Anthropic wants to slow AI down and Bernie wants 50%: JCal Reacts | E2297

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Grasshopper Bank https://grasshopper.bank/twist Vanta https://www.vanta.com/twist Render https://render.com/twist Plaud https://Plaud.ai/twist Today's show: Anthropic wrote a blog post calling for a global AI slowdown. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders wants the government to seize 50% of every major AI company's stock. Find out why JCal is reconsidering universal basic (or even high!) income policies, and why he thinks the 2028 presidential election will likely come down to AI policies. PLUS a live ComfyUI demo from founder Yoland Yan. Find out why the free-to-use open-source node-based platform has become a crucial part of millions of designers' and VFX experts' workflows, and how their tool has been used to create everything from "The Wizard of Oz" at the Vegas Sphere to those viral Coca-Cola holiday ads. Guest Yoland Yan: http://x.com/yoland_yan ComfyUI: https://comfy.org/ AI Models and Tools Ideogram 4.0: https://ideogram.ai/models/4.0/ Stable Diffusion: https://stability.ai/ LTX Video: https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-Video LoRa: https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/training/lora Google Veo: https://deepmind.google/models/veo/ Relevant Links: Anthropic: "When AI Builds Itself": https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement Bernie Sanders: "The Public Should Own Half of the Big AI Companies": https://www.sanders.senate.gov/op-eds/the-public-should-own-half-of-the-big-a-i-companies/ Bloomberg: "Sam Altman-Backed Group Completes Largest US Study on Basic Income": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-22/ubi-study-backed-by-openai-s-sam-altman-bolsters-support-for-basic-income Timestamps: 0:00 Guest 1: Yoland Yan, ComfyUI — live demo intro 2:06 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 4:34 Guest 1: Yoland Yan, ComfyUI — live demo intro 9:47 Grasshopper Bank - Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to https://grasshopper.bank/twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. 20:05 Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist 22:24 What is Outpainting? 30:01 Render - Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. 32:13 Jason's insider sales team advice 38:42 LA mayoral race: Bass vs. Pratt 42:25 Anthropic wants AI to slow down? 48:45 Will Sen. Sanders' argument resonate with the public? 59:39 Why 2028 will be the AI jobs election 1:05:32 Brian Chesky's new AI lab 1:15:21 Jason's "Mandalorian and Grogu" review 1:18:53 YouTubers take over the box office 1:24:16 Dean Potter vs. Alex Honnold Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Anthropic, they want to slow down global AI development.

• 0:03Jason Calacanis?

  What? Wait a second. Why are they doing this now? Didn't we just all go through this, that they withheld Methos, they're acting responsible? Now they're calling for a global pause?

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Shut down Claude then, if it's too dangerous. If not, what are you doing? You're the ones behind all of this development.

• 0:20Jason Calacanis?

  Bernie Sanders released a video. This is a completely insane, deranged concept. He wants to seize 50% of the shares of the AI companies. 2028, the number one issue in the election is not going to be inflation. It's not going to be wars. It's going to be AI.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  This week in startups is brought to you by Render. Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500 to $100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. Vanta, compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist. And Grasshopper Bank. Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to grasshopper.bank/twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account.

• 1:25Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to Twist. It is June 5th, Friday, 2026. With me again, the Lon Harris. How are you doing, brother?

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Hey, I'm all right. I'm doing okay. I looked a little banged up this week because I got a new dog and she clawed my face, but I'm feeling all right.

• 1:41Jason Calacanis?

  And we'll talk about it in off-duty. We'll also talk about the knickerbockers.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  The New York knickerbockers, yeah.

• 1:47Jason Calacanis?

  And my experience at Game One here in San Antonio. So, but let's get started. There's a lot in the news. I hate to, you know, too much small talk at the beginning. We put that at the back, like a mullet. Business in the front, party in the back. Let's get started, Lonnie Donnie.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  I think before we go any further, I think we should applaud our friends at Claude and point out we're both. Wearing our Plod pins right here. I've got mine. You've got yours. A million, a million uses for these Plod pins. That's what you discover new ones all the time while you're wearing them. Like I just, I adopted a dog named Barry this week and the whole time that I was talking to her previous foster mom about, you know, what she likes, everything. I recorded the whole thing with my Plod and then on the way driving home with her, I jotted down some more notes. I captured some more thoughts. So now I had a whole Barry adoption action plan written up by Plod, just because I was recording it the whole time.

• 2:43Jason Calacanis?

  I didn't even think about that. You go to see your doctor, you see a vet, you're doing something important. Trusting human memory, not a good idea. Trusting human judgment, great idea. And this is augmenting human intelligence. I found a new use this week for my Plod. I had it on my wrist. Today I'm wearing it on my shirt here. I had my Plod pin. You can also get the one that goes in the back of your phone. I was at the liquidity conference and I just left it on for the, all the programming.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Wow, yeah.

• 3:09Jason Calacanis?

  Now, after doing four hours of content, I have the entire live straight feed in my phone available to me. What they did at the conference was a very unique thing. It turns out Plod has had such a good experience at This Week in Startups that they went and did a partnership with All In. The liquidity conference was our LP conference this week. They recorded the conference, then every night they sent out the same link that you and I would use when we're sharing Plod conversations that have been recorded, mind mapped, summarized, action items, all that stuff. They sent it out to the 550, 650 people there.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 3:47Jason Calacanis?

  So it was a group Plod. Once again, we applaud Plod. I met the founder. He's awesome. Millions of users using this. It is a tremendous life-changing product. Give them the code.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  So if your work relies on conversations, we urge you to get a Plod note pin as.

• 4:02Jason Calacanis?

  Urge.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  You can check it out at plaud.ai/twist and if you use the code twist, you're going to get 10% off your new Plod pin.

• 4:10Jason Calacanis?

  10% off an already unbelievable, reasonable product. It's a great deal. All right, let's get started.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Let's get started. We got our first guest I want to bring up. We're doing an interview and a demo. It's Yoland Yen, the co-founder and CEO of a great tool that I use very often, Comfy UI.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  It's amazing to be here.

• 4:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, great, great to have you. Are you going to show us a little demo here to kick us off?

• 4:29Speaker 03

  What I usually tell people what comfy is, is the polar opposite of what a, you know, a ChatGPT or a Midjourney prompt box is. Um, over there, you have this black box of typing out the prompt, generating the image. Maybe it's not, uh, it's maybe it's what you want, maybe it's not what you want, but you change one word and everything changes. Comfy, on the other hand, give you a node-based interface. It's very complex, is something that people actually uh take a decent amount of time to to learn and now becoming a, you know, professional skill required in many studios such as Netflix. Um, and what it gives you is the maximum amount of control that you can change every single parameter.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Uh, and what I'm showing you over here, uh, for folks who are listening is this type of uh uh individual node that connects to each other and with all of the parameters exposed such as the noise with with height and then including the the prompt itself, which.

• 5:33Jason Calacanis?

  So we're seeing like a TikTok story here of a gentleman, uh, you know, um, skateboarding. And it obviously the dimensions are that of a TikTok story. But then you have multiple boxes connecting to each other and then you have all these variables as you're pointing out, not just the dimensions, but I'm assuming each of those objects or layers, I guess, was how Photoshop did it. Explain to us the concept here at a high level.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So the prompts, the the the text itself in here describes the entire image you are trying to generate. Uh, this is actually using a uh very new state-of-the-art uh open source image model called Ideogram V4. Uh, shout out.

• 6:18Jason Calacanis?

  Ideogram V4, it's an open source, uh, and is it out of China, the US, where is it from?

• 6:23Speaker 03

  It is out of a lab in, I I believe, Canada and US. Uh, it's uh actually a fairly.

• 6:30Jason Calacanis?

  I D E O G R A M, Ideogram, gone.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, they just dropped a new model this week. Uh, if you haven't taken a look, definitely check it out. Um, and then uh that the uh prompt itself is uh is describing what the final image is. What this model is actually really cool in terms of doing is you can set bonding boxes um uh to say like, hey, I want the image to be generated exactly at this portion of the place. So. Over here, there's a, you know, the description is a massive 3D fluff, white typography spelling of comfy. So as you can see in the end, it's all exactly generating around this.

• 7:10Jason Calacanis?

  And it looks like balloons and it's in the air. So this is what you don't get when you give a prompt lawn to stable diffusion or any of these other Gemini banana, nano banana.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Banana, yeah.

• 7:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's up to them to decide where everything's going to go. This is much more granular, saying, hey, I want the logo here. I want the person here. I want this font. And you're giving it a much more granular, I'll call them micro prompts within a mega prompt. So you have micro actions in a mega prompt.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  One analogy that YOLO and comfy have used a bunch that I really like is like it's like a slot machine with when you're engaging directly with the model. It's like 60% of the time, 70% of the time you're rolling the dice. Maybe it's going to get what I look like, but the more granular you can make the prompting in the early controls of the weights and the, you know, adding on Laura's and all of these other sort of add-ons with comfy, the more precise you can get. You can get what you want the first time without having to keep pulling the lever.

• 8:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and the lever takes, it would be like a slot machine that takes 90 seconds to tell you if you lost your money.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, exactly.

• 8:16Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty annoying as a slot machine.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  That is correct. And actually, one thing that people keep on emphasizing a lot of times is that for a lot of these other models, you know, that is behind a single prompt box. What you usually happens, even if you were to use exactly the same prompt, you don't have the reproducibility. That's because they actually hide most of the parameters away, such as the initial seed. So in comfy, what you can do is actually you set a fixed seed and this image and this generation would always be exactly the same. And that's huge for creatives that in the end they are able to reproduce exactly the imagery they were expecting or other people have produced for them and reliably using that in.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  You know, production environment or in the kind of scaling up the product. So I actually just queued up the job again, just to showcase that two of the image are exactly the same. But if you were to change the seed a tiny bit, and then in that case scenario, you're enabling the model to, you know, reuse a new noise to, to start the generation from the, from the ground up. And then in that case scenario, you actually get a, a brand new image in here. This is kind of a live generation demo of like how it, it's actually showing a pretty cool diffusion process of.

• 9:41Jason Calacanis?

  Is that prompt written by human? Or do you give an audio prompt with a bunch of details and say, make me a prompt? When you're a founder and you're moving fast and you want to close a big deal, a traditional bank can kill your momentum. Long approval processes, clunky outdated systems, not intuitive. I mean, some of these systems look like they were made in the 1970s and have never been updated. Not all banks are designed to work for startups. We all know that. And that's exactly why Grasshopper Bank was created. Grasshopper is a real federally chartered bank, but with the kind of financial tech stack that you'd build for yourself. They're going to open your new account in just minutes, not days. That's a key pain point. An integration friendly platform with real time transfers and AI tools that are going

• 10:24Jason Calacanis?

  to save you even more time, all without shrinking your budget on a bunch of unnecessary fees. That's where they get you. And because you're a valued twist listener, Grasshopper will drop a $500 cash bonus into your account when you use the promo code TWIST, T W I S T. Start building without the slowdown at grasshopper.bank/twist. Terms and conditions apply. Grasshopper is a federally chartered bank, member FDIC.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can do many ways. You can send, actually, there's more complex workflow in here where you can say, ask a Claude model to generate the prompt using this kind of a structure. So in the end, it will, like, you can give very simple prompts and you don't have to try write this entire thing. And then afterwards, it will give you a more structured version of this type of.

• 11:15Jason Calacanis?

  This is something people miss, right? That you, we were talking about on All In, David Sacks, in month three of us doing this like daily report on what topics are being discussed in the news that would align with. You know, the besties interest. We had trained a model. Here's all the besties interest. Here's what we've talked about previously, and then it went out and found new stories. Okay, great. But producer Nick had asked it, make me a prompt.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 11:42Jason Calacanis?

  And then Sax saw the prompt. He's like, oh, my God, this is incredible because it looks so structured. It looks so

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:48Jason Calacanis?

  Um, like a developer with, you know, um, OCD wrote it. This is like an OCD level gorgeous code. And it was like, he's like, no, no, no, I described the prompt I wanted. I got back the prompt. And nobody seems to know this. Lon,

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:05Jason Calacanis?

  People don't understand that the number one job of AI is to write the prompt. They're using AI like it's three fucking years ago. It's insane.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. And this is, it's one of the big things we too, we talk about with different models, like some models are great for things like prompt writing. And then when you take that and you feed it into another model, that model can perform so much better because the previous model helped you fine tune your prompt. So

• 12:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  That's why like operating it, you know, everybody gets sort of they like, oh, this is my favorite model. This is the one I use for everything. They're all good at different things like Claude is great at writing prompts, but not the best image maker. Then you feed that

• 12:38Jason Calacanis?

  Of course.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Your nano bananas or your ideograms or whatever. And like it's, it's, that's where I think a lot of the magic comes from that people miss who don't use these tools is like the combination of models.

• 12:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, very important. You'll in all this that you're building here. How do you run it? How do you run the prompt? Or does it change the prompt? Like if you said, change comfy there and make it orange. If we wanted to make the comfy in the sky orange for orange and blue skies for the knickerbockers. Well, how would you do that? And then when does it change? Like, does it refresh in real time? How does it work?

• 13:12Speaker 03

  So you, um, one, this is a very interesting, uh, thing for, for, uh, folks who don't know about comfy. Comfy is, uh, both open source and, uh, can run in a local environment. Um, uh, so for anyone who wants to just use their, uh, computer, whether it's a Mac or whether it's a Windows machine that has a decent GPU, they can completely download this for free. And run it in a local environment and use your own GPU.

• 13:41Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. So you're the hosted version of Comfy UI.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  This is the hosted version.

• 13:45Jason Calacanis?

  But I could download the open source version, pay you zero dollars, use my MacBook M5 with 48 gigs of RAM. I'm assuming that's enough?

• 13:54Speaker 03

  It's enough for some of the models.

• 13:56Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  You'd be surprised how big the model performance requirement is these days.

• 14:00Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So you probably need to have that. I think there's a MacBook now with 256? I don't think they've gotten to 512, do you know?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  I would actually recommend using Nvidia chips for running a lot of these models. It's a much better performance.

• 14:15Jason Calacanis?

  So what do you run?

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Uh, I would say, you know, just get as comfortable as you can buy a high-end GPU from Nvidia. If you were to run it locally, but if you don't, you can use cloud. And in that case scenario, you'll get access to a state of the art graphics.

• 14:31Jason Calacanis?

  Do people, I'm unsure of this, but do people buy an Nvidia GPU? Like a card that would go in a PC for gamers? And put it in its own enclosure and then attach it to their MacBook Pros? And have that as like an offloading point? I did see some enclosures when I was surfing around the internet.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's definitely a possibility. But a lot of times in those case scenario, they'd rather just rent or, you know, use a cloud hosted service as opposed to just doing that. There are actually studios out there that do use Comfy in a kind of enclosed environment. And sometimes it's because of privacy and air gap requirement as well.

• 15:13Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay. So you could be like literally running this on the flight to Japan if you had the right laptop. Wow. And so look at the detail level here. You've got, you know, 15 different boxes and arrows going in between them, connecting them. What are the arrows that we're seeing connecting all these together? Because you're just making an output of a silly TikTok video. But this looks like you're launching a rocket ship.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, the complexity definitely can scale up. So what I just did was going, taking one of the nodes that from the outside and then entering into what we call a subgraph, which is essentially a component that encapsulated a lot of the functionality and actually help some of the users to abstract the complexity.

• 16:00Jason Calacanis?

  So what are we seeing in here? Like you had that mega prompt and this is kind of what's going on under the hood. This is the detail level.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is the detail level. This actually give you control over everything. In here, you can decide on what model you're loading, what type of weight type you're loading it into because there's all sorts of different, you know, mechanisms. You can utilize the CUDA GPU and then including the certain type of configuration. So for example, this is a parameter called CFG, which is on the high level, kind of giving you how much of guidance. The the prompt itself is is is injecting into this model. So you can, you know, tune up, tune down that model itself.

• 16:48Jason Calacanis?

  Now, I don't have to to do all this level of granularity. I'm just basically looking at the granularity behind the prompt. And that's what's abstracted in current products like ChatGPT. But when I use Proxity Computer and it's doing these crazy searches, I don't know if you saw the interface I built on like Next Unicorn Salon. I just decided like I'm going to make my own Next Unicorns database of like who could potentially be a unicorn a year or two from now.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  I hope we're on there.

• 17:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yep, well, we'll see. I may have to adjust the prompt here and then insert you in there. But it has all, when you're running it, and I ran it for two hours last night, it had to collapse everything. But I could click and expand it and see what it was doing under the hood. So this is the same equivalent. Yeah, Yoland?

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so show us, show us a changing comfy from white in blue skies, a white logo to an orange logo.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just edited out here earlier and then now I run it again using the same configuration. And then the job will kick started. The model itself runs fairly fast.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Let's see if in the end it actually.

• 18:00Jason Calacanis?

  Does what you said.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:02Jason Calacanis?

  Here's a moment of truth, demo or die here on this week in startups.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Let me see if there are more blue. Ah, okay, there's vibrant blue.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  I'm playing around with a tool like this, Jason. It is a great way. Like, I, I think I got a lot better at making AI-generated images because I worked with Comfy UI early on. Because you learn about, like, what does every word of my prompt do? And like, how do these models, how are all of the different variables and factors going in to producing the final image? And like, you know, even like the setting he was just saying, like, how much fidelity do I want the final image to have to exactly what I wrote in my prompt? Versus how much freedom do I want the model to have to like, abstract a little? Like, you'd be amazed at how different your images will turn out just by tweaking a few of those kind of weights and things. It's a great way to like, see under the hood a little bit.

• 18:54Jason Calacanis?

  There's the orange, good filibuster. There's the orange in the background, though. Looks like we put the orange in the wrong part of the prompt. Let's move. I mean, I think we understand how the product works. This is industrial strength.

• 19:08Jason Calacanis?

  Levels of prompting. Oh, I see you have one here of me.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, 100%. This is definitely like, if there's one takeaway for the audience, this is basically a production level of a product that enable people to give that fine-grained control and quality for AI. Hence why the Coca-Cola ads, the recent like AI Super Bowl ads were all generated using Comfy.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  That's so real. I actually wanted to ask about that because you guys worked on the Wizard of Oz Sphere of Vegas show as well? Like, how, how is Comfy actually like, what part of the process is Comfy being used on? Like, how do you integrate into the process of making something massive like that?

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, we are the tool builder. We did not directly participate. I cannot pay credit over the Wizard of Oz on Sphere.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Accusing you of ruining the Wizard of Oz, Yola. Don't worry, don't worry.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't even know people were saying that.

• 20:05Jason Calacanis?

  The AI revolution isn't just creating new tools and new products. It's reinvented the entire landscape when it comes to compliance. Startups face an intricate patchwork of overlapping rules and regs from the EU, the United States, federal agencies, everywhere. It's coming at us from all angles. And if it sounds like a lot for you to track while you're also trying to build your business, well, you're right. And that's why you need a reliable, trusted partner like Vanta. V A N T A. Vanta's AI-powered platform automates your entire compliance process. Whether you're preparing for a SOC two, running an enterprise GRC program, or doing an audit, Vanta is going to worry about the security.

• 20:48Jason Calacanis?

  So your team can focus on building great products. That's why some of our favorite companies like Ramp and Writer, and they're both doing great, are spending 82% less time on their audits by working with Vanta. Whether you're a fast-growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance and earn and prove trust. So get started today at vanta.com/twist. That's V A N T A dot com slash twist.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  It was very cool because we were able to be fairly close with the studios that ended up working with the Google VO team and generating all of the results. So a very kind of simple scenario is using the VO model and Comfy together for upscaling. But you cannot just take a 1920s color film into full 32K video for a sphere screen. Because a lot of times where if you scale, let's say, this image into a sphere environment, what you're going to get is Jason's face being completely warped around the globe, and it just looked good for the audience.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  So in that case, they had to outpaint. They had to create.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  Imagery that never existed before in this film. So that's the case scenario. They utilized Comfy's power in here to run all sorts of parameters to figure out, hey, what would be the best option of outpainting all of these imageries? And sometimes I have to be generating characters reacting to the main character talking and all of those things. And you've just got to make sure that the highest quality and control is there. And hence why Comfy is utilized in that environment.

• 22:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So what are we seeing here? You took a screenshot of me talking or is this from a previous episode?

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, this is from a previous episode. And I actually wanted to show because we are talking about the outpainting process. This would run a while. I can rerun it again, but this is a input, input video of Jason talking. And this is, you know, a TikTok type of a video itself. But what Comfy was able to do in the end, using the LTX open source model is that it looks very complex. I'm not going to explain the whole thing. I actually, funny enough, I like, I don't even know the whole thing. Like, so I just excuse to say I'm not going to explain it. What happens in the end is this ended up outpainting the entire video based off of the input.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  So it's guessing your arm, guessing all of the background, what happens over there. This might look like the original, you know.

• 23:29Jason Calacanis?

  It isn't, but you filled it in, you're saying?

• 23:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a.

• 23:33Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, this reminds me.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Based on the TikTok image, they guessed at what is on the outside edges of your screen.

• 23:40Jason Calacanis?

  There's a couple of accounts, Lon, that do this on the internet for, and they make tall versions of Star Wars or Goodfellas or Sopranos. I don't know what they call that meme, but it's to basically Sopranos in vertical.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. Well, there's, there's in painting and out painting. In painting is when you put something in the image that wasn't already there. So like, we could replace your microphone with like a dog running around the table. And then outpainting would be extrapolate beyond the parameters of the original frame. Like what's going on on the sides or in the background or like Wizard of Oz at the sphere, like what would? The rest of Kansas look like, other than that little window of Dorothy that we see?

• 24:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and it's not perfect. Like, it put me in a short-sleeved shirt. Obviously, I'm not wearing a short-sleeved shirt. But that's okay. Like, that's something you could change, right?

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a part of your problem. You can change all of the parameters in here. Yeah, and then all sorts of crazy things you can do. You can utilize the model. And this is actually using a ChatGPT image model to take this input video and then transform you into-

• 24:43Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, this was single de mile. Yes, there I am.

• 24:48Jason Calacanis?

  Hilarious.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Senor Calacanis.

• 24:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So, Yoland, where is all this going in terms of as a business? You know, you are building on top of open-source models, other people's frontier models. You're building these tools, you have open source. Explain to me the contours in the audience of how you're architecting strategically your business in a world in which people are saying, like a Neo Fight investor might be like, isn't this just a wrapper? What if, like, OpenAI does this? And then, explain. So there's the wrapper criticism you'll get. Not that I would give that, because obviously we can see there's a level of fidelity here that, you know, we don't think OpenAI or Anthropic are going to get to in interface and tools and user base.

• 25:33Jason Calacanis?

  And then the second piece is, you know, after it. So first, being a wrapper. Second, open source as a weapon or as a liability? Those are the two things I'm curious about. Take it in whichever order you want, Yoland.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are great questions. I would say, from the first perspective, in terms of whether Comfy is a wrapper or where is the business going fundamentally. Comfy, actually, there are many layers in here. Comfy underneath the hood, the reason why we are able to run these open-source models is Comfy. At the core is an inference engine. It actually do the calculation. So there's a very-

• 26:17Speaker 03

  A deep technical layer in terms of how we can efficiently run these model. And for folks who actually understand the training and inference difference in here. There's a huge gap in terms of what inference engine has to do to unlock these models capability and value and speed. And those are the area where we say, like, would say it's actually fairly difficult to build a inference engine, especially the most popular diffusion model inference engine. Comfy as an open source tool is actually the top, I believe, seventy most popular GitHub projects out there by, you know, kind of the amount of stars ranked.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  And then another component in here is at the core. Comfy has this open source and extensibility nature. Anyone can write a custom. Inside Comfy, people can bring their own code and connecting with different components. Whatever people don't actually have in the baked in version of Comfy, they can easily just use Claude and write a version of that code and bring that into. And that's a huge, huge strength. In, in, especially in agentic coding world. What you're seeing is people be able to easily build their own component, customize their pipeline. So at the core, Comfy just want to be that foundation layer of a, what we call operating system for

• 27:47Speaker 03

  generative AI, visual generative AI.

• 27:50Jason Calacanis?

  Have you raised a ton of money for the company? And where are you at in your journey? I mean, obviously, AI has gotten very hot. This is an incredibly verticalized tool that people who are in the arts and who are making social media clips all the way up to, you know, you know, whatever's going on at the Wizard of Oz or not, and Coca-Cola and Super Bowl commercials. This has got a large group of people who are interested in using it. So tell us about the pricing for the product, how that's going, consumption base, per seat, yada, yada. And then how's the fundraising going?

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Pricing itself is, we have the local is completely free. You can. Actually use local while using some of the close source models using our API platform as well to to speed up your generation. And that you can just pay us as you go. And then on the cloud version, you have, you know, the basic tier of $20, $35 and $100. Depending on different usage, like a different kind of demand, you get different amount of usage in the end. And then on the enterprise side, we do offer a kind of more customized solution in terms of enabling enterprises to get, you know, the the tier of

• 29:03Speaker 03

  features and security they need, and those are kind of based off of sales.

• 29:08Jason Calacanis?

  And you raised 30 million from my pal David Sacks over at Kraft?

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, we.

• 29:15Jason Calacanis?

  Not that he did it, because I know he's been pretty busy.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  The UI czar, David Sacks.

• 29:19Jason Calacanis?

  UI czar, David Sacks, meme, meme czar.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was fortunate to meet him once. But yeah, we raised from Kraft's most recently 30 million round at 500 million post. Yeah, so I think on that end, we're pretty excited and looking for correct engineers and, you know, operators to join our team.

• 29:43Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Yohan, great job. Everybody can go to comfy.com. Do I have the domain correct? What you got?

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Comfy.org or comfy.com.

• 29:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, love it. And so it's comfy. And, you know, sometimes the founder has first name at the domain name once in a while. Big cloud providers may offer you cheap compute, but you'll end up paying the difference in engineering costs and hiring extra developers. You don't want to waste time configuring virtual networks. None of us do, or your access policies. You want your team building your product. So it's time to look at Render. Render is the all in one cloud platform for developers that allows you to deploy, scale and secure your apps and agents with zero ops. Most cloud platforms ask you to split your focus between product and infrastructure, or they force you into platform constraints.

• 30:36Jason Calacanis?

  You know you're going to grow in six months, but just connect your GitHub repo to Render and you are live. Web services, cron jobs, the whole stack in one platform. It's time to find out why 5 million developers are already using Render. 5 million. Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program. You'll get anywhere from $500 to $100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and who your backers are. That's render.com/twist. Who do you need to hire right now? I see you got a bunch of people actively working in the set from Office Space. Is that the film? What was the film, Lon?

• 31:15Speaker 00

  I mean, I think you're thinking of Office Space. That's the one about engineers and they're in Austin and the guy gets.

• 31:21Jason Calacanis?

  The red stapler?

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's Office Space.

• 31:25Jason Calacanis?

  In your nondescript office with the drop ceilings. Is that a video you made with Comfy? Or is that the actual office?

• 31:34Speaker 03

  That's the actual office.

• 31:35Jason Calacanis?

  Where are you guys based?

• 31:37Speaker 03

  We are right next to the bridge. You can't see it.

• 31:41Jason Calacanis?

  The Bay Bridge.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Bay Bridge.

• 31:43Jason Calacanis?

  Great location. If you want to be right in the heart of it all.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:48Jason Calacanis?

  Go work for Yolanda. What are you looking for? What's the top hardest position you need to fill?

• 31:52Speaker 03

  I think all across the board, definitely on the most urgent need on our end is scaling up our sales team and also our front-end development team.

• 32:06Jason Calacanis?

  So you have a go-to-sales motion that you need to get going.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Yes, we are actually only able to process above 100K inbound requests so far because of the.

• 32:18Jason Calacanis?

  Let me give you a tip. You're trying to do this in San Francisco, build the sales. Big mistake. It's just you're up against so many lunatics right now who are going to overpay salespeople because a lot of these sales executives have families. And a lot of them have worked at Google or Uber or Salesforce or Oracle, you know, like major comp places. And so they tend to, I'm not going to say entitled, but they have high expectations. You know, I this is my best piece of advice. Are you a first time founder or second time founder?

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Uh, first time to get to this stage for sure.

• 32:56Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay. So congratulations. Number one. Number two.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 32:59Jason Calacanis?

  Um, what a lot of savvy founders do is they open a remote office in a place where other people have already done so historically. And added salespeople who are grinders. What's an example of that? Somebody like HubSpot, Spotify, um, Yelp. And I remember the place they loved to do it long. Was a place where you can golf, you can raise your family, it's got great weather. And there's people who are college educated, but not so educated with graduate degrees that they want to be the CEO of the company and take your job, Yoland. That place is known as Phoenix, Arizona.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 33:39Jason Calacanis?

  Or Salt Lake City, Utah. Or, you know, um, pick up Austin, Dallas, Houston. There's tons of salespeople, grinded out salespeople who are awesome. And instead of wanting to get paid $300,000 and 1% of sales, they would prefer to get 75K and 8% of sales. In other words, they'd rather bet on themselves than force you to pay a huge salary because their home costs 500,000 and it's already paid off. That's my best advice is to explore that. And the way one of my, one of my companies did this, the way they did it, they told the story here on this week in startups. And now that we have AI, we can go into the 2000 episodes and find it.

• 34:25Jason Calacanis?

  What they did was, it's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard. They put out ads in four different cities for salespeople. They put a range of positions, they put a range of salaries. Then they set up in the airport Marriott. And they said, hey, we're going to be in town at this day, you know, I'm just picking like airport, you know, the easy airport. So they just landed there in the morning, all afternoon into the evening, they did recruiting. Where they, for the previous couple of weeks, said, hey, we'd love to interview you, come anytime on this Tuesday or Wednesday. The next day, so they, let's say they started in Salt Lake City, next day they went to Boulder, next day they went to two cities in Arizona, next day they went to Austin and Dallas.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:11Jason Calacanis?

  And then they just collectively looked at the resume flow and who they fat, who they met. And they said, you know what this town, and I think it was in Arizona town, is the most amazing fit because Yelp was paying people 50K base with a 50K package, which 100K, and this is 15 years ago, they did it. It was one of the most brilliant ideas I ever heard. Most CEOs who are not of action would be like, I'm going to hire a consultant. This one was like, F it. Two weeks of time, sent the COO, parachuted in himself, said, we have to get this working. Give me five cities, two days in each. And I want to see the salespeople. I want to get the vibes. I want to understand how, and they, they lost their mind. Don't tell anybody this technique, Johan.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  And don't, don't spend more than

• 35:57Jason Calacanis?

  This cannot get out.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  And don't spend more than 48 hours in Phoenix. Not recommended. That's the max. It's max out of 48 hours.

• 36:04Jason Calacanis?

  No, Vegas was one of them too, actually. And my friend Tony Shay, rest in peace with Zappos. He did a similar thing where he was looking for where to play Zappos. And he found all these people who were, as customer sports agents, were completely thrilled with a $40,000 salary. This is in 2005.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Right. He had that whole plan. He was going to like build a whole tech hub in downtown Vegas, I remember.

• 36:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And that, rest in peace, Tony Shay. But Tony Shay was a genius. And this was his big secret. He wanted people to be happy. And what he realized was people were profoundly sad in a lot of cities that had extremely high cost of living. When he found downtown Las Vegas, he found an abandoned city next to the greatest, you know, home developments, downtown leisure, gambling, shows, restaurants, a boomtown. And in the middle of boomtown was a just dilapidated old town with these gorgeous buildings.

• 37:10Jason Calacanis?

  And he bought the old city hall and put Zappos into it. Genius. It was so close. And this was the genius of Tony. He knew how to make people happy. He optimized for the happiness of his staff, not his own. He didn't want to live in Vegas. He was a billionaire. He could live anywhere he wanted. He could place the home and he could live in Kauai in Honolay Bay. Steady said, where can I make 40, 50 K customer support people happy and give them a 10 K bonus? And have them be like, whoa, this is significant. Las Vegas. All right, everybody. YOLO and great job.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, we do appreciate that.

• 37:45Jason Calacanis?

  Really excited. This is a, it's a type of tool, Lon, that makes me want to stay up all night and try it. This is the problem with this moment in time.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  That was my exact experience with comfy UI when I, when I first started using it was, yeah, you, you, you, you suddenly realize, because you could type things directly into stable diffusion and see what you'd get. It would, it would not, it was not a great experience, especially in 2021, 2022. But as soon as you start using this tool, you start playing around with it. Oh, my God, I could start to get better images. I could start to get more fidelity for what I'm looking for. And it is, it was that kind of tool that you would stay up till 4 a.m. like playing around with just, just to see what you could do with it.

• 38:20Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, what's the poly market for today? Because you and I, I did a hit on Jesse Waters last night on Fox. You were helping me prep and getting me up to speed.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:28Jason Calacanis?

  On what's going on with all these elections in my, both of our previous hometown of Los Angeles. Shout out.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  You want to, you want to take a look at that Los Angeles mayor, the election odds on polymarket?

• 38:40Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to understand what's going on here because they had the results of the runoff primary, whatever they call that. It's a primary.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, the California governor race, or there's the, there's the mayoral election. We were talking about.

• 38:51Jason Calacanis?

  This is what I want to know. I want to know if they're going to let Karen Bass burn the city down or Spencer Pratt's going to have a chance to save it.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Well, uh, it's, I mean, things are, things are looking not so great for, for Spencer Pratt right now. I, I'll look up the most recent Bass, Ramon.

• 39:05Jason Calacanis?

  This doesn't make sense to me. I, I'm going to go put money on Spencer Pratt just because if he wins, I'm going to have a great sense of joy that an outsider won who actually cares and who had his home burnt down. I like the narrative. This is Karen Bass who burnt the city down.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  What I'm seeing right now, the most updated numbers, the, now that's the polymarket. The actual numbers right now.

• 39:28Jason Calacanis?

  And the polymarket says 66% chance of Karen Bass.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Bass eventually becoming LA mayor with Nithya Ramon at 31%. Spencer Pratt at a measly 4%. Now, the, the actual numbers right now, Bass has the lead. 35.1% of the vote, then Pratt 29.4% and Ramon at 23.4%. The thing to remember about California elections is that they are, their laws are designed to get the most number of ballots in possible. So there's all kinds of like, you can mail your ballot and as long as it's postmarked Election Day, it counts. So think about like, the mail might take an extra four or five days to get that ballot to the counting center, they still have to count it.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  And there's other rules too, like if you, if there's a signature mismatch, like when they're looking at the ballot and your signature doesn't match right, they don't just throw that ballot away, they send you a notification and you then have 10 days to resubmit. So all of these rules end up pushing back the deadline. That's why it takes so long to count votes in California and why things seem like they're so back and forth.

• 40:39Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta tell you.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  Go ahead.

• 40:41Jason Calacanis?

  Long.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Tell me.

• 40:43Jason Calacanis?

  4% chance, Spencer Pratt. I might have to put five dimes on this.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  I think we were talking about this, here's like, when you're talking about California, you're talking about it's so heavily weighted to Democrats. There's so many more Democrats per capita that Republicans have to do exceptionally well, like they have to go way over the top and be not-

• 41:07Jason Calacanis?

  But he's a Democrat.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Spencer Pratt?

• 41:09Jason Calacanis?

  He's a Democrat.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  I mean, he's been appealing to-

• 41:11Jason Calacanis?

  Of course he is.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  I think, you want to know what I think the other big problem for Spencer Pratt is? Is that a lot of the neighborhoods where he has the most appeal, they don't actually get to vote for LA mayor. Like, if Santa Monica and Beverly Hills got to vote, we probably see a lot more support for Spencer Pratt, but they're not part of Los Angeles, the city technically, they have their own mayor, so they don't get to vote. So I think that would make a big difference too.

• 41:36Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, I can tell you about California. There's like, it's the opposite of, it's the inverse of Texas. We have like a little drop of blue called Austin or purple.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  I always like-

• 41:46Jason Calacanis?

  And then, it's like you just drip, Orange County is a drop of red, so it turns like orange, but everybody there is a Democrat.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Texas politician Rick Perry describes Austin as, "It's the blueberry in Texas's tomato soup." I always liked that.

• 42:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right, that's disgusting, but I would say it's the blueberry in the, somebody dropped a blueberry in the strawberry rhubarb pie. Let's lightning round some news here.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  In big news this week, we're going to talk about this. Anthropic, in a blog post on Thursday, they said they want to slow down global AI development. An odd thing for Anthropic to say.

• 42:22Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, their heads of internal research and policy wrote that slowing down the pace of global AI development would, and I'm quoting, "likely be a good thing." They warned that AI models are showing the capacity to self-improve, recursive self-improvement, as they call it, without human intervention. Here's another quote, "We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology."

• 42:53Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, you know, listen, I've been traveling, Knicks games, liquidity, Napa, Yombeau, French Laundry, I've been living the life of J. Cal for the past week, which is a crazy vibe.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  I saw your photos from Bouchon, I'm very jealous.

• 43:05Jason Calacanis?

  I'll take it, it's incredible. Anyway, I'm a bit exhausted. I saw this go by my Twitter feed, I didn't understand exactly what was going on here. Wait a second, why are they doing this now? Didn't we just all go through this, that they withheld ethos, they're doing their thing, they're acting responsible? Now they're calling for a global pause?

• 43:26Speaker 00

  And they're...

• 43:27Jason Calacanis?

  Do you realize that Bernie Sanders is going to make this into a campaign ad to combine with his desire to seize 50% of the equity in Anthropic?

• 43:38Speaker 00

  The timing is bizarre, it seems crazy. It's also, they're on the verge of like an IPO, right? Like, part of me feels like if Anthropic genuinely thinks that AI is too dangerous and we need to slow down, it's like, well, you first, buddy. Like, you're leading the, like, shutdown club then if it's too dangerous. If not, what are you doing? You're the ones behind all of this development. It just seems like, I don't know how you square that circle, I really don't.

• 44:06Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, they have the ability to slow down, and they did. And they did it correctly, apparently. You know, we interviewed Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks at Liquidity, and he said they were one of the early companies, obviously, cybersecurity space. They looked at it and were able to...

• 44:28Jason Calacanis?

  In their using of Methos, they were able to find a lot of internal attack vectors and close them, he said.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:38Jason Calacanis?

  And I said, was, is it the real deal? And he said, absolutely. This was a level that was of performance to find bugs that we had not seen before. So they did exactly the right thing. They don't need to call for a global thing. Now, please combine this story, Lon, with the other story I had asked you to put on the docket. I don't know if it made it because we had a couple of

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had a few missed shows, yeah.

• 45:00Jason Calacanis?

  Do you remember the Bernie thing that came out, I believe on Monday, that I commented on? Bernie Sanders released a video. This is a completely insane, deranged concept. He wants to seize 50% of the shares of the AI companies. And he doesn't say like, these three companies, he just says AI companies. So does that mean, you know, everybody, Nvidia shares, whatever? Let's play a little bit of this on 1.5, 1.5 speed, please.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Share sound.

• 45:33Jason Calacanis?

  We got to speed up Bernie Sanders because he wants, if you put him on 1.5 speed, that's the speed that some of these entrepreneurs talk at. Hello, everybody. I probably don't need to tell you that artificial intelligence

• 45:46Speaker 04

  will be the most transformational technology in the history of the world. It will profoundly affect the lives of every man, woman, and child in our country and in fact throughout the world. It is already bringing significant changes to our economy, our democracy, our emotional well-being, our environment, and how we educate and raise our kids. There is also a very real fear that as AI becomes smarter than human beings, it could eventually function independent of human control with potentially catastrophic consequences. The question is not whether AI will change the world. It will. The question is who will own and control that future? Who will benefit from it and who will be hurt by it? Will AI be used to make life better for working families?

• 46:28Speaker 04

  Will it help us eliminate poverty, extend life expectancies, and help us solve the climate crisis?

• 46:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, it will.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  Or will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have developed AI to become even richer and more powerful than they are? That is the fundamental choice before us.

• 46:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  And let us be clear. AI was not created out of thin air.

• 46:50Jason Calacanis?

  This is the point where he's gonna crush it.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  The foundation of AI is our collective human intelligence.

• 46:53Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, training data.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  The foundation of AI is our collective human intelligence.

• 46:58Jason Calacanis?

  Where do they get it from?

• 46:59Speaker 04

  Our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images, and ideas spanning generations. As Sam Altman himself acknowledged, AI models were trained on our, quote, "collective experience, knowledge, and learnings of humanity," end quote.

• 47:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, that's true.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  The reality is that big tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their AI models without permission, acknowledgement, or compensation. In other words, the creative work of millions and hundreds of millions of people has been stolen by the wealthiest people in the world. The time has come to reclaim what was stolen from us.

• 47:34Jason Calacanis?

  How are you gonna do that?

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and other billionaires, or the venture capitalists and Wall Street firms who see AI as the next great wealth-extracting machine.

• 47:50Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  And that is why in the coming weeks, I will introduce the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America through a one-time 50% tax, not on profits, but on stock. It would do two extremely critical things. First, it would give the American people a direct role in determining the future of this technology. No longer would the future of AI be dictated by a handful of big tech oligarchs while the rest of the world sits back and watches them do what they want. Secondly, it would guarantee that the trillions potentially created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us, not simply to make the richest people on earth even richer. And I have to tell you, this is not...

• 48:34Jason Calacanis?

  So basically, he advocates for 50%. This is one of the great arguments that I think will play with the American public. Why will this play with the American public?

• 48:46Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody knows that AI companies stole people's IP to train their models. How do we know that? There are an infinite number of lawsuits and settlements that have occurred and are still underway.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and if you can see it, like if you ask, you know, OpenAI, give me the plot of Wuthering Heights, like it knows it, it can, it read that book and knows what's in the book and can spit it back out.

• 49:09Jason Calacanis?

  Or, or it read a summary of the book from the OpenCrawl, etc.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:15Jason Calacanis?

  So, the fact is, this has already been done. Now, The New York Times has a big lawsuit, other people have had lawsuits, settlements have occurred. So he has the high ground on this one with the American public. The American public understands this. And if you're going to scare the bejesus out of us and say, over and over again, we're taking your jobs with AI,

• 49:39Jason Calacanis?

  for him to combine it with not only are they taking your jobs, but they stole all of humanity's knowledge in order to steal your jobs, in order for personal enrichment. I'm not saying I agree with this argument. What I'm saying is, the public's going to agree with this argument and it's going to have an, it's going to get consensus from the left and the right and some moderates.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:05Jason Calacanis?

  Because it's plain as day that they took everybody's content without permission. That's a true statement. Now, is it legally permissible to train your AI on somebody else's content without their permission? The courts are going to adjudicate that issue. They have started to adjudicate it. It looks like some amount of training on people's content is going to be allowed.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:29Jason Calacanis?

  That's where the courts are signaling.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  So far, the precedent seems to be, you're not allowed to steal copyright material to train AI. So like, you know, Anthropic found like that vast archive of like bootlegged books and then they downloaded it and used it. That's against the law because those were bootlegged and you're supposed to pay for content. But if you legally access copyrighted material, you're allowed. To train your AI.

• 50:53Jason Calacanis?

  So if you bought the book, ripped it apart, scanned it.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  You're allowed.

• 50:57Jason Calacanis?

  That expense you can.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  You're allowed, and it's the output. So far, that's what courts have determined is if an AI output infringes on a copyright, that's actionable. But if you trained it upfront on a copyrighted material, and then it reconfigures it and comes out with something original, that's allowed. That's what so far. I mean, we, there are certainly a lot more lawsuits working their way through the courts that could change that. But that's the precedent so far.

• 51:22Jason Calacanis?

  This is, this appeals to people who feel that rich aren't paying their taxes. It appeals to people who believe intellectual property should be protected. This appeals to people.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:34Jason Calacanis?

  Who feel like jobs are going to go away in a large part in order to enrich other companies. And it's going to unite America first, America only. You know, the sort of most MAGA of the MAGA.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:49Jason Calacanis?

  But I think it's kind of a separate movement now. I think it's going to appeal to them.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Well, yeah.

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  And I think, I know it's going to appeal to the left.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  We discussed that.

• 51:56Jason Calacanis?

  They are elitists who make content.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  There are, there's a real split going on in the political right. On the left, basically, everybody is against AI. On the right, it feels like there is this very direct split between like the pro-business, the big tech side of things. Your JD Vances, your Peter Thiel's, your David Sacks's. They're, they're very pro-AI. They're pushing this very accelerationist agenda. And then you do, you have the Steve Bannon, sort of more traditional MAGA side. And they do seem to have a lot of doubts, both sort of ethically, morally, and, you know, the same kind of stuff that Bernie's talking about. Like, is this just going to take everybody's job and funnel money exclusively to the wealthy and sort of kill the free market?

• 52:40Jason Calacanis?

  I got a prediction.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  I'd love to hear it.

• 52:42Jason Calacanis?

  I think Anthropic and OpenAI. Are going to sit down with Bernie Sanders and say, we're willing to put 10% of our equity

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 52:51Jason Calacanis?

  Into Invest America account, Trump accounts, or dedicated to public service in some way, job retraining, etc. And that would be a non-trivial amount of money. It's trivial in a $40 trillion of debt for the country, right? If you just seized all of these companies combined, it would equal 25 trillion.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:12Jason Calacanis?

  Right? If you took every, all the top public companies, just literally seize SpaceX, seize Tesla, seize Nvidia, seize Google.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Like a South American communist.

• 53:21Jason Calacanis?

  That would be 20, it wouldn't even be 20 trillion. So you cut that, yeah, if you nationalize it, you take 20 trillion, and of course, that would crater the stock, so you wouldn't have 20 trillion. But anyway, it's ridiculous. It's not gonna, it's insane, but it's gonna play. It's going to play.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  I think it's directionally correct, and I think that's what most people get like. And I think this is an opening salvo, you know, like Bernie's opening at 50% of the stock. I think it's a negotiating position. You open at 50, the other side says 10, well, now we're in a dialogue. But I think, directionally, I think most people agree this is something Americans would like to see. And I think it has the extra benefit of Americans are so negative about AI, they're so dubious about AI, there's so much anti-AI sentiment. Well, if everybody started feeling a little bit more of an ownership stake, if we felt like if AI companies do better, I get more money, or my local school district gets more

• 54:20Speaker 00

  money, or my city gets more money, I think that's, that makes it a lot more compelling for people to have a, to have a little exposure to it, a little taste of their own.

• 54:29Jason Calacanis?

  And here's the challenge. If you were to go through the top three AI labs, Anthropic is going to be in Bernie's camp to a certain extent. They're not going to agree, they, I think, correct me if I'm wrong here, Anthropic has done licensing deals and settlements. With publishers before, I believe OpenAI started doing some. So they have tacitly, through their actions, agreed with Bernie Sanders' position that it was trained on copyright materials without permission, because they've done settlements and they've done deals and they sought after deals to get AI, at least for the output. I mean, in fact, I got paid

• 55:11Jason Calacanis?

  $2,500 for my book, Angel, I believe by Microsoft licensed it for four years or something. So that's underway. OpenAI has a nonprofit that's going to own some percentage of their trillion dollar market cap. I don't know the exact percentage that they own, but they actually have the vehicle to do this. They could just say, okay, Bernie, we have this OpenAI vehicle, we're going to take X percent of our revenue and we're going to put it into job retraining, universal healthcare, UBI, some version of that. Sam Altman ran a UBI test, a long-forgotten UBI test. He funded with Y Combinator in Berkeley. So you have,

• 55:54Jason Calacanis?

  Sam Altman believes in UBI and in fact did the largest test of it, I believe, outside of like, say, Alaska giving money to their citizens. So he did the most recent, most strongest test run of it. Then Elon has tweeted.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  "Universal high income via checks issued by the federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation."

• 56:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so this is Elon Musk's belief. Elon's belief, OpenAI's belief, and Anthropic's belief is there'll be job displacement to some extent, right? They're all predicting it.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 56:38Jason Calacanis?

  So who are you going to believe? And these tweets and these positions are well-known.

• 56:45Jason Calacanis?

  Bernie Sanders is going to be able to say Anthropic believes in job displacement is going to be massive and we should pause it. OpenAI's founder, Sam Altman, ran a UBI test. I asked for that, please pull it up. OpenAI NYC, under Sam Altman, ran a UBI test. He believes that we're going to need to get universal income. Elon believes that jobs are going away and they'll be optional and they'll be universal ones. So here it is, Sam Altman puts 14 million into studying universal income. And what's the date of this story?

• 57:16Speaker 00

  This is from May 7th, 2026, so just a month ago. Now says it's really useful, but not what we're going to need for this next phase.

• 57:24Jason Calacanis?

  He did this study through Open Research in 2020.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 57:29Jason Calacanis?

  Scrolled right past it, yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  No, I got the details. The three-year study gave 1,000 low-income adults $1,000 a month, while a control group of 2,000 people received just $50. Researchers expected to see whether steady cash would reduce motivation to work. Instead, they found something different. Participants actually reported valuing work more. Belief in the importance of work rose slightly, and many agree with statements like, quote, "Work is a duty towards society, and people who don't work turn lazy." At the same time, people worked fewer hours on average, but they did not stop working. They used the financial cushion to make decisions about their careers, like going back to school, pursuing certifications, switching into jobs that have more long-term potential.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  One participant said the extra money allowed her to take a temporary pay cut for a role with better growth opportunities. So the research ended up concluding, it's not about laziness, the reason that people worked a little bit less, it's the flexibility of being able to make larger-picture decisions about how and where they wanted to work.

• 58:34Jason Calacanis?

  So what Sam Altman's study?

• 58:38Jason Calacanis?

  proved, and it was a small study, but not an insignificant one, No. was if you give people a small amount of money, not enough so they can quit their jobs, but a small amount, a thousand dollars a month that might cover half their rent, I'm guessing, that gives them more flexibility. Yes. And they might make a career choice that is more long term as opposed to short term. They might be working as a waiter or bartender at a great restaurant where they make three hundred a night, but they're never going to have a career, but they're going to make this seventy five thousand dollars a year. Whereas if they joined, say, an associate in training program Right. like we run here, they might get paid sixty or seventy, they might be ten K less. Yeah.

• 59:20Jason Calacanis?

  To start in year one as a researcher, but you're learning and you're in the room where it happens. This is all to say that there is going to be a reckoning, and the reckoning is going to be twenty twenty eight, because by twenty twenty eight, that election, I'm predicting now, the twenty twenty eight presidential election will be the AI job displacement election. Let me state it again. Twenty twenty eight, the number one issue in the election in nineteen, in twenty twenty eight, the number one deciding issue, it's not going to be inflation, it's not going to be wars, it's going to be AI. And is AI a net positive for Americans or is it negative? And the attack vector for the twenty twenty eight election will be,

• 1:00:05Jason Calacanis?

  these companies became worth trillions of dollars while jobs went down, a small number of elitists in Silicon Valley benefited, venture capitalists, the workers at these companies, of course, the founders and co-founders. And the way that we're going to resolve that issue, I predict, is with the ability to take all of these social programs and have a grand bargain. I believe it's time for a grand bargain. What should the grand bargain be? I believe the grand bargain should be anybody making under $100,000 a year, $75,000 a year, play, maybe it's under 50 pays nothing, under 75 K pays a 750%,

• 1:00:49Jason Calacanis?

  token amount to the government, flat rate, no deductions, no nothing, just send your 750 in, you're good. And then something similar, you know, from 100K and under, maybe it's like $2,000, you pay a token 2% of your salary to the government. If that were to happen, that's one concession on the K-shaped recovery. The rich doing better in the top of the K, the poor doing worse, the non-equity holders. Second, we already have one solution, which is Invest America, AKA Trump Accounts, that has said, hey, your kids are going to have a stake in this equity. Then another grand bargain emerges. And this grand bargain

• 1:01:27Jason Calacanis?

  is the hardest to do, but could be revolutionary long. If we said, here's what all the social programs cost, food stamps, unemployment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:01:43Jason Calacanis?

  Give me that number, whatever that number is. Anybody making under 50K a year gets a percentage of that pool. Everybody making under 40K a year gets a percentage of that pool, 30K a year gets a percentage of that pool. Is it UBI? Kind of, but what we're saying is get rid of those programs. Stop operating food stamps. Just give people the money.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Jason Calacanis?

  Just give them the money.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  I think you'd get Democrats and Republicans to agree on that as a principle. Like, I don't think anybody's married to these elaborate bureaucratic nightmare systems that we all have had bad experiences with, or mostly, everybody knows somebody who's been screwed over by one of these agencies. We know how wasteful they are. I mean, in Los Angeles, you hear about all the time, the groups that are supposed to be helping the homeless, but it's just graft and they're just like losing half the money. I think most people would understand, just if you gave everybody a check, you wouldn't really need to worry about those programs. I think we get so caught up in the sort of merit-based idea of it, you know, every time Democrats want to pass a social welfare program, it's like, well, it only goes to people, you have to make less than this, and you have to apply this way,

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  and you have to meet these five criteria, or just think about when you're paying your taxes in California. Do you qualify for any of these 2,000 extremely complicated too complicated. exceptions that nobody knows if they actually qualify for? If you forgot all of that and just gave people money, I think that would be an obvious solve for a lot of these issues. It makes total sense to me.

• 1:03:14Jason Calacanis?

  SNAP, SSI, all these means-tested programs is, I think, the fancy way of saying it. There's housing, there's unemployment, Medicare, Medicaid, everything.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  And it's all means-tested, and it's all very complicated and convoluted, and the people who need help don't necessarily get it. Other people are defrauding the system or taking advantage of it. If we just got rid of those systems, or the government just passed AI profits on to the American people, I think that solves a lot of problems, and it simplifies everything, which is obviously better.

• 1:03:46Jason Calacanis?

  Here's my big idea. You take all these social programs, they're all means-tested, they're all complicated, they all take a ton of paperwork, and they take a ton of administrators. Millions of people are figuring out how to give billions of dollars to Americans. There's a much simpler solution. If you didn't make any money this year, if you make no money, you get a percentage of all those social programs. If you made 20,000, or 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, maybe it's up to that number, 40,000, let's say, maybe 50, max. You just get a percentage of that pool. And so we take that pool, and we just give it directly to people in a simple UBI check. But if you make more than that amount, you come out of it, and it's done on a scale.

• 1:04:30Jason Calacanis?

  Then, in addition to that, you would be able to

• 1:04:35Jason Calacanis?

  Get rid of the 30% of waste, fraud, abuse, and then probably another 30% in administration. I'm guessing it's less than 50 cents of a dollar that actually gets to people.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Yes, of course.

• 1:04:47Jason Calacanis?

  After those two things.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  Right. And that's what, oh, anytime you go back and pick apart like a well-intentioned social welfare program years later, that's what you figure out. It's like, oh, we spent 70% of the total budget just on the people counting up who gets what and dealing with the paperwork and operating the office that needs to be open. Like, you know, if you think about like, I don't know if you've ever had to go to the Social Security Administration Office. I had to get my-

• 1:05:12Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's a joke.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  I had to get my card replaced one time. And it's hours of waiting. There's 18 people working there. It's like, what are we doing? What are we doing? I'm doing the SNL Tucker Carlson. What are we doing?

• 1:05:23Jason Calacanis?

  What are we doing?

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  What are we doing?

• 1:05:25Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, so anyway, I think this is kind of a very interesting moment in time.

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. We got Kevin O'Leary agreeing to shrink his data center project. It's kind of similar to what we just talked about. And then we've got Brian Chesky's new AI lab that he's found.

• 1:05:39Jason Calacanis?

  Hit me with Brian Chesky.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  All right. So Brian Chesky, of course, Airbnb co-founder and CEO. He's going to remain on as the Airbnb CEO, but he's also founding a new lab that is going to develop AI models. The focus, at least for now, is user interaction and design. He won't serve as this new lab CEO. He's going to stay on at Airbnb and just sort of dip a toe into this. So here's the big argument. He argues that AI for travel specifically is going to need a richer interface. It's going to need better designs. He thinks people don't just want to go to like a chatbot and have a conversation about their trip. They want a more bespoke, designed, customized experience. And so it looks like that may be what some of these

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  models are going to sort of play into. Of course, Chesky notably was a design major in college before founding Airbnb.

• 1:06:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we had a company early on, even before, I think, ChatGPT 3.5, and it was called Rome Around. It was in batch 28. And if somebody can find.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  I think we looked for that before, and it's already gone. We did this in a previous episode, and I don't think Rome Around still exists.

• 1:06:51Jason Calacanis?

  Let me finish my sentence. If you check YouTube, you'll find it, because we have the demo day of it.

• 1:06:58Jason Calacanis?

  And I just did a search for it. So we had a company, Rome Around. This was an AI travel planner. It went through our accelerator, batch 28, I believe. It was before ChatGPT 3.5 came out. So this is when you had, I think, 2.5, and you could use it as an API, but not as the public. It was an incredible, incredible pitch. Everybody loved it. It was like number one. And the team, I think, wound up giving, if my memory serves me correctly, they gave us the money back. Because they were like, oh, you can just do this in ChatGPT. And I was like, you know, I still want all the great parts of this. Let's see if we can scrub to the moment when they demoed the product here.

• 1:07:40Jason Calacanis?

  And this is a very tactical and practical, important lesson we're going to talk about. When you're a founder, should you

• 1:07:48Jason Calacanis?

  persevere or not? Should you persevere or pivot? Here is the Rome startup. That was in an early accelerator class pitching. What date was this, Lon?

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  This would have been September 20th, 2023.

• 1:08:05Jason Calacanis?

  Roll the tape.

• 1:08:06Speaker 05

  Hey, everyone. My name is Shai. I'm the CEO of Rome Around. Rome Around is an AI concierge in your pocket. So you ever feel like you need a vacation from planning a vacation? Introducing Rome Around. Rather than spending days planning a trip, enter two days in Barcelona. We'll create a complete and actionable itinerary for you. If it's not perfect, you can say something along the lines of, it's our anniversary. And we'll iterate the itinerary to recommend romantic restaurants, beach blogs, hot air balloons, etc. With all that time saved, you can say add a beach day. You can see day three in Costa Brava has been added. Now that it's perfect, you can request it to be translated to Spanish. And then, once it's done, you can share via SMS, WhatsApp, email.

• 1:08:49Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, multiplayer mode. Oh, so much.

• 1:08:53Speaker 05

  You're probably asking yourself, aren't you just a ChatGPT rapper? Well, leveraging our first movers advantage, we've accumulated millions of.

• 1:09:01Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, this was like me going back and forth with the founder, begging them to keep spending our money, to raise money. And I just said, you know, yes, you're going to be accused of being a rapper, but don't let that get in your head. There's so many things around the model and there'll be so many twists and turns on this journey that there is a business here in doing this. And now Brian Chesky is like, you know what? There's so much of a business in AI with travel. I need to make a dedicated model. Rome Around probably would have made their own vertical model based on an open source one. Or they could continue to build features and a rapper's not a bad thing. The Corvette or the, you know, a Cadillac. Cadillac is a rapper around the Corvette engine today.

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 1:09:46Jason Calacanis?

  It's the Corvette's engine in their high-end Corvettes.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:09:48Jason Calacanis?

  In the high-end Cadillacs. Does it make it a rapper or not? Like Jaguars and some other cars have other components in it. It's a rapper, but it's also a brand and it also symbolizes something. It has a look and a feel and a texture and a brand value. Yeah, of course, people use ChatGPT, but what if there's other features in here like a human in the loop?

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:07Jason Calacanis?

  Beg them, please, please, please don't give us your money. Keep going. Because it was such, you know, it's like we're talking about 500K. I'd rather see the founder go for it, but they did what I think is also a mature decision. If they don't have the want, desire, stamina, belief, and they have a different belief than me as the investor that, hey, it's just not worth it and it's not worth my time, the opportunity cost. I have to say, okay, it's not my choice. But anyway, this was heartbreaking for me.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's kind of the same thing I would say before. It's, it's, it's the magic for me, I think, is multi-model. Like you, you use different models and different, you know, tools for the different parts of the trip. And so one service that could pull all of that together would probably be the magic rather than just going to ChatGPT and asking it, what else should I do while I'm here in Rome or whatever?

• 1:10:55Jason Calacanis?

  That being said, if I'm Airbnb and I'm a shareholder, I'm on the board, I'm an institution with a large holding, I'm going to ask. Brian, hey, can Airbnb put the first hundred million in and buy 10% of the company? In the case you figure this out?

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:11:14Jason Calacanis?

  And have a perpetual license to it for Airbnb to use?

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:11:18Jason Calacanis?

  But then the question becomes for Brian, and this is like, you know, no conflict, no interest. If this actually works and it's great and he put his cycles into it and Airbnb didn't collect it, or Expedia wants to use it, or Uber wants to use it, and One Fine Stay wants to use it, or Hilton wants to use it. Okay, are they going to let Marriott and Hilton use it if they're competitors or not? So just all kinds of conflicts, all kinds of interesting things will emerge. And he's gotta get some skin in the game for the Airbnb shareholders, I think. But he's super smart, he's an incredible designer, a design-first LLM, frontier language model, whatever it's going to wind up being, a verticalized one. I'm here for it, go for it.

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah.

• 1:12:03Jason Calacanis?

  Walk on, he's smart.

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  If it's even a language model, I mean, we don't even know if it's an LLM or if it's something else. I mean, there's, at this point, I think we're, we're reaching the point where a lot of people are feeling like the LLM has sort of, we, we know what it can do and we've sort of worked out most of it. And now we're sort of picking around with world models and other kinds of models. So I don't even, you know, I don't know for sure if this is an LLM or something else.

• 1:12:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Layla, a travel discovery and booking app, purchased Roamaround.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  There, yes, that's right. Don't, no, R.I.P. Roamaround.

• 1:12:31Jason Calacanis?

  I go mental every time I go down history like this. This is my gift and curse as a, as an investor and supporter of founders. I believe in them so much that when they give up or they fold, they collapse shop, you know, which is their decision, as I said, and my decision. I always think, oh, God, if we just persevered for six more months or one more year.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  Travel is so tough. I feel like that's one of the tough, everybody wants to do a travel app.

• 1:12:57Jason Calacanis?

  But they were, they were at it in 2023. This was three years ago long. We had them in the accelerator. Can you imagine what the Roamaround would have done in three years? If the founder came back to me. Tomorrow and say, can I come back to the accelerator? I have another spin on travel. I like that guy, Shay. He was great. I remember talking to him in the parking lot at Bucks after our closing dinner, closing lunch. Had J. Cal's onion rings, might have even predated J. Cal's onion rings being on the menu officially. It might have been off menu item and I'm just talking to him and talking to him in the parking lot and he's, he's struggling with this, right? This tension and I was like, just stay the course, stay the course. You know, like if there weren't questions, there wouldn't be an opportunity. So it's on a tactical and practical moment here.

• 1:13:42Jason Calacanis?

  As a founder, persevering in an important category is, I believe, the, the correct decision 90% of the time. If it's a big market, if you got a lead, if you got cash in the back, you can do pivots, of course, but I think you should persevere and pivot your way to success as opposed to give up and giving the money back. I always appreciate a founder's like, hey, this isn't here, but we're going to give the money back or these are my next two ideas. Would you vote in favor and be supportive of me pursuing either of those or both?

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:19Jason Calacanis?

  That's this moment in time. If you raise money, and this is a message to founders and investors. If you've invested in and the founder has raised money for one vision and you believed in them for that vision and they have the maturity to say, that vision I don't believe is achievable, but I want to pursue this one. I believe that is how great startups are built, which is trusting the founder's instinct, letting them collect information and let them make a hard pivot or a micro pivot or a complete, we're shutting this down and we're going to try this with the money that's been invested. Why? The money's already in the company. By the time you return it,

• 1:14:57Jason Calacanis?

  everybody's getting back 10, 20, 30 cents on the dollar. The money's already been pot committed. Let's play the hand. Let's see if the founder can figure it out.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Jason Calacanis?

  I love a great pivot. So many great companies are built around them. So. That's just my little tactical practical summary.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  There you go. Roam around. R.I.P. We'll miss you. Should we go? Should we go off duty? I feel like it's time to go off duty. All right. So there's a ton. Jacob wanted me to ask you your thoughts on Mandalorian and Grogu. I know you wanted to talk about this HBO series you've been watching. Take, take your pick. I got a dog that beat me up. You can take your pick where you want.

• 1:15:34Jason Calacanis?

  Mandalorian and Grogu was a great season of excitement and fun without lightsabers, without getting into the Skywalker saga or the Disgraciad sequels, episode seven, eight, nine. Just a lot of fun, a lot of great characters, a lot of great Easter eggs for the fans. Just great summer fare. You bring your family, you know, a six, seven, eight, nine, 10 year old's gonna love it and, you know, the Gen Xers are gonna love it, everybody in between. Incredibly well done. Jon Favreau is a genius and the guy who took over, Filoni.

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  Dave Filoni, Dave Filoni.

• 1:16:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he's also a genius and I love these characters and it's a lot of fun. Sigourney Weaver piloting an X-Wing is just like incredible. Now, some people might think it's like a season of Mandalorian and they're correct. It was literally the season of Mandalorian. They made it into a movie. I don't mind it. My bigger idea is that I think all these series should come out in movie theaters in extended versions or two weeks before they're on. So if you have a nine-episode Mandalorian series, I think you should be able to watch it two days before it comes out on the streaming service. So if it comes out on Monday on the streaming service, Friday, Saturday, Sunday,

• 1:16:58Jason Calacanis?

  you should be able to go see it in theaters and then Monday you can watch it. This would create a way of having community. That's what I want to see them do. I would imagine if they did that for The Sopranos or a peak television show where you could go buy a $15 ticket and go see Breaking Bad on Friday, Saturday night, and then it came out Sunday night. Incredible. People would pack the theaters.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  They have done some stuff like this. Stranger Things, you could go see the finale of Stranger Things Netflix played it in cinemas.

• 1:17:28Jason Calacanis?

  Before or concurrent?

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  It was the night, like the night that the series finale debuted on Netflix. That night, you could also go see it in your local movies.

• 1:17:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I got a better idea. Two nights before.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  Well, there you go.

• 1:17:41Jason Calacanis?

  And the community would go crazy. So what I think you do is you play the previous episode. With like five minutes of bonus material you can only get in theaters. Then you play the new episode, five minutes of bonus material you can only get in. So you're getting 10 unique minutes. So you can show up 60 minutes into this double header.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:00Jason Calacanis?

  And watch the previous episode with a little more in it, or maybe an interstitial between the two episodes. And then you watch the new one. It would bring back theater because, you know, secession. Industry, all these ones have great communities and people want to go share their fandom.

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  Severance. People would have gone to see the Severance finale in theaters for sure.

• 1:18:20Jason Calacanis?

  No, but do it for every episode and add five or 10 minutes.

• 1:18:23Speaker 00

  Well, I like where your head's at because I do, I mean, part of my whole thing has been you save movie theaters by mixing it up. Like it's some first run things, it's some classic things, you could show all kinds of stuff in movie theaters. It doesn't just have to be original first run movies. And I mean, we're already seeing like if you have YouTubers that start to make movies. Those can also become huge hits, back rooms.

• 1:18:44Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well, take me off duty with that. My understanding is there's a movie, there's two movies in theaters that what blew past.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  Mandalorian and Grob.

• 1:18:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. The first one is Obsession. I actually saw this one the other night. It's by a guy, YouTuber named Curry Barker.

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  He and his friend Cooper Tomlinson, they used to do sketches. They were doing YouTube and TikTok sketches. And then they started doing these horror shorts. They did one called Milk and Cereal, like serial killer, S E R I L. That was, that was, that was pretty well received and they just built up it and then they made this $100,000 movie Obsession. Or maybe, maybe a little bit more than that. I'll have to look it up.

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  That's making, you know, Ted's the number one movie at the box office. It's become like a, you know, cultural sort of phenomenon now.

• 1:19:29Jason Calacanis?

  I want to see it.

• 1:19:30Speaker 00

  It's really good.

• 1:19:30Jason Calacanis?

  Now I need to know.

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  It's really, it's really well done. The concept is very simple. Uh, this guy finds in a magic shop, this like device that you can make one wish on. He's in the friend zone with this girl who's in his friend group that he's got a crush on. And so he just offhandedly makes the wish. I wish she was more in love with me than anyone else on the whole planet. And he breaks the thing.

• 1:19:52Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  Then it turns out it's real.

• 1:19:54Jason Calacanis?

  Obsession.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  It really has magic and she becomes terrifyingly over the top obsessed with him in a psychotic and frightening way. And the, the actress, Indy Navarrete, who plays the, the girl who he makes this wish about. It is an incredible performance. I mean, she goes to places that are genuinely very scary. Uh, and then the other one is this movie called Backrooms, which is, this is a, going back a few years now, YouTube, one of those like creepypasta online things that this guy, Kane Parsons made, who's now, I believe, the youngest director in history to have a number one film at the box office. He's like 21 or 22. Uh, so he just made a big screen version of this online meme trend. It's about people who get caught in this sort of liminal space.

• 1:20:39Speaker 00

  The back rooms where it's yellowed and it's just sort of endless hallways and it's kind of creepy and unsettling in a way. And, you know, in the movie, I haven't seen the movie. I'm sure there are monsters and things that pop up. But yeah, taking these ideas from the internet, you know, like the idea used to be IP. We always thought about IP, but I think our thinking about it was very narrow. It was like, well, Transformers is IP and Star Wars is IP and Severance is IP. But what I think especially Backroom shows is IP can be a popular YouTube video if enough people have seen it and feel enthusiastic about it. Like Gen Z will show up to, to a theater to see something they like, but it doesn't have to be this like very pre-established IP like we think of them where it was a TV show that was on for years.

• 1:21:24Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, listen, this is going, we're going back to Easy Rider days, um, of the movies, which is a young generation who has not. Been at the helm of movies before gets the helm and starts delivering. And their contemporaries say, you know what? I'd like to hear some new stories. This could be the revival of the movie industry. If these YouTubers can make something for a million and have it generate 100 million in revenue, which is, is that what obsession is going to do?

• 1:21:53Speaker 00

  Obsession, it was 750,000 was the budget. It's so far grossed over 166 million globally at the box office.

• 1:22:01Jason Calacanis?

  So now I want to know what the, what their take is of that. Cause you can self distribute that crazy.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's Blumhouse. So they're, they're sharing it.

• 1:22:11Jason Calacanis?

  So Blumhouse just made.

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  With Jason Blum, yeah.

• 1:22:14Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so he made 50% of every dollar, I'm assuming is. And so this is pretty amazing. And Blumhouse has now figured it out. A24 has started to figure it out, which is there's a place for one to 20 million dollar budget movies. I think their largest one may have been 50 or 60 million.

• 1:22:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Jason Calacanis?

  This is the future and you don't need to get everybody to go see it. There was a product called Blair Witch Project. Back in the day that cost 100, 200,000 to make and also did something similar. Incredible. 166 times the production cost. This feels like a business I want to get into. I would love to start a movie studio. I've talked about that before. I have a syndicate. I have my own money. I would love to independently distribute a film like this.

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:22:58Jason Calacanis?

  That would be the interesting thing. Cause the people, what's the one of the crazy clown?

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  Oh, Terrifier, Terrifier.

• 1:23:05Jason Calacanis?

  Terrifier. My understanding is Terrifier self distributes. Art the Clown.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  Art, yeah, the Art the Clown, right. That, they're a small production company that sort of has been, they started doing like roadshow things and then they grew it out sort of organically.

• 1:23:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but they control the means of distribution and own that Terrifier Art the Clown, which is disgusting and I tried to watch one and it was just way too gross.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, no, they're brutally, the gore is like the whole thing. They're really brutally gleefully violent.

• 1:23:34Jason Calacanis?

  Beyond gore. It's like, it's unrealistic, but it's just too much.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's really intense. Uh, yeah, so Damien Lyon, that's the creator, uh, writer, director of these movies. And, uh, yeah, he has his own independent production company, Dark Age Cinema.

• 1:23:47Jason Calacanis?

  But they distribute it and their idea is to go directly to the movie venues and say, hey. Will come up with a deal that's bespoke for us.

• 1:23:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:23:56Jason Calacanis?

  They don't have to go to Blumhouse or Paramount or wherever you would go to.

• 1:24:00Speaker 00

  They partner with Screambox, which is like bloody disgusting, that website that's their streamer. But that's still, I mean, they're a, they're a small independent company compared to like the Blumhouses, which has a universal deal, you know?

• 1:24:12Jason Calacanis?

  There's a great documentary called The Dark Wizard. Have you watched it yet?

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  I have not. I was gonna try to watch it last night because I knew you wanted to talk about it, but then I have this, this new dog at home and she.

• 1:24:24Jason Calacanis?

  You can play it in the background, the trailer while I, while I talk over it. It's about an artistic, autistic guy who climbs and does free soloing. You all know Alex Honnold. This was Alex Honnold before Alex Honnold. And he's a challenging character, not always likeable in his pursuits. And the trailer has him jumping off of a mountain while free soloing. You'll notice he has a backpack on when he does that. And then they show later in him doing base jumping, which is when you jump off a cliff.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:07Jason Calacanis?

  So he's free soloing, he's base jumping, and then he also does slacklining. He's a true artist. He's a sensitive guy. And he's obviously like Alex Honnold, probably on this spectrum, which makes you able to do things like hang off a cliff without a rope. And it gets into the competitive nature of these two individuals where Alex Honnold comes out and he starts taking all the routes that the principal character in this film, I'm forgetting his name right now.

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  Dean Potter, Dean Potter.

• 1:25:41Jason Calacanis?

  Dean Potter. So Dean Potter's 10 years a senior, basically. Dean Potter's been doing all these things that are making people love him and sponsor him. And then this guy.

• 1:25:53Jason Calacanis?

  Alex Honnold comes in and takes all the things that Dean Potter wanted to do and just crushes them like it's just unfairly stealing all those records, doing all the things people predict Dean Potter is gonna do, but Dean Potter is not the athlete slash performer that Alex Honnold is. So this kind of over emphasizes their competition, which they were friends, but it does show commerce coming into art.

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:26:26Jason Calacanis?

  And making people do unnatural acts and competition leading to suffering and something I've always talked about with Alex Honnold, which is I think a lot of what he was doing would be just as notable if he used a top rope or, you know, some amount of safety gear. There's no need to do this without safety gear. Um, and I guess people have.

• 1:26:49Speaker 00

  The gimmick. Yeah. It's like, it's that makes it exciting because maybe he'll die, you know?

• 1:26:54Jason Calacanis?

  I don't like that as a gimmick because life is precious. Just like I don't like these people, um, Ocean Ramsey, uh, swimming with the great white sharks and the bull sharks in Hawaii and like taunting them in my mind, riding them. They're not meant to be ridden, Ocean Ramsey, and you're not meant to chum the water and jump in with them.

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Jason Calacanis?

  I understand that this is the hook, but I don't like the hook personally.

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  Eric.

• 1:27:20Jason Calacanis?

  I'd like to see them use some basic, basic safety.

• 1:27:24Speaker 00

  Pull, pull this one up too, Jacob. Speaking of commerce sort of coming in and intruding here, I saw this from pump dot fun. They've got a new, uh, pump dot, you know, pump fun. They're the, the meme coin sort of service.

• 1:27:36Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:27:37Speaker 00

  They've got a new thing called go. Uh, and it's basically you could pay people to do crazy things anywhere around the world with this service. I, I compared it to like that movie Money Plane or like Squid Game where people are betting on these people doing dangerous things or unwise things or crazy things. Yeah. It's a little bit like Rent a Human, but to, to put people in purposefully disturbing or difficult.

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  or crazy circumstances do things they wouldn't normally do with the the offer of these payouts.

• 1:28:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  It's dystopian. I feel like this world feels this world that we're creating now bounties for, you know, doing things in the real world that you might not want to do. It it it unsettles me. It it really unsettles.

• 1:28:23Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So Pump Fun is letting people put bounties on behaviors that are silly and or.

• 1:28:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:32Jason Calacanis?

  It's true.

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  An all encompassing bounty platform where anyone can create or complete bounties for any task for unlimited rewards. It's the any task part that strikes me as like the funny, the the weird.

• 1:28:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is kind of Running Man Black Mirror. And is it anonymous? So like, because it's a crypto group of people, you can say, I want

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:56Jason Calacanis?

  pay you $10,000 to hang off the Golden Gate Bridge?

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  I I.

• 1:28:58Jason Calacanis?

  And nobody knows you put the bounty there?

• 1:29:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I I mean, I I'm assuming like they they they don't say specifically, but yes, I how to create a bounty. Connect your X account and wallet, create your bounty, set a description, timeframe and deliverables. Submit your bounty payment into escrow. Pump Fun reviews bounty submission. So that's it. There there's no.

• 1:29:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:29:18Speaker 00

  There's no public face disclosure. It's just if you have an X account and a crypto wallet, you're in.

• 1:29:24Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, we we have things like Fiverr or the other places where you can hire people, Upwork, etc.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  Rent a Human.

• 1:29:32Jason Calacanis?

  And there was TaskRant.

• 1:29:34Speaker 00

  Agent can rent a person and have them do something.

• 1:29:37Jason Calacanis?

  There have been other platforms that do this. You have Fiverr, you've got Upwork, you have Rent a Human, which we had on the program where you can rent a human to have your agent do different actions for you or check work. Great. What's challenging about this one is I know which way they're going. They want people to do disturbing things in public. Now, if it was streaking, okay, that's illegal, or I don't know, you run around in your mankini and you do something like Barat. Or Borat, like, okay, maybe it's funny, whatever, but it always goes too far. And then there's always somebody who gets hurt in this equation. So the people who make these platforms have to be very thoughtful about it.

• 1:30:19Jason Calacanis?

  And it does dovetail with Alex Honnold and Netflix having him climb a building without a rope. I thought this was negligence on Netflix's part because nobody in their right mind wants to see him die. Yet everybody's tuning in and they're promoting it because he might die. We don't want people dying. That's the human spirit. I mean, the human life is so precious. Don't do these crazy stunts. What they should have done with him is they should have had him do it and had a net that was, say, 10 floors below him that just rose with him. And they say, listen, he's doing it without a thing, but if he falls, he's going to take a 10 story and he's going to get caught by the net.

• 1:31:04Jason Calacanis?

  It's still exciting. It's still exciting. And you know what? Then he can fall so he could do more challenging things. Would that be the worst thing in the world to watch him scale one of these crazy, you know, buildings and make it even more extreme? Have three people do it and have it be a race and have them fall and the net is following them up the building?

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26Jason Calacanis?

  And then if they fall, they can jump back on the building and they're five stories behind.

• 1:31:30Speaker 00

  I do think part of it is, as sick as it is, I think there is that human impulse to like, like people looky, looky loos on the freeway if there's an accident. Like, I think people are more curious because there's a chance this guy might actually bite it if he falls.

• 1:31:46Jason Calacanis?

  I think Alex Honnold even, he's got kids now, so I think, or that last I heard. So, all right, listen, this has been an amazing episode of This Week in Startups Twist. We'll see you on Monday. Bye, bye.

• 1:31:57Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:32:17Speaker 06

  in investment. Apply now at founder.university/twist. Already have traction? The Launch Accelerator invests $125,000 and connects you with 500-plus investors to help you raise your next round. Apply at launchaccelerator.co. If you're an accredited investor looking to gain access to quality deal flow, apply for Jason's Angel Syndicate at thesyndicate.com. We find two to three deals a month. And check out This Week in AI, Jason's experts-only roundtable with top AI founders and operators every week. Find it thisweekinai.ai. Check out the TWIST ticker, our daily newsletter, at thisweekinstartups.com/ticker. Thanks again to our sponsors for making today's show possible.

• 1:33:02Speaker 06

  Follow the show on Instagram. Follow the show on X.com. This Week in Startups publishes three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5:00 PM Central Time. You can submit an audio or video file question by emailing it to thisweekin.com.