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

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo https://Odoo.com/twist Quo https://quo.com/TWiST Conservation Fund https://conservationfund.org how old a movie has to be for me to be able to show a part of it on youtube Generally 10 seconds or less of a film clip can fall under fair use for commentary or criticism — which is how most podcasts and talk shows use clips without issue. But there's no hard legal rule based on age. What actually matters more than age is fair use, which considers: Purpose — commentary, criticism, education = stronger fair use case Amount used — shorter = safer; a 5-10 second clip for reaction/discussion is generally fine Effect on market — your clip shouldn't replace the original In practice for YouTube specifically: Most major studios have Content ID systems that will flag clips regardless of movie age — even 100-year-old films if the rights holder has registered them Public domain is the real safe zone — films from 1927 or earlier are generally in the public domain in the US. Some films from the 1928-1963 range are also public domain if copyright wasn't renewed Disney, Warner Bros., Universal etc. actively enforce even very old films For a show like TWiST showing a short reaction clip — 5-10 seconds with clear commentary context is the industry standard and rarely gets actioned. But age alone won't protect you. Today's show: *A humanoid robot ran the 100m in 9.39, breaking the human Usain Bolt's world record, while an entire stadium cheered. Jason thinks Beijing's World Humanoid Robot Games aren't a science fair, or a fun exhibition, but the best AI PR campaign on Earth. While Americans debate the data centers that train the robot brains, China is already turning them into a spectacle and world-class entertainment. Find out what Jason thinks America can do to catch up… and why he believes there will be 1 billion Optimus robots deployed by the year 2036. PLUS on an all-news TWiST, hot takes on the potential $13B Hugging Face sale (to a mystery buyer), why founders should always "buy the threat," analyzing Sam Altman's "I'm listening and I hear you" face, and are kill drones already in operation around the world? We're digging in to how close the real world is to mirroring the "Terminator" films. Relevant Links CBS coverage of World Humanoid Robot Games: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-robot-usain-bolt-sprint-run-record-faster/ Bloomberg coverage of World Humanoid Robot Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lsrUAdcPPE X-Humanoid: https://www.x-humanoid.com/ Tesla Optimus on X: https://x.com/Tesla_Optimus Trailer for Spielberg's "A. I. Artificial Intelligence": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_19pRsZRiz4 Bloomberg: Hugging Face exploring sale: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/hugging-face-gauging-interest-for-potential-sale-business-insider-says Fortune: Stripe acquires OpenRouter: https://fortune.com/2026/08/16/stripe-7-billion-deal-ai-firm-openrouter-acquisition/ InfoWorld: OpenAI acqui-hires OPenClaw founder: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4132731/openai-hires-openclaw-founder-as-ai-agent-race-intensifies-2.html David Senra podcast w/ Sam Altman: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/sam-altman Harvey Tenet Research Preview: https://www.harvey.ai/blog/post-training-update-harvey-tenet David Sacks comments on Harvey's Tenet (from X): https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2090790063047168473 CNBC: Iran linked to UK cyberattack: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/23/small-uk-power-plant-shut-down-after-iran-linked-cyberattack-report.html NYT: A drone killed 3 Ukrainians: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drones-autonomous-ai-kill-ukraine-war.html Forbes: Eric Schmidt secretly testing AI drones: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/06/06/eric-schmidt-is-secretly-testing-ai-military-drones-in-a-wealthy-silicon-valley-suburb/ Restream: https://restream.io/ Kimbal Musk's Nova Sky Stories: https://novaskystories.com/ IKEA: Plug-in Solar Panels: https://www.ikea.com/be/en/energy-services/plug-in-solar/ Deadline: "Mandalorian and Grogu" box office: https://deadline.com/2026/08/star-wars-mandalorian-grogu-disney-release-date-1237040464/ THR: Dave Filoni leading Lucasfilm: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-wars-mandalorian-grogu-box-office-franchise-low-1236604973/ Star Wars: Starfighter first look: https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-starfighter-ryan-gosling Star Wars Theory: "Vader" fan series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey68aMOV9gc Timestamps: 0:00 Jason got a fresh Optimus demo 1:35 Robots are breaking human sports records 3:39 America's messaging problem vs. China's elite PR machine 11:07 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist 12:08 Jason got a fresh Optimus demo 19:21 Quo (formerly OpenPhone) - Quo gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free and get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/TWiST 28:09 Who's going to buy Hugging Face and why? 28:56 Conservation Fund - Find out more about how the Conservation Fund is protecting land, wildlife, and our shared access to the great outdoors while also providing economic opportunities. Visit https://conservationfund.org 31:35 How OpenAI killed OpenClaw 39:08 Sam Altman wants to make a platform, not a product 41:19 The "Castles and Keeps" metaphor for sovereign AI 49:27 UBI isn't happening but we could raise the minimum wage 58:47 Embracing redundancy and self-reliance 1:10:53 Is Star Wars at a historic low point (and Lon's Worst Take) 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 Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is the master plan. Instead of telling everybody, you're gonna lose your jobs. Sam Alman's doing UBI studies. As the Chinese say, let us entertain you. You have to entertain people. You have to make them root for the robots. Before the robots take everyone's jobs and then murder everybody. This is the key. This is a psyops. This has nothing to do with capitalism. These are murder bots.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by the Conservation Fund. For 40 years, the Conservation Fund has protected at-risk land and important wildlife habitats while actively supporting local communities. Learn more at conservationfund.org. Quo, formerly OpenPhone, gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread, all in one place. Try it free and get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/twist. Odoo, the all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free. Get started today at odoo.com/twist.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  All right, everybody, welcome to TWIST, T-W-I-S-T. That stands for This Week in Startups. It is August 24th. Summer is ending.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Thank God, I'm dying.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Talking to my friend, I hate to name drop, but I was talking to Elon, Lon. I saw two things. I saw two things and my brain is now broken. Once in a while, he says, hey, J Cal, check this out. He showed me the Roadster 2.0.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Hmm, it's finally, it's been a long time.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  He showed me the latest Optimus. I'll talk about it at the end of the program, to the extent I can. Anyway, we gotta talk about the Beijing.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  We do.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Robot Olympics. Let's get to it. I was seeing clips of all this. I saw a bunch of robots running into a wall and smashing into pieces. But I was, you know, out of pocket for a couple of days. I'm not exactly up on it. Tell us, Lon, what is going on with the World Robot Olympics?

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Well, really, there were two events over the weekend in Beijing. The first was the World Robot Conference, China's annual flagship government-backed robotic showcase, held every year since 2015. That event ran from the 19th through the 23rd. That's forums, exhibitions, showcases, pavilions, the usual sort of conference stuff. And then there was also the World, hang on, let me pull it up. Then there was also the World Humanoid Robot Games, which are also held in Beijing. 51 events, more than 1,000 competitions. It's held in the National Speed Skating Oval that Beijing built for the 2022 Winter Games. So we saw a lot, as you're seeing on the screen now, if you're watching the video,

• 2:36Speaker 02

  robots that are boxing one another, robots that are playing tennis and table tennis with humans and with one another, robots that are doing all kinds of sort of Olympic sports and events. We actually set, J Cal, two world records, or what would have been world records if these robots were human during the game. Humanoid robot.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  Oh, look at that. This robot just fell over as being carried off.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, stretcher, yeah.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  And bolting it down. I gotta give the Chinese credit. The Chinese understand what this is about. You have to entertain people. You have to make them root for the robots. Before the robots take everyone's jobs and then murder everybody. This is the key. If you look in those stands, people are cheering. Robots playing ping pong, which you referred to as table tennis, which is an accurate description.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  That's what they call it, I'm told.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  And then they're doing all kinds of gymnastics. This is the master plan. This is what the Chinese do great. They are awesome at PR. America sucks at AI PR. We are full on retardés when it comes to, I wouldn't use the R word, but I will say retardé. It's a French word for idiots. We're effing idiots when it comes to AI PR. And the Chinese are next level when it comes to PR. Instead of telling everybody, you're gonna lose your jobs and Sam Altman's doing UBI studies. Why would Sam Altman be doing a UBI study? Universal Basic Income. He knows. The writing's on the wall.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  He looked inside the black box. And when these people look inside the black mystery box that answers all questions and solves all problems, they all seem to come to the same conclusion, which is humans equal unnecessary. But the Chinese do instead, is the Chinese say, let us entertain you. Let us entertain you. We're gonna show you some robots doing fun stuff. And here they are, a stadium full of humans cheering on robots.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  We had this idea in America. There was BattleBots. There's that movie with Hugh Jackman, Real Steel. The idea of like Rock'em, Sock'em fighting robots or whatever, that.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  It's our idea.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  That was our idea. But now we've gotten so stressed out about AI that, yeah, it wouldn't be fun for Americans at this point to watch it. Whereas, yeah, it does. And also, I was thinking about, you know, in Star Wars, when they go into, I believe it's in the prequels, when they're in.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Clankers, the droids.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  And they're watching drone sports on like an ESPN type, like George Lucas saw droid sports coming. We've sort of taken this turn, this anti-AI turn now, and it feels like Americans just aren't receptive to it anymore. But I was gonna say, we got two actual records set during the games. Two robots from X humanoid. One finished the 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds, besting Usain Bolt's world record. And then another one bested the human record in the standing high jump with 2.88 meters. That's higher than any human has ever jumped. The record was set in 1993 by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba, 2.45 meters.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  So we're at the point.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  And these are human-sized, right? So we're not making 12-foot robots.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  To jump higher. These are human, 5-foot-9 robots.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Here's the standing high jump.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  It's a pretty tall robot. Let me see. High jump. He jumps. Oh, and he does a leg split.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  That's like Jean-Claude Van Damme.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Look at me, can I hear the commentary? This is unbelievable.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  2.8843米，也就是2米8还要多，将近3米，掌声送给奥特尔！

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Look at the crowd! They got thunderclapping sticks. And I can translate this. You didn't know, I was studying. But just play it again. And can you put it on half-speed? And I will actually live translate, Lon. I'm gonna live translate this. Okay, ready? Go. I gotta really listen here. Okay, because my Chinese is a little rough. Okay. Your robot overlord is about to show you how your job is over. Yes, you have no need to go to work anymore.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  This robot will grab everything off the top shelf at Costco and bring it to your car for you. And in fact, it will run to your house with your milk and break Usain Bolt's record when it runs to your house with a pint of milk. That's literally what she said, Lon.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, why? I know you've been working on your Mandarin. I know you've been working on the.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Getting there. It's a little rough.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  It's a little rusty, but you'll get there, yeah, so.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  I'm gonna make a prediction here. There were 51 activities and robots won two.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Next year.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  No, it's all robot competitors for the most part.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Yes, but they broke humans.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  They broke human world records, correct?

• 8:02Speaker 00

  The two of 51 broke human records.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Next year, I'm gonna say 48 of 51 categories will be broken the human record. There'll be like three where they don't.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  And this one, by the way, this sprinter, it runs, it hits the wall.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then it sparks.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  It bounces off. Yeah, and adding the exploding battery, bang. That exploding battery was done on purpose. There's another person who said, you know what would be great? Let's make it even more entertaining. When it lands, hit the explosive, boom. This is all choreographed. This is a psyops. This has nothing to do with capitalism. These are murder bots. This is a message to the rest of the world that we can send.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  A million of these to Taiwan and take the fabs. This is literally a message to Donald Trump. We are going to create 1 billion murder bots. They're going to leave the factory, Lon. The factory is going to be at the beach. There's going to be a secret tunnel. And they're going to run underwater. And they will be walking. It's actually probably happening right now. There are probably 10,000 robots in the South China Sea on the floor, on the floor of the ocean, slowly walking to the beaches at Taiwan. And 1 million of them in sync are going to emerge from the ocean and take Taiwan.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  That's what this is, Lon. I hate to tell it to you. Welcome to Conspiracy Corner.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Your previous theory, I like that it's about engendering sympathy for them. That would be a good reason to show them like sparking up or catching fire when they failed. Like if we want them, if we want to think of them as more sympathetic and less like faceless.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Look at it's waving at people.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, there, I mean, that is definitely, I think if you watch enough of these clips, you see there is definitely an overt, they're trying to make them feel relatable. They're anthropomorphizing them. They're giving them human qualities. They're making them feel like, oh, this is comfortable. This is familiar. I, I like, I'm rooting for this robot. Right. As opposed to, oh, this is terrifying. This, this is like a, this thing could destroy me. And I, I, I will say, I do feel like there's an inherent limit to how interesting robot sports can be, because the robots don't have to work at it. Like if you're a sports fan and you're watching football or basketball, the appeal is like, these guys have to train or these ladies have to train so hard.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  You know, like, we know the effort. We can all appreciate how hard it is to play football, basketball at, at a professional level. And that these robots, they're just built to do it. Like they're not, there's no discipline. There's no, there's no grit or drive. It's not a, it's not a good story in that way. I feel like that holds you back.

• 11:07Speaker 00

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• 11:50Speaker 00

  No, you make a sale and your invoice gets created instantly while your inventory gets quickly updated. So if you're still combing together your back office across five different tools and apps, get started today at Odoo.com/twist. And your first app is free. That's O D O O dot com slash twist. Yeah, there's a lot to say here about these bots. As impressive as all of these are, these robots will not hold a candle to Optimus.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  I saw one of the latest Optimus demos. I teased it at the beginning of the show. Can't say what I saw. But I can tell you what I saw is better than anything I just saw at these World Games. Optimus is going to be the greatest product ever made by humanity. It is next level. It's being built by Tesla. You know, they ripped out the Model X and the Model S factory lines and they're building these. Optimus is going to, if Optimus came to these games, I would predict Optimus wins 35 of 51 contests.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  I mean, what, what's, like, why, what puts Optimus so far ahead of like Unitree or, or X humanoid or these companies that were showing off at Beijing?

• 13:08Speaker 00

  I think, you know, in addition to the hardware that I think is one and a half generations beyond these, I think the brain is like five generations behind these. This is not to diss anything happening in China. They're building legit stuff. But I think Optimus is going to be the greatest selling product in the history of humanity. It will sell and provide more value than the iPhone. I would say iPhone is the greatest product made in the history of humanity up until this point in terms of popularity, usage. You know what I'm saying, Lon? Like utility to the law, you know, you could say the smartphone, but if you had to pick of the smartphones, you'd say iPhone.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Of the robots, Optimus, I will guarantee you, we will be sitting here in 10 years and there will be 1 billion Optimuses in the world. I didn't say 1 million. I didn't say 10 million. I didn't say 100 million. I said 1 billion. I think there'll be 1 billion Optimus robots in 2036.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  That's it. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying what I saw. Well, I'm not saying any details. I'm just saying the fidelity is so much better than these.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  I will say this, I don't always see eye to eye with Elon in terms of branding. Like the Tesla robot taxi cyber cabs you see driving around Austin with that weird cursive, like punk rock font. Like, I don't like, in terms of branding, not for me. But Optimus as the name for your robot, 10 out of 10. The best possible, the best possible name. What could make you feel better about owning a robot than having it be named after pop culture's number one kindest and most respected robot? I, I feel like he nailed that one. He nailed that one.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  All right. Yeah, and listen, I got, somebody leaked to me, somebody leaked to me.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  A video of a secret underground version of these Olympics.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Is this a Twist exclusive we've got right here?

• 15:09Speaker 00

  It's a Twist exclusive. Somebody emailed me this. This is happening in Alabama and, and the people's, oh, rednecks, whatever. They're in on it. They've been importing these. Play the tape, Jacob. Boom. See, here it is. This is a celebration of life.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  They're calling this the Flesh Fair. Now, this, this is an arena that's hyped up, but they are not, Lon.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Wow. So we, we have a whistleblower.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Describe what they're seeing.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  We got a source into the, the Flesh Fair where, yeah, it looks like, uh, robots are fighting. It's, it's, it's sort of backyard fights, but with robots on a much larger scale.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  These robots do not seem to be willing participants.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  No, I would say, yeah, this is definitely a situation where.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  They're putting a robot in a cannon.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  This is anti-clanker violence, I think we're witnessing here.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  He's trying to fight his way out of the cannon. They're forcing a clanker into a cannon against his will.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  You know, did you notice how?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Pretty sadistic.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  That, that robot sounds a lot like Chris Rock, weirdly. I don't know if you know.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  He might be doing an impersonation. And there's a fan and they got the fan going. And there's a bunch of other robots in a cage.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  This seems like quite an elaborate, I wonder if the local authorities were tipped off about this or maybe got a little cash on the side to look the other way.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  This is the American PR version of this. Remember I said the Chinese made it like very world positive?

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  This is how Americans feel about, about AI.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Robots, yes. Humanoid robots. They just took that poor robot and shot it through a cannon into blades on fire.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  You know what I never realized before? This is, it's the Thunderdome. They created the Thunderdome for Mad Max, but for robots.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Poor robots.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Poor robots.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  These humans seem to be taking delight in destroying the robots.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Uh, all right, well, there it is, folks.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  There it is, folks.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  There it is, the Flesh Fair. Uh, I don't, we don't condone robot violence, humanoid robot violence. We do not condone here at this week in Star Wars.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Makes you, makes you sad, just makes you sad.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  For those of you wondering, people who work for me, um, this is a film called AI, done by somebody named Steven Spielberg, written originally by?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Stanley Kubrick. It was a Stanley Kubrick concept.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Kubrick died.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Was murdered after he released the film Eyes Wide Shut.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Eyes Wide Shut, yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Because the Illuminati felt that he too close to home.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  It was, it was faking the moon landing too. They, they, they were always afraid he was going to come out and reveal that he faked.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Yes, they forced Kubrick to do the moon landing. Welcome to Conspiracy Corner. Then he did Eyes Wide Shut. You can go down that rabbit hole.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  He got whacked.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  It.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Literally murdered him.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  crazily precedent, prescient, when you go back and watch Eyes Wide Shut. Now, he was, he was talking about stuff way before the mainstream was talking about that stuff.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Uh, thank you to my friend Alex Jones for educating me. All right. Should I do the Alex Jones show on? Would that be funny for me to be on Alex Jones?

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Are, is this a sincere question? Like Alex Jones invited you on? Oh my God, I think you have to, I think you have to do it just for the story.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  I have to do it for the, for the, for the LOL.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  The experience. I mean, also an Austin legend, like people don't know this.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Austin legend.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Like Alex Jones was infamous in Austin for like a decade before he was nationally famous. So.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Consider, okay.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  I think so. I mean, that would be very entertaining.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Let's keep doing the news. Let's keep doing the.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Well, before we go on, Jason, I do, I do want to talk about, uh, our executive assistants and how helpful they are here at launch.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, we love our sponsors here at Twist. We love being in constant communication with them to make sure that they're getting the most out of these partnerships. But that we make a lot of content. We're all very busy, so it's great to have your Athena EAs. They're very clutch as sort of the middle layer here. They can watch all the stats and the analytics, the numbers every day. Keep everyone up to date on all the viewership and the metrics that matters most of them. And if a partner does need the attention of someone on the team, they're the first line of defense to find out who they need to talk to and route those questions to them. So we love our, our Athena assistants, uh, Steven, AJ, tremendous asset to our team. They do a great job.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  You've heard me say it many times now upon. If you're an early stage startup or small business, every single new potential customer is extremely valuable. You can't afford to have a team that's missing calls. If your communication is inconsistent, your customers will notice. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, Q U O, the smarter way to run your business communication. I use Quo all day long. I love it and it's just great to have that one number that my team and I can share so that we don't lose any customers. Quo is the number one top rated business phone system on G2 and it's already trusted by more than 90,000 businesses. They're going to bring all of your calls, texts and contacts together in a shared collaborative space. That means your entire team is going to use one shared number.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  So there's zero chance anyone is going to fall through the cracks. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash twist. That's Q U O dot com slash twist. This is one of my favorite products in the world. It gets my highest endorsement. Here's how I explain it to people. They say, oh, well, don't you automate everything with Grok Bot, which is exceptional. You've been using it, uh, Claude Code, perplexity, all these great things. Yes, you can automate some things and then you could give a human here in America some tasks to do. But there are some tasks that the AI can't get done or a human using AI can get done. But a human still needs to be in the loop. One of those things is managing customer success.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Customer success, there's, you know, a hundred units of work in customer success. I would say the first 50% of that, the first 50 full units are things that the AI can prep. Like how many views did this clip get? And how many people clicked on this? And who was the advertiser? And like, let's give them some reporting. Great to have the AI queue it up, but a human needs to do the last little polish, fit and finish on it. Make sure it's tight before it goes to the, to the partner. Cause we, we don't want to send AI slop to people. That's the perfect use of an Athena assistant. Go to Athena wow, W O W. If you go to Athena wow.com, you're going to get a couple of weeks off. I have an Athena assistant. Chabath has talked about his Athena assistant.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  I was talking to Free Bird, his chief of staff and his assistant have two Athena assistants. They're rocking it. I don't, I can't speak for David Sacks, but I can tell you three out of four besties are using Athena at this very moment. Athena wow.com, go check it out.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Or, or you could go to Athena.com slash J Cal. Either way, find out more.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Athena wow.com forwards to it and we get credit for it.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Uh, I'm going, I was the first investor in Athena. As sincerely, these Athena assistants are so good and they all know AI now. They all know AI now. I would say the Athena assistant that I paid $3,000 a month for, $36,000 a year, full in, fully baked, is as good as $80,000 assistants I've had here in the United States and they don't quit. And if they do move on, Athena says, here's your new assistant. Try them for a couple of weeks. And if you like them, great. If not, we can swap out another person. The hardest thing about getting like operational people, Lon, is every American

• 22:44Speaker 00

  looks at an operational job and they look at all those chores and they say, I will do this for a full six months. But then I want to be, I, I, I want to, I want to raise, I want to promotion. I want to do more interesting stuff. And then you're just chasing your tail.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  What?

• 22:59Speaker 00

  I told you my hack for Abby Jane Bakery, right?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, I think we talked about that at a previous Athena productivity hack.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Oh, this is, you know, Rockman Bakery in the east side?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't know that one.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Okay. There's a baker called Rockman. Go ahead, pull it up, boys and show the pastry counter there. I like a little pastry, you know?

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Who doesn't love a little pastry?

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Ro dot co slash twist. I lost a bunch of weight. You've been losing weight, but I love a chocolate croissant, have a bagel once in a while. This is Rockman.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  That looks good.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  If you ever, I had that, uh, so Rockman is just a great place. Now, Rockman, it's all the way on the east side.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  I'm all the way out in hill country. And this woman, uh, who runs Rockman Bakery is like a master at pastries. I've been wanting to try it, but you know, I like to treat my daughters to some, uh, pastries. She sells everything out, like any great pastry person, they sell everything out. And then you know what happens? These lunatics on Tik Tok say, this is the greatest pastry I've ever had. And then it sells out even faster. So I went there with my daughters. I get there at like 11:30. There's no pastry left.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Zero. They're like, I can make you a cup of coffee, but there's nothing left. They open it at 8:00 AM. See that right there? 8:00 AM.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  So here's what my Athena assistant does. And they're not doing delivery. You're not getting like these elite purveyors on DoorDash or Uber Eats or anything. So my AJ or Steven, my Athena assistants, thank you guys. They call, they say, hey, uh, it's Jason, I'm Jason Calacanis's assistant. Uh, we're doing a pickup. Can we get, um, you know, four pan of chocolat, a couple of bagels? And then four random pastries that you think are the best ones that are new this week. Cause she, she rotates new stuff in.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Sure, of course. Yeah.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  We'll be there at 8:30 to pick it up. So we're the first in line.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  They literally call at 8:01, eight, eight o'clock they call.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Phone picks up, they get it. Then they send an Uber courier.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Uber courier is super cheap. They're not expensive Uber courier. They pick it up, they bring it to the ranch.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Hmm. Systems over goals.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  I built my.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  You got a pastry system.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  I hacked the pastry system with my Athena assistant. Now, if I did that with an American assistant and I said, hey, um, could you do me a favor? Can, can you get me some fresh pastry? I, I would seem like a lunatic rich guy doing something super oppressive and making their assistant go pick up their croissants.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  I, it would be like I'm the king of France, right?

• 25:34Speaker 02

  I was going to say, it's one of those like Silicon Valley shows where they're trying to make the tech execs look as like vapid and obnoxious as possible. That's what they would have that guy do. And like the, like send the person an hour away to the bakery. They like to get their, their favorite pan of chocolat. Yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  So now I don't have to be an obnoxious a-hole.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Athena wow.com.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  Great. How's it doing with your weight loss? By the way, you started your weight loss journey.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  You went to Ro dot co slash twist. This is a dual sponsorship.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Ro, I went to Ro dot co slash twist. It's amazing. It, it is so easy. It is so fast. That's what I couldn't believe is like you're within a few days of going and checking it out for the first time. You've got your prescription. It's in your hand. You're starting the medication. Uh, yeah. So I've already, uh, I'm, I'm on 1.5 milligrams. The, the starter Wegovy pill. I've already dropped about eight, nine pounds, but it's sort of stalled out there. I, I dropped eight, nine pounds like right away and then it's kind of plateaued. And I was getting a little like, oh, well, maybe that's, maybe that's it. Maybe that's the magic of GLP ones for me. But then my doctor from Ro dot co got back to me the other day and explained that, no, no, you're just tapering on. So next month I'm going to be on the four milligram pill.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  If that goes well, then they put you on the nine milligram pill. And then they're saying nine and above, that's where the real weight loss kicks in. So for now.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  But 8%, eight, wait, hold on a second. Eight pounds is like 4% of your body weight.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Eight, eight pounds is great. No, I, and then it's only been like.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  See it in your face.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  It's only been like two and a half weeks. So.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  How are you tolerating the shot?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm doing the pill. I'm not on the shot, uh, but.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  You're doing the pill?

• 27:10Speaker 02

  I'm on the pill. I'm on the, the Wegovy pill.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  The pill's out?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  The pill's out.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Makes it even easier.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  It, yeah. The only rule is a tiny little pill. The only rule is you take it first thing when you wake up and then you don't eat or drink anything for 30 minutes. That's it. And they, they act like, they tell you this like it's like a huge, like, listen.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  We got, we got the pill. There is a pill. You could take the pill, but you're not going to be able to eat for 30 minutes. You can't eat or drink for 30 minutes. They tell you this like it's

• 27:39Speaker 00

  survive.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Like it's like you gotta remove a limb and it's like, no, you do nothing. See, you, you, you take the pill, you take your shower, you, you, you do your morning routine. By the time you're done, doctor.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  You call your Athena assistant, you get four chocolate.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  You get four chocolate. Yeah. By the time my coffee's done brewing, it's, it's, it's great. So, uh, I'm on my way. Let's talk about some other news. Uh, Hugging Face, I don't know if you've heard about this, Jason. Maybe up for sale.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Love Hugging Face.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Business Insider reports, Hugging Face has been approached for a sale at a valuation of over $13 billion. It's a mystery buyer. We don't know who Hugging Face has been in these talks with, but they are apparently taking it seriously. They are mulling over the sale and have been talking with banks about evaluating these bids. Of course, Hugging Face, the open source platform that allows developers and researchers to share, find, test, deploy AI models and data sets. They were the ones who are famously attacked by Hugging, uh, by OpenAI's bots during that recent, uh, cybersecurity kerfuffle. Uh, Stripe also recently acquired a sort of similar product, OpenRouter, for $7 billion. Just a little bit of context here.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Hugging Face's last raise was in 2023, $4.5 billion post-money valuation. So, I mean, I think the first question on everybody's mind, who do you think this is who is trying to buy Hugging Face?

• 28:56Speaker 00

  A lot of people think there is a binary choice. Be a capitalist who supports growth or care about the environment and the natural world. But these two ideas don't have to be in opposition. Our friends at the Conservation Fund believe that you can protect land, wildlife, and our shared access to the great outdoors while also providing important economic opportunities. For 40 years, the Conservation Fund has been acting quickly to protect at-risk land and important wildlife habitats while also actively supporting local communities and, this is key, creating new jobs. The Conservation Fund already holds over 9 million acres across all 50 states, proving that we can watch out for the environment and keep our natural surroundings

• 29:41Speaker 00

  in balance without endless gridlock, debate, and politics. And this isn't just a land trust scooping up property and sitting on it. They're working alongside permanent stewards who will find practical uses for these important spaces without destroying them. Find out more about how the Conservation Fund is changing the playbook at conservationfund.org. All right. So Stripe bought OpenRouter.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Right? And just so people understand what these platforms do is they have all the models and you can route your token usage. I've been talking for a couple of years. I thought open source would win the majority of the tokens. Not the majority of the revenue because the frontier models are expensive. But people are increasingly saying, whoa, sticker shock when the Claude bill comes in. I got a little, we had a little sticker shock at our company because we put on Claude tag. It's on Fable and everybody starts using it all at once. And literally we got a couple of thousand dollars and they're like, oh, we're going to give you $2,500 in credits. I'm like, oh, that's nice. We turn on Claude tag, $2,400 in the first six weeks, gone. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. What are

• 30:48Speaker 00

  we doing here? Why are we not using like the Claude app and now we're using it in Slack? And it's like burning through credits like a lunatic. And now I've got to spend on top of the $2,500 per employee I'm spending. So that's like times 20, it's 50 grand a year. Now they want to get another 50 grand out of me. What these platforms do is they let you route to the cheapest platform, the cheapest, um, that's why it's called OpenRouter.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  And Hugging Face, they let you route to the latest version and then underneath it, they might have multiple providers. Anyway, what this means is, um, a lot of developers and increasingly prosumers who are using Hermes, uh, the incredible, but you know, um, luxury bag company. They, they also went into AI. They did a pivot.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  It's scarves, bags, and AI models. Yes.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  And, and, and, and, and a harness.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Which is like harnesses are kind of right next to bags. I mean, it's like a bag, a harness, same, same.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  There was that, yeah. Nineties, it was very chic, those like harness designs. Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  So who would want to then capture the open source early adopters? Well, remember Sam Altman bought, essentially bought, soft bought, the gentleman who created OpenClaw. I was like,

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Peter Steinberg.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Yes. And I said to myself, if you buy the founder, you buy the vision and you kill the existing thing. Now, I don't want to be a party pooper here and say, I told you so. How much did you hear about OpenClaw after Peter went to OpenAI? When did the OpenClaw surging momentum dissipate? When did it dissipate?

• 32:28Speaker 02

  It was almost, it was almost immediately after he joined. And I mean, I think you could make the argument that, well, so many other entrants came into the field. Maybe that was inevitable. But it does seem like OpenClaw suddenly was no longer part of that conversation.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Because the founder secured, what I'm going to guess is a quarter billion dollars.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  A billion.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  200, I think, and this is like, I'll give credit to Sam Altman.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Master dealmaker. Too good of a dealmaker. To the point at which, you know, you remember he did like, uh, an Nvidia deal and then like two weeks later did an AMD deal, then he's doing this deal. And then Jensen's like, well, we don't have to invest 10 billion into OpenAI. That's at our option. We have an option, right? And you could tell Jensen's a pretty chill dude, public facing, but he was, I, my interpretation, Jensen, you know, take it for what it's worth. You know, he's chill, but I think he was a little perturbed.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  That those announcements happened back to back. And I don't know if he put the 10, whatever it was, five or 10 billion. I don't know if he took his option to invest that in OpenAI. Open, the, the purchase of OpenClaw's founder killed OpenClaw. Let me just say it clearly, folks. I predicted it. OpenClaw is not part of the dialogue anymore.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Not really, no.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  There's an OpenClaw Foundation. My friend Dave Moran is running it. They're hiring people. But I just kind of feel like if you take the founder, if you took Elon out of SpaceX, if you took, you know, Zuck out of Facebook, what happens? What happens? The soul.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  So Sam Altman rips the soul out of OpenClaw and now we're talking about Hermes. Now we're talking about perplexity computer. Now we're talking about Grokbot.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  But you do the math, folks. You don't like my interpretation? You do the math.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  They were, they were first. OpenClaw was the first arrival that was like, here's what you could do. This agent's going to plug into everything and it's going to have all the context. And then they didn't, they didn't keep up. They didn't, like, all of these other entrants came in. There were suddenly rivals. They were easier to set up and that they were faster, more intuitive. And you never, there was never that next OpenClaw update that was like, okay, here, now we're going to keep up and advance. We're going to take it even one level further. They just didn't stay in the race. They're still.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Stopped innovating.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Let's go back to Hugging Face. Who would buy it? Well, obviously, if Anthropic and OpenAI are going public and people are telling them over and over again, open source is their biggest threat.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Have they not been saying that? Right? Between the whole dialogue?

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  I said it two years ago on All In.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  You did.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  From my ski house. We have the clip. I have the receipts.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  It's January 2024 was that clip. You're in your, you're in Tahoe. You can see the, the snowy background.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  I mean, you should have that clip ready. I tried to pull it last week. Let's keep that top of mind, that clip, because I need to do a victory.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Jacob, can we pull up that clip? I know I sent it to you on Friday.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Okay. So I did that victory fact for a reason. Um, I was right. Everybody else in the world was wrong. And, you know, listen, sometimes you gotta listen to J Cal. And I'm not saying, there's some people saying.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Some have said.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  J Cal was right about everything.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Hmm. Many people are saying this. Many people.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Many people are saying it. Somebody made a T-shirt, J Cal was right about everything.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  I've seen it all over.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  This is, this is the thing I was right about. I said, there's a chance in this clip. I said, there's a chance I think open source could win the whole thing. And the reason I said that was because AI is too important for one person to own. Developers are going to want sovereignty, which is kind of obvious to me because I saw it happen with databases.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  People were like, I want my sovereignty with a database. Give me Hadoop. Give me my SQL. Give me something where I control my destiny. We'll put it all aside for a second. The master stroke to your original question is who would buy Hugging Face? The master stroke would be a frontier model company buying it. Why would that be a master stroke? Because then they have two ways to win.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  You want to use Kimmy? You want to use Quentin? Great. Go to our Hugging Face. Go to, you know, if they had bought OpenRouter, it would be insane for Anthropic or OpenAI or SpaceX to not buy it.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Just because it's a threat factor.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  And if you are Google and you're selling ads and you see YouTube growing like a weed and it's would be perfect for ads and video ads are wonderful and make a big business. You want to get rid of that threat vector. So you buy it. You know, Facebook's growing nicely, but Instagram's growing faster. You want to buy it. Facebook Messenger is doing well, but WhatsApp's growing faster. You want to buy it. You always buy the threat. Open Claw was growing. People loved Open Claw over OpenAI. What did Sam do? He bought the threat. You always buy the most threatening thing to your business,

• 37:37Speaker 00

  either to kill it or to get the data and control it. So now if Anthropic owned Hugging Face, they get all that data. They're watching which customers are using which models. Then if they're watching which customers are doing which models, they can insert their model at a lower price and say, yeah, oh, I see you're using Quen. Oh, you're paying, you know, a dollar, you know, a dollar per 10 million tokens. We'll match it. We'll beat it by 20%. Just, you know, hey, it's the options there for you. You're a great customer. Boom. They just insert themselves on the menu. That would be the master stroke. I don't think it's going to happen. But I do think AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure will

• 38:20Speaker 00

  buy this in a heartbeat for that amount of money. Anybody who has a web service, including Elon Web Services, anybody with a web service will buy this because you or Caruso Cloud, you know, pick, pick your, your scaler, because you can then send traffic to your cloud.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Right. That makes sense.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  There's a, it's a no brainer. It's a no brainer for either a hosting company to buy it or for wildcard, seems crazy, a frontier model to buy the open source leader.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  It's interesting that you say that. I'm going to jump ahead to a different news story. Sam Altman was on David Senra's podcast over the weekend. I believe the full episode goes up today. There was a lot of, some of the other clips got the most focus, but here's a moment that I'd like to have Jacob maybe pull up. It's the first one under some more interesting moments. Altman says he doesn't want OpenAI to be a product company. He thinks they're a platform company and he doesn't want to compete directly with his customers on the application layer. So let's pull up that one. And that is basically him talking about exactly what I think you're sort of saying.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  What you described to me is a direct shot at Anthropic. Anthropic created Claude Code and Claude Design. They specifically went after their customers. Here's Sam Altman.

• 39:40Speaker 04

  People talk about different ways, a new utility and new commodity, whatever you want to call it. Like people want to use a lot of AI and they wanted it at a low cost and they want to be fast and to work well and have their context and be smooth. We got you. And then there's like a single product, which is I need to ask the AI something. Eventually, maybe it's the AI should proactively offer me things, but you will have this interface, which started as a chatbot and now also has coding agents. And I think at some point will feel like a more persistent agent to this AI that is running on whatever you need it to run on. But that's it. I don't think we should go build every product category. I don't think we should like go try to compete with all our customers. I don't think we should try to like subsume the entire economy. I think we should offer this platform and

• 40:25Speaker 04

  try to have 100 million new businesses and 8 billion people use it in all kinds of new ways.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  To me, that sounds like he's pitching what you're talking about. That you'd go to OpenAI, they're the marketplace for all intelligence, and then you're building on top of that. That's what I.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  The AWS of intelligence is what he's referring to there. That's, that's a good vision for him, especially when, as we saw just recently, Harvey, and I don't know if we talked about this last show.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  We did at the Harvey Tenet. Yes.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Yes. Harvey has forked, I believe it was Quen.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Kimi, Kimi K3.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Kimi K3 to make their own legal AI sovereign. They control it. It's on their servers. They control it. Nobody has access to the innovations, the updates, the usage, the utilization, the output, the problems, the thumbs up, the thumbs down, any of the signal. They control it. And that's their castle now. They got their castle. And then I use the metaphor of the keeps. Keeps are like the little areas outside around the castle. It's a little bit of a smaller wall. Those keeps are their customers. So now their customers, whatever law firms Harvey is going into, they can say, hey, I don't know, Wilson Cincini or, you know, Oric, whatever the Sherman Sterling, they can say, hey, Sherman Sterling,

• 41:46Speaker 00

  we know you have a bunch of documents. They're not our documents. They're your documents. We, and you keep them in your keep. They don't come back up to us and they certainly don't come up to us to OpenAI or Anthropic. And they certainly don't go up to us and back down to Wilson Cincini. And then Wilson Cincini, you got your little keep. And if you have a bunch of secrets and a bunch of great documents, you're working on a bunch of case law, it's not going into our system. It's going to be on prem, on your site, in your database, you know, it's all yours. That's what the world has realized. That's what I realized a couple of years ago when I made that famous thing. I think open source could run, run away with it. Because it's just so obvious. And now Sam is having to

• 42:31Speaker 00

  play catch up and say, yes, we're not going to compete with you. Why? Eleven Labs, huge customer of the frontier models and Lovable, who I had both of those on the All In interview show. And at Lingora, is that the other?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Lagora, yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Lagora, I had the founder of Lagora. All of those app levels. And then you have Figma over here, Dylan. I'd love to have Dylan on the show, by the way. Please book Dylan.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  We've reached out.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  For an hour.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  We'll reach out.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Yes. And if somebody needs to get back, then I got to come in and do the invite. But we'll have Dylan on. Figma, Claude Design, like that people are starting to realize, I just can't trust the frontier models not to steal my business. They're going to steal my cheese. So I like this vision. Personally, I'd love to see Elon buy it. Or I would love to see, like it's a Microsoft GitHub, like Microsoft owns GitHub, right?

• 43:26Speaker 02

  I believe so.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  Nvidia would be a great, Nvidia is probably the no brainer. Microsoft, GitHub, Google Cloud, Nvidia, you know, like a Salesforce might want, you know, Marc Benioff's pretty aggressive. He might want to do this to restructure what he's doing as more AI first.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and it puts.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Because he's getting his ass kicked in the markets because he's viewed as a SaaS company. So he has Slack plus Hugging Face. Maybe then he's in the AI game and he can move from the framing of Salesforce as part of the SaaS apocalypse, and then it would be part of the AI revolution.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  It speaks directly to the criticisms of him, which is like that they're bolting on like, oh, they're just buying all these AI companies and then bolting those on to the core Salesforce product. This would shift the conversation to, well, now you come to Salesforce first and it's what's your infrastructure that's powering all of your AI. So it would speak to that. That's, that's an interesting theory.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  I mean, listen, if you want to be extra spicy, Stripe should buy it.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Ooh, on top of Open Router. Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Well, they are different. I made the comparison, but they are different. I mean, Hugging Face is more like a repository. It's where everybody is going to sort of communicate. It's almost got a social network aspect to it. Whereas Open Router is much more like I have a workload directed.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Utility.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Yes. But they would be interesting together.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  But how different are they? How different are they then?

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's like a lot of overlap. There's a lot of overlap. Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  If Open Router were to add comments and a little bit more community features or Hugging Face were to do a little more routing, it's the same product. They both host LLMs.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  And data sets. It'll allow you to deploy directly from the platform. Yeah. Should we keep, do you want to take a look at a few more of these Sam Altman clips?

• 45:14Speaker 00

  I mean, if they're relevant or it's interesting.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  There was one more that was getting a lot of attention that I think we should discuss. He's talking about how he agrees with the popular public sentiment that the industry has not done a good job of talking and communicating about AI and data centers and a little bit for what he thinks that conversation should be. This is the very top clip on there, Jacob. Let's, let's play it.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  Man, this thing is going to be really terrible and there's going to be 50% of the jobs are going to go away in the next year and we hope you all are okay, but seems really scary. Like, we have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated. And we certainly have not done a good job, even if people have had answers like, you know, saying, well, there's going to be universal basic income or work will be optional or whatever. There's been very little discussion from people about how and why it's important that people have more power and first personal freedom in the world, not less. And that matters a lot to most people.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you look in his eyes right there, I think the message has been received loud and clear. And revenue, there it is. See that look? That's the I get it look. There was a famous venture capital capitalist, Jerry Colonna, had him on the program two or three times. Good friend of mine. And I knew him in New York in the 90s. And then he became a Buddhist and a coach. So now he like coaches CEOs. You can take Sam off the screen. And so he said, Jason, the question we must ask ourselves is, what have I done to create? I think it was, what have I done to create the suffering that I'm experiencing?

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  What have I done? How have I contributed to the suffering that I'm experiencing?

• 47:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  So if you were like tired and depressed, you might say, okay, well, why am I tired and depressed? Like, well, I'm not sleeping, I'm drinking too much booze, you know, and I'm wallowing in it and I'm out of shape. Okay, great, you contributed to it. I think what Sam is doing right here in this moment is, and I don't think it's performative at all, I think it's actually very sincere, is like, when he says "we," I think he should say "I."

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  It would have been stronger if he said "I." He said, you know what? I have talked a lot about UBI and I did a UBI experiment. And then I said that a lot of these jobs are gonna go away, and I should not have said that as my lead-in

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  to why you should use ChatGPT. What I should have said, what I should have said was, you're going to learn any skill anytime using this for free, for life. We're always gonna have a free tier, and whatever you wanna learn, whether you're a 12-year-old with a single parent and you can't afford a tutor, but you wanna learn a new skill, you could have the same, you can have a better tutor than the person on the other side of the tracks with the rich parents who have a personal tutor coming over every day for 250 bucks and they're spending $50,000 a year in extra tutors so you can get into an Ivy League school. You know what?

• 48:29Speaker 00

  OpenAI is gonna be that free tutor for you for life, and you're gonna be on a level playing field with the rich kids on the other side of the track. And when you go to your doctor and your doctor's only got seven minutes for you and you're on the cheapest, worst healthcare plan, we're gonna let you put in your labs, we're gonna let you ask questions, and you're gonna have as much information as your doctor. And when you go to that doctor, you're gonna know every single possible medicine drug modality to help you, to help you get healthier. And my commitment to you is that we will always have a free unlimited tier for every human on planet Earth. That's the ChatGPT promise.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  All human beings have access to all intelligence for all time.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's, it's more effective, I think, than what they've been doing. I have to say, and I tweeted about this over the weekend and a lot of people reacted, I just, I get why people don't believe there's gonna be universal basic income, it just doesn't, it seems, they keep promising it, but that, I mean, it doesn't seem like it's very American. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing Americans would actually pass or want or be into. We don't like handouts, we don't like free lunches, there's all this debate about every socialist policy that comes out. It makes me very cynical to hear people talk about universal basic income, because it just feels like a thing that there's no excitement for among America's elite and ruling class. Like, they don't wanna give-

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Nobody wants a, nobody wants a handout.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  And the rich people don't wanna give, these companies don't wanna give their stock away for free, the government, they don't want the government giving things away for free, so where is this UBI coming from?

• 50:14Speaker 00

  UBI is a path to, and I don't mind, my grandmother used to say, "I don't mind, devil's playground." And so if you give people enough money that they don't have to work, their minds are gonna look for problems to solve or other things to do that are unhealthy to fill their time. People do not want handouts. Now, what would be a way for us to increase the standard of living and opportunity for all humans? I've been talking about this for a couple of weeks. The minimum wage, federal minimum wage, seven bucks and change, has not changed for decades. It was five bucks, it doesn't keep up with inflation, it doesn't keep up with anything.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  And every time they do a study of just raising the minimum wage, just a little bit, dollar a year here and there, Australia, New Zealand, Seattle, New York, the number of jobs lost that pass along inflation to consumers when they buy their hamburger, it winds up being, you lose less than one or two percent of jobs, you lose less than one or two percent of jobs to automation, and the price of a burger goes up one, two, or three percent. In other words, it has no impact, but everybody has to agree to raise that wage, or one company that does raise it, like Starbucks, is now at a disadvantage to Dutch Bros or whatever other company doesn't.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  So my continued plea and instructions, and this will be another Jake always right about everything, if you want to have an esprit de corpse, if you want to have a spirit that we're all in this together, all the corporations in the world, all the rich people in the world should say, you know, there's only 15 million Americans making under 15 an hour? Let's get them all to 20. We don't have to do it, we don't have to shock the system and go from seven to 20. We're just gonna make a commitment, a dollar a year for 10 years, and let's just raise the bottom up a little bit. 100% of the money people spend when they're at that tier one, they, all that money they make, if they go from seven to 15 dollars an hour, they're just gonna spend it.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  There's no savings going on with the bottom 15 million workers in America. It's the bottom 10%, we got like 150 million people working in the country, 67%, 62% of the country is employed. Just free your mind for a second as a capitalist. I am a rabid capitalist. I have changed my position based on new information. Please take the time to follow me on Twitter, X.com/Jason, while I argue this with my fellow capitalists who will not even consider for a moment what this would do for the spirit of America.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  I, yeah, I mean, I don't know, I, obviously I agree we should raise the minimum wage, it's like $7.50 an hour right now, the federal-

• 53:02Speaker 00

  The federal.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  -federal minimum wage, which is insane. I mean, I can't imagine trying to survive, let alone support another person on that paltry amount of money. But I have to say, I don't necessarily think universal basic income wouldn't work, there's a certain chunk of the population that they're lazy, they're not gonna wanna work, they're just gonna take the money and, and, and you know what? Fine, rather, better that than them being a drain on their parents or a drain on society or doing crime or whatever to make up the gap. But I think most people would be, you know, like, they're, okay, this is a, this is a bare minimum, this is gonna cover rent, I don't have to sweat it, what can I do with

• 53:43Speaker 02

  my time now that is gonna be fulfilling for me and productive? I'm gonna create things, I'm gonna make things, I'm gonna start my own business. If you freed people up from having to work whatever job they could find to pay for their rent and food and healthcare, and you just had that as a baseline, and then they could go be, I think, I think you'd see amazing things, and I think there would be whole new discoveries of industries and, and businesses, but I just don't think it would ever happen. I just don't think, America doesn't have the appetite for it. We don't like giving things away for free.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  UBI is a road to nowhere. Just take it out of your mind for a second.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  It's about the minimum wage, that's what it's about. And here's the other great thing, Lon, that people don't know, and I didn't know. I've been doing this research, I've been finding every study, I've been tweeting about it, I've let my tweets be open, everybody tells me I'm a libtard, I go look at their profile, they created the account in July of 2026, and they've got 14 followers. Okay, great, these are all like spam accounts or whatever. But if you make that $20 an hour and you get to, you know, 2,000 hours a year, 20 bucks an hour, let's say you're just working nine to five, now you're getting to 40,000, that level of income now takes you out, there's like a benefit cliff, you now no longer are

• 54:59Speaker 00

  gonna be trying to get food stamps or other stuff from the government,

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  housing subsidies, there's so many government programs that you wouldn't need to tap. So then you have to ask yourself, wait a second, how did we structure society? We structured society so corporations, and listen, I am the most capitalist person you could imagine, I invest in 100 startups per year and lose 100% of my money on 90 of those 100. I am a capitalist capitalist. But I think it's profoundly unfair for a company like Amazon to be able to pay DSPs, delivery service partners, and push the minimum wage down, and then those same people who are delivering Amazon, so Amazon can print money and be this incredible organization,

• 55:49Speaker 00

  and I'm a very large shareholder in Amazon, and I'm increasing my ownership in Amazon because I think it's the best-run companies in the world. What they're actually doing is they're paying people a substandard wage in some cases in order, and then the subsequent impact of that is that the rest of us paying into the tax base are they're giving Amazon delivery workers food stamps because Amazon just won't pay them 25 bucks an hour. Come on, people. Just open your eyes to it for a second. Just steel man the other side. Steel man the other side. It's only 15 million people. It's only 15 million people. And if everybody raises it at the same time, would anybody care if

• 56:33Speaker 00

  their latte that was $4 added 4%? I'm going high, 4%. Now your $4 latte is $4.16. Would you rather have them sharpening the guillotines and firebombing CEOs' houses and shooting CEOs in the back of the head, gangland style? Would you rather pay $4.16 for a latte? That's my message.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  I think there's something just deep in our character that we don't like the idea of other people getting more fair treatment or money. We want everybody to be in this cutthroat competition. That's why I just don't believe, I don't believe UBI would ever pass. I just don't believe these. No, I'm talking about minimum wage. We're in strong agreement on UBI. I'm only talking about. Even that, like, we've been fighting over the 750 minimum wage for so, like, 750, that's crazy. That's what I was making in like, you know, 20, 25 years ago. Like, that's, and it was hard to live then.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  I mean, $7 time, and there's not that many people making $7, just to be clear.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Because most states.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  There are a lot of people making 10.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  Well, right, because that's the federal. A lot of states and cities have already adjusted, so it's much higher in a lot of places. That's the federal state.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  Enough with socialism, corner.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  All right.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Now, everybody thinks I'm a socialist. I'm not a socialist. I actually think it'd be good for capitalism. I'll tell you why it's good for capitalism. I'll end on this. That person goes from 7 to 15, they can buy another latte. They can join Amazon Prime. They can get their own Netflix account and not be sharing a Netflix account. Instead of stealing stuff, you know, pirating stuff, whatever, they can go buy it themselves. It's good for capitalism. It's good for monetary velocity. What else is in the news?

• 58:12Speaker 02

  All right, let's talk about, there's two sort of military AI stories in the news that I think we should discuss. The first one, hackers from Iran apparently shut down a UK power plant last week. According to The Telegraph, a small UK power plant was shut down for, oh, this is July, not last week. According to The Telegraph, a small UK power plant was shut down for four days in July following a cyber attack linked to Iran. Here's a UK government spokesperson. This story refers to an incident impacting a small-scale energy generator. At no point was there a risk to the wider energy system. The UK has a highly resilient energy system. The FBI is also warned about cyber attackers targeting US water facilities across at least seven states. These are also believed to be

• 58:56Speaker 02

  linked to Iran. I mean, at this point, how vulnerable do you think we are, Jason, to a large-scale destructive cyber attack? Do we have the best models? Does that make you feel safe or what?

• 59:09Speaker 00

  We need distributed systems that are redundant. And if you look at anybody of any means, anybody of any means is now, and I'm talking about middle class now, the middle class, especially here in Texas where we had some power problems, they have, I was just listening to a podcast, middle-class person was talking about, I got solar and batteries, spent, you know, whatever, 10, 20 grand on it, after we had this big freeze out, and I think it was 21 or 22 here in Texas, I wasn't here yet. And they bought the solar and battery, and they said explicitly, I bought this in case that happens again, so I can keep my refrigerator and my computers and my internet running, just to sustain

• 59:51Speaker 00

  ourselves in these kind of situations. Then you look at water. Here in Texas, people are putting water tanks on their properties. You know, if you got, you know, a half acre, an acre, you can do these things quite easily. They put a water tank, and then you take all the gutters around your house, because we get these crazy storms here, and they just flow, costs you a couple grand to have it flow into a tank. The tank fills up. Now you got extra water. That's on an individual basis. We need to just keep making all systems that are required redundant. In capitalism, we like to build one system because it is

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  more affordable. So, okay, let's make all the medicine in China, because it's the cheapest place to make it. Let's make all the, you know, PPE, the personal protection stuff, let's make it all in, you know, China. And then we realize what not having a redundant supply system can do when things fail. The American rugged individualism and self-reliance is the solution to a lot of these problems. And we did a little document, you and I, we just remembered it. There's something called porch solar.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  And find the IKEA page for me and throw it up. Porch solar, and maybe you can even find the document we wrote for that shorty we never did. There's going to be example after example example of redundancy added to our lives. And the one from India and other places where, like, you don't want to talk about the electric grid not being stable or reliable, you know, in emerging cultures, in frontier countries, you can have a lot, a lot of issues with electricity. So what people do now is they get porch solar. Porch solar. Here's a picture of it. IKEA has gotten in the game. IKEA is a very smart

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  company. These people are, I dare I say, a brilliant company. And if you look at the screen right now, plug in solar panels, make the most of every sunny day. Small systems, big impact. With portable solar, I'm reading from this IKEA, with portable solar panels, you can take your first step into solar energy. Turn your balcony, garden, or terrace into a mini power station. Simple, efficient, and sustainable, thanks to powerful stream storage and easy plug-and-play installation. At the core of this, and it doesn't look ugly, it doesn't look pretty, but you can fold one of these or put it on the side of your home without ever calling an installer. You don't have to rip your roof up. You just

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  literally put this on your porch, or you can put it in your backyard somewhere. Yeah, and they call it SVE solar. SVE solar, and IKEA, S-V-E. And you get a little battery pack, and what people are using these for, this is the page I want to see, right there. Look at these. And these are in euros, but, you know, it ranges from 500 bucks all the way up to, I can't see, it's too small, but you buy these little battery packs, like the ones you might put on the back of your phone, but bigger. It's like the size of, like, a suitcase. You get a couple of these solar panels. The battery is constantly filling

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  up. And you see they have stands there, like this little holders that you might use to, like, have a TV. This is an example of what we need to do as humanity, is just keep building redundant systems. And then, when there's no central place to attack, yeah, okay, you turned off the main energy, but everybody's phone's running, their refrigerator's running, and then we can take load off of the main system. And that's one of the keys here, is the grid is constantly going to be challenged. Every time somebody installs one of these things, they just take a little bit of drain off of the system, and you're protected in

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  the case of an outage. In California, San Francisco, we have rolling outages all the time. People get, Genentech is the company, I believe, that makes these external power that uses nat gas or kerosene. Those are, I think, about 10K installed, 20K installed. These solar panels and batteries are $1,000. You install it yourself. Just keep making more of this stuff, folks. Get yourself a water tank. Get yourself a protein supply. You get a couple chickens. When I was living in the Bay Area, people in the suburbs were raising chickens. I'm talking about rich people, Juan, were putting chicken coops in, having their own eggs, and if things really hit the fan, you could eat the chickens.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  There you go. If we're, if we really are in the post-apocalyptic, which brings me to my next story, actually, perfect segue.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  And by the way, if you're Iran. Don't, don't, don't make your situation even worse by dragging another country into the war with you. I mean, the last thing they need is another country, uh, dropping bombs on them. Like, why on earth would they start hacking the UK?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  I feel like they're calling our, they're calling our bluff. They've realized that we don't want to go and send troops in there. We're not going to do it. And so now they're can like, oh, if we can get away with, let's see, let's see what we can get away with.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, but the UK's got some navy and like, maybe the people of the UK are like, well, if you're going to shut down our electricity, maybe we'll send a ship or two to the hor-

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  That's true. They're, they're, they can be pretty intense with the stiff upper lip and all that. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily poke them, but I think Iran's feeling their oats right now. They're, they're feeling it.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  What do we got? We got an off-duty? We haven't done an off-duty?

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  We could do, we could do, uh, there was one, let's, let's do one more, one more, uh, kill drone story, uh, that I want to talk about. So this incident happened in Zaporijia, uh, in southeast Ukraine last month. A small Russian drone resembling a model airplane, it was trying to navigate to blow up a gas station. Instead, Jason, it crashed into a wall, it exploded, it sent out shrapnel, it killed three people, uh, including a 19 year old university student. Uh, and now drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders, and a forensic team have examined the wreckage, and they believe this was a fully autonomous drone. They think that Russia gave it a overall target, hit somewhere near this gas station,

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  and then the drone piloted itself there, chose a target, which was the propane tanks at the back of the gas station. It missed, but that's what they believe it was sort of aiming itself for. Here's a quote from Ukrainian air defense minister Colonel Sergey Minayev, "In a few years, we believe we will be living in a Terminator movie. It's no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike." Uh, so I think the question on my mind is, is this inevitable now? This is the future of warfare. We're under attack by autonomous kill drones. And do you think Anthropic, now that we're looking back with the benefit of hindsight, did they have a point? Was this something maybe we should have avoided instead of now ushering in the era of autonomous kill drones?

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  There's plenty of laws about adding weapons to robots that some people are following, et cetera. The really interesting thing is, um, that Ukraine, which has severe, um, technical talent in it, before this whole Ukraine-Russia conflict, many startups I know had dev shops or offices in Ukraine. And in fact, they then had to try to figure out, I think it was Riverside or one of those streaming platforms, in fact, had majority of the, was it the Stream Deck or Riverside? Somebody can look it up, had the majority of their developers, I believe, in Ukraine. And then they had to get some of them out

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  of Ukraine to keep their service up and running, basically. Um, Ukraine has now got the most robust, um, drone capabilities of, of any country, I believe. You know, maybe with the possible notable exceptions of US and China. And they are now exporters of drones. And, I mean, I know this, but now people are investing in drone companies. Eric Schmidt, uh, the former CEO of Google, is now in the drone business. American entrepreneurs, billionaires, are now investing in companies in the Ukraine to build drones and anti-drone technology.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  This is a booming industry, no pun intended. Uh, yeah.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  It's Restream. Restream is based in Kiev, yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  In some ways, uh, there will be a silver lining to what is happening in Ukraine and Russia, which is the good people of the West are going to increase their ability to use drones and have anti-drone technology. You know what one of the greatest ways to stop drones is? Nets. It turns out, people are putting netting over buildings and putting netting over streets, and the drones are flying into netting and exploding.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  I saw that. There was, there's a Ukrainian, like, town that did that, where they have all these, like, tennis, it looks like tennis nets up above the buildings that catch the drones as they go by. Yeah, I saw that.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  Yes. Um, incredible what to think of, that like, we're now in the, um, well, and this is interesting, too, what we're seeing on the screen.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  They're firing nets at drones, yeah.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  This is like, yeah, this is some, like, Batman utility belt thing. Uh, I don't know which startup this is, but it's basically shooting a net at a drone. Um, okay, fine. I don't think that this is the ultimate solution. The, the really interesting one is, uh, Kimball Musk, a friend of mine, brother of Elon, has a drone company that does those beautiful drone, um, drone shows.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  Very tiny drones, coordinated.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  The, the, the other really great way to do anti-drone technology is you use AI to watch for drones, and then you send out these little tiny drones to just kamikaze them. Just zip and run into them. So drones running into drones is the other great countermeasure. And, um, yeah, it's, the next war, you know, like, if this Taiwan thing happens, God forbid, I have a feeling like it's going to be a bunch of humans in container ships, running AI drones and robots against each other. It's going to be very strange for us to comprehend. In the same way, uh, when you and I were growing up and we watched Desert Storm and

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  Desert Storm 2 and all these things, we're like, wait a second, we're fighting the war from, you know, Boise, Idaho, with container ships, with pilots doing the original drones, you know, sending missiles.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the Predator drones and all that, like 90s and aughts, uh, technology. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  Here we are, folks. Okay.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  All right, let's go off.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Let's go off-duty. You, you told me there's something going on in the Star Wars universe. It was particularly close to me.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  Uh, so, uh, there was a viral tweet the other day, Jake, if you could pull it up, that I responded to. Uh, that guy was saying, "It's unthinkable how Star Wars seemed to be this massive, unshakable franchise, and then Disney came along." And this is a sentiment I've seen a lot. To me, I feel like this is not, this is, all of Star Wars history is an up and down. It, it, it's in, it's hot, everybody loves the most recent thing that came out, and then it's out, the fans hate the most recent thing that came out, it's never been worse. And, and we're always on, if you take the long view, I think Star Wars fandom is always like that. You know, people loved Empire, then they hated Return of the Jedi. People hated Phantom Menace, but then they loved Revenge of the Sith. You know,

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  people hated a lot of the Disney Plus shows, but then they loved Andor. You know, like, we're, we're always on this ride. So I feel like it's a narrow view to be like, Star Wars is at its lowest point ever right now. Uh, but I got, I got, I'll tell you, Jason, I got a lot of pushback. I got a lot of angry response from people who do feel like we are in the nadir. Uh, some of the evidence points, Mandalorian and Grogu, that new one that came out this summer, only grossed 345 million worldwide in theaters. Even Disney concedes it came in below expectations. It was a budget of 145 to 165 million before marketing, and it was the first theatrical Star Wars release since Rise of Skywalker, all the way back in 2019. Uh, also, a lot fewer shows coming out now on Disney Plus

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  than we had. Ahsoka, uh, which I know you're a fan of, uh, now the only active, ongoing live-action Disney Plus Star Wars franchise. It's back in January for season two, but we had stuff like Skeleton Crew, The Acolyte, which failed to make an impression, and Andor is over. There's a new Star Wars movie coming out next year with Ryan Gosling, Starfighter, from, uh, Sean Levy. That's May 2027. But what, I'm curious as to what you think. Are we at a historical low point for the Star Wars franchise? Or is this just, you know, Mandalorian and Grogu didn't hit, maybe this Gosling one did? It's just sort of a, a, a, an up and down thing?

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  Uh, the sequels were a disaster. Uh, just straight up. They should have just gone with George Lucas's vision. Instead, they had no plan. They had no plan. And they made three incredibly sloppy, disjointed, um, you know, trio of films that if you're going to make a series of films, there should be some cohesiveness to it. Uh, there was like, a sprinkling of wokeness to it, but the main problem was, they didn't use the characters that we all wanted to see. We wanted to see what happened to Han.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  Luke and Leia, and they wouldn't give us just the finishing of that story. The Jedi Temple and the Jedi School being recreated by Luke Skywalker. They decided to go off on this crazy tangent with this new character that may or may not be a Skywalker. Who knows who they are? They screwed the whole thing up. They need to take those three, retcon them out, just burn them to the ground and then give people what they wanted. Which they're kind of doing with Ashoka. Uh, and they wanted to see Luke Skywalker rebuild the Jedi Temple. When they did the Mandalorian, spoiler alert, and Luke Skywalker comes back as peak Jedi. And he's getting Grogu to become one of his first students. That's what people wanted.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  They wanted to finish that story. They totally screwed it up, but there is redemption for them. The Clone Wars, which I've watched with my children, is exceptional. And there's so much story there that somebody made their own film. It's called the Ultimate Edition, I think. I've been trying to get it because it's like one of these, um, fan edits. It's a five hour version of Revenge of the Sith. That includes the Battle of Mandalore. It includes stuff from the Bad Batch, the Clone Wars, inter-dispersed into Revenge of the Sith. And then they found the deleted scenes, anything. It's like a four or five hour thing. That whole time period is the most interesting period, like in Star Wars.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  It's, it's, it's arguably more interesting than the original trilogy. They just need to do that live action with Ewan McGregor and

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Hayden, Hayden Christensen.

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  And Hayden Christensen and Padme.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Natalie Portman.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  Natalie Portman. Just do that. Take the Clone Wars, make it a TV show, do five seasons, 10 episodes a season. Everybody will be happy, which is kind of what they tried to do a little bit with the Obi-Wan series, which takes place between three and four. That's what they did with Andor, which takes place between three and four. That's what they did with

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  The, what was the film that everybody loved?

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  Rogue One?

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  With the Death Star.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  Rogue One, the one that leads into Andor. Where the render leads into.

• 1:15:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's what everybody wants. Give them what they want.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  Well, it's, it's interesting you bring it. I mean, the guy who created the Clone Wars, Dave Filoni, he's, he's the new Kathleen Kennedy, running the whole thing creatively now. So I'm, we are going to see, I think, a lot more Clone Wars references. And that's going to be much more central, I think, to the vision because it's Filoni's. It's Dave Filoni's baby.

• 1:16:04Speaker 00

  Just give it, I mean, Filoni will figure it out. I, that, uh, in Filoni, I trust.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Hopefully he has better taste in spinoffs than hats. I think the cowboy hat, he's the guy, he's always in a cowboy hat, Dave Filoni.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's great. Filoni's great because he's a, you know what? He's a super fan and he like literally went to George Lucas and said, like, you know, like, here's what I want to do with the characters. You know, you tell me if this makes sense in terms of your vision. And he had like this proper respect for it. And then you go over to Kathleen Kennedy and she was like, literally took the treatment that Lucas made and threw it in the garbage. Kathleen Kennedy destroyed Star Wars for a decade. Dave Filoni is going to make it great.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Kathleen Kennedy is a legend. That's not, that's a baseball cap. It's, I'm talking about the cowboy hat, Jacob.

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  You see it on the right.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  There it is. Yeah. That's, that's, come on. Like the, the T-shirt cowboy, you know, just take that hat off. It looks ridiculous.

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  No, he's, he's a genius. Dave Filoni is going to Kathleen, Kathleen Kennedy, the scratia.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  Kennedy produced so many of everybody's favorite movies.

• 1:17:06Speaker 00

  And then she ended her career.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  An icon.

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  She's, she was an icon. She destroyed her career with the sequels. That's my position. That's Ben Shapiro's position. That's all, you like them.

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  I like Last Jedi. I think, no, I, I don't, uh, I don't love the other two. I, I don't like the first one, uh, or Force Awakens. It's okay. I really like Last Jedi and then I don't like Rise of Skywalker. Now, I don't think J.J. Abrams got it, but I like the Ryan Johnson one.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. You're, you're like one of one.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Uh, anyway, I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it when I saw it.

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  There's a, there's a bunch of fan films that are fantastic.

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  You mean the AI slap ones?

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  There's a guy who does Star Wars Theory. He's got over three million.

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  He's, he's in sync with me and everybody else.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  He's the guy who cried when Luke Skywalker showed up, uh, very famously. You can find like the meme of him crying. Anyway, he has been doing a Vader series and it's like a nonprofit fan series. Uh, you can search for Star Wars Theory.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  And the stuff, he's made two of these episodes. They're just absolutely fantastic. He's got three million views already. This thing came out three weeks ago. The first episode of Vader, he did, um, I don't know, maybe five years ago or something like that. He, he, he gets all of the people who watch his channel to donate to this. He does it as a nonprofit and he sells sabers. He is fantastic.

• 1:18:31Speaker 02

  Don't you think it's like fan service is not, that's never been what Star Wars was. It was always about challenging and pushing to the next. Like it's easy to make things that you know people are going to like because you're just recalling what they've already seen. But that's not interesting in an artistic way. That's just, you know, endless merch and fan service. And, and sure, I mean, that, that Star Wars, for, for most of our lives, there weren't new Star Wars movies. It was just merch. It was just comics and books and video games and stuff about the movies. Like I like when the movies take chances and move things in different, interesting

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  That was Andor.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  Groundbreaking ways.

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

  Andor took a chance.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's what makes it interesting. And that's what Last Jedi does too. And like no fan film is ever going to do. Cause families are like, oh, what if this guy fought this guy? And I'm not knocking, like fan films are fine and they have their place and it's great, but like.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  All right, folks, there you have it. Lon's worst take. We got there. We were waiting for Lon's worst take ever. Now we have Lon's worst take. The reason this is your worst take is because they made Luke Skywalker like, they just destroyed Luke Skywalker's character. When he takes the lightsaber and throws it over his shoulder and he doesn't want to do anything. That's the opposite of who Luke Skywalker was. He was brave. He was bold.

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  If he doesn't have any more things to learn, if he doesn't have any more to grow, if he's just like the ultimate greatest warrior of all time, that's not dramatically compelling. You can't make that. That's just, then there's no change. Stories are about change. It's about, you face the obstacle and it changes you. So he had to, he had to start from a place of weakness and grow back into strength.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  Stop digging Lon.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:20:09Speaker 00

  Literally you and Kathleen Kennedy are on an island.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  She and Ryan Johnson were right. They were right. They were right all along about that one.

• 1:20:16Speaker 00

  All right. Well, we'll agree to disagree here on This Week in Startups and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.