SPEAKER_00: i think in general um my sense is that overall companies that have been considering going public

SPEAKER_02: are now sort of opted to do that sort of route okay i was asking because there's a great note in there s1 jason you'll love this uh they were talking about how they're using their ai powered virtual agent chatbot and they say that our ability to control customer support costs over time even as volume has gone up has contributed to an increase in gross margin from 60 percent in

SPEAKER_04: fiscal 24 to 68 and fiscal 25 and even more so essentially they're automating things jason static team size cost savings and uh it's helping the company look more profitable so kind of an ai story

SPEAKER_05: and a fintech story a lot the the age of efficiency is upon us uh every unit in every company um

SPEAKER_08: particularly in startups who are always resource constrained they are the ones to first use these tools because they're resource constrained they can save a they can turn a nickel into a dollar startups going to do it now big companies like well we're spending three dollars to get a dollar in value and we can afford to do it because we're sitting on a bunch of cash there's no you know imperative there's no existential dread about money at apple when you're sitting on hundreds

SPEAKER_05: of billions of dollars in cash so yeah we'll get to it when we get to it but at a startup it's quite the opposite you're seeing that as well i assume that is uh startups doing really fascinating

SPEAKER_00: stuff with this technology already yeah it's super exciting and the ramp on revenue for some of these companies is out of this world right i mean between going from zero to a few hundred million

SPEAKER_12: dollars in revenue in two three years is something that i haven't seen in a very long time and there's multiple companies doing that so i think uh this is the big c change and you see it in enterprise adoption you see it in all sorts of things the company that um i started with jared and eric and others that we mentioned earlier is basically working on this for big enterprise how can you help big

SPEAKER_00: enterprises really make that adoption of ai and what applications should you provide for them to be able to really thrive in this post ai world so i think it was there's an enormous amount of

SPEAKER_14: stuff to be done there yeah and it's going to be really interesting the cynical take on this is a

SPEAKER_16: lot of people sampling ai solutions and trialing them and there'll be big churn issues and of course competition issues and i guess the um optimist view of it which i'm primarily in that camp is these things are providing massive value at very low price therefore why wouldn't you try it it's like you know come get three hamburgers that are grass-fed beef for 20 bucks it's like how is that possible okay i don't need to know i'm just gonna order the burgers like if you want to charge me 20 bucks for something that saves me two thousand dollars a month okay and it's just wild to see how

SPEAKER_22: mispriced some of these products are for the value they're creating this week in startups is brought to

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SPEAKER_30: 1200 off your first year all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups i'm your host jason calacanis with me and my co-host alex wilhelm and a special guest today introduce our guest alex

SPEAKER_34: our special guest today is the former founder of mixer labs and color health he helped incubate brain

SPEAKER_04: and co but you probably know a lot gill as an investor par excellence he has backed many many well-known names in the technology world and jason i believe commands the largest single aum of any solo gp in the world a lot we're happy to have you oh thanks for having me on board yeah what are you

SPEAKER_11: working on these days before we get into all this crazy news what's uh in your fancy what are you

SPEAKER_12: exciting yeah it's kind of a mix of stuff yeah that's a nice stuff um you know i guess three things one is uh recently launched a company uh with jared kushner eric wu and a few other folks to bring ai to the world's biggest enterprises so we're really excited about that um second area uh just investing so um you know a lot of the companies i got involved with early perplexity harvey decagon a bridge etc on the ai side are obviously all seeing you know real growth acceleration etc and then third there's kind of some side projects i've been working on around building large-scale monuments translating books using ai a variety of different things and so there's also more of the societal

SPEAKER_00: and philanthropic stuff that i think has been really fun amazing kind of those three areas yeah well tell

SPEAKER_12: me about this uh translating books with ai yeah we're calling it alexandria um the basic idea is that if you look at um every society we we've benefited since the days of alexandria the egyptian library uh from large-scale access to human knowledge and books and so we're taking a thousand of the most important books that are off of copyright and we're translating them working in concert with open ai and anthropic and 11 labs and a few other folks on um creating a book uh a version of the book in every language audio books in every language so anybody around the world can stream it they can download it they can interact with it we've actually built a book reader um and so you know we'll we'll be doing a launch for that in the next few months but uh that's been incredibly rewarding and we've actually done machine versus human eval uh where people check do they like more what we've done with translation or what human translators have done

SPEAKER_00: yeah and um people prefer the machine translated works by far and so that's been a really interesting

SPEAKER_12: and an unexpected what do you attribute it to i think um it is often more modern language although you can obviously tune that based on your prompts um and then i think often it's more concise and often it's more consistent you have better qa especially if you're thinking about a long work or corpus you can enforce certain things that a human translator may or may not be able to do

SPEAKER_02: fascinating it is i want to know how long until you add a zero to that and then another zero when is it ten thousand when is it a hundred and what's stopping you from going to like a million there's

SPEAKER_50: a lot of books out of copyright a lot yeah i think um we decided to start with the things that we thought were books that often should exist in other languages that just have never been translated

SPEAKER_12: because if you look at it there's maybe two dozen languages that cover 80 of humanity yeah and uh you know for even some of the greatest works ever produced or at least the consensus from you know academics is these are the greatest books ever produced there just aren't copies in all sorts

SPEAKER_00: of languages you know 20 30 40 percent of humanity can't access them um so we just thought let's start with this stuff that's kind of obvious i think to your point you could do um we have the infrastructure belt now so you could run an arbitrary book through and if you really wanted to you could turn this into a service where anybody should be able to upload any book and then basically have this output in terms of um every language every audio book uh we we've also been looking at building ai guides to the book so you can start interacting with it asking questions etc so i think

SPEAKER_56: it's almost like this modern library of alexandria right we want to bring humanity's knowledge to the

SPEAKER_14: world in an accessible way so it's been fun so you have you also gone down like the bit tensor and distributed computing as related to ai and llm's rabbit hole well i've looked at it a bit yeah what's

SPEAKER_16: your conclusion on it i don't have one but i made a small investment in a um like a hedge fund that's looking at all the nodes of bit tensor every day trying to figure out the different projects buying you know the the tokens etc and it feels to me like now that we're in the sort of sax era of crypto regulation i feel more comfortable spending a little time there and i've always felt like distributed computing and would be a viable coexister to cloud computing for certain jobs um and we'll move from that seti at home kind of you know i don't want to say silliness but hobbyist you know toy to something more meaningful and perhaps at some point even if we're building out too much infrastructure it could be like bitcoin and that people will start putting up infrastructure and know they'll make um a high return on it and you could get some you know i don't know scale that was not previously considered realistic in the same way bitcoin and the number of you know uh people participating

SPEAKER_08: in the number of nodes is would be hard to comprehend 10 or 15 years ago right yeah that's an interesting

SPEAKER_12: question because i think in the case of um anything that has strong economic viability compute tends to collapse into centralization and so for example um to your point on bitcoining i think uh it's like the six or seven largest mining pools are over 50 of bitcoin volume yeah and so that's centralization in terms of buying of hardware in terms of energy and negotiation for that and so anytime you have something with a huge economic output it seems to almost always centralize because of those economies of scale um and then to your point there's all sorts of circumstances where you have more distribution

SPEAKER_00: either because it's people who are just you know generating an extra bitcoin every once in a while because they have some idle capacity but on a volume basis that's pretty low if you want your

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SPEAKER_72: website or domain purchase that's squarespace.com twist or it could be things like study at home

SPEAKER_12: which is more philanthropic or very early bitcoin mining or crypto mining where you know there isn't

SPEAKER_00: that same liquidity in terms of mining of the token so it's a really interesting question of when do you transition from decentralized decentralized and yeah and it's an open consolidation that occurs

SPEAKER_76: because it's not like you have to ask a gatekeeper it's not like you have to go to

SPEAKER_16: you know somebody and say i would like to participate in this can we cut a deal you're not like negotiating with oracle or microsoft it's like you can just participate and if you have innovations that you can bring to bear you you come up with your own chipsets you come up with your own power strategies you have a cousin who works at a nuclear facility in china and they they happen to give you a little space for your for your nodes all of a sudden you're up to the races so i'm super bullish on it also like um if you just think about all the inference that's occurring it's gonna be unlimited demand for this stuff i think i don't know that the demand curve ever um yeah i don't know if it's going to abate anytime soon it would what's your take on it like the overbuild versus you know the dark fiber analogy do you have a position on it or does all this stuff jevin's way to a conclusion

SPEAKER_86: yeah i don't have a strong point of view on it i do think there's some really interesting shifts that

SPEAKER_12: are happening so to your point on the inference side eventually more and more inference will happen on a device and so to some extent the distributed compute notion may just be everybody's iphone in some sense in terms of at least the inference side um in terms of training the thing i've been looking at most is the degree to which energy costs will impact where training centers are actually going to get built yeah and one thing that i think is really under discussed is the fact that

SPEAKER_00: given how poorly europe has governed itself relative to energy you know shutting down nuclear power plants

SPEAKER_12: in germany and um being dependent on russian oil etc um it basically means that training data centers are unlikely to go there because it's going to be too expensive to run them just because of energy ignoring regulation ignoring everything else which means that basically all the training centers should end up in the gulf and in the u.s and the gulf in part because under the trump um ai plan uh basically there's some extension of some rights relative to uh being able to run training in uae and a few other places and those are going to be places with low energy costs so i think there'll be parts of the us parts of the gulf where all the training is going to run inference is probably more globally distributed in part because of gdpr so europe will force it from a regulatory perspective

SPEAKER_00: but they're going to lose out on tons of gdp spend and capex spend because people just won't build training centers there so i think that's a little bit under discussed right now it's quite

SPEAKER_16: a paradox because also in the middle east they're adopting solar and batteries at an extraordinary pace these are people who it seems to me the people who understand energy are not being particularly precious about where the energy comes from in texas we have the largest installed base of solar and i can tell you living in texas they're not super precious about you know where the energy comes from is it the cheapest way to do it great we can make a business out of that we got a grid let's compete and that's what they're doing in the middle east where there's a lot of sun there's a lot of sun and there's a lot of capital to buy those solar panels and you're right they just their energy costs are going to be so de minimis um and they also have a populace in that region that has been educated in the west over the last 30 or 40 years very quietly at the top institutions who have now boomeranged back to qatar to uae to saudi uh you know and then of course you have israel which is you know just a juggernaut per capita in terms of startups so it's i'm spending more time in the region we'll probably spend two weeks three weeks a year there um looking at startups and working with

SPEAKER_12: different investors are you spending time in the region a little bit yeah i'm an investor in a few companies some of whom have been bridged across israel traditionally so that'd be things like trip

SPEAKER_00: actions not called nivan etc but then also more recently a company called the eon which is doing data infra one called kella on the defense side etc so i have a handful of investments in israel and then obviously there's just really fascinating things happening across the entire region

SPEAKER_93: yeah it's gonna be really interesting when you can fly direct from yeah you know tel aviv to riad to doa to you know this is kind of mind-blowing in our lifetime that this is happening

SPEAKER_04: so a lot you mentioned nivan which is going public right now it's currently in a little bit of a limbo

SPEAKER_94: with the government because the government shut down and such but uh what can you tell us about the

SPEAKER_12: company's you know road to ipo yeah i can't really say anything i mean um you know usually ips have quiet periods i think um in just hoping they didn't apply when the government was shut down but apparently not in general um my understanding of what's happening at a meta situation is just uh because of the government shut down the sec for a short period was not reviewing or fully reviewing s1s and then they actually issued a rule that would allow companies to still go public um if they did

SPEAKER_00: certain filings and certain disclosures and then within a certain time period they could go out and so i think in general um my sense is that overall companies that have been considering going public

SPEAKER_02: are now sort of opted to do that sort of route okay i was asking because there's a great note in there s1 jason you'll love this uh they were talking about how they're using their ai powered virtual agent chatbot and they say that our ability to control customer support costs over time even as volume has gone up has contributed to an increase in gross margin from 60 percent in fiscal 24 to 68 and

SPEAKER_04: fiscal 25 and even more so essentially they're automating things jason static team size cost savings and uh it's helping the company look more profitable so kind of an ai story and a fintech

SPEAKER_05: story a lot the the age of efficiency is upon us uh every unit in every company um particularly in

SPEAKER_08: startups who are always resource constrained they are the ones to first use these tools because they're resource constrained they can save a they can turn a nickel into a dollar a startup's going to do it now big companies like well we're spending three dollars to get a dollar in value and we can afford to do it because we're sitting on a bunch of cash there's no you know imperative there's no existential dread about money at apple when you're sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in cash

SPEAKER_05: so yeah we'll get to it when we get to it but at a startup it's quite the opposite you're seeing that as well i assume that is uh startups doing really fascinating stuff with this technology already

SPEAKER_00: yeah it's super exciting and the ramp on revenue for some of these companies is out of this world right i mean between going from zero to a few hundred million dollars in revenue in two three

SPEAKER_12: years is something that i haven't seen in a very long time and there's multiple companies doing that so i think uh this is the big c change and you see it in enterprise adoption you see it in all sorts of things the company that um i started with jared and eric and others that we mentioned earlier is basically working on this for big enterprise how can you help big enterprises

SPEAKER_00: really make that adoption of ai and what applications should you provide for them to be able to really thrive in this post ai world so i think there's there's an enormous amount of

SPEAKER_14: stuff to be done there yeah and it's going to be really interesting the cynical take on this is a

SPEAKER_16: lot of people sampling ai solutions and trialing them and there'll be big churn issues and of course competition issues and i guess the um optimist view of it which i'm primarily in that camp is these things are providing massive value at very low price therefore why wouldn't you try it it's like you know come get three hamburgers that are grass-fed beef for 20 bucks it's like how is that possible okay i don't need to know i'm just gonna order the burgers like if you want to charge me 20 bucks for something that saves me two thousand dollars a month okay and it's just wild to see how

SPEAKER_22: mispriced some of these products are for the value they're creating yeah 100 and some of them

SPEAKER_00: are uh burning a lot of money along the way to get there so as uh to your point the pricing versus the value differential in one or two well-known cases are also just leading to odd economics but i think most of them are very solid in terms of what they're providing the cash the potential cash

SPEAKER_04: losses for the business etc so a lot on that point uh we're not seeing a lot of gross margin negative businesses then because i've heard bits and pieces about people saying that some companies are so underpriced that they're actually gross margin negative which is so uneconomic as to make me worry but

SPEAKER_86: it sounds like that's not the case too often no i think there's one or two very high profile versions

SPEAKER_00: of that and one could argue in those cases they're basically trading inference for market share and so

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SPEAKER_00: sent you but i think in most cases most of the companies i know are running at you know quite healthy margins and in some cases software plus one thing i've been investing behind over the last two

SPEAKER_12: years kind of quietly is these ai driven rollouts so can you fund the purchase of services businesses roll them up and then increase margin dramatically using ai because effectively you're making the

SPEAKER_00: people on those teams dramatically more productive and that's been a thesis it's really been proving itself out quite strongly there's two companies i'm involved with in particular where we're seeing very strong lift um and very strong execution relative to these really big opportunities

SPEAKER_116: because services can you say the names of them or are they uh i can i can mention one of them the

SPEAKER_12: other one's quite stealthy um the one that is non-stealthy is called long lake and or long lake management so lln and um basically clever uh yeah very good um one of the founders alex is uh an exceptional pe person uh zach frankel who's more technical help get it up and running and they um uh basically have a really great team of both engineers but also private equity and operations people and if you think about it the um the key for any sort of ai driven transformation is you need if you're doing a roll-up you need a pe person if you're not you just need you know uh the sort of edict to do it then you need somebody to operationally implement it a lot of the issues with adopting ai is not that ai a lot of it's actually pretty easy to build given that apis that we have from open ai and anthropic and others for google um it's usually the change management it's convincing the team to adopt it it's aligning incentives it's saying hey we understand you really like this tool but we're switching you know it's all that kind of stuff yeah the resistance is real right the resistance is very real yeah in some cases maybe it's going to threaten that person's job or perceptually do so so um often when you're doing roll-ups for ai you need the pe person to be able to do good purchases you need the ops person to really help revamp the org and then you need the engineers to implement the ai and the workflow and so very few of the roll-up companies that i've seen have this magical convergence of those three skill sets into one team yeah athena is in a

SPEAKER_16: roll-up but they're you know people think of them as and i'm the first investor in that company as well as was the first investor in thumbtack jonathan's other company um

SPEAKER_14: people think of it as like assistants right uh virtual assistants uh in a different time zone at

SPEAKER_16: a different price but it's really an ai company because every time they can automate a task across 10 000 assistants if they can help one assistant schedule five percent faster right down the line if they can help them book hotels faster right down the line etc and we have an investment in a company that austin petersmith is doing that it's just doing one thing scheduling better than anybody so there's a lot of people taking swings at this i guess the company this week of note the main character energy goes to amazon alex maybe you could tee up the breaking news from the last 48 hours

SPEAKER_36: uh about amazon and jobs and employment yeah so the new york times yeah new york times got its

SPEAKER_04: hands on some internal documents from amazon the cloud and e-commerce giant these are from the 2024 time frame so they're a little bit dated but essentially the company's investments in automation at the warehouse level in particular are going to help it hire 160 000 fewer people through 2027 and the times writes that because they have them up to about 30 cents per package that they pick and then deliver 30 cents is not that much but if you multiply times billions of packages it adds up quite quickly and all the work they've done over the last 10 to 15 years to build out robots and increase automation in their warehouses we'll save them about 600 000 hires through 2033 and the ultimate goal is to get to about three quarters automation about 75 percent um one of the major stories we talked about through the covet era was how many people amazon hired to build out its warehouses as e-commerce took off during that period of economic disruption now we're seeing the other side of that and a lot of long-term bets by the company come good um great news for amazon shareholders all of us here who have 401ks pretty tough i think jason looking ahead for the people who currently uh feud their families on 19 an hour

SPEAKER_05: amazon warehouse jobs what's your take lad uh seems conservative to me but what are your thoughts on automation robotics yeah purpose-built humanoid yeah it's interesting it feels like um for a long time

SPEAKER_12: robotics was one of those areas that was always going to happen and didn't quite right if you looked at

SPEAKER_00: the installed base of robots it was in the hundreds of thousands of new robots per year largely for

SPEAKER_12: automotive and very specific industrial applications and it seems like now we're going through a sea change and i think um you know it's kind of funny actually if you ask what's a robot your dishwasher to some extent is a robot right like a lot of things that we kind of take for granted now are robots um in the modern era the things that are really emerging now are obviously some of the things that were just mentioned relative to amazon but also even self-driving cars and waymo and uh tesla and what's

SPEAKER_00: happening there those are robots right those are cars that drive themselves there's a lot of startups right now uh pi and the bot company and a few others who are all building next-gen sort of uh foundation

SPEAKER_12: models for robots and so it seems like within the next couple years we'll see a lot of these things substantiate and there's sort of two questions that come to mind for me one is what proportion of the winners will be incumbents versus startups so for example if you look at self-driving there was two dozen self-driving companies but the winners arguably are waymo from google and then tesla right two incumbents actually effectively have so far at least one self-driving

SPEAKER_00: there's cool companies like applied intuition and others who are providing pieces of this but you know car os and other things but i think um that's sort of clear winners at least so far those two and robots it seems like tesla will be one right through their optimist work and then the question is who else is it a startup is it another incumbent is an incumbent who buy the startup um is it at home robots which a lot of people are working on uh which i i view would be kind of awkward there's

SPEAKER_12: like a robot in your living room and you walk in and you know it's like mopping or something i'm joking about um or it's uh um or is it an industrial application more b2b which is sort of the tesla optimist sort of view and so i think there's this big question of um you know who wins

SPEAKER_00: and why and then what are the first application areas on top of that yeah it was pretty obvious to me

SPEAKER_14: i saw andy jassy speak at a private event i don't know a couple months ago and um it was pretty

SPEAKER_16: bullish on ai and then a day later he did this public missive um where he wrote hey ai is going to transform everything and we could see different team sizes that was like a to me when a ceo that's sophisticated doesn't write that memo without a reason he was telegraphing internally externally with partners hey you know this is going to result in less jobs and um i was on the bulwark podcast a political podcast and i said you know um i don't see a world in you know the next 10 years where a human being touches a package at an amazon factory or to your doorstep here's here's the quick clip do you

SPEAKER_142: want to just run the clip yeah it's a little self-indulgent but sure let's uh it's this is literally your podcast you're allowed to be self-indulgent don't want to be too self-indulgent

SPEAKER_01: here we'll stop you anyways here's jason quoting himself this is where things could get really nutty

SPEAKER_145: um and we're already starting and that's where like the doomsday scenarios terminator ones kind of come out of that group um so what happens if you know all drivers go away uh well every self-driving car is four full-time jobs and every uh humanoid robot in a factory is five jobs maybe six because those jobs you can you work for maybe seven hours as a just physical limitation as humans were driving you can work a 12-hour shift and those are those are going to be here folks and before 2030 you're going to see amazon which has massively invested in this replace all factory workers and all drivers the idea that when you order something from amazon a human would touch it at any point in that supply chain is insane it will be 100 uh you know robotic which means all of those workers are going away every amazon worker all those jobs you ups gone fedex gone every all of those are going to be gone and those companies will be more profitable and when you order something it's going to come faster and cheaper and better and your uber will be half as much but somebody needs to retrain these people and

SPEAKER_16: that's actually a very vast what do you think about job displacement elad um obviously i have strong feelings that this displacement is coming um i don't know if anybody disagrees with that i guess we're all just gonna debate timelines three years five years seven years ten years do you think we're gonna have societal issues with uh job displacement we're already seeing computer science graduates having a hard time recently getting jobs uh and i think most people are attributing it to ai making

SPEAKER_149: the senior people more um productive so what's your take on job displacement i'm curious probably

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SPEAKER_155: yeah i mean i think any technology wave uh definitely has uh job displacement that comes with

SPEAKER_12: it and so then the question is what do you do from a retraining perspective um how do you think about social safety nets and then also how well are you governed if the you know if we were governed remarkably well i'd say well we'll figure it out almost if we're governed really badly then it's probably a different story in terms of the degree to which you end up with uh you know different forms of unrest or outcomes depending on how much jobs are in place at what speed and then how much of a safety net or retraining or other things you provide so i think it's a pretty complex thing um but i do think that it's it's pretty clear in certain areas that you're starting to see shifts in terms of um labor particularly around you know customer uh support may be one of the earliest places that i think

SPEAKER_02: ends up getting impacted to some of the points made earlier yeah i think your point oh just salesforce said they're saving 100 million a year now on automated customer support a lot just to back up your point it's a place where people are finding enormous cost savings already which of

SPEAKER_12: course impacts jobs yeah and if you have like a temp or outsource labor team or you've partnered with somebody about it as a company you're more likely to willing be willing to cut that back than if it was your own employees right and so often when you have these outsourcer delegated systems you're more willing to shut them off and so that could be some of the uh savings without actually changing official employee headcount but it changes the virtual set of people you've hired and i think that's that's why we're not seeing it in some cases as much right it's kind of hidden

SPEAKER_168: it's such a good point yeah you're outsourced it already so you're just ending a contract you're not exactly doing a plant shutdown so in the united states you have that it's not visible war notice the warren notice like war note is like you don't have to warn anybody it's like yeah i just got rid of

SPEAKER_16: a vendor and i wonder if that has a pass through where you still have to do a war notice putting it aside um i will say just had this realization as you're talking about i now as a default do not go

SPEAKER_168: to you know the manufacturer's website to get an answer i go to an llm why the llm has indexed all the reddit threads quora threads twitter threads you know uh message boards of people solving the problem on their own before the company even knows there's an issue and you so i think most organizations probably don't even know what their true customer support uh requests yeah and there's

SPEAKER_12: companies like decagon obviously helping with that and then um i think there's two other implications

SPEAKER_00: of that or implications of all this one is there are certain countries that should be impacted sooner rather than later from a employment perspective that we're not actually thinking about right because there's certain types of jobs outsourced to specific regional hubs india philippines etc sure and

SPEAKER_12: then um i think the second thing and this is the point that uh nikesh aurora at the cf alto networks has uh brought up with me in the past um which i thought was a really good insight that you know he said this quite publicly that they're using uh ai tools and foundation models and everything else to iterate on product because customer support in some cases not all just means your product isn't working good enough or the ui is hidden or something else is going on and so to some extent by iterating on product faster you're going to cascade into support as well from that perspective right it's essentially if you have bots fixing every problem for you automatically your support loads you go down

SPEAKER_00: right and so there's all these really interesting sort of second or third order things that that you know are really interesting to speculate on in terms of the future world it's really interesting to see the

SPEAKER_180: number of people employed at these companies stay the same as their earnings go up exactly and this

SPEAKER_16: is why yeah so i've never seen that in our lifetime and this is if you were going to think about where to park money in the world i was hearing somebody who's like super liberal podcaster who hates america and trump derangement syndrome the whole thing and he's like i'm taking all of my money out of the united

SPEAKER_187: states not you alex i don't know i was gonna say dude i'm sitting right here

SPEAKER_93: i was worried you just got doxxed yeah exactly you don't have tds you just have a love of democracy it's slightly different and another capitalist yeah um and he said i'm just putting it i think the united

SPEAKER_168: states is on the decline i gotta put my money in europe and every other thing and i was like um anarcho capitalism would argue the opposite if in fact people are going to deploy this technology aggressively uh in the most vibrant capital market on the planet the united states

SPEAKER_16: um we could see amazon to my point earlier like what does amazon look like with no delivery drivers

SPEAKER_08: what does it look like without with you know delivery times cut in half and running 24 hours a day

SPEAKER_155: what does that even look like yeah eventually it says jeff bezos and a bunch of bots though

SPEAKER_195: i mean back to the one person billion dollar startup like maybe it's a you know 10 person trillion

SPEAKER_16: dollar startup at some point if it's if it's that efficient um here in texas they're delivering stuff

SPEAKER_08: from amazon warehouses so fast that i'm like i don't need it that fast they literally are like would you like this from 4 a.m to 8 a.m or 8 a.m to you know 10 a.m and i'm like um it's 10 p.m sir i don't need it i'm ordering a cable it's 10 p.m tomorrow that's okay leisure yeah and like literally

SPEAKER_195: the drones are coming like if you live on a ranch or something like that i mean the drones are going

SPEAKER_16: to be the ultimate um how crazy is it a lot of that larry and sergey bought every robotics company for five years what 10 15 years ago and then they sold them all because they couldn't figure out an

SPEAKER_86: application for it i mean yeah they were so far ahead on so many things and so i think a lot of

SPEAKER_12: creditors do in terms of being really uh advanced on the curve and that you know there's the old saying that um i mean there's there's two different things i think that apply here but one of them is just that um uh you know a the features here is just not good distributed than b um you know often it's less a matter of um of uh uh who but when and this is a good example of a when right they they were just too early and i think they've been remarkably early on all sorts of things they experimented with delivery they experimented with uh internet using weather balloons they experimented with satellites they experiment you know because eventually i think they sold their satellite company to planet labs or somebody right but they had satellites they had everything they're just too early on so much so

SPEAKER_16: so kudos to them you know for trying and you know it's like a venture portfolio you only have to hit on one and it looks like waymo will be that one of the other bets the loom project was too close to earth turns out low earth orbit better you look at google glass um that might actually be landing soon in the form of these ray-bans that you know everybody can't shut it about shut up about for meta so they could have kept going with that i also think their chromebooks and the chrome operating system is eventually where um ai lands like if you think about what will be the starting point for every ai journey where do you think that will occur do you think it's voice and wearables phones dumb terminals

SPEAKER_11: but what do you a new operating system where do you think the end game is for mass consumption mass

SPEAKER_213: interaction of ai yeah i think it depends on how good the companies are who are currently providing all our hardware because the default status they should win now the question is are they going to

SPEAKER_12: win which i think is a separate question and one could argue that there's been uh very little on device innovation in ai and then the question is is that because they're waiting to see what works is it because they're um you know investing and it takes time to build client applications is it a lack of imagination and so i think there's this broader question of why has so little ai been built into these devices so far and in some cases um you know you look at something like siri it was never you know the best voice based system etc and so there's there's a broader question of um you know why is that and in some cases it's to protect users so for example apple has a very strong data privacy policy which means that they don't have a lot of data that they normally would have for training that google has and so it's been purposeful but now in the ai era should that still apply or not or how should you think about it as a company i think those are very interesting probably ongoing questions in terms of where does that ai future come from the default should be the devices you use today or the devices that should be the launching point for ai whether that actually happens i don't know i mean what do

SPEAKER_16: you think yeah i've been thinking about apple a lot um they are very good at making hardware one of the greatest things they ever did was get off of other people's chipsets and just make their own right and that's been kind of the revolution and they can make devices that are higher margin more powerful leapfrog everybody low battery consumption solve so many problems for them these laptops they build are unnecessarily powerful and unnecessary long battery lives because they've just optimized so well so they actually have an advantage in that and then there will be a time when people have their

SPEAKER_93: llms um come up in um you know lawsuits and discovery and sam won't be more than happy to turn them over he said like don't put your stuff in here folks like we will you know have to hand them over you know i think that's good that he was honest about that so encrypted on your device uh with an apple phone

SPEAKER_16: apple mini apple you know m17 whatever they get to you could actually run the llm locally all the you know context window could be run locally on all your items and it could be running in the background indexing your photos without ever putting them in the cloud like google and having

SPEAKER_132: your photos you know train google's llm which i don't think you really want to do and zuckerberg

SPEAKER_224: will do that in a heartbeat obviously so i think i have a potential there yeah yeah it's a really

SPEAKER_12: interesting question because if you look at search as an analog and i don't think it's the correct analog right um but if you look at it as an analog basically google ended up paying apple tens of billions of dollars a year to use that search instead of developing its own and it was all margin right you'd have to hire old engineers you didn't have to implement all this stuff you literally got paid money to just distribute somebody else's search effectively it seems like that's the path that's been taken so far on llms around foundation models and then the question is is that the right approach or wrong approach in this era because you're not just searching for things it's not just a way to interface with the web it's the way to interface with everything you're shifting the the the set the framework but from a deal perspective that deal worked so well that i wonder if that's part of the framework that they're thinking it's i have no inside knowledge of them just saying if i if i had gone through that historical arc maybe that's how i'd be thinking about things um and it may or may not apply to this different world of like uh ai doing sort of all

SPEAKER_00: these various tasks for you and agents suddenly spawning up like in the agentic world that's a

SPEAKER_14: very bad strategy potentially i'm so uh i'm so bullish on apple making a big ai purchase i just think they should just take out whatever llm doesn't break you know stay in the top three they should

SPEAKER_16: just take out perplexity is a great user interface they really know how to build slick interfaces uh the comet browser and my lord just uh since the antitrust case think about how much traffic they could spill over to duck duck go brave or perplexity or anybody in that kind of zone of excellence it would be extraordinary for those companies and um yeah yeah i led um perplexity's first round wow and arvind is

SPEAKER_12: one of the most uh impressive founders i've worked with in a really long time like just a complete he's incredible at hiring incredible at execution highly strategic morphed into a very commercial person i mean when i met him um he was at open ai as a researcher right uh and i actually met him because i think he reached out to me on linkedin and said um hey i was you know i'm working at this lab at berkeley and i joined open ai like eight months ago and this is when nobody was doing generative ai stuff right i think i funded him in maybe just uh 22 sometime and um so we started meeting up weekly and just brainstorming and you know he obviously came up with perplexity and that's what he wanted to do and what he wanted to pursue and all this stuff uh but i've just been impressed by how he's um really just ramped so so quickly on so many areas so it's been a very impressive journey to watch yeah are companies

SPEAKER_107: sniffing around perplexity trying to snap it up a lot i don't know i'm not on the board there or anything so

SPEAKER_239: okay look at that trying to get this breaking news i like it out well no i'm just i mean jason's been

SPEAKER_245: talking about secrets the difference the difference is the worst thing that happened in your childhood

SPEAKER_246: let's talk you know like no one cares about my secrets a lot that's that's that's the difference

SPEAKER_04: my secrets are newsworthy no but i'm more just asking the general point like how much interest is there from the incumbent technology companies towards ai startups because we've seen some acquisitions yeah but jason keeps seeing these interesting possible combinations and i don't see as many of those uh in the market as we would expect so i'm just kind of curious about the

SPEAKER_02: temperature or the appetite for that kind of deal making big animal yeah i think it's because um

SPEAKER_12: you know the uh the ftc has continued to be reasonably anti-large tech acquisitions and that was started into the biden administration um with lena khan and others and i think that's just been continued into this administration so i think it has um as much to do with kind of a purview of how the government may intervene and that's not just the u.s government it's also the eu it's the uk right the figma deal was scuppered by the uk it wasn't the us that did it and it almost feels like

SPEAKER_00: there's this um regulator round robin where these different groups are taking turns in terms of who's going to scupper which thing so it isn't the same party every time yeah they must be on a group chat

SPEAKER_14: they're like we're busy with stopping the totally inconsequential figma adobe deal why don't you guys find an inconsequential robotics purchased by amazon for a two billion dollar company to block

SPEAKER_04: and it's like how does the uk have that much power though jason like the uk is this little bankrupt

SPEAKER_16: rock off the coast of europe which is an actual economic block i i said this probably many times

SPEAKER_93: they should just ban you from using adobe and figma products in the uk forever and just punish them if for blocking it they should just say like okay if you're going to block it we're not going to sell to your citizens they can go use some open source project hey um speaking of interfaces we

SPEAKER_16: have this sesame round which i'd like to go to but before we do i think it'd be good to look at a poly

SPEAKER_128: market will tesla beat their quarterly earnings so i chose this jason just to let everyone know

SPEAKER_04: because we're getting into earnings season and you know i'm a big dweeb for the public markets and i thought it's interesting that as we see sports betting and prediction markets come together it's important to keep in mind that also people use these for what we used to use the stock market for which was a surprise to me because why would you bother to use a different vehicle for that but

SPEAKER_180: people seem really into it yeah 80 chance they're going to beat their quarterly earnings

SPEAKER_08: i think you could really uh do well on these prediction markets by looking at the historical data almost every company tries to sandbag these earnings right a lot they're always trying to underestimate them so they can beat them so beat is almost always the default case but this is an interesting if you were a large shareholder i guess that you could use these prediction markets in some way to hedge you know just like sometimes people collar stocks or something like

SPEAKER_16: that or getting a little extra juice how do you think about putting aside just this one specific one which you're welcome to comment on uh what do you think about these prediction markets becoming just so um quickly integrated into our lives i was using one to gamble on uh the emmys and made a little bit of money watching the emmys and then i did i was watching a boxing match i won again so obviously

SPEAKER_08: these things are amazing since i've won two times in a row if i lose then i have a different opinion but

SPEAKER_265: for now my confirmation bias is these things are awesome fantastic yeah um yeah you know it's

SPEAKER_12: interesting because this is one of those concepts that's existed for years and there was crypto projects to do another and finally it's working between polymarket and calci um and really if i look at it it feels like there's two or three big use cases right there's basically sports and sports betting yep and they took what was a really complicated interface not uh they did three things right one is

SPEAKER_00: suddenly it's available in every state when it wasn't before because sports betting was regulated on a state per state basis they simplified the ui dramatically right it used to be what's the spread

SPEAKER_12: and the point thing and this and all this complex stuff versus yeah who wins yes no so they simplified the ui it's like swiping left right um and then there's kind of like um uh you know that global liquidity pool where you're suddenly reaching a much larger mass of people and so you have way more crowd wisdom and that sports is a huge area um politics when there's the political season is obviously a big area and i'm going to argue the stock market is just a prediction market right it's the same thing and so i always wonder where does this go can you start buying stocks or um shares that are basically uh uh collateralized via crypto you know because there's also basically tokenized shares um uh through these markets at some point like do these things converge are they completely separate in which case a lot of the financial speculation will continue to be the actual markets and this becomes more sports and politics so i've been kind of wondering like where does this whole world go and um what sort of financial instruments emerge either on top of this or does it go the other way right the new york stock exchange announced that it was investing through ice i think it was two billion

SPEAKER_117: dollars in polymarket do eventually the stock markets effectively become these prediction markets

SPEAKER_16: because they are in some sense already yeah i think if you want to own the underlying asset you buy the stock and you uh and if you want to speculate uh and get extra juice on more acute specific time-based

SPEAKER_70: moments options that's option trading it's like you're doing it in a simple way yeah it simplifies options way down yeah and that i think is the real innovation here is you've collapsed these

SPEAKER_12: really complex speculative things sports betting options et cetera and you've turned them into a yes

SPEAKER_16: no yeah this is um when you're in the professional gambling circles um and you are like the bottom rung of it as i am and i watch people try to do side bets what they call string bets they make them very

SPEAKER_168: complicated which for the people who are the sharps who are constructing these between the poker sessions where they drop them out it's like those option traders you know they're coming up with some really interesting synthetic thing they want to do like michael burry and the big short or whatever and then there's somebody a goldman trying to make it more complex to try to get an edge and they're all just trying to get some little edge on it and you're right the simplification of it yeah you know will open ai raise money at a billion dollar valuation in the next two years well i can't

SPEAKER_08: own um open ai shares it's too complicated or people want 10 vig on it you know what i'll just bet on that yeah the same you know it's like okay it's a 60 chance great i can make you know whatever percent

SPEAKER_213: more on my money i'll take it yeah it's a it's a transition from blogs to tweets but from a financial

SPEAKER_277: speculation perspective perfect analogy perfect shorter form fewer calories you do more of them

SPEAKER_279: and then more people do it easier to participate everybody can do it etc yeah okay let's talk about

SPEAKER_168: the sesame raising 250 million dollars because i don't know what sesame is yes i thought you might

SPEAKER_04: not so this is a company that came out of stealth back in february it's done a couple things one it's built voice first ai and its first two models that have put out earlier this year jason were popular enough that they racked up five million minutes but what's interesting about this company and why i wanted to bring it up on the show today is they're also working on hardware they're building glasses for you and i have an image here from their oh let's call it their lab or their office it doesn't really show us much but the idea here is back to the point about google glass being early is that sesame wants to give you some hardware that lets you chat with your personal ai agent or assistant or friend or whatever you want to call it on the go and they're taking the hardware approach to it and i think that explains the amount of capital here just as background how did they manage that well

SPEAKER_02: they're founded by um brendan aribe a co-founder of oculus and also the former cto of ubiquity six

SPEAKER_241: which was an ar startup so they have a lot of that ar um dna in their veins interesting so they

SPEAKER_284: worked at ubiquity so they understand ar uh 250 million dollars and exactly how is the device going

SPEAKER_16: to work is there a demo of this device out have they made a video of it very very little the verge

SPEAKER_04: got to try it and talked about a little bit and that's where that image came and i do have another one from the same post but it's pretty pretty nascent in fact this company is only putting out the beta of their ios app now they're actually taking applications for the beta of their ios app so it's very much under wraps if you will but the idea is and sequoia wrote about this in a piece

SPEAKER_02: explaining their investment jason is that it's not just another ai voice chat like your chat gpt instance for example it's supposed to be more of like a collaborator with you and with a focus on how it handles speech to make it seem natural between you and maybe your ai one thing i'm sure you've noticed is that if you chat with gpt5 and you make any sound while it's talking it just stops to give you space which makes it almost impossible to con converse yeah so i'm hoping that what they're doing here is making more natural communication with ai's more personalized ai and then making it functional on the go without having to opt in to the zuckerberg um i would say you know spyware empire

SPEAKER_05: what are your thoughts on wearables elad and this idea of like it's persistently monitoring what

SPEAKER_16: you're doing in the world in what could only be described as the most creepiest truman show concept

SPEAKER_291: ever but the benefit seriously you like it i love the truman show in a dystopian way like that's

SPEAKER_12: cool yeah i think um have you guys ever read this book called accelerando it's like a book it's like a it's it's it's a book with wonderful concepts i think the book itself is a little bit roughly written but the basic idea is it's the um you know for it's it's like the decades leading up into the singularity where you have this technology discontinue discontinuation and you know eventually at the point where every 10 years you accomplish more than all of human progress and then eventually every year you accomplish more than everything ever before that etc and things keep accelerating and in it they have this notion of glasses which are effectively a form of external memory they're an agent they act on your behalf this book was written maybe 20 25 years ago very sort of word looking yeah and um yeah one of the really cool questions that it raises if so much of your memory and all these agents and all these things you do is actually loaded in your device and you lose your device and somebody else puts it on how much of their personnel of your personality or how much of your memories or how much of your abilities is it absorbing as you sort of augment as a human and you externalize stuff um and so i thought that was a really interesting almost like conceptual book like again there's lots of really interesting ideas in that book um and this was one of them and is one of the earliest versions of you know um glasses and human augmentation and all that kind of stuff so it's this interesting old concept that seems to again people are iterating

SPEAKER_16: against william gibson had a similar concept with um in his um virtual light eduru the bridge series of like san francisco dystopian future um and he had this thing called god's little machine or something it was like a little zeppelin that flew above you in like a three-quarter shot like the sims recorded your entire life indexed it and you could pull it up and say oh when did elon and i first meet or what was it like when i you know the first date i went on with my wife and you could just kind of replay everything and then you have of course um strange days the katherine bigelow film where you can put on a neural headset and record your experience then somebody else could put it on and live stream your experience and or relive it so these ideas are there and it really goes to show how much of our consciousness and processing in the world is done visually and that whole system could be uh the unlock for intelligence and consciousness in some way is what some of the you know biology uh yeah i'm sorry strange days um and it was called the squid superconducting quantum interface device thank you producer claude for coming to the rescue here um i do have some concerns about these things or being always on and recording everybody all the time i don't know if i'm gonna win that battle though

SPEAKER_86: you have concerns about this no you know i'm in general a very paranoid person so i always have

SPEAKER_12: concerns um but i think that uh it just comes back to utility right what i think one thing that's been proven to us is um people fluctuate between willing to sacrifice privacy in order to get access to more stuff that was google gmail right there was all these concerns around google reading your email reading it not really but a machine reading it to generate ads and that was an issue but then you know hundreds of millions of people adopted gmail and then facebook similarly people had concerns about their own personal data and privacy and i think for a while um facebook actually was doing fine on it and probably what happened is because i you know i sold my first company to twitter and that was around 2009 and so this was right as facebook started paying attention to twitter and i always wonder if there's some alternate timeline or history or something else where instead of trying to go after twitter and media and public content facebook leaned into its strengths because at the time it was a very trusted privacy brand right it was your identity and it was your friends and your friend group and it was viewed very differently and what if they'd gone into banking and payments what if they'd gone into healthcare what if they'd gone into all the things that were privacy native almost what apple ended up doing that's a very interesting alternative timeline for facebook and maybe they will be the trusted identity yeah no but it's an interesting concept right of like they decided to go after twitter what if they decided to go after banking at that moment in time when they were very trusted as like a you know they had all your stuff but that was fine

SPEAKER_16: right because it was just your friends seeing it it was your it was your social graph it was closed they weren't trying to serve you ads in zuckerberg in fact hated advertising that was like he thought it

SPEAKER_132: was terrible he didn't want to have ads on the service until at some point somebody told him well you can make it free and get billions of people to use it and he was like okay fine and then cheryl samberg

SPEAKER_12: comes and the rest is and this could have been an alternate timeline maybe you would monetize your payments and this has happened a few times right i've talked to some of the people who worked on the early browsers and it was the same thing they're like is it going to be micro payments or

SPEAKER_00: ads and they ended up going down the ads route but there's an alternative universe where it was like

SPEAKER_04: micro payments right and you just maybe not i mean the technology wasn't there as the founder of a short-lived uh micropayment startup back in 2000 and whatever you know i mean credit cards just weren't weren't there i think the idea was good but i think we needed essentially that you had one

SPEAKER_321: you had a micro payments startup oh you did not you did a startup yeah it's called it's called

SPEAKER_04: contenture we founded it tech crunch wrote about it we launched got customers and then we failed and i had to go back to college oh okay wow you were just too early i kind of feel like yeah they were

SPEAKER_16: doing the brave attention token for a while that didn't take oh that's right yeah uh bat and there's been a couple of shots at this and you know one of the things i've learned is when we just talked about it with you know sergey being so ahead of the curve that he was too ahead of the curve and then

SPEAKER_08: probably some accounting wonks were like we're seven years into this sergey like let's pull the plug and he was probably like all right fine um when if he had just stayed till year 11 it would have been like oh okay now we own low earth orbit satellites we have starlink which was waymo right yeah which was

SPEAKER_155: waymo but yeah they could have had a couple others so again very forward-thinking company i think they

SPEAKER_08: don't get enough credit for that i think this is where like sergey and larry just need to say we will be willing to lose money on projects for 20 years not just seven and we don't care what you think remember they were doing google fiber and i think that one got deprecated as well that would have been fascinating if they kept going along and pulled that string because then you'd have fiber

SPEAKER_91: plus uh satellites you'd have fiber we'd have flying cars basically everything would be done well and we'd be out of business we couldn't invest anymore well exactly be like google's world but also

SPEAKER_168: that was like larry had to go off balance sheet and use his personal balance sheet to do he did three

SPEAKER_16: of them i think kitty hawk right kitty hawk was he also in archer i think he might have also invested in archery maybe yeah i'm not sure he was in at least two of them um just fascinating how close being too early is but i'm always encouraging founders to to look in that startup graveyard i think actually micro payments as silly as it sounds built into a social network a browser for content you know this might be like sub stack or you know a youtube competitor might be able to do very well with this where you could set your what if you could set your browser to just say if i watch more than one minute of a youtube video send the person one penny and uh if i watch you know a penny for every second i watch of anything and if i you know if i stay on a new uh a document and i scroll down to the end yeah give them a penny there's a lot of people who might buy into that if there was some reward for it

SPEAKER_02: i don't know what that reward is well i mean that was kind of what we were trying to build jason so it

SPEAKER_04: was back then you couldn't do one penny so you would put in five dollars to your contention account and then as you went around the internet we would hand out the money to people that you visited that had our integration and people kind of liked it but it was hard to get any sort of momentum think

SPEAKER_132: about stable coins like i wonder if there you coins are the unlock here what do you think about

SPEAKER_12: stable coins yeah yeah i've been uh long interested in them i mean uh it's interesting to see some of these second order effects of those now right in terms of the biggest holders of treasuries in some cases yeah amongst the biggest holders are stable coin companies yeah so it's it's been fascinating to see both their growth i remember when tether came out initially everybody thought it was super sketchy or very uncertain in terms of the assets are actually holding against the money yeah and now obviously they're it seems like they're fully collateralized between a mix of like gold bitcoin and treasuries they've done a great job cleaning it up yeah yeah so i you know it seems like it's going to be a really central thing in general and i think one of the things that people have under appreciated about crypto particularly people in the us is the degree to which globally for example that people don't have access to dollars yeah because you're not allowed to buy a government and this is a way to buy dollars and this is a way to do simple transactions like all the stuff that we take for granted here but it also shows the path forward with tokenizing shares and token you know

SPEAKER_00: things we've been talking about for years it feels like are finally going to happen so it's a it's a

SPEAKER_66: very exciting era i feel here we go tether is according to producer claude tether 127 billion in

SPEAKER_16: treasuries as of q2 2025 number 18 global ranking ahead of south korea and circle 18 billion is in the top 30.

SPEAKER_213: yeah yeah it's very under discussed how many treasuries are actually held by crypto companies

SPEAKER_12: now and so one of the biggest buyers of u.s government debt is the crypto industry like think about that what are the implications of that in the long run if crypto gets 10 times bigger and that 120

SPEAKER_00: billion goes to 1.2 trillion what does that mean in terms of the u.s government government's relationship to crypto who owns who yeah super interesting who's your daddy it's kind of like

SPEAKER_358: the china relationship it's tether it's tether tether's your daddy power is your daddy i guess in

SPEAKER_195: that case well and the interesting thing about tether is um yeah they did have that really um spicy i'll use the word spicy i don't want to get sued here but they were banned in a lot of regions a lot of like regional action taken against them a lot of questions about those reserves and they have gone like on a five-year process of cleaning all that up and there's like i think they have according to

SPEAKER_08: the bill the stablecoin bill that sax was involved in or talked about on the pod a bunch of times i think they have a three-year window to clean everything up in order to participate in the united states uh so circle's got the clear lane along with i guess their partnership with coinbase but they have to tether is going to clean up and then the guy paulo is his name paulo yes who was like living in

SPEAKER_195: some non you know the speculation was like none of the executives were available and they were living in jurisdictions where you couldn't be deported or picked up by a red notice i don't know how much is that true there were a lot of tether truthers out there you know speculating um but them figuring out how to go legit if these stories of illegitimacy were in any way true is like a story for the ages

SPEAKER_12: that's going to be the next storkin movie i think yeah it's pretty good um i think one of the most under hype players in crypto right now perhaps is stripe who i think have been doing amazing things in terms of um stable coins and bridges and all the rest of it and you know i first invested in stripe in 2010 i think so it's been kind of a long road but um what an amazing next act i mean obviously the payment stuff is going to keep going and the sas stuff will keep going up but i think what they're

SPEAKER_00: doing in crypto is super interesting right now they're never going to go public bridge and everything

SPEAKER_365: else no they definitely have they're never going to go public this is my new prediction

SPEAKER_371: valley market i just infinite duration uh yeah perpetual perpetual options there's some hyperliquid

SPEAKER_16: well here's the thing if you have that fluid of a market if you're an expert in transactions in commerce what's to say they couldn't build and you know the infrastructure to let people who are qualified purchasers trade in and out of their private company and then slowly buy back all their shares based on massive profitability and then have a black box company that nobody understands what's going on there it's a tremendous advantage and the colson brothers are uh unique in their perspective of the world i don't think they're particularly driven by some outrageous um you know personal net worth on a public market and the traditional accoutrement of being an entrepreneur they seem very mission driven and have very specific principled things they want to work on you know like their think tanks their science think tank etc so i that could be amazing i mean i'm trying to think of the equivalent

SPEAKER_12: of what's the largest private entity yeah there's a couple of them there's like coke uh industries there's cargill there's a bunch of these yeah it's kind of interesting bloomberg right yes tons of cash and it's private so i think people under um appreciate especially you know europe like a lot of the market cap is actually these uh middle stock private companies in germany for example

SPEAKER_16: just family here vitol swiss based dutch multinational energy and commodity trading company

SPEAKER_381: yeah revenue 400 billion dollars yeah isn't coke isn't coke like coke is number five 125 billion

SPEAKER_227: cargill should be on there like there's a bunch of these cargill number four 160.

SPEAKER_08: yeah i'm trying to find a tech one huawei number 10. i didn't know that they were probably yeah i mean

SPEAKER_378: i guess byte dance is a private by 10 14. that company yeah yeah hey a lot on the uh on the stripe

SPEAKER_04: stablecoin points i agree very much that they're they're leading they bought uh was it bridge for 1.1 billion and they just announced tempo their their own kind of blockchain or l1 for for stablecoin payments and i'm not asking for internal information here but like what do you think they're trying to do with that is that just to make a better foundation better rails for stables to fit into the kind of existing e-commerce world or are they trying to solve a more i don't know fundamental issue

SPEAKER_107: with stablecoins today that is not well served by existing l1s and l2s yeah i you know i think it's

SPEAKER_12: best to just look at what the company says about all this stuff um because i don't want to over interpret or misinterpret what they're trying to do um i think fundamentally if i look at what

SPEAKER_00: they've been building as a company over the years it's really this focus on providing uh a piece of global infrastructure like patrick used to talk about it almost like container ships

SPEAKER_12: and that enabled global commerce for the world and so i think they're very mission driven around

SPEAKER_00: you know this interconnected web of commerce is not good for the world and how do we help make it really easy for people and in particular developers to build things against that so absolutely extraordinary

SPEAKER_343: what else do we have on the docket here uh we got maybe one more story left in us what do we got well

SPEAKER_04: because we have a lot here why don't we talk a little bit about the uh the fracas jason with anthropic and uh your bud david sex oh that's spicy yeah we also have the open ai browser less spicy

SPEAKER_400: let's go for the spice okay let me just pull that up real quick i gotta find i have some thoughts on

SPEAKER_405: it i'm shocked i'm shocked that you do not believe this but i have opinions so i know for better or worse

SPEAKER_04: it's good it's good all right so uh anthropics dario amade wrote a public post this week responding to his critics but to understand what's going on we have to go back in time a little bit to the one big beautiful bill jason we discuss here on the show that there was a provision that eventually didn't make it in but that would have banned states from having state level ai regulations for a period of 10 years ended up getting voted down 99 to 1 in the senate fast forward to recently jack clark another co-founder of open sorry of anthropic wrote a post a summary of a talk that he gave in which he said that he thinks other stakeholders in the world should have a bit of a say in how we build ai as we build it he's not a doomer he's definitely an optimist but he thinks that we should listen to other people uh and then your friend david sex comes in and he says that quote anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering it is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging startups fast forward through some back and forth and other people weighing in and we got dario's um open letter essentially saying hey what the hell's wrong with you guys we love startups we work with them we're in favor of a federal standard and this has become such a big deal such a back and forth that cnbc is covering it and so jason i'm i'm incredibly curious why we have left the era of founder friendliness and we're now seeing venture

SPEAKER_02: capitalists attack some of the most successful companies in the history of startups

SPEAKER_16: you know um this industry left its boutique phase when facebook hit scale uh facebook just had far far too much impact on society elections our children instagram i think that was the end of the innocence um just if i were to pick you know a demarcation point a lot of when we became so big that we couldn't be looked at as the weirdos in california building cool stuff and then it became oh how are these things damaging society we should be questioning everything about ai we just did today talking about amazon and job displacement we should be thinking about kids using these products we should be thinking about people getting one-shotted and getting you know and we should be thinking about the truth and the search for truth i think all these things are valid discussions i think what's at stake here is there is covert um i don't know lobbyists uh and covert political actions to try to regulate things and though that does make me nervous i just want to see all the evidence of it um if that's actually happening or not and i i told sax this he wasn't too pleased with me a lot but if this is the most important technology of our lifetime why wouldn't states have a right in the format of the

SPEAKER_132: united states of america to you know chime in on it you know if they kids access to it or how it's used in healthcare how it's used in terms of job displacement what's your take on all this yeah i think um at this

SPEAKER_12: point in time and i think industries evolve over time and the nature of how you regulate those industries should evolve with it but early on in industries it's a bit of a disaster to let each incremental state chime in on how to regulate it because fundamentally there's a handful of states that effectively by fiat govern what the rest of the country does whether the rest of the country adopts things or not it's almost the flip why should california be able to govern ai for everyone in the us which effectively almost happened through the scout wiener bill so i actually viewed on the other side of this one where i think um the states should not intervene for now it should be federally mandated there are both national security reasons to do that there are national competitive dynamics to drive that so uh you know my view would be um and and this literally almost happened right california was gonna try and regulate how the rest of the country deals with ai which is a really bad idea so and it was based

SPEAKER_16: on the number the amount of compute you have as if that is some sort of well the question is why should

SPEAKER_56: california regulate it for at all a and then b for everyone else which is i mean it would have been

SPEAKER_70: national which means it would have been global so should california have the right to set national

SPEAKER_16: or global ai policy effectively yeah and the car example is a good one and so that's one where i happen to be in favor of it so when you look at these it's always uh it may have been the right

SPEAKER_70: thing to do the question is should california been able to do it in other words correct yeah i was

SPEAKER_12: in favor of it yeah yeah yeah it's like let's separate the do we agree with the thing yes from how should that thing get done right and i think those are two separate things so yeah and that's

SPEAKER_16: what i've been trying to parse in my head because i you know yeah we should have higher gas standards and who cares if cars cost a little more we you know having smog over cities and people losing you know months to years off their life and you know asthma and all this kind of stuff yeah it's obviously a tragedy of the commons it's a good thing that california did that in my mind but should texas be forced to not buy the trucks they want that have the hauling power and the price performance ratio that they want i picked texas as a place to live because i like less regulation um and so it really does come down to the operating system of america where the states are supposed to have some sovereignty but then you have to super oppose it against well if we are in fact in a global race with china can we can we afford to slow ourselves down and that's like a very interesting this is probably

SPEAKER_12: there's a global race with china and then there's the um there's the political side there's the the military side of that there's the economic side of that there's the political and cultural side of that and so i i disagree as well with hey we should have every country on the planet weigh in on how ai models should get built in the us i think each country should have its own sovereign ai model there's lots of ways to accomplish that right like if i was running a country i'd be very interested in that i want my cultural values represented in local models and things like that so i sure agree with that but the flip side of it is um if anything perhaps the last few decades have shown us that perhaps we don't need to solicit everybody's opinion on everything both in the context of the company in the context of a country and the con you know and so this is almost a throwback to things that uh haven't really been working it feels yeah if you were to put this against high-speed

SPEAKER_16: trains alex like there's a reason why we don't have them in america because everybody gets to chime

SPEAKER_168: in on the high-speed train and then the high-speed train you know is like you know it's in other

SPEAKER_428: countries they're like high-speed train you has to be a straight line yeah but else it can't go fast and

SPEAKER_04: you know but in china there's been a lot of studies discussing how both province and central planning has led to a dramatic overbuild of economically inefficient high-speed rail and so we can all give a thumbs up to the shanghai beijing line why not but when you see the what is it eight eight pillars and eight cross beams there's some model that i'm translating poorly here for how to build high-speed rail in china and it's led to a lot of misplaced spend and so i agree that we should

SPEAKER_213: have drivers of that spend now like that's often also corruption that's a bunch of stuff it's not

SPEAKER_433: just but if you want centralized power a lot if you don't want people to have yeah you're going to end

SPEAKER_434: up with a central power well really what the question is is what are the things that should

SPEAKER_12: be regulated by what level of government and that's that is something that has been established and adjudicated in the us for centuries now right and that this falls into line of those things which is how much should states be able to govern on their own overall technology progress for the u.s and for the globe and that's effectively what this issue really is right interstate commerce uh not just interstate commerce it's effective de facto regulation of the entire country right no i'm saying that

SPEAKER_04: because it's that it should fall prey to that and therefore it could be limited in that way exactly exactly what's what's interesting though is we're talking almost about the wrong the wrong foe here because i think this is why anthropic is you know being dragged into a bit of the mud here but the the the provision to blant to block state level ai regs was voted down nearly unanimously in the senate and partially because republicans from the south wanted to protect local industries so how do we get congress to listen to this perspective and do something intelligent and pass something that will preclude or maybe just do better than state level regulations because dario said in his letter that they disagreed with the idea because um a blocked action without offering a federal alternative

SPEAKER_442: so how do we get to one how do we fix congress i mean there is there is um i i'd say three things on

SPEAKER_12: it one is i tend to stay away from politics i'm the least uh cogent person to ask about how to fix congress or how to change you know like i'm that's not the world that i tend to spend time in um you know i do think there's a number of different approaches that we've taken in the past or historically to federally mandate things and one route is executive orders where they can be applied the other route has been acts of congress you know there's three or four routes that are just standard and the question is what best applies here and then i think it's back there's also the meta issue of where do states cross the boundaries in terms of the areas that probably shouldn't apply to them and is that a legal framework is that something else that already exists and how do we interpret

SPEAKER_00: um you know the existing legal structures of the country relative to some of these topics

SPEAKER_180: i think that's the granular piece that you're talking about a lot i think is the key piece of this

SPEAKER_16: which uh downside what concern do we have over ai that is not addressed by an existing law if you were to go in an ai and you ask it right now how do i build a chemical weapon how do i build a biological

SPEAKER_168: weapon it says hey i'm not going to do that it's already been solved by the teams they've self-regulated so okay what's the next piece oh um how do we deal with uh you know i don't know the termino stuff the

SPEAKER_12: bioweapons stuff is so overstated and i feel like that's the way that some of these companies have been trying to uh cause distress and fear and regulators and others because the reality is all the protocols for um building a virus you can release etc are on the web yeah i mean i worked as a biologist for almost a decade right and all these love protocols are out there um the real issue is buying the equipment using it actually doing things in an intelligent manner ordering all the logos you'd need etc you know so the extra information content in my opinion isn't high and the hard part is the physical world stuff and so whenever people raise that as an example i view it as kind of a red herring where where it's purposefully raised in an attempt to cause fear in people so they'll react and regulate

SPEAKER_00: something so i do think those are bad bad examples that people tend to use yeah that's why it's purposeful

SPEAKER_195: i think it's per i agree and i always ask people tell me the next one tell me the next one yeah let's just get granular here for a minute i have one like ip protection i think that that should be done uh that should be self-regulated by the industry which they're starting to do they're starting to say hey even if you don't agree with how sam's doing it at open ai he's saying with sora hey if you're like you know the estate of elvis or martin luther king will be gracious and turn off the ability to make martin luther king saying inappropriate things and they did they didn't have to go the legal route sam said we're good people we're going to be aggressive in letting people do things but we're also going to be reasonable in turning them off i disagree with the approach i think they should

SPEAKER_08: always get permission but okay fine he took a different route he'll get the legal exposure but

SPEAKER_132: yeah this is um a situation we have to get into each one and i was just thinking when you were

SPEAKER_168: talking about um you know bombs and i was like remember fertilizer bombs everybody was like oh my god you know the internet's causing this the tour network uh you know dark web everybody knows it's like you still got to get the fertilizer every piece of every bag of fertilizer has ids in it like in the chips from what i understand there's like some secret way that they watermark every bag of fertilizer so if you blow something up and then if you buy them you need to register and they've got some you know i i mean who knows how the government is implementing this after the 9-11 because the first before 9-11 they tried to blow up the world trade sensor with the

SPEAKER_16: fertilizer bomb they succeeded in blowing up oklahoma city two different groups of terrorists domestic and international they they solved this problem i bet you they have like

SPEAKER_168: like ways of tracking fertilizer where like the second the person leaves the fertilizer store

SPEAKER_93: there's like a camera on their license plate they're being tracked by a drone like the government took this seriously there's so many like simple solutions to this so yeah that's why i stopped fertilizing my

SPEAKER_04: my garden i was worried that uh i get tracked down yeah so you you laugh but the only time i've actually gotten pulled out at the airport and put into a small room was after going home to oregon to my parents house and i was walking around the backyard a lot and i popped a uh some sort of test at tsa for a possible fertilizer that happened too and they like i've never been treated as a criminal quite like that they're like is there anything in here that's explosive i'm like i don't know weed but

SPEAKER_01: please don't find that and it was so oh sorry we're live uh edit that out i guess um but it was just it was so surreal but it can catch you and they uh they literally asked me like have you been doing

SPEAKER_168: gardening i was like no how's that relevant i didn't know what they were talking about like i've been

SPEAKER_469: helping startups grow i don't get gardening by spreading manure yeah exactly uh all right listen

SPEAKER_16: listen this has been another amazing episode of this week in startups a lot thank you for joining us today what a great guest uh where can people find you i mean you got a twitter account

SPEAKER_449: you're pretty active yeah yeah twitter they can find me uh at a lot go and a pleasure to be on

SPEAKER_36: thanks for including me all right uh and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups bye-bye