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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/bb2b5b1db9243e7f

This is the master plan. Instead of telling everybody, you're gonna lose your jobs. Sam Alman's doing UBI studies, the Chinese say, let us entertain you. You have to entertain people, you have to make them root for the robots.
Before the robots take everyone's jobs and then murder everybody.
This is the key. This is a psyops.
This has nothing to do with capitalism. These are murder.
But
This week in Startups is brought to you by
The Conservation Fund. For 40 years, the Conservation Fund has protected at-risk land and important wildlife habitats while actively supporting local communities. Learn more at conservationfund.org.
Formerly open phone.
Gives you a clean modern way to handle every customer call.
Text and thread all in one place. Try it free and get 20% off your first six months at quo.comslash twist.
Odo, the all in one business platform. Your first app is free. Get started today at ODOO.comslash twist.
All right, everybody, welcome to Twist. T W I S T that stands for this week in startups.
It is August twenty fourth. Summer is ending. Thank God.
Died talking to my friend, uh to name drop, but I was talking to Elon.
I saw two things.
I saw two things and my brain is now broken.
Once in a while, he says.
Hey Jake.
He showed me the Roadster two point oh. Mm.
It's fine. It's been a long time.
I'll talk about it at the end of the program. To the extent I can. Anyway, we gotta talk about the Beijing.
We do.
Robot Olympics.
Let's get to it. I was seeing clips of all this. I saw a bunch of robots running into a wall and smashing it to pieces.
But I was uh you know out of pocket for a couple of days. I'm not exactly up on it.
Tell us, Lan, what is going on with the World Robot Olympics? Well, really, there were two events over the weekend in Beijing. Uh the first was the World Robot Conference, China's annual flagship government backed robotic showcase held every year since 2015. That event ran from the 19th through the 23rd.
That's forums, exhibitions, showcases, pavilions, uh the usual sort of conference stuff. And then there was also the uh world hang on, let me pull it up. Then there was also the world humanoid robot games, which are also held in Beijing. Fifty-one events.
More than a thousand competitions. It's held in the national speed skating oval that Beijing built for the 2022 winter games. Uh so we saw a lot, as you're seeing on the screen now, if you're watching uh the video, robots that are boxing one another, robots that are playing tennis and table tennis, ro with with humans and with one another.
uh robots that are doing all c all kinds of sort of Olympic sports and events. We actually set J Cal two world records or what would have been world records if these robots were human during the game. Uh
Humanoid robot. Oh, look at that. This robot just fell over is being carried off. Bolting it down. I I gotta give the Chinese credit.
The Chinese understand what this is about.
You have to entertain people.
You have to make them root for the roба.
Mm.
Before
The robots take everyone's jobs.
And then murder everybody.
This is the key.
If you look in those stands, people are cheering.
Robots
Playing ping pong.
Which you refer to as table tennis.
Yeah w which is an accurate description.
And then there are
Doing
All kinds of gymnastics.
This is the master plan.
This is what the Chinese do great. They are awesome at PR.
America sucks at AIPR.
We are full on.
Retade when it comes to I wouldn't use the R word, but I will say Retade.
It's a French word for idiots.
We're
Effing idiots when it comes to AIPR.
And the Chinese are next level when it comes to PR. Instead of telling everybody, you're gonna lose your jobs.
And uh Sam Alman's doing UBI studies. Why would Sam Alman be doing a UBI study?
Universal basic income. Mm-hmm.
He knows the writing's on the wall. He looked inside the black box.
And when these people look inside the black mystery box that answers all questions and solves all problems.
They all seem to come to the same conclusion, which is humans equal unnecessary.
But the Chinese do instead.
Is the Chinese
Say.
Let us entertain you.
Let us entertain you. We're gonna show you some robots doing fun stuff, and here they are.
A stadium full of humans cheering on robots. We had this idea in America. There was BattleBots, there's that movie with Hugh Jackman, Real Steel. The idea of like rock em sock em fighting robots or whatever. That's our idea. That was our idea.
But now we've gotten so stressed out about AI that that yeah, it wouldn't be fun for Americans at this point to watch it. Whereas, yeah, it does and also I I was thinking about uh, you know, in Star Wars when they go into it, I believe it's in the prequels.
When they're in uh in in precisely and they're watching drone sports on like uh an ESPN type like George George Lucas saw droid sports coming. We've sort of taken this turn this anti AI turn now
And
It feels like
Americans just aren't receptive to to it anymore. But I was gonna say, uh we got two actual records set during
the games a b two robots from X humanoid. One finished the hundred meter sprint in nine point three nine seconds, besting Usain Bolt's world record. And then another one bested the human record in the standing high jump.
With two point eight eight meters that's higher than any human has ever jumped. Though the record was n set in nineteen ninety three by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba, two point four five meters. So we're actually And these are human sized, right? So we're not making twelve foot robots to jump higher. These are human.
Five foot nine robots. Here's the standing high jump.
It's a pretty tall robot. Let me see.
High jump. He jumps.
Oh, and he does a leg split. Right. That's like Jean Claude Vandamme.
Yeah. Can I hear the commentary?
This is unbelievable.
Oh
Papa Susanny. Look at the crowd.
They got thunderclapping stick. And I I can translate this, you didn't know I was studying it. Play it again. And uh can you put it on half speed.
And I will actually live translate alon, I'm gonna live translate this.
Okay, ready? Go.
I got some I gotta really listen here. Okay,'cause my my Chinese little Okay.
Your robot overlord.
is about to show you
How?
You're
Job.
Is over.
Yes, you have no need to go to work anymore. This robot will grab everything off the top shelf at Costco.
And bring it to your car for you.
With your milk.
And break.
We've seen Bald's record.
When it runs to your house,
With a pint of milk.
That's literally what she said, Lon. Yeah. I know you've been working on your mandarin. I know you've been working on the getting there. It's a little rusty. It's a little rusty, but you'll you'll you'll get there, yeah. So I I'm gonna make a prediction here. There were fifty one activities and robots won too.
Mm-hmm.
Next year? No, it's all robot competitors for the most part. Yes, but they broke humans. They broke human world records, correct. The two of fifty one.
Broke human records. Correct. Next year.
I'm gonna say
Forty eight of fifty one categories will be broken the human record.
There'll be like three where they don't.
Yeah, I mean, by the way.
This this sprinter
It runs, it hits the wall. Yeah, and then it starts off. Yeah.
Yeah, and the adding the exploding battery.
Bang.
That exploding battery
was done on purpose. There's another person
Who said, You know what would be great? Let's make it even more entertaining. When it lands.
Hit the explosive. Boom.
This is all choreographed.
This is a psyops.
This has nothing to do with capitalism.
These are murder.
But
This is a message to the rest of the world.
That we can send
A million of these
To Taiwan.
And take the fabs.
This is literally a message to Donald Trump.
We are going to create
One billion murder bots.
They're going to
Leave the factory lawn. The factory's gonna be at the beach.
There's gonna be a secret tunnel.
Yeah.
And they will be walking. It's actually probably happening right now.
There are probably ten thousand robots.
In the South China Sea.
On the
More.
On the floor of the ocean.
Slowly walking.
to the beaches of Taiwan.
And
One million of them in sync.
Are going to emerge
from the ocean and take Taiwan.
That's what this is, Lon. I hate to tell it to you.
Welcome to Conspiracy Corner. Your previous theory, I like that it's about engendering sympathy for them. That would be a good reason to show them like sparking up or catching fire when they failed. Like if we want them if we want to think to of them as more sympathetic and less like
Faceless. Look at his waving at people.
Yeah, there I mean that is definitely I think if you watch enough of these clips you see there is definitely an overt
They're trying to make them feel
relatable, they're anthropomorphizing them, they're giving them human qualities. They're making them feel like
Oh, this is comfortable. This is familiar. I I like I'm rooting for that. Right. As opposed to uh oh, this is terrifying, this
This is like a
This thing could destroy me and I I I will say
I do feel like there's an inherent
limit to how interesting robot sports can be because the robots don't have to work at it. Like as if you're a sports fan and you're watching football or basketball, the appeal is like these guys have to train or these ladies have to train so hard. You know, like we know the effort. We can all appreciate how hard it is to
play football, basketball, a professional level.
Um, and that these robots are just built to do it. Like they're not there's no discipline. There's no
There's no grit or drive. It's not a it's not a good story in that way.
I feel like that holds you back.
If you've got a company, you probably have a tool for invoicing and one for running your website. And then finally, you got one for your CRM, of course.
And somehow, even with all these time savers, you're still moving data around by yourself at ten pm? That's why here at Twist we recommend O Do O D O O, the all in one management software that's already serving sixteen million users across more than a hundred seventy thousand companies. Think about that. They're bringing everything you need into one platform.
That means your CRM, your sales tools, accounting, manufacturing, your website, inventory, and of course your point of sale. If you have a point of sale, all right where you need them. And they're all in constant communication with each other. No more logging, every change order or new sale across three different apps and the dreaded spreadsheet as a database. No, you make a sale and your invoice gets created instantly.
While your inventory gets quickly updated. So if you're still cobbling together your back office across five different tools and apps, get started today.
at odo.com slash twist.
And your first app is free.
That's O D O O slash twist. Yeah, there's a lot to say here about these bots.
As impressive as all of these are.
These
Robots.
Will not hold a candle.
To optimists. Hm.
I saw.
One of the latest Optimist demos. I teased it at the beginning of the show. Can't say what I saw.
But I can tell you what I saw.
is better than anything I just saw at these uh World Games.
Optimists.

Product.
Ever made by humanity.
It is next level.
It's being built.
By Tesla, you know, they ripped out the model X and the Model S.
factory lines and they're building these.
Optimist is
going to
If Optimus came to these games, I would predict Optimus wins thirty five of fifty one contest. I mean what what specific why what puts Optimus so far ahead of like Unitry or or X humanoid or these companies that were showing off at Beijing? I think
You know, in addition to the hardware.
That I think is one and a half generations beyond these.
I think the brain.
Is like
five generations behind this. This is not to diss anything happening in China.
They're building legit stuff.
But I think Optimus is going to be
The greatest selling product.
In the history of humanity, it will sell
And provide more value than
The iPhone. I would say iPhone is the greatest product made in the history of humanity up until this point, in terms of popularity, usage.
You know what I'm saying, Lan? Like
Utility to the Lor you know, you could say the smartphone, but if you had to pick
Of the smartphones.
Right. You'd say iPhone. Yeah.
Of the robots optimists.
I will
Guarantee you we will be sitting here in ten years.
And there will be one.
billion optimists in the world.
I didn't say one million, I didn't say ten million, I didn't say hundred million, I said one billion.
I think there'll be one billion Optimus robots in
Twenty
thirty six.
Wow.
That's it. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying what I saw. Yeah.
Well, I'm not saying any details. I'm just saying the fidelity is so much better than these. I will say this. I don't always see eye to eye with Elon in terms of branding. Like the Tesla Robo Taxi cyber cabs you see driving around Austin with that weird cursive like punk rock font. Like I don't like in terms of branding.
Not for me.
But
Optimus as the name for your robot.
Ten out of ten. The best possible name
What could make you feel better about owing a robot than having it be named after pop culture's number one kindest and most uh respected robot? I I feel like he nailed that one. He nailed that one. All right, yeah, and listen, I got somebody leak to me.
Mm.
Somebody leaked to me. Ooh.
A video of a secret underground.
version of these Olympics. Is this a twist exclusive variety? Is it twist exclusive? Somebody email me this. This is happening
in Alabama.
in the in the
Yeah, people say, Oh, rednecks, whatever.
They're in on it.
They've been importing these you play the tape Jacob. Boom. See here it is. This is a celebration of life.
Wow. They're calling this the flesh fair.
Now this
This is an arena that's hyped up.
But they are not.
Wow.
So we we have a whistleblower. We got a source into the the the the flesh fair where yeah, it looks like uh robots are fighting. It's it's
It's sort of backyard fights, but with robots.
On a much larger scale.
These robots do not seem to be willing participants. No, I would say yeah, this is definitely a situation where they're putting a robot in a cannon. This is anti clanker violence, I think we're witnessing. Yeah.
Against his will. You know, did you know pretty sadistic. That that robot sounds a lot like Chris Rock, weirdly. I don't know if you know. And there's a fan, and they got the fan going.
And there's a bunch of other robots in a cage.
This seems like quite an an elaborate I wonder if the local authorities were tipped off about this or have maybe got a little cats on the side to look the other way.
This is the American PR version of this. Remember I said the Chinese made it like very world positive. Yeah.
Oh my God. This is how Americans feel about about AI robots. Yes. They just took that poor
Robot and shot it through a cannon.
Into blades on fire. You know what I never realized before? This is it's the Thunderdome. They created the Thunderdome for Mad Max, but for robots.
Poor robots. Poor robots. These humans seem to be taking delight in destroying the robots. Yeah.
Uh all right, well there it is, folks. There it is, folks. There it is. The flesh fair. Uh I don't
From the clearing.
violence. Human on robot violence we do not condone here at the Sweeting Star. Terrible. Makes you makes you sad. Just makes you for those of you wondering people who work for me
Um, this is a film called AI done by somebody named Steven Spielberg, written originally by Stanley Kubrick.
It was a Stanley Kubrick concert. Kubrick died.
Uh eyes wide shut. Yeah.
Because
The Illuminati
Felt a hit too close to home. It was uh faking the moon landing too. They they they were always afraid he was gonna come out and reveal that he fake the Yes, they forced Kubrick to do the moon landing, Welcome to Conspiracy Corner. Then he did Eyes Wide Shut.
You can
Go down that rabbit hole. She got whacked.
It literally murdered him. Crazily precedent prescient when you go back and watch Eyes Wide Shut. Now he was he was talking about stuff way before the mainstream was talking about that stuff. Absolutely. Uh thank you to my friend Alex Jones for uh educating me. All right. Should I do the Alex Jones show on?
Would that be funny for me to be on Alex Jones? Are you is this a sincere question? Like Alex Jones invited you Oh my God, I think you have to I think you have to do it just for the story. I have to do it for the L for the for the L O L the experience. I mean also an Austin legend. Like people don't know this. It's a legend.
Like Alex Jones was infamous in Austin for like a decade before he was nationally famous. So
Consider. Okay. I think I mean that would be very entertaining. Let's keep doing the new let's keep doing the news. Well, before we go on, Jason, I do I do want to talk about uh our executive assistants and how helpful they are here at launch. Oh uh you know, we love our sponsors here at Twist. We love being in constant communication with them.
To make sure that they're getting the most out of these partnerships, but
That
We make a lot of content. We're all very busy. So it's great to have your Athena EAs there very clutch as sort of the middle layer here. They can watch all the stats and the analytics, the numbers every day, keep everyone up to date on all the viewership and the metrics that matters most of them. And if a partner does need the attention of someone on the team,
They're the first line of defense to find out who they need to talk to and route those questions to them. So we love our our Athena assistants, uh Steven, AJ.
Tremendous asset. They do a great job. They do a great job. You've heard me say it many times now, if you're an early stage startup or small business, every single new potential customer is extremely valuable. You can't afford to have a team that's missing calls if your communication is inconsistent.
Your customers will notice. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo Q U O, the smarter way to run your business communication. I use Quo all day long. I love it. And it's just great to have that one number.
That my team and I can share so that we don't lose any customers. SQL is the number one top rated business phone system on G2, and it's already trusted by more than 90,000 businesses. They're going to bring all of your calls, text and contacts together in a shared collaborative space. That means your entire team is going to use one shared number. So there's zero chance.
Anyone is going to fall through the cracks. Money is on the line. Always say hello with quo. Try quo for free. Plus get twenty percent off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash twist. That's q.com slash twist. This is one of my favorite products in the world. It gets my highest endorsement. Here's how I explain it to people.
They say, Oh well don't you automate everything with
Crop bot, which is exceptional. You've been using it.
A claw code, perplexity, all these great things. You can automate some things.
And then you could give a human here in America some task to do.
But there are some tasks that the AI can't get done or a human using AI can get done.
But a human still needs to be in the loop.
One of those things is managing customer success.
Customer success. There's you know
a hundred units of work and customer success. I would say the first fifty percent of that, the first fifty full units.
Are things that
The AI can prep.
Like, how many views did this clip get? And how many people clicked on this? And who was the advertiser? And like, let's give them some reporting.
Great to have the AI queue it up.
But a human needs to
Do the last little polish, fit and finish on it, make sure it's tight before it goes to the to the partner, because we we don't want to send AI sloth to people.
That's the perfect use of an Athena assistant. Go to Athena Wow W O W
If you go to AthenaWild.com.
You're gonna get couple of weeks off.
I have an Athena assistant.
Shaboth has talked about his being an assistant.
I was talking to Freebird.
His chief of staff and his assistant have two Athena assistants. They're rocking it.
I don't I can't speak for David Sacks, but I can tell you three out of four besties are using Athena.
At this very moment.
Fino wow that come
Go check it out. Or or you can go to Athena dot com slash J Cal. Either way, and find out more about it. AthenaWow.com forwards to it and we get credit for it.
There you go.
Uh I'm I was the first investor in Athena. Sincerely
These Athena assistants are so good and they all know AI now.
You all know AI now.
I would say
The Athena system that I pay three thousand a month for.
thirty six thousand a year, full in, fully baked.
Is as good.
As
Eighty thousand dollar assistance I've had here in the United States, and they don't quit.
And if they do move on, Athena says, Here's your new assistant, try them for a couple of weeks.
And if you like'em, great. If not, we can swap out another person.
The hardest thing about
getting like operational people.
Long?
Is every
American.
Looks at an operational job.
And they look at all those chores and they say, I will do this for a full six months, but then I want to be I I wanna I wanna raise, I want promotion, I wanna do more interesting stuff.
And
Then you're just chasing your tail. I told you my hack for Abbey Jane Bakery, right?
Yes. Well I think we talked about that at a previous Atheta productivity hack.
Oh, this is
You know Rockman Bakery in the East Side? I don't I don't know that one.
Okay, it's a bag of Garakman. Go ahead, pull it up, boys, and show the pastry counter there.
I like a little pastry.
You know, ro.co slash twist. I lost a bunch of weight. You've been losing weight.
But I
Love a chocolate croissant.
Mm-hmm.
This is Rockman.
If you ever had that. Um so Rockman's just a great place. Now Rockman, it's all the way on the east side. Yeah. I'm all the way out in hill country.
And this woman
uh who runs Rockman Bakery is
Like a master.
uh at pastries. I've been wanting to try it.
But you don't know I like to
treat my daughters to some uh pastries. She sells everything out.
Like any great pastry person, they sell everything out.
And then you know what happens?
These lunatics on TikTok say this is the greatest pastry I've ever had. And then it sells out even faster. So I went there with my daughters.
I get there at like eleven thirty.
There's no pastry left.
Wow. Zero.
They're like I can make you a cup of coffee, but there's nothing left.
They open at eight a.m.
See that right there? Eight a.m? Yeah.
So my Athene Assistant does. Uh-huh. And they're not doing delivery. You're not getting like these elite purveyors on DoorDash or
Uber Eats or anything.
So my
AJ or Steven, my theme assistants, thank you guys.
Um they call.
I say hey, uh it's Jason Cal I'm Jason Calicanas' assistant. Uh we're doing a pickup.
Can we get um, you know, four panel chocolate?
A couple of bagels and then four random pastries that you think are the best ones that are new this week. She she rotates new stuff. Sure, of course. Yeah.
We'll be there.
At eight thirty to pick it up.
So we're the first in line. It literally call at eight o one. Eight o eight o'clock they call. Yeah.
Phone picks up.
They get it.
Then
They send an Uber courier.
Wow.

І супер чіт
They're not expensive, Uber Courier.
They pick it up, they bring it to the ranch.
Mm.
Systems over gold. You got a pastry system.
I hack the pastry system with my athena system. Now
If I did that with an American assistant and I said, Hey
Um, could you do me a favor?
K can you get me some fresh pay? I I would seem like a lunatic rich guy.
Doing something super oppressive and making their assistant go pick up their croissants. Yeah. I it would be like I'm the king of France. I was gonna say it's one of those like Silicon Valley shows where they're trying to make the tech execs look as like vapid and obnoxious as possible.
That's what they would have that guy do. And like the of like send the person an hour away to the bakery they like to get their their favorite pan of chocolate. Yeah. So now I don't have to be an obnoxious A Hole.
No, Athenawild.com.
There you go. Great. How are you doing with your weight loss, by the way? You started your weight loss journey. Yes. You went to row.co slash twist. This is a dual sponsorship. I went to row.co slash twist. It's amazing. It it is so easy. It is so fast. That's what I couldn't believe. Like
You're within a few days of going and checking it out for the first time, you've got your prescription. It's in your hand. You're starting the medication. Uh yeah, so I've already uh I'm I'm on one point five milligrams, though the the starter Wagovy pill. I've already dropped about eight, nine pounds, but it's sort of
stalled out there. I I dropped eight nine pounds like right away and then it's kind of plateaued. And I was getting a little like, oh well maybe that's maybe that's it. Maybe that's the magic of GLP was for me. But then my doctor from row dot co got back to me the other day and explained that no, no, you're just tapering on
So next month I'm gonna be on the four milligram pill. If that goes well, then they put you on the nine milligram pill and then they're saying nine and above, that's where the real weight loss kicks in. So for now, eight percent Wait, hold on a second, eight pounds is like four percent of your body weight.
Eight eight pounds is great. No, I and then it's only been like seen in your face. It's only been like two and a half weeks, so
How are you tolerating the shock?
Oh, I'm doing the pill. I'm not on the shot. Uh
But You're doing the pill. I'm on the pill. I'm on the the the Wigove pill.
The pill's out makes it even easier. It yeah, the only rule it's a tiny little pill. The only rule is you take it first thing when you wake up and then you don't eat or drink anything for thirty minutes. That's it. And they they act like they tell you this like it's like a huge like listen.
We've got we got the pill. There is a pill. You could take the pill, but
Uh.
You're not gonna be able to eat for thirty minutes. You can't eat or drink for thirty minutes. They tell you this survive. Like it's remove a limb and it's like no, you do you take the pill, you take your shower, you you you do your morning routine by the time you're done.
Doctor. Did you call your Athena assistant? You get four chocolate questions. Like, yeah, by the time I'm brewing, it's it's it's great. So uh I'm on my way. Let's talk about some other news. Uh Hogging Face, I don't know if you heard about this, Jason. Maybe up for sale. Hugg face.
Business inside reports Hugging Face has been approached for a sale at a valuation of over thirteen billion dollars. It's a mystery buyer. We don't know who Hugging Face has been in these talks with, but they are apparently taking it seriously. They are mulling over the sale and have been talking with banks.
about evaluating these bids. Of course, Hugging Face, the open source platform that allows developers and researchers to share, find, test, deploy AI models and data sets. They were the ones who are famously attacked by Hugging uh by open AI's bots during that recent uh
Cybersecurity kerfuffle. Uh Stripe also recently acquired a sort of similar product, Open Router for seven billion dollars. Just a little bit of context here. Hugging Faces last raise was in 2023, 4.5 billion dollar post money valuation. So I mean I think the first question on everybody's mind.
Who do you think this is who is trying to buy Hugging Face?
A lot of people think there is a binary choice.
Be a capitalist who supports growth or
Care about the environment and the natural world. But these two ideas don't have to be in opposition. Our friends at the Conservation Fund.
believe that you can protect land
Wildlife and our shared access to the great outdoors while also providing important economic opportunities. For forty years, the conservation fund has been acting quickly to protect at-risk land and important wildlife habitats, while also actively supporting local communities and this is key, creating new jobs.
The conservation fund already holds over nine million acres across all fifty states, proving that we can watch out for the environment.
And keep our natural surroundings in balance without endless gridlock, debate, and politics. And this isn't just a land trust scooping up property and sitting on it. They're working alongside permanent stewards who will find practical uses for these important spaces without destroying them.
Find out more.
About how the conservation fund is changing the playbook. A conservation fund
Dot org.
All right. So Stripe bought open router. Correct.
Right.
And
Just so people understand what these platforms do.
is
They have all the models.
And you can route your token usage. I've been talking for a couple of years that I thought open source would win the majority of the tokens. Not the majority of the revenue, because the frontier models are expensive.
But people are increasingly saying
Whoa, sticker shock when
The Claude Bell comes in.
I got a little we had a little sticker shock at our company'cause we put on Claw Tag.
It's on Fable and everybody starts using it all at once. And literally got a couple of thousand dollars. And they're like, Oh, we're gonna give you twenty five hundred dollars in credits. I'm like, Oh, that's nice. We turn on Claw Tag.
twenty four hundred dollars in the first six weeks gone.
Wow. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. What are we doing here?
Why are we not using like
The Claude app and now we're using it in
Slack and it's like burning through credits like a lunatic and now I've gotta spend
On top of the twenty five hundred dollars per employee I'm spending, so that's like times twenty is fifty grand a year. Now they want to get another fifty grand out of me. What these
platforms do is they let you route to the cheapest platform, the cheapest
Um, that's why it's called Open Router. Yeah. And Hugging Face. They let you route to the latest version, and then underneath it, they might have multiple providers.
Anyway, what
This means is
Um a lot of developers and increasingly prosumers who are using Ermes.
Uh the incredible but you know, um
luxury bag company. They they also went into AI, they did a pivot. It's scarves, bags, and AI models. Yeah.
And yeah, that's it.
And a harness. Yeah. Which is like harnesses are kinda right next to bags. I mean, it's like a bag, a harness, same similar. There was a yeah in the nineties, it was very chic, those like harnesses. Very chicken.
So
Who would want
To then capture the open source early adopters. Well, remember, Sam Altman bought
Essentially bought, soft bought.
The gentleman.
Who created Open Claw. I was like Peter Steinberg.
Yes, and I said to myself
If you buy the founder.
You buy the vision.
And you kill the existing.
Be a party pooper here and say I told you so.

How much did you hear about Open Claw after Peter went to OpenAI? I when did the Open Claw surging
Momentum.
dissipate. When did it dissipate? It was almost immediately after he joined. And I mean I think you could make the argument that, well, so many other entrants came into the field. Maybe that was inevitable, but it does seem like
Open class suddenly was no longer part of that conversation.
Because the founder
Secured.
What I'm gonna guess is a quarter
billion dollars. A billion. I think
And this is like I'll give credit to Sam Altman.
Mm.
Master deal maker.
too good of a deal maker.
To the point at which, you know, you remember he did like uh an NVIDIA deal and then like two weeks later he did an AMD deal, then he's doing this deal, and then Jensen's like, Well, we don't
have to invest 10 billion into open AI. That's at our option. We have an option, right?
And I you could tell Jensen's a pretty chill dude.
Public facing.
But he was I my interpretation, Jensen, you know, take it for what it's worth. You know, he's chill.
But I think he was a little perturbed.
that those announcements happen back to back. And I don't know if we put the ten
Whatever it was, five or ten billion. I don't know if he took his option to invest that in open air.
Open the the purchase of open clause
Founder.
Killed open clock.
Let me just say it clearly, folks.
I predicted it.
Open claw is not part of the dialogue anymore.
Not really, no. There's an open claw foundation.
My find Dave Morren is running it, they're hiring people.
But I just kinda feel like if you take the founder out, if you took Elon out of SpaceX, if you took
You know, Zuck out of Facebook. What happens? What happens? The soul. Right.
So Sam Baltman rips the soul out of Open Claw.
And now we're talking about Ermes. Now we're talking about perplexity computer. Now we're talking about Grockbot.
Right. You do the math, folks. If you don't like my interpretation, you did the math. They were they were first. Open claw was the first arrival that was like, here's what you can do, this agent's gonna plug into everything and it's gonna have all the context. And then they didn't they didn't keep up. They didn't
Like all of these other entrants came in. There were suddenly rivals. They were easier to set up and that they were faster, more intuitive. And you never there was never that next open claw update that was like, Okay, here, now we're gonna keep up and advance. We're gonna take it even one level further. They just didn't stay in the race. They're still stopped innovating. Yeah, exactly.
Let's go back to Hugging Face.
Who would buy it?
Well, obviously.
If anthropic and open AI.
Are going public.
And people are telling them over and over again open source is their biggest threat.
Oh, have they not been saying that? Absolutely. I said it two years ago on All In You did From my ski house. We have the clip. I have the receipts. It's January 2024 was that clip. You're in your you're in Tahoe. You can see the the snowy back. I mean you should have that clip ready. I tried to pull it last week. Let's keep that
Top of mind that clip because I need to do a victory factor. Jacob, can we pull up that clip? I know I sent it to you on Friday. Okay. So
I did that victory fac.
For a reason.
Um
I was right.
Everybody else in the world was wrong.
Yeah.
And s you know, listen sometimes you gotta listen to Jake out.
And I'm not saying
There's some people saying
Some have said
Check out.
was right about
Everything. Many people are saying this. Many people Many people are saying it. Somebody made a t shirt. Jake Al was right about everything. I've seen it. This is this is the thing I was right about. I said there's a chance in this clip. I said there's a chance I think open source could win the whole
B.
And the reason I said that was because
AI is too important for one person to own. Developers are gonna want sovereignty, which is kinda obvious to me because I swan happen with databases. Yeah. People were like, I want my sovereignty with the database. Give me Hadoop, give me my SQL, give me something where I control my destiny.
We'll put it all aside for a second.
The master stroke to your original question is who would buy Hugging Face? The master stroke would be a frontier model company buying it.
Why would that be a master stroke?
Because then they have two ways to win.
Right.
You wanna use Kimmy, you wanna use Quentin, great.
Go to our hugging phase, go to a you know, if they had bought open router.
It would be insane.
Four.
Anthropic.
Or open AI.
Or space XI.
to not buying.
Hm.
Just because
It's a threat factor.
And if you are Google
And you're selling ads.
And you see YouTube growing like a weed.
And it's
would be perfect for ads and video ads are wonderful and make a big business.
You want to get rid of that threat vector, so you buy it.
You know, Facebook's growing nicely, but Instagram's growing faster.
You wanna buy it.
Facebook Messenger's doing well, but WhatsApp's growing faster.
You wanna buy it.
You always buy the thread.
OpenClaw was growing. People loved OpenClaw over OpenAI. What did Sam do? He bought the threat.
Ю Овіс Бай.
The most threatening thing to your business.
Either to kill it.
or to get the data and control it.
So now if Anthropic owned hugging face
They get all that data. They're watching which customers are using which models.
Then
If they're watching which customers are doing which models
they can insert their model at a lower price and say, Yeah, oh, I see you're using Quinn. Oh, you're paying, you know, a dollar, you know, a dollar per ten million tokens.
We'll match it.
We'll beat it by twenty percent. Just, you know, hey, it's the option's there for you.
You're a great customer, boom, they just insert themselves on the menu.
That would be the master stroke. I don't think it's gonna happen.
But I do think AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure
We'll buy this in a heartbeat for that amount of money.
Anybody who has
A web service, including Elon Web Services.
Anybody with a web service will buy this because you or Caruso Cloud, you know, pick pick your your scalar.
Because you can then send traffic to your cloud.
Right.
That makes sense. There's a it's a no brainer. It's a no brainer for either a hosting company to buy it.
Or
Four.
Wildcard.
Seems crazy, a frontier model to buy the open source leader. It's interesting that you say that. I'm gonna jump ahead to a a different news story. Sam Altman uh was on David Senra's podcast over the weekend. I believe the full episode goes up today.
Uh there was a lot of the some of the other clips got the most focus, but here's a moment that I'd like to have uh Jacob maybe pull up.
Uh
It's the first one under some more interesting moments. Altman says he doesn't want open AI to be a product company. He thinks they're a platform company and he doesn't want to compete directly with his customers on the application layer. So uh let's pull up that one. And that it's basically him talking about exactly what I think you're sort of saying.
What you described to me is a direct shot.
At
Anthropic.
Anthropicated
Claude Code.
And Claude Design.
They specifically went after their customers. Here's Sam Waltman.
People talk about different ways, a new utility, a new commodity, whatever you want to call it. Like people want to use a lot of AI.
And they wanted it a low cost and they want to be fast and to work well and have their contacts and be smooth.
We got you.
And then there's like a single product.
Which is
I need to ask AR something.
Eventually maybe it's yeah, I should proactively offer me things, but
You will have this interface.
which started as a chatbot and now also has cutting agents, and I think at some point we'll feel like a more persistent agent.
Two.
This
AI that is running on whatever you need it to run on.
But that's it. I don't think we should go build every product category. I don't think we should like go try to
compete with all our customers. I don't think we should try to like
subsume the entire economy. I think we should offer this
platform.
And try to have a hundred million new businesses and eight billion people use it in all kinds of new ways. To me, that sounds like he's pitching what you're talking about. That you'd go to open AI
They're the marketplace for all intelligence.
And then you're building on top of that. That's what I The AW the AWS of Intelli
referring to there. That's a that's a good vision for him, especially when
Has
We saw just recently Harvey
And I don't know if we talked about this last year.
Yes. Harvey
has forked I believe it was Quen. Kimmy. Kimmy K three.
Kimmy K three to make their own legal
AI sovereign, they control it.
It's on their servers.
They control it. Nobody has access to the innovations, the updates, the usage, the utilization, the output, the problems, the thumbs up, the thumbs down, any of the signal.
They control it.
And that's their castle now.
They got their castle. And then I use the metaphor of the keeps.
Keeps are like the little areas outside around the castle with a little bit of a smaller wall. Those keeps are their customers.
So now their customers, whatever law firms Harvey is going into.
They can say
Hey.
I don't know, Wilson Cincini or you know, Orric, whatever the Sherman Sterling. They can say, Hey Sherman Sterling.
We know you have a bunch of documents.
They're not our documents, they're your documents.
We and you keep them in your keep.
They don't come back up to us.
And they certainly don't come up to us to open AI or anthropic, and they certainly don't go up to us.
And back down.
to Wilson Cincini.
And then Wilson Cincinnati, you got your little keep. And if you have a bunch of secrets and a bunch of great documents, you're working on a bunch of case law.
It's not going into our system. It's gonna be on prem.
on your site, in your data bay, you know, it's all yours.
That's what the world has realized.
That's what I realized a couple of years ago when I
made that famous thing. I I think open source could run away run away with it. Yeah. Because
It's just so obvious, and now
Sam is having to play catch up.
And say, Yes, we're not gonna compete with you.
Why?
Eleven Labs, huge customer of the Frontier Models.
And lovable who I had both of those.
uh on the all in interview show
And I Lingora, is that the other one? Lingora, yeah.
Lagora I had the founder of Lagora.
All of those app levels
And then you have Figma over here, Dylan. I'd love to have Dylan on the show, by the way. Please book Dylan. We've reached out for an hour. We'll reach out. Yes.
Um and if somebody doesn't get back, then I gotta come in and and do the invite. But we'll have Dylan on.
Figma.
Clawed design like
That people are starting to realize.
I just can't trust the frontier models not to steal my business. They're gonna steal my cheese. Yeah.
Um so I like this vision.
Personally, I'd love to see Elon buy it. Mm.
Um, or I would love to see
Like it's um a Microsoft GitHub.
Like Microsoft owns GitHub, right?
Believe so. Uh NVIDIA would be a great NVIDIA is probably the no brainer.
Microsoft, GitHub, Google Cloud, NVIDIA
You know, like a
A sales force.
My
Want you know, Mark Benioff's pretty aggressive. He might want to do this to restructure what he's doing as more AI first. Yeah, well, and it becomes he's getting his ass kicked in the markets because he's
viewed as a SaaS company. So we have Slack plus hugging face.
Maybe then he's in the AI game and he can move from
The framing of Salesforce as part of the SAS po.
And then it would be part of the AI revolution. Speaks directly to the criticisms of him, which is like that they're bolting on, like, oh, they're just buying all these AI companies and then bolting those on to the core Salesforce product. This would shift the conversation to, well, now you come to Salesforce first and it's what's
your infrastructure that's powering all of your AI. So it would speak to that. That's a that's an interesting theory.
I mean
Listen, if you want to uh be extra spicy.
Stripe should buy it.
Ooh, on type of OpenRouter, yeah. Yes. Well they are different. I made the comparison, but they are different. I mean oh oh Hugging Face is more like a repository. It's where everybody is going to sort of communicate. It's almost got a social network aspect to it. Uh whereas open router is much more like I have a workload directly. Yes.
They would be interesting to But how different are they? How different are they then? If there's like a lot of overness. There's a lot of overness. Yeah. If open router
Word to add comments and a little bit more community features or hugging face.
Were to do a little more routing, it's the same product, they both host.
LLMs. And data sets. It allow you to deploy directly from the platform. Yeah. Uh should we keep do you want to take a look at a few more of these Sam Altman clips? I mean if they're relevant or it's interesting to There was one more that was getting a lot of attention that I think we should discuss. He's talking about uh how he agrees with the popular public sentiment that
Uh the industry has not done a good job of talking and communicating about
A I and data centers and and and a little bit for what he thinks that conversation should be. This is the very top clip on there, Jacob. Let's let's play it. Man, this thing is gonna be really terrible and there's gonna be fifty percent of the jobs are gonna go away in the next year and hope you all are okay, but it seems really scary. Like we have not
As a field.
Done a very good job of explaining to people.
what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated, and we certainly have not done a good job.
Even if people have had answers like, you know, saying well there's gonna be universal basic income or work will be optional or whatever.
There's been very little
Discussion.
From people about
how and why it's important that people have more power and first personal freedom in the world, not less.
And
That matters a lot to most people. Yeah.
Um if you look in his eyes right there, I
Think
The message has been received loud and clear.
And revenue.
There it is. See that look. That's the I get it look. There was um
Famous venture capital.
Capitalist Jerry Colonna, had him on the program two or three times. Good friend of mine.
Um, and and I knew him in New York in the nineties. And then he became a Buddhist and a coach. So now he like coaches CEO. She can take Sam off the screen.
Uh and so he said
Jason.
The question we must ask ourselves.
Is
What
Have I done to create
I think it was what have I done to create
the suffering that I'm experiencing.
What have I done?
How have I
uh contributed to the suffering that I'm experiencing.
Sure. So
If you were like tired and depressed, you might say, Okay, well, why am I tired and depressed? Well, I'm not sleeping, I'm drinking too much booze.
You know, and I'm wallowing in it and I'm out of shape. Okay, great.
You contributed to it.
I think what Sam is doing right here in this moment
Is and I don't think it's performative at all. I think it's actually very sincere.
He's like
When he says we
I think he should say I
It would have been stronger if he said I.
He said, You know what?
I have talked a lot about UBI and I did a UBI experiment.
And then I said
That a lot of these jobs
Are gonna go away.
And I
should not have said that as my lead in right to why
You should use
Chat GPT.
What I should have said
But I should have said.
Was
You're going to learn
Any skill, any time.
Using this for free.
For life.
We're always gonna have a free tier.
And whatever you want to learn.
Whether you're a twelve year old
With a single parent.
And you can't afford a tutor.
But you want to learn a new skill?
You could have the same you can have a better tutor.
Then the person on the other side of the tracks with the rich parents
Who have a personal tutor coming over every day for 250 bucks, and they're spending$50,000 a year on extra tutor so you can get into an Ivy League school. You know what?
Open AI is gonna be that free tutor for you for life. And you're gonna be
on a level playing field with the rich kids on the other side of the track.
And when you go to your doctor and your doctor's only got seven minutes for you.
And you're on the cheapest
Worst health care plan, we're gonna let you put in your labs.
We're gonna let you ask questions and you're gonna have as much information as your doctor. And when you go to that doctor,
You're gonna know.
every single possible
medicine drug
Modality.
To help you.

Get healthier.
And
My commitment to you.
is that we will always have a free unlimited tier.
For every human on planet Earth. That's the chat GPT promise.
All human beings
Have access to all intelligence for all time.
Yeah. I mean I think that's a it's more effective, I think, than what they've been doing. I I have to say, and I tweeted about this over the weekend and and and and a lot of people uh reacted.
I I just I get why people don't believe there's gonna be universal basic uh income. It just doesn't it seems they keep promising it, but that uh I mean it it that doesn't seem like it's very American. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing Americans would actually
pass or want or be into. We don't like handouts. We don't like free lunches. There's all this debate about every socialist policy that comes out. It makes me very cynical to hear people talk about universal basic edge because it just feels like a thing that there's no excitement for among America's elite and ruling class. Like
Nobody wants a
Nobody wants a hand. And the rich people don't want to give these companies don't want to give their stock away for free. The government they don't want the government giving things away for free. So where is this UBI coming from? UBI is a path.
to um
And I don't mind. My grandmother used to say, I don't mind.
Devil's playground.
And so
If you give people
Enough money.
That they don't have to work.
Their minds are gonna look for problems to solve or other things to do.
uh that are unhealthy to fill their time people
Do not
What?
Handouts.
Now.
What would be a way for us?
To increase the standard living and opportunity for all humans.
I've been talking about this for a couple of weeks.
The minimum wage, federal minimum wage, seven bucks a change, has not changed for decades.
It was five bucks. It doesn't keep up with inflation. It doesn't keep up with anything.
And every time they do a study.
Of just raising the minimum wage just a little bit, dollar a year here and there, Australia, New Zealand, Seattle, New York.
The number of jobs lost
A pass along inflation
to consumers when they buy their hamburger
It winds up being
You lose less than one or two percent of jobs. You lose less than one or two percent of jobs to automation.
And the price of a burger goes up one two or three percent.
In other words.
It has no impact.
But everybody has to agree to raise that wage or
One company that does raise it, like Starbucks, is now at a disadvantage to Dutch Bros or whatever other company doesn't.
So
My
Continued plea.
And instructions, and this will be another Jake Always Right About Everything.
If you want to have an esprit de corps, if you want to have a spirit that we're all in this together.
All the corporations in the world, all the rich people in the world should say
You know, there's only fifteen million Americans making under fifteen an hour.
Let's get them all to twenty.
We don't have to do it. We don't have to shock the system and go from seven to twenty.
We're just gonna make a commitment a dollar a year for ten years.
And let's just
Raise the bottom up a little bit.
A hundred percent of the money people spend
When they're at that tier line.
They
All that money they make, if they go from seven to fifteen dollars an hour.
They're just gonna spend it. There's no savings going on with the bottom fifteen million workers in America. It's the bottom 10%. We got like 150 million people working in the country, sixty-seven percent, sixty-two percent of the country is employed.
Just
Free your mind for a second as a capitalist. I am a rabid capitalist.
I have changed.
My position based on new information.
Please take the time.
to follow me on Twitter x dot com slash jason while I argue this
With my fellow capitalists.
Who will not
Even consider for a moment what this would do for the spirit of America.
I I yeah, I mean, I I don't know. I obviously I agree we should raise the minimum wage. It's like seven dollars and fifty cents an hour right now, the federal federal minimum wage, which is insane. I mean, I can't imagine trying to survive, let alone support another person on that.
paltry um amount of money. But I I have to say, I don't necessarily think universal basic income wouldn't work. There are there's a certain chunk of the population that
They're they're lazy. They're not gonna want to work.
They're just gonna take the the the money and and and and and you know what? Fine.
rather better that than them being a drain on their parents or a drain on society or doing crime or whatever to make up the gap. But I think most people would be
Uh you know, like they're okay, this is a this is a bare minimum. This is gonna cover rent. I don't have to sweat it.
What can I do with my time now that
is gonna be fulfilling for me and productive. I'm gonna create things, I'm gonna make things, I'm gonna start my own business. If you free people up from having to work whatever job they could find to pay for their rent,
and food and healthcare and you just had that as a baseline and then they could go be I think I think you'd see amazing things and I think there would be whole new discoveries of industries and and businesses and but
I just don't think it would ever happen. I just don't think we America doesn't have the appetite for it. We don't like giving things away for free.
Uh U BI is a road to nowhere, exactly. I just take it out of your mind for it.
That's what it's about. And here's the other great thing, Lon, that people don't know and I didn't know.
I I've been doing this research. I've been finding every study. I've been tweeting about it. I've let my tweets be open. Everybody tells me I'm a
Lib Tart, I go look at their profile. They created the account in July of twenty twenty six, and they've got 14 followers. Okay, great. These are all like
spam accounts or whatever.
But if you make that twenty dollars an hour and you get to
You know, two two two thousand hours a year, twenty bucks an hour. Let's say you just work a nine to five.
Now you're getting to forty thousand.
That level of income.
Now takes you out.
There's like a benefit cliff.
You now no longer are gonna be trying to get
food stamps or
Uh other stuff from the government.
housing subsidies
There's so many government programs that
You wouldn't need to tap.
So then you have to ask yourself, Wait a second, how did we structure society?
We structured society so corporations and listen, I am
the most capitalist person you could imagine. I invest in one hundred startups per year and lose a hundred percent of my money on ninety.
Of those hundred.
I am a capitalist capitalist.
But I think it's profoundly unfair.
For a company like Amazon.
to be able to pay DSPs, delivery service partners, and push the minimum wage down.
And then those same people who are delivering Amazon, so Amazon can print money and be this incredible organization. And I'm a very large shareholder in Amazon, and I'm increasing my ownership in Amazon because I think it's one of the best run companies in the world.
What they're actually doing is they're paying people a substandard wage in some cases.
In order
And and then then the subsequent
Impact of that.
is that the rest of us paying into the tax base
Are they giving it?
Amazon delivery workers, food stamps.
Because Amazon just won't pay them twenty five bucks an hour. Come on, people. Just
Open your eyes to it for a second.
Just
S still man the other side.
Still me on the other side.
Only fifteen million people.
It's only fifteen million people.
And if everybody raises it at the same time
Would anybody care if their latte that was four dollars added
Four percent. I'm I'm going high. Four percent.
Now your four dollar latte is four dollars and sixteen cents.
Would you rather have them sharpening the guillotines and firebombing CEOs' houses and shooting CEOs in the back of the head?
Gangland style.
Would you rather pay four dollars and sixteen fucking cents for an a latte?
That's my message. I I think there's something just deep in our character that we don't like the idea of other people getting
More fair treatment or money. We want everybody to be in this cutthroat.
Competition. That's why I just don't believe I don't believe UBI would ever pass. I just don't believe these. No, I'm talking about minimum wage. We're in strong agreement on UBI. That's what I was making in like, you know, twenty, twenty five years ago. Like that's
And it was hard to live then.
I mean seven dollars time and and there's not that many people making seven dollars just to be clear. There are a lot of people making ten. Well, right, because that's the federal a lot of states and cities have all already adjusted, so it's much higher in a lot of places. That's the federal stuff. Enough with socialism corner. All right.
Now everybody thinks I'm a socialist. I'm not a socialist. She'd think it'd be good for capitalism. I'll tell you why it's good for capitalism, I'll end on this.
That person goes from seven to fifteen.
They can buy another latte.
They can join Amazon Prime.
They can get their own Netflix account and not
B sharing a Netflix account instead of stealing stuff.
You know, uh pirating stuff, whatever.
They can go buy it themselves. It's good for capitalism. It's good for monetary velocity. What else is in the news? All right. Let's talk about there's two sort of military AI stories in the news that I think we should discuss. The first one
A hackers from Iran apparently shut down a UK power plant last week. According to the Telegraph, a small UK power plant was shut down for Oh, this was July, not last week. According to the Telegraph, a small UK power plant was shut down for four days in July following a cyberattack linked to Iran. Here's a UK government spokesperson
This story refers to an incident impacting a small scale energy generator. At no point was there a risk to the wider energy system. The UK has a highly resilient energy system. The FBI is also warned about cyberattackers targeting U.S. water facilities across at least seven states. These uh are also believed to be
Linked to Iran. I mean, at this point, how vulnerable do you think we are, Jason, to a large scale destructive
Cyber attack. Do we have the best models? Does that make you feel safe or or or what?
We need distributed systems that are redundant.
And if you look at
Uh anybody of any means.
Anybody of any means.
Is now and and I'm talking about middle class now.
The middle class
Especially here in Texas where we had uh some
Pows.
They have
I was just listening to a podcast, middle class person was talking about I got solar.
And batteries, spent, you know, whatever, ten, twenty grand on it.
Uh after we had this big freeze out and I think it was twenty one or twenty two here in Texas. I wasn't here yet.
And they bought the solar battery and they said explicitly
I bought this.
In case that happens again.
So I can keep my refrigerator and my computers and my internet running just to sustain ourselves in these kinds of situations. Then you look at water.
You're in Texas, people are putting water tanks.
On their properties.
you know, a half acre, an acre, you can do these things quite easily.
They put a water tank.
And then you take
All the uh gutters around your house because we get these crazy storms here.
And they just flow.
cost you a couple of grand to have it flow into a tank. The tank fills up.
Now you got extra water.
That's
Uh on an individual basis. We need to just keep making
All systems
That are required.
Redundant.
In capitalism.
We like to build one system
Because it is more affordable. So okay, let's make all the medicine
In China'cause this is the cheapest place to make.
You know, um
You know, PPE, the personal protection stuff, let's make it all in, you know, China may
And then we realized what not having a redundant supply system.
uh can do when things fail.
The American rugged individualism and self reliance is the solution to a lot of these problems. And we did a little document, you and I, we I for just remembered it.
There's something called porch.
Solar. Hm.
And and find the IKEA page for me and throw it up.
Porch solar.
And maybe you can even find the document we wrote uh for that shorty we never did.
There's going to be example after example, example.
Of redundancy.
Added.
To our lives.
And the one from India and other places where like you want to talk about the electric grid.
Not being
um stable or reliable, you know.
In emerging cultures, in frontier countries.
You can have a lot, a lot.
of issues.
uh with electricity so what people do now is they get porch solar
Porch solar. Here's a picture of it.
IKEA has gotten in the game. Ikea is a very smart
company. These people are, I dare I say, a brilliant company.

And if you look at the screen right now, plug in solar panels make the most of every sunny day.
Small systems, big impact with portable solar. I'm reading from the psychia, with portable solar panels.
You can take your first step.
Step into solar energy. Turn your balcony, garden, or terrace into a mini power station.
Simple, efficient, and sustainable.
Thanks to powerful stream.
storage and easy plug and play installation.
at the core of this and it d it doesn't look ugly.
It doesn't look pretty.
But you can fold one of these
Or put it on the side of your home without ever calling an installer.
You don't have to rip your roof, Bob.
You just literally put this
On your
Um
Porch.
Or you can put it in your backyard somewhere.
Yeah, and they call it SV Solar, SV Solar and IKEA, S V E. And you get a little battery pack. And what people are using these for, this is the page I wanna see right there. Look at these.
Um and these are in Euros, but
You know, it ranges from five hundred bucks all the way up to
Uh can't see it's too small, but
You buy these little battery packs.
Like the ones you might put on the back of your phone.
But bigger.
Like the size of like a suitcase. You get a couple of these solar panels, the battery is constantly filling up.
And um
You see they have stands there, like this uh little holders that you might use to like

This is an example of what
we need to do as humanity is just keep building redundant systems.
And then
When there's no central place to attack.
Yeah, okay, you turned off the main energy, but
Everybody's phone's running, their the refrigerator's running, and then we can
uh take load off of the main system. And that and that's one of the keys here is
The grid is constantly going to be challenged.
Every time somebody installs one of these things, they just take a little bit of
Um, drain off of the system.
And you're protected in the case of
An outage in California.
San Francisco, we have rolling outages all the time.
People get it. Uh, Genentech is the company, I believe, that makes these external power that uses Nat gas or kerosene. Those are
I think about
Ten K installed, twenty K installed.
These solar panels and batteries are a thousand dollars, you install it yourself.
Just keep making more of this stuff, folks. Get yourself a water tank.
Get yourself a protein supply, you get a couple chickens. When I was living in the Bay area.
People in the suburbs were raising chickens. I'm talking about rich people were putting chicken coops in, having their own eggs, and if things really hit the fan, could eat the chickens. There you go. If g if if if we're if we really are in the post apocalyptic uh
Which brings me to my next story, actually, perfect segue.
And by the way, if you're if you're Iran

Don't don't.
Don't make your situation even worse by
dragging another country into the war with you. I mean
The last thing they need is another country.
uh dropping bombs on them. Like why on earth would they start hacking the UK? I feel like they're calling our they're calling our blood. They realize that we don't want to go and send troops in there. We're not gonna do it. And so now they're can like oh we can get away with
Let's see.
Let's see what we can the UK's got some navy and like maybe the people of the UK are like well if you're gonna shut down our electricity
Yeah. Maybe we'll send a ship or two to the horror moves. They're they're they can be pretty intense, though with the stiff upper lip and all that. I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily poke them, but
I think Iran's feeling their oats right now. They're they're feeling it. What do we got? We got an off duty. We haven't done an off duty. We can do we can do uh there was one let's let's do one more one more uh kill drone story uh that I want to talk about. So this incident happened in Zuporizia uh in southeast Ukraine last month. A small Russian drone resembling a model airplane
It was trying to navigate to blow up a gas station. Instead, Jason it crashed into a wall, it exploded, it sent out shratel and killed three people.
Uh including a nineteen year old university student. Uh and now drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders, and a forensic team have examined the wreckage and they believe this was a fully autonomous drone. They think that Russia
gave it a overall target, hit somewhere near this gas station, and then the drone piloted itself there.
chose a target which was the propane tanks at the back of the gas station it missed, but that's what they believe it was sort of aiming itself for. Here's a quote from Ukrainian air defense minister Colonel Sergei Mineev. In a few years we believe we will be living in a terminator movie. It's no joke.
Machines are making decisions to strike.
Uh so I think the question on my mind is
Is this inevitable now? This is the future of warfare. We're under attack by autonomous kill drones. And do you think anthropic, now that we're looking back with the benefit of hindsight, did they have a point? Was this something maybe we should have avoided instead of now ushering in the era of autonomous kill drones?
There's plenty of laws about adding weapons to robots that some people are following, et cetera. The really interesting thing is um that Ukraine, which has severe um
Technical talent in it before this whole Ukraine Russia conflict.
Many startups, I know, had dev shops or offices in Ukraine.
And in fact they then had to
Try to figure out, I think it was Riverside or one of those streaming platforms, in fact, hadn't majority of the uh was either Stream Deck or Riverside.
somebody can look it up, had the majority of their developers, I believe, in Ukraine and then they
Had to get some of them out of Ukraine to keep their service up and running, basically.
Um Ukraine's now got the most
Robust.
Um drone.
capabilities of uh of any country, I believe.
With the possible notable exceptions of US and China, and they are now exporters of drones and
Mean I know this.
But now people are investing. Yeah.
In drone companies. Eric Schmidt.
uh the former CEO of Google
is now in the drone business.
American
Entrepreneurs billionaires are now investing in companies.
in the Ukraine to build drones and anti drone technology. This is a booming industry, no pun intended. Yeah. Uh yeah. I guess it's it's Restream. Restream is based in Kiev, yeah.
In some ways, uh there will be a silver lining.
To what is happening in Ukraine and Russia.
Which is the good people of the West.
are going to increase their ability to use drones and have anti-drone technology.
You know one of the greatest
Ways to stop drones is?
Nets.
It turns out.
People are putting netting over buildings and putting netting over streets. Yeah. And the drones are flying into netting and explosing. I saw that. There was there's a Ukrainian like town that did that where they have all these like tennis it looks like tennis nets up above the buildings that catch the drones as they go by. Yeah. I thought that's
Um
Incredible what to think of that like we're now in the um well, and this is interesting too, what we're seeing on their firing nets at drones. Yeah.
This is like, yeah, this is some like Batman utility belt thing. Uh I don't know which startup this is, but it's basically shooting a net.
At a drone. Um Okay, fine.
I don't think that this is the ultimate solution. The the really interesting one is
Uh Kimball Musk, a friend of mine, brother of Elon, has a drone company that does those beautiful drone, um drone shows. Sure.
Very tiny drones.
Coordinated. Right.
The the r the other really great way to do anti drone technology is
You use AI.
To watch for drones.
And then you send out these little tiny drones.
To just kamikaze them.
Just zip.
And run into them. So drones running into drones.
is the other great counter
Measure.
And um
Yeah, it's the next war, and you know, like if if this Taiwan thing happens, God forbid
I have a feeling like it's gonna be a bunch of humans in container ships.
running AI drones and robots against each other. It's gonna be very strange for us.
To comprehend in the same way uh when you and I were growing up and we watched Desert Storm and Desert Storm Two and all these things.
We're like
Wait a second. We're fighting the war from
You know, Boise, Idaho. Yeah.
with container ships with pilots
Doing
the original drones, you know.
Yeah, the predator drones and all that like nineties and odds uh technology. Yeah, exactly. Here we are, folks. Okay. All right, let's go off duty. Let's go off duty. You you told me there's something going on in the Star Wars until particularly close to me. Jake, if you could pull it up that I responded to.
Unthinkable how Star Wars seemed to be this massive, unshakeable franchise, and then Disney came along. And this is a sentiment I've seen a lot.
To me
I feel like this is not this is all of Star Wars history is an up and down. It it it's in, it's hot, everybody loves the most recent thing that came out, and then it's out.
The fans hate the most recent thing that came out. It's never been worse. And and we're always on, if you take the long view, I think Star Wars fandom is always like that. You know, people loved Empire, then they hated Return of the Jedi. People hated Fandom Menace.
But then they loved Revenge of the Sith. You know, people hated a lot of the Disney plus shows, but then they loved Andor. You know, like we're we're always on this ride. So I feel like it's a narrow view.
To be like Star Wars is at its lowest point ever right now. Uh, but I got I got I'll tell you, Jason, I got a lot of pushback. I got a lot of angry response for people who do feel like we are in the nadir. Uh some of the evidence points.
Mandalorian and Grogu, that new one that came out this summer, only grows 345 million worldwide in theaters. Even Disney concedes it came in below expectations. It was a budget of 145 to 165 million before marketing.
That was the first theatrical Star Wars release since Rise of Skywalker all the way back in twenty nineteen.
Uh also a a lot fewer shows coming out now on Disney Plus than we had. Ahsoka, uh, which I know you're a fan of, uh now the only active ongoing live action Disney Plus Star Wars franchise. It's back in January for season two. But we had stuff like Skeleton Crew, the Acolyte, which
Failed to make an impression and Andor is over. There's a new Star Wars movie coming out next year with Ryan Gosling, Starfighter from uh Sean Levy. That's May twenty twenty seven. But wh I'm curious as to what you think. Are we at a
historical low point for the Star Wars franchise, or is this just, you know, Mandeler and a Grogu didn't hit, maybe this gosling one did. It's just sort of a a uh an up and down thing. Uh the sequels were a disaster.
Hm.
Uh
Just straight up. They should have just gone with George Lucas's vision. Instead they
had no plan.
They had no good.
They
made three incredibly sloppy
Disjointed.
Um
You know, trio of films
That
If you're going to make a series of films, there should be some cohesiveness to it.
Uh there was like a a sprinkling of wokeness to it.
But the main problem was
They didn't use the characters that we all wanted to see. We wanted to see what happened to Han.
Luke.
And Leah.
And they wouldn't give us
Just the finishing of that story.
The Jedi temple and the Jedi School being recreated by Lou Skywalker, they
decided to go off on this crazy tangent with this new character that may or may not be a Skywalker, who knows who they are.
They screwed the whole thing up.
They need to take those three.
retcon them out.
Just burn'em to the ground and then give people what they wanted.
Which they're kinda doing with Ashoka.
Uh and they wanted to see Luke Skywalker.
Rebuild the Jedi Temple. When they did the Mandalorian, uh spoiler alert, and Luke Skywalker comes back as peak Jedi.
And he's getting Grogu to become one of his first students.
That's what people wanted.
They wanted to hear
Finish that story.
They totally screwed it up.
But there is redemption for them. The clone wars.
which I've watched with my children is exceptional.
And there's so much story there that somebody made their own film. It's called the Ultimate Edition, I think. I've been trying to get it because it's like one of these um fan edits. It's a five hour version of Revenge of the Sith.
That includes the Battle of Mandalore. It includes stuff from the Bad Batch, the Clone Wars, interdispersed.
into Revenge of the Sith and then they found the deleted scenes, anything, it's like a four or five hour thing.
That whole time period is the most interesting period.
like in Star Wars. It's it's it's arguably more interesting.
than the original
uh trilogy.
They just need
To do that live action with you and McGregor.
And Hayden. Hayden Christians.
And Hayden Christensen.
And Padme Natalie Port.
Now the Cormant.
Just do that.
Take the Clone Wars.
Make it a T V show.
Do five seasons.
Ten episodes a season, everybody will be happy, which is kind of what they tried to do a little bit with the Obi Wan series, which takes place between three and four. That's what they did with Andor, which takes place between three and four. That's what they did with
The what was the film that everybody loved? Rogue One, the one that starts. The Rogue One, the one that leads into the random leads in it. Yeah.
That's what everybody wants. Give them what they want. Well it's it's interesting you bring I mean the guy who created the Clone Wars, Dave Filone, he's he's the new Kathleen Kennedy running the whole thing creatively now. So I'm I we are gonna see, I think, a lot more.
Clone Wars references and that's gonna be much more central.
I think to the vision because it's Felone's
Dave Felone's givea I mean Felone will figure it out.
I uh in Felone I trust. Hopefully he has a better taste in spin offs than hats. I think the the cowboy hat he's that guy he's always in a cowboy hat, Dave Feloni of his. Yeah, he's great. Feloni's great. Because he's a you know what, he's a super fan and he
Like literally went to George Lucas and said, Like, you know, like here's what I want to do with the characters, you know, you tell me.
If this makes sense in terms of your vision and he had like this proper respect for it.
And then you go over to Kathle Kennedy and she was like literally took
the treatment that Lucas made and threw it in the garbage.
Kathleen Kennedy.
Destroyed Star Wars for a decade. Dave Filone's gonna make it great. Cathly Kennedy's a legend. That's not that's a baseball cap. It's I'm talking about the cowboy hat, Jake.
You see down the right. There it is. That's that's come on. T shirt, cowboy. Take that hat off. It looks ridiculous. No.
He's he's a genius. Dave Faloni is going to Kathleen.
Kathleen Kennedy, Disgraciada. Kathleen Kennedy produced so many of everybody's favorite movies. And then she ended her career an icon. She's a she was an icon. She destroyed her career with the sequels. Oh that's my position. That's Ben Shapiro's position. That's all You like them. I like sequels? I think no, I I don't uh
I don't love the other two. I I don't like the first one, F uh or Force Awakens, it's okay. I really like Last Jedi, and then I don't like Rise of Skywalker. I don't think J Abrams got it, but I like the Ryan Johnson one.
Yeah.
I you're you're like one of one.
Uh anyway, I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it when I saw it. There's a there's a bunch of fan films that are fantastic.
You mean the guy who does something for the
No.
There's a guy who does Star Wars theory. He's got over three million He's he's in sync with me and everybody else. Yes.
He's the guy who cried when Luke Skywalker showed up.
uh very famously you can find like the meme of him crying. Anyway, he has been doing
A Vader series.
And it's like a non profit fan series.
Uh, you can search for Star Wars theory. Yeah. And the stuff he's made two of these episodes.
They're just absolutely fantastic. He's got
Three million views already. This thing came out three weeks ago. The first episode of Vader.
He did um
I don't know, maybe five years ago or something like that. He he he gets all of the people
Who watches channel to donate to this. He does it as a nonprofit and he sells sabers. He is fantastic.
Interesting in an artistic way.
You know, endless merch and fan service and and sure, I mean that that Star Wars for for most of our lives, there weren't new Star Wars movies. It was just merch. It was just comics and books and video games and w stuff about the movies. Like I like when the movies take chances and move things in different
interesting. That was Andor took a chance. Exactly, exactly. That's what makes it interesting. And that's what Last Jedi does too. And like no fan film is ever gonna do. Because fan film are like, Oh, what if this guy fought this guy or and I'm not knocking like fan films are fine and they have their place and it's great, but like
All right, folks, there you have worst take. We got there. We were waiting for Lan's worst take ever.
Now we have Juan's worst take. The reason this is your worst take is because
They made Luke Skywalker
Like
They just
destroy Luke Skywalker's character. When he takes the lightsaber and throws it over his shoulder and he doesn't want to do anything
That's the opposite of who Lou Skywalker was. He was brave. He was bold. If he doesn't have any more things to learn, if he doesn't have any more to grow, if he's just like the ultimate greatest warrior of all time, that's not dramatically compelling. You can't make that.
That's just then there's no change. Stories are about change. It's about you face the obstacle and it changes you. So he had to he had to start from a place of weakness and grow back into strength. Stop digging, Lon. All right.
Literally you and Kathleen Kennedy are on and out. She and Brian Jesuit. They were right all along about that one. All right. Well we'll agree to disagree here on This Week in Startups and we'll see you next time. Bye bye.