Why AI has no taste and how to fix it (w/ Thais Castello Branco) | E2319

This Week In Startups is made possible by: YSecurity https://YSecurity.io/TWIST MongoDB https://MongoDB.com/ai Odoo https://Odoo.com/twist Today's show: AI models can solve PhD-level math equations and code an app in minutes… So why does everything they design look like identical slop? Thais Castello Branco, founder of Taste Labs, raised $18.5M in seed funding to teach frontier models about aesthetics and outputting quality content. She talks to Jason and Lon about why even frontier models regress to the mean on subjective tasks, how paid "TasteMakers" can improve output quality, and whether AI accelerates or destroys the half-life of "what's cool." PLUS Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI hedge fund liquidated its public stock portfolio, but it may be too soon to count this 25-year-old completely out. Google Earth adds AI generation and turns into a misinformation factory. LinkedIn and Substack join the AI slop crackdown. And why does every venture capitalist seem to have an opinion about the Ceuta border crisis? Guest Thais Castello Branco on X: https://x.com/thaiscbranco_ Taste Labs: https://tastelabs.com/ Amplify Partners: "Kill the Slop": https://www.amplifypartners.com/blog-posts/kill-the-slop-announcing-our-investment-in-taste Relevant Links Leopold Aschenbrenner's essay "Situational Awareness": https://situational-awareness.ai/ CNBC on SA fund collapse: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/31/leopold-aschenbrenner-situational-awareness-fund-fire-sale.html Henk van Ess thread on Google Earth + Nano Banana: https://x.com/henkvaness/status/2082912544394498228 Substack CEO Chris Best: "Against Claudefishing": https://post.substack.com/p/against-claudefishing NPR on the Ceuta crisis: https://www.npr.org/2026/07/31/g-s1-136507/morocco-spain-migration Ethan Goodhart's self-driving golf cart post: https://x.com/EthanGoodhart/status/2082136189998682598?s=20 "Wind" app on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/zZqmhhwf TechCrunch: "Gritt exits stealth": https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/gritt-exits-stealth-with-34-million-for-robots-to-build-solar-plants-then-everything-else/ CA Gov: Project Nexus solar-covered canal announcement: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/04/29/governor-newsom-announces-the-completion-of-first-of-its-kind-solar-covered-canal-in-the-central-valley-piloting-a-new-way-to-save-water-and-reduce-costs/ Molly Wood's "Everybody in the Pool" podcast: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 Coming up on today's show… 1:23 Thais Castello Branco on teaching models to have good taste 10:45 YSecurity - The on-demand security team for startups. Need enterprise-grade security without hiring a $400k CISO? YSecurity gives you 40+ expert engineers, matched to exactly what you need, by the hour, with your first six hours completely free. Go to https://YSecurity.io/TWIST 15:19 The "TasteMaker" community of paid human curators 20:37 MongoDB - AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start building at https://MongoDB.com/ai 24:40 Jason's personal "cool hunter" prompt 30:16 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at https://Odoo.com/twist 37:36 Situation Awareness lacked situational awareness 46:59 Claude models hacked three external organizations 50:54 Google Earth adds Nano Banana for some reason 54:24 The AI Slop crackdown spreads 57:54 Too many opinions about the Ceuta migrant crisis 1:04:05 Self-driving golf carts and also cars 1:09:53 Robot arms are installing solar panels Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You have models that can solve cyber hack and solve PhD level math problems and they can't like write a good tweet or make a good design. The average is that thing that you're gonna kind of not even take a second glance at, that you've seen a lot in.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  The people who build these things have no taste. Let's be honest. They don't have taste. Most design, most tweets, most blog posts are average. I haven't replaced that function yet.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  I don't feel like we have figured this out yet. Everyone I know who used to work in media as this kind of cultural critic.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Curator class.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Thinker, curator, all struggling to, to find work.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  The more you have of this like mass production of things, the more I think the peak of the peak of the peak becomes valuable.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  This weekend startups is brought to you by Odo, the all in one business platform. Get started for free at odo.com/twist. That's odo.com/twist. MongoDB, AI assisted engine to coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start building at mongodb.com/ai. And Y Security, the on-demand security team for startups. Need enterprise-grade security without hiring a $400,000 CISO? Y Security gives you 40 plus expert engineers matched to exactly what you need by the hour with your first six hours completely free. Go to ysecurity.io/twist. That's the letter Y, security.io/twist.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  All right, everybody. Welcome back. It is Friday. It's July 31st, 2026. I'm in New York City. World tour, Hawaii, Paris, Tokyo, New York.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  You've been everywhere.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Back in Austin next week and get ready for the big school. Everybody says, school starts at August 15th now, Lon. Did you know that?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  I think they added more holidays for the kids during the year. When, when I was going to school, it was September, second week of September, you go back. This seems shockingly early to me, like.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I broke out of the matrix a while ago. I told these schools, like, listen, we live a non-traditional like situation. We're gonna take the kids on a ski week. We're gonna start, you know, Christmas a week early. We're gonna come back two days later. And, you know, they give all this kind of pressure on you. And I'm like, but we're gonna have a tutor and we'll keep up with the stuff. And I want them to see the world. And I was really excited because my three daughters came with me to Paris and they came with me to Tokyo. But they came to found a university in Japan and got to see some of the content. So I'm really excited about that. Because how do you raise kids, Lon, in this new world, in this new AI world where like you could be taking a class and never put it to?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  We already were in that situation where like, is this class gonna be applicable? Now it's like, is anything applicable? What is the skill of the future?

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Do you need to read Hamlet at this point? Like, I don't know. I'm glad, I'm glad I did, I guess, but.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Or maybe you do, and that's what makes us uniquely human is our, you know, artistic ability and, and other things, which we'll get into today.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Read Hamlet. It's good. It's good. I'm not saying Hamlet's not good. You should read it. I'm just saying.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Well, and I mean, all the jobs are going away, except for the six open job recs I have right now.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Twist producer and editor.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Growing.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Not going away. We need newsletter writers, but most jobs are going away.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Well, if you're ambitious, now is the best time ever. All right. We've got a lot of news, but we also have a guest.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  We do.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  So we're gonna do guest and then news. What's in the news to tease it a bit?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, we gotta, we gotta talk about situational awareness. That's Leopold Oshin Brenner's fund. He's only 25. His public portfolio had been sold off to Citadel, but there, there is more to this story. I think everybody initially.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  We're gonna get into it.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And everybody initially was like, ha, ha, Wall Street, this kid got blown out. He's done. There, there's a lot going on here behind the scenes.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  And I have strong feelings about it. What else is in the news?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Well, there we go. All right. We gotta talk about Google made this insane decision to add, they added Nano Banana to Google Earth. Did you see this? So you could use their AI image generator to manipulate images from Google Earth. I think you can immediately see why that might be a questionable idea.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Shenanigans are, might ensue.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we'll, we'll, we'll have to talk about that. Anthropic's models, last week we talked about OpenAI's models escaped their sandbox and went wild. On Hugging Face, they hung out there for a whole weekend. So that inspired Anthropic to investigate what their own models were up to. They found some surprising things. So we've got their report on the three incidents.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Okay. So now it wasn't enough for OpenAI. Anthropic had to catch up and say, no, no, we're committing grand theft as well. We're breaking into other people's, we're cyber hacking.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  We are also a devastating cybersecurity threat. Okay, everybody, listen, it's not just.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, just to be clear.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we'll talk about that.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  So there's a lot, and we're gonna go off duty at the end, aren't we?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  We are, and we got, you've used through a ton of docket suggestions at us. We've got some rapid fire news. We are gonna go off duty. It's a packed show, Jay.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  All right. Let's introduce our guest, because I, I think this was a suggestion from J Cal.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  This was. You saw, you saw her launch video on X and we're like, book this lady. And we always listen to you. This is Thais Castello Bronco from Taste Labs. She is designing a, it's a system, it's a two-pronged system for generating better quality stuff with AI. She feels like AI has cracked the objective domains like coding, but subjective domains that require taste judgment. You need another layer of preference data on top of that. That's what they are building at Taste Labs. Thais, thanks for joining us.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Welcome to the show, Thais, T-H-A-I-S. The first time I've ever heard this name, but it's a Greek name. You're not Greek. But you have a Greek name, which scores you immense points with this Greek kid from Brooklyn. Welcome to the show.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  I'm already up on the, on the.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're starting from a very privileged position.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Good start, good start. So, um, why do most large language models have no taste? Because when I design something or a founder comes to me and they show me their design, I'm like, yep, that's the Intranet from hell. That is the canonical, you know, tasteless Facebook looking, you know, Intranet with the sidebar and the shadowing. And it just always looks, not like slop, but it looks the same.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Looks the same.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Same, yeah, yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Same. Why, why does it suck like this? Because it's a known problem.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Well, and we keep hearing about how smart these models are.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  That's exactly, I think, people's frustration is you have models that can solve, cyber hack and solve PhD level math problems and they can't like write a good tweet or make a good design, which, and I think a lot of this honestly goes back to like, how are these models trained, right? I think a lot of the logic is how do you arrive at the most likely answer of something that should be the correct answer? And, and in math or coding, that's kind of exactly the behavior you, you want. But then for something that's more subjective, what's considered great, right? Like in real life, like things that you encounter that are like, hey, this is really great writing or really great design. They tend to be things that are a bit more unique, that are a bit more like out of distribution, right? It's not the average. Like the average is that thing that you're gonna kind of not even take a second glance at, that you've seen a lot. And so I think that variety is one of the core things that, that are missing, but also that nuance, right?

• 7:09Speaker 00

  I think the other piece that's very weird is the fact that like both of you could, for example, prompt to, for two completely different things, but then the end output would like look the same. And why? Like, I'm asking for a totally different use case. Like, why should this be, like, why should this look the same? And so I think this almost like fits to the prompt and fit to the user intent and almost like personalization is almost missing from, from the model.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Well, and it, it makes sense in two ways to me. Have you been ever, Thais, to Palo Alto or Atherton?

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  You know, driven up and down El Camino Real? It is a wasteland architecturally, design-wise. Have you ever gone to a rich person's $40 million house? They all look the same restoration hardware, disgrazia. You, you can barely keep a Michelin star restaurant below San Francisco. The people who build these things have no taste. Let's be honest. They don't have taste. They have taste in like private jets and then it's a big drop off from there. Like they know which private jet is the best one. They could talk to you about it for hours, but they can't do anything else. Like they, that's it. I mean, it's, they have no taste. And then second, if you were to take everything, um, as opposed to skimming the cream,

• 8:24Speaker 01

  most design, most tweets, most blog posts are average. In fact, when you take everything, you're guaranteed to have regression to the mean. That is like the term that exists. So I guess, how do you? Reverse that and then who are your customers? And how are you working with them?

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Both great points. And by the way, I think quickly on the first point of like, kind of who has taste for like, how to develop taste? I think this, it's very hard, right? Like this is such a rare skill because I think it takes this combination of like seeing many things and having that exposure in whatever domain it is. And I think it's impossible for every human to develop taste in everything. There might be one area you you pick that you're like, okay, I'm going to obsess over this specific thing. And like, for example, half my family are like architects. So the side of interior design, they're obsessed over, they have great taste in. They might have less good taste in code because they didn't spend their life like perfecting that. And so this process of like developing really strong opinions and intuition for like what is good or what is right, when there isn't a clear right answer, just like takes a lot of work and trial and error. And so, yeah, I think it's, we have to find the people that that have it to help us go

• 9:31Speaker 00

  and then train these models and like determine what good is. And yeah, I think a lot of our challenge now, so we we work in two ways. We work half with the frontier labs on how do we benchmark their models, eval their models, understand where they're breaking and figure out exactly how do we pull them more out of distribution into this direction of greats? And how do we both fix it from like a capability perspective in terms of more like mistakes that they're doing or inability to do things like vision or 2D reasoning, which are more foundational, but then also these higher order things of like creativity and style and like aesthetics. And then on the other side is like, okay, great. Let's assume we're making these foundation models better. How do we work with application layer companies and agent companies that aren't necessarily touching the model layer, but that wants to still make the outputs better? Right? So what can we control there?

• 10:16Speaker 00

  And I think a lot of our answer there is both context of like, how do we help the generation be better before it even starts by like feeding it the right context? So most users nowadays that are using things like, I don't know, lovable or cursor or codex or Claude or Figma design to create are not experts, right? They're not designers professionally. They're regular people just wanting to to make interesting, great things. And of course, they're not going to know how to express what they want in the exact right terminology or

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  write really good projects.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  You know what kills more enterprise deals than bad products? Security concerns. One question from a customer's IT team and suddenly your whole pipeline is frozen in place. What happens if you get hacked? How will you protect our data? But relax, there's no need to panic. This is why you brought in Y Security. Y Security is your on-demand security team. They're providing you with 40-plus engineers who've been in the trenches at places like Apple, Uber, Microsoft, Robinhood and Brex. Hey, I invested in two of those six. But you're not hiring a full-time CISO at 400K a year, are you? Nope, you rent their team by the hour. Real experts embedded in your company, getting you through SOC 2, ISO 40 to 100, whatever compliance hurdle is standing between you and the deal. And you can set up a monthly cap so you know exactly what you're spending.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  No surprises, no bloated retainers. Plus, your first six hours are completely free. So here is your call to action. Head to ysecurity.io/twist and book your free six-hour strategy call. That's ysecurity.io/twist. Once again, ysecurity.io/twist. So does that put you in the category of company like our investment in Micro One that provides, you know, data sets to the large language models? Or, you know, are you doing something different? The data labeling annotation companies, are you like those? Or are you something different? How do I put you in a box and understand this?

• 12:12Speaker 00

  It's it's hard because we kind of, we kind of don't like boxes.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  So I would say, I would say we like, so half of our business maybe it looks more like that, like half is more like data, our environments. But the other half is is tools, it's API. So I come from Exa before I started taste. And so I love this infra side of like, how do you build the tools for agents? What needs to be true in the world? What needs to exist for agents to do great work? And we're also building those very like opinionated tools and products that look more like infrastructure or like API shaped things. So yeah, it's it's both, multiple things at once.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  I was going to ask you a question, Lon, here, because I think one of the things is an observation I've had is we used to have a curator class. And the curator class were restaurant reviewers. We had, Lon was part of it.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  I was part of this, yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  We had incredible reviewers of movies. Elvis Mitchell, A.O. Scott. And then who was the one from the 80s that like Bret Easton Ellis was a, from the New York Times, who was a very famous movie critic in the 80s and 90s? You can look it up on Claude or something.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  That's producer Claude.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  I'm not sure. There, I'm thinking of a few different ones. I'm not sure which one it is, but I'll see.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Maslin, something Maslin or something?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Oh, Janet Maslin, sure.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Janet Maslin was like a real critique. And then you had The New Yorker.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, the list goes on.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  But these were intellectuals who made it their lives work, you know, to go to restaurants, to study food, to study art, to go to art exhibitions, to study the opera.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And they have been hollowed out along with the newspapers and the magazine class. And what's the first thing to go? You know, you're like, hey, listen, there's other people who can review books, there's other people who read this. And so they just got gutted.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  And social media. I mean, now that I can just go on X and see what does everybody think of the new Spider-Man movie, maybe I don't need a guy who saw it early to tell me in a 200 bird review.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  That's my question for you, Lon, is that's been lost, right? Is there, because when you go onto X or Instagram, like I haven't replaced that function yet. Is there, is it been, is it still chaotic and they're just all losing their jobs?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't feel like we have figured this out yet. Everyone I know who used to work in in media as this kind of cultural critic

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Curator class.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  or thinker, curator. Those people are all struggling to to find work. And, you know, here I am, I mean, honestly, I'll just talk, here I am talking about AI and tech with you lovely people right now, not movies, not pop culture. Because we sort of phased that that function out. I don't think we have replaced it with anything solid. I think people just now use AI or Rotten Tomatoes or social media as sort of a, or TikTok.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Well, this is an opportunity for you, Tayus. Why don't you just like, we've got an incredible company, you've got incredible customers. Maybe you could create this class by hiring these folks, but then we lose them in the public and they're trapped in some AI box somewhere. So what's your thought on this creator class? Because I'm going to give you my secrets of how I very quickly figure things out. I'm going to give you my stack and then I want to compare it to your stack and your process. Because you hire humans, right? To help you?

• 15:27Speaker 00

  We do, we do. So I was going to say, we actually, and we call them tastemakers. So we have this awesome community of about like 1,000 tastemakers of different domains, like different specialties in terms of design, different media types, different styles. And we purposely wanted to bring folks from like very distinct style buckets too, so that we can have that that diversity. And I think it's worked in a really good setup because you have folks that have three points, spent years like honing their craft, developing very strong opinions, developing that like critic sense. And honestly, a lot of what they do with us is literally like being a design critic. And that they get to both like be a part of this and be a part of changing. And I think they they have the same frustration as we're talking about in terms of slop and being like, I don't want to live in a world where all of it looks the same and feels

• 16:09Speaker 01

  And these are paid? They get paid 50 bucks an hour, 100 bucks an hour, something like that?

• 16:13Speaker 00

  So they, we pay them, of course, for their time, but I think we've also been exploring some more interesting ways to collaborate with them, both like involving them more deeply in the company. Some folks have been joining full-time, actually.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  And we've been, we've been testing some different things. So even like partnerships.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  You're testing this new concept of equity for?

• 16:30Speaker 00

  No, not that, not that. Like we're testing almost like allowing them to contribute their designs to our index. Because part of it is like, we're building this design index. So if they can like contribute their portfolios or things that they've done in the past.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  And get credit when the LLM does output?

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Not necessarily that, because that's like a hard attribution, but more so our search engine. So this like API product that I'm telling you about, that's something that we're testing or, yeah, having these assets also be a part of like lab projects. And so it monetizes a little bit differently.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suggest money.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  For sure, for sure.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Money, money seems to work pretty well for this class. All right.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  So I am one, can I take it in a little bit of a philosophical direction?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Sure, why not?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Let's do it. So to me, when, when I think of taste, when I think of like the people in my life who I'm like, well, they have great taste, part of it is the uniqueness, like, well, they told me about a band I'd never heard before. They turned me on to this obscure TV show from the 70s that was so cool. And so I wonder, once you're commodifying taste, what you're saying, we're going to teach this AI how to have taste, doesn't that go away? Don't you lose that? And now the AI is recommending the same kinds of things to all sorts of people and it loses that rarity that made it special?

• 17:43Speaker 00

  I think that would be my my fear. That's what I think we're trying not to do. So I think it's more so about execution of us doing it well.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  But I don't, yeah, that's definitely not the goal. I think, because part of it right now is the bar's just so on the ground. And the first job is just let's lift the bar off the ground and even get to a place where these models can output like high quality things. Then I think it becomes more a problem of like personalization, but I don't think we're there yet. I think it's like, we have to first fix just quality. And I think there's elements of quality that more people would agree on in terms of just like craft and polish. And then there's things that people would more disagree on depending on like style or fit or audience.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  But yeah, I think quality is the challenge first. But yeah, definitely don't don't want to end up with that scenario.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  So this is an interesting philosophical thread and let's keep going, pulling and see where it leads us to. If.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Everyone knows in 1982 that U2 is this really cool band before, you know, the Joshua Tree comes out and, you know, then all of a sudden, everybody knows about it. We kind of all feel like it's been commodified, the knowledge of it.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  So it's a never ending task. And, you know, this is happened very acutely in Japan. I go to Japan twice a year. Have you been, by the way, to Japan?

• 18:57Speaker 00

  No, I actually haven't.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're into, if taste is your thing, I brought lawn for the first time.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  It's neat.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  If taste and refinement and kaizen, the constant improvement concept that comes from Japan is like, gets you excited, oh my Lord, you're gonna, it's gonna blow your mind to watch people kind of just operate in the world. But there's a problem. Tik Tokers, Instagram influencers. I can't stand these people now because what they do is there's places I've been, like I started talking about Niseko where I ski like seven years ago, I guess. And now everybody knows about it. I can't get a hotel room. I can't get a reservation. Then in Japan, somebody finds out that this noodle shop that's 150 years old is like the best one.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  And then everybody who goes there feels the need to go there and Tik Tok it. And now those places have crazy lines. Some of them now, and I'm making the X here. This is what the Japanese people do when they say no. They don't allow Americans, no tourists. So they changed their menu all to Japan. They changed their Google listing, all Japanese lawn.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  And then they make it hard to find the place. So they make the signs.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Well, everything in Tokyo is hard to find. Everything, you go to the building and you're like, I'm at the right building. And it's like, oh no, it's three floors underground or like, oh no, it's at the top of this thing. And you gotta go around and down the hallway.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Now imagine they put it, they put it in Japanese in a tiny sign around the corner when they used to have it in the front.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  I was the dumbest, most oafish person in every room I was in for two weeks. It was crazy.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  AI is writing code, reviewing that code, and then shipping that code. But it's important to remember your workflow is only as fast as the slowest thing that it touches. And for most of you, it's going to be your database. Hey, with today's tools, you can generate a new feature in 90 seconds. Then spend three days bending it to fit your rigid decade old schema. But this is where MongoDB can help. MongoDB gives you the flexibility to ship at the speed of AI. The asset compliance guarantees you get to actually sleep at night while it scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. And the best part is developers swear by it, literally. I can't use the actual words they said in this ad. So let's just call it a really great database.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  The MongoDB for Startups program is here and it makes it easy for eligible startups to get started with free credits. Apply now at mongodb.com/startups. Once again, that's mongodb.com/startups. So your thoughts on this particular issue, which is, you know, there's, there's a half life to cool?

• 21:42Speaker 00

  I think yes, but I don't think that's the function of AI. I think that's always been true, right? You've always had this like class of curators or like the tastemakers that are at the forefront. They kind of pick the thing that is the cool thing next. Or they're at the avant garde, let's say. And once it starts getting more ubiquitous and like more people start knowing about it, it loses the cool. And then they move on to the next thing. But I think that's always been true, even before social media, even before AI. I do think though, that social media like accelerated the speed of that cycle, let's say. And AI could have that potential too. I think so far it honestly hasn't just because it's so, it's still so bad that I don't think like the actual tastemakers are being like,

• 22:22Speaker 00

  oh yes, this is the exact thing I want my, my side to look for or to look like. And so I don't think we've seen that effect yet, but I think as long as we push for that diversity, where it's not meant about it having like one correct answer, but it's about it having both breadth and the ability to execute well in like all those different directions. Then I think actually could help the, the problem in a good way, like of pushing people towards actually more directions rather than compressing to the mean further.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Let me tell you my stack.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  Tell me, yeah.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  I don't want, I'm reticent to share this. Because this is going to cause the other problem I have. Okay. I have a number of curators that I trust. I'll give you but one. Monocle Magazine is a magazine out of the UK. Have you ever read it or seen it?

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Okay. So you should subscribe to and support them. And so I was having my Athena assistants last year, take Monocle. And about 15 other sources where I find things and specific searches I use on those places. I'm not going to say anything else. I gave you one. Then I would tell them, hey, aggregate what I'm looking for when I go to Singapore. I went to Singapore for the first time. I like design hotels. I like hip, I like funky, et cetera. And so if you were to put in Singapore here, put in Singapore hotels. And that's how I picked my hotel for Singapore. It's beautiful, like cyberpunk hotel that had like trees on the side of it. I think I showed it to you on, if you search for Singapore hotels.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  And I find it there. And yeah, let's see if it's there when you pull it up. It's like a garden hotel that's like really tall. And it looks like something out of like a positive version of Blade Runner. Anyway, you're just seeing like Singapore pictures. That's not it, but there's like a ton of things that are like this, where they make it like a rainforest. Incredible. So then they did a really good job of finding the places I like to eat food, which I'm looking for things that are, I'll just say Anthony Bourdain-esque, you know, street stuff, one dish they're known for, et cetera. So then I programmed my own CoolHunter. And I said, you are a CoolHunter.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  You're looking for things that would appeal to these specific people, you know, in these categories that have these specific design elements, et cetera. And it works. That's all I'm saying.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  I want to, I want to test it.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  But it's a, it's a super mega prompt. And then I have it go out and I have a cool hunt for me over and over and over again. And so every week I get a cool hunting report of like trends, et cetera. Just because I'm like interested in the world or whatever. So how do you do it? You, you actually get to hire people to review output from LLMs? And then have them rated on some vectors?

• 25:21Speaker 00

  So there's a mix of things. So there's, there's rating things. There's also this like concept of almost like a critique. So imagine if someone's actually like a design critic or a senior designer who's like teaching a junior designer on their team. So how would they almost like critique every single thing they're doing and, and explain why it's, it's wrong or, or good? There's also this aspect of actually curation. So like choosing examples of things that are good and choosing examples of things that are bad and explaining why. And yeah, or also actually creating things from scratch of like, hey, here's a example of like what a perfect version theoretically of this thing would be compared to what like an LLM was able to, to generate. So yeah, there's all these different data shapes that are helpful in different ways for, for model training. And then they are also helping a lot of these internal products that we're building.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  So the index, for example, is something that had a lot of like curation from experts. And this judgment system that we're building of like, how do you verify also if something is, for example, like staying on brand, involved a lot of experts, like making those judgments and be like, hey, this is.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  How do the experts feel about this work? Do they have this sense like I'm giving away my curation and what makes me special? And I'm going to get myself out of a job? And then how do you handle that? Because AI is scary to people. So if you came to somebody who's a movie reviewer and you're like, or you're, you're an art critic and we're like, we're going to show you art. We're going to give you the providence of it. And we want you to describe it like, are they like, are you trying to take my art critique and eliminate me from the world? So they, they must be thinking that on some level and you must have an answer for that. What is that answer?

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think it, by the way, I don't actually fundamentally believe that tastemakers are, are going to go away by any means with AI. I actually think it's the opposite. I think they become more valuable because the more you have of this like mass production of things and kind of creation of outputs, which is just going to happen, right? Because everyone now in the world can click a button and create something. The more I think the peak of the peak of the peak becomes valuable. Similar to what you're describing about the, the specific restaurant in Japan, right? It's like those really specific things that become really good, I think, become more valuable and not less. And so, and I think we're infinitely far of having the power of like a true like creative direction and choice and this kind of craft. And so I think, yeah, being a tastemaker kind of becomes more valuable. In terms of like how, how they feel in terms of the work, we actually ran this survey with a community a couple of weeks ago of asking like,

• 27:35Speaker 00

  kind of why are you here? Like, why are you excited about working with us? And it was really cool to see how a lot of responses were almost around like curiosity. I was like, I am excited about the problem and I hate SOP and I want to help. It was like very motivational in terms of purpose of why, why they were interested in the work. And so I think people want to be a part of the solution, maybe as the, the conclusion I've gotten to.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  That would make sense to me. Here's the Artisan Hotel I stayed at. Check this out.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Oh, I see.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  This is going to blow your mind. And so like I stayed a little bit off the beaten path, but this place was kind of new. I think, I think my room was like only five or 600 bucks. But if you zoom in on this thing and you, you'll see there's like cutouts where it's green. Those are actually double story, green atriums lawn. And so those are seating areas common to everybody. Like you can't get them as a suite.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Right. It looks like the whole place is like, are there rooms in between the jungle?

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Yes. When you look at the jungle area, like if you look at any jungle area, there's rooms to the left of it. There's rooms above it, like in typically in like eight. And it was, and then on the roof, there's an infinity pool, go to the roof. There, that whole area up there, that's an infinity pool type situation. And there it is. So you go up to the roof, I would go up there and work. And I would have never found this if I didn't have my system because it didn't come up anywhere. It's not like this is a giant hotel. It's got like whatever, probably 50 rooms. It would be in the boutique hotel, not a chain. Artisan, A R T Y Z E N.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  You know what it looks like?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Find these things so consistently.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  It looks like in the post apocalyptic movie when the nature has reclaimed the building, but people are still like huddling in it, like children of men, you know?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Check this out.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Look at the cutout there.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  That's beautiful. No, by, by the way, half, half of my family are architects. So I feel like the side of like interior design and, and hotel hospitality, like I, I love. I gotta give you some Brazil tips for next time you guys go.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  You know, I've never been. I feel so ashamed.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  What are we going to do? Founder University, Sao Paulo or something?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Oh, Sao Paulo has a huge, huge like family community.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely go.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Make that happen.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  So do you have aspirations to do anything public facing with?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  This collection of people, or have you thought about buying? And this is the idea I had. If I, because I think you raised money at a pretty decent valuation, yes?

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, we did.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Do we have that in the notes, Lon?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  We did. I have that it was a-

• 30:06Speaker 01

  And who the investors were?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Yes, I have an $18.5 million seed round co-led by CRV and Amplify. That's what I have.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Oh, CRV, I am, I knew, I knew the team over there.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Oh, nice.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Congrats. Founders are scrappy by nature, and many like you like to dig in and get started building without worrying about admin. They run the whole business on Excel, then keep adding on more random tools as needed. But here's the problem, none of these tools and platforms know how to talk to each other. So you wind up playing go-between with a cluster of different systems. It's a Franken business. It's a Franken site, and it's a huge waste of time. But now there's Odoo, the all-in-one management software that's serving 16 million users across more than 170,000 companies in over 120 countries. Now your CRM, sales, accounting, manufacturing, website, inventory, and point of sale, they're all in one easy-to-find place.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  And most importantly, every app talks to every other app. Sell a product on your website, and the invoice gets created instantly, and your inventory gets updated automatically. So if you're stitching together spreadsheets and keeping track of five different logins, get started today at Odoo.com/twist. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash twist to level up your business. What it would cost to buy Monocle Magazine, or to say, I want the exclusive license to Monocle Magazine, would be a fraction of what, you know, these large language model, frontier model companies, or even like the mid-tier ones. Have you considered maybe acquiring some of those assets and putting them together? Or the archives of them? Like Paper Magazine got sold in a fire sale, I think, sadly.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  And that, it was just like, it's incredible, I used to write for them back in the 90s, like incredible archive of like history and art and taste. Like, somebody could actually own that and the, oh, and get the writers involved in one of those. And it could be like the rebirth of the magazine business, which was the ultimate coalescence of taste.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Of curation. Yeah, so I think right now, we're very focused on like visual design. And so, yeah, we're thinking, we're going very deep on the visual design side of things. And so we've been more doing these types of relationships, actually, with the creative agencies, or like epic designers that we want to like, take a look at what kind of, never saw the light of day in their portfolio that they maybe worked on.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Oh, very nice.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  But yeah, I think when we eventually get to something like creative writing, it would be really cool to explore some of these, these partnerships. Because to your point, it's like, it's one of one, right? Like, you don't have, you don't have separate magazines. And so, yeah, totally.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  All right, listen, this has been incredible. Since you just raised money, I know you're hiring. What positions you're hiring for? Where's the company based?

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Every single position you can think of. We're, we're based in San Francisco, but I think we're hiring a lot across like engineering, research, operations. And we actually have this really cool like design researcher role. So for a designer, but that really wants to think of the problem of design almost as like a theme to be studied. And how do we like break down what does good mean? And, and, and evolve this, then yeah, that's a really cool role.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Sounds like you'd hire a professor. The website is tastelabs.com. And yeah, look at the careers page, a lot going on there. Hey, just give us an update as we wrap here. I know San Francisco's on fire. I might have to, I have a loft that I rented, and it was like underwater for four years. But now I think it's probably a good time to sell it. What's it like operating in San Francisco with no housing stock?

• 33:26Speaker 00

  It's crazy.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, people, yeah, say a little bit, explain to the audience, people who aren't there, exactly how crazy it is and hard it is for employees that you try to hire.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  No, it's, it's nuts. Like, I, I lived in New York before, so New York also was not easy by any means. But no, I, I've become very self-filled, and I love it. And, and we are very like in-person, and so a lot of folks have moved here. But yeah, it's like you have to show up to the apartment, visit with already, like all the documentation to like pay them upfront.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  Get it, and like, it's, it's insane. And so, yeah, I think this, the housing side has been tough, but the energy of the city really is incomparable, and it's, it's very worth it here, so.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  We, we have this great thing in New York City. It's the subway, and then we have boroughs. And so you can live in Flatbush and take the subway for an hour and get a $2,000 a month apartment and live a little closer, and it's three or four. But in San Francisco, I mean, what's a one-bedroom now? Four or 5K?

• 34:24Speaker 02

  I don't even want to think about it.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Bonkers.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it really, it really is bonkers. But I do think that this like concentration of people in one place-

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  -just creates the type of magic you can't reproduce.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I had, I had a dozen great years there, and now I'm in Austin and love it there. But, but it's something you should think about. Like, imagine if you were running the, in, you know, Austin, you, the housing stock has gone down three or four years.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  They're like, hey, y'all, first three months free, no rent, come stay here. That's what it's like.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  It's crazy. They've built so much inventory. It breaks a New Yorker or somebody from the Bay area's brain when they first like move there.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Jacob looked it up, a one-bedroom in San Francisco costs an average of $3,500 to $4,600 per month right now, Jason. That's what, that's our latest-

• 35:08Speaker 01

  If you, if you got in for 4K, you'd feel lucky. All right, listen, continued success, and we'll check in with you in a year.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Tice. Yeah, that, that's really, I'm, I'm curious, after design, I wonder if they're gonna try to go comedy? Because I feel like that's the one area where we all know LLMs aren't funny, they're not good at writing jokes, everybody seems to have sort of given up-

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Terrible at Twitter threads.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Like, they don't understand Twitter.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  I mean, Grok is on Twitter, and it kind of understands it a little bit, but not good enough to hit public.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Grokpedia can be very useful, but Grok is not funny. And that's what I mean, like, I feel like we've all kind of even given up, like, there, it's never gonna be funny, it's never gonna write a good joke. But I don't know, that's also a, a taste consideration.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Good for brainstorming, though. Great for brainstorming.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Great for brainstorming, useful in a million ways. I'm not trying to go there. I'm just saying, this one area, like, write me something funny. You can explain jokes, you can feed it a million jokes. Claude isn't funny. Claude's many things, but he's not funny.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  I'm really feeling good about my annotated.com. I bought this because I love bookmarking and curation. But we're gonna have to, I, I think I should launch annotated as, instead of my bookmarking service, like have that available. But I think I should let anybody put a task up there to rate stuff and fact-check stuff.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  So you're collecting data.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Correct. Like, I didn't think about it, but like, it all is data collection. So consumers did this, and then you could sell it to the micro ones or hard-

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, nothing more valuable right now than preference data. That's, that's the goal.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  You could also put it out there, like if you had annotated.com/hotels, and you could just send to people who were hotel aficionados, hey, what do you think of this offering? What do you think of this price? What do you think of this room design? What is this missing? What's good about it? And you could actually get them to maybe vet other people's curation. Anyway, we're gonna do it as a bounty this week in startups.com/bounties. And we should put some fresh dates on that, that maybe will push that contest to finish in September or something.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  There was some travel, there was some delays, but now that you're back around and in the mix, we'll definitely get that bounty going again.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Yes, and the software is great right now, right?

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Software's great. So I want to build this app. You know what I'm gonna work on, is try to get somebody who has a tool, like a, you know, perplexity computer, or Claude Code, or a lovable. I'd like to get one of these people as my partner on this and put up like some serious bounties. That's what we have to do next.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  But go ahead, check that out. All right, we got a lot of news to do, let's wrap it up.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  We got so much news. All right, well, we got to talk about situational awareness, or, or lack thereof. So famed AI-focused hedge fund was led by 25-year-old former OpenAI-er Leopold Ostenbrenner. It was founded in 2024. He started out with a few hundred million, Jason. He amassed over $45 billion in assets under management by July. In June, Wall Street Journal said $20 billion, so it, it went wildly up. The fund had a 439% net return through June 30th. He was placing very large leveraged bets. No professional investing experience prior to launching this firm. Early backers included the Collison Brothers from Stripe, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman from Meta, many others. Investments included S.K.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Hynek's, Micron, Sandisk, Bloom Energy, CoreWeave Nebius Group. There was a, there was a, a paper that he wrote in 2024, also called situational awareness. The argument, the thesis was basically like, we know AI is going to explode, we know the demand for compute is going to increase exponentially, so he was-

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Let's place our bets.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  He was placing bets in the infrastructure and the hardware that was going to allow for this build-out to happen. So then what happened? He compared it to a bank run. He got margin called by a number of his biggest investors, Goldman, B of A. And so eventually he had to, in order to access cash, he sold the public portion of his stock portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel. Everything that had been financed with borrowed cash is gone. However, private investments, he's still holding on to, it's going to just continue on as a fund for his private investments. That includes what Financial Times tells us is $5 billion of Anthropic stock.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  So TBPM this morning published the letter Leopold sent to his LPs this week.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yes. He took ownership of it.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, we let you down this month, we came closer to permanent capital impairment than is acceptable to us. He took full responsibility. He said vulnerability was begetting more vulnerability, and we took decisive action to protect LP capital. That's why they will carry on with the Anthropic shares and other private investments.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Got a question for me at the end there, or are you just gonna drop it?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Oh, I, I'm sorry. I thought you were gonna jump in. So my, I guess my big question to you is, this kid is 25, he did not have investing experience before this. Do you think that a more seasoned pro would have seen this coming and been able to navigate around it? Or is this a classic, no crying in the casino, you take a big risk, there's a chance you're gonna get crashed out, could have happened to anyone?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Uh, no, this is, I guess, the folly of youth and the lack of experience, for sure. That played some sort of a role here. He was running, according to the reports, something like 4X leverage, which means for every dollar he held in a share, he was then ballooning it up by 4X. So if the market goes down 25% or 50%, you basically get four times that kind of, you know, volatility, I guess, and downdraft. So that was a mistake. And then there were other things at play here. The, the South Korea stock market was having a crazy run, where like a million different levered accounts, again, having leverage, AKA debt.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Is it's different when you have a home and you have debt than when you have equities or when you have crypto. When you have a home, they have to foreclose on it, which means they gotta kick you out of it. It's a process. It's emotional to kick somebody out of their house. And there's laws around it and it's a slower process. You can miss some payments, you can get some penalties, you can do a partial payment. What happens when you're on margin, you know, either for crypto or for stocks is you get margin called. What does that mean? Whoever your banker is that gave you that loan, then start selling your equities automatically. Now, they may give you a correct period as a grace, you know, in a grace period, hey, you got 24 hours, 48 hours to put up the collateral, but generally speaking, they will just liquidate you. This happens in Bitcoin all the time.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  People lever up their Bitcoin, you know, they own a million dollars in Bitcoin, they're like, okay, give me another 500,000, I'll buy another 500,000 in Bitcoin and go long. I'll pay 7, 8% interest on that, but I believe Bitcoin's gonna go up 100% this year. Then Bitcoin goes down, they gotta sell Bitcoin to cover it.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  And those lenders. So that's what's like technically happening here. Schadenfreude is really, really high in finance, especially in hedge funds and stuff like that. Have you ever watched the TV show Billions?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  There is a pile on that occurs. So he kind of outlined this in his letter, where when this occurs, people know that you're, you know, experiencing this downdraft and that you're gonna get margin called. So what do they do? If they have the same positions, if we all own, let's say it was, pick a public company that's in AI.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Nvidia.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Nvidia, Micron, you and I sell all of our position so that it makes it go down more. So we're flooding it with stocks. So there's more supply available to put pressure on them. Then we short it, we pay more pressure and just more pressure, more pressure. And then at the same time, you're talking to that person about buying their position. So Citadel was talking to them about buying the position. Other people, and I don't know if Citadel was involved in this, but this is what they do on Wall Street. They are just like knives out. Somebody starts falling, you just push them in the back. Like if they're stumbling, you don't want them to recover, you want to buy the asset from them. I will tell you this.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  I mean, there were those conspiracy theories that Citadel sort of purposefully did this. They were predicting a surprise rate hike from the Fed, which historically would have tanked the market. That did not materialize. So people are coming up with these theories that, oh, this was all sort of like purposeful. I don't, I don't know how you feel about that. Seems a little farfetched to me.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  This is not SBF Sam Bankman Fried. This is not the same situation. Sam was making great bets and he would have been one of the great betters of all time because he also bet on Anthropic, et cetera. And they wound up selling his positions for peanuts when they liquidated FTX.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  He was stealing money allegedly, went to jail for it.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  He was involved in real fraud where he's taking people's assets that they put in their essentially bank accounts, in their accounts, and he was investing it.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  And giving it to celebrities. That would be like Bank of America goes into our accounts and then sponsors the Superbowl and invests in, you know, SpaceX and Uber with the money.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  He was doing the crypto exchange and the investment fund and intermingling funds in ways that the SEC says you absolutely cannot do.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  But he, you know, this young gentleman is obviously pretty bold and getting your ass kicked this publicly, this brutally is gonna either break him, and I was a little concerned with the pile on. I'm like, this is the kind of thing that could psychologically break somebody and they commit suicide.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  People were taking a little bit of glee in it. I mean, he's like, he's a very young guy.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Schadenfreuder, yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a very brash guy, he's a good looking guy. I think there was a little bit of like. I don't know if he's good looking, but maybe. You don't think so? Pull up, pull up one of the memes. Pull up Jacob.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Anyway, the memes are coming, but this, I think it's also a slow news day. Now, wait a second, come on.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  That's him is Mitch McConnell, but that, that, that's.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  That's not cool.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  That's an objectively good looking guy. You don't think so?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  I mean, sure, like as a German or Scandinavian, whatever he is.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  A preppy German guy.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, it's okay. I'm not, listen, I'm nice, not Brad Pitt.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  I think people were taking a little bit, I think people were taking a little bit of excessive glee in this guy.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Too much glee. He does have a lot of layers in that photo, so like layers are for layers. I'll give him, the layer game was pretty good there. Look at the layer game in the brown.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  He definitely had the layer game going. He was playing the role.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Looks like clavicular.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  He was, yeah, I don't know what he was, he was, he was leverage maxing. He was leverage maxing.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Anyway, the lessons here are.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Spiked his cortisol levels.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was cortisol maxing for sure the last week. But this is not an example of like something fundamentally wrong with the industry. If you have leverage, it's just not something anybody with any experience does at this level. If you want to have a margin loan against like 5% or 10% of your stocks, so you got like a billion dollars in stock and you have 50 million, you're not gonna get called until it comes down to like one to one or something like, you have plenty of room.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  This was the opposite. This would be like somebody who's got a billion dollars trying to put $4 billion to work. Very, very dangerous. But he's gonna come back stronger is my prediction.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he's gonna be, he's got $5 billion in Anthropic still he's sitting on, plus other investments. I, I wouldn't be too worried about this guy.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Now, there were other memes, so I don't want to pile on, but I do want to see the best memes.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Jacob's got a few more memes for us.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Okay, let's see. Yeah, there's a surprising memes for me. I'll put my glasses back on for these. And I think it was a slow news day and then people are kind of sick of AI and nobody likes a young, successful person.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Exactly. I think, I think to me, it feels like this is bubbling over, people just dislike AI and they dislike AI people and this young punk was trying to make all these billions of dollars placing AI bets. I think that's what fueled the backlash.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Sure. All right, here's your next one.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Next one, Jacob, let's take a look.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  When you beg a client to accept a great settlement offer and they end up getting zeroed out at trial instead. Okay, not funny.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  Not that funny. Next one.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Not funny. So your account got liquidated even though the S and P is only 3% off its highs. Okay.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  It's Jonah Hill from Wolf of Wall Street there.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was great. He should have.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  It's a good performance.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Did he get, did he get nominated?

• 47:21Speaker 02

  I believe he got nominated. I don't think he won, but he, I believe he was nominated.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  I wonder who he lost against.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  I'd have to, I'd have to look it up.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  I think Wolf of Wall Street, by the way, just not to go off duty, I don't want to pre-off duty this, but I think during that moral panic, when the overture window was really closed, worked against this film.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  He was.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  That's my hot take.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Uh, yes, he was, he was nominated. It did, that movie didn't win any Oscars.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Any, any, and he, and this, was that the year of like Moonlight and other woke stuff?

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Uh, Moonlight is a terrific movie, but I will, I will look up what.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  I fell, I literally fall asleep four times.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  You're, you're wrong, you're wrong about Moon, you're wrong about Moonlight.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Okay, I thought that was, that was La La Land Moonlight year. Two terrible picks. Go ahead.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, let's see. Best directing went to Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity. I'm on the Oscar sites, of course, they don't have it.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  No, Gravity, no.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, Matthew McConaughey won Best Actor for Dallas Buyers Club. Oh, here we go, Jared Leto beat him. Jared Leto won for Dallas Buyers Club.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Okay, it's a perfect example. I listen, I thought Dallas Buyers Club was great and those two guys, well, I thought those two guys had great performances, let me say that. But I do think Oscars go, if Oscars are given a choice, a bunch of debaucherous 80s cocaine taking stripper paying debauchery from the 80s or 90s versus people dying of AIDS.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that was.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  You know, and a tragedy, we know what the Oscars are gonna go for.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  There was a lot of weird discourse around Wolf of Wall Street too, like is Marty praising these guys? Is it pro Jordan Belfort? There was a lot of that stuff. That might have hurt his Oscar chances as well.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Same thing with the Goodfellas. It's like, are we praising these guys or are we just telling a story, folks? It's just aesthetics and a story. And if you look at the test of time, you know, Dallas Buyers Club, Moonlight, whatever, Gravity, nobody's gonna remember those compared to Wolf of Wall Street in 20 years.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  Gravity's awesome. Gravity's so good.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  All right, it's okay. It's not, you're telling me, wait, hold on, who's your best picture then?

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Of 24, let me see. All right, let me, let me, let me look at the 20.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  I'm gonna force you on this one because you know I'm right. You would, you're definitely.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  2014 Best Picture nominee.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Run me through this.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  I might have been a, I might have been a Wolf of Wall Street, let's see.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Of course. Gravity over Wolf of Wall Street? Nobody even remembers Gravity. Who's in it?

• 49:38Speaker 02

  What is, what?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Sandra Bullock?

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Oh. You know, you know what? Google's AI here, really awful. Like, you would think this is such an easy thing to look up, like, what were the movies that were nominated? All right, here are your 10 best picture nominees for this year. It was the 2013 movies. It was the 2014 Academy Awards.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Okay, go ahead. Hit me.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  The nominees, you want to hear the winner last? I'll do the nominees first and then I'll give you the winner.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  The nominees were American Hustle, Captain Phillips. Remember, this is the 10 nominee years. American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena, The Wolf of Wall Street, and your winner was 12 Years a Slave that year. 12 Years a Slave won.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  You know, it's just, that's not, it's, there is no contest there. I mean, I did like Nebraska. Artistically, great film. I like our films.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  I have to say, to me, Her and Wolf of Wall Street, it was between those two.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a jump ball. That's clearly a jump ball.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Of those nominees, it's between those two.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  But, you know, this is just the problem with the Oscars, is they go for Max Suffering and, you know, whatever, Put Your Hand Over Your Heart is the most-

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Her did win Best Original Screenplay that year.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is why the Oscars are meaningless to me. I just hate the Oscars. Okay, let's keep going through the news.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  All right, we got, yeah, we got to talk about this. So, Google Earth, Alphabet embedded their AI image generator Nano Banana into Google Earth.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Which is great, yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  Nano Banana, amazing. Google Earth, amazing. Now, you can go to Google Earth and with a simple prompt, you can change things, the way things look on Google Earth, visualize streets and intersections as they might have looked in history.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Come on now.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  You can even make an infographic based on anything. You can pull up an in-street view, but people have already discovered-

• 51:24Speaker 01

  You got to describe what's happening here. You got to describe what's happening here. Okay, so here's an image.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  You can do nefarious things, too. Like, here is a spot along the US-Mexico border that we see from above. There's nobody really there. It's a totally normal image, but if you tell it, "Hey, put a huge refugee camp and people pouring all over the border."

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  You can create that image.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Like what's going on in Spain, right?

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Like what's going on right now in Spain. And, and, and so here is, it's Hank Van Es created this fake refugee camp near the Mexican border. There's a second example as well that we were looking at. This is, he put in Gaza, a bomb crater next to a fake hospital. This is a fake image, folks. This is not real. And so, obviously, the potential here for creating misinformation and visually appealing, inaccurate things is massive, which led a lot of people, myself included, to wonder, just why even do this? Is the utility-

• 52:22Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what happened here.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  What is the use case here? Like, why is this useful?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  No, no, it's very simple. There, everybody at that company is going, "Hey, AI is the next big thing. Sprinkle a little AI on everything." So, Google Local, Google Flights, you know, Gmail, just put some AI on it. Just get a little AI on there.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Just dab, just a dab.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Just a little dash, let's see. And then if it's good, maybe we just code it in AI. Maybe we deep fry it in AI, whatever it is. So, somebody was like, "Oh, would this be cool to say, 'Hey, here's my lot. What happens if I put a five-story building over here?'" Which, like, on an architectural basis, I can come up with 100 uses for this. That would be really, like, a city planner might look at this and say, "Hey, let's put bike lanes in," instead of doing something nefarious. The problem is-

• 53:08Speaker 02

  You can do fun stuff, too. Like, I, to test it out, I pulled up Downtown Austin, like, right where we produce the show, and I made it like, "What if this looked like the lunar surface?" Like, you could do fun stuff like that.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, so there's goofy stuff, there's practical stuff, and then there's nefarious stuff. Now, anybody could take these images already, put them in Nano Banana, they just close the loop here. I'll tell you what the problem is here. When you do close the loop like that, like, if you were to take, I don't know, Instagram, and then be able to, on the top level, say like, "Instagram this person and put him in a bikini," you know? Which is what people do with Grog all day long, and you get the images of Grok. Like, "Please don't make me do it. Grok is exhausted."

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, Grok now is like, refuses to do almost anything with a real picture because it got in trouble.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  So, this, this is the problem with a tech, every time there's a new technology that accelerates stuff, you're going to have these bad uses of it. And because it's adjacent, that does lead somebody to believe, or lead somebody to rightfully criticize, like, "Did you think this through?" That's why you can't, to the best of my knowledge, Zuckerberg hasn't said, on Instagram, you know, "Long press, you know, your Instagram post, and then I put it in an AI prompt and repost it to my site or comments."

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we got a related story this week, actually, I wasn't sure we were going to get into, but I don't know if you saw, LinkedIn added a "Report AI Slot" button.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  And they've gotten rid of the "Let AI Help You Write Your Post" button. That, they put in that originally, that's gone. So, there's no more like, "Enhance your LinkedIn post with AI," because so many people were just hitting that button and lazily posting AI slop. And I don't know if you saw, last week, Substack added a bunch of anti-AI tools, and Chris Best, the CEO-

• 54:56Speaker 01

  This is going to be, this is going to be a big trend, of course.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Chris Best, the CEO, in his blog post explaining the new tool, was like, "We don't want Substack to turn into LinkedIn." Like, LinkedIn has become the definitional, like, "This is a place where everybody posts AI slop."

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, if you're a busy salesperson and somebody tells you, "Hey, if you write your five secrets to sales, you're going to, like, get more sales." And so, you know, there is, you know, and then back to being, AI being pushed by the boss, and I'm one of these pushy bosses saying, "Hey, let's use AI, let's use AI." You know, you're going to have situations where people don't do it thoughtfully, right? They're just, "I'll just produce slop." I've had that happen. I had team members here who are like, "Okay, J. K. L. wants us to use it," and they just make a full business plan that they haven't even read, or they, you know, scanned, and they presented them, and I'm like, "Uh, no, no, I'm paying you to write the plan."

• 55:48Speaker 02

  I've had a few newsletters submitted that we were like, "I don't, I don't think this is original. This feels like Claude."

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Well, interesting you say that. So, there is this company, Pangram, that we were talking about on Wednesday's show.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  These are the guys who designed Substack's anti-AI tools.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so what Substack should do is, when you actually publish it, they should tell the writer, "Hey, our AI's, you know, checker says it thinks this is a 92% chance it's, you know, not, you know, whatever, it's AI-produced. You're going to be, you will not, because it's AI, we're going to put a label on it, and we're not going to feature on the homepage." And this is what has to happen on social networks, is this stuff-

• 56:30Speaker 02

  LinkedIn is now doing this. If they think you're posting AI, they flag it and they say, "Hey, maybe consider rewriting this so that it sounds more human."

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Okay, so they do it at the moment of publishing. I think what they should do is, if anything scores over 90%, over 50% on AI, they should grade out in the feed, not put it in the feed. They should, what was the term? They should shadow ban it. Shadow ban posts, yeah. So, anyway, this is good. This is a good moment in time. I like this. And everybody's going to have to make a decision. Do we want to live in an AI slop world or not? And it's, it's screwing up my feed, because I like to show my daughter, is really into sharks, and I like to show her shark videos in my Instagram feed, and now they're all like, "Oh, my God, here's a great white shark taking three bites out of a person." I'm like, "That's never been recorded."

• 57:11Speaker 02

  I've had this exact, my nephew Dougie loves trains, and so I had, we had YouTube up, and we were just pulling up, you know, videos of trains going by, trains pulling in, and everything. But, who doesn't love trains, right? But, there's tons of AI slop now, so it's like, fake train, he doesn't want to see fake cartoon trains, he wants to watch real trains. Like, it, it, it's terrible, terrible experience.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  This is why young people hate AI. Like, my daughters, when I say, "Hey, use AI to find a place to have dinner," you know, "I use Gemini and put it on a Google map," they're like, "No AI. We don't want to use AI. AI is lame." Like, that's what 10 to 15-year-olds think right now. All right, let's keep going down the docket.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  All right, do you want to, well, let's get to some of these rapid-fire items, because I'm worried we're not going to get to everything. All right, so first one that you share with the, so, Suda is a Spanish-controlled territory on the northern tip of Morocco in North Africa. I pulled a screenshot from Google Earth, not doctored, folks. This is the actual image. So, that's where it is. You can see, it's essentially a small city on the North African coast, right next to Morocco, across from the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, but it is considered Spanish territory. So, what's going on is, thousands of migrants are attempting to cross into Suda from Morocco. The border fence has been breached. 18 migrants or so,

• 58:31Speaker 02

  we're not, it's very chaotic, so we're not sure. They think about 18 migrants have died so far from either being drowned or being crushed in a stampede of people trying to get across this border from Morocco.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not much of a border we're looking at here. It's like a-

• 58:44Speaker 02

  It's a fence along an urban beach. So, that's a beach, there's a border fence, but it is-

• 58:51Speaker 01

  You can swim around it in 10 minutes.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  You can swim around it, you can push your way through it. It has been breached, it's open now. Spain's government is deploying their civil guard to keep the peace. They have not yet declared a national emergency. Here are some numbers. The Spanish government says 60,000 people have now entered Suda from Morocco. It's just a city. The entire population is 85,000 residents. So, that's a-

• 59:14Speaker 01

  So, one for one, almost.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  That's a 70% jump in their population since this started.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Was there a inciting event here that, because I am trying to catch up on this, and my entire feed is venture capitalists retweeting this, like, 20 times, like, dude, you're a venture capitalist. Nobody cares your opinion on migration, but I guess people have strong feelings about migration.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Elon is one of the people who really started this trend and made it sort of go bigger and viral in the US. A lot of people are talking about it now.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  It's the number one account, yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Yes. NPR, I looked it up, as far as we could tell, we don't know. There have been breaches along this border before. It's not like this has never happened, but we're not exactly sure why, all of the sudden, tens of thousands of people seem to have all gotten the same idea. They did, NPR did talk to some of the people who are pushing their way across the border, and almost all of them were talking about economic hardship. There's no jobs, they're looking for employment.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's coordinated. Okay, so if it was economic, this must have been coordinated on socials or group chats, so that's what's got to come out. I think there's some psyops going on here, because like, you know, they're- You know how the CIA and other three-letter or other intelligence agencies from the around world do this kind of stuff to create, you know?

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Long history of the CIA creating civil unrest in other places for all kinds of reasons.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  All kinds of reasons.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  You could argue propagandistically that this backs up a lot of the kinds of stories that we hear, scary stories about migrant invasions and migrant crises.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  I mean, this is a literal migrant invasion.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  The West being invaded.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  I've never seen anything of this scale. Like, if you have boats show up in Italy, you know, okay, there's 50 people on a boat. I think you said the number 60,000?

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Spanish.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  That's like four Madison Square Gardens, five Madison Square Gardens.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  That's a lot of people.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  That's what the Spanish government is saying, that it's 85,000 people in the whole town, 60,000 are now trying to enter the town. But that's the other thing is, this is not, it's a Spanish-controlled territory, but even if you get from Morocco into Shuda, you're just now in the city, you're not across the Strait of Gibraltar and in mainland Spain.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, this has nothing to, I mean, in some ways, has nothing to do with Spain, because this is a territory of Spain.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Well, it does, yeah. It does also make you, if you want to get colonialist about it, like, why is there a little territory in Morocco that's still owned by Spain? Like, shouldn't this just be Morocco at this point?

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  I guess. I mean, we have that kind of situation. We have Alaska, I mean.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Sure, we've got all kinds of little islands and stuff still, yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Puerto Rico, Guam. Is what it is, but I just want to say, if you're a founder and your VC is tweeting about this more than once, like, probably not the right VC for you. I don't understand why VCs are spending their entire day losing their minds over this. Like, this is Spain's issue. You don't have to, this is my message to VCs, you don't have to comment on everything. We don't need 20. Literally one. You get one tweet on this if it's like the news story of the day, but like, I don't know, how do you, how do you make this go back to venture capital and startups and nothing to do with it?

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  There is one venture capitalist, I'm not going to name names, there is one VC, there is one VC that I feel like, I don't know how this man has time to invest in companies, because he is so unbelievably active on X, constantly, no matter what the trend is, he's on top of it. Like, way more than me, and I make podcasts. I won't mention names. I bet a lot of you can already...

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a number of them, I know which one you're talking about.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Jacob already guessed in our chatroom which guy I was talking about.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Hold on, let me take a look in the chatroom here. Oh, no, I was gonna go for, yeah, that's an interesting one.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  I mean, I think there's a few, there's a few names up there at the list, but this, I mean, he's an amazing investor, an amazing founder in his own right, like, not, I'm not trying to crap on the guy, but I honestly don't know how he has this much brain power for X. It's unbelievable.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  There's two other guys, I agree with that one, but there's two other guys who...

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  Yes, we're all thinking about the same guy. I can tell, there's a few of them, which is like, how are you doing this? I don't know how you have time to attend a board meeting while you're, you must be in the board meeting.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're doing that and you're commenting on this stuff, I wonder if, if a founder is waiting for you to email them about something, like, they're like, "Ah, dude."

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  And you're like...

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Anyway, I think this goes to show that VCs have a lot of spare time. Okay, let's keep moving.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  All right, let's keep going. Next up on our list, we have Ethan Goodhart's self-driving golf cart. He's a Stanford computer science grad, autonomy expert. He created his own self-driving golf cart. This is utilizing entirely cameras and vision models, no LiDAR. He's had some beta testers, so he's offering rides on his autonomous golf cart around the Stanford campus. Some of his early beta testers, we have a photo here, includes Sam Altman, Andre Karpathy, Jensen Huang, they've all given it high marks. And actually, there's an iPhone app, if you want a ride around the Stanford campus, it's called Wind, it's in test flight right now, so they're getting ready to sort of open this up in a beta test situation, so people can get automated golf cart rides.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so, the reason I wanted to share this was, number one, everybody hangs out at Stanford, obviously, and you know, these guys are good at intercepting them. But I think what this shows is how commoditized self-driving is getting, and, you know, my thesis has always been 20 people would get there at the same time. I think my thesis is going to be correct, because Tesla's at the, you know, double nines, Waymo's clearly ahead of everybody with more double nines, BYD, Baidu just launched, I guess, Nuru, Zoox just got 2,500, units federally approved for no steering wheel, which is really important.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Now, they still have to go through all the local communities, cities, states.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Zoox is, it's those two-sided, it looks like a little mini bus thing, but there's no, like, front to the car, it's just like, no driver seat at all, no windshield.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  And with no driver, no steering wheel, no paddles, no nothing. So, I think, you know, if students can start to build this on their own and hack it together, doesn't mean it's like ready to compete with Waymo, but if students can start building this, what we're gonna see is a plethora, a plethora, an unbelievable number of people with these. So, what is the self-driving race gonna come down to? It's gonna come down to scale. Who can build and manage and get licenses for this? And there's a news story, and you can look it up, and I just wanted to talk about, and everybody assumes I'm talking my book here with Uber, but I can assure you, I am involved in, probably got investments in over 10 self-driving companies. A lot of them are public.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  And the reason I say that is, I'm not just talking about the Uber book, there is very quickly going to be a lot of bad feelings about self-driving, because people are gonna, the first wave of people losing their jobs to AI is gonna be drivers. And, like, when I say wave, I mean, like, they're not, they're literally gonna lose their jobs, and the pay's gonna go down.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  And this would be both Uber and Uber Eats, like, the people driving people, ride-sharing and delivery, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  This week, Stanley Tang, friend of mine, debuted the Zip Line, which I'm an investor in Zip Line, and I'm an investor in DoorDash, through a venture fund I was in, that invested in DoorDash, I've been a shareholder of DoorDash. They did their drone company, and we had another drone company from Ireland on the program recently here, so there'll be like three or four drone companies doing, it'll be four or five drone companies doing this, so that gets rid of like burritos or just coffee, small things. Larger orders obviously gonna go in cars or small things. The reason I bring this up is, in China, where, you know, they embrace technology at a pretty rapid pace, and they have a top-down government, they have stopped allowing licenses for self-driving. So, you can look that up, there's many stories about it, but China is freezing the number

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  of self-driving cars on road. Why? It's not about safety, it's about protecting jobs.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  What's gonna happen, and I asked this on this week in, what did I ask on, this week in VC this week, when we did the VC show, so here it is, China suspends new autonomous vehicle permits after Baidu outage, Bloomberg News reports. It's nothing to do with Baidu outages, it's nothing to do with Pony AI, nothing to do with anything other than, they don't want thousands, in fact, millions eventually, of self-driver, of drivers protesting this, so get ready for licenses.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Well, we've already seen in America, we've seen there is anger at self-driving cars, people calling Waymos that they don't need and getting them all trapped in a parking lot together, you know, like, there is some already sort of resentment, I think, building up.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  And there's been, like, this has been brewing, so that story we showed was from April, but there's some more recent stories in June and July of this kibosh being put on it. So, be prepared for that, folks, and I think I am in favor of, and I'm gonna be called like a libtard for this, but I do think some licensing of these, collecting of revenue to smooth out for society, the unemployment and/or retraining of those individuals, would not be out of line, and I think it would be smart for self-driving companies to offer that, so that they can deploy the technology.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  It just seems obvious, right? Like, you, why, why wouldn't you try to soften the blow for people? It'll make them feel better about this technological change that you want to introduce.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  I don't know why that automatically goes to libtard for people, but I...

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's just, it's not a free-market solution, but I consider it an easy way for Waymo or Uber, Nuru, they could just say, "Listen, we know this is gonna impact people negatively, so, we're going to pay $10,000 a year, $1,000 a month or whatever for each self-driving thing, that money's gonna go to that driver," or like, I think every self-driving car, I estimate.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's what Mark Cuban said to do with data centers, it's just like, pay people off to get them to accept what you do.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Free electricity, yeah, very simple. Okay, next.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  All right, well, we gotta let you go in just a few minutes, you've got a hard out, but we want to go...

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  What about the automated solar one? I thought this video was crazy.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  We'll pull this up. Robotics podcaster Leo Karen shared this, Grit Robotics of San Francisco is the company. Now, they don't build the robot arms, that is an off-the-shelf, that is an off-the-shelf Kawasaki robot arm, they designed the AI that teaches robots how to handle utility-scale solar panels. Now, it does, it unloads the panel...

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  And this is real, or this is AI?

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  No, no, this is real.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  This is real.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  The robot, they have trained the robot to be able to unload a solar panel, it can transport it to where it needs to go, and it begins the installation process, you do need a human in the loop, the human then comes and fastens it into place, the robot can't do that precision work, but it drops it, as you can see, right where it needs to go, so the human just needs to come along and boom, boom.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Zip, zip, zip.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  It's like, right, zip it into place.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Until they make an R2-D2 that goes underneath that giant and does the zip, zip, zip, or they build a system that has clamps in it, so this is, you know, very interesting.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  I'm sure that's the next problem they're solving, is how to get that human out of there entirely.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Well, it's super easy, like, if the thing drops into place, and in the factory, it has a clasp that fits into a hole and locks in place, you don't need to put bolts on it, so obviously, they're using like the classic system that wasn't designed for robot deployment. What I found really interesting about that video, and if you can queue up this one moment in, is they show a very long field of them.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  There are very long fields being built. Just recently, in California, we hit 51% of energy coming from solar and batteries, that's also happened in Germany on a couple of sunny days, and it's happening in Australia continuously, and some places in South America. We can build a factory in the desert.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  That has the ability to build solar panels. And then out of the back of it, have a robot place them.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  And then it would just become this fait accompli. Is that the right word?

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Yep, you got it.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Fait accompli. The robots keep making them and then the distance they have to drive, maybe it gets to three, four, or five miles. Who cares? The robot's driving it. You place this one factory in the center and then you just have solar panels go in all directions.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Now, somebody will complain about the cacti, but let me tell you something. Losing some cacti and, you know, a couple of rabbits get more shade. I think it's gonna be okay.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  If you drive right now from LA to Vegas, there's a huge solar farm like three quarters of the way when you're almost to Vegas. But it could be, I mean, it's really big, but it could be 20 times as big and nobody would really notice because there's nothing, there's like three guys out there, you know, in a trailer most of the time. There's like, you know, Walter White burying his meth and that's about all that's out there.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Well, and then what I will say to add to this is, to break my reference, you know, there's, there's very few NIMBY people to complain and you don't need a lot of space. And there are bodies of water and tracts of water. When you drive from San Francisco to LA, there's like this, these canals of water. They're putting solar on top of them. They, they started by covering them so they would get rid of evaporation, but you could now take this, and I've talked about this maybe a thousand episodes ago with Molly Wood, when she was co-hosting. Shout out to Molly. Everyone in the pool is her new podcast. Go subscribe to it. A hundred bucks a year, well worth it.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  You could, you could, there it is. So I don't know what date this is, but this is California Roof these, June 27th.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  This month?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Okay. So California Roof, two irrigation canals with solar panels that makes electricity and cut the evaporation off the water lawn by 70%.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  So this is all within our ability. Now, what you could also do is you could do desal, desalinization, powered by the solar panel and batteries, and in a canal, and all of this fighting over water and electricity would end and there's nobody to complain. Because if you're complaining about the solar being put over a canal and it reduces water, then you are a certified idiot. You're a moron. Now, there must be people protesting this. Please, somebody ask Producer Quad or Producer Grok or Producer Deepsea, is anybody protesting these solar farms and these solar on top of rivers?

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  This is like, there must be, I just can't wait for somebody, somebody's going to, you know it's true lawn. Somebody's protesting this.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  I'm sure there's some animal in there, people like to, Native Americans used that water canal for some, I'm sure you could come up with a reason.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  I mean, poltergeist or some Native American burial ground.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  It was a burial ground. Yes, yes, I'm sure you, if you gave me sufficient time, I could come up with something.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  This is this week in hope, last week in hope. I'm just giving a little hope here. Everybody's angry about immigration, Trump, this, that, AI, duma-ism.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  You've soaking up all the water for your data centers.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  This is great. This is great. You could stop complaining, people. We're about to solve energy. If we solve energy, we solve water. If we solve energy and water, we solve agriculture. Good things are happening, folks. See you next week on This Week in Sartor's. Bye-bye.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Bye-bye.