, our AI's checker says it thinks this is a 92 % chance. It's not whatever. It's AI produced. you're going to be, you will not, because it's AI, we're going to put a label on it and we're not going to feature on the homepage.

56:26Lon Harris:And this is what has to happen on social networks. Is this stuff now doing this? If they think you're posting AI, they flag it and they say, Hey, maybe consider rewriting this so that it sounds more human. Okay. So they do it at the moment of publishing. I think what they should do is if anything scores over 90%, over 50 % on AI, they should gray it out in the feed, not put it in the feed. they should um what was the term they should shadow ban it shadow ban posts yeah so anyway this is good this is a good moment in time i like this and everybody's gonna have to make a decision do we want to live in an ai slop world or not and it's it's screwing up my feed because i like to show my daughter uh is really into sharks and i like to show her shark videos in my instagram feed and now they're all like oh my god here's a great white shark taking three bites out of a person i'm like that's never been recorded i've had this exact my nephew dougie loves trains and so i had We had YouTube up, but we were just pulling up, you know, videos of trains going by, trains pulling in.

57:20Trains are great. But who doesn't love trains, right? But there's tons of AI slapdance. So it's like fake trains. He doesn't want to see fake cartoon trains. He wants to watch real trains. Like, it's terrible. Terrible experience.

57:33Lon Harris:This is why young people hate AI. Like, my daughters, when I say, hey, use AI to find a place to have dinner. You know, I use Gemini and put it on a Google map. They're like, no, AI. We don't want to use AI. AI's lame. Like that's what 10 to 15 year olds think right now. All right, let's keep going down the docket. All right. Do you want to, well, let's get to some of these rapid fire items because I'm worried we're not going to get to everything. All right. So first one that you share with me. So Suta is a Spanish controlled territory on the northern tip of Morocco in North Africa. I pulled a screenshot from Google Earth, not doctored folks.

58:06This is the actual image. So that's where it is. You can see it's essentially a small city on the North African coast right next to Morocco across from the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, but it is considered Spanish territory. So what's going on is thousands of migrants are attempting to cross into Chouda from Morocco. The border fence has been breached. 18 migrants or so were not, it's very chaotic, so we're not sure. They think about 18 migrants have died so far from either being drowned or being crushed in a stampede of people trying to get across this border. I mean, it's not much of a border we're looking at here.

58:44It's like it's a fence along an urban beach. So that's a beach. There's a border fence. But it is you can swim around it in 10 minutes, swim around it. You can push your way through it. It has been breached. It's open now. Spain's government is deploying their civil guard to keep the peace. They have not yet declared a national emergency. Here are some numbers. The Spanish government says 60 ,000 people have now entered Sudha from Morocco. It's just a city. The entire population is 85 ,000 residents. So that's a 70 % jump in their population since this started.

59:19Lon Harris:Was there an inciting event here? I am trying to catch up on this, and my entire feed is venture capitalists retweeting this. Yes. Elon Musk retweeted it. Like, dude, you're a venture capitalist. Nobody cares your opinion on migration, but I guess people have strong feelings about migration. Elon is one of the people who really started this trend that made it sort of go bigger and viral in the U.S. A lot of people are talking about that. It's the number one account. Yes. NPR, I looked it up. As far as we could tell, we don't know. There have been breaches along this border before. It's not like this has never happened, but we're not exactly sure why all of the sudden tens of thousands of people seem to have all gotten the same idea.

59:56They did. NPR did talk to some of the people who are pushing their way across the border, and almost all of them were talking about economic hardship. There's no jobs. They're looking for employment.

1:00:06Lon Harris:Coordinated. OK, so if it was economic, this must have been coordinated on socials for group chat. So that's what's got to come out. I think there's some psyops going on here because, like, you know, they're you know, the CIA and other three letter or other intelligence agencies from the wrong world do this kind of stuff to create, you know. Absolutely. Long history of the CIA creating civil unrest in other places for all kinds of reasons. I mean, you could argue propagandistically that this backs up a lot of the kinds of stories that we hear, scary stories about migrant invasions and migrant crises.

1:00:44Lon Harris:I mean, this is a literal migrant invasion. The West being invaded. I've never seen anything of this scale. Like if you have boats show up in Italy, you know, OK, there's 50 people on a boat. I think you said the number 60 ,000. That's like four Madison Square Gardens, five Madison Square Gardens with a lot of people. That's what the Spanish government is saying. 85 ,000 people in the whole town, 60 ,000 are now trying to enter the town. But that's the other thing is this is not – it's a Spanish-controlled territory. But even if you get from Morocco into Chouda, you're just now in this city. You're not across the Strait of Gibraltar and in mainland Spain.

1:01:21Lon Harris:Yeah, this has nothing to – I mean in some ways it has nothing to do with Spain because this is a territory of Spain. It does also make you, if you want to get colonialist about it, like, why is there a little territory in Morocco that's still owned by Spain? Like, shouldn't this just be Morocco at this point? I guess. I mean, we have that kind of situation. We have Alaska. I mean, we have all kinds of little islands and stuff still. Puerto Rico is what it is. But I just want to say, if you're a founder and your VC is tweeting about this more than once, like, probably not the right VC for you.

1:01:55Lon Harris:I don't understand why VCs are spending their entire day losing their minds over this. This is Spain's issue. This is my message to VCs. You don't have to comment on everything. We don't need 20, literally one. You get one tweet on this if it's the news story of the day. But I don't know. How do you make this go back to venture capital and startups and nothing to do with it? There is one venture capitalist. I'm not going to name names. There is one VC. No, don't name anybody. There is one VC that I feel like I don't know how this man has time to invest in companies because he is so unbelievably active on X constantly.

1:02:38No matter what the trend is, he's on top of it. Like way more than me, and I make podcasts. I won't mention names. I bet a lot of you can already. I mean, there's a number of them. I know which one. Jacob already guessed in our chat room which guy I was talking to. Hold on.

1:02:51Lon Harris:Let me take a look in the chat room here. Oh, no. I was going to go for, yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, I think there's a few names up there at the list. But this, I mean, he's an amazing investor, an amazing founder in his own right. Like, I'm not trying to crap on the guy. But I honestly don't know how he has this much brain power for X. It's unbelievable. There's two other guys. I agree with that one, but there's two other guys. We're all thinking about the same guys. I can tell. There's a few of them. We're just like, how are you doing this? I don't know how you have time to attend a board meeting while you're, you must be in the board meeting.

1:03:25Lon Harris:I mean, if you're doing that and you're commenting on this stuff, I wonder if a founder is waiting for you to email them about something. Like, they're like, dude. And you're like, yeah. Anyway, I think this goes to show that VCs have a lot of spare time. Okay, let's keep moving. All right, let's keep going. Next up on our list, we have Ethan Goodhart's self-driving golf cart. He's a Stanford computer science grad, autonomy expert. He created his own self-driving golf cart. This is utilizing entirely cameras and vision models, no LiDAR. He's had some beta testers. So he's offering rides on his autonomous golf cart around the Stanford campus.

1:04:05Some of his early beta testers, we have a photo here, include Sam Altman, Andre Carpathy, Jensen Wang. They've all given it high marks. And actually, there's an iPhone app if you want a ride around the Stanford campus. It's called Wind. It's in test flight right now. So they're getting ready to sort of open this up in a beta test situation so people can get automated golf cart rides. Okay.

1:04:27Lon Harris:So the reason I wanted to share this was, number one, everybody hangs out at Stanford, obviously. And, you know, these guys are good at intercepting them. But I think what this shows is how commoditized self-driving is getting. And, you know, my thesis has always been 20 people would get there at the same time. I think my thesis is going to be correct because Tesla's at the double nines, way most clearly ahead of everybody with more double nines. BYD, Baidu just launched, I guess, Nuru, Zooks just got 2 ,500 units federally approved for no steering wheel, which is really important. Now they still have to go through all the local communities.

1:05:11It's those two-sided, it looks like a little mini bus thing, but there's no front to the car. It's just like no driver seat at all. And with no driver, there's no steering wheel, no paddles, no nothing.

1:05:23Lon Harris:So I think if students can start to build this on their own and hack it together, it doesn't mean it's ready to compete with Waymo. But if students can start building this, what we're going to see is a plethora, a plethora, an unbelievable number of people with these. So what is the self-driving race going to come down to? It's going to come down to scale. Who can build and manage and get licenses for this? And there's a news story, and you can look it up, and I just wanted to talk about it. And everybody assumes I'm talking my book here with Uber, but I can assure you, I am involved in probably got investments in over 10 self-driving companies.

1:06:04Lon Harris:A lot of them are public. And the reason I say that is I'm not just talking to Uber, but there is very quickly going to be a lot of bad feelings about self-driving because the first wave of people losing their jobs to AI is going to be drivers. When I say wave, I mean they're literally going to lose their jobs and the pay is going to go down. This would be both Uber and Uber Eats, like the people driving people, ride sharing, and delivery. Yeah, yeah. This week, Stanley Tang, a friend of mine, debuted the Zipline, which I'm an investor in Zipline, and I'm an investor in DoorDash through a venture fund I was in that invested in DoorDash, so I've been a shareholder of DoorDash.

1:06:51Lon Harris:They did their drone company, and we had another drone company from Ireland on the program recently here. So there'll be like three or four drone companies doing, maybe four or five drone companies doing this. So that gets rid of like burritos or just coffees, small things. larger order is obviously going to go in cars or small things. The reason I bring this up is in China, where they embrace technology at a pretty rapid pace and they have a top-down government, they have stopped allowing licenses for self-driving. So you can look that up. There's many stories about it, but China is freezing the number of self-driving cars on road.

1:07:25Lon Harris:Why? It's not about safety. It's about protecting jobs. What's going to happen, And I asked this on this week in a, what did I ask on this week in VC this week when we did the VC show? So here it is. China suspends new autonomous vehicle permits after Baidu outage, Bloomberg News reports. It's nothing to do with Baidu outages. It's nothing to do with Pony AI, nothing to do with anything other than they don't want thousands, in fact, millions eventually of self driver, of drivers protesting this. So get ready in America. We've seen there is anger at self-driving cars, people calling Waymos that they don't need and getting them all trapped in a parking lot together.

1:08:08You know, like there is some already sort of resentment, I think, building up.

1:08:13Lon Harris:And there's been like this has been brewing. So that story we showed was from April. But there's some more recent stories in June and July of this kibosh being put on it. So be prepared for that, folks. And I think I am in favor of, and I'm going to be called a libtard for this, but I do think some licensing of these, collecting of revenue to smooth out for society the unemployment and or retraining of those individuals would not be out of line. And I think it would be smart for self-driving companies to offer that so that they can deploy the technology. It just seems obvious, right? Why wouldn't you try to soften the blow for people?

1:08:55It'll make them feel better about this technological change that you want to introduce. I don't know why that automatically goes to libtard for people.

1:09:04Lon Harris:Well, I think it's just it's not a free market solution, but I consider it an easy way for Waymo or Uber, Neuro. They could just say, listen, we know this is going to impact people negatively. So we're going to pay$10 ,000 a year,$1 ,000 a month or whatever for each self-driving thing. That money is going to go to that driver or like every self-driving car, I estimate. Yeah. It's what Mark Cuban said to do with data centers. It's just like pay people off to get them to accept what you want. Free electricity. Yeah. Very simple. Okay, next. All right. Well, we got to let you go in just a few minutes.

1:09:39You've got a hard out, but we want to go - What about the automated solar one? I bet this video was crazy. We'll pull this up. Robotics podcaster Leo Karen shared this. Grit Robotics of San Francisco is the company. Now, they don't build the robot arms. That is an off-the-shelf Kawasaki robot arm. They design the AI that teaches robots how to handle utility-scale solar panels. Now, it unloads the panel. And this is real or this is AI? No, no, this is real. This is real. They have trained the robot to be able to unload a solar panel. it can uh transport it to where it needs to go and it begins the installation process you do need a human in the loop the human then comes and fastens it into place the robot can't do that precision work but it drops it as you can see right where it needs to go so the human just needs to come

1:10:31Lon Harris:along and zip zip zip like right zip it until they make an r2d2 that goes underneath that giant and does the zip zip zip or they build a system that has clamps in it so this is you know that's the next problem they're solving is how to get that human out of there entirely. Well, it's super easy. If the thing drops into place and in the factory, it has a clasp that fits into a hole and locks in place, you don't need to put bolts on it. So obviously they're using the classic system that wasn't designed for robot deployment. What I found really interesting about that video, and if you can queue up this one moment in it, is they show a very long field of them.

1:11:08Lon Harris:There are very long fields being built. Just recently in California, we hit 51 % of energy coming from solar and batteries. That's also happened in Germany on a couple of sunny days, and it's happening in Australia continuously, and some places in South America. We can build a factory in the desert that has the ability to build solar panels, and then out of the back of it, have a robot place them. Yes. And then it would just become this fait accompli. Is that the right word? Yep, you got it. Fait au complet. The robots keep making them, and then the distance they have to drive, maybe it gets to three, four, or five miles.

1:11:51Lon Harris:Who cares? The robot's driving it. You place this one factory in the center, and then you just have solar panels go in all directions. Now, somebody will complain about the cacti, but let me tell you something. Losing some cacti and a couple of rabbits get more shade, I think it's going to be okay. If you drive right now from L.A. to Vegas, there's a huge solar farm like three quarters of the way when you're almost to Vegas. But it could be I mean, it's really big, but it could be 20 times as big and nobody would really notice because there's nothing. There's like three guys out there, you know, in a trailer.

1:12:26Most of the time there's like, you know, Walter White burying his meth. And that's about all that's out there.

1:12:31Lon Harris:Well, and then what I will say to add to this is, it's a breakaway reference, there's very few NIMBY people to complain and you don't need a lot of space. And there are bodies of water and tracks of water. When you drive from San Francisco to LA, there's like these canals of water. They're putting solar on top of them. They started by covering them so they would get rid of evaporation. but you could now take this, and I've talked about this maybe a thousand episodes ago with Molly Wood when she was co-hosting. Shout out to Molly. Everyone in the pool is her new podcast. Go subscribe to it. A hundred bucks a year, well worth it.

1:13:09You could, there it is.

1:13:14Lon Harris:So I don't know what date this is, but this is California Roof these June 27th this month. Okay. So California your roof, two irrigation canals with solar panels that makes electricity, and cut the evaporation off the water lawn by 70%. There you go. So this is all within our ability. Now, what you could also do is you could do desal, desalinization, powered by the solar panel and batteries, end in a canal, and all of this fighting over water and electricity would end, and there's nobody to complain. Because if you're complaining about the solar being put over a canal and it reduces water, then you are a certified idiot.

1:13:56Lon Harris:You're a moron. Now, there must be people protesting this. Please, somebody ask Producer Claude or Producer Grock or Producer DeepSeek, is anybody protesting these solar farms and these solar on top of rivers? This is like, there must be. I just can't wait for somebody. Somebody's going to. You know it's true, Lon. Somebody's protesting this. I'm sure there's some animal in there. People like to, Native Americans use that water canal for something. I'm sure you could come up with a reason. I mean, poltergeist or some Native American burial ground. It was a burial ground. Yes, yes. I'm sure you could.

1:14:39If you gave me sufficient time, I could come up with something.

1:14:42Lon Harris:This is This Week in Hope. Last Week in Hope. I'm just giving a little hope here. Everybody's angry about immigration, Trump, this, that, AI, tumorism. You've soaking up all the water for your data centers. This is great. This is great. You can stop complaining, people. We're about to solve energy. If we solve energy, we solve water. If we solve energy and water, we solve agriculture. Good things are happening, folks. See you next week on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.