SPEAKER_01: we're we're on our way to commodification is i think what's happening this could very much look like storage or compute in a couple of years um looked you know 20 years into web 2.0 which is people just start stop thinking about it and can't tell the difference it's completely possible that there'll be 20 different models um that all have you know 99 similar results not for super intelligence and trying to cure cancer or fold proteins or solve mysteries of the universe and you know go through every single image on in the world but be able to tell you how to make sushi rice really well or you know where to plan your trip for your family in europe for two weeks you know at this price point so we're going to see that commodification happen i think right now if you were to switch the models from the major companies for 50 60 70 percent maybe 70 of queries i don't think

SPEAKER_04: consumers could tell the difference this week in startups is brought to you by northwest registered

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SPEAKER_11: welcome back to this week in startups i'm jason calacanis with my co-hosts with me today my co-host alex wilhelm

SPEAKER_15: and lon harris hey everybody hey hey hey how you guys doing uh let's go to our first story which uh in the

SPEAKER_01: media space is super interesting i saw south park had taken a couple of weeks off and uh they're back

SPEAKER_19: they took last week off under strange circumstances uh the day of the show there was a tweet from the

SPEAKER_21: south park account apparently signed by matt parker matt stone and trey parker saying apologies we make the show you know right up to the moment that it premieres that's how they always have made it so that that's how they get it so timely uh so they said but this week we just missed our deadline no south park this week we'll see you all next week now that has happened in the past but it's rare and in this charged political climate with the ellison family having very recently taken over paramount and now seeking to take over tick tock warner brothers discovery they've got all these irons in the fire there were people suggesting maybe there was some behind the scenes like did south park get pulled last week we have no confirmation one way or the other i want to stress that's pure speculation but so this week apparently south park is back a brand new episode tonight and it's going to deal in some

SPEAKER_01: way with prediction markets is what they're saying i did notice that online uh the description says that there's a prediction markets they nail it every single time uh and uh man they have been absolutely

SPEAKER_26: brutal to the 47th administration it is nuts how brutal they are i just want to say that i'm kind

SPEAKER_30: of shocked that prediction markets have reached such a level of prominence that they've made it on to south park i mean often we can kind of anticipate what topic they're going to discuss but i i didn't

SPEAKER_28: think that polymarket and kaoshi were big enough yet to jason have this level of cultural import i are you

SPEAKER_26: surprised because i'm kind of blown away um they have huge cultural cachet um they have been known for taking down any sacred cow uh they went after scientology they went after kanye every president biden trump obama clinton's i mean it has been they they are just known for gloves off and i think it's great that comedians can feel free to go for it and it's uh i saw jimmy kimmel's last night and a few gentlemen saw it as well i just want to say he did a bang up job you know and i think he was incredibly sincere he talked about how he felt terrible about charlie kirk being murdered and he talked about being a christian and being affected by the widow of charlie kirk uh talking about giving

SPEAKER_30: forgiveness to charlie's assassin so yeah and uh jason that monologue racked up something like 13 million views in 14 hours that's not the exact latest data but it had a huge resonant impact on the internet so

SPEAKER_38: i guess people wanted him to come back and the question now is just what does the government do in response and we'll have to see uh but it's good to have him back i'll just say that to keep

SPEAKER_21: things neutral ish here on the show i would note also uh the president uh went on truth social last night and said he's very disappointed that abc has brought kimmel back and he suggested he's going to look for other potential avenues to get him kicked off abc so for the people who are arguing this had nothing to do with trump it was just low ratings this was not political pressure

SPEAKER_41: the president himself is continuing to apply pressure to disney he's outright stating he wants

SPEAKER_30: jimmy kimmel gone well that's not gonna happen i don't think that's gonna be the way this this breaks down i mean brendan car jason is someone that you've had on the show yeah um many times you've had you've had good vibes with them i mean i've gone through the transcripts you guys have riffed a lot on starlink and such um but just because he's been a twist regular did you foresee his actions that we've now run into because a friend of the show has now become a bit different i'd say yeah i mean i

SPEAKER_01: said i'm disappointed i think i may have even used my disgraziad for the behavior here um i'm gonna just call balls and strikes i think when uh the worst of the 47th administration is when they go vindictive and they go like trying to settle scores or going for the censorship both parties have censorship like obsessions they both have big money spending obsessions and they both have war obsessions these

SPEAKER_26: are the three worst things about these two parties that's why we need a third party that's not for war not for censorship uh and for balancing the budget but hey listen we don't have to go too far

SPEAKER_34: past the mandate here we've got a big giant uh docket to get through all right so i'm gonna go

SPEAKER_30: ahead and kick us off jason i want to talk about the latest uh model from alibaba it's called juan and we've all seen a number of i'll just say very high quality deep fakes spring up around the internet

SPEAKER_06: people showing off what they've built with it but i think most interestingly there's been a a explosion to people showing how they've used this model to not just make a deep fake but to essentially take their own video and create something very very i would say surprising and compelling so here is an example that i pulled from reddit um of this in action if you're on the audio version it's a man sitting in

SPEAKER_38: the car and he's made himself into both sydney sweeney and mark zuckerberg and let's roll the clip

SPEAKER_49: so i'm trying one animated i'm trying to replace myself with a different character take a look at this

David Friedberg: so like i can create fake ads with this if i wanted to what are you talking about what that's

SPEAKER_06: crazy it goes on from there now the background here jason is that alibaba which makes both the

SPEAKER_38: quinn models and the juan family of models put out something called uh juan 2.2 animate 14b uh 14 billion parameters is what that means at the end it came out on september 19th and they said it's quote a unified model for character animation and replacement with holistic movement and expression

SPEAKER_54: replication it's an open source model and i believe the cow has left the barn when it comes

SPEAKER_01: on copyright infringement and deepfakes yeah you know in certain jurisdictions that's going to be true you've never been able to have um copyright protection intellectual property protection in places like china or if you did it was with a lot of work and a lot of hand wringing i remember going there and um people would chase you down the street as an american with just buckets of dvds 20 years ago and try to sell you dvds that were i think two rem and b each which at the time and it was eight rem and b to the dollar so it was four dvds for a dollar it's basically 25 cents 50 cents depending on the blu-ray or whatever and they would just hand you 10 of them at a time and i bought some of them just as a lark to see what they were like and and it was software as well like every software program and um yeah it was like bad copies and this is what you see sold on canal street in new york back in the day but we're going to have um our work cut out for us with this because i'd say this is 80 percent 85 percent of the way there and so it's obviously going to get to a hundred percent in the next year or two and you it will be indistinguishable so you will have to

SPEAKER_26: take the approach that if you see somebody saying something crazy and it's not on their official

SPEAKER_61: account it is not them i believe we've already sort of hit this point that was purely theoretical

SPEAKER_21: up to even a few months ago there was that when everybody was saying oh trump has been gone for a week he's disappeared he's sick he's dying then trump came out and made that statement and everybody was looking at that statement there was like he did some weird thing with his thumb or there was like an edit in the video and so everybody was like oh there's a glitch it's ai that's not really donald trump and it was i mean as far as we know it does seem like that actually was so i think we're already at

SPEAKER_62: the point now it was a splice cut i mean if you've never done video editing you can well from what i

SPEAKER_21: can tell what they did was yes exactly but it would not have been even possible with the ai technology we have today to create a 20-minute believable president trump speech that only had one little glitch that was the president but i just think we've already crossed this rubicon that if you see a

SPEAKER_41: famous person on video saying something you should automatically now be like is that really them or is this some elaborate deep fake text to video prompt all right it's a classic dilemma startup founders

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SPEAKER_67: a thousand dollars for a limited time that's vanta.com twist okay two things about this that really matter

SPEAKER_68: one the videos that i showed were someone basically transposing someone else over them to make a

SPEAKER_30: compelling video that's not real time yet so jason i couldn't put myself up as scarlett johansson on zoom

SPEAKER_38: those videos were then were processed and synced up after the fact so it's not real time yet that provides

SPEAKER_01: i think some that's very important i thought this was real time and i was absolutely flabbergasted when i saw it what happened here is he spliced it together after and there was some rendering time yes so these things also are going to cost a pretty penny to do you know when you do grok images which i think is nano banana and grok are the two best right now um they take time they take a little bit of time to make these videos and they typically make five second videos so yep um here's the thing though

SPEAKER_68: because it's open source though jason you know anyone with a couple of gpus in iraq can probably

SPEAKER_06: run this at a reasonable clip in their own in their own house is my understanding of this model 14 billion parameters is not a trillion it's not the biggest thing out there so as it gets faster i mean

SPEAKER_74: that gap's going to get narrowed down six months eight months not far until it's real time one more

SPEAKER_64: observation here the guy who made this video is very smartly not turning his head like this he's

SPEAKER_41: looking straight on that's when this deep fake stuff messes up if i go like this it has trouble matching sydney sweeney straight on to her profile and you'd get some glitchiness there but if i look straight into the camera the whole time even if i move my arms around or i do this it gets to keep consistent and it looks better so this guy does understand the limits of the technology he's using

SPEAKER_78: and is putting its best foot forward i think okay jason though i want to know does this create the need for a new and more robust online verification system so that way people who are in fact famous or

SPEAKER_38: celebrities or just you know well known can have a little modicum of protection around their persona

SPEAKER_01: yeah my friend vinnie lingam had a um uh a startup i forgot the name of it right now where he was using the blockchain uh to certify you know this is the person that you're saying it is um and um yeah this is a perfect thing for crypto and distributed computing if it's not from my twitter handle my linkedin or a url i own in control then it's not me so there's a lot of different ways to do verification and i think this is going to be a huge opportunity for the platforms so if you know i've been tweeting and instagramming from the at jason handles on each platform for decades man you're going to have a um those companies are going to have a leg up in becoming a place where you know that if

SPEAKER_26: i posted it to my official handle that um you know you can trust it so it's going to be actually

SPEAKER_41: big for those companies it's called civic by the way vinnie vinnie lingam's company he's co-founder of cynic a blockchain-based identity verification platform yes i want to make one more point before

SPEAKER_07: we move on which is that there's a pretty big startup angle to this because this is a alibaba

SPEAKER_06: model it's open source great love that the technology is out there but there are startups doing kind of synthetic video generation that are doing quite well uh the one that comes to mind is synthesia they reached 100 million arr this april and so what i'm going to be curious to see and i don't actually know where this is going yet is do these strong open source models from china begin to undercut startups out here in the west that are monetizing technology uh pretty effectively do companies for example jason decide to roll their own video creation products using an open source model in their own uh hardware uh because you know synthesia has to not compete against a potentially free offering though of course it does offer enterprise support and so forth but it's compelling it's gonna be harder i think to not say yes to to free even for the uh the more um conservative

SPEAKER_01: companies yeah so what happens is with free versus paid in you know these kind of major markets we saw it in gmail you see it in web hosting there are ways for you to put up your own wordpress uh server or you could there's a open source slack competitor that you can use and you can pay zero dollars so right now i spend probably low tens of thousands of dollars using slack um between you know two or three different projects maybe okay yeah if you have 20 people and i think it's 20 bucks a month so you know 400 a month yeah five thousand dollars let's say six thousand dollars a year seven thousand dollars a year so i could save seven thousand by using one of these other services popping up my

SPEAKER_26: own server and then you start thinking about that and maintaining it as long as the price isn't so dramatic people are going to go with the stable steady um performant product and the people who are really cheap probably would never pay for the enterprise versions of slack they would look for a free option like discord so for a lot of communities they just use discord for their

SPEAKER_34: community like we're using now and uh i think you can uh yeah we'll promote the discord in a moment um i don't know if you have the url set up yet but we've been experimenting with discord it's free so i'm

SPEAKER_02: thinking about moving all my founder activity off of slack because we don't get the whole history and all those features and people seem to like discord so for large communities slack gets too expensive you'll move to discord but i don't think this will crush uh synesthesia or synthesis synthesis i think will do just fine the people paying for that want a faster better product but it could

SPEAKER_30: create downward pricing pressure yes but it also could create a better product for them so i was trying to figure out does synthesia use its own models or does it use third-party models you know stuff from open ai or anthropic what have you it turns out it does both so i'm hoping my optimistic

SPEAKER_06: take here jason is that companies like synthesia can take what alibaba has released for free bake

SPEAKER_30: it into what they currently do and make something better even faster than they could have on their own and then keep charging for and building great companies because that would be better startups

SPEAKER_38: better outcomes and happier vcs which would be the best possible outcome i think for everyone

SPEAKER_41: in the industry yeah i mean i think i think that's what we're seeing that's what we're seeing with so many of these tools where you know they give you the option of well which model would you want to use to do this and i think that's it kind of goes back to the future that we were talking about so often on the show of like the llms for now they're they're the the big product that everybody knows do you use claude do you use gpt5 but eventually that will become the background layer they're powering the apps that you use that sit on top of those that get to pick and choose whatever llm they prefer to do the function they're trying to complete we're we're on our way to commodification

SPEAKER_01: is i think what's happening this could very much look like storage or compute in a couple of years um looked you know 20 years into web 2.0 which is people just start stop thinking about it and can't tell the difference it's completely possible that there'll be 20 different models um that all have you know 99 similar results not for super intelligence and trying to cure cancer or fold proteins or solve mysteries of the universe and you know go through every single image on in the world but be able to tell you how to make sushi rice really well or you know where to plan your trip for your family in europe for two weeks you know at this price point so we're going to see that commodification happen i think right now if you were to switch the models from the major companies

SPEAKER_02: for 50 60 70 percent maybe 70 percent of queries i don't think consumers could tell the difference i was

SPEAKER_21: actually reading about that you know there's all those like character ai like conversation chat bot systems uh i was reading something about those where even they're discovering that different models are good for different kinds of conversations like uh this model is better if you want therapy this model

SPEAKER_41: is better if you want to be a little sexy flirty this model is better if you're looking to go like go real deep on stem topics or literature and like that's really fascinating that those models aren't being built with that in mind it's just some of them work out to be better for different kinds of chats

SPEAKER_02: so that would be emergent properties yeah i mean we're literally getting to a science fiction moment

SPEAKER_103: where they're starting to have personalities in them we're all familiar with aws amazon web services that's the cloud platform that powers so many of your favorite brands but do you know about aws activate that's their program for startups where they provide up to a hundred thousand dollars in aws credits for all startups whether you're backed by an investor or you're bootstrapping money is time to keep innovating time to delight customers and time for you to keep gaining traction you need runway and aws's activate is going to help you with that runway we hear this story from so many of our founding university companies are finding product market fit the words getting out about their product just a little boost finding some savings here or there to get a little extra time can be the difference between getting traction and bringing in revenue or hey let's call it what it is running out of money okay and shutting down aws knows this that's why they've created the ultimate toolkit for early stage startups looking to boost growth with aws activate you're gonna get up to a hundred thousand dollars in aws credits hands-on support and training plus exclusive discounts with some of our favorite companies and tools so start getting the support you need at every stage of your startup

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SPEAKER_26: let's keep moving i know there's a lot going on in california and uh yeah here we go more censorship

SPEAKER_30: uh possibly yeah all right so there's a bill called sb 771 over in california it's passed their version

SPEAKER_06: of congress and is now up for signature by gavin newsom the governor and what this does jason is create financial risk or a penalty for social media companies that use their algorithms to promote content that runs afoul of certain civil rights rules uh it basically sets on precedent that scotus the supreme court set in the court case moody versus netchoice and that held that social media platforms can create quote expressive products when they create a personalized feed for a user so if you think about section 230 it protects platforms online from the content people post on them that's very reasonable i think we all like that but what this says is if a company has an algorithm that pushes something that does go against certain rules and laws they could be held liable for it uh the penalties are large up to a million dollars for willful violations and jason if i understand it correctly those penalties double if the person who is harmed in this case is a minor now we've talked a lot on the show about protecting kids from social media uh though it does seem from your tone that you think

SPEAKER_01: this is a little bit over the line it feels like this is overreaching i think there's a middle ground that i talked about on previous episodes and on all in just recently and for years on all in as well which is if you give consumers choice with their algorithm and they can byo a bring your own algorithm then you shouldn't have to deal with this if you build a singular algorithm that's a black box like tick tock you should have some liability you should lose your 230 protection so if your tick tock and you were to take a video and your algorithm trended it and that was calling on violence let's say um and all of a sudden you know a blm riot or a january 6th occurs and you can correlate it to that video you know because the people who saw that video then went and charged the capital or burned

SPEAKER_26: down buildings during blm let's just say like a violent blm protest not the peaceful ones um and if you were to send people to a violent right and promote violence so let's say the video itself said let's break all the windows of the capital and in this mall in in the case of these kind of actions

SPEAKER_02: yeah i think if you only have one algorithm you should be responsible because you made an editorial choice to put that algorithm in and giving people a free pass on these algorithms is going to lead to the algorithms creating more and more psychosis this is all science fiction it doesn't mean i believe in silencing freedom of speech i believe the algorithms are too powerful they're they are making editorial choices and when you make editorial choices you need to own them but if you give people a choice of different algorithms and you subscribe to an algorithm store and you disclose what the algorithm's doing that would be enough for me to say you don't need this i would also know oh i was just

SPEAKER_21: gonna say this isn't purely theoretical like there are studies that show like there was this one i was just looking it up in 2021 where there was that study that uh instagram points younger girls towards the kinds of content that gives them body issues and anorexia and like makes them more concerned about their size and so we do have evidence that some of these algorithms are pointing people in perditious ways it's not just purely an academic question at this point we can look at some of these algorithms say youtube does tend to point people towards you know politically controversial or divisive issues or instagram does push girls towards you know diet content and makeup and

SPEAKER_41: beauty content and all of those kinds of things i think also a lot probably part of that is because

SPEAKER_30: they're being pushed towards things they can sell ads against so if you tell people that they're not

SPEAKER_114: attractive enough they're probably going to click on the sephora ad oh of course i'm not saying it's

SPEAKER_41: purely malicious like they're trying to give girls anorexia it's just that's a side effect of they're making the platform as profitable and revenue generating as possible oh i i was trying to make

SPEAKER_30: that in reverse which is saying that the profit motive leads companies to creating algorithms that do harm people uh not that they're creating algorithms on purpose that are bad they're just following the profit motive which is why i think jason's idea kind of helps people uh not fall afoul of

SPEAKER_06: themselves by giving people more choice but jason it lacking the third option that you're describing your byo a model would you support sb771 as it exists or stay where we are today without it yeah i wouldn't

SPEAKER_01: support it as it exists um and i'm just becoming aware of this this week because this is it just started trending on x and other places and people are talking about it so as it stands right now i i would rather see something more refined which is if you have uh algorithmic transparency you know what

SPEAKER_26: the algorithm serving you and you have algorithmic choice or no choice at all you can turn it off then i would like to see them remove the liability and have freedom of speech it's it's really important because now we're going to be asking this question well what should the algorithm do with a really charged instance like russia invading ukraine or you know uh october 7th or gaza like the opinion on gaza is a moving target how is an algorithm going to parse that if there's

SPEAKER_02: so much misinformation disinformation a lack of information we're asking a little too much of youtube and twitter and facebook to be able to adjudicate that understand what these algorithms are trained to do at their core is increase engagement that's it they want you to stay on the website longer that is their north star and the algorithms for advertising want you to spend money and click

SPEAKER_26: on ads that's the dual mandate there so if you understand the mandate of these then you can kind of understand that i don't think you could get the companies to tweak these in a way that it would be

SPEAKER_02: able to make sense of the conflict in gaza i don't think the algorithm can actually make sense of that because humans can't make sense of it and find consensus yeah it's actually a really good point

SPEAKER_30: that you bring that up jason because we were looking through which groups are in favor of sb 771 and which groups are opposed now it's not going to shock anybody that listens to this show that technology lobbying groups are opposed to it because it creates the potential for financial penalties against their client companies you know tech net etc opposed to it not a shock but what's interesting was there was a bit of a split between um different uh advocacy groups about the bill um a great number of jewish community organizations for example are in favor of sb 771 because they view it as a very uh potentially strong tool to combat anti-semitism online and we have seen data from the last couple of years that anti-semitism uh in the digital realm has increased in frequency and quantity and and badness so that's a fair point on the other side jason betcher pointed by not being able to parse uh very complicated issues uh many arab and muslim advocacy groups here in the states are opposed to it because they think that it's going to lead to platforms censoring um perhaps pro-palestinian uh

SPEAKER_06: commentary so it's a bit tricky to decide what to do here though i do think i i fall on your side of

SPEAKER_21: the fence here but lon i want to get you in now yeah i think that's a real that really highlights the warning and the danger of this kind of legislation i believe it's well-intentioned i think that like

SPEAKER_41: democrats at gavin newsom are trying to do something good that's trying to arm groups like you know lgbt

SPEAKER_21: advocacy groups to help them you know combat some of this hate speech online i think that's fine but the the downside is as you've seen well zionist groups are saying you know if we define our position as if you're opposed to it that's anti-semitism as we've seen some zionist groups do uh then they can use this as a cudgel to suppress pro-palestinian speech online and i think that's why you're seeing this divide that zionist organizations are saying oh this is a good thing we can help police more speech online and the pro-palestinian organizations are recognizing they're the ones that are about to be policed and so i feel like that does show the danger is like well if you who who are you entrusting to decide what is misinformation what is hate speech what crosses the line i i think it's too ambiguous for a law to designate hey listen we meet a lot of early stage

SPEAKER_10: founders here at launch my investment company and some they don't have a lot of traction yet they just have an idea maybe they haven't even finished their product they've just got an mvp but they still need investors and accelerators like ours to take them seriously and you know what we can't just wire money to your gmail or your paypal that's not how it works folks we need to know that you're a legit and official business we need to know your company is incorporated that's why you need northwest registered agent it's the service that will help you run your business the right way from day one in 10 clicks and in under 10 minutes you're going to file for your llc or a c corp if you're a startup get a domain name launch your official website claim your business email and even fast track your trademark application which some people forget to do we're talking about more than just company formation this is your entire identity as a business go to northwestregisteredagent.com twist

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SPEAKER_01: sent you i will add there it's a very well said the other issue i think or the opportunity will be if you hold these corporations to an unreasonable standard then people will move to distributed systems powered by crypto and the reason people haven't moved to those systems is because the current systems are working just fine but if you did start to create issues with the current systems i think blue sky and different federated services would become the outlet that people would move to because then you can't be censored right and so if i'm putting stuff onto a blockchain and then you're using

SPEAKER_26: distributed computing to pull your feed and build it together i think that's where this is going to wind up now then you're going to have a dark web effect where people are going to do sinister things on distributed computing like uh publish i don't know thousands of spam accounts in coordination using ai so you know pick your poison folks in a distributed system that nobody has ownership of it's up to the users and the nodes to try to make sense of it and then with centralized you know it's up

SPEAKER_11: to the corporations to do this i think it's unfair and i think it relates to the youtube story we're

SPEAKER_130: about to get to yeah beautiful segue no go ahead all right we don't know if gavin newsom's gonna

SPEAKER_38: sign this bill jason i have a suspicion he won't and then he'll wrap himself in free speech um uh

SPEAKER_54: garments afterwards and then run for president so this is not a done deal everybody we're still

SPEAKER_132: debating this but lon back to you oh i was just gonna say uh this leads beautifully into our next

SPEAKER_21: story uh about youtube and how they had attempted to sort of police speech on their platform uh so in a letter to the house judiciary committee and its chair uh ohio representative jim jordan uh youtube's

SPEAKER_41: parent company alphabet said it's going to reinstate the creators who were banned for spreading misinformation i'm doing air quotes if you're listening uh on spotify uh they're banned for misinformation about covid and the the last two political elections here's a quote from the letter itself youtube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have

SPEAKER_21: extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse the company recognizes these creators are among those shaping today's online consumption landing must watch interviews giving viewers the chance to hear directly from politicians celebrities business leaders and more unquote alphabet also implies that they were directly pressured into action by the biden administration another quote senior biden administration officials including white house officials conducted repeated and sustained outreach to alphabet and press the company regarding certain user generated content related to the covet 19 pandemic and here's the key part that did not violate its policy so they're saying people were posting things that were not against youtube's terms of service but then the biden administration was saying you need to delete that stuff anyway and then they complied so that's we are taking a another step down that road of of looking back on the biden years and saying they there legitimately is an argument that they were suppressing speech on some of these platforms

SPEAKER_01: yeah they obviously were both of these parties i hate to break it to folks who are into these two parties i'm an independent i'm not part of either one uh for a reason and i want a third party uh as soon as

SPEAKER_34: possible please so that's where i'm putting my support going forward after my uh delving into politics over the last couple of years being dragged into it by my friends because fauci himself was figuring out ways

SPEAKER_01: uh uh and the team over there with the foia lady remember all that they were figuring out ways to use hacker speak trying to figure out how to delete emails because they were having the same conversations that the quote unquote conspiracy theorists were having and john stewart pointed out with his famous

SPEAKER_26: bit on the wuhan lab having a covid wuhan lab um you know so i think a lot of this is great because we can kind of learn from it as a society that censoring people is wrong and you can

SPEAKER_01: sense i mean there's obviously illegal speech but what is the government doing trying to if somebody is wrong about medical information and they're posting their crazy theories about what they think you know meditation or you know oils and essential oils or you know their crazy diet like if you have a crazy diet and you're doing all that stuff like okay it's up to consumers to make that decision if i'm going to listen to the crazy yoga lady who says just eat fruit all day long or i'm going to listen

SPEAKER_26: to tim ferris who says to go into ketosis like it's not the role of the government to sort all that

SPEAKER_30: out in my mind yeah the thing that i'm curious about is whom are we going to grant a little bit of power to because i'm a big advocate for section 230 protections for platforms to be able to set their own rules but there are people who are also saying that section 230 protections should be stripped away which will lead either to a ton of censorship online or an absolute mess of of nazi ai slop as we

SPEAKER_38: tend to see i i do also want to say to my to my friends out there on the left uh we're talking about

SPEAKER_30: the biden administration doing what's called jaw boning which is essentially getting people on the

SPEAKER_38: phone and and hollering at them not using a a law to force action but essentially browbeating them

SPEAKER_61: working the refs if you will i mean personally i don't think it to be fair and and even-handed

SPEAKER_21: and look i'm no trump administration fan but that is basically what people were also accusing brendan carr of doing last week he there there was not a law passed that jimmy kimmel had to be pulled

SPEAKER_41: from the airwaves he just went on a podcast and looked into the camera and said we're going to

SPEAKER_79: do this the easy way and the hard way it was it was soft power just like what the biden administration

SPEAKER_38: was sort of doing i would say threats of license revocation is a bit different than job but i'm trying to say lon uh to your point is that we shouldn't give uh people on the left a a pass on this issue this was a bad thing job owning is in fact bad i just want to say that platforms then if

SPEAKER_30: we're going to take the government out of this entirely therefore become the ultimate arbiters of what is allowed and is not allowed and therefore to jason's point consumers have to vote with their

SPEAKER_38: feet or i guess their eyes in this case in their ears um but i i've been in completely uncensored online spaces before in terms of there haven't been no rules and they don't tend to work that well so what we're going to do here is let corporations and platforms set the terms which

SPEAKER_02: they should you know and then you can choose which one you want if you are you know you there's no adult content on youtube right like they draw the line at pornography there are platforms like linkedin and facebook that require real names there are some that require pseudonyms so you can post to it but you have to use the same handle each time you post like x and reddit and we're all familiar with like

SPEAKER_41: the rumbles of the world there are parlors there are all kinds of like alternate x if you want more conservative viewpoints or you want to be sort of less censored in that way it's a common thing

SPEAKER_114: rumble though does have a terms of service that has an explicit list of things you can't do i've

SPEAKER_93: read it right i'm sure that they don't allow adult they don't allow pornography for example but i will

SPEAKER_02: say that you know i i'm with you lon i think um if you're making threats in public or private what we learned from the twitter files what we learned from this is the democrats were doing it privately they were having the fbi go and visit them like the fbi shows up at your doorstep as zuckerberg said like we we felt threatened you know and i would feel threatened if they were like hey we need you to take this stuff down i would take that as the same threat as the fcc chair it's like fbi

SPEAKER_145: officers showing up arguably to me might be scarier than you know um and i don't agree with either of

SPEAKER_148: them obviously yeah no i think we're all we're all in agreement here i just think it's good that we're having the conversation it's almost good that it involves everyone across both sides of the aisle

SPEAKER_38: here in american politics because we can look at it and i think and i'll hold hands and say

SPEAKER_06: let's not do that anymore and that's a very positive place for us to be to make it a non-partisan point because then we can all agree and that brings joy to my little free speech heart i was just gonna

SPEAKER_19: one thing to add i think alphabet is uh they now said they're going to adopt basically the exact same

SPEAKER_41: response we've seen from x they're not going to uh officially fact check every video you know they're

SPEAKER_21: they're done fact checking they're going to do community notes so if you watch a youtube video and you feel like that is full of misinformation now you will be able to tag it and say here's why i think it's wrong and then if enough people say that or vote it up you'll get community noted just

SPEAKER_98: like you do if you're jd vance and you tweet something can i can i throw in i got a little inside

SPEAKER_26: story here too um on community notes i was with elon when he took over twitter and there was a

SPEAKER_01: bunch of stuff that projects that were going to get cut and uh i think community notes was one of the ones that was going to get cut amongst many different side projects or whatever and i said to elon like i think this thing is super promising you should really double click on it because it's it actually works um and um the guy who created it pitched him and i watched the pitch i watched them

SPEAKER_26: talk eulon got it immediately and was like oh this seems like the most fair way to do this you you get to have a debate you get to see multiple ones of these and in practice i would say nine

SPEAKER_01: out of ten times i agree with the community notes and i have an account that i don't know if you

SPEAKER_26: gentlemen have this as well but i get asked to rate community notes all the time yeah i think if

SPEAKER_21: you have the blue check uh you do get because i also get asked to like help us out or approve this

SPEAKER_41: community note or what do you think of this like they do seek my feedback yes what's your general

SPEAKER_26: experience with it in terms of if you looked at a hundred of them how many would you agree with oh

SPEAKER_21: it's uh nine out of ten i think and and it's it's also i think impressive how fast they are like a lot

SPEAKER_41: of the time i'll see a tweet that's only two or three hours old and it's already got a very lively community note debate back and forth and like that's really reassuring because that i think was the

SPEAKER_21: big fear that i had about community notes as like our main attack against misinformation my fear was yeah but they won't get corrected until the next day so the whole first day you've got the lie going out there and then it only gets corrected that's like what happens with newspapers like if the new york times messes up it's on the front page but then the correction is like page 23 section c and so nobody ever sees that but i don't think that actually happens all right let's keep going we got a lot to get through here and um yeah so recall that mit study from last month where it said 95 of ai pilot programs and experience experiments at enterprises weren't producing like real results and we were all debating like oh is ai like not as good as we thought well now there are uh research teams from harvard and stanford believe they may have the answer they found that while many workers are using ai effectively to improve their efficiency make their work better others are lazily using these tools to create what they call low effort passable work that ends up making more work for their colleagues down the road who have to go back adjust it fix it make it better uh so they define work slap as quote ai generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task so a lot of these a lot of this is based on a survey they only sampled 1 150 people which is a lot but not massive so keep that in mind grain of salt uh but 40 percent of the workers they surveyed said they'd interacted with work slop in the last month and among those who said yes they had interacted with work slop they said around 15 percent of the total work they see these days qualifies so i'm curious what you guys think about this this is a real thing i had somebody i have

SPEAKER_26: like three instances of this recently somebody was writing uh show notes for us and it was work slop or like they were doing recaps or tweets using uh we do a thing called partner clips where we post tweets

SPEAKER_21: uh thanking the clips from the show that we also thank our partners and yes the team nobody working here now we're all nobody's doing this but the team was using ai to generate the descriptions for those videos which would sometimes come out crazy or not describing what was in the video and i caught

SPEAKER_01: it and i was like what is this who wrote this and they're like yeah i wrote it now it's like oh and then i had a an analyst who joined the researcher and i had them read out you know because i checked these things and we were like talking about a company i said read it out loud your summary of the company he was reading it it made no sense this is a year and a half ago and i was like wait did you you wrote this and he's like no i used ai and so today wednesdays we have our management uh meeting so i have a dinner i bring dinner in and we do a management meeting every wednesday where the heads

SPEAKER_26: come to me and just tell me what they're working on what their goals are it's you know nice little uh way for us to get out of our day to day and i said i realized everybody was using ai notes then

SPEAKER_01: not reading them and i was like oh you know note taking is very important because when you write things down on a piece of paper you remember them and you process them and then um if you retype

SPEAKER_26: them in or you share them with another person and you crystallize them a second time now you're really integrating them and what i found was people in meetings are just passively like i don't know like not paying attention so for tonight's meeting i said everybody needs to have a pen and paper laptops closed i want you to write notes of when you're hearing your peers go over each of their segments only a 90-minute meeting so just write notes and at the end we're going to do an exercise where just for 10 minutes people type in from their notes the five most important takeaways they have and then share them in the group chat so i'm just trying to get people back to understanding writing and i think what they're going to have to do eventually is force young people because i'm finding young people can't write they can't type uh it's like two things they just don't know how to do this is a serious crisis and they can't do math as well and so what they need to do is yes that's everything okay so kids are coming into the workforce

SPEAKER_02: without the ability to do math i do this i say tell me the percentage they can't do percentages i ask them to to add two numbers together they can't they literally can't do math in their brains and these are college educated people from colleges that you would be like what so what they need to do is they need to sit kids down with a pen and paper and they need to write their essays with a pen and paper yeah i want to see uh these kids raw dog their essays no more using a computer and you know what i'm going to keep going on my rants about these kids being over medicated not that i think this medication doesn't have a place but it's very clear from all the studies here in america adults and kids are over medicated there's too many people who have diseases quote unquote that are benchmarked through like surveys and then i talk to these kids they now have techniques where they know how to get these drugs they know what to say and then they additionally know what to tell their teachers in order to get accommodations and the accommodations are i can take a test with unlimited time with a computer and with the book which is not a test that's the opposite

SPEAKER_61: of a test that's just homework that's just a homework assignment but yeah i think we've lost our ability not to get too down a rabbit hole here but we've lost our ability to distinguish between

SPEAKER_21: a severe case of whatever and then just like somebody who has like one or two symptoms like there are people who have severe adhd severe depression severe autism whatever they need those medications but then there's a lot of casuals i think right sneaking through and getting getting a buzz on that don't maybe really need it bringing us back to to work slop i think this is actually a

SPEAKER_30: very important thing to bring up because if you recall the mit study that lawn name check at the start of the segment it didn't say that only five percent of people are using ai work actually it said that most people are and so i think what we're seeing here is the same impact we saw in the

SPEAKER_38: education world show up in the corporate world if there's a tool that does most of your work for

SPEAKER_06: you quote quote air quotes uh people are going to use it and i think this is going to show off jason who is actually useless at the office and who is not because if all you're doing is taking your work putting it into an ai chat interface and then copying pasting the output i can replace you with a twenty dollar a month chat gpt subscription i don't need you so to me like this you have the

SPEAKER_179: option now to turn in crappier work that looks like work but i think also you're just arguing

SPEAKER_21: yourself out of a job i do think it's a morale thing too that's the last thing i would point out

SPEAKER_41: here like it is a problem in terms of like companies are spending this money on ai tools and then not getting good use out of it it's making more work but it's also making people resent their co-workers and bringing down the community aspect there is a chart i don't know if you guys have this that they they uh included 34 percent of respondents who said they'd received work slop said

SPEAKER_21: they reported it to other teammates and managers today are creating tension within the office and then 32 percent said they were less likely to want to work with the work slop creator in the future you see here when people get work slop in from their colleagues it makes them feel like those people are less creative less capable less reliable less trustworthy less intelligent this is the opposite of what you want to see going on in your team you want people who respect and love working with one another who are excited to collaborate not people who think each other is stupid and are waiting for them to send them ai slop yeah work slop is real um this is just uh people are going to think

SPEAKER_26: think that you're not intelligent and trustworthy that's not a way to build a career um hey uh let's talk a little bit about uh some prediction markets we saw that south park is going to um uh you know have a whole poly market i guess episode but i want to understand what's going on with the tick

SPEAKER_11: tock odds so walk us through this uh alex yeah so as we've talked about on the show there is the

SPEAKER_30: rumblings the the makings of a big tick tock transaction agreement between both china the united states by dance the chinese company and also a lot of american interests both financial and

SPEAKER_38: technologic and so there's an interesting market over on polymarket trying to sort out when the

SPEAKER_06: tick tock sale will be announced now jason what we like here is that it gives us a couple of different options uh three in fact will tick tock sale be announced by september 30th october 31st or

SPEAKER_38: december 31st and as you can see if you're on the audio version uh 40 chance this month 70 chance roughly by the end of october and roughly 80 chance by the end of december so people are really betting this is going to happen but uh not in the next couple of weeks probably in the october time frame and what i love about this market jason is that there's 1.4 million dollars in betting volume so we have a lot of folks raising their hand now the question is who's right jason lay your bet

SPEAKER_26: well you know i always tell folks to look at the details and the rules of this poly market this

SPEAKER_02: market will resolve to yes if bite dance bite dance announces their intention to sell tick tock by september 30th 2025 otherwise this market will resolve to no a public announcement of the intention to sell tick tock will qualify even if a sale has not been finalized this includes any formal declaration made by bite dance or its authorized representatives regarding their plans to sell or transfer ownership of tick tock the primary resolution source for this market will be official information from bite dance however consensus of credible reporting may also be used so it has to be

SPEAKER_26: bite dance saying it and the source has to be bite dance or other people reporting that bite dance said it but they don't have to close the transaction so this is what's critically important when you're looking at these prediction markets including my favorite poly market so when we look at poly market here

SPEAKER_01: it's has tick tock announced the sale not that they've closed it right it's just the announcement that they intend to do it which means it might not happen i feel like 80 80 chance by december 30th is a

SPEAKER_184: lock i feel like that's a lock i think that might be found money i would actually say december 16th

SPEAKER_41: because that's the trump extended the deadline to december 16th so if this deal doesn't go through by december 16th trump either has to once again extend the deadline or tick tock has to cease operations in the u.s so i bet there is a plan and they're planning to resolve it within the first half of

SPEAKER_38: december not i now think that it's a higher chance that it'll be after december 16th because if you've seen one thing in this tick tock saga it's that the law doesn't really matter here we can just keep kicking that can down the road so why not let's extend it to 2028 i mean you know you should buy the

SPEAKER_10: no if you put ten thousand dollars on the no you win 21 250 bucks i would make a difference between

SPEAKER_78: me joking at lawn and also putting a small used car on to polymarket oh no wait i take it back that

SPEAKER_02: yeah that didn't make sense it should be roughly 4x so a thousand dollars gets you 3 800 basically so i i might i i like the odds of the no actually because what if things break down with our uh negotiations polymarket is going to be available in the u.s and i think we uh as since they're partners do we have

SPEAKER_11: like a promo code for them or we just say polymarket i guess we just tell people to go check out their

SPEAKER_21: check out polymarket i don't believe we have a specific polymarket call to action but go go look at polymarket and if you're outside the u.s go uh go buy uh go check out a market go go lay your

SPEAKER_11: lay your bets okay let's go to the tether story uh alex i'm sure you're excited about this one oh

SPEAKER_114: absolutely hype so the news everybody is that tether the company behind the well-known usdt stable coin

SPEAKER_06: which is pegged to the u.s dollar is in talks to raise between 15 and 20 billion dollars now the company which is based in el salvador could be valued at up to 500 billion dollars in this transaction the old half trillion dollar mark which as we all know is roughly what open ai is valued at today so that means they're looking at about a three percent stake for the money here uh jason this

SPEAKER_28: strikes me as a relatively aggressive fundraise for a profitable company and evaluation that makes me a little bit nervous but your first reactions well uh you know they're making five percent or so on

SPEAKER_01: treasuries i guess something in that range four or five percent i guess depending on the time frame that they're holding those uh the company has had a checkered sorted controversial past i think is a fine way to say it they've been banned in certain markets there's reports that they were insolvent

SPEAKER_26: potentially they didn't do audits and so they have a certain period of time to clean all this up

SPEAKER_01: i think they're well within that they're being advised by cantor fitzgerald um and i think lutnik was uh from cantor fitzgerald although he's not anymore so uh i think if you were to look at um the stablecoin alignment all of this has been a big setup for tether to go legit and now

SPEAKER_26: that they're profitable because they have so many tethers out there it's well over a hundred billion dollars i understand um somebody can check producer claude for that but if they're making five percent on that i think they started releasing their actual revenue and it was tens of billions of dollars a year uh so this is extremely popular however rate cuts are coming we just had one as rate cuts happen

SPEAKER_02: they are going to see their business collapse because they will not be able to make the float also in the genius act is that they're not allowed to give uh interest to people who own stable coins so people who own stable coins uh can't get if you own a lot of them you're not going to be able to get interest on it i think what this will create is places like robinhood which i'm a shareholder of or coinbase are going to have their own stable coins but what they'll do is they'll do automatic sweeping so in most sophisticated consumer first products you have legitimate ones the ability to automatically sweep from your uh non-interest-bearing account like checking to your interest-bearing

SPEAKER_26: account most banks uh will not do that for poor people uh and unsophisticated quote-unquote unsophisticated people but banks for rich people do this automatically and i think robinhood does the

SPEAKER_02: sweeping automatically i believe that this business will collapse the interest on these businesses is going to collapse so they are selling at the peak or they should have been doing this six months ago when they actually had a window but i guess because the genius act happened um you know they

SPEAKER_26: did this but coinbest has a product with circle um and they do uh give um some amount of interest

SPEAKER_38: correct alex maybe you could yeah between 4.1 and 4.5 but wait didn't jason just say that the

SPEAKER_06: genius act bans stablecoin issuers from paying interest to stablecoin holders absolutely but circle and coinbase have long had an agreement that circle gives to coinbase the money that it earns off the reserves for usdc tokens it's stablecoin that are held on coinbase's platform and because coinbase doesn't issue them it can essentially remit all that money to the people who hold the stablecoin on its platform so what we have here what a loophole and there's been some controversy between coinbase's legal team and the banking industry about if this is fair but i really think your point about a collapse is very important because why would i want to go buy a tether stablecoin in the us when i could hold a usdc stablecoin also worth one dollar and earn interest against it so coinbase has found a way to make the stablecoin market less profitable for the stablecoin issuers not great for circle long term but i think it really just goes to show that the amount of money that tether is currently making and uh according to their own attestation jason they had 4.9 billion dollars in profit in the second quarter is going to be diminished not just from

SPEAKER_28: the fed but also through competition everyone wants to have a stable i'm still with long stablecoins

SPEAKER_01: because i think they're going to 20x from here i think they're going to replace um things like paypal venmo um checking accounts so if we all go to a concert in the future i think or if we all played poker together we will be settling up with circle or tethers rather than using venmo paypal and those things why we're going to have wallets those wallets will not be tracked there will be you know less um

SPEAKER_26: and there'll be less fees so i don't know what the fees are on the venmos of the world but they're in paypal's but they're incredibly low um and i guess on some of them it's free to even send between family members or incredibly de minimis but this is all going to be massively deflationary um so it's great for consumers and the real losers here are not the stablecoin companies they're going to be ultimately winners it's going to be the credit card companies who are going to lose because don't be surprised if you go buy some furniture and the person says yeah that's a two thousand dollar couch um but i'll give you uh fifty dollars off i'll give it to you for 1950 or i'll throw in these pillows if you stable coin me so those are new cash then jason because you can often get a

SPEAKER_38: discount for using cash as opposed to a credit card this is the new cash these will be considered

SPEAKER_26: like cash because it won't have the typical three or four two three four percent merchant fees merchant fees are going away i would be short the visas and mastercards and long the stablecoin

SPEAKER_21: companies i was going to say uh i have some answers for you both tether's currently holding about 127 billion in u.s treasury uh exposure so that's answer to that one and then for paypal it's about a three percent fee to sell goods or services using paypal and then there's also a fee for currency

SPEAKER_41: conversions those are the only fees for venmo instant transfers are a 1.75 fee that's not nothing not not

SPEAKER_30: nothing one last data point here jason i was really curious about the comparative valuation of tether at 500 billion and circle which is public at about 33 um yeah 33 billion dollars and using their q2

SPEAKER_06: numbers from both companies uh tether's worth about three dollars and 18 cents in equity value at 500 billion uh per tether in circulation where circle is only worth about 44 cents per dollar of its stable coin circulation so we're seeing a rather large valuation gap there and i think that's the margin

SPEAKER_54: we're discussing is a bit rich in the tether sorry in the case of tether well here you go private

SPEAKER_01: company is worth you know essentially six times more or seven times more seven times more than the publicly traded company publicly traded company has a bunch of people voting every couple of microseconds you know uh so now you've got millions of people voting on the valuation of circle and tether's

SPEAKER_26: a private valuation it sounds to me like tether is worth a hundred billion um probably double uh usdc and so if they do go public again i think this will be a bad trade if i would never make the 500 billion i would if you offered me to invest in this at 500 billion i would not do it i would not put a dollar in now if you ask me to invest in circle i haven't made a bet on circle um i actually would if you gave me a hundred dollars to invest i would put a hundred of it into circle and zero into tether at this valuation if the valuations were in line at that 44 cents per dollar of stable coin and if it was equal i would just split it equally i think they both have a chance actually i would probably give tether well i would give circle more i give circle two there's tether one third as a private company because you don't have as much oversight and i would trust the management of circle a hundred times more than i would trust the management of tether given their performance that being said the fact that the tether uh project has been a bit of the wild west you could also as an investor say okay

SPEAKER_34: they're willing to do things to make money that maybe circles not so it's kind of like a zuckerberg

SPEAKER_11: conundrum where like zuckerberg will bend some rules to to make it work anyway a really interesting

SPEAKER_30: story and we are going to keep tracking stable coins episode 2004 was the last time we had uh jeremy allaire from circle on the show if you want to go back and dive into a interview with him i think

SPEAKER_06: i did that one great chat all right moving along jason stripe is going to purchase shares back from its investors according to axios now it has a new valuation a 409 a valuation of 106.7 billion dollars but this is not an employee tender in which they allow employees to share some of their stock or sell some of their stock to other shareholders instead the company itself wants to repurchase equity from its venture backers there's very little precedent for this but i think it as a way for the company to provide a little dpi and also to reduce pressure to go public jason but i can't recall other

SPEAKER_01: examples of this in the past is this de novo i think this uh has happened in the past but not in the circumstance of a incredibly successful company sometimes companies that decide they're going to be a profitable enterprise run it for profits not go for growth where they're trying to grow 50 year over year or 30 year over year you could have the venture capitalists ask to sell their positions back we've had to do that in a couple instances as seed investors sometimes the founder builds a business that makes a couple of million dollars in profits and they're just like you know what i kind of just want this for my life and i respect them and but then they have to say okay you invested when it was a five million dollar company it's making five million in profits which times 20 makes it a hundred million dollars so what are your shares worth and then that's where you

SPEAKER_26: have this weird negotiation because there's not a market for those shares because the founder has said i'm not growing this to take it public etc i think this takes a lot of pressure off them if they are profitable and they have money sitting around doing a share buyback as a company in year 12 13 14 whatever they're at now sure um you know it will then they don't have to have those venture capitalists have uh protective provisions board seats etc and they don't need to go to them with their information or get sign off when they want to do transactions um so this is a super power play if this is a wildly profitable company they should just keep offering their um their shareholders and then get rid of those shares eventually then the founders and the company will own the entire company uber is buying back 20 billion there's going to be nine percent less uber in the world when they announced that a bunch of different um institutional holders bought the shares and that's why it broke a hundred because they're like okay this business isn't going anywhere there's going to be less shares available therefore the shares should be nine percent more valuable and it went from ninety to a hundred and it was like okay it's now ten percent more valuable and then people are like oh this management team understands what they're doing so this makes you uh de facto more interested but these are weird cats like they're unique cats i don't say weird they're unique cats in all the world the collison brothers they have said they might see themselves never taking this company public and

SPEAKER_01: have a 30 40 50 year old company and never go public so if i was an investor i would sell half my shares at 100 billion sure you got to get that dpi in fact sequoia did this where they said hey you have the opportunity as an early investor to sell shares and we're going to be letting the late stage funds buy those shares so this is in private equity you have this ability to swap out one group of investors

SPEAKER_26: for another i think this is going to become more common but not the default case roloff

SPEAKER_61: actually roloff both have talked about this at the all-in summit how sequoia is like they're sort of

SPEAKER_41: holding on to some of the equity even after these companies they've invested in go public and just like it's a very different kind of business for them just kind of like sitting on

SPEAKER_79: these stock profiles long term from these companies that they help to seed and grow so that's interesting

SPEAKER_01: i mean i own shares in i own every share of robin hood i ever bought as a private company

SPEAKER_34: which was probably at pennies i own a large amount of my uber shares and again in pennies

SPEAKER_01: and then new bank doordash and a bunch of other companies that i was invested in as a private investor i still own those shares because if you believe in the management then and they're still

SPEAKER_26: cooking with oil why would you sell the only mistake i made was i distributed those public shares of robin hood to fund one at 12 or something now 120 so but you know my investors understand that so i just had one of my invest two of my investors in that first fund who had put in like 50k i think the fund might be five six seven x if you didn't sell your robin hood shares not counting the calm shares the superhuman shares and other liquidations we've had that

SPEAKER_01: fund will probably wind up being gosh i don't know it could be a 10 to 15 x fund when all said and done over 15 years not 10. and so there is something happening here and it built a lot of

SPEAKER_26: credibility because i had said to the people when i distributed the robin hood i am personally not selling my robin hood shares i believe in the company i believe it's undervalued and i in fact bought more shares at ten dollars when i was doing j trading which we got to get the jtrading.com back going here and i gotta do a partnership with one of these platforms maybe robin hood to just do my j trades and let people follow them because um that j trade let me look it up here hold on i gotta do a little i'll give you guys a little j trading insight here doing a live a live j trade well i bought baidu the other day because they're self-driving unit so i think that that's apollo go right yes and baidu yeah i just bought by that was my most recent trade

SPEAKER_01: but just looking at i bought five thousand shares of hood just out of complete annoyance that i was trading at ten dollars and forty two cents a share i am up eleven hundred percent in those two years

SPEAKER_213: since i bought it um yeah i'm up five hundred eighty four thousand dollars on that purchase uh and i want to raise more than collectively in my meta shares i bought here's my meta i bought a bunch of shares

SPEAKER_34: a bunch 502 shares at 97 it was at 94 over the weekend and then i heard him do the um layoffs that weekend and i put up like market order in so it went up like three bucks

SPEAKER_218: about six hundred seventy seven percent on that trade three hundred thirty two thousand dollars

SPEAKER_132: there were a few years there where you could wait for uh zuckerberg to get himself in trouble or for there to be a public controversy and meta shares would dip like ten percent and if you bought the

SPEAKER_41: dip they would inevitably go back up and then it would crash again for the day and like you could

SPEAKER_132: just keep playing that like riding that wave over and over again and make i was making a few hundred

SPEAKER_221: maybe a thousand bucks every time yeah you buy the bad news and sell on the good people are going

SPEAKER_21: to stop using instagram and facebook though the whatsapp isn't going away so yeah he's he's got a

SPEAKER_84: bad news cycle or two they'll they'll ride it out i think this is my next biggest win when i did j

SPEAKER_26: trading i actually did in 2022 so it's been three years sorry three years up 95 on this one in three

SPEAKER_84: years my average cost of 112 now trading at 220 amazon about 2500 shares market value 550 dimes

SPEAKER_26: up 269 i just did this for fun because i had these in like a qqq or just like a blended or some retirement account and i was like i'm just going to day trade this i think it was in my wealth front account i just started day trading it i think amazon is my big pick i'm going to buy more amazon people are down on amazon my belief is amazon's going to shed um that's producer claude how many employees amazon has and then what percentage of them are drivers and factory workers versus executives

SPEAKER_02: i think they have hundreds of i think they might be close to a million they are one of the largest employers i believe the factory workers and the drivers are going to go down 10 percent a year for like five years in a row it's going to be unbelievable amazon had 1 million

SPEAKER_41: 546 000 employees as of june 30th of this year uh 1.56 million full and part-time workers is a good estimate approximately 65 percent of amazon's workforce about a million employees work in operations and fulfillment roles that's warehouse associates delivery drivers other logistics coordinators that includes both warehouse workers and drivers we don't necessarily break them down individually but claude is saying about two-thirds are involved in the manual moving around of products to get you

SPEAKER_01: the thing that you ordered so if they're growing 20 a year in sales that means they're that team i

SPEAKER_26: wonder what they're growing at we could make a really interesting poly market of how many of those class of workers they'll have but given what i'm watching with optimist figure robotics zooks

SPEAKER_34: robo taxis waymo i saw that neuro and um uh the lucid just had their first pilot or they got the first

SPEAKER_26: mule and they they put the sensors on it so that's moving fast i think you look at all of that activity i can't imagine that they will ever add more drivers or i think this is peak drivers peak factory workers and i actually had somebody from amazon because they heard me go on this rant and i had somebody correct me on twitter and i had a comms person be like we haven't actually lowered it we found new things for those people to do like same day delivery like other stuff so i i will give them credit that they are trying to redeploy folks intelligently to not have those jobs but that will be the one place where we're going to see the most acute job destruction now it's a million of um how many workers we have in the united states 62 labor participation amongst roughly 280 million americans so that means we have 150 million people working so it's not even one percent but it's a significant group of people who are going to be the first to go or amongst the first to go which is people sorting through packages and putting them in boxes uh i just want to add you can't do everything we're

SPEAKER_21: doing with producer claude without a paid plan but if you go to claude.ai twist twist listeners get 50

SPEAKER_41: off their first three months of claude pro so go go check that out very generous okay uh you had something

SPEAKER_226: to add there alex oh i just wanted to i was going to take us over to a founder question that i wanted to get your take on jason love it let's end with the founder question i love it yeah all right so i do spend

SPEAKER_38: a lot of time reading the startups reddit a lot of great folks over there and this question really took me by surprise jason because i didn't have an answer for it so redeemer over on r slash startups wants to know how do you negotiate pilots so they don't stall out after success they're running a pilot with a quote multi-location client and they're worried that after it goes well hopefully that they're going to try to renegotiate or it's going to stall out so if you're an early stage company doing pilots with some of your first customers jason how do you ensure that after the trial period you actually end up with a paying customer at the end yeah so you should keep uh you should have a

SPEAKER_01: discussion of hey what would success of the pilot be for you as a customer and then shut up and listen to them so what notes do we need to hit in order for you to have a successful pilot and put us into production so if you were a figure and you had bmw remember there was this controversy of you know are they an actual customer or not figures should say to them hey we've sent you these five robots we've

SPEAKER_26: got five engineers you know one behind each of them and we're doing this pilot with you what notes do we need to hit for you to turn those five into paid or if it is a paid pilot how do we go from this modest paid pilot to a full-blown pilot so you just have that negotiation in advance but you can couch it in what does success look like for you and then what would the deployment schedule be like so if we're talking about the robots we have five robots here and i know you have 20 different factories which of those factories would you want to go to next and how many robots would you want to put in them and what would the pace be would you want to do all 20 factories at once with 10 robots would you want to do 10 robots in each factory and then separate them month by month would you like us to do four factories at a time with 10 robots each tell us what would work for you and how do you look at we're not going to hold you to it but it's helpful with our planning so you just kind of have that discussion but at the end of the day if you make

SPEAKER_01: a product that they can't live without and you study their usage of it then you are in the catbird seat and then you can say you know that doesn't work for us and then having multiple customers and multiple pilots then gives you the ability to say to one hey we have to focus on this other customer so it's been great working with you but we have limited bandwidth and we need to focus on this customer i know this because we have a lot of people who want us to bring founder university to different cities around the world and i've said to my team we i think we can add one per year so the first one will be in saudi in riad uh the first week of november it's starting and the second city if people aren't serious about it and they don't you know the pricing doesn't work for them

SPEAKER_26: the commitment and the time they have to put it into it doesn't work that's okay it's our job to look at the five to ten people who want to do it with us and say these three are the most likely and then this is the one we're choosing to go with right so you also have to be willing to fire your customers or pick your customers and the way you get the right to pick your customers is by having a really great product that's priced you know appropriately and if people are going to nickel and dime you my lord it's never going to end especially the big companies when somebody's nickel and diamond you at a big company and i've had one of the big companies nickel and dime me who you know typically sponsor stuff and i just told them at one point like i just please stop emailing me to collaborate because somebody new takes this job and becomes the evangelist for this company it's big established company and then they try to do a partnership with us it's the same thing every time you want everything for free and you want us to do your job for you we don't do that it's a hard pass so if you can't compensate us for the work we're doing and pay our team and you're from a company worth you know billions of dollars with or trillions of dollars whatever it is with billions of profit like what do we do why are we even in a collaboration here you

SPEAKER_44: obviously don't respect us and i literally told them stop emailing me yeah exactly jason a follow-up

SPEAKER_06: question about this um pilots as as a thing that startups might get into when do pilots make sense when should they be avoided because i don't want people to end up in a never-ending stream of of

SPEAKER_01: doing kind of trial wear for customers i mean a pilot is a way for you to get a paying customer who's not ready to pay for your nascent product on board if your product was fully baked it wouldn't be a pilot you would just be selling them the product so typically when you sell a pilot into a company it's because your product's either not completed or you know fully completed or it's such an innovative thing that it would disrupt their existing way of doing it and they just want to trial it but that's why i'm only for paid pilots no free pilots when you put a price on it you get rid you you then have a commitment from their side which is critical because if you don't pay for something you don't actually use it how many times have has somebody sent you free software that you never used if somebody sends you a video game if you're into video games and gives you a free copy you're not going to play it but if you paid 99 for it you're like i got to get 10 hours of this at least

SPEAKER_26: to give it a shot right if you bought tickets to you know the new paul thomas anderson movie you're going to go um and you're going to watch it in the theater alex why don't you uh take us out

SPEAKER_01: with a get startup credits ad read let's see you do an ad read here since i have to carry all the ad reads here he goes go ahead alex it's at the bottom get started credits it's uh yeah i'm ready to sign

SPEAKER_228: off yeah credits oh there it is yeah go ahead let me see your uh ad read style here the stylings

SPEAKER_28: of mr alex wilhelm i feel like i'm being set up to fail here but ladies and gentlemen let's do it

SPEAKER_06: all right now we all know that jason invests in an enormous number of companies we profile an even greater set here on twist and that means that we talk to a lot of founders we are absolutely plugged into a huge network of businesses and services and we want to take all that networking all that time and give it to you in the form of startup credits that way your early stage startup can beat the competition and also reap the benefits of hanging out with us here on twist so what do you have to do just go to getstartupcredits.com sign up give us a little basic information about what you're building and then we will custom match you with tools and resources that are tailored just to what you need you can get over a hundred thousand dollars in free startup credits right now just go to getstartupcredits.com and feast your eyes and your wallet upon the work we have done for you

SPEAKER_239: because we love all founders here at twist nailed it i think pretty good um get startupcredits.com i

SPEAKER_01: created this because you you hear all these um promo codes you forget them so it has all the promo codes and direct access to all those partners in one form so you fill out the form once and then you get all these credits including the google credits everybody um and so we're going to keep building this if you want to be part of the get startup credits program you can email partners at launch.co

SPEAKER_26: um and uh yeah we'll get you in or i think this week in startups.com partners i think there's a form there to fill out where you can become a partner of the show and so this becomes like my idea for making the ads more effective and helping founders because founders always want you know the best deal possible so we just tell everybody give us the best deal possible and we'll put it into one thing and then they get your your um contact info so you don't have to give your phone number if you wanted to you could if you want to use like your email or if you've got an email for marketing stuff you know you can use that email but it's just a great way to balance out um not cooking people having them opt in to getting credit so i really i'm going to be focused on this in the next year i'm

SPEAKER_02: trying to get like another 20 things in there so founders just get everything at once they need so if you have a product or service for founders we're now getting i think hundreds of founders filling this out every month and we're just starting to promote it because it's working okay uh it's been a great show thanks a lot thanks alex we'll see you all uh on friday this week in startups.com is our website and we go live on the youtube on x on linkedin on substack so sign up for all that great stuff and we'll see you next time bye bye