SPEAKER_00: Anthropic, they want to slow down global AI development. What? Wait a second. Why are they doing this now? Didn't we just all go through this, that they withheld mythos, acting responsible?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Now they're calling for a global pause?

SPEAKER_03: Shut down Claude, then, if it's too dangerous.

SPEAKER_00: If not, what are you doing? You're the ones behind all of this development. Bernie Sanders released a video.

Chamath Palihapitiya: This is a completely insane, deranged concept. He wants to seize 50% of the shares of the AI companies. 2028, the number one issue in the election.

SPEAKER_05: It's not going to be inflation. It's not going to be wars. It's going to be AI.

SPEAKER_06: All right, everybody, welcome back to Twist. It is June 5th, Friday, 2026. With me again, DeLon Harris. How are you doing, brother?

SPEAKER_03: Hey, I'm all right. I'm doing okay. I looked a little banged up this week because I got a new dog and she clawed my face, but I'm feeling all right.

SPEAKER_11: And we'll talk about it in Off Duty.

SPEAKER_12: We will also talk about the Knickerbockers. The New York Knickerbockers, yeah.

SPEAKER_15: And my experience at Game 1 here in San Antonio.

SPEAKER_16: So, but let's get started. There's a lot in the news.

SPEAKER_17: I hate to, you know, too much small talk at the beginning. We put that at the back, like a mullet. Business in the front, party in the back. I like it.

SPEAKER_19: Let's get started, Lonnie Donnie.

SPEAKER_03: I think before we go any further, I think we should applaud our friends at Plod and point out we're both wearing our Plod pins right here. I've got mine. You've got yours. A million, a million uses for these Plod pins. That's what, you discover new ones all the time while you're wearing them. Like, I just, I adopted a dog named Barry this week. And the whole time that I was talking to her previous foster mom about, you know, what she likes, everything, I recorded the whole thing with my Plod. And then on the way driving home with her, I jotted down some more notes. I captured some more thoughts. So now I had a whole Barry adoption action plan written up by Plod just because I was recording it the whole time.

SPEAKER_21: I didn't even think about that. You go to see your doctor.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You see a vet. You're doing something important. Trusting human memory, not a good idea. Trusting human judgment, great idea. And this is augmenting human intelligence.

SPEAKER_25: I found a new use this week for my Plod. I had it on my wrist. Today I'm wearing it on my shirt here. I had my Plod pin. You can also get the one that goes in the back of your phone. I was at the Liquidity Conference, and I just left it on for all the programming.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Wow, yeah. Now, after doing four hours of content, I have the entire live straight feed in my phone available to me.

SPEAKER_25: What they did at the conference was a very unique thing. It turns out Plod is such a good experience at This Week in Startups that they went and did a partnership with All In. The Liquidity Conference was our LP conference this week. They recorded the conference. Then every night they sent out the same link that you and I would use when we're sharing Plod conversations that have been recorded, mind mapped, summarized, action items, all that stuff.

SPEAKER_05: They sent it out to the 550, 650 people there. Yeah, that's amazing. So it was a group Plod.

SPEAKER_28: Once again, we applaud Plod. I met the founder. He's awesome.

SPEAKER_31: Millions of users using this. It is a tremendous, life-changing product. Give them the code.

SPEAKER_03: So if your work relies on conversations, we urge you to get a Plod note pin S. Urge. You can check it out at Plod.ai slash twist. And if you use the code twist, you're going to get 10% off your new Plod pin.

SPEAKER_34: 10% off an already unbelievable, reasonable price. A great deal. It's a great deal.

SPEAKER_03: All right, let's get started. Let's get started. We got our first guest I want to bring up. We're doing an interview and a demo. It's Yolen Yen, the co-founder and CEO of a great tool that I use very often, Comfy UI. It's amazing to be here.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, great to have you. Are you going to show us a little demo here to kick us off?

SPEAKER_43: What I usually tell people what Comfy is, is the polar opposite of what a ChatGPT or a MidJourney prompt box is. Over there, you have this black box of typing out the prompt, generating the image. Maybe it's what you want. Maybe it's not what you want. But you change one word and everything changes. Comfy, on the other hand, give you a node-based interface. It's very complex. It's something that people actually take a decent amount of time to learn and now becoming a professional skill required in many studios such as Netflix. Um, and what it gives you is the maximum amount of control that you can change every single parameter. Uh, and what I'm showing you over here, uh, for folks who are listening is this type of, uh, uh, individual node that connects to each other. And with all of the parameters exposed, such as the noise with, width, height, and then including the, the prompt itself, which.

SPEAKER_25: So we're seeing like a TikTok story here of a gentleman, uh, you know, um, skateboarding. Yeah. And, uh, obviously the dimensions are that of a TikTok story, but then you have multiple boxes connecting to each other. And then you have all these variables as you're pointing out, not just the dimensions, but I'm assuming each of those objects or layers, I guess, was how Photoshop did it.

SPEAKER_28: Explain to us the concept here at a high level.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_43: So the prompts, the, the, the text itself in here, it describes the entire image you are trying to generate. Uh, this is actually using a, uh, very new state of the art, uh, open source image model called ideogram before, uh, shout out.

SPEAKER_28: So ideogram v4, it's an open source, uh, and is it out of China, the U S where's it from?

SPEAKER_43: It is out of a lab in, I believe Canada and U S uh, it's, uh, uh, actually a fairly.

SPEAKER_52: I D E O G R A M. Ideogram. Yeah. They just dropped a new model this week.

SPEAKER_43: Uh, if you haven't taken a look, definitely check it out. Um, and, uh, that the, uh, prompt itself is, uh, it's describing what the final image is, what this model is actually really cool. In terms of doing is you can set bonding boxes, um, uh, to say like, Hey, I want the image to be generated exactly at this portion of the place. So over here, uh, there's a, uh, uh, you know, the description is a massive, uh, 3d fluff white typography spelling of comfy. So as you can see in the end, so there's exactly generating around this.

SPEAKER_25: And it looks like balloons and it's in the air.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So yes, this is what you don't get when you give a prompt lawn to stable diffusion or any of these other Gemini, um, banana, nano, banana, banana.

SPEAKER_58: Yeah. Yeah. It's up to them to decide where everything's going to go. This is much more granular saying, Hey, I want the logo here.

SPEAKER_25: I want the person here. I want this font and you're giving it a much more granular.

SPEAKER_60: I'll call them micro prompts within a mega prompt. So you have micro actions in a mega prompt.

SPEAKER_03: One, one analogy that Yolen and comfy have used a bunch that I really like is like, it's a, it's like a slot machine with, with Mo when you're engaging directly with the model. It's like 60% of the time, 70% of the time you're rolling the dice. Maybe it's going to get what I look like, but the more granular you can make the prompting in the early controls of the weights and the, the, the, you know, adding on Laura's and all of these other sort of add ons with comfy, the more precise you can get. You can get what you want the first time without having to keep pulling the lever.

SPEAKER_65: Well, and the lever takes, it would be like a slot machine that takes 90 seconds to tell you if you lost your money.

SPEAKER_68: It's pretty annoying. There's a slot machine.

SPEAKER_48: That is correct.

SPEAKER_43: And actually, uh, one thing that people keep on emphasizing a lot of times is that, uh, for a lot of these other models, uh, you know, that is, uh, behind a single prompt box, um, what you usually happens, even if you, you were to use exactly the same prompt, you don't have the reproducibility.

SPEAKER_48: That's because they actually hide most of the parameters away, such as the initial seed. So in comfy, what you can do is actually, you set a fixed seed and this image and this generation would always be exactly the same.

SPEAKER_43: And that's huge for creatives that in the end, they are able to reproduce exactly the imagery they were expecting or other people have produced for them. And reliably using that in, you know, production environment or, um, in, uh, uh, uh, kind of, uh, scaling up the, the, the product. So I, I actually just queued up the job again, uh, just to showcase that two of the image are exactly the same. Um, but if you were to change the seed a tiny bit, and then in that case scenario, you're enabling the model to, you know, reuse a new noise to, to start the generation from the, uh, from the ground up. And then in that case scenario, you will actually get a, uh, brand new image in here. This is kind of a live generation demo of like how I, um, it's actually showing a pretty cool diffusion process of, uh,

SPEAKER_76: Is that prompt written by a human or do you give an audio prompt with a bunch of details and say, make me a prompt?

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SPEAKER_48: Yeah, you can do many ways.

SPEAKER_43: You can send, actually, there's more complex workflow in here where you can say, ask a cloud model to generate the prompt using this kind of a structure. So in the end, it will, like you can give very simple prompts and you don't have to try, right, this entire thing. And then afterwards, it will give you a more structured version of this type of thing.

David Friedberg: This is something people miss, right?

SPEAKER_31: That you, we were talking about on All In, David Sachs, in month three of us doing this, like, daily report on what topics are being discussed in the news that would align with, you know, the besties' interest.

SPEAKER_25: We had trained a model, here's all the besties' interest, here's what we've talked about previously, and then it went out and found new stories. Okay, great. But producer Nick had asked it, make me a prompt, and then Sachs saw the prompt and he's like, oh my God, this is incredible because it looks so structured. It looks so, like a developer with, you know, OCD wrote it. This is like an OCD level gorgeous code.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And it was like, he's like, no, no, no, I described the prompt I wanted, I got back the prompt, and nobody seems to know this.

SPEAKER_05: Lon, if people don't understand that the number one job of AI is to write the prompt, they're using AI like it's three fucking years ago. It's insane.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and this is, it's one of the big things, too, we talk about with different models. Like, some models are great for things like prompt writing, and then when you take that and you feed it into another model, that model can perform so much better because the previous model helped you fine-tune your prompt. So that's why, like, operating it, you know, everybody gets sort of like, oh, this is my favorite model, this is the one I use for everything. They're all good at different things. Like, Claude is great at writing prompts, but not the best image maker. Then you feed that into your nano bananas or your ideograms or whatever. And, like, it's, it's, that's where I think a lot of the magic comes from that people miss who don't use these tools is, like, the combination of models.

SPEAKER_28: Yes, very important. Yolen, all this that you're building here, how do you run it?

Chamath Palihapitiya: How do you run the prompt? Or does it change the prompt? Like, if you said, change comfy there and make it orange. If we wanted to make the comfy in the sky orange for orange and blue skies for the Knickerbockers, how would you do that?

SPEAKER_25: And then when does it change?

SPEAKER_95: Like, does it refresh in real time? How does it work?

SPEAKER_43: So you, one, this is a very interesting thing for, for folks who don't know about comfy comfy is both open source and can run in a local environment. So for anyone who wants to just use their computer, whether it's a Mac or whether it's a Windows machine that has a decent GPU, they can completely download this for free and run it in a local environment and use your own GPU. Wow.

SPEAKER_102: So you're the hosted version of comfy UI, but I could download the open source version, pay you $0, use my MacBook M5 with 48 gigs of RAM. I'm assuming that's enough.

SPEAKER_43: It's enough for some of the models. Got it. You'd be surprised how big the model of performance requirement is these days.

SPEAKER_104: Got it. So you probably need to have that. I think there's a MacBook now with 256. I don't think they've gotten to 512. Do you know?

SPEAKER_105: I would actually recommend using NVIDIA chips for running a lot of these models.

SPEAKER_43: It's a much better performance.

SPEAKER_107: So what do you run?

SPEAKER_43: I would say, you know, just get as comfortable as you can buy a high-end GPU from NVIDIA if you were to run it locally.

SPEAKER_108: But if you don't, you can use cloud. And in that case scenario, you'll get access to a state of the art graphics.

SPEAKER_25: Yolen, I'm unsure of this, but do people buy an NVIDIA GPU, like a card that would go in a PC for gamers, and put it in its own enclosure and then attach it to their MacBook Pros and have that as like an offloading point?

SPEAKER_16: I did see some enclosures when I was surfing around the internet.

SPEAKER_48: Yeah, I think that's definitely a possibility.

SPEAKER_43: But a lot of times in those case scenarios, they'd rather just rent or, you know, use a cloud-hosted service as opposed to just doing that. There are actually studios out there that do use Comfy in a kind of enclosed environment, and sometimes it's because of privacy and air gap requirement as well.

SPEAKER_21: Got it. Okay, so you could be like literally running this on the flight to Japan if you had the right laptop.

SPEAKER_25: That's correct. Wow. And so look at the detail level here. You've got, you know, 15 different boxes and arrows going in between them, connecting them. What are the arrows that we're seeing connecting all these together? Because you're just making an output of a silly TikTok video, but this looks like you're launching a rocket ship.

SPEAKER_48: Yeah, yeah, the complexity definitely can scale up.

SPEAKER_43: So what I just did was going, taking one of the nodes that from the outside and then entering into what we call a subgraph, which is essentially a component that encapsulates a lot of the functionality and actually help some of the users to abstract the complexity.

SPEAKER_25: So what are we seeing in here? Like you had that mega prompt, and this is kind of what's going on under the hood. This is the detail level?

SPEAKER_43: Yeah, this is the detail level. This actually gives you control over everything. In here, you can decide on what model you're loading, what type of weight type you're loading it into, because there's all sorts of different mechanisms. So you can utilize the CUDA GPU, and then including the certain type of configuration. So for example, this is a parameter called CFG, which is on a high level, kind of giving you how much of guidance the prompt itself is injecting into this model. So you can, you know, tune up, tune down that model itself.

SPEAKER_121: Now, I don't have to do all this level of granularity. I'm just basically looking at the granularity behind the prompt.

SPEAKER_123: And that's what's abstracted in current products like ChatGPT.

SPEAKER_25: But when I use Proxy Computer, and it's doing these crazy searches, I don't know if you saw the interface I built on, like, Next Unicorn Salon. I just decided, like, I'm going to make my own Next Unicorns database of, like, who could potentially be a unicorn a year or two from now.

SPEAKER_124: I hope we're on there.

SPEAKER_28: Well, we'll see. I may have to adjust the prompt here and insert you in there.

SPEAKER_25: But it has all, when you're running it, even when I ran it for two hours last night, it had to collapse everything.

Chamath Palihapitiya: But I could click and expand it and see what it was doing under the hood. So this is the same equivalent. Yeah, Jolant?

SPEAKER_127: Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_28: Okay, so show us it's changing Comfy from white in blue skies, a white logo to an orange logo.

SPEAKER_48: Yeah, I just edited it out here earlier, and then now I run it again using the same configuration, and then the job will kickstart it. The model itself runs fairly fast. Let's see if, in the end, it actually does what you said. Yeah, yeah. Here's the moment of truth. Demo or die here on this week in startups. Let me see if there are more blue. Ah, okay, there's vibrant blue.

SPEAKER_03: Playing around with a tool like this, Jason, it is a great way. Like, I think I got a lot better at making AI-generated images because I worked with Comfy UI early on. Because you learn about, like, what does every word of my prompt do? And, like, how do these models, how are all of the different variables and factors going in to producing the final image? And, like, you know, even, like, the setting, he was just saying, like, how much fidelity do I want the final image to have to exactly what I wrote in my prompt versus how much freedom do I want the model to have to, like, abstract a little. Like, you'd be amazed at how different your images will turn out just by tweaking a few of those kind of weights and things. It's a great way to, like, see under the hood a little bit. Well, there's the orange.

SPEAKER_138: There's the orange in the background, though. Thank you. Looks like we put the orange in the wrong part of the prompt.

SPEAKER_25: Let's move. I mean, I think we understand how the product works. Yeah, yeah. This is industrial strength levels of prompting. Oh, I see you have one here of me. There you go. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_48: There's this. A hundred percent.

SPEAKER_43: This is definitely, like, if there's one takeaway for the audience, this is basically a production level of a product that enable people to give that fine-grained control and quality for AI.

SPEAKER_56: Hence why the Coca-Cola ads, the recent, like, AI Super Bowl ads were all generated using Comfy. That's so real.

SPEAKER_03: I actually wanted to ask about that because you guys worked on the Wizard of Oz Sphere of Vegas show as well. Like, how is Comfy actually, like, what part of the process is Comfy being used on? Like, how do you integrate into the process of making something massive like that?

SPEAKER_105: Yeah, we are the tool builder. We did not directly participate. I cannot pay credit over the Wizard of Oz on Sphere.

SPEAKER_148: I'm accusing you of ruining the Wizard of Oz, Yolen. Don't worry. Don't worry.

SPEAKER_149: Oh, I didn't even know people were saying that.

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SPEAKER_43: It was very cool because we were able to kind of be fairly close with the studios that ended up working with the Google Vio team and generating all of the results. So a very kind of simple scenario is using the Vio model and Comfy together for upscaling. But you cannot just take a 1920s color film into full 32K video for a sphere screen. Because a lot of times where if you scale, let's say, this image into a sphere environment, what you're going to get is Jason's face being completely warped around the globe. And it just looked good for the audience. So in that case scenario, they had to outpaint. They had to create imagery that never existed before in this film. So that's a case scenario. They utilized Comfy's power in here to run all sorts of parameters to figure out, hey, what would be the best option of outpainting all of these imageries? And sometimes they have to be generating characters, reacting to the main character talking and all of those things. And you just got to make sure that the highest quality and control is there. And hence why Comfy is utilized in that environment.

SPEAKER_14: All right. So what are we seeing here? You took a screenshot of me talking or is this from a previous episode?

SPEAKER_48: Yeah. Yeah. This is from a previous episode. And I actually wanted to show because we were talking about the outpainting process.

SPEAKER_43: This will run a while. I can rerun it again. But this is an input video of Jason talking. And this is a TikTok type of video itself. But what Comfy was able to do in the end using the LTX open source model is that it looks very complex. I'm not going to explain the whole thing. I actually, funny enough, I don't even know the whole thing. So I just excuse to say I'm not going to explain it. But what happens in the end is this ended up outpainting the entire video based off of the input. So it's guessing your arm, guessing all of the background, what happens over there. So this might look like the original, you know.

SPEAKER_163: It isn't, but you filled it in, you're saying?

SPEAKER_48: Yeah. Yeah. This is a generating.

SPEAKER_03: Based on the TikTok image, they guessed at what is on the outside edges of your screen.

SPEAKER_58: There's a couple of accounts, Lon, that do this on the internet for, and they make tall versions of Star Wars or Goodfellas or Sopranos. I don't know what they call that meme, but it's to basically Sopranos in vertical. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_170: Well, there's in-painting and out-painting.

SPEAKER_03: In-painting is when you put something in the image that wasn't already there. So like we could replace your microphone with like a dog running around the table and then out-painting would be extrapolate beyond the parameters of the original frame. Like what's going on on the sides or in the background or like Wizard of Oz at the Sphere. Like what would the rest of Kansas look like other than that little window of Dorothy that we see?

SPEAKER_58: Yeah. And it's not perfect. Like it put me in a short-sleeved shirt. Obviously, I'm not wearing a short-sleeved shirt, but that's okay.

SPEAKER_56: Like that's something you could change, right? Yeah. That's a part of your problem. Exactly. You can change all of the parameters in here.

SPEAKER_48: Yeah. And then all sorts of crazy things you can do. You can, you know, utilize the model.

SPEAKER_43: And this is actually using a Chajabiki image model to take this input video and then transform you.

SPEAKER_178: Oh, this was Cinco Dimaio. Yeah, for Cigarette. Here I am.

SPEAKER_179: Hilarious. Senor Calacanius.

SPEAKER_178: Yes.

David Friedberg: So, Yolen, where is all this going in terms of as a business, you know, you are building

SPEAKER_25: on top of open source models, other people's frontier models. You're building these tools. You have open source. Explain to me the contours in the audience of how you're architecting strategically your business in a world in which people are saying, like a neophyte investor might be like, isn't this just a wrapper? What if, like, OpenAI does this? And then explain. So there's the wrapper criticism you'll get. Not that I would give that because obviously we can see there's a level of fidelity here that, you know, we don't think OpenAI or Anthropica are going to get to and interface and tools and user base. And then the second piece is, you know, after it, so first, being a wrapper.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Second, open source as a weapon or as a liability. Those are the two things I'm curious about.

SPEAKER_182: Take it in whichever order you want, Yolen.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are great questions.

SPEAKER_48: I would say from the first perspective in terms of whether Comfy is a wrapper or where is

SPEAKER_43: the business going fundamentally. Comfy actually, there are many layers in here. Comfy underneath the hood, the reason why we are able to run these open source model is Comfy at the core is an inference engine. It actually do the calculation. So there's a very deep technical layer in terms of how we can, you know, efficiently run these models. And for folks who actually understand the training and the inference difference in here, there's a huge gap in terms of what inference engine has to do to unlock these models' capability and value and speed. And those are the area where we say, like we would say it's actually fairly difficult to build an inference engine, especially the most popular diffusion model inference engine. Comfy as an open source tool is actually the top, I believe, 70 most popular GitHub projects out there by, you know, kind of the amount of stars ranked. And then another component in here is at the core, Comfy has this open source and extensibility nature. Anyone can write a custom mode. Inside Comfy, people can bring their own code and connecting with different components. Whatever people don't actually have in the baked in version of Comfy, they can easily just use Claude and write a version of that code and bring that into Comfy. And that's a huge, huge strength, especially in the agentic coding world. What you're seeing is people be able to easily build their own component, customize their pipeline. So at the core, Comfy just want to be that foundation layer of what we call operating system for generative AI, visual generative AI.

SPEAKER_128: Have you raised a ton of money for the company? And where are you at in your journey?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I mean, obviously, AI has gotten very hot. This is an incredibly verticalized tool that people who are in the arts and who are making

SPEAKER_25: social media clips all the way up to, you know, you know, whatever's going on at the Wizard of Oz or not and Coca-Cola and Super Bowl commercials. This has got a large group of people who are interested in using it.

SPEAKER_104: So tell us about the pricing for the product, how that's going, consumption-based, proceed, yada, yada. And then how's the fundraising going?

SPEAKER_48: Pricing itself is, we have the local, it's completely free.

SPEAKER_43: You can actually use local while using some of the closed source models using our API platform as well to speed up your generation. And that you can just pay us as you go. And then on the cloud version, you have, you know, the basic tier of $20, $35, and $100. Depending on different usage, like a different kind of demand, you get different amount of usage in the end. And then on the enterprise side, we do offer kind of more customized solution in terms of enabling enterprises to get, you know, the tier of features and security they need. And those are kind of based off of sales-led growth.

David Friedberg: And you raised $30 million from my pal, David Sachs, over at Kraft?

SPEAKER_188: Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_58: Not that he did it, because I know he's been pretty busy.

SPEAKER_189: Ah, the UI czar, David Sachs, Nelson. UI czar, David Sachs. Meme czar.

SPEAKER_43: Yeah, I was fortunate to meet him once. But yeah, we raised from Kraft, and most recently, $30 million round at $500 million post. Amazing. Yeah, so I think on that end, we're pretty excited and looking for cracked engineers and, you know, operators to join our team.

Chamath Palihapitiya: All right, Yolen, great job. Everybody can go to comfiui.com. Do I have the domain correct?

SPEAKER_194: It's comfiui.org or comfiui.com.

SPEAKER_195: Oh, love it. And so, it's comfy. And, you know, sometimes the founder has first name at the domain name once in a while.

SPEAKER_79: Big cloud providers may offer you cheap compute, but you'll end up paying the difference in engineering costs and hiring extra developers. You don't want to waste time configuring virtual networks. None of us do, or your access policies. You want your team building your product. So, it's time to look at Render. Render is the all-in-one cloud platform for developers that allows you to deploy, scale, and secure your apps and agents with zero ops. Most cloud platforms ask you to split your focus between product and infrastructure, or they force you into platform constraints. You know you're going to grow in six months. But just connect your GitHub repo to Render, and you are live. Web services, cron jobs, the whole stack in one platform. It's time to find out why 5 million developers are already using Render. 5 million. Go to render.com slash twist and apply for the Render Startup Program. You'll get anywhere from $500 to $100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and who your backers are.

SPEAKER_198: That's Render.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_197: Who do you need to hire right now? I see you got a bunch of people actively working in the set from Office Space. Is that the film?

SPEAKER_63: What was the film, Lon?

SPEAKER_13: I mean, I think you're thinking of Office Space. That's the one about engineers, and they're in Austin, and the guy gets- The red stapler?

SPEAKER_200: Yeah, that's Office Space. The mic judge.

SPEAKER_202: In your nondescript office with the drop ceiling.

SPEAKER_205: Is that a video you made with Comfy? Or is that the actual office?

SPEAKER_105: That's the actual office.

SPEAKER_207: Where are you guys based? You guys are in San Francisco?

SPEAKER_105: We are right next to the bridge. You can't see it. Ah, the Bay Bridge. Yeah, the Bay Bridge. Ah, great location. Amazing.

SPEAKER_208: If you want to be right in the heart of it all. Yes.

SPEAKER_152: We'll work for Yoland. What are you looking for? What's the top hardest position you need to fill?

SPEAKER_48: I think all across the board, definitely on the most urgent need on our end is scaling up our sales team and also our front-end development team.

SPEAKER_102: So you have a go-to sales motion that you need to get going?

SPEAKER_48: Yes.

SPEAKER_43: We are actually only able to process above 100K inbound requests so far because of the- Let me give you a tip.

SPEAKER_214: You're trying to do this in San Francisco, Bill, the sales, big mistake.

SPEAKER_05: It's just you're up against so many lunatics right now who are going to overpay salespeople

SPEAKER_100: because a lot of these sales executives have families and a lot of them have worked at Google or Uber or Salesforce or Oracle, you know, like major comp places.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And so they tend to, I'm not going to say entitled, but they have high expectations. You know, this is my best piece of advice. Are you a first-time founder or a second-time founder?

SPEAKER_219: You're on. First time to get to this stage for sure.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Got it. Okay. So congratulations, number one. Number two. Thank you. What a lot of savvy founders do is they open a remote office in a place where other people have already done so historically and added salespeople who are grinders. What's an example of that? Somebody like HubSpot, Spotify, Yelp. And I remember the place they love to do it, Lon, was a place where you can golf, you can raise your family. It's got great weather, and there's people who are college educated, but not so educated with graduate degrees that they want to be the CEO of the company and take your job, Yolen. That place is known as Phoenix, Arizona.

SPEAKER_224: Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_65: Or Salt Lake City, Utah.

SPEAKER_100: Or, you know, pick up Austin, Dallas, Houston.

SPEAKER_05: There's tons of salespeople, grinded out salespeople who are awesome, and instead of wanting to get paid $300,000 and 1% of sales, they would prefer to get $75,000 and 8% of sales.

SPEAKER_100: In other words, they'd rather bet on themselves than force you to pay a huge salary because

SPEAKER_214: their home costs $500,000 and it's already paid off.

SPEAKER_228: That's my best advice is to explore that.

SPEAKER_214: Yeah, and the way one of my companies did this, the way they did it, they told the story here on This Week in Startups, and now that we have AI, we can go into the 2,000 episodes and find it.

SPEAKER_100: What they did was, it's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard. They put out ads in four different cities for salespeople. They put a range of positions. They put a range of salaries. Then they set up in the airport Marriott, and they said, hey, we're going to be in town at this day. You know, I'm just picking like aeroport, you know, the easy airport. So they just landed there in the morning. All afternoon into the evening, they did recruiting where they, for the previous couple of weeks, said, hey, we'd love to interview you. Come anytime on this Tuesday and Wednesday. The next day, so let's say they started in Salt Lake City. Next day, they went to Boulder. Next day, they went to two cities in Arizona. Next day, they went to Austin and Dallas.

SPEAKER_102: And then they just collectively looked at the resume flow and who they met, and they

SPEAKER_100: said, you know what, this town, and I think it was an Arizona town, is the most amazing fit because Yelp was paying people a 50K base with a 50K package, which 100K, and this is 15

SPEAKER_05: years ago they did it. It was one of the most brilliant ideas I ever heard. Most CEOs who are not of action would be like, I'm going to hire a consultant. This one was like, F it. Two weeks of time, sent the COO, parachuted in himself, said, we have to get this working. Give me five cities, two days in each, and I want to see the salespeople. I want to get the vibes. I want to understand how hard. And they lost their mind. Don't tell anybody this technique, Jolend.

SPEAKER_236: And don't spend more than 48 hours in Phoenix, not recommended. That's the max. It's a max out of 48 hours.

SPEAKER_100: No, Vegas was one of them too, actually. And my friend Tony Hsieh, rest in peace with Zappos, he did a similar thing where he was looking for where to play Zappos.

SPEAKER_228: And he found all these people who were, as customer support agents, were completely thrilled with a $40,000 salary. This is in 2005. Right. He had that whole plan.

SPEAKER_147: He was going to build a whole tech hub in downtown Vegas, I remember. Yeah.

SPEAKER_100: And rest in peace, Tony Hsieh. But Tony Hsieh was a genius, and this was his big secret.

SPEAKER_05: He wanted people to be happy. And what he realized was people were profoundly sad in a lot of cities that had extremely high

SPEAKER_100: cost of living. When he found downtown Las Vegas, he found an abandoned city next to the greatest home

SPEAKER_05: developments, downtown, leisure, gambling, shows, restaurants, a boom town. And in the middle of boom town was a just dilapidated old town with these gorgeous buildings. And he bought the old city hall and put Zappos into it. Yeah. Genius. It was so close. This was the genius of Tony. He knew how to make people happy. He optimized for the happiness of his staff, not his own. He didn't want to live in Vegas. He was a billionaire. He could live anywhere he wanted. He could place the home and live in Kauai in Hanalei Bay. Instead, he said, where can I make $40,000,000, $50,000,000 customer support people happy

SPEAKER_100: and give them a $10,000,000 bonus and have them be like, whoa, this is significant, Las Vegas. All right, everybody, Yolen, great job. Yeah. Really appreciate it. Really excited.

SPEAKER_214: This is a type of tool, Lon, that makes me want to stay up all night and try it. This is the problem with this moment in time.

SPEAKER_03: That was my exact experience with Comfy UI when I first started using it was, yeah, you suddenly realize, because you could type things directly into Stable Diffusion and see what you'd get, it was not a great experience, especially in 2021, 2022. But as soon as you start using this tool, you start playing around with it. Oh my God, I could start to get better images. I could start to get more fidelity for what I'm looking for. And it is, it was that kind of tool that you would stay up till 4 a.m.

SPEAKER_247: Like playing around with just to see what you could do with it.

SPEAKER_22: Hey, what's the poly market for today? Because you and I, I did a hit on Jesse Waters last night on Fox.

SPEAKER_249: You were helping me prep and getting me up to speed on what's going on with all these elections in my, both of our previous hometown of Los Angeles, shout out.

SPEAKER_252: You want to take a look at that Los Angeles mayor, the election odds on poly market?

SPEAKER_202: I just want to understand what's going on here because they had the results of the runoff primary or whatever they call that. It's the primary.

SPEAKER_32: Yeah. The California governor race, uh, or there's the, there's the mayoral election. We were talking.

SPEAKER_195: This is what I want to know. I want to know if they're going to let Karen Bass burn the city down or Spencer Pratt's going to have a chance to save it.

SPEAKER_03: Well, uh, it's, I mean, things are, things are looking not so great for, uh, for Spencer Pratt right now. I I'll look up the most recent bass Ramon.

SPEAKER_58: This doesn't make sense to me.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I I'm going to go put money on Spencer Pratt just because if he wins, I'm going to have a great sense of joy that an outsider, one who actually cares and who had his home burnt down. I like the narrative.

SPEAKER_256: This is, I mean, Karen Bass who burnt the city down.

SPEAKER_03: What I'm seeing right now, the most updated numbers, the, the, now that's the poly market, the actual numbers right now.

SPEAKER_63: And the poly market says 66% chance of Karen Bass eventually becoming LA mayor

SPEAKER_03: with Nithya Ramon at 31% Spencer Pratt at a measly 4%. Now the actual numbers right now, Bass has the lead 35.1% of, uh, of the vote. Then Pratt 29.4% and Ramon at 23.4%. The thing to remember about California elections is that they are, their laws are designed to get the most number of ballots in possible. So there's all kinds of like, you can mail your ballot. And as long as it's postmarked election day, it counts. So think about like the mail might take an extra four or five days to get that ballot to the counting center. They still have to count it. And there's other rules too. Like if you, uh, if there's a signature mismatch, like when they're looking at the ballot and your signature doesn't match right, they don't just throw that ballot away. They send you a notification and you then have 10 days to resubmit. So all of these rules end up pushing back the deadline. That's why it takes so long to count votes in California and why things seem like they're so back and forth.

SPEAKER_44: So I got to tell you, go ahead, Lon, tell me 4% chance. Spencer Pratt.

SPEAKER_03: I might have to put five dimes on this. I think we were talking about this. Here's like, when you're talking about California, you're talking about, it's so heavily weighted to Democrats. There's so many more Democrats per capita that Republicans have to do exceptionally well. Like they have to go way over the top and be nice. But he's a Democrat. Spencer Pratt? He's a Democrat. I mean, he's been appealing to, I think you want to know what I think the other big problem for Spencer Pratt is, is that a lot of the neighborhoods where he has the most appeal, they don't actually get to vote for LA mayor. Like if Santa Monica and Beverly Hills got to vote, we probably see a lot more support for Spencer Pratt, but they're not part of Los Angeles, the city. Technically they have their own mayor, so they don't get to vote. So I think that would make a big difference too.

SPEAKER_264: Listen, I can tell you about California.

SPEAKER_22: There's like a, it's the opposite of, it's the inverse of Texas. We have like a little drop of blue called Austin or purple. I always like, and then it's like, you just drip orange county as a drop of red. So it turns like orange, but everybody there is a Democrat.

SPEAKER_03: Texas politician, Rick Perry describes Austin as it's the blueberry in Texas's tomato soup. I always liked that.

SPEAKER_268: All right. That's disgusting.

SPEAKER_195: But I would say it's the blueberry in the, somebody dropped a blueberry in the, in the strawberry rhubarb pine. Let's lightning round some news here.

SPEAKER_252: In big news this week, we're going to talk about this Anthropic in a blog post on Thursday.

SPEAKER_03: They said they want to slow down global AI development. An odd thing for Anthropic to say. Yeah. Their heads of internal research and policy wrote that slowing down the pace of global AI development would end up quoting likely be a good thing. They warn that AI models are showing the capacity to self-improve recursive self-improvement as they call it without human intervention. Here's another quote. We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.

SPEAKER_25: Wait, I, you know, listen, I've been traveling, Nick's games, liquidity, Napa, Yonville, French Laundry. I've been living the life of J. Cal for the past week.

SPEAKER_63: I saw your photos from Bouchon. I'm very jealous.

SPEAKER_274: I'll take it. It's incredible.

SPEAKER_05: Anyway, I'm a bit exhausted. I saw this go by my Twitter feed. I didn't understand exactly what was going on here. Wait a second. Why are they doing this now? Didn't we just all go through this, that they withheld mythos?

Chamath Palihapitiya: They, they're doing their thing. They're acting responsible. Now they're calling for a global pause.

SPEAKER_100: And they're- Do you realize that- They're on the verge of an IPO. Bernie Sanders is going to make this into a campaign ad to combine with his desire to

SPEAKER_278: seize 50% of the equity in Anthropic.

SPEAKER_252: The timing is bizarre. It seems crazy. It's also, they're on the verge of like an IPO, right?

SPEAKER_03: Like, part of me feels like if Anthropic genuinely thinks that AI is too dangerous and we need to slow down, it's like, well, you first, buddy. Like, you're leading the, like, shut down Claude then if it's too dangerous. If not, what are you doing? You're the ones behind all of this development. It just seems like- I don't know how you square that circle. I really don't.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. They have the ability to slow down and they did.

SPEAKER_100: And they did it correctly, apparently. You know, we interviewed Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks at Liquidity and he said they were one of the early companies, obviously cyber security space.

Chamath Palihapitiya: They looked at it and were able to, in their using of mythos, they were able to find a lot of internal attack vectors and close them, he said. Right. And I said, is it the real deal? And he said, absolutely. This was a level that was of performance to find bugs that we had not seen before. So they did exactly the right thing. They don't need to call for a global thing. Now, please combine this story, Lon, with the other story I'd asked you to put on the docket.

SPEAKER_197: I don't know if it made it because we had a couple of package shows.

SPEAKER_285: We had a few missed shows. Yeah. Do you remember the Bernie thing that came out?

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

SPEAKER_05: We got to speed up Bernie Sanders because he wants, if you put them on 1.5 speed, that's the speed that some of these entrepreneurs talk at. Hello, everybody. I probably don't need to tell you that artificial intelligence be the most transformational

SPEAKER_289: technology in the history of the world. It will profoundly affect the lives of every man, woman, and child in our country, and in fact, throughout the world. It is already bringing significant changes to our economy, our democracy, our emotional well-being, our environment, and how we educate and raise our kids. There is also a very real fear that as AI becomes smarter than human beings, it could eventually function independent of human control with potentially catastrophic consequences. The question is not whether AI will change the world. It will. The question is who will own and control that future, who will benefit from it, and who will be hurt by it? Will AI be used to make life better for working families? Will it help us eliminate poverty, extend life expectancies, and help us solve the climate crisis? Yes, it will. Or will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have developed AI to become even richer and more powerful than they are? That is the fundamental choice before us. And let us be clear, AI was not created out of thin air. The foundation of AI is our collective human intelligence. Ah, training data. The foundation of AI is our collective human intelligence. Where do they get it from? Our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images, and ideas spanning generations. As Sam Altman himself acknowledged, AI models were trained on our, quote, collective experience, knowledge, and learnings of humanity, end quote. Yes, that's true. The reality is that big tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their AI models without permission, acknowledgement, or compensation. In other words, the creative work of millions and hundreds of millions of people has been stolen by the wealthiest people in the world. The time has come to reclaim what was stolen from us. Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Elson, and other billionaires, or the venture capitalists and Wall Street firms who see AI as the next great wealth extracting machine. Interesting. And that is why, in the coming weeks, I will introduce the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America through a one-time 50% tax, not on profits, but on stock. It would do two extremely critical things. Wow. First, it would give the American people a direct role in determining the future of this technology. Like the Invest America, yes. No longer would the future of AI be dictated by a handful of big tech oligarchs while the rest of the world sits back and watches them do what they want. Secondly, it would guarantee that the trillions potentially created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us, not simply to make the richest people on earth even richer. And I have to tell you, this is not-

SPEAKER_25: So basically, he advocates for 50%. This is one of the great arguments that I think will play with the American public.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Why will this play with the American public? Everybody knows that AI companies stole people's IP to train their models. How do we know that? There are an infinite number of lawsuits and settlements that have occurred and are still

SPEAKER_05: underway. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: And you can see it. Like, if you ask, you know, OpenAI, give me the plot of Wuthering Heights, like, it knows it. It read that book and knows what's in the book and can spit it back out.

SPEAKER_00: Or it read a summary of the book from the open crawl, et cetera.

SPEAKER_100: So the fact is, this has already been done. Now, the New York Times has a big lawsuit. Other people have had lawsuits. Settlements have occurred. So he has the high ground on this one with the American public. The American public understands this. And if you're going to scare the bejesus out of us and say over and over again, we're taking your jobs with AI for him to combine it with not only are they taking your jobs, but they stole all of humanity's knowledge in order to steal your jobs, in order for personal enrichment. I'm not saying I agree with this argument. What I'm saying is the public's going to agree with this argument and it's going to get consensus from the left and the right and some moderates because it's plain as day that they took everybody's content without permission. That's a true statement. Now, is it legally permissible to train your AI on somebody else's content without their permission? The courts are going to adjudicate that issue. They have started to adjudicate it. It looks like some amount of training on people's content is going to be allowed.

SPEAKER_322: Right.

SPEAKER_252: That's where the courts are signaling.

SPEAKER_03: So far, the precedent seems to be you're not allowed to steal copyright material to train AI. So like, you know, Anthropic found like that vast archive of like bootlegged books and then they downloaded it and used it. That's against the law because those were bootlegged and you're supposed to pay for content. But if you legally access copywritten material, you're allowed to train your AI. So if you bought the book, ripped it apart, scanned it, you're allowed to do that expense.

SPEAKER_258: You can.

SPEAKER_03: You're allowed. And it's the output. So far, that's what courts have determined is if an AI output infringes on a copyright, that's actionable. But if you trained it up front on a copyrighted material and then it reconfigures it and comes out with something original, that's allowed. That's what so far. I mean, there are certainly a lot more lawsuits working their way through the courts that could change that. But that's the precedent so far.

SPEAKER_25: This is this appeals to people who feel the rich aren't paying their taxes. It appeals to people who believe intellectual property should be protected. This appeals to people who feel like jobs are going to go away in a large part in order

Chamath Palihapitiya: to enrich other companies.

SPEAKER_25: And it's going to unite America first, America only, you know, the sort of most MAGA of the MAGA.

SPEAKER_329: Right.

SPEAKER_25: But I think it's kind of a separate movement now. I think it's going to appeal to them. And I know it's going to appeal to the left because they are elitists who make content.

SPEAKER_03: There are there's a real split going on in the political right. On the left, basically, everybody is against AI. On the right, it feels like there is this very direct split between like the pro business, the big tech side of things, your J.D. Vance's, your Peter Thiel's, your David Sachs's. They're they're very pro AI. They're pushing this very accelerationist agenda. And then you do you have the Steve Bannon sort of more traditional MAGA side. And they do seem to have a lot of doubts, both sort of ethically, morally and, you know, the same kind of stuff that Bernie's talking about. Like, is this just going to take everybody's job and funnel money exclusively to the wealthy and sort of kill the free market?

SPEAKER_21: I got a prediction.

SPEAKER_333: I'd love to hear it.

SPEAKER_21: I think Anthropic and OpenAI are going to sit down with Bernie Sanders and say,

Chamath Palihapitiya: we're willing to put 10 percent of our equity into Invest America account, Trump accounts, or dedicated to public service in some way, job retraining, et cetera. And that would be a non-trivial amount of money. It's trivial in a 40 trillion dollars of debt for the country, right? If you just seized all of these companies combined, it would equal 25 trillion, right?

SPEAKER_25: If you took every all the top public companies, just literally seized SpaceX, seized Tesla,

SPEAKER_334: seized NVIDIA, seized Google. Like a South American communist. That would be 20. It wouldn't even be 20 trillion.

SPEAKER_199: So you cut that. Yeah. If you nationalize it, you take 20 trillion. And of course, that would crater the stock. So you wouldn't have 20 trillion. But anyway, it's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_25: It's not going to it's it's insane, but it's going to play. It's going to play.

SPEAKER_03: I think it's directionally correct. And I think that's what most people get like. And I think this is an opening salvo, you know, like Bernie's opening at 50 percent of the stock. I think it's a negotiating position. You open at 50. The other side says 10. Well, now we're in a dialogue. But I think directionally, I think most people agree this is something Americans would like to see. And I think it has the extra benefit of Americans are so negative about AI. They're so dubious about AI. There's so much anti-AI sentiment. Well, if everybody started feeling a little bit more of an ownership stake, if we felt like if AI companies do better, I get more money or my local school district gets more money or my city gets more money. I think that's that makes it a lot more compelling for people to have a to have a little exposure to it, a little taste of their own.

SPEAKER_63: And here's the challenge.

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

SPEAKER_25: I mean, in fact, I got paid twenty five hundred dollars for my book, Angel, I believe, by Microsoft, licensed it for four years or something. So that's underway.

SPEAKER_100: OpenAI has a nonprofit that's going to own some percentage of their trillion dollar market cap. I don't know the exact percentage that they own, but they actually have the vehicle to do this. They could just say, OK, Bernie, we have this OpenAI vehicle. We're going to take X percent of our revenue and we're going to put it into job retraining, universal health care, UBI, some version of that. Sam Altman ran a UBI test, a long forgotten UBI test he funded with Y Combinator in Berkeley. So you have Sam Altman believes in UBI and, in fact, did the largest test of it, I believe, outside of, like, say, Alaska giving money to their citizens. So he did the most recent, most strongest test run of it.

SPEAKER_256: Then Elon has tweeted.

SPEAKER_03: Universal high income by checks issued by the federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in the money supply. So there will not be inflation.

SPEAKER_344: OK, so this is Elon Musk's belief.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Elon's belief, OpenAI's belief and Anthropik's belief is there'll be job displacement to some extent. Right. They're all predicting it. Right. So who are you going to believe?

SPEAKER_05: And these tweets and these positions are well known.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Now, Bernie Sanders is going to be able to say, Anthropik believes in job displacement is going to be massive and we should pause it. OpenAI's founder, Sam Altman, ran a UBI test. I asked for that. Please pull it up. OpenAI, NYC, under Sam Altman, ran a UBI test. He believes that we're going to need to get universal income.

SPEAKER_05: Elon believes that jobs are going away and they'll be optional and they'll be a universal one.

SPEAKER_346: So here it is. Sam Altman puts $14 million into studying universal income.

SPEAKER_327: And what's the date of this story? This is from May 7th, 2026.

SPEAKER_03: So just a month ago. Now says it's really useful, but not what we're going to need for this next phase.

SPEAKER_63: He did this study through open research in 2020. Here we go. Scrolled right past it. No, I got the details.

SPEAKER_03: The three-year study gave 1,000 low-income adults $1,000 a month, while a control group of 2,000 people received just $50. Researchers expected to see whether steady cash would reduce motivation to work. Instead, they found something different. Participants actually reported valuing work more. Belief in the importance of work rose slightly. And many agreed with statements like, quote, work is a duty towards society and people who don't work turn lazy. At the same time, people worked fewer hours on average, but they did not stop working. They used the financial cushion to make decisions about their careers, like going back to school, pursuing certifications, switching into jobs that have more long-term potential. One participant said the extra money allowed her to take a temporary pay cut for a role with better growth opportunities. So the research ended up concluding it's not about laziness the reason that people worked a little bit less. It's the flexibility of being able to make larger picture decisions about how and where they wanted to work.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So what Sam Altman's study proved, and it was a small study but not an insignificant one, was if you give people a small amount of money, not enough so they can quit their jobs, but a small amount, $1,000 a month, that might cover half their rent, I'm guessing. That gives them more flexibility, and they might make a career choice that is more long-term as opposed to short-term. They might be working as a waiter or bartender at a great restaurant where they make $300 a night, but they're never going to have a career, but they're going to make this $75,000 a year. Whereas if they joined, say, an associate in training program like we run here, they might get paid $60,000 or $70,000, they might be $10,000 less to start in year one as a researcher, but you're learning and you're in the room where it happens. This is all to say that there is going to be a reckoning, and the reckoning is going to be 2028, because by 2028, that election, I'm predicting now, the 2028 presidential election will be the AI job displacement election.

SPEAKER_05: Let me state it again. 2028, the number one issue in the election in 2028, the number one deciding issue, it's not going to be inflation, it's not going to be wars, it's going to be AI. And is AI a net positive for Americans or is it negative?

SPEAKER_100: And the attack vector for the 2028 election will be these companies became worth trillions of dollars while jobs went down, a small number of elitists in Silicon Valley benefited, venture capitalists, the workers at these companies, of course, the founders and co-founders. And the way that we're going to resolve that issue, I predict, is with the ability to take all of these social programs and have a grand bargain. I believe it's time for a grand bargain. What should the grand bargain be?

SPEAKER_05: I believe the grand bargain should be anybody making under $100,000 a year, $75,000 a year, maybe it's under 50 pays nothing, under 75K pays a $750, 1% token amount to the government, flat rate, no deductions, no nothing, just send your 750 in, you're good.

SPEAKER_100: And then something similar from 100K and under, maybe it's like $2,000, you pay a token 2% of your salary to the government. If that were to happen, that's one concession on the K-shaped recovery, the rich doing better in the top of the K, the poor doing worse, the non-equity holders. Second, we already have one solution, which is Invest America, a.k.a. Trump accounts, that has said, hey, your kids are going to have a stake in this equity. Then another grand bargain emerges. And this grand bargain is the hardest to do, but could be a revolutionary one. If we said, here's what all the social programs cost, food stamps, unemployment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, give me that number, whatever that number is. Anybody making under 50K a year gets a percentage of that pool. Everybody making under 40K a year gets a percentage of that pool, 30K a year gets a percentage of that pool. Is it UBI? Kind of. But what we're saying is get rid of those programs. Stop operating food stamps. Just give people the money.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Just give them the money. These elaborate bureaucratic nightmare systems that we all have had bad experiences with are mostly everybody knows somebody who's been screwed over by one of these agencies. We know how wasteful they are. I mean, in Los Angeles, you hear about all the time the groups that are supposed to be helping the homeless, but it's just graft and they're just losing half the money. I think most people would understand just if you gave everybody a check, you wouldn't really need to worry about those programs. I think we get so caught up in the sort of merit-based idea of it. You know, every time Democrats want to pass a social welfare program, it's like, well, it only goes to people you have to make less than this and you have to apply this way and you have to meet these five criteria. Or just think about when you're paying your taxes in California. Do you qualify for any of these 2,000 extremely complicated exceptions that nobody knows if they actually qualify for? If you forgot all of that and just gave people money, I think that would be an obvious solve for a lot of these issues.

SPEAKER_256: It makes total sense to me.

SPEAKER_25: Snap, SSI, all these means-tested programs is, I think, the fancy way of saying it.

SPEAKER_359: There's housing, there's unemployment, Medicare, Medicaid, everything.

SPEAKER_03: And it's all means-tested and it's all very complicated and convoluted and the people who need help don't necessarily get it. Other people are defrauding the system or taking advantage of it. If we just got rid of those systems or the government just passed AI profits on to the American people, I think that solves a lot of problems. And it simplifies everything, which is obviously better.

SPEAKER_361: Here's my big idea.

SPEAKER_25: You take all these social programs. They're all means-tested. They're all complicated. They all take a ton of paperwork and they take a ton of administrators. Millions of people are figuring out how to give billions of dollars to Americans. There's a much simpler solution. If you didn't make any money this year, if you make no money, you get a percentage of all those social programs.

Chamath Palihapitiya: If you made $20,000 or $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, maybe it's up to that number, $40,000, let's say, maybe $50,000 max. You just get a percentage of that pool. And so we take that pool and we just give it directly to people in a simple UBI check. But if you make more than that amount, you come out of it and it's done on a scale.

SPEAKER_05: Then, in addition to that, you would be able to get rid of the 30% of waste, fraud, abuse, and then probably another 30% in administration. I'm guessing it's less than $0.50 of a dollar that actually gets to people.

SPEAKER_100: Yes, of course.

SPEAKER_03: Those two things. Right. And that's what, oh, anytime you go back and pick apart like a well-intentioned social welfare program years later, that's what you figure out. I was like, oh, we spent 70% of the total budget just on the people counting up who gets what and dealing with the paperwork and operating the office that needs to be open. If you think about, I don't know if you've ever had to go to the Social Security Administration office. I had to get my- No, it's a joke. I had to get my card replaced one time. And it's hours of waiting. There's 18 people working there. It's like, what are we doing? I'm doing the SNL Tucker Carlson. What are we doing?

SPEAKER_22: So anyway, I think this is kind of a very interesting moment in time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: We got Kevin O'Leary agreeing to shrink his data center project. It's kind of similar to what we just talked about.

SPEAKER_146: And then we've got Brian Chesky's new AI lab that he's found. Hit me with Brian Chesky.

SPEAKER_03: All right. So Brian Chesky, of course, Airbnb co-founder and CEO. He's going to remain on as the Airbnb CEO, but he's also founding a new lab that is going to develop AI models. The focus, at least for now, is user interaction and design. He won't serve as this new lab CEO. He's going to stay on at Airbnb and just sort of dip a toe into this. So here's the big argument. He argues that AI for travel specifically is going to need a richer interface. It's going to need better designs. He thinks people don't just want to go to like a chat bot and have a conversation about their trip. They want a more bespoke, designed, customized experience. And so it looks like that may be what some of these models are going to sort of play into. Of course, Chesky, notably, was a design major in college before founding Airbnb.

SPEAKER_370: Yeah.

SPEAKER_25: We had a company early on, even before, I think, ChatGPT 3.5, and it was called Roam Around. It was in batch 28.

SPEAKER_195: And if somebody can find-

SPEAKER_371: I think we looked for that before and it's already gone. We did this in a previous episode, and I don't think Roam Around still exists. Let me finish presenting. Sorry.

SPEAKER_25: If you check YouTube, you'll find it because we have the demo day of it. And I just did a search for it. So we had a company, Roam Around. This was an AI travel planner. It went through our accelerator batch 28. I believe it was before ChatGPT 3.5 came out. So this is when you had, I think, 2.5 and you could use it as an API, but not as the public.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It was an incredible, incredible pitch. Everybody loved it. It was like number one. And the team, I think, wound up giving, if my memory starts with credit, they gave us the money back because they were like, oh, you can just do this in ChatGPT. And I was like, you know, I still want all the great parts of this.

SPEAKER_100: Let's see if we can scrub to the moment when they demoed the product here. And this is a very tactical and practical, important lesson we're going to talk about. When you're a founder, should you persevere or not? Should you persevere or pivot?

SPEAKER_228: Here is the Roam startup. That was in an early accelerator class pitching.

SPEAKER_63: What date was this, Lon? This would have been September 20th, 2023.

SPEAKER_375: Roll the tape. Hey, everyone. My name is Shai. I'm the CEO of Roamaround. Roamaround is an AI concierge in your pocket. So you ever feel like you need a vacation from planning a vacation? Introducing Roamaround. Rather than spending days planning a trip, enter two days in Barcelona. We'll create a complete and actionable itinerary for you. If it's not perfect, you can say something along the lines of, it's our anniversary. And we'll iterate the itinerary to recommend romantic restaurants, beach box, hot air balloons, etc. With all that time saved, you can say add a beach day. You can see day three in Costa Brava has been added. Now that it's perfect, you can request it to be translated to Spanish. And then once it's done, you can share via SMS, WhatsApp, email.

SPEAKER_380: Oh, multiplayer mode. Oh, so much. You're probably asking yourself, aren't you just a Chachi Petit rapper? Well, leveraging our first mover's advantage, we've accumulated millions of-

Chamath Palihapitiya: Lon, this was like me going back and forth with the founder, begging them to keep spending our money, to raise money. And I just said, you know, yes, you're going to be accused of being a rapper, but don't let that get in your head. There's so many things around the model, and there'll be so many twists and turns on this journey that there is a business here in doing this. And now Brian Chesky is like, you know what, there's so much of a business in AI with travel, I need to make a dedicated model.

SPEAKER_05: Roamaround probably would have made their own vertical model based on an open source one. Or they could continue to build features, and a wrapper's not a bad thing. The Corvette or, you know, a Cadillac, a Cadillac is a wrapper around the Corvette engine today. Right, yeah. It's the Corvette's engine in their high-end Corvettes. Right. In the high-end Cadillacs. Does it make it a wrapper or not? Like Jaguars and some other cars have other components in it. It's a wrapper, but it's also a brand. And it also symbolizes something. It has a look and a feel and a texture and a brand value. Yeah, of course people use ChatGPT, but what if there's other features in here like a human in the loop? Right. Beg them, please, please, please don't give us your money.

SPEAKER_100: Please keep going. Because it was such, you know, it's like we're talking about 500K. I'd rather see the founder go for it. But they did what I think is also a mature decision.

SPEAKER_228: If they don't have the want, desire, stamina, belief, and they have a different belief than me as the investor that, hey, it's just not worth it and it's not worth my time and the opportunity cost, I have to say, okay, it's not my choice.

SPEAKER_392: But anyway, this was heartbreaking for me.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's kind of the same thing I would say before. It's the magic for me, I think, is multi-model. Like you use different models and different, you know, tools for the different parts of the trip. And so one service that could pull all of that together would probably be the magic rather than just going to ChatGPT and asking it, what else should I do while I'm here in Rome or whatever?

SPEAKER_31: That being said, if I'm Airbnb and I'm a shareholder, I'm on the board, I'm an institution with a large holding, I'm going to ask Brian, hey, can Airbnb put the first $100 million in and buy 10% of the company in the case you figure this out and have a perpetual license to it for Airbnb to use?

Chamath Palihapitiya: But then the question becomes, for Brian, and this is like, you know, no conflict, no interest, if this actually works and it's great and he put his cycles into it and Airbnb didn't collect it or Expedia wants to use it or Uber wants to use it and One Fine Stay wants to use it or Hilton wants to use it, okay, are they going to let Merit and Hilton use it if they're competitors or not? So just all kinds of conflicts, all kinds of interesting things will emerge, and he's got to get some skin in the game for the Airbnb shareholders, I think, but he's super smart.

SPEAKER_399: He's an incredible designer, a design-first LLM, frontier language model, whatever it's going to wind up being, a verticalized one, I'm here for it, go for it.

SPEAKER_03: I mean, if it's even a language model, I mean, we don't even know if it's an LLM or if it's something else. I mean, there's, at this point, I think we're reaching the point where a lot of people are feeling like the LLM has sort of, we know what it can do and we've sort of worked out most of it and now we're sort of picking around with world models and other kinds of models. So I don't even, you know, I don't know for sure if this is an LLM or something else.

SPEAKER_392: Yeah.

SPEAKER_393: Layla, a travel discovery and booking app purchased Roamaround. There, yes, that's right. Don't, no, RIP Roamaround.

SPEAKER_403: I go mental every time I go down history like this.

SPEAKER_25: This is my gift and curse as an investor and supporter of founders.

SPEAKER_274: I believe in them so much that when they give up or they fall, they collapse shop, you know, which is their decision, as I said, it's my decision.

SPEAKER_405: I always think, oh, God, if we just persevered for six more months or one more year.

SPEAKER_146: Travel is so tough. I feel like that's one of the tough, everybody wants to do a travel app.

SPEAKER_407: But they were at it in 2023. This was three years ago long. We had them in the accelerator.

SPEAKER_05: Can you imagine what the Roamaround would have done in three years? If the founder came back to me tomorrow and said, can I come back to the accelerator? I have another spin on travel.

SPEAKER_100: I like that guy, Shea. He was great. I remember talking to him in the parking lot at Bucs after our closing dinner, closing lunch.

SPEAKER_228: Had J. Cal's onion rings. Might have even predated J. Cal's onion rings being on the menu officially. It might have been an off menu item.

SPEAKER_394: And I'm just talking to him and talking to him in the parking lot. And he's struggling with this, right? This tension.

SPEAKER_356: And I was like, just stay the course. Stay the course.

SPEAKER_228: You know, like if there weren't questions, there wouldn't be an opportunity. So it's a tactical and practical moment here. As a founder, persevering in an important category is, I believe, the correct decision 90% of the time. If it's a big market, if you got a lead, if you got cash in the back, you can do pivots, of course. But I think you should persevere and pivot your way to success as opposed to give up and giving the money back. I always appreciate a founder who's like, hey, this isn't here. We're going to give the money back. Or these are my next two ideas.

SPEAKER_100: Would you vote in favor and be supportive of me pursuing either of those or both? That's this moment in time.

SPEAKER_05: If you raise money, and this is a message to founders and investors. If you've invested in and the founder has raised money for one vision and you believed in them for that vision and they have the maturity to say, that vision I don't believe is achievable, but I want to pursue this one. I believe that is how great startups are built, which is trusting the founder's instinct, letting them collect information, and let them make a hard pivot or a micro pivot or a complete, we're shutting this down and we're going to try this with the money that's been invested. Why? The money's already in the company. By the time you return it, everybody's getting back 10, 20, 30 cents on the dollar. The money's already been pot committed. Let's play the hand. Let's see if the founder can figure it out. Yeah. I love a great pivot. So many great companies are built around them.

SPEAKER_416: So that's just my little tactical practical summary. There you go.

SPEAKER_418: Roam around. RIP. We'll miss you. Should we go off duty? I feel like it's time to go off duty.

SPEAKER_420: Let's go off duty.

SPEAKER_03: All right. So there's a ton. Jacob wanted me to ask you your thoughts on Mandalorian and Grogu. I know you wanted to talk about this HBO series you've been watching. Take your pick. I got a dog that beat me up. You can take your pick where you want me to go.

SPEAKER_25: Mandalorian and Grogu was a great season of excitement and fun without lightsabers,

SPEAKER_31: without getting into the Skywalker saga or the Disgraciad sequels, episode 7, 8, 9.

SPEAKER_370: And just a lot of fun, a lot of great characters, a lot of great Easter eggs for the fans, just great summer fair. You bring your family, you know, a 6, 7, 8, 9, 10-year-old is going to love it.

SPEAKER_25: And, you know, the Gen Xers are going to love it, everybody in between. Incredibly well done. Jon Favreau is a genius. And the guy who took over Filoni. Dave Filoni. Dave Filoni. Yeah. He's also a genius. And I love these characters, and it's a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_370: Sigourney Weaver piloting an X-Wing is just, like, incredible.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Now, some people might think it's like a season of Mandalorian. And they're correct. It was literally the season of Mandalorian. They made it into a movie. I don't mind it. My bigger idea is that I think all these series should come out in movie theaters, in extended versions, or two weeks before they're on.

SPEAKER_228: So if you have a nine-episode Mandalorian series, I think you should be able to watch it two days before it comes out on the streaming service. So if it comes out on Monday on the streaming service, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you should be able to go see it in theaters. And then Monday you can watch it.

SPEAKER_100: This would create a way of having community. That's what I want to see them do. I would imagine if they did that for The Sopranos or a peak television show where you

SPEAKER_228: could go buy a $15 ticket and go see Breaking Bad on Friday, Saturday night, and then it came out Sunday night. Incredible. People would pack the theaters.

SPEAKER_03: They have done some stuff like this. Stranger Things. You could go see the finale of Stranger Things. Netflix played it in cinemas.

SPEAKER_265: Before or concurrent? It was the night.

SPEAKER_03: Like the night that the series finale debuted on Netflix. That night you could also go see it in your local movies.

SPEAKER_430: Yeah, I got a better idea.

SPEAKER_160: Two nights before. Oh, there you go. And the community would go crazy.

SPEAKER_25: So what I think you do is you play the previous episode with like five minutes of bonus material you can only get in theaters. Then you play the new episode, five minutes of bonus material you can only get in. So you're getting 10 unique minutes. So you can show up 60 minutes into this doubleheader and watch the previous episode with a little

Chamath Palihapitiya: more in it or maybe an interstitial between the two episodes. And then you watch the new one. Man, it would bring back theater because, you know, secession, industry, all these ones have great communities and people want to go share their fandom. Severance.

SPEAKER_03: People would have gone to see the Severance finale in theaters for sure.

SPEAKER_436: No, but do it for every episode and add five or 10 minutes.

SPEAKER_03: Well, I like, I like where your head's at because I do, I mean, part of my whole thing has been you save movie theaters by mixing it up. Like it's, it's some first run things. It's some classic things. It's, you could show all kinds of stuff in movie theaters. It doesn't just have to be original first run movies. And I mean, we're already seeing like, if you have YouTubers that start to make movies, those can also become huge hits, back rooms. Okay.

SPEAKER_22: Well, take me off duty with that. My understanding is there's a movie, there's two movies in theaters. That's what blew past Mandalorian and Grove.

SPEAKER_03: Mandalorian and Grove. The first one is Obsession. I actually saw this one the other night. It's by a guy, YouTuber named Curry Barker. He and his friend Cooper Tomlinson, they used to do sketches. They were doing YouTube and TikTok sketches. And then they started doing these horror shorts. They did one called Milk and Serial, like serial killer, S-E-R-I-A-L. Uh, that was, that was, that was pretty well received and they just built up it. And then they made this hundred thousand dollar movie, Obsession, or maybe, maybe a little bit more than that. I'll have to look it up. Uh, that's making, you know, Ted's the number one movie at the box office has become like a, you know, cultural sort of phenomenon now. Uh, I want to see it. It's really good. Now I need to know. It's really, it's really well done. The concept is very simple. Uh, this guy finds in a magic shop, this like device that you can make one wish on. He's in the friend zone with this girl who's in his friend group that he's got a crush on. And so he just offhandedly makes the wish. I wish she was more in love with me than anyone else on the whole planet. And he breaks the thing. Oh no. Then it turns out it's real. Obsession. Really has magic. And she becomes terrifyingly over the top, obsessed with him in a psychotic and frightening way. Love it. And the, the actress Indy Navarrete, who plays the girl who he makes this wish about, it is an incredible performance. I mean, she goes to places that are genuinely very scary. Uh, and then the other one is this movie called Backrooms, which is, this is a, going back a few years now, YouTube, one of those like creepy pasta online things that this guy Kane Parsons made, who's now, I believe the youngest director in history to have a number one film at the box office. He's like 21 or 22. Uh, so he just made a big screen version of this online meme trend. And it's about people who get caught in this sort of liminal space. The back rooms where it's yellowed and it's just sort of endless hallways and it's kind of creepy and unsettling in a way. And, you know, in the movie, I haven't seen the movie, I'm sure there are monsters and things that pop up. But yeah, taking these ideas from the internet, you know, like the idea used to be IP. We always thought about IP, but I think our thinking about it was very narrow.

SPEAKER_146: It was like, well, Transformers is IP and Star Wars is IP and severance is IP. But what I think, especially backroom shows is IP can be a popular YouTube video if enough

SPEAKER_03: people have seen it and feel enthusiastic about it. Like Gen Z will show up to a theater to see something they like, but it doesn't have to be this like very pre-established IP like we think of them where it was a TV show that

SPEAKER_63: was on for years.

SPEAKER_25: We're going back to Easy Rider days of the movies, which is a young generation who has

Chamath Palihapitiya: not been at the helm of movies before gets the helm and starts delivering and their contemporaries say, you know what? I'd like to hear some new stories. This could be the revival of the movie industry. If these YouTubers can make something for a million and have it generate a hundred million

SPEAKER_16: in revenue, which is, is that what Obsession is going to do?

SPEAKER_03: It was $750,000 was the budget. It's so far grossed over $166 million globally at the box office.

SPEAKER_25: So now I want to know what the, what their take is of that. Because you can self-distribute that crazy.

SPEAKER_452: It's Blumhouse. So they're sharing it with Jason Blum.

SPEAKER_25: Yeah. Okay. So he made 50% of every dollar I'm assuming.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And so this is pretty amazing. And Blumhouse has now figured it out. A24 has started to figure it out, which is there's a place for one to $20 million budget movies. I think their largest one may have been 50 or 60 million. Yeah. This is the future and you don't need to get everybody to go see it.

SPEAKER_104: There was a product called Blair Witch Project back in the day that cost 100, 200,000 to make and also did something similar. Incredible. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 166 times the production cost. This feels like a business I want to get into. I would love to start a movie studio. I've talked about that before. I have a syndicate. I have my own money. I would love to independently distribute a film like this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_327: I mean, that would be the interesting thing because the people, what's the one of the crazy clown? Oh, Terrifier. Terrifier. Terrifier. My understanding is Terrifier self-distributes.

SPEAKER_459: Art the Clown.

SPEAKER_03: Art, yeah. The Art the Clown, right. They're a small production company that sort of has been, they started doing like roadshow things and then they grew it out sort of organically.

SPEAKER_393: But they control the means of distribution and own that Terrifier, Art the Clown, which is disgusting.

SPEAKER_462: And I tried to watch the one and it was just way too gross.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah. No, they're brutally, the gore is like the whole thing. They're really brutally, gleefully violent.

SPEAKER_322: I mean, it's like beyond gore. It's like it's unrealistic, but it's just too much.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's really intense. Yeah. So Damien Leone, that's the creator, writer, director of these movies. And yeah, he has his own independent production company, Dark Age Cinema.

SPEAKER_25: But they distribute it and their idea is to go directly to the movie venues and say, hey, we'll come up with a deal that's bespoke for us.

SPEAKER_467: They don't have to go to Blumhouse or Paramount or wherever you would go to.

SPEAKER_03: They partner with Screambox, which is like bloody disgusting, that website that's their streamer.

SPEAKER_256: But that's still, I mean, they're a small independent company compared to like the Blumhouses, which has a universal deal, you know.

SPEAKER_16: There is a great documentary called The Dark Wizard. Have you watched it yet?

SPEAKER_03: I have not. I was going to try to watch it last night because I knew you wanted to talk about it. But then I have this new dog at home.

SPEAKER_16: You can play it in the background, the trailer, while I talk over it. It's about an artistic autism. There's no need to do this without safety gear.

SPEAKER_472: Well, that's the gimmick. Yeah, it's like that makes it exciting because maybe he'll die, you know.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I don't like that as a gimmick because life is precious. Just like I don't like these people, Ocean Ramsey, swimming with the Great White Sharks and the Bull Sharks in Hawaii and like taunting them in my mind, riding them. They're not meant to be ridden, Ocean Ramsey, and you're not meant to chum the water and

SPEAKER_372: jump in with them.

SPEAKER_25: Yeah, I understand. I understand that this is the hook, but I don't like the hook personally. I like to see them use some basic, basic safety.

SPEAKER_03: Pull this one up, too, Jacob. Speaking of commerce sort of coming in and intruding here, I saw this from Pump.Fun. They've got a new Pump.Fun, the meme coin sort of service. Oh, gosh. They've got a new thing called Go, and it's basically you can pay people to do crazy things anywhere around the world with this service. I compared it to like that movie Money Plane or like Squid Game where people are betting on these people doing dangerous things or unwise things or crazy things. Yeah, it's a little bit like Rent a Human, but to put people in purposefully disturbing or difficult or crazy circumstances, do things they wouldn't normally do with the offer of these payouts, it's dystopian. And I feel like this world feels this world that we're creating now, bounties for, you

SPEAKER_256: know, doing things in the real world that you might not want to do, it unsettles me. It really unsettles me.

SPEAKER_22: All right. So Pump.Fun is letting people put bounties on behaviors that are silly and or extreme.

SPEAKER_03: An all-encompassing bounty platform where anyone can create or complete bounties for any task for unlimited rewards. It's the any task part that strikes me as like the funny, the weird middle ground.

SPEAKER_25: Yeah, this is kind of running man, Black Mirror. And is it anonymous? So like, because it's a crypto group of people, you can say, I want to pay you $10,000 to hang off the Golden Gate Bridge and nobody knows you put the bounty there?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I'm assuming like they don't say specifically, but yes, how to create a bounty, connect your X account and wallet, create your bounty, set a description, time frame and deliverables, submit your bounty payment into escrow, Pump.Fun reviews, bounty submissions. So that's it. There's no there's no public face disclosure. It's just if you have an X account in a crypto wallet, you're in.

SPEAKER_16: Listen, we have things like Fiverr or the other places where you can hire people, Upwork, etc.

SPEAKER_486: Rent a human.

SPEAKER_265: And there was a task where your agent can rent a person and have them do something. There have been other platforms that do this.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You have Fiverr. You've got Upwork.

SPEAKER_25: You have rent a human, which we had on the program where you can rent a human to have your agent do different actions for you or check work. Great. What's challenging about this one is I know which way they're going. They want people to do disturbing things in public. Now, if it was streaking, OK, that's illegal.

SPEAKER_100: Or I don't know, you run around in your mankini and you do something like Borat or Borat, like, OK, maybe it's funny, whatever. But it always goes too far. And then there's always somebody who gets hurt in this equation. So the people who make these platforms have to be very thoughtful about it. And it does dovetail with Alex Honnold and Netflix having him climb a building without a rope. I thought this was negligence on Netflix's part because nobody in their right mind wants

SPEAKER_05: to see him die. Yet everybody's tuning in and they're promoting it because he might die.

SPEAKER_356: We don't want people dying. The human spirit, I mean, the human life is so precious.

SPEAKER_05: Don't do these crazy stunts. What they should have done with him is they should have had him do it and had a net that was, say, 10 floors below him that just rose with him. And they say, listen, he's doing it without a thing. But if he falls, he's going to take a 10 story and he's going to get caught by the net. It's still exciting. It's still exciting. And you know what? Then he can fall so he could do more challenging things. Would that be the worst thing in the world to watch him scale one of these crazy, you know, buildings and make it even more extreme? Have three people do it and have it be a race and have them fall. And the net is following them up the building. And then if they fall, they can jump back on the building and they're five stories behind.

SPEAKER_03: I do think part of it is as sick as it is. I think there is that human impulse to like, like people looky, looky, lose on the freeway if there is an accident. Like, I think people are more curious because there's a chance this guy might actually bite it if he falls.

SPEAKER_16: I think Alex Arnold even he's got kids now. So I think that last I heard. So, yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_492: Listen, this has been an amazing episode of This Week in Startups Twist. We'll see you on Monday. Bye bye. Bye everybody.

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