Amazon's "Age of Efficiency," LLM distribution, AI wearable worries, and more with Elad Gil | E2197

Today's show: *Amazon's dropping a LOT of employees for AI and robots… are Jason's darkest predictions coming true? Legendary investor Elad Gil joins Jason and Alex for the full show today! Together, they're digging into the Amazon news, looking back at Jason's predictions from just last month, and theorizing about just how many people will lose their jobs to computers, and what we're going to do about it. (Is it possible the US hasn't been massively hit by job displacement so far because those gigs already moved overseas?) PLUS… Anthropic's Dario Amodei responds to criticisms from JCal's bestie David Sacks, Sesame emerges from stealth to work on AI wearables, and where will people in the future interact with their favorite apps? A headset? Phones? Somewhere else? The great debate continues. Timestamps: (00:04:04) Our guest is iconic angel investor Elad Gil! What's he working on… (00:04:54) Alexandria AI translates public domain books into all commonly spoken languages… Do people actually prefer AI translations? (00:09:16) Why compute tends to centralize over time… (It's because of economies of scale!) (00:09:29) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (00:12:49) So are we building TOO MANY datacenters? Will AI apps eventually run on your phone anyway? (00:16:39) Jason says "The Age of Efficiency is upon us." (00:19:24) When companies trade inference for market share (00:19:27) Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST (00:21:57) Why one of the main challenges of adopting AI is buy-in and convincing teams to use it. (00:25:47) Elad's robotics questions: (1) What % of winners will be incumbents? (00:27:50) Jason called the Amazon news last month and we have the receipts! (00:29:36) Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first yea (00:45:33) Jason says Adobe and Figma should abandon the UK entirely. (00:45:55) Time for a Polymarket: The sharps say 80% chance Tesla beats their quarterly earnings (00:51:02) What is Sesame? They just emerged from stealth, they raised $250M, and they're working on AI wearables. (00:53:21) Jason has concerns about AI wearables that are always recording… Does Elad share these concerns? (01:03:17) The crypto industry is now one of the largest purchasers of US government debt… what does that mean? Who owns who? (01:08:53) Anthropic responded to JCal's Bestie David Sacks… Is Dario Amodei a doomer? Fearmongering? (01:19:12) Why Jason thinks AI companies need to self-regulate 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 Thank you to our partners: Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first yea 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 Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think in general, um, my sense is that overall companies that have been considering going public are now sort of opted to do that sort of route.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Okay. I was asking because there's a great note in their S1, Jason, you'll love this. They were talking about how they're using their AI powered virtual agent chatbot. And they say that our ability to control customer support costs over time, even as volume has gone up, has contributed to an increase in gross margin from 60% in fiscal 24 to 68 in fiscal 25 and even more. So essentially they're automating things, Jason, static team size, cost savings, and it's helping the company look more profitable. So kind of an AI story and a fintech story, Alad.

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  The, the age of efficiency is upon us. Every unit in every company, particularly in startups who are always resource constrained, they are the ones to first use these tools because they're resource constrained. They can save a, they can turn a nickel into a dollar, startup's going to do it. Now, big companies like, well, we're spending $3 to get a dollar in value and we can afford to do it because we're sitting on a bunch of cash. There's no, you know, imperative, there's no existential dread about money at Apple when you're sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. So yeah, we'll get to it when we get to it. But at a startup, it's quite the opposite. You're seeing that as well, I assume, Alad, is startups doing really fascinating stuff with this technology already.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's super exciting and the ramp on revenue for some of these companies is out of this world, right? I mean, between going from zero to a few hundred million dollars in revenue in two, three years is something that I haven't seen in a very long time. And there's multiple companies doing that. So I think, uh, this is the big sea change and you see it in enterprise adoption. You see it in all sorts of things. The company that I started with Jared and Eric, and others that we mentioned earlier, is basically working on this for big enterprise. How can you help big enterprises really make that adoption of AI? And what applications should you provide for them to be able to really thrive in this post AI world? So I think there's, there's an enormous amount of stuff to be done there.

• 1:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and it's going to be really interesting. The cynical take on this is a lot of people sampling AI solutions and trialing them and there'll be big churn issues and of course, competition issues. And I guess the, um, optimist view of it, which I'm primarily in that camp is these things are providing massive value at very low price. Therefore, why wouldn't you try it? It's like. You know, come get three hamburgers that are grass fed beef for 20 bucks. It's like, how is that possible? Okay, I don't need to know. I'm just gonna order the burgers. Like, if you want to charge me 20 bucks for something that saves me $2,000 a month? Okay.

• 2:33Jason Calacanis?

  And it's just wild to see how mispriced some of these products are for the value they're creating.

• 2:41Speaker 01

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• 3:24Speaker 01

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• 3:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me, my co-host, Alex Wilhelm, and a special guest today. True star guest, Alex.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Our special guest today is the former founder of Mixer Labs and Color Health. He helped incubate Brain and Co., but you probably know Alad Gill as an investor par excellence. He has backed many, many well-known names in the technology world, and Jason, I believe, commands the largest single AUM of any solo GP in the world. Alad, we're happy to have you.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me on board.

• 4:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. What are you working on these days before we get into all this crazy news? What's tickling your fancy? What are you excited about?

• 4:10Speaker 00

  It's kind of a mix of stuff. Yeah, it's a mix of stuff. You know, I guess three things. One is recently launched a company with Jared Kushner, Eric Wu, and a few other folks to bring AI to the world's biggest enterprises. So we're really excited about that. Second area, just investing. So, you know, a lot of the companies I got involved with early, Perplexity, Harvey, Decagon, Abridge, et cetera, on the AI side are obviously all seeing, you know, real growth, acceleration, et cetera. And then third, there's kind of some side projects I've been working on around building large-scale monuments, translating books using AI, a variety of different things. And so there's also more of the societal or philanthropic stuff that I think has been really fun.

• 4:48Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Kind of those three areas.

• 4:50Jason Calacanis?

  Well, tell me about this, translating books with AI.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're calling it Alexandria. The basic idea is that if you look at every society, we've benefited since the days of Alexandria, the Egyptian library, from large scale access to human knowledge and books. And so we're taking a thousand of the most important books that are off of copyright, and we're translating them, working in concert with OpenAI and Anthropic and Eleven Labs and a few other folks on creating a book, a version of the book in every language, audiobooks in every language, so anybody in the world can stream it, they can download it, they can interact with it. We've actually built a book reader.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  And so, you know, we'll be doing a launch for that in the next few months, but that's been incredibly rewarding. And we've actually done machine versus human eval, where people check, do they like more what we've done with translation, or what human translators have done? And people prefer the machine translated works by far. And so that's been a really interesting and unexpected.

• 5:49Jason Calacanis?

  What do you attribute that to? What do you attribute it to?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  I think it is often more modern language, although you can obviously tune that based on your prompts. And then I think often it's more concise and often it's more consistent. You have better QA, especially if you're thinking about a long work or corpus, you can enforce certain things that a human translator may or may not be able to do.

• 6:10Jason Calacanis?

  Fascinating.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  I want to know how long until you add a zero to that and then another zero? When is it 10,000? When is it 100? And what's stopping you from going to like a million? There's a lot of books that are copyrighted, a lot.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we decided to start with the things that we thought were books that often should exist in other languages that just have never been translated, because if you look at it, there's maybe two dozen languages that cover 80% of humanity.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  And, you know, for even some of the greatest works ever produced, or at least the consensus from, you know, academics is the greatest books ever produced, there just aren't copies in all sorts of languages, you know, 20, 30, 40% of humanity can't access them. So we just thought, let's start with the stuff that's kind of obvious. I think to your point, you could do, we have the infrastructure built now. So you could run an arbitrary book through. And if you really wanted to, you could turn this into a service where anybody should be able to upload any book and then basically have this output in terms of every language, every audio book. We've also been looking at building AI guides to the book. So you can start interacting with it. Asking questions, et cetera. So I think it's almost like this modern. Library of Alexandria, right? We want to bring humanities, knowledge.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  To the world in an accessible way. So it's been fun.

• 7:20Jason Calacanis?

  So you, have you also gone down like the BitTensor and distributed computing as related to AI and LLM's rabbit hole?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've looked at it a bit. Yeah. What's your conclusion on it?

• 7:32Jason Calacanis?

  I don't have one, but I made a small investment in a like a hedge fund that's. Looking at all the nodes of BitTensor every day, trying to figure out the different projects, buying. You know, the, the tokens, et cetera. And it feels to me like. Now that we're in the sort of Saks era of crypto regulation, I feel more comfortable spending a little time there. And I've always felt like distributed computing and would be a viable co-exister to cloud computing for certain jobs. And we'll move from that sety at home. Kind of, you know, I don't want to say silliness, but hobbyist, you know, toy to something more meaningful. And perhaps at some point, even.

• 8:18Jason Calacanis?

  If we're building out too much infrastructure, it could be like. Bitcoin and that people will start putting up infrastructure and know they'll make. A high return on it and you could get some. You know, I don't know, scale that was not. Previously considered realistic in the same way Bitcoin and the number of. You know, people participating in the number of nodes is, would be hard to comprehend. 10 or 15 years ago, right?

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Yeah, that's an interesting question because I think in the case of anything that has strong economic viability. Compute tends to collapse into centralization. And so, for example, to your point on Bitcoin. I think it's like the six or seven largest mining pools are over 50% of Bitcoin volume.

• 9:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  And so that's centralization in terms of buying of hardware, in terms of energy and negotiation for that. And so anytime you have something with a huge economic output, it seems to almost always centralize because of those economies of scale. And then to your point, there's all sorts of circumstances where you have more distribution, either because it's people who are just, you know, generating an extra Bitcoin every once in a while because they have some idle capacity, but on a volume basis, that's pretty low.

• 9:29Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:14Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:49Speaker 00

  Or it could be things like Seti at Home, which is more philanthropic, or very early Bitcoin mining, or crypto mining, where, you know, there isn't that same liquidity in terms of mining of the token. So it's a really interesting question of when do you transition from decentralized to centralized?

• 11:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And it's an open consolidation that occurs because it's not like you have to ask a gatekeeper. It's not like you have to go to... You know, somebody and say, I would like to participate in this. Can we cut a deal? You're not like negotiating with Oracle or Microsoft. It's like you can just participate. And if you have innovations that you can bring to bear, you come up with your own chipsets, you come up with your own power strategies. You have a cousin who works at a nuclear facility in China and they they happen to give you a little space for your for your nodes. All of a sudden you're up to the races. So I'm super bullish on it. Also, like, if you just think about all the inference that's occurring,

• 11:46Jason Calacanis?

  it's going to be unlimited demand for this stuff, I think. I don't know that the demand curve ever.

• 11:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I don't know if it's going to abate anytime soon. It would. What's your take on it? Like the overbuild versus, you know, the dark fiber analogy? Do you have a position on it? Or does all this stuff, Jevon's way to a conclusion?

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't have a strong point of view on it. I do think there are some really interesting shifts that are happening. So to your point on the inference side, eventually more and more inference will happen on a device. And so to some extent, the distributed compute notion may just be everybody's iPhone in some sense, in terms of at least the inference side. In terms of training, the thing I've been looking at most is the degree to which energy costs will impact where training centers are actually going to get built. And one thing that I think is really under discussed is the fact that, given how poorly Europe has governed itself relative to energy, you know, shutting down their power plants in Germany and being dependent on Russian oil, et cetera.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  It basically means that training data centers are unlikely to go there because it's going to be too expensive to run them just because of energy, ignoring regulation, ignoring everything else, which means that basically all the training centers should end up in the Gulf and in the US. And the Gulf in part because under the Trump. AI plan, basically, there's some extension of some rights relative to being able to run training in UAE and a few other places. And those are going to be places with low energy costs. So I think there'll be parts of the US, parts of the Gulf where all the training is going to run. Inference is probably more globally distributed in part because of GDPR. So Europe will force it from a regulatory perspective. But they're going to lose out on tons of GDP spend and capex spend because people just won't build training

• 13:32Speaker 00

  centers there. So I think that's a little bit under discussed right now.

• 13:34Jason Calacanis?

  It's quite a paradox because also in the Middle East, they're adopting solar and batteries at an extraordinary pace. These are people who, it seems to me, the people who understand energy are not being particularly precious about where the energy comes from. In Texas, we have the largest installed base of solar. And I can tell you, living in Texas, they're not super precious about, you know, where the energy comes from. Is it the cheapest way to do it? Great. We can make a business out of that. We got a grid. Let's compete. And that's what they're doing in the Middle East where there's a lot of sun. There's a lot of sun and there's a lot of capital to buy those solar panels. And you're right, they just, their energy costs are going to be so de minimis. And they also have a populace

• 14:19Jason Calacanis?

  in that region that has been educated in the West over the last 30 or 40 years, very quietly, at the top institutions, who have now boomeranged back to Qatar, to UAE, to Saudi. You know, and then of course you have Israel, which is, you know, just a juggernaut per capita in terms of startups. So it's, I'm spending more time in the region. I'll probably spend two weeks, three weeks a year there, looking at startups and working with different investors. Are you spending time in the region?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  A little bit. Yeah, I'm an investor in a few companies, some of whom have been bridged across Israel traditionally. So that'd be things like Trip Action, it's not called Navan, et cetera. But then also, more recently, a company called Eon, which is doing data infra, one called Kela on the defense side, et cetera. So I have a handful of investments in Israel. And then, obviously, there's just really fascinating things happening across the entire region.

• 15:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's gonna be really interesting when you can fly direct. From, you know, Tel Aviv to Riyadh, to DOA, to, you know, this is kind of mind blowing in our lifetime that this is happening.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  So, Alad, you mentioned Nivon, which is going public right now. It's currently in a little bit of limbo with the government because the government shut down and such. But what can you tell us about the company's, you know, road to IPO?

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't really say anything. I mean, you know, usually IPOs have quiet periods. I think in general.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I was hoping that didn't apply when the government was shut down, but apparently not.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  In general, my understanding of what's happening at a meta situation is just because of the government shutdown, the SEC for a short period was not reviewing or fully reviewing S1s. And then they actually issued a rule that would allow companies to still go public if they did certain filings and certain disclosures. And then within a certain time period, they could go out. And so I think in general, my sense is that overall companies that have been considering going public are now sort of opted to do that sort of route.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Okay. I was asking because there's a great note in their S1, Jason, you'll love this. They were talking about how they're using their AI powered virtual agent chatbot. And they say that our ability to control customer support costs over time, even as volume has gone up, has contributed to an increase in gross margin from 60% in fiscal 24 to 68 in fiscal 25 and even more. So essentially they're automating things, Jason, static team size, cost savings, and it's helping the company look more profitable. So kind of an AI story and a fintech story, Alad.

• 16:38Jason Calacanis?

  The age of efficiency is upon us. Every unit in every company, particularly in startups who are always resource constrained. They are the ones to first use these tools because they're resource constrained. If they can save a, if they can turn a nickel into a dollar, startup's going to do it. Now, big companies like, well, we're spending $3 to get a dollar in value and we can afford to do it because we're sitting on a bunch of cash. There's no, you know, imperative, there's no existential dread about money at Apple when you're sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. So, yeah, we'll get to it when we get to it. But at a startup, it's quite the opposite. You're seeing that as well, I assume, Alad, is startups doing really fascinating stuff with this technology already.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's super exciting and the ramp on revenue for some of these companies is out of this world, right? I mean, between going from zero to a few hundred million dollars in revenue in two, three years is something that I haven't seen in a very long time. And there's multiple companies doing that. So I think this is the big sea change and you see it in enterprise adoption. You see it in all sorts of things. The company that I started with Jared and Eric and others that we mentioned earlier is basically working on this for big enterprise. How can you help big enterprises really make that adoption of AI? And what applications should you provide for them to be able to really thrive in this post AI world? So I think there's an enormous amount of stuff to be done there.

• 17:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and it's going to be really interesting. The cynical take on this is a lot of people sampling AI solutions and trialing them. And there'll be big churn issues and of course, competition issues. And I guess the optimist view of it, which I'm primarily in that camp is these things are providing massive value at very low price. Therefore, why wouldn't you try it? It's like, you know, come get three hamburgers that are grass fed beef for 20 bucks. It's like, how is that possible? Okay, I don't need to know. I'm just going to order the burgers. Like, if you want to charge me 20 bucks for something that saves me $2,000 a month, okay.

• 18:37Jason Calacanis?

  And it's just wild to see how mispriced some of these products are for the value they're creating.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And some of them are burning a lot of money along the way to get there. So as to your point, the pricing versus the value differential in one or two well-known cases are also just leading to odd economics. But I think most of them are very solid in terms of what they're providing, the cash, the potential cash flows to support the business, et cetera.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  So a lot on that point, we're not seeing a lot of gross margin negative businesses then? Cause I've heard bits and pieces about people saying that some companies are so underpriced that they're actually gross margin negative, which is so uneconomic as to make me worry, but it sounds like that's not the case too often.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  No, I think there's one or two very hyperpolar versions of that and one could argue. In those cases, they're basically trading inference for market share. And so you could view it as a marketing funnel.

• 19:27Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:39Speaker 00

  But I think in most cases, most of the companies I know are running at, you know, quite healthy margins and in some cases, software plus. One thing I've been investing behind over the last two years, kind of quietly, is these AI driven rollouts. So can you fund the purchase of services, businesses, roll them up? And then increase margin dramatically using AI? Because effectively, you're making the people on those teams dramatically more productive. And that's been a thesis that's really improving itself out quite strongly. There's two companies I'm involved with in particular where we're seeing very strong lift and very strong execution relative to these really big opportunities. Because services is.

• 21:12Jason Calacanis?

  Can you say the names of them or are they stealthy?

• 21:15Speaker 00

  I can, I can mention one of them. The other one's quite stealthy. The one that is non stealthy is called Long Lake. And or Long Lake Management, so L L N. And basically. Very good. One of the founders, Alex, is an exceptional PE person. Zach Frankel, who's more technical, helped get it up and running. And they basically have a really great team of both engineers, but also private equity and operations people. And if you think about it. The key for any sort of AI-driven transformation is you need, if you're doing a roll-up, you need a PE person. If you're not, you just need, you know, the sort of EDIC to do it. Then you need somebody to operationally implement it. A lot of the issues with adopting AI is not

• 21:58Speaker 00

  the AI. A lot of it's actually pretty easy to build, given that APIs that we have in OpenAI and Anthropic and others, or Google. It's usually the change management. It's convincing the team to adopt it. It's aligning incentives. It's saying, hey, we understand you really like this tool, but we're switching. You know, it's all that kind of stuff.

• 22:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the resistance is real, right?

• 22:17Speaker 00

  The resistance is very real. Yeah. In some cases, maybe it's going to threaten that person's job or perceptually do so. So often, when you're doing roll-ups for AI, you need the PE person to be able to do good purchases. You need the ops person to really help revamp the org, and then you need the engineers to implement the AI in the workflow. And so, very few of the roll-up companies that I've seen have this magical convergence of those three skillsets into one team.

• 22:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Athena is in a roll-up, but they're, you know, people think of them as, and I'm the first investor in that company, as well as was the first investor in Thumbtack, Jonathan's other company. People think of it as like assistants, right? Virtual assistants in a different time zone, a different price, but it's really an AI company, because every time they can automate a task across 10,000 assistants, if they can help one assistant schedule 5% faster, brrr, right down the line. If they can help them book hotels faster, brrr, right down the line, etc. And we have an investment in a company called Howie that Austin Petersmith is doing, that is just doing one thing, scheduling better than anybody. So there's a lot of people

• 23:21Jason Calacanis?

  taking swings at this. I guess the company this week of note, the main character energy goes to Amazon. Alex, maybe you could tee up the breaking news from the last 48 hours about Amazon and jobs and employment.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the New York Times, yeah, New York Times got its hands on some internal documents from Amazon, the cloud and e-commerce giant. These are from the 2024 timeframe, so they're a little bit dated. But essentially, the company's investments in automation at the warehouse level in particular are going to help it hire 160,000 fewer people through 2027. And the Times writes that because they have them up to about 30 cents per package that they pick and then deliver. 30 cents is not that much, but if you multiply it times billions of packages, it adds up quite quickly. And all the work they've done over the last 10 to 15 years to build out robots and increase automation in their warehouses will save them about 600,000 hires through 2033. And the ultimate goal is to get to about three quarters automation, about 75%.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  One of the major stories we talked about through the COVID era was how many people Amazon hired to build out its warehouses as e-commerce took off during that period of economic disruption. Now we're seeing the other side of that and a lot of long-term bets by the company come good. Great news for Amazon shareholders, all of us here who have 401ks, pretty tough, I think, Jason, looking ahead for the people who currently feed their families on $19 an hour Amazon warehouse jobs.

• 24:43Jason Calacanis?

  What's your take, Lad? Seems conservative to me, but what are your thoughts on automation, robotics? Yeah, purpose-built humanoid?

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting. It feels like for a long time robotics was one of those areas that was always going to happen and didn't quite, right? If you looked at the installed base of robots, it was in the hundreds of thousands of new robots per year, largely for automotive and very specific industrial applications. And it seems like now we're going through a sea change and I think, you know, it's kind of funny, actually, if you ask what's a robot, your dishwasher to some extent is a robot, right? Like a lot of things that we kind of take for granted now are robots. In the modern era, the things that are really emerging now are obviously some of the things that were just mentioned related to Amazon, but also even self-driving cars and Waymo and Tesla and what's happening there, those are robots, right? Those are cars that drive themselves. There's a lot of startups right now, Pi and the Bot Company and a few others who are all building

• 25:35Speaker 00

  next-gen sort of foundation models for robots. And so it seems like within the next couple of years, we'll see a lot of these things substantiate. And there's sort of two questions that come to mind for me. One is what proportion of the winners will be incumbents versus startups? So for example, if you look at self-driving. There was two dozen self-driving companies, but the winners arguably are Waymo from Google. And then Tesla, right? Two incumbents actually effectively have so far at least one self-driving. There's cool companies like Applied Tuition and others who are providing pieces of this, but you know, Car OS and other things, but I think that's sort of clear winners at least so far are those two. And the robots, it seems like Tesla will be one, right? Through their Optimus work. And then the question is, who else? Is it a startup? Is it another incumbent? Is it incumbent who buy the startup?

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Is it at-home robots, which a lot of people are working on? Which I, I, I view would be kind of awkward. It was like a robot in your living room and you walk in and, you know, it's like mopping or something. I'm joking about that. Or it's a, um, or is it an industrial application or B2B? It was just sort of the Tesla Optimus sort of view. And so I think there was this big question of, um, you know, who wins and why? And then what are the, the first application areas on top of that?

• 26:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it was pretty obvious to me. I saw Andy Jassy speak at a private event, I don't know, a couple of months ago. And, um, you know, it was pretty bullish on AI. And then a day later, he did this public missive,

• 26:59Jason Calacanis?

  where he wrote, hey, AI is going to transform everything. And we could see different team sizes. That was like a, to me, when a CEO that sophisticated doesn't write that memo without a reason. He was telegraphing internally, externally with partners. Hey, you know, this is going to result in less jobs. And, um, I, I was on the Bulwark podcast, a political podcast, and I said, you know,

• 27:26Jason Calacanis?

  I, I don't see a world in, you know, the next 10 years where a human being touches a package at an Amazon factory or to your doorstep. Here's, here's the quick clip.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Jason, do you want to just run the clip?

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a little self-indulgent, but sure. Let's, uh,

• 27:40Speaker 01

  It's, this is literally your podcast. You're allowed to be self-indulgent.

• 27:43Jason Calacanis?

  Don't want to be too self-indulgent here.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  We'll, we'll stop you. Anyways, here's Jason quoting himself.

• 27:50Jason Calacanis?

  This is where things could get really nutty. And we're already starting, and that's where like the doomsday scenarios, Terminator ones, kind of come out of that group. So what happens if, you know, all drivers go away? Well, every self-driving car is four full-time jobs. And every humanoid robot in a factory is five jobs, maybe six. Because those jobs, you can, you can work for maybe seven hours as a, just physical limitation. As humans were driving, you could work a 12-hour shift. And those are, those are going to be here, folks. And before 2030, you're going to see Amazon, which has massively invested in this, replace all factory workers and all drivers. The idea that when you order something from Amazon, a human would touch it at any point

• 28:34Jason Calacanis?

  in that supply chain is insane. It will be 100%, you know, robotic, which means all of those workers are going away. Every Amazon worker, all those jobs, UPS, gone, FedEx, gone. Every, all of those are going to be gone and those companies will be more profitable. And when you order something, it's going to come faster and cheaper and better. And your Uber will be half as much. But somebody needs to retrain these people. And that's actually a very valuable. What do you think about job displacement, Alad? Obviously, I have strong feelings that this displacement is coming. I don't know if anybody disagrees with that. I guess we're all just going to debate timelines, three years, five years, seven years, 10 years.

• 29:17Jason Calacanis?

  Do you think we're going to have societal issues with job displacement? We're already seeing computer science graduates having a hard time recently getting jobs. And I think most people are attributing it to AI, making the senior people more productive. So what's your take on job displacement? I'm curious. Probably the best part of being a founder is watching a project that started as just an idea blossom into a full-fledged startup. The worst part, it's bookkeeping. It's boring. It's detail-oriented and it takes time away from building your product and hey, growing your team. It's time for you to let Pilot take care of all this bookkeeping so you can get back to running your company. Pilot's the largest accounting firm and it was built just for startups.

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• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think any technology wave definitely has a job displacement that comes with it. And so then the question is, what do you do from a retraining perspective? How do you think about social safety nets? And then also, how well are you governed? If the, you know, if we were governed remarkably well, I'd say, well, we'll figure it out. And if we're governed really badly, then it's probably a different story in terms of the degree to which you end up with, you know, different forms of unrest or outcomes, depending on how much job to do at place at what speed and then how much of a safety net or retraining or other things you provide. So I think it's a pretty complex thing. But I do think that it's, it's pretty clear in certain areas that you're starting to see

• 31:31Speaker 00

  shifts in terms of labor, particularly around, you know, customer support may be one of the earliest places that I think ends up getting impacted to some of the points made earlier.

• 31:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think your point.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Oh, just Salesforce said they're saving 100 million a year now on automated customer support law. Just to back up your point, it's a place where people are finding enormous cost savings already, which of course impacts jobs.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And if you have like a temp or outsourced labor team, or you've partnered with somebody about it as a company, you're more likely to willing, be willing to cut that back than if it was your own employees. Right? And so often when you have these outsourced or delegated systems, you're more willing to shut them off. And so that could be some of the savings without actually changing official employee headcount, but it changes the virtual set of people you've hired. And I think that's, that's why we're not seeing it in some cases as much, right? It's kind of hidden.

• 32:20Jason Calacanis?

  That's such a good point. Yeah, you outsourced it already. So you're just ending a contract. You're not doing a planned shutdown. So in the United States, you have that.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  It's not visible.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Warn notice.

• 32:31Jason Calacanis?

  The Warren notice, like Warren notice, like you don't have to warn anybody. It's like, yeah, I just got rid of a vendor. And I wonder if that has a pass through where you still have to do a warn notice, putting it aside.

• 32:43Jason Calacanis?

  I will say, just had this realization as you were talking, I now, as a default, do not go to, you know, the manufacturer's website to get an answer. I go to an LLM. Why? The LLM has indexed all the Reddit threads, Quora threads, Twitter threads, you know, message boards of people solving the problem on their own before the company even knows there's an issue. And you... So I think most organizations probably don't even know what their true customer support requests are.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's companies like Decagon, obviously, helping with that. And then I think there's two other implications of that, or implications of all this. One is there are certain countries that should be impacted sooner rather than later from an employment perspective that we're not actually thinking about, right? Because there are certain types of jobs outsourced to specific regional hubs.

• 33:38Jason Calacanis?

  India, Philippines, etc.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Sure. And then I think the second thing, and this is the point that Nikesh Arora, the CFO of Alton Networks, has brought up with me in the past, which I thought was a really good insight, that, you know, he said this quite publicly, that they're using AI tools and foundation models and everything else to iterate on product because customer support, in some cases, not all, just means your product isn't working good enough, or the UI is hidden, or something else is going on. And so to some extent, by iterating on product faster, you're going to cascade into support as well, from that perspective, right? Essentially, if you have bots fixing every problem for you automatically, your support load should go down.

• 34:18Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  And so there's all these really interesting sort of second or third order things that, you know, are really interesting to speculate on in terms of the future world.

• 34:27Jason Calacanis?

  It's really interesting to see the number of people employed at these companies stay the same as their earnings go up.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. And this is why, yeah.

• 34:35Jason Calacanis?

  We've never seen that in our lifetime. And this is, if you were going to think about where to park money in the world, I was hearing somebody who's like, super liberal podcaster. Who hates America and Trump, derangement syndrome, the whole thing. And he's like, I'm taking all of my money out of the United States. Not you, Alex. I was gonna say, dude, I'm sitting right here.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  I was worried you just got doxxed.

• 35:00Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. You don't have TDS. You just have a love of democracy. It's slightly different. And another capitalist. Yeah. And he said, I'm just putting it, I think, United States is on the decline. I gotta put my money in Europe and every other. Then I was like, hmm, a narco-capitalism would argue the opposite. If, in fact, people are going to deploy this technology aggressively in the most vibrant capital market on the planet, the United States. We could see Amazon, to my point earlier, like, what does Amazon look like with no delivery drivers?

• 35:39Jason Calacanis?

  What does it look like without, with, you know, delivery times cut in half and running 24 hours a day? What does that even look like?

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, eventually it's just Jeff Bezos and a bunch of bots.

• 35:54Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, back to the one person billion dollar startup, like, maybe it's a, you know, 10 person trillion dollar startup at some point. If it's, if it's that efficient.

• 36:05Jason Calacanis?

  Here in Texas, they're delivering stuff from Amazon warehouses so fast that I'm like, I don't need it that fast. They literally are like, would you like this from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. or 8 a.m. to, you know, 10 a.m.? And I'm like, um, it's 10 p.m., sir. I don't need it. I'm ordering a cable. It's 10 p.m.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Tomorrow. That's okay.

• 36:28Jason Calacanis?

  Ultra-leisure.

• 36:31Jason Calacanis?

  And like, literally, the drones are coming. Like, if you live on a ranch or something like that, I mean, the drones are going to be the ultimate.

• 36:40Jason Calacanis?

  How crazy is it, Larry and Sergey bought every robotics company for five years, what, 10, 15 years ago? And then they sold them all because they couldn't figure out an application for it. I mean.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were so far ahead on so many things. And so I think a lot of creditors do in terms of being really advanced on the curve. And, you know, there's the old saying that, um, I mean, there's, there's two different things I think that apply here, but one of them is just that. You know, A, the features here is just not goodly distributed, and then B, you know, often it's less a matter of of who, but when. And this is a good example of a when, right? They were just too early. And I think they've been remarkably early on all sorts of things. They experimented with delivery. They experimented with internet using weather balloons. They experimented with satellites. They experienced, you know, because eventually I think they sold their satellite company to Planet Labs for somebody, right?

• 37:35Speaker 00

  But they had satellites. They had everything. They were just too early on so much. So kudos to them, you know, for trying.

• 37:42Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, it's like a venture portfolio. You only have to hit on one. And it looks like Waymo will be that one of the other bets. The Loom project was too close to Earth. Turns out low Earth orbit better. You look at Google Glass, that might actually be landing soon in the form of these Ray-Bans that no, everybody can't shut it about, shut up about for Meta. So they could have kept going with that. I also think their Chromebooks and the Chrome operating system is eventually where AI lands. Like, if you think about what will be the starting point for every AI journey, where do you think that will occur? Do you think it's voice and wearables, phones, dumb terminals?

• 38:25Jason Calacanis?

  But what do you, a new operating system, where do you think the end game is for mass consumption, mass interaction of AI?

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it depends on how good the companies are who are currently providing all our hardware, because the default status, they should win. Now, the question is, are they going to win, which I think is a separate question. And one could argue that there's been very little on-device innovation in AI. And then the question is, is that because they're waiting to see what works? Is it because they're, you know, investing and it takes time to build client applications? Is it a lack of imagination? And so I think there's this broader question of why has so little AI been built into these devices so far? And in some cases, you know, you look at something like Siri, it was never You know, the best voice based system, et cetera. And so there's a broader question of,

• 39:16Speaker 00

  you know, why is that? And in some cases, it's to protect users. So for example, Apple has a very strong data privacy policy, which means that they don't have a lot of data that they normally would have for training that Google has. And so it's been purposeful. But now in the AI era, should that still apply or not? Or how should you think about it as a company? I think those are very interesting, probably ongoing questions in terms of where does that AI future come from? The default should be the devices you use today, or the devices that should be the launching point for AI. Whether that actually happens, I don't know. I mean, what do you think?

• 39:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I've been thinking about Apple a lot. They are very good at making hardware. One of the greatest things they ever did was get off of other people's chipsets and just make their own, right? And that's been kind of the revolution. And they can make devices that are higher margin, more powerful, leapfrog everybody, low battery consumption, solve so many problems for them. These laptops they build are unnecessarily powerful and unnecessarily long battery lives because they've just optimized so well. So they actually have an advantage in that. And then there will be a time when people have their LLMs come up in, you know, lawsuits and discovery.

• 40:29Jason Calacanis?

  And Sam Altman will be more than happy to turn them over. He said, like, don't put your stuff in here, folks. Like, we will, you know, have to hand them over. You know, I think that's good that he was honest about that. So encrypted on your device with an Apple phone, Apple Mini, Apple, you know, M17, whatever they get to, you could actually run the LLM locally. All the, you know, context window could be run locally on all your items. And it could be running in the background, indexing your photos without ever putting them in the cloud like Google and having your photos, you know, train Google's LLM, which I don't think you really want to do. And Zuckerberg will do that in a heartbeat, obviously. So I think they have a potential there. Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a really interesting question, because if you look at search as an analog, and I don't think it's the correct analog, right? But if you look at it as an analog, basically, Google ended up paying Apple tens of billions of dollars a year to use its search instead of developing its own. And it was all margin, right? You'd have to hire all the engineers, you didn't have to implement all this stuff. You literally got paid money to just distribute somebody else's search. Effectively, it seems like that's the path that's been taken so far in LLMs or on foundation models. And then the question is, is that the right approach or wrong approach in this era? Because you're not just searching for things. It's not just a way to interface with the web, it's the way to interface with everything. You're shifting the the the set, the framework. But from a deal perspective, that deal worked so well that I wonder if

• 41:57Speaker 00

  that's part of the framework that they're thinking. So I have no inside knowledge of them. I'm just saying, if I if I had gone through that historical arc, maybe that's how I'd be thinking about things. And it may or may not apply to this different world of like AI doing sort of all these various tasks for you and agents suddenly spawning up like in the agentic world, that's a very bad strategy potentially.

• 42:15Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. I'm so uh, I'm so bullish on Apple making a big AI purchase. I just think they should just take out whatever LLM doesn't break, you know, stay in the top three. They should just take out perplexities, a great user interface. They really know how to build slick interfaces, the comment browser and my lord, just since the antitrust case, think about how much traffic they could spill over to DuckDuckGo, Brave, or perplexity, or anybody in that kind of zone of excellence. It would be extraordinary for those companies. And yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I led perplexities first round.

• 42:56Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  And Arvind is one of the most impressive founders I've worked with in a really long time, like just a complete, he's incredible at hiring, incredible at execution, highly strategic, morphed into a very commercial person. I mean, when I met him, he was at OpenAI as a researcher, right? And I actually met him because I think he reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, hey, I was, you know, I'm working at this lab at Berkeley, and I joined OpenAI like eight months ago. And this is when nobody was doing generative AI stuff, right? I think I funded him and he was just 22 sometime. And so we started meeting up weekly and just brainstorming. And, you know, he obviously came up with perplexity, then that's what he wanted to do, and he wanted to pursue and all this

• 43:39Speaker 00

  stuff. But I've just been impressed by how he's really just ramped so so quickly on so many areas. So it's been a very impressive journey to watch.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Our company's sniffing around perplexity, trying to snap it up a lot?

• 43:53Speaker 00

  I don't know. I'm not on the board there or anything. So.

• 43:55Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  I'm a humble investor.

• 43:57Jason Calacanis?

  Breaking news. I like it, Alex.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Well, no, I'm just, I mean, Jason's been talking about.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Tell me all your darkest secrets.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  The difference, the difference is-

• 44:06Speaker 00

  What is the worst thing that happened in your childhood? Let's talk, you know, like-

• 44:09Speaker 01

  No, no one cares about my secrets a lot. That's, that's, that's the difference. My secrets are news. No, but I'm more just asking the general point of like, how much interest is there from the incumbent technology companies towards AI startups? Because we've seen some acquisitions.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  But Jason keeps seeing these interesting, possible combinations, and I don't see as many of those in the market as we would expect. So I'm just kind of curious about the, the temperature or the appetite for that kind of deal making.

• 44:31Jason Calacanis?

  Big M.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's because, um, you know, the, uh, the FTC has continued to be reasonably anti-large tech acquisitions. And that was started under the Biden administration, with Lina Khan and others. And I think that's just been continued into this administration. So I think it has, um, as much to do with kind of a purview of how the government may intervene. And that's not just the US government. It's also the EU, it's the UK, right? The Figma deal was scuppered by the UK. It wasn't the US that did it. And it almost feels like there's this regulator, Ron Robin, where these different groups are taking turns in terms of who's going to scupper which thing. So it isn't the same party every time.

• 45:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they must be on a group chat. They're like, we're busy with stopping the totally inconsequential Figma Adobe deal. Why don't you guys find an inconsequential robotics purchased by Amazon for a $2 billion company to block? And it's like-

• 45:24Speaker 01

  How does the UK have that much power though, Jason? Like, the UK is this little bankrupt block off the coast of Europe, which is a natural economic block.

• 45:31Jason Calacanis?

  I, I said this probably many times. They should just ban you from using Adobe and Figma products in the UK forever and just punish them if, for blocking it. They should just say like, okay, if you're going to block it, we're not going to sell to your citizens. They can go use some open source project. Hey, um, speaking of interfaces, we have this sesame round, which I'd like to go to, but before we do, I think it'd be good to look at a poly market. Will Tesla beat their quarterly earnings?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  So I chose this, Jason, just to let everyone know, because we're getting into earnings season and, you know, I'm a big dweeb for the public markets. And I thought it's interesting that as we see sports betting and prediction markets come together, it's important to keep in mind that also people use these for what we used to use the stock market for, which was a surprise to me because why would you bother to use a different vehicle for that? But people seem really into it.

• 46:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, 80% chance they're going to beat their quarterly earnings. I think you could- Really do well on these prediction markets by looking at the historical data. Almost every company tries to sandbag these earnings, right, Alad? They're always trying to underestimate them so they can beat them. So beat is almost always the default case. But this is an interesting. If you were a large shareholder, I guess that you could use these prediction markets in some way to hedge. You know, just like sometimes people collar stocks or something like that or get a little extra juice. How do you think about, putting aside just this one specific one, which you're welcome to comment on.

• 47:01Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think about these prediction markets becoming just so quickly integrated into our lives? I was using one to gamble on the Emmys and made a little bit of money watching the Emmys. And then I did, I was watching a boxing match, I won again. So obviously, these things are amazing, since I've won two times in a row. If I lose, then I have a different opinion. But for now, my confirmation bias is these things are awesome.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Fantastic, yeah. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because this is one of those concepts that's existed for years. And there was crypto projects to do it and finally it's working between polymarket and Kalshi. And really, if I look at it, it feels like there's two or three big use cases, right? There's basically sports and sports betting. And they took what was a really complicated interface, not, they did three things, right? One is suddenly it's available in every state when it wasn't before. Because sports betting was regulated on a state per state basis. They simplified the UI dramatically, right? It used to be, what's the spread and the point thing and the this and all this complex stuff versus who wins? Yes, no? So they simplified the UI, it's like swiping left, right? And then there's kind of like, you know, that global liquidity pool where you're suddenly reaching a much larger mass of people.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  And so you have way more crowd wisdom. And that sports is a huge area. Politics, when there's the political season, is obviously a big area. And then what could argue the stock market is just a prediction market, right? It's the same thing. And so I always wonder, where does this go? Can you start buying stocks or shares that are basically collateralized via crypto? You know, because there's also, basically tokenized shares.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Through these markets at some point, like, do these things converge? Are they completely separate? In which case, a lot of the financial speculation will continue to be the actual markets. And this becomes more sports and politics. So I've been kind of wondering, like, where does this whole world go? And what sort of financial instruments emerge either on top of this? Or does it go the other way, right? The New York Stock Exchange announced that it was investing through ICE, I think it was $2 billion in poly market. Do eventually the stock markets effectively become these prediction markets? Because they are in some sense already.

• 49:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think if you want to own the underlying asset, you buy the stock and you and if you want to speculate and get extra juice on more acute, specific, time-based moments.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  Options, that's option trading.

• 49:30Jason Calacanis?

  It's like options.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  But you're doing it in a simple way. Yeah, it simplifies options way down. Yeah. And that, I think, is the real innovation here is you've collapsed these really complex speculative things, sports betting, options, et cetera. And you've turned them into a yes, no.

• 49:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is when you're in the professional gambling circles. And you're like the bottom rung of it, as I am. And I watch people try to do side bets, what they call string bets. They make them very complicated, which for the people who are the sharps, who are constructing these between the poker sessions where they drop them out. It's like those option traders, you know, they're coming up with some really interesting synthetic thing they want to do, like Michael Burry and the big short or whatever. And then there's somebody, a Goldman, trying to make it more complex to try to get an edge. And they're all just trying to get some little edge on it. And you're right, the simplification of it.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:25Jason Calacanis?

  You know, will OpenAI raise money at a billion-dollar valuation in the next two years? Well, I can't own OpenAI shares. It's too complicated. Or people want 10% vig on it. You know what? I'll just bet on that. I get the same, you know, it's like, okay, it's a 60% chance. Great, I can make, you know, whatever percent more on my money, I'll take it.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a, it's a transition from blogs to tweets, but from a financial speculation perspective.

• 50:52Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect analogy, perfect analogy.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Shorter form, fewer calories, you do more of them and they have more impact.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  More people do it, easier to participate, or they can do it, et cetera. Yeah.

• 51:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's talk about the Sesame raising $250 million because I don't know what Sesame is.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Yes, I thought you might not. So this is a company that came out of stealth back in February. It's done a couple of things. One, it's built voice-first AI and its first two models that I put out earlier this year, Jason, were popular enough that they racked up five million minutes. But what's interesting about this company and why I wanted to bring it up on the show today is they're also working on hardware. They're building glasses for you. And I have an image here from their, oh, let's call it their lab or their office. It doesn't really show us much, but the idea here is back to the point about Google Glass being early, is that Sesame wants to give you some hardware that lets you chat with your personal AI agent or assistant or friend, or whatever you want to call it, on the go. And they're taking the hardware approach to it. And I think that explains the amount of capital here. Just as background, how did they manage that?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Well, they're founded by Brendan Uribe, the co-founder of Oculus, and also the former CTO of Ubiquity Six, which was an AR startup. So they have a lot of that AR DNA in their veins.

• 52:06Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting. So they worked at Ubiquity. So they understand AR, $250 million. And exactly how is the device going to work? Is there a demo of this device out? Have they made a video of it?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Very, very little. The Verge's got to try it and talked about it a little bit. And that's where that image came. And I do have another one from the same post, but it's pretty, pretty nascent. In fact, this company is only putting out the beta of their iOS app now. They're actually taking applications for the beta of their iOS app. So it's very much under wraps, if you will. But the idea is, and Sequoia wrote about this in a piece explaining their investment, Jason, is that it's not just another AI voice chat, like your ChatGPT instance, for example. It's supposed to be more of like a collaborator with you and with a focus on how it handles speech to make it seem natural between you and maybe your AI. One thing I'm sure you've noticed is that if you chat with GPT-5

• 53:02Speaker 01

  and you make any sound, well, it's talking, it just stops to give you space, which makes it almost impossible to converse. So I'm hoping that what they're doing here is making more natural communication with AIs, more personalized AI, and then making it functional on the go without having to opt in to the Zuckerberg, I would say, spyware empire.

• 53:20Jason Calacanis?

  What are your thoughts on wearables, Elad, and this idea of like it's persistently monitoring what you're doing in the world and what could only be described as the most creepiest Truman Show concept ever, but the benefit?

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Seriously, you like it?

• 53:38Jason Calacanis?

  I love the Truman Show in a dystopian way.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  That's cool, yeah. I think, have you guys ever read this book called Accelerando?

• 53:47Jason Calacanis?

  I have not.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  It's like a book, it's like a, it's, it's, it's a book with wonderful concepts. I think the book itself is a little bit roughly written, but the, the basic idea is it's the, you know, for, it's, it's like the decades leading up into the singularity where you have this technology discontinu- discontinuation and, you know, eventually at the point where every 10 years you accomplish more than all of human progress and then eventually every year you accomplish more than everything ever before that, et cetera, and things keep accelerating. And in it, they have this notion of glasses, which are effectively a form of external memory. They're an agent, they act on your behalf. This book was written maybe 20, 25 years ago.

• 54:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, 2005.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Very sort of forward looking, yeah. And, um, yeah, one of the really cool questions that it raises, if so much of your memory and all these agents and all these things you do is actually loaded in your device, and you lose your device, and somebody else puts it on, how much of their personality, of your personality, or how much of your memories, or how much of your abilities is it absorbing as you sort of augment as a human and you externalize stuff? And so I thought that was a really interesting, almost like conceptual book. Like again, there's lots of really interesting ideas in that book. And this was one of them, and is one of the earliest versions of, you know, glasses and human augmentation and all that kind of stuff. So it's this interesting old concept that seems to, again, people are iterating against.

• 55:06Jason Calacanis?

  William Gibson had a similar concept with, in his Virtual Light, Udo, the Bridge series of like San Francisco dystopian future. And he had this thing called God's Little Machine or something. It was like this little Zeppelin that flew above you in like a three-quarter shot, like The Sims, recorded your entire life, indexed it, and you could pull it up and say, oh, when did Elad and I first meet? Or what was it like when I, you know, the, the first date I went on with my wife? And you could just kind of replay everything. And then you have, of course, Strange Days, the Catherine Bigelow film, where you can put on a neural headset and record your experience, then somebody else could put it on.

• 55:48Jason Calacanis?

  And livestream your experience and/or relive it. So these ideas are there and it really goes to show how much of our consciousness and processing in the world is done visually. And that whole system could be the unlock for intelligence and consciousness in some way is what some of the, you know, biology, yeah, I'm sorry, Strange Days, and it was called the squid, superconducting quantum interface device. Thank you, producer Claude, for coming to the rescue here. I do have some concerns about these things or being always on and recording everybody all the time. I don't know if I'm gonna win that battle, though. You have concerns about this?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  No.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  You know, I'm in general a very paranoid person, so I always have concerns. But I think that it just comes back to utility, right? What I think one thing that's been proven to us is people fluctuate between willing to sacrifice privacy in order to get access to more stuff. That was Google Gmail, right? There was all these concerns around Google reading your email, reading it, not really, but a machine reading it to generate ads. And that was an issue. But then, you know, hundreds of millions of people adopted Gmail. And then Facebook, some of the people had concerns about their own personal data and privacy. And I think for a while, Facebook actually was doing fine on it. And probably what happened is, because I, you know, I sold my first company to Twitter, and that was around 2009. And so this was right as Facebook

• 57:16Speaker 00

  started paying attention to Twitter. And I always wonder if there's some alternate timeline or history or something else, where instead of trying to go after Twitter and media and public content, Facebook leaned into its strengths, because at the time, it was a very trusted privacy brand, right? It was your identity, and it was your friends and your friend group. And it was viewed very differently. And what if they'd gone into banking and payments? What if they'd gone into healthcare? What if they'd gone into all the things that were privacy native, almost what Apple ended up doing? That's a very interesting alternative timeline for Facebook. And maybe they would be the trusted identity. Yeah, no, but it's an interesting concept, right? Of like, they decided to go after Twitter, or what if they decided to go after banking? At that moment in time, when they were very trusted as like a, you know, they had all your stuff, but that was fine, right? Cause it was just your friends seeing it.

• 57:59Jason Calacanis?

  It was your, it was your social graph. It was closed. They weren't trying to serve you ads in Zuckerberg. In fact, hated advertising. That was like, he thought it was terrible. He didn't want to have ads on the service until at some point, somebody told him, well, you can make it free and get billions of people to use it. And he was like, okay, fine. And then Charles Amber comes and the rest is.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  And this could have been an alternate timeline. Maybe you would monetize through payments. And this has happened a few times, right? I've talked to some of the people who worked on the early browsers. And it was the same thing. They're like, is it going to be micro payments or ads? And they ended up going down the ads route, but there was an alternative universe where it was like micro payments, right? And you'd pay a, maybe not.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Kind of. I mean, the technology wasn't there. As the founder of a short-lived micro payment startup back in 2000 and whatever, you know, I mean, credit cards just weren't, weren't there. I think the idea was good, but I think we needed essentially.

• 58:50Jason Calacanis?

  You had one? You had a micro payments startup?

• 58:54Speaker 00

  I did not.

• 58:55Jason Calacanis?

  You did a startup?

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's called, it's called contention. We founded it at TechCrunch, wrote about it. We launched, got customers and then we failed and I had to go back to college.

• 59:03Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. Wow. You were just too early. I kind of feel like, yeah, they were doing the brave attention token for a while. That didn't take.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah.

• 59:13Jason Calacanis?

  B A T. There's been a couple of shots at this and you know, one of the things I've learned is when we just talked about it with, you know, Sergey being so ahead of the curve, that he was too ahead of the curve. And then probably some accounting wonks were like, we're seven years into this Sergey, like, let's pull the plug. And he was probably like, all right, fine. When if he had just stayed till year 11, it would have been like, oh, okay. Now we own low earth orbit satellites. We have Starlink.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Which was Waymo, right? Yeah. Which was Waymo. But yeah, they could have had a couple others. So again, very forward thinking company. I think they don't get enough credit for that.

• 59:49Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is where like Sergey and Larry just need to say, we will be willing to lose money on projects for 20 years, not just seven. And we don't care what you think. Remember they were doing Google Fiber? And I think that one got deprecated as well. That would have been fascinating if they kept going along and pulled that string. Cause then you'd have fiber plus.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  Satellites, you'd have fiber, we'd have flying cars. Basically, everything would be done.

• 1:00:17Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  You'd be out of business. You can't invest anymore.

• 1:00:20Jason Calacanis?

  Well, exactly. Be like Google's world. But also, that was like Larry had to go off balance sheet and use his personal balance sheet to do. He did three of them, I think.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Kitty Hawk, right?

• 1:00:30Jason Calacanis?

  Kitty Hawk. Was he also in Archer? I think he might have also invested in Archer.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Maybe. Yeah, I'm not sure.

• 1:00:35Jason Calacanis?

  He was in at least two of them. Just fascinating how close being too early is, but I'm always encouraging founders to to look in that startup graveyard. I think, actually, micropayments, as silly as it sounds, built into a social network, a browser for content, you know? This might be like Substack or, you know, a YouTube competitor might be able to do very well with this, where you could set your. What if you could set your browser to just say, if I watch more than one minute of a YouTube video, send the person one penny? And if I watch, you know, a penny for every second I watch of anything. And if I, you know, if I stay on a new, a document and I scroll down to the end, yeah, give them a penny.

• 1:01:20Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot of people who might buy into that if there was some reward for it. I don't know what that reward is.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that was kind of what we were trying to build, Jason. So it was back then, you couldn't do one penny. So you would put in $5 to your contention account. And then as you went around the internet, we would hand out the money to people that you visited that had our integration. And people kind of liked it, but it was hard to get any sort of momentum.

• 1:01:41Jason Calacanis?

  Think about stable coins. Like, I wonder if stable coins are the unlock here. What do you think about stable coins?

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I've been long interested in them. I mean, it's interesting to see some of these second order effects of those now, right? In terms of the biggest holders of treasuries in some cases, amongst the biggest holders are stablecoin companies. So it's, it's been fascinating to see both their growth. I remember when Tether came out initially, everybody thought it was super sketchy. Are very uncertain in terms of what the assets are actually holding against the money. And now, obviously, they're, it seems like they're probably collateralized between a mix of like gold, Bitcoin and treasuries.

• 1:02:17Jason Calacanis?

  They've done a great job cleaning it up. Yeah.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, you know, it seems like it's going to be a really central thing in general. And I think one of the things that people have underappreciated about crypto, particularly people in the US, is the degree to which globally, for example, that people don't have access to dollars. Because you're not allowed to buy a government, and this is a way to buy dollars, and this is a way to do simple transactions, like all the stuff that we take for granted here. But it also shows the path forward with tokenizing shares and token, you know, things we've been talking about for years. It feels like are finally going to happen. So it's a, it's a very exciting era. I feel.

• 1:02:52Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go. Tether is according to producer Claude. Tether 127 billion in treasuries as of Q2 2025. Number 18 in global ranking ahead of South Korea and Circle 18 billion is in the top 30.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very under discussed how many treasuries are actually held by crypto companies now. And so one of the biggest buyers of the US government debt is the crypto industry. Like, think about that. What are the implications of that in the long run? If crypto gets 10 times bigger and that 120 billion goes to 1.2 trillion, what does that mean in terms of the US government, government's relationship to crypto? How should we think about that?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  Super interesting.

• 1:03:34Jason Calacanis?

  Who's your daddy? It's kind of like the China relationship.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  It's tether. It's tether. Tether.

• 1:03:38Jason Calacanis?

  Tether's your daddy.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Power is your daddy, I guess, in that case.

• 1:03:42Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and the interesting thing about tether is, um, yeah, they did have that really spicy. I'll use the word spicy. I don't want to get sued here, but they were banned in a lot of regions, a lot of like regional action taken against them, a lot of questions about those reserves. And they have gone like on a five year process of cleaning all that up. And there's like, I think they have, according to the bill, the stablecoin bill that Saks was involved in or talked about on the pod a bunch of times. I think they have a three year window to clean everything up in order to participate in the United States. Uh, so Circle's got the clear lane along with, I guess, their partnership with Coinbase, but they have to tether is going to clean up. And the guy, Apollo is his name.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Apollo, yes.

• 1:04:27Jason Calacanis?

  Who was like living in some non, you know, the speculation was like, none of the executives were available and they were living in jurisdictions where you couldn't be deported or picked up by a red notice. I don't know how much of that are true. There were a lot of tether truthers out there, you know, speculating. Um, but them figuring out how to go legit. If these stories of illegitimacy were in any way true is like a story for the ages. That's going to be the next Storkin movie, I think.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's pretty good. Um, I think one of the most. Under hyped players in crypto right now perhaps is Stripe, who I think have been doing amazing things in terms of stablecoins and bridges and all the rest of it. And, you know, I first invested in Stripe in 2010, I think. So it's been kind of a long road. But what an amazing next act. I mean, obviously the payment stuff is going to keep going and the SaaS stuff will keep going. But I think what they're doing in crypto is super interesting right now. They're never going to go public.

• 1:05:25Jason Calacanis?

  No, they definitely haven't. They're never going to go public. This is my new prediction.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  You put on a poly market.

• 1:05:32Jason Calacanis?

  I just think that they Yeah, perpetual, perpetual options.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  You put on hyper liquid.

• 1:05:38Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here's the thing. If you have that fluid of a market, if you're an expert in transactions in commerce, what's to say they couldn't build and, you know, the infrastructure to let people who are qualified purchasers trade in and out of their private company and then slowly buy back all their shares based on massive profitability and then have a black box company that nobody understands what's going on there. It's a tremendous advantage. And the Carlson Brothers are unique in their perspective of the world. I don't think they're particularly driven by some outrageous,

• 1:06:19Jason Calacanis?

  you know, personal net worth on a public market and the traditional accoutrement of being an entrepreneur. They seem very mission driven and have very specific principled things they want to work on, you know, like their think tanks or science think tank, et cetera. So that could be amazing. I mean, I'm trying to think of the equivalent of what's the largest private entity.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a couple of them. There's like Coke Industries, there's Cargill, there's a bunch of these. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. Bloomberg, right?

• 1:06:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, famously.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  Tons of cash and it's private. So I think people underappreciate, especially, you know, Europe, like a lot of the market cap is actually these middlestah private companies in Germany, for example.

• 1:07:04Jason Calacanis?

  I'm looking here. Vito, Swiss-based Dutch multinational energy and commodity trading company.

• 1:07:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, revenue $400 billion.

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Jason Calacanis?

  In 2023.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  Isn't Coke, isn't Coke like a hundred billion or something?

• 1:07:19Jason Calacanis?

  Coke is number five, 125 billion.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  Cargill should be on there. Like, there's a bunch of these.

• 1:07:23Jason Calacanis?

  Cargill, number four, 160. I'm trying to find a tech one. Huawei, number 10. I didn't know that they were private.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I guess ByteDance is a private.

• 1:07:34Jason Calacanis?

  ByteDance, 14.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  That company. Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Hey, a lot on the, on the Stripe, stablecoin points. I agree very much that they're, they're leading. They bought, was it Bridge for 1.1 billion? And they just announced Tempo, their, their own kind of blockchain or L1 for, for stablecoin payments. And I'm not asking for internal information here, but like, what do you think they're trying to do with that? Is that just to make a better foundation, better rails? For stables to fit into the kind of existing e-commerce world? Or are they trying to solve a more, I don't know, fundamental issue with stablecoins today that is not well-served by existing L1s and L2s?

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, you know, I think it's best to just look at what the company says about all this stuff. Because I don't want to overinterpret or misinterpret what they're trying to do. I think fundamentally, if I look at what they've been building as a company over the years, it's really this focus on providing a piece of global infrastructure, like Patrick used to talk about it, almost like container ships, and that enables global commerce for the world. And so I think they're very mission-driven around, you know, this interconnected web of commerce, isn't that good for the world? And how do we help? Make it really easy for people, and in particular developers, to build things against that. So.

• 1:08:44Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely extraordinary. What else do we have on the docket here? We got maybe one more story left in us. What do we got left?

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Because we have a lot here, why don't we talk a little bit about the, the fracas, Jason, with Anthropic and your bud David Sacks?

• 1:08:57Jason Calacanis?

  Ooh, that's spicy.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Jason Calacanis?

  And we also have the OpenAI browser, less spicy. Let's go for the spice.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Okay. Let me just pull that up real quick. I gotta find.

• 1:09:08Jason Calacanis?

  I have some thoughts on it.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  I'm shocked. I'm shocked that you do.

• 1:09:12Jason Calacanis?

  I do not believe this, but I have opinions. For better or worse.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  It's good. It's good. All right. So Anthropic's Dario Emade wrote a public post this week responding to his critics. But to understand what's going on, we have to go back in time a little bit to the one big, beautiful bill. Jason, we discussed here on the show that there was a provision that eventually didn't make it in, but that would have banned states from having state level AI regulations for a period of 10 years. Ended up getting voted down 99 to one in the Senate. Fast forward to recently, Jack Clark, another co-founder of Anthropic, wrote a post, a summary of a talk that he gave in which he said that he thinks other stakeholders in the world should have a bit of a say in how we build AI as we build it. He's not a doomer. He's definitely an optimist, but he thinks that we should listen to other people.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  And then your friend David Sacks comes in and he says that, quote, "Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear mongering. It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging startups." Fast forward through some back and forth and other people weighing in. And we got Dario's open letter essentially saying, hey, what the hell is wrong with you guys? We love startups. We work with them. We're in favor of a federal standard. And this has become such a big deal, such a back and forth that CNBC is covering it. And so, Jason, I'm incredibly curious why we have left the era of founder friendliness and we're now seeing venture capitalists attack some of the most successful companies in the history of startups.

• 1:10:38Jason Calacanis?

  You know, this industry left its boutique phase when Facebook hit scale. Facebook just had far, far too much impact on society, elections, our children, Instagram. I think that was the end of the innocence. Just if I were to pick, you know, a demarcation point a lot of when we became so big that we couldn't be looked at as the weirdos in California building cool stuff. And then it became, oh, how are these things damaging society? We should be questioning everything about AI. We just did today, talking about Amazon and job displacement. We should be thinking about kids using these products. We should be thinking about people getting one-shotted and getting,

• 1:11:22Jason Calacanis?

  you know, and we should be thinking about the truth and the search for truth. I think all these things are valid discussions. I think what's at stake here is there is covert.

• 1:11:34Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know lobbyists and covert political actions to try to regulate things. And that does make me nervous. I just want to see all the evidence of it.

• 1:11:45Jason Calacanis?

  If that's actually happening or not. And I told Sacks this, he wasn't too pleased with me a lot. But if this is the most important technology of our lifetime, why wouldn't states have a right in the format of the United States of America to, you know, chime in on it, you know, if they kids access to it, or how it's used in healthcare, how it's used in terms of job displacement? What's your take on all this?

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think at this point in time, and I think industries evolve over time. And the nature of how you regulate those industries should evolve with it. But early on in industries, it's a bit of a disaster to let each incremental state chime in on how to regulate it, because fundamentally, there's a handful of states that effectively by fiat govern what the rest of the country does, whether the rest of the country adopts things or not. And it's almost the flip. Why should California be able to govern AI for everyone in the US? Which effectively almost happened through the Scalpinger bill. So I actually view it on the other side of this one, where I think the states should not intervene for now. It should be federally mandated. There are both national security reasons to do that. There are national competitive dynamics to drive that.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  So, you know, my view would be, and this literally almost happened, right? California was gonna try and regulate how the rest of the country deals with AI, which is a really bad idea. So.

• 1:13:11Jason Calacanis?

  And it was based on the number, the amount of compute you have, as if that is some sort of?

• 1:13:17Speaker 00

  Well, the question is, why should California regulate it for it all? A and then B for everyone else, which is, I mean, it would have been national, which means it would have been global. So should California have the right to set national or global AI policy effectively?

• 1:13:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and the car example is a good one. And so that's one where I happen to be in favor of it. So when you look at these, it's always.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  It may have been the right thing to do. The question is, should California have been able to do it? In other words,

• 1:13:43Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. Yeah, I was in favor of it. Yeah.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like, let's separate the, do we agree with the thing?

• 1:13:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  From how should that thing get done? Right? And I think those are two separate things. So.

• 1:13:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And that's what I've been trying to parse in my head because I, you know, yeah, we should have higher gas standards and who cares if cars cost a little more. We, you know, having smog over cities and people losing, you know, months to years off their life and, you know, asthma and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, it's obviously a tragedy of the commons. It's a good thing that California did that in my mind, but should Texas be forced to not buy the trucks they want that have the hauling power and the price performance ratio that they want? I picked Texas as a place to live because I like less regulation. And so it really does come down to the operating system of America where the states are supposed to have some sovereignty,

• 1:14:35Jason Calacanis?

  but they have to superimpose it against, well, if we are in fact in a global race with China, can we, can we afford to slow ourselves down? And that's like a very interesting, this is probably.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  There's a global race with China and then there's the, there's the political side, there's the military side of that. There's the economic side of that. There's the political and cultural side of that. And so I disagree as well with, hey, we should have every country on the planet, we in on how AI models should get built in the US. I think each country should have its own sovereign AI model. And there's lots of ways to accomplish that, right? Like if I was running a country, I'd be very interested in that. I want my cultural values represented in local models and things like that. So I

• 1:15:15Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  I agree with that. But the flip side of it is,

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  if anything, perhaps the last few decades have shown us that perhaps we don't need to solicit everybody's opinion on everything, both in the context of a company and the context of a country and the, you know, and so this is almost a throwback to things that haven't really been working, it feels.

• 1:15:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, if you were to put this against high-speed trains, Alex, like, there's a reason why we don't have them in America, because everybody gets to chime in on the high-speed train, and then the high-speed train, you know, is like, you know, it's in other countries, they're like, high-speed train, you have to be a straight line.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Jason Calacanis?

  Or else it can't go fast, and you know.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  But in China, there's been a lot of studies discussing how both province and central planning has led to a dramatic overbuild of economically inefficient high-speed rail. And so we can all give a thumbs up to the Shanghai-Beijing line, why not? But when you see the, what is it, eight pillars and eight crossbeams, there's some model that I'm translating poorly here for how to build high-speed rail in China, and it's led to a lot of misplaced spend. And so I agree that we should have.

• 1:16:24Speaker 00

  The drivers of that spend, you know, like, that's often also corruption, that's a bunch of stuff, it's not just.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  But if you want centralized power a lot, if you don't want people to have say, you're going to end up with a central power.

• 1:16:34Speaker 00

  Well, really, what the question is, is what are the things that should be regulated by what level of government?

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  And that's, that is something that has been established and adjudicated in the US for centuries now, right? And that, this falls into line of those things, which is, how much should states be able to govern on their own overall technology progress for the US and for the globe? And that's effectively what this issue really is, right?

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Interstate commerce.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Not just interstate commerce, it's effective de facto regulation of the entire country.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Right, no, I'm saying that because it's that, it should fall prey to that, and therefore it could be limited in that way.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  But what's, what's interesting, though, is we're talking almost about the wrong, the wrong foe here, because I think this is why Anthropic is, you know, being dragged into a bit of the mud here. But the, the, the provision to block state-level AI regs was voted down nearly unanimously in the Senate, and partially because Republicans from the South wanted to protect local industries. So how do we get Congress to listen to this perspective and do something intelligent and pass something that will preclude or maybe just do better than state-level regulations? Because Dario said in his letter that they disagreed with the idea because it blocked action without offering a federal alternative. So how do we get to one? How do we fix Congress?

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  I mean, there is, there is.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  I I I'd say three things on it. One is I tend to stay away from politics. I'm the least cogent person to ask about how to fix Congress or how to change, you know, like I'm that's not the world that I tend to spend time in. Um, you know, I do think there's a number of different approaches that we've taken in the past or historically to federally mandate things. And one route is executive orders where they can be applied. The other route has been acts of Congress. You know, there's three or four routes that are just standard. And the question is what best applies here? And then I think it's back. There's also the meta issue of where do states cross the boundaries in terms of the areas that probably shouldn't apply to them?

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  And is that a legal framework? Is that something else that already exists? And how do we interpret, you know, the existing legal structures of the country relative to some of these topics?

• 1:18:49Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's the granular piece that you're talking about a lot. I think it's the key piece of this. Which downside, what concern do we have over AI that is not addressed by an existing law? If you were to go in an AI and you ask it right now, how do I build a chemical weapon? How do I build a biological weapon? It says, hey, I'm not going to do that. It's already been solved by the teams. They've self-regulated. So, okay, what's the next piece? Oh, how do we deal with, you know, I don't know, the Terminator series?

• 1:19:20Speaker 00

  The bioweapon stuff is so overstated. And I feel like that's the way that some of these companies have been trying to cause distress and fear in regulators and others, because the reality is all the protocols for building a virus you can release, etc., are on the web.

• 1:19:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  I mean, I worked as a biologist for almost a decade, right? And all these protocols are out there. The real issue is buying the equipment, using it, actually doing things in an intelligent manner, ordering all the logos you'd need, etc. And, you know, so the extra information content, in my opinion, isn't high.

• 1:20:00Speaker 00

  And the hard part is the physical world stuff. And so whenever people raise that as an example, I view it as kind of a red herring where it's purposefully raised in an attempt to cause fear in people so that they'll react and regulate something. So I do think those are bad, bad examples that people tend to use. In general, and it's purposeful, I think.

• 1:20:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's, I agree. And I always ask people, tell me the next one. Tell me the next one. Let's just get granular here for a minute. I have one, like IP protection. I think that that should be done. That should be self-regulated by the industry, which they're starting to do. They're starting to say, hey, even if you don't agree with how Sam's doing it at OpenAI, he's saying with Sora, hey, if you're like, you know, the estate of Elvis or Martin Luther King, we'll be gracious and turn off the ability to make Martin Luther King saying inappropriate things. And they did. They didn't have to go the legal route. Sam said, we're good people. We're going to be aggressive in letting people do things, but we're also going to be reasonable in turning them off. I disagree with the approach. I think they

• 1:21:01Jason Calacanis?

  should always get permission. But, okay, fine. He took a different route. They'll get the legal exposure. But, yeah, this is a situation where we have to get into each one. And I was just thinking, when you were talking about, you know, bombs, and I was like, remember fertilizer bombs? Everybody was like, oh, my God, you know, the internet's causing this, the Tor network, you know, dark web, everybody knows. And it's like, you still got to get the fertilizer. Every piece of, every bag of fertilizer has IDs in it, like in the chips, from what I understand. There's like some secret way that they watermark every bag of fertilizer. So if you blow something up, and then if you buy them, you need to register and they've got some, you know, I mean, who knows how the government is implementing

• 1:21:46Jason Calacanis?

  this after the 9/11? Because the first, before 9/11, they tried to blow up the World Trade Center with the fertilizer bomb. They succeeded in blowing up Oklahoma City, two different groups of terrorists, domestic and international. They solved this problem. I bet you they have like, Ways of tracking fertilizer where like the second the person leaves the fertilizer store, there's like a camera on their license plate, they're being tracked by a drone. Like the government took this seriously. There's so many like simple solutions to this. So.

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's why I stopped fertilizing my garden. I was worried that I get tracked down.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you laugh, but the only time I've actually gotten pulled out at the airport and put into a small room was after going home to Oregon to my parents' house. And I was walking around the backyard a lot. And I popped a some sort of test, a TSA for possible fertilizer.

• 1:22:36Jason Calacanis?

  That happened too.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  And they like, I've never been treated as a criminal quite like that. They're like, is there anything in here that's explosive? I'm like, I don't know, fucking weed, but please don't find that. And it was so, oh, sorry, we're live. Edit that out, I guess. But it was just, it was so surreal, but it can catch you. And.

• 1:22:53Jason Calacanis?

  They, they literally asked me like, have you been doing gardening? I was like, no, how's that relevant? I didn't know what they were talking about.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  You're like, I've been helping startups grow.

• 1:23:02Jason Calacanis?

  I don't get it.

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  Been gardening this.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  By spreading manure.

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:23:07Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen. This has been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. A lot. Thank you for joining us today. What a great guest. Where can people find you? I mean, you got a Twitter account. You're pretty active. Yeah?

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, Twitter, they can find me at Alogel. And a pleasure to be on. Thanks for including me.

• 1:23:25Jason Calacanis?

  All right. And we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups. Bye bye.