Why does Gen Z hate AI?

24:40Not everybody has the motivation. Not everybody has the skill set. Like, I've been doing this for a while. I've invested in 600 or 700 companies. Like, I can tell you anybody can do it. Like, anybody can do it. At this point in time, anybody can do it. Sure. Anybody can put up a shingle. Anybody can build a website. Anybody can start a sales process. All the answers are out there. ChatGPT and Claude and everything will do half the work for you. So if you are going to get laid off and you don't want to do this dance anyway, building a large number of small companies, and small companies means like making$500K to$5 million a year, not venture scale, but delightful scale for the people who own them.

25:26okay, here we go. And in media, we've seen this happen. So if you look at the Substack podcasting, everybody leaving big media, they've already experienced it. They experienced massive layoffs over the last 20 years since newspapers and magazines contracted. BuzzFeed and Huffington Post and Vox, all the things that were supposed to replace them, they also imploded. They also either shut down or laid everybody off. Vice is the other one. All those are gone. So what did they do? They went and they started independent publications, podcasts, consultancies to work. Those are the same people. Those are the same journalists in a lot of cases who are like, that's terrible advice, J.

26:11Cal. Not everybody can start a company. And I'm like, except you guys all just did that. Except you all just did that. And it's like, then people realize, oh, if necessity forces me to start it, then I will start it. And so that is when there is a fire, you know, and like you're running out of money, you will get very creative. And the fear of starting a startup is a lot better than working at Starbucks as a professional, you know, like that would be the, uh, the, the disaster case for like somebody who is a writer at Glocker or Vice. Why isn't someone right now talking about removing obstacles and barriers and friction to making small companies more viable?

26:55Like, why haven't we talked more about healthcare portability? Why aren't we actually trying to support these people? Because I agree with 98 % of what you just said, call it that. And I think that you're right. It is possible. But if you have kids and you're a one-income family and you need to quit your job to go do a thing, that's a big barrier. I want to let that area down. I want to decimate it. I want to let people be free. But I feel like we're not addressing some of the structural things that would take your point and just turbocharge it and help a lot of people. If healthcare is the issue, just move to Europe and start a company there.

27:29And then you get the healthcare and then you have to just pay more in taxes. And there's some regulations that it might take you six months to get your company fired up. So what you have to do is keep your company domiciled in America. And then live in. And live in Spain or Italy or France or Canada, somewhere where they have socialized medicine and the problem is solved. But of course, people are also scared of moving. But, you know, we've lived for many decades with a beautiful, safe, you know, employment environment that maybe we should have appreciated more when we were complaining about it.

28:05And now it's a bit chaotic and you're kind of on your own. You were on your own all that time. It just you just had companies that would keep you employed for 20 or 30 years. and Americans, when they came to America, guess what? They were on their own too. They had to go figure it out. So we just had like a hundred year delusion where it was just like really easy. Now it's going back to like it was for our forefathers and mothers who came here and it was hard. So it's gonna be hard folks and you're gonna have to figure it out for yourself. Radical self-reliance. Self-reliance is what people need to learn in school.

28:42Self-reliance, like radical self-reliance. Like I will survive through sheer force of will. And, you know, for some people, it's like, I would rather survive through Mondami making the buses free and, you know, whatever, you know, and then other people are like, I'll just move to Texas. I'll figure it out. The information reports that Anthropica and OpenAI generate 89 % of all AI startup revenue or basically revenue made by AI startups, Jason. And there's this particularly terrifying chart. I'm curious what you think about this and if this is bad news for startups. But as you can see here, going back to July of 2023, there's been a dramatic ramp in revenue from the major AI companies.

29:21And then if you see those little gray bars, that's pretty much everyone else in the AI startup game. Kind of a shocking data set. Sure. Tokens are being sold at an alarming rate by two major companies. Cursor has a couple of billion in revenue, 2 billion, I think, 3 billion. Cognition and then 29 others are sharing like 7 billion, it looks like. if this is correct. And this is a quarterly chart? I think this is as the data is released. I don't think we have exact monthly. Well, no, it's monthly. Yeah, it looks like it's monthly. So the scale is monthly, or is it one, two, three, four? No, it's quarterly chart.

30:02Are there indentations between the quarters? Yes. Okay, so it is a monthly chart. So it's a monthly chart based on estimates that the information pulled together from a total of 30 companies? 34, including OpenAI and Anthropic. It's not your imagination. Risk and regulation really are ramping up quickly. Your customers don't just want assurances from you. They expect proof of your security just to do business with you. That is why Vanta is a game changer for you and your startup for your business. Vanta's AI-powered platform automates your entire compliance process. Whether you're preparing for a SOC 2 or you're running an enterprise GRC program or you're doing an audit, Vanta's gonna worry about the security so your team can focus on building a great product.

30:50Moving your business forward, some of our favorite companies like Ramp and Rider, they're spending 82 % less time on their audits right now because they work with Vanta. We've all heard the rumors about shady compliance and security companies. I don't need to get into the details. They were taking shortcuts apparently with their clients accounts, allegedly. That's why you need a trusted partner like Vanta now more than ever. So get started today at vanta.com slash twist. That's V-A-N-T-A.com slash twist. Okay. So there's a long tail of companies, obviously providing stuff. And this is only startups.

31:24This doesn't have the revenue from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Azure, right? They're not included in here. Not included in here, but it's worth noting that Anthropic doesn't take out the 20 % or so. It pays to certain cloud providers when reporting its annualized run rate. So there is a little bit of that kind of hidden inside the data, Jason, but not enough to really change the overall picture. Yeah. So I guess the question is, is it a duopoly now? certainly is starting to look like one in terms of how people are using tokens. Yes, it would be a duopoly. And the companies that, the interesting thing is those other 30 companies, many of them are probably using, there's like a double counting here.

32:10So like some number of them are using Claude, our OpenAI as their backend. So maybe the revenue is getting double counted there is the other possibility. but$80 billion in revenue is the total here or something? $80 billion in annualized revenue, about$6.6 billion per month. One more data point for people following along. Six months ago, the two major labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, were actually 4.5 % less of the total startup AI revenue out there. So they're actually gaining share on these startups, which is a little staggering because we've seen companies like Cursor grow quickly, Cognition grow quickly, Eleven Labs is a rocket ship, Harvey, Lagora, et cetera.

32:51And they're still losing ground. This actually has me worried, like legitimately concerned about startups and the app layer for now. It's really two different things. This is like combining the app layer and the infrastructure layer. Tokens feel more like infrastructure to me than the actual end product. So these companies are selling tokens at a massive loss right now. So the other way to look at this is this is like Uber versus Lyft. in those days where they were both losing a lot of money per ride. And then at some point, they've got to make these profitable businesses. But they did kind of build a duopoly.

33:30And it looks like now then, who's the Uber? Who's the Lyft in this? That's interesting. So you think that their gross margins on inference today are negative? Of course. Yeah. With all the infrastructure they're building out, all the... I mean, The humans they have working for them, even if they're paid massively, probably a small percentage of their costs. It's really the infrastructure. So they're certainly losing money as they build up this infrastructure. And the infrastructure is questionable how long it has a practical use. You know, four years, five years, six years, CoreWeave, Amazon, all.

34:06We've talked about this on the show. I've had this debate and discussion of like, what's the reasonable life? And then what do they do after their primary lifespan? Do they have a use or not? They probably do have some use. But the Anthropic space XAI deal, I think actually puts a good floor underneath the value of GPUs. Because I think most of the processors in Colossus one from XAI are like H100s, I think, which is now a pretty dated chip, frankly. But Anthropic ones, they're going to power up the whole data center. I mean, they're two years old. So if they're two years old, yeah, it's definitely less time than I thought, I guess.

34:40I guess they're probably in year three of their own life, somewhere between year two and three. Maybe they're at like 24 months, 30 months of lifespan. So they probably have half of it left to go. Yeah, there is going to be a consolidation in this. And then this obviously doesn't show open source tokens or other services. So it's an interesting mental model to start building is where is the revenue going? And right now it's on tokens. People want to buy tokens. And that means there'll be many people selling tokens soon. You've talked a lot about how there's a risk to building on top of other people's models because you're at risk of training them with your own use about what they're...

35:26So when I look at these charges and I wonder if these major AI labs now have access to so much information from startups that use them, that actually application layer startups today that are building on top of these models are just going to fall backwards down the slope. Because look at how fast coworker is advancing. Look at how fast Codex is improving. They're building OpenGlox into Codex. I mean, it feels like if you're a startup, you're just hoping that your market is not big enough to warrant a new set of Anthropic co-work plugins that could just rip the ground up from underneath you. And it makes me bummed that startups seem to be at such a disadvantage to these companies.

35:59If you own the tokens and you have the foundational model building an application like Harvey into OpenAI or building codecs into OpenAI, like, yeah, that is a significant risk to those other products. You do need to actually think, are they going to, in their search for revenue and profits, going to go direct and there'll be open AI for lawyers, open AI for accountants, open AI for creatives, et cetera. But this doesn't account for Gemini's revenue because it's not a startup. So this is not a complete picture. This is defined as startups, and it removes many of the players. What happened to Google's AI prowess?

36:45Do you remember the end of last year when Gemini 3 preview dropped and everyone was like, oh, they're on top. Google's run away with it, back from the dead. And then they just didn't say anything for like six months. Yeah. It's kind of crazy. Well, they've got, I think, more users using AI than OpenAI because of putting it at the top of search. So I think they have more technically users, not dedicated AI users. Yeah. But this really is just about selling tokens. and you have two token providers and then you have applications all put into a bucket of startups. Startups design, I guess, is defined by not yet public.

37:23So this is a look at private companies, and it excludes the public ones, which gives it a bit of, I'm sure if you put Google and Amazon and Azure's revenue from this space, it would look much different. Yeah, actually, that's fun. I'll do that for Wednesday because I think we got some better, more concrete AI revenue reporting from the hyperscalers. So I'll see what I can dig up for us. Are they breaking that out? I wonder if they're breaking out like what percentage of, you know, their revenue is tokens being purchased from them. Because if they're selling H100s for six bucks an hour, H200s for six bucks an hour, that's different than providing tokens.

38:03So this is like apples and bananas and, you know, a fruit bowl all being counted in the same kind of the, you know, bucket. It is interesting to look at though, for sure. Two companies are running away with the revenue. A lot of things like Google saying revenue from products built on gen AI models grew by 800%. That's not so helpful. Yeah. They're not going to break it out. All right. Now, Jason, I want to do a shout out to everyone who's done our bounties. We have two bounties running. We have the AI sidebar, which by the way, we just got a demo turned in that takes into account your changes, just getting the two people talking through.

38:39I played with it this morning. Incredible. Oh, really? Jason, I almost wanted to declare it the winner when I started playing with it. But we wanted to do one thing, just so we are clear. Just do the fact-checking. I think I made that decision on the last one because we had so many different personas. I can't even follow it when it's doing it. So we said, just do fact-checking. I see here the personas should have a troll and a comedy writer. That's not actually accurate. We said last week, So Jacob, make sure this is correct and everybody understands it. Just do the real-time fact checker. One simple solution, one simple part of this that we should then judge everybody by.

39:16And we're going to give everybody another week to just finalize what they're working on. But you actually used one? Yeah. And was it doing the fact checking in real time? It was doing the fact checking in real time. And it had these simply amazing customization features. You could say, only give me answers after 80 words. Only give me responses after 160 words. You could change the personality. You could change how they talk. And it's a website. You don't have to download it. I didn't have to download a GitHub repo, build a codex, install it on my damn Mac. Friday, we're going to have another round of demos for that.

39:47And then also, Jason, tell people about the annotated.com bounty. This is one that we're all very excited about internally. Sure. And we have this week in startups.com slash bounties, plural or bounty, singular. Bounty. Either one. Yeah. Or you can go to bounties. So I always tell everybody, make both in case we make a mistake on air. So if you type in bounties or slash bounty, it should work. This is like a little tip from Jcal to employees who don't think about the users. If you think about users, like they may hear bounty and type in bounties, or I might say bounties instead of saying bounties.

40:20Why not have both redirect to the right page? So we have a page here. We're going to keep doing these, I think, on this week in Star Wars because it's fun and it's interesting and we get to meet people who are builders. For Annotated, I wanted to build a service that let you clip something on the web. And so at the web page, if you click on it, you know, the concept here is to create a sidebar. Anywhere you are on the web, you highlight something. let's say it's a YouTube video and it says, okay, what do you want to clip from this YouTube video? You pick this starting point, this ending point, you know, these 30 seconds of this podcast.

41:03It then makes a landing page with a piece of that media. It could be text from a New York Times article. It could be the transcript in the video of Eric Schmidt. We talked about earlier on the program when he was getting booed and then you could put comments under it. So you log in with your Twitter, your Google, whatever. You have a sidebar. You can clip it. It makes a landing page. So annotated.com slash Alex slash Eric Schmidt commencement. And then it always links to the original author's work. So it's not stealing. It's fair use because you're doing commentary. So this is a fair use. This isn't like archivists or other places that let you remove a paywall.

41:47The intent is not to be remove paywall. dot com, which, you know, listen, everybody uses. This is very popular. If you don't have like some niche St. Louis Herald subscription and people want to jump the paywall, I think people are kind of cool with it. But we don't want to be like wholesale stealing. What we want is you take a small piece and you annotate it. Yes. And you put your opinion, you put your thoughts on it. Now, if Alex and I both put in the URL of the same New York Times story, now we can see this New York Times story was also annotated by these other users. And then you can see what they annotated.

42:24But nobody can take the whole story. You could take a paragraph, I take a paragraph, that I could respond to yours, you could respond to mine. And it's clear who the original author is, but you get to do some commentary on it. And this came from my frustration with places that just steal content. And also, very often, I want to take something and make a new landing page and comment on it and then share it with somebody. Yeah. Kind of like a bookmark, a little bit more with these modern tools. That's my goal. Now, if I go to, let's say that I have the Chrome extension sidebar installed for annotated.com and I go to a website that I've annotated and you've annotated, do I automatically under your vision see both annotations or do I have to go into the app itself to kind of see the collection of notes about that page?

43:10Great question. I mean, I don't have the answer. I do know when you're on that New York Times story, it should show in the annotated sidebar, like the number seven. And if you click that, then when you're walking around the web and you're on a YouTube page and it's like, here's some new audio track, here's the new, or here's a Dire Straits song that three people have commented on, it shows you the number three. So it's basically a global annotation system for the web, for podcasts, et cetera. So during a Joe Rogan podcast, you can put in the link to Spotify or the YouTube link or wherever it's hosted, and you can see multiple comments on it.

43:50But it's not on Spotify. It's not on YouTube. It's on annotated. Not the whole podcast, just the part you want to comment on. And then if that gets taken down eventually, this acts as a mini archive of that moment. Yes. Which, by the way, really freaking matters. All of 538.com just got taken offline. Talk about link rot. Just gone. Yeah, just gone. That's so depressing. Now, while we're talking about bookmarks, Jason, can I show you something really cool, really quick? Of course. Okay. And I don't know if people are building this. Anyway, and then I reserve the right to split the prize if I think there's like multiple good winners.

44:23Fair enough. It is literally the Jason bounty, so I believe you are in charge of it. There's a company called Think with Mark. It has their website, thinkwithmark.com. And they made an AI bookmark about a year ago. It was like$129. and I forgot about it entirely after it came out. They're back with a new one. I want to show this to you because I think this is the first real AI gadget apart from Plod that I really want in my life. Take a listen. Last year, our viral mark launch blew the internet away. A bookmark that kept track of what you're reading. But amidst all the noise, we wanted to create something that truly felt like it was built for you.

44:58It highlights passages, records your thoughts, and builds a personal library of everything you choose to keep. And with customization, it's a great way to show the world your taste. Highlighter is where magic happens. It has a scanner allowing you to save your favorite quote and a voice recorder for your favorite ideas, allowing you to engage with your reading without leaving the moment. Yes. So you can literally just take half this bookmark, take your book or your e-reader or whatever it is you're reading in a hundred languages, scan it, and then you don't forget the cool quotes. Literally, I just had to return my copy of Gulag Archipelago to the Athenaeum up the street.

45:36And that means that I lost all the sections that I had marked for later reference, but it was overdue. So I had to give it back. I would have literally used this in my life like 20 minutes ago,$159. And it's an AI gadget that rocks. See, it's possible. I think there's like personal gadgets that are down the long tail. Like I wouldn't use this one myself. Sure. Why? Because I buy books. I don't ever want to rent books or use a library. I like to buy them and have them because they're so cheap anyway. And then I have a stack of them and I use my Kindle. My Kindle has all those type of features in it.

46:11You can take notes in your Kindle, you know, and the same thing with Audible. So since my primary place is those two places, this doesn't super appeal to me. But I do think for people who are readers, they're going to love this. Just like Plod and these note takers, they have unlocked a very specific use case for a very specific group of people. If you are a leader, if you're a writer, if you're a researcher, you need these kind of tools. And I could see this one getting better and better. Now, there is this axiom, the best camera is the one you have with you. uh and so the question is always you know what do you have with you at the time and if you have your phone what would be nice with this device is if you forget your device or you're doing something else you can take a picture with your phone of that page and it also allows input from that so i'm always thinking of like multiple ways to get input into it but what would be great about this is putting it in your brain eventually and being able to have your agent have all this knowledge.

47:16And that's really something I've been thinking about. There's something called Obsidian that people are obsessed with, which is some sort of bookmarking knowledge tool for nerds. I've been thinking about this with the domain name begin.com, where I just, and annotated is kind of like in my same thinking, which is I just want to have all my bookmarks in one place. Yes. But I use the bookmarking system in TikTok, and I use the bookmarking system in Instagram, and the bookmarking system in Twitter with folders. I want all of those to be collected into one location. And then my agent to have that knowledge, when I'm like, you know, I really, I was, you know, in this book, I remember talking, they were talking about this specific designer.

47:59And I also bookmarked that designer and their, you know, perfect t-shirt. Okay, tell me about that. And it knows. It's like, oh yeah, well, you read this book and you heard about Calvin Klein and Calvin Klein made this t-shirt and then this Japanese company was the origin. Boom. It all comes together in one place. I think that's what we're all trying to use AI for is to build like a little backup brain before Neuralink kind of does this for us. I agree. I kind of have a mind palace of our own. Before we move on to flock safety and preventing tragedy, I just want to say libraries do have a use case that we didn't mention.

48:35And I agree with you. I mean, look behind me. this is a fraction of my family's library we're huge fans of books we buy more than we can read but the best part about a library is you're browsing for free like you just walk around i found like six or seven books about soviet economics and i just took them all home i read like 10 pages of some of them and i read the whole book but i just don't care because it's free yeah anyways it's wild what did you learn about soviet economics it's fucked did you know that central that centralizing authority in one country as part of a larger union doesn't work i mean for like 10 billion different reasons.

49:08If you want to get really, really opposed to centralized planning, just go study the Soviet economy. It'll, it'll radicalize you in a funny way. Uh, all right, Jason Garrett Langley, uh, the founder and CEO of flock. Uh, he's been on the program. He's been on the program several times. Uh, you talked to him episode one, two, four, nine, July 21. I talked to episode two, one, three, four in June of 25. So last year now What's going on? Well, this is the thing that you flagged, and it's him discussing how his group, Flock Security, they make cameras and such, helped solve a crime while looking at data from a town that wasn't where the crime was committed.

49:48So why does this capture your eye? So there was a shooting in Austin yesterday when I was doing my rucking and I was at the domain. I got like these alerts. My daughter has a phone now. It came up on her phone. And it was like, hey, stay out of this area. There's police activity that gave the all clear or whatever. And apparently there was a shooting. Now, block is very controversial because privacy. And do you want your license plates and where you're going in a database? No, is everybody's answer. Like, just, of course, I don't. But then if there is a shooting or a robbery in your neighborhood, Do you want the criminal's license plate recorded so you can capture them and get your money back or arrest them before they harm anybody or rob another house?

50:38Of course you want that. So most people have a hard time deciding my personal privacy and where I was and where my license plate got picked up or the edge case, which is a certainty in the United States. you're going to have a crime at some point, unless, I don't know, maybe you live way out in Montana. But if you live in a city, there's crime happening all day long. So if you assume there's tens of thousands of crimes in a city, there's hundreds a day, you then have to make a very simple equation. Am I willing to give up my license plate data and somebody could abuse that and then publish it or it could get hacked in every single place I've been every single location.

51:22Let's say you were at a casino. Let's say you were at a, an adult entertainment venue. Let's say you were at, I don't know, a place you're not supposed to be in the middle of the day. I don't, you know, pick your vice that somebody was involved in. I don't know. Somebody was scoring drugs in a, in a drug alley. Um, or you just were out late at night. Maybe you don't want people to know your other. Are you willing to give up that privacy and risk that abuse for catching criminals more quickly? Now, how does this relate to Austin? Austin is incredibly democratic and woke in the middle of Texas. So we do have some of the same issues that San Francisco has, like a prosecutor who won't prosecute crimes as maybe you would get in Dallas or Houston or San Antonio.

52:17Sure. Put it all aside. Austin City Council got rid of Flock for privacy reasons. Yep. Intellectual people, whatever. The shooting happened. they couldn't find the guys driving around who were involved in a multi-shooting spree. I don't know what the motivation for this spree was, but they went to multiple locations and discharged a firearm multiple times. They then went to, was it Lockhart County? They went to a county outside of Austin, got picked up on Flock immediately because somebody had the license plate number, and they were captured immediately. So here, yesterday, 12 shootings reported across Austin led to a manhunt that involved 200 officers, including SWAT, air, and canine support over several hours.

53:08The suspects were found and arrested as they entered. Flock supported Manor. I'm sorry, it wasn't Lockhart, it was Manor, M-A-N-O-R. If Flock safety wasn't able to aid Manor PD and Austin PD in this case, how many more could have been harmed? So that's basically the message from Garrett Langley. I thought I would bring it up because I am conflicted on this issue myself. I am too. I just thought I'd go ahead and show some people what this looks like in practice. So there's a, how to phrase this, a community activist group of people who are finding these cameras and putting them on a map. So here is a data set from D-Flock showing my town of Providence.

53:52And these are all the cameras that have been reported. Now, these are not all Flock. There's 177 cameras in this shot of my local area. 155 of them are from Flock. So mostly when we're talking about license plate readers and such, we're talking about Flock. Their argument to Jason, as I had this talk with the CEO about it is, if you're on a public road, you have no expectation of privacy. And that to me is actually a pretty good argument. The problem is I also share your unease about this. I don't really want to be surveilled. And I don't mean to judge up old, you know, 1776 quotes, but the idea that those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither does come to mind.

54:32Why did this happen without a national conversation is what I'm kind of stuck on a bit like ai earlier yeah technology moves quick and everybody had security cameras so then if you have a security camera and ai comes out um ai all of a sudden is like i can tell you what type of car that is what model it is what color it is what the license plate is and i can tell you who's driving it. And literally my security systems at my residences have a plate reader, face reader, car reader, animal reader. It reads everything, puts it all into a database. And I know when a license plate comes onto the ranch, if that license plate or not is in the database and approved.

55:26So I have approved license plates. And then you can take these things a step further. Now the gate can open or close based on license plates. You can open and close doors and gates based on facial recognition. Now on a private property, you can do whatever the heck you want. I was about to say. Public property. Okay. You can also do this. So this is a technology that didn't exist when the forefathers thought of all this stuff. So what is the concern? The concern is the police state abuse, the Stasi nightmare scenario. How do you solve for that? Well, with new technology, it's a very easy solution.

56:02You track every single request that gets made and authorized and you audit it. And then the data is kept for six months or a year, and then it is destroyed. And destroying data pretty hard these days because everything's backed up and in cloud. So even when people think they've deleted something, is it actually deleted? We saw that with Savannah Guthrie's mother being kidnapped. They didn't have a subscription to the Nest camera and Google was able to recover the clip of it. So you're like, wait a second. It's like, okay, Google is running the paid version on everybody's camera, even if they don't have it, or maybe they're running the last week.

56:45Yeah. Recover is doing a lot of work in that, I saw the same word that you did. I will say that there does seem to be a public backlash to this stuff. Do you recall the Super Bowl advertisement from Ring that was going to call the cops if dogs were out and about in the neighborhood? My friend Jamie Siminoff's company, yeah. There was enough blowback to that. Ring is actually, Amazon, the parent company, has scrapped that police partnership because people were so mad. Their pitch for public safety became a privacy nightmare. So there is still a limit about what people will take and won't take. And I, you know, we were talking about states' rights a week or two ago, and this is going to be one of those issues.

57:20But I think it's reasonable for people to be concerned about this. I think that there's been a lot of people that are like, oh, you just want murders then? You're a murderer? Calm down, everybody. It is not pleasant. I have another concept here. So number one is there has to be an audit trail. There has to be a cost paid if you abuse it. Just like Facebook had to deal with and Google had to deal with people spying on their exes, right? Yep. pretty well-documented cases of that. They put audit trail. So an audit trail basically means if somebody looks at something they're not supposed to, they get fired, they get sanctioned, et cetera.

57:53And then retention is the other piece. So there has to be a retention policy. Then there's another idea. If crime is above a certain level, these things are deployed. If crime is below a certain level, maybe it's not as necessary. So, you know, if you lived in the Tenderloin and you went to anybody who lived in the Tenderloin. A neighborhood in San Francisco that's famously rough and tumble. I mean, as rough and tumble as this kid from Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s would tell you. It's bad. Like, it was scarier to me than the scariest places in New York I'd been. because there were hundreds of people out at night, high as F, and chaos, and no police presence, and just, you would literally feel like you were in, like, literally hell, like anything could go wrong.

58:51If you told 100 % of the people who are not addicts in that group and not homeless, we want to put up these cameras to, like, you know, dissuade this stuff and have facial recognition, they would say, thank you so much. i appreciate you so much so i think people's um belief in these systems versus giving up privacy depends on the chances of a crime happening to them yeah i think that's right because people the people's preferences will shift dramatically based on what they're seeing and what they need now when you think about where it's being deployed though jason i'm gonna show this map again show you texas this is a d flock this is the d flock map uh which we're using because i don't think there's as public one from flock itself this is uh roughly texas you can see dallas and i think this is uh houston down here tons and tons of cameras i'm a little surprised that in texas the you know the uh the lone star freedom state there's this much surveillance and it's acceptable by people that are there i would have thought there'd be more of a pushback so i wonder if i'm actually over indexing on people's aversion to these cameras given that they seem to be all the rage in a place that's famous for independence and straight shooting here's the thing.

1:00:00These are deployed locally. So this is bottoms up, not top 10. Your local community makes the decision and pays for these. It's not like the state of Texas deployed 21 ,000 flock cameras, if that's the right number. That means Manor and Lockhart and Tripping Springs and West Lake and if it was the Tenderloin, whatever. Each of those communities has to opt into it. So that actually, to me, means people have agency and are making their own decisions. In my community, I want to know what's going on. And I don't mind security cameras everybody accepts. So then is it AI-enabled security cameras becomes the issue?

1:00:41Oh, that's interesting. I think the problem is that it's not the Stasi. It is a third party that is fueling the Stasi. So there's two potential boogeymen here for people to worry about. It's not just the central government. Then Flock shouldn't have access to the data. So that's an easy solution. I don't remember from my conversation with him, But he told me everybody sets their local standards. So the retention policy is local, et cetera. And I think I did ask him, like, do you have like a minimum or a maximum? And he's like, yeah, no, we don't. And we have to think about that if I remember correctly.

1:01:11But it was very early on. This was like five or six years ago. Yeah, that was 2021. So today, you know, he could just say, listen, we don't have access to this. It's encrypted. You are the only people with the keys. We do enforce a log system. So you have to have a log. You have to use a biometric. So our software is designed that in order to look at the reader, you got to put in your thumbprint and you got to do an IR scan. If you don't want that, you can't have the system. That's our safeguard. So they could create like a very low benchmark or, you know, for basic use of their system. You can't keep data over 36 months.

1:01:45You can set it from zero, one month to 36 months. So they probably will self-regulate their own system, and then the government will probably come to them at some point if they're not self-regulating, and then regulate them. And that's what you really want in a vibrant, high-functioning democracy is that local folks can have input and make decisions, and then people self-regulate to the point at which citizens feel like they've done a decent job. Nobody's complaining about the rating system for movies or explicit language on music. When I was a kid, that was the entirety of the discussion in the 80s.

1:02:28This album, you know, NWA or shocking Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. You know, that's where the PG-13 rating came from. Now people are like, yeah, there's a rating on it. Just read the rating. And yeah, smoking is dangerous. There's a label on it. And so, you know, at a certain point, society just labels things properly. People have decisions and there's some personal freedom. So I don't see the when I see that chart of Texas, I don't see people not having personal freedom. I see people having personal freedom. They're making a decision in their community and they're electing to put these cameras in.

1:03:03I may not like it as somebody who's privacy concerned, but it is what it is. I don't I just from a very high level, I don't love that. I don't recall voting for cameras in Providence. And also I don't like that my location information on my phone is so widely commercially available. It feels like I am now not able to functionally live in society and maintain a private location. And that to me is a bit of a bummer, but also I don't know how we could have not gotten here given our generally permissive approach to technology and the pace of its expansion, but it does make me slightly leery. Anyways, Jason, putting that aside.

1:03:38Be vigilant. Be vigilant. Do you have time for a couple of nodie gang questions? Yeah, sure. Okay. So Channing Hodges, and I've cleaned up his question just a little bit here for you. Sure. What does Jason think about startups using AI to help file patents instead of using expensive lawyers? That's a great question. Patents are a pretty sophisticated area of the law. it's not like just filing a trademark or incorporating a business or doing an employment agreement or doing a convertible note. So if you were to look at all the things you could possibly work on as a startup, that would be litigation and And patents would be like amongst the most high risk areas, high stakes areas where you wouldn't want to rely on AI.

1:04:34You could use AI with human in the loop. In other words, you could do all you want with AI and then go talk to an attorney. Now, if you didn't have money and you thought, hey, I can just file a bunch of patents and this AI is making it work and it's the only option you have. OK, fine. Do it. you just might need the wisdom of a patent attorney at some point. And if people are filing patents, it tends to be a lot at stake, like you're building some rocket or some incredible technology and something that really needs to have IP protection for some period of time, like a drug. And so, yeah, that would not be the place to try to save money.

1:05:18But most startups don't need patents. That's the other piece is like these business process patents, all these patents. Like I almost never see them come into play in business. It's the world's most annoying vanity metric. Do you know who has the most patents per year? IBM. IBM does a lot of core research. Yeah. They have a lot of patents. Yeah. Big impact. All right. Russell, again, translating here. He says, what does Jason think about people buying high end or lower end hardware to run AI models at home? Or is this a fad? Essentially the MacBook minis, the Mac studios. Mac studios. It's not a fad.

1:05:50It's the future. So it's my personal belief is these models are going to be so good. You're going to want to run them without looking at the price tag of the tokens. And until tokens become, you know, much cheaper, it's going to be much easier to just run these things locally for a certain group of people, depending on the application. And I don't see a time when you wouldn't want a corporation to have the privacy and not educate, to our first story today, or second story about all the money being made by the top two token providers. You also have the privacy issues. Like, do you want your venture capital company secrets and all your investing secrets and all your documents and knowledge being uploaded to Anthropic?

1:06:42Probably not. People are doing it. But now Anthropic understands the entire venture business or understands your documents. And then when the next person makes documents, they just draft off of yours. It's kind of got to be thoughtful about it. And then data leaking, something leaks into one of these LLMs. It could be really problematic. It could be incredibly problematic. All right, Jason, before we let our friends go, do you want to do a quick row.co plug? Sure. Row.co. I take it to get GLPs. You can go to row.co slash twist and they'll tell you if your insurance will cover it. And here's the good news.

1:07:20When I started on my weight loss journey four or five years ago and lost 40 pounds, I did it through fasting. I did it through rocking. I did it through getting better sleep. And I did it through GLPs. At that time, they were$3 ,000 a month, $2 ,000 or$3 ,000 a month. Really? Yeah. It was absurdly expensive to come out of pocket. They were only for, these drugs were only for people doing, who had diabetes. And the off-label use five years ago was, hey, maybe these work for weight loss. That's when I started using them. I heard Kevin Rose talk about it. Now you can get into them for 150 bucks, 300 bucks a month.

1:07:58It's literally five, 10 % of the cost of five years ago. Don't be scared about paying for it out of pocket. and your insurance will probably cover it. I think you have to probably have a BMI. I think my BMI at the peak was 32, which was crazy. And I was technically obese. And so it got covered or some portion of it got covered. And now you don't have to worry about that. So row.co slash twist. Absolutely. I highly recommend looking into it. Hard agree. And for everyone who's a big Twist fan on Wednesday, we have two absolute banger guests coming on the show, Jason, including one in the fintech banking space, let's say that you're not going to want to miss.

1:08:37So we'll see everyone here live on Wednesday. All right. Bye-bye.