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

This is the master plan. Instead of telling everybody, you're gonna lose your jobs, Sam Altman's doing UBI studies, what does the Chinese say? Let us entertain you. You have to entertain people. You have to make them root for the robots before the robots take everyone's jobs and then murder everybody. This is the key. This is a psyops. This has nothing to do with capitalism. These are murder This Week in Startups is brought to you by The Conservation Fund. For 40 years, The Conservation Fund has protected at-risk land and important wildlife habitats while actively supporting local communities. Learn more at conservationfund.org. Quo, formerly OpenPhone, gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free and get 20% off your first 6 months at quo.com/twist.

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Your first app is free. Get started today at odoo.com/twist. All right, everybody. Welcome to TWIST. T-W-I-S-T. That stands for This Week in Startups. It is August 24th. Summer is ending.

Thank God. I'm dying.

I was talking to my friend. I hate to name drop, but I was talking to Elon. Elon. I saw 2 things. I saw 2 things and my brain is now broken. Once in a while he says, hey, Jake, how? Check this out. He showed me the Roadster 2.0.

It's finally— it's been a long time.

Showed me the latest Optimus. I'll talk about it at the end of the program to the extent I can. Anyway, we got to talk about the Beijing—

we do—

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

Well, it's really—

there were 2 events over the weekend in Beijing. Uh, the first was the World Robot Conference, China's annual flagship government-backed robotics showcase held every year since 2015. Uh, that event ran from the 19th through the 23rd. That's forums, exhibitions, showcases, pavilions, uh, the usual sort of conference stuff. And then there was also the World— hang on, let me pull it up. Then there was also the World Humanoid Robot Games, which are also held in Beijing. 51 events, more than 1,000 competitions. It's held in the national speed skating oval that Beijing built for the 2022 Winter Games. So we saw a lot, as you're seeing on the screen now, if you're watching the video, robots that are boxing one another, robots that are playing tennis and table tennis. With humans and with one another, robots that are doing all kinds of sort of Olympic sports and events. We actually set, J-Cal, 2 world records, or what would've been world records if these robots were human during the games. Humanoid robots—

Oh, look at that. This robot just fell over. It's being carried off in a stretcher.

In a stretcher, yes.

Bolting it down. I gotta give the Chinese credit. The Chinese understand what this is about. You have to entertain people. You have to make them root for the robots before the robots take everyone's jobs and then murder everybody. This is the key. If you look in those stands, people are cheering robots playing ping pong, which you refer to as table tennis, uh, which is an accurate description. That's what they call it, I'm told. And then they're running. And then they're doing all kinds of gymnastics. This is the master plan. This is what the Chinese do great. They are awesome at PR. America sucks at AI PR. We are full-on retardés when it comes to— I wouldn't use the R word, but I will say retardé. Sure, it's a French word for idiots. We're effing idiots when it comes to AI PR. And the Chinese are next level when it comes to PR. Instead of telling everybody, you're going to lose your jobs, and, uh, Sam Altman's doing UBI studies. Why would Sam Altman be doing a UBI study? Universal basic income.

Mm-hmm.

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

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

It's our idea.

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

Clankers, the droids.

Precisely. And they're watching drone sports on like an ESPN type, like George Lucas saw droid sports coming. We've sort of taken this turn, this anti-AI turn now. And it feels like Americans just aren't receptive to it anymore. But I was gonna say, we got 2 actual records set during the games. 2 robots from Ex-Humanoid. One finished the 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds, besting Usain Bolt's world record.

Ooh.

And then another one bested the human record in the standing high jump with 2.88 meters. That's higher than any human has ever jumped. The record was set in 1993 by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba. 2.45 meters. So we're at the point—

And these are human-sized, right? So we're not making 12-foot robots to jump higher. These are human 5-foot-9 robots.

Here's the standing high jump.

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

Right.

That's like Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Yeah, that, that—

Look at me. Can I hear the commentary?

This is unbelievable. 2.8843米，也就是两米八还有多，将近三米。Yes. Look at the crowd.

They got thunder clapping sticks. And I I can translate this. You didn't know I was studying. Play it again, and can you put it on half speed? And I will actually live translate, Lon. I'm gonna live translate this. Okay, ready? Go. I gotta really listen here, okay? Because my Chinese will arrive. Okay. Your robot overlord is about to show you how your job is over.

Oh!

Yes, you have no need to go to work anymore. This robot will grab everything off the top shelf at Costco. Costco and bring it to your car for you. And in fact, it will run to your house with your milk and break Usain Bolt's record when it runs to your house with a pint of milk. That's literally what she said, Lon. Yeah.

Why? I know you've been working on your Mandarin. I know you've been working on that.

Getting there.

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

Yeah.

So I'm going to make a prediction here. There were 51 activities and robots won 2. Mm-hmm.

Next year— No, no, no. It's all robot competitors for the most part.

Yes, but they broke humans.

They broke human world records. Correct.

The 2 of 51 broke human records.

Correct.

Next year, I'm going to say 48 of 51 categories will be broken the human record. There'll be like 3 where they don't.

Yeah, I mean—

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

Yeah, and then it sparks.

It bounces off.

Yeah.

Yeah, and adding the exploding battery, bang. That exploding battery was done on purpose. There's another person who said, you know what would be great? Let's make it even more entertaining. When it lands, hit Hit the explosive, boom. This is all choreographed. This is a psyops. This has nothing to do with capitalism. These are murder bots. This is a message to the rest of the world that we can send a million of these to Taiwan and take the fabs. This is literally a message to Donald Trump. We are going to create 1 billion murder bots. They're going to leave the factory lawn. The factory is going to be at the beach. There's going to be a secret tunnel, and they're going to run underwater.

Yeah.

And they will be walking. It's actually probably happening right now. There are probably 10,000 robots in the South China Sea on the floor, on the floor of the ocean, slowly walking to the beaches at Taiwan. And 1 million of them in sync are going to emerge from the ocean and take Taiwan. That's what this is, Lon. I hate to tell it to you. Welcome to Conspiracy Corner.

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

Look at it waving at people.

Yeah, they're— I mean, that is definitely— I think if you watch enough of these clips, you see there is definitely an overt— they're trying to make them feel relatable. They're anthropomorphizing them. They're giving them human qualities. They're making them feel like, oh, this is comfortable. This is familiar. I like— I'm rooting for this robot.

Cheerful.

Right. As opposed to, oh, this is terrifying. This, this is like a— this thing could destroy me. And I will say, I do feel like there's an inherent limit to how interesting robot sports can be because the robots don't have to work at it. Like, if you're a sports fan and you're watching football or basketball, the appeal is like, these guys have to train or these ladies have to train so hard. You know, like we know the effort. We can all appreciate how hard it is to play football, basketball at a professional level. And that these robots, they're just built to do it. Like, they're not— there's no discipline. There's no, there's no grit or drive. It's not a, it's not a good story in that way. I feel like that holds you back.

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Hmm.

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

I mean, what, what's specific? Like, why? What puts Optimus so far ahead of like Unitree or, or Ex-Humanoid or these companies that were showing off at Beijing?

I think You know, in addition to the hardware that I think is 1.5 generations beyond these, I think the brain is like 5 generations behind these. This is not to diss anything happening in China. They're building legit stuff. But I think Optimus is going to be the greatest selling product in the history of humanity. It will sell and provide more value than The iPhone. I would say iPhone is the greatest product made in the history of humanity up until this point in terms of popularity, usage. You know what I'm saying, Elon? Like utility to the large— you know, you could say the smartphone, but if you had to pick of the smartphones, you would say iPhone.

Yeah.

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

Wow! Big.

That's it. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying what I saw.

Yeah.

Well, I'm not saying any details. I'm just saying the fidelity is so much better than these.

I will say this: I don't always see eye to eye with Elon in terms of branding. Like. The Tesla robotaxi CyberCabs you see driving around Austin with that weird cursive, like punk rock font. Like, I don't like—

Okay, not for me.

In terms of branding, not for me. But Optimus as the name for your robot, 10 out of 10. The best possible— 10 out of 10. The best possible name.

No notes.

What could make you feel better about owning a robot than having it be named after pop culture's number one kindest and most respected robot? I feel like he nailed that one. He nailed that one.

All right, yeah, and listen, I got somebody leaked to me. Somebody leaked to me a video, an exclusive of a secret underground version of these Olympics.

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

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

Wow!

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

Wow! So we we have a whistleblower.

Describe what they're seeing here.

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

These robots do not seem to be willing participants.

No, I would say yeah, this is definitely a situation where they're putting a robot in a cannon. This is. Anti-clanker violence. I think we're witnessing here.

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

You know, did you notice this?

Pretty sadistic.

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

Yes, yes.

He might be doing an impersonation.

An oddly.

And there's a fan, and they got the fan going, and there's a bunch of other robots in a cage.

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

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

Yeah.

Oh my God.

This is how Americans feel about, about AI. Robots.

Yes.

Humanoid robots.

They just took that poor robot and shot it through a cannon into blades on fire.

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

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

Yeah.

All right, well, there it is, folks.

There it is, folks.

There it is. The flesh fair. I don't—

From the classic—

We don't condone robot violence. Human-on-robot violence, we do not condone here at This Week in Star Wars.

Terrible. Makes you sad. Just makes you sad.

For those of you wondering, people who work for me, this is a film called AI.

Yes.

Done by somebody named Steven Spielberg.

Right.

Written originally by—

Stanley Kubrick. It was a Stanley Kubrick concept.

Yeah, Kubrick, of course.

Kubrick died.

Was murdered after he released the film, uh, Eyes Wide Shut.

Eyes Wide Shut, yeah.

Because the Illuminati felt it hit too close to home.

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

Yes, they forced Kubrick to do the moon landing. Welcome to Conspiracy Corner. And then he did Eyes Wide Shut. You can go down that rabbit hole. I mean, he got whacked. It literally murdered him.

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

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

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

I have to do it for the for the for the LOLs.

The experience. I mean, also an Austin legend. Like people don't know this. The legend. Like Alex Jones was infamous in Austin for like a decade before he was nationally famous.

So consider.

Okay.

I think.

I mean, that would be very entertaining.

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

Well, before we go on, Jason, I do. I do want to talk about our executive assistants and how helpful they are here at Launch. Oh. You know, we love our sponsors here at Twist. We love being in constant communication. with them to make sure that they're getting the most out of these partnerships, but that we make a lot of content. We're all very busy. So it's great to have your Athena EAs. They're very clutch as sort of the middle layer here. They can watch all the stats and the analytics, the numbers every day.

Yes.

Keep everyone up to date on all the viewership and the metrics that matters most to them. And if a partner does need the attention of someone on the team, they're the first line of defense to find out who they need to talk to and route those questions to them. So we love our, our Athena assistants, Stephen, AJ, tremendous assets to the team.

They do a great job.

They do a great job.

You've heard me say it many times now on the pod. If you're an early-stage startup or small business, every single new potential customer is extremely valuable. You can't afford to have a team that's missing calls. If your communication is inconsistent, your customers will notice. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communication. I use Quo all day long. I love it. And it's just great to have that one number that my team and I can share so that we don't lose any customers. Quo is the number one top-rated business phone system on G2, and it's already trusted by more than 90,000 businesses. They're going to bring all of your calls, texts, and contacts together in a shared collaborative space. That means your entire team is going to use one shared number, so there's zero chance anyone is going to fall through the cracks. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months When you go to quo.com/twist, that's quo.com/twist. This is one of my favorite products in the world. It gets my highest endorsement. Here's how I explain it to people. They say, oh, well, don't you automate everything with GrokBot, which is exceptional? You've been using it. Uh, Claude Code, Perplexity, all these great things. Yes, you can automate some things, and then you could give a human here in America some tasks to do. But there are some tasks that the AI can't get done. Where a human using AI can get done, but a human still needs to be in the loop. One of those things is managing customer success. Customer success, there's, you know, 100 units of work in customer success. I would say the first 50% of that, the first 50 full units, are things that the AI can prep, like how many views did this clip get, and how many people clicked on this, and who was the advertiser, and like, let's give them some reporting. Great to have the AI queue it up, but a human needs to do the last little polish, fit and finish on it, make sure it's tight before it goes to the to the partner because we don't want to send AI slop to people. That's the perfect use of an Athena assistant. Go to Athena Wow W O W. If you go to AthenaWow.com, you're gonna get couple of weeks off. I have an Athena assistant. Chamath has talked about his Athena assistant. I was talking to Freeberg. His chief of staff and his assistant have 2 Athena assistants. They're rocking it. I don't— I can't speak for David Sacks, but I can tell you 3 out of 4 besties are using Athena at this very moment. athenawow.com. Go check it out.

Or you could go to athena.com/jcal. Either way, find out more.

Well, the athenawow.com forwards to it and we get credit for it.

There you go.

I was the first investor in Athena. Sincerely, These Athena assistants are so good, and they all know AI now. They all know AI now. I would say the Athena assistant that I pay $3,000 a month for, $36,000 a year, full in, fully baked, is as good as $80,000 assistants I've had here in the United States.

Wow.

And they don't quit. And if they do move on, Athena says, here's your new assistant, try them for a couple weeks. And if you like them, great. If not, we can swap out another person. The hardest thing about getting like operational people, Lon, is every American looks at an operational job and they look at all those chores and they say, I will do this for a full 6 months, but then I want to be— I, I want to, I want a raise, I want a promotion, I want to do more interesting stuff. And then you're just chasing your tail. I told you my hack for Abby Jane Bakery, right?

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

Oh, this is—you know Rockman Bakery in the East Side? I don't.

I don't know that one.

Okay, there's a bakery called Rockman. Go ahead, pull it up, boys, and show the pastry counter there. I like a little pastry. You know, road.co/twist. I lost a bunch of weight. You've been losing weight, but I love a chocolate croissant. I'll have a bagel once in a while. This is Rockman.

That looks good.

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

Yeah.

I'm all the way out in Hill Country. And this woman who runs Rockman Bakery is like a master at pastries. I've been wanting to try it, but, you know, I like to treat my daughters to some pastries. She sells everything out. Like any great pastry person, they sell everything out. And then you know what happens? These lunatics on TikTok say, this is the greatest pastry I've ever had. And then it sells out even faster. So I went there with my daughters. I get there at like 11:30. There's no pastry left. Wow. Zero. They're like, I can make you a cup of coffee, but there's nothing left. They open at 8:00 AM. See that right there?

8:00 AM at the bottom? Yeah. So where's—

Here's what my Athena assistant does. They're not doing delivery. You're not getting like these elite purveyors on DoorDash or Uber Eats or anything. So my AJ or Steven, my theme assistants— thank you guys— um, they call, they say, hey, uh, it's Jason, I'm Jason Calacanis's assistant, uh, we're doing a pickup, can we get, um, you know, 4 pain au chocolat, a couple bagels, and then 4 random pastries that you think are the best ones that are new this week? Because she rotates new stuff. Sure, of course. Yeah, we'll be there. At 8:30 to pick it up. So we're the first in line. They literally call at 8:01, 8 o'clock they call.

Yeah.

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

Wow.

It's a whole process.

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

Systems over goals. You got a pastry system.

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

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

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

No.

athenawild.com.

There you go.

Great. How are you doing with your weight loss, by the way? You started your weight loss journey.

Yes.

You went to row.co/twist. This is a dual sponsorship.

I went to row.co/twist. It's amazing. It is so easy. It is so fast. That's what I couldn't believe. It's like you're within a few days of going and checking it out for the first time, you've got your prescription. It's in your hand. You're starting the medication. Yeah, so I've already, I'm on 1.5 milligrams, the starter Wegovy pill. I've already dropped about 8, 9 pounds, but it sort of stalled out there. I dropped 8, 9 pounds like right away, and then it's kind of plateaued. And I was getting a little like, oh, well, maybe that's it. Maybe that's the magic of GLP-1s for me. But then my doctor from ro.co got back to me the other day and explained that, no, no, you're just tapering on. So next month I'm gonna be on the 4 milligram pill. If that goes well, then they put you on the 9 milligram pill. And then they're saying 9 and above, that's where the real weight loss kicks in. So for now—

But 8%? Wait, hold on a sec. 8 pounds is like 4% of your body weight.

8 pounds is great. No, I, and then it's only been like 2—

It's eating your face.

It's only been like 2 and a half weeks, so.

How are you tolerating the shot?

Oh, I'm doing the pill. I'm not on the shot. But—

You're doing the pill?

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

Pills out?

The pill's out.

Makes it even easier.

Yeah, the only rule, it's a tiny little pill. The only rule is you take it first thing when you wake up and then you don't eat or drink anything for 30 minutes. That's it. And they act like, they tell you this like it's like a huge, like, listen, we've got the pill. There is a pill. You could take the pill, but you're not gonna be able to eat for 30 minutes. You can't eat or drink for 30 minutes. They tell you this like it's—

How do you survive?

Like it's like you gotta remove a limb. And it's like, no, you just, it's easy. You take the pill, you take your shower, You you do your morning routine. By the time you're done, doctor, you call your Athena assistant.

You get four chocolate croissants.

You get four chocolate croissants. Like yeah, by the time my coffee is brewing, it's it's it's great. So I'm on my way. Let's talk about some other news. Hugging Face. I don't know if you heard about this, Jason. Maybe up for sale. Business Insider reports Hugging Face has been approached for a sale at a valuation of over thirteen billion dollars. It's a mystery buyer. We don't know. Who Hugging Face has been in these talks with, but they are apparently taking it seriously. They are mulling over the sale and have been talking with banks about evaluating these bids. Of course, Hugging Face, the open source platform that allows developers and researchers to share, find, test, deploy AI models and datasets. They were the ones who were famously attacked by Hugging— by OpenAI's bots during that recent cybersecurity kerfuffle. Stripe also recently acquired a sort of similar product, OpenRouter, For $7 billion. Just a little bit of context here. Hugging Face's last raise was in 2023, $4.5 billion post-money valuation. So, I mean, I think the first question on everybody's mind, who do you think this is who is trying to buy Hugging Face?

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Wow.

And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. What are we doing here? Why are we not using like the Claude app and now we're using it in Slack and it's like burning through credits like a lunatic. And now I've got to spend on top of the $2,500 per employee I'm spending. So that's like times 20, it's $50 grand a year. Now they want to get another $50 grand out of me. What these platforms do is they let you route to the cheapest platform, the cheapest, um, that's why it's called OpenRouter. Yeah. And Hugging Face, they let you route to the latest version and then underneath it they might have multiple providers. Anyway, what this means is, um, a lot of developers and increasingly prosumers who are using Hermès, uh, the incredible, but, you know, um, luxury bag company. They, they also went into AI. They did a pivot.

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

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

There was that. Yeah. Anyway, '90s, it was very chic. Those like harnesses. Very chic harnesses. Yeah.

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

Pieter Steinberger.

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

It was almost—

The dialogue.

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

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

A bit, yeah.

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

Master dealmaker.

Too good of a dealmaker to the point at which, you know, you remember he did like an NVIDIA deal and then like 2 weeks later did an AMD deal.

Sure.

Then he's doing this deal. And then Jensen's like, well, We don't have to invest $10 billion into OpenAI. That's at our option. We have an option, right? And you could tell Jensen's a pretty chill dude, public-facing, but he was— my interpretation, Jensen, take it for what it's worth. He's chill, but I think he was a little perturbed that those announcements happened back to back. And I don't know if he put the $10 Whatever it was, $5 or $10 billion. I don't know if he took his option to invest that in OpenAI. Open— the purchase of OpenClaw's founder killed OpenClaw. Let me just say it clearly, folks. I predicted it. OpenClaw is not part of the dialogue anymore.

Not really, no.

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

Right.

So Sam Altman rips the soul out of OpenClaw. And now we're talking about Ermes. Now we're talking about Perplexity Computer. Now we're talking about GrokBot.

Right.

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

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

Stopped innovating.

Yeah, exactly.

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

Oh, interesting.

Have they not been saying that? Right? It became the whole dialogue.

Absolutely.

I said it 2 years ago on All-In.

You did.

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

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

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

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

Okay, so I did that victory fap for a reason. Um, I was right, everybody else in the world was wrong. And you know, listen, sometimes you got to listen to Jay Cowell. And I'm not saying— there's some people saying, some have said Jay Cowell was right about everything.

Many people are saying this.

Many people, many people are saying it. Somebody made a t-shirt, Jay Cowell was right about everything.

I've seen it.

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

Yeah.

People were like, I want my sovereignty with a database. Give me Hadoop, give me MySQL, give me something where I control my destiny. We'll put it all aside for a second. The masterstroke, to your original question, is who would buy Hugging Face? The masterstroke would be a frontier model company buying it. Why would that be a masterstroke? Because then they have 2 ways to win.

Right.

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

Hmm.

Just because it's a threat vector. And if you are Google and you're selling ads and you see YouTube growing like a weed and it would be perfect for ads and video ads are wonderful and make a big business, you want to get rid of that threat vector. So you buy it. You know, Facebook's growing nicely, but Instagram's growing faster. You want to buy it. Facebook Messenger's doing well, but WhatsApp's growing faster. You want to buy it. You always buy the threat. OpenClaw was growing. People loved OpenClaw over OpenAI. What did Sam do? He bought the threat. You always buy the most threatening thing to your business, either to kill it or to get the data and control it. So now if Anthropic owned Hugging Face, They get all that data. They're watching which customers are using which models. Then if they're watching which customers are doing which models, they can insert their model at a lower price and say, yeah, oh, I see you're using Quen. Oh, you're paying, you know, a dollar, you know, a dollar per 10 million tokens. We'll match it. We'll beat it by 20%. Just, you know, hey, it's— the option's there for you. You're a great customer. Boom. They just insert themselves on the menu. That would be the masterstroke. I don't think it's going to happen, but I do think AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure will buy this in a heartbeat for that amount of money. Anybody who has a web service, including Elon Web Services, anybody with a web service will buy this because you— or Caruso Cloud, you know, pick, pick your, your scaler— because you can then send traffic to your cloud, right?

That makes sense.

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

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

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

People talk about different ways, a new utility, a new commodity, whatever you want to call it. Like, people want to use a lot of AI and they want it at a low cost and they want it to be fast and to work well and have their context and be smooth. We got you. And then there's like a single product, which is, I need to ask the AI something. Eventually, maybe it's the AI should proactively offer me things, but You will have this interface which started as a chatbot and now also has coding agents. And I think at some point will feel like a more persistent agent to this AI that is running on whatever you need it to run on. But that's it. I don't think we should go build every product category. I don't think we should like go try to compete with all of our customers. I don't think we should try to like subsume the entire economy. I think we should offer this platform and try to have 100 million new businesses and 8 billion people use it in all kinds of new ways.

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

The AW— the AWS of intelligence.

Exactly.

Is what he's referring to there. That's, that's a good vision for him, especially when, as we saw just recently, Harvey— and I don't know if we talked about this last time.

We did. The Harvey Tennant. Yes.

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

KIMI. KIMI K3.

KIMI K3 to make their own legal AI sovereign. They control it.

Yeah.

It's on their servers. They control it. Nobody has access to the innovations, the updates, the usage, the utilization, the output, the problems, the thumbs up, the thumbs down, any of the signal. They control it. And that's their castle now. They got their castle. And then I use the metaphor of the keeps. Keeps are like the little areas outside around the castle with a little bit of a smaller wall. Those keeps are their customers. So now their customers, whatever law firms Harvey is going into, they can say, hey, I don't know, Wilson Sonsini or, you know, Orrick, whatever the— Sherman Sterling. They can say, hey, Sherman Sterling, we know you have a bunch of documents. They're not our documents, they're your documents. We— and you keep them in your keep. They don't come back up to us, and they certainly don't come up to us to OpenAI or Anthropic, and they certainly don't go up to us and back down to Wilson Sonsini. And then Wilson Sonsini, you got your little keep. And if you have a bunch of secrets and a bunch of great documents, you're working on a bunch of case law, it's not going into our system. It's going to be on-prem, on your site, in your database. You know, it's all yours. That's what the world has realized. That's what I realized a couple of years ago when I made that famous thing. I think open source could run away with it.

Yeah.

Because it's just so obvious. And now Sam is having to play catch-up and say, yes, we're not going to compete with you. Why? ElevenLabs, huge customer of the Frontier models, and Lovable, who I had both of those on the All-In interview show. And Lingora, is that the other company?

Lingora, yeah.

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

We've reached out.

For an hour.

We'll reach out. Yes.

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

I believe so.

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

Yeah, well, and it puts him—

Because he's getting his ass kicked in the markets because he's viewed as a SaaS company.

Yeah.

So he has Slack plus Hugging Face. Maybe then he's in the AI game and he can move from the framing of Salesforce as part of the SaaS-pocalypse, and then it would be part of the AI revolution story.

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

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

Ooh. On top of OpenRouter. Yeah.

Yes. Well, they are different. Why not?

I made the comparison, but they are different. I mean, oh, oh, Hugging Face is more like a repository. It's where everybody is going to sort of communicate. It's almost got a social network aspect to it. Uh, whereas OpenRouter is much more like, I have a workload directly. Utility. Yes. But they would be interesting to compare.

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

If— Yeah, there's like a lot of overlap. They're not that different. There's a lot of overlap. Yeah.

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

And datasets that allow you to deploy directly from the platform. Yeah. Should we keep— do you want to take a look at a few more of these Sam Altman clips?

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

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

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

Yeah. Um, if you look in his eyes right there, I think the message has been received loud and clear. And revenue, there it is. See that? Yeah. Look, that's the I get it look. There was, um, famous venture capitalist, Jerry Colonna. I had him on the program 2 or 3 times.

Sure. Yeah.

Good friend of mine. Um, and, and I knew him in New York in the '90s, and then he became a Buddhist and a coach. So now he like coaches CEOs. You can take Sam off the screen. Uh, and so he said, Jason, the question we must ask ourselves is, what have I done to create— I think it was, what have I done to create the suffering that I'm experiencing? What have I done? How have I contributed to the suffering that I'm experiencing?

Sure.

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

Yeah.

It would have been stronger if he said I. He said, you know what, I have talked a lot about UBI and I did a UBI experiment, and then I said that a lot of these jobs are going to go away, and I should not have said that as my lead-in, right, to why You should use ChatGPT. What I should have said, what I should have said was, you're going to learn any skill anytime using this for free for life. We're always going to have a free tier. And whatever you want to learn, whether you're a 12-year-old with a single parent and you can't afford a tutor, but you want to learn a new skill, You could have the same— you can have a better tutor than the person on the other side of the tracks with the rich parents who have a personal tutor coming over every day for $250, and they're spending $50,000 a year on extra tutors so you can get into an Ivy League school. You know what? OpenAI is going to be that free tutor for you for life, and you're going to be on a level playing field with the rich kids on the other side of the track. And when you go to your doctor and your doctor's only got 7 minutes for you, And you're on the cheapest, worst healthcare plan, we're going to let you put in your labs, we're going to let you ask questions, and you're going to have as much information as your doctor. And when you go to that doctor, you're going to know every single possible medicine, drug, modality to help you, to help you get healthier. And my commitment to you is that we will always have a free unlimited tier for every human on planet Earth. That's the ChatGPT promise. All human beings have access to all intelligence for all time.

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

They don't want it. Nobody wants a— nobody wants a handout.

You don't want to give— these companies don't want to give their stock away for free. The government— they don't want the government giving things away for free. So where is this UBI coming from?

UBI is a path to, um, an idle mind. My grandmother used to say, idle mind, devil's playground. And so if you give people enough money that they don't have to work Their minds are going to look for problems to solve or other things to do that are unhealthy to fill their time. People do not want handouts. Now, what would be a way for us to increase the standard of living and opportunity for all humans? I've been talking about this for a couple of weeks. The minimum wage, federal minimum wage, $7 and change, has not changed for decades. It was $5. It doesn't keep up with inflation and keep up with anything. And every time they do a study of just raising the minimum wage just a little bit, dollar a year here and there— Australia, New Zealand, Seattle, New York— the number of jobs lost, the pass-along inflation to consumers when they buy their hamburger, it winds up being you lose less than 1 or 2% of jobs, you lose less than 1 or 2% of jobs to automation, and the price of a burger goes up 1, 2, or 3%. In other words, it has no impact, but everybody has to agree to raise that wage, or one company that does raise it, like Starbucks, is now at a disadvantage to Dutch Bros or whatever other company doesn't. So my continued plea and instructions, and this will be another Jake Al was right about everything. If you want to have an esprit de corps, if you want to have a spirit that we're all in this together. All the corporations in the world, all the rich people in the world should say, you know, there's only 15 million Americans making under $15 an hour. Let's get them all to $20. We don't have to do it. We don't have to shock the system and go from $7 to $20. We're just going to make a commitment, $1 a year for 10 years, and let's just raise the bottom up a little bit. 100% of the money people spend when they're at that tier line, they spend All that money they make, if they go from $7 to $15 an hour, they're just going to spend it. There's no savings going on with the bottom 15 million workers in America. It's the bottom 10%. We got like 150 million people working in the country. 67%, 62% of the country is employed. Just free your mind for a second as a capitalist. I am a rabid capitalist. I have changed my position based on new information. Please take the time. to follow me on Twitter, x.com/jason, while I argue this with my fellow capitalists who will not even consider for a moment what this would do for the spirit of America.

I, I, yeah, I mean, I, I don't know. I obviously, I agree we should raise the minimum wage. It's like $7.50 an hour right now, the federal, federal minimum wage, which is insane. I mean, I can't imagine trying to survive, let alone support another person on that paltry amount of money. But I, I have to say, I don't necessarily think universal basic income wouldn't work. There, there's a certain chunk of the population that they're, they're lazy, they're not going to want to work, they're just going to take the, the money. And, and, and, and you know what, fine. Rather better that than them being a drain on their parents or a drain on society or doing crime or whatever to make up the gap. But I think most people would be Uh, you know, like they're okay. This is a, this is a bare minimum. This is gonna cover rent. I don't have to sweat it. What can I do with my time now that is gonna be fulfilling for me and productive? I'm gonna create things. I'm gonna make things. I'm gonna start my own business. If you freed people up from having to work whatever job they could find to pay for their rent and food and healthcare, and you just had that as a baseline and then they could go be, I think, I think you'd see amazing things. And I think I think there would be whole new discoveries of industries and, and businesses. And, but I just don't think it would ever happen. I just don't think we— America doesn't have the appetite for it. We don't like giving things away for free.

UBI is a road to nowhere.

Exactly.

Take it out of your mind first. Right. I just— it's, it's about the minimum wage. That's what it's about. And here's the other great thing, Lon, that people don't know, and I didn't know. I've been doing this research. I've been finding every study. I've been tweeting about it. I've let my tweets be open. Everybody tells me I'm a Libtard. I go look at their profile. They created the account in July of 2026, and they've got 14 followers. Okay, great. These are all like spam accounts or whatever. But if you make that $20 an hour and you get to, you know, 2,000 hours a year, $20 an hour— let's say you just work a 9 to 5— now you're getting to $40,000. That level of income now takes you out— there's like a benefit cliff You now no longer are going to be trying to get food stamps or, uh, other stuff from the government. Housing subsidies. There's so many government programs that you wouldn't need to tap. So then you have to ask yourself, wait a second, how did we structure society? We structured society so corporations— and listen, I am the most capitalist person you could imagine. I invest in 100 startups per year and lose 100% of my money on 90 of those 100. I am a capitalist capitalist, but I think it's profoundly unfair for a company like Amazon to be able to pay DSPs, delivery service partners, and push the minimum wage down. And then those same people who are delivering Amazon so Amazon can print money and be this incredible organization— and I'm a very large shareholder in Amazon, and I'm increasing my ownership in Amazon because I think it's the best-run companies in the world. What they're actually doing is they're paying people a substandard wage in some cases in order— and, and then the subsequent impact of that is that the rest of us paying into the tax base are then giving Amazon delivery workers food stamps.

Right.

Because Amazon just won't pay them $25 an hour. Come on, people, just open your eyes to it for a second. Just Steelman the other side. Steelman the other side. It's only 15 million people. It's only 15 million people. And if everybody raises it at the same time, would anybody care if their latte that was $4 added 4%? I'm going high, 4%. Now your $4 latte is $4.16. Would you rather have them sharpening the guillotines and firebombing CEOs' houses and shooting CEOs in the back of the head Gangland style, would you rather pay $4.16 fucking cents for a latte? That's my message.

Yeah, I just— it's— I, I think there's something just deep in our character that we don't like the idea of other people getting more fair treatment or money. We want everybody to be in this cutthroat competition. That's why I just don't believe— I don't believe UBI would ever pass. I just don't believe these—

No, I'm talking about minimum wage. We're in strong agreement on UBI.

I'm only talking Even that, like, we've been fighting over the $7.50 minimum wage for so long. $7.50, that's crazy. That's what I was making in like, you know, 20, 25 years ago. Like, that's— and it was hard to live then.

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

No, because most—

There are a lot of people making $10.

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

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

All right, let's talk about— there's 2 sort of military AI stories in the news that I think we should discuss. The first one, hackers from Iran apparently shut down a UK power plant last week, according to The Telegraph. A small UK power plant was shut down for— oh, this is July, not last week. According to The Telegraph, a small UK power plant was shut down for 4 days in July following a cyberattack linked to Iran. Here's a UK government spokesperson. This story refers to an incident impacting a small-scale energy generator. At no point was there a risk to the wider energy system. The UK has a highly resilient energy system. The FBI has also warned about cyberattackers targeting US water facilities across at least 7 states. These are also believed to be linked to Iran. I mean, at this point, how vulnerable do you think we are, Jason, to a large-scale destructive Cyberattack. Do we have the best models? Does that make you feel safe or what?

We need distributed systems that are redundant. And if you look at anybody of any means, anybody of any means is now— and I'm talking about middle class now, the middle class, especially here in Texas where we had some power problems. They have— I was just listening to a podcast. Middle class person was talking about, I got solar. And batteries, spent, you know, whatever, $10,000, $20,000 on it, uh, after we had this big freeze-out. And I think it was '21 or '22 here in Texas. I wasn't here yet. And they bought the solar and battery, and they said explicitly, I bought this in case that happens again so I can keep my refrigerator and my computers and my internet running, just to sustain ourselves in these kind of situations. Then you look at water here in Texas. People are putting water tanks On their properties. You know, if you got, you know, a half acre, an acre, you can do these things quite easily. They put a water tank, and then you take all the gutters around your house— because we get these crazy storms here— and they just flow. Cost you a couple grand to have it flow into a tank. The tank fills up, now you got extra water. That's on an individual basis. We need to just keep making all systems that are required redundant. In capitalism, we like to build one system because it is more affordable. So, okay, let's make all the medicine in China because that's the cheapest place to make it. Let's make all the, you know, um, you know, PPE, the personal protection stuff, let's make it all in, you know, China. And then we realize what not having a redundant supply system uh, can do when things fail. The American rugged individualism and self-reliance is the solution to a lot of these problems. And we did a little document, you and I, we just remembered it. There's something called porch solar.

Hmm.

And find the IKEA page for me and throw it up. Porch solar, and maybe you can even find the document we wrote for that shorty we never did. There's going to be example after example, example of redundancy added to our lives. And the one from India and other places where, like, you want to talk about the electric grid not being, um, stable or reliable, you know, in emerging cultures, in frontier countries, you can have a lot, a lot of issues, uh, with electricity. So what people do now is they get porch solar. Porch solar. Here's a picture of it. IKEA has gotten in the game. IKEA is a very smart company. These people are, dare I say, a brilliant company. And if you look at the screen right now, plug-in solar panels make the most of every sunny day. Small systems, big impact. With portable solar— I'm reading from this IKEA— with portable solar panels, you can take your first step into solar energy. Turn your balcony, garden, or terrace into a mini power station. Simple, efficient, and sustainable thanks to powerful stream storage and easy plug-and-play installation. At the core of this— and it, it doesn't look ugly, it doesn't look pretty— but you can fold one of these or put it on the side of your home without ever calling an installer. You don't have to rip your roof up. You just literally put this on your, um, porch, or you can put it in your backyard somewhere. Yeah, and they call it SveSolar. SveSolar and IKEA. S-V-E. And you get a little battery pack. And what people are using these for— this is the page I want to see right there. Look at these. Um, and these are in euros, but you know, it ranges from $500 all the way up to— I can't see, it's too small. But you buy these little battery packs like the ones you might put on the back of your phone. But bigger. It's like the size of like a suitcase. You get a couple of these solar panels, the battery is constantly filling up, and, um, you see they have stands there like this, uh, little holders that you might use to like have a TV.

Yeah.

This is an example of what we need to do as humanity is just keep building redundant systems. And then when there's no central place to attack, Yeah, okay, you turned off the main energy, but everybody's phone's running, their refrigerator's running, and then we can take load off of the main system. And that's one of the keys here, is the grid is constantly going to be challenged. Every time somebody installs one of these things, they just take a little bit of drain off of the system, and you're protected in the case of an outage. In California— San Francisco, we have rolling outages all the time. People get a— Genentech is the company, I believe, that makes these external power that uses nat gas or kerosene. Those are, I think, about $10K installed, $20K installed. These solar panels and batteries are $1,000. You install it yourself. Just keep making more of this stuff, folks. Get yourself a water tank, get yourself a protein supply. You get a couple chickens, When I was living in the Bay Area, people in the suburbs were raising chickens. I'm talking about rich people, Juan, were putting chicken coops in, having their own eggs, and if things really hit the fan, you could eat the chickens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We could do— there was one. Let's do one more kill drone story that I want to talk about. So this incident happened in Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine last month. A small Russian drone resembling a model airplane. It was trying to navigate to blow up a gas station. Instead, Jason, it crashed into a wall, it exploded, it sent out shrapnel, it killed 3 people, uh, including a 19-year-old university student. Uh, and now—

Oh no.

Drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders, and a forensic team have examined the wreckage, and they believe this was a fully autonomous drone. They think that Russia gave it an overall target, hit somewhere near this gas station, and then the drone piloted itself there, chose a target, which was the propane tanks at the back of the gas station. It missed, but that's what they believe it was sort of aiming itself for.

Yes.

Here's a quote from Ukrainian Air Defense Minister Colonel Serhiy Minaev. In a few years, we believe we will be living in a Terminator movie. It's no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike. So I think the question on my mind is, is this inevitable now? This is the future of warfare. We're under attack by autonomous kill drones. And do you think Anthropic, now that we're looking back with the benefit of hindsight, did they have a point? Was this something maybe we should have avoided instead of now ushering in the era of autonomous kill drones?

There's plenty of laws about adding weapons to robots that some people are following, et cetera. The really interesting thing is that Ukraine, which has severe, um, technical talent in it. Before this whole Ukraine-Russia conflict, many startups I know had dev shops or offices in Ukraine. And in fact, they then had to try to figure out— I think it was Riverside or one of those streaming platforms, in fact, had majority of the— was it the Stream Deck or Riverside? Somebody can look it up— had the majority of their developers, I believe, in Ukraine. And then they had to get some of them out of Ukraine to keep their service up and running, basically. Um, Ukraine has now got the most robust, um, drone capabilities of, of any country, I believe. You know, maybe with the possible notable exceptions of U.S. and China. And they are now exporters of drones. And may not know this, But now people are investing now in drone companies. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, is now in the drone business. American entrepreneurs, billionaires are now investing in companies in the Ukraine to build drones and anti-drone technology. This is a booming industry, no pun intended. Yeah, yeah, it's I guess it's Restream.

Restream is based in Kiev.

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

Yeah.

Over buildings and putting netting over streets.

Yeah.

And the drones are flying into netting and exploding. I saw that.

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

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

They're firing nets at drones. Yeah.

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

Sure.

Very tiny drones coordinated.

Right.

The, the, the other really great way to do anti-drone technology is You use AI to watch for drones, and then you send out these little tiny drones to just kamikaze them. Just zip and run into them.

Yeah.

So drones running into drones is the other great countermeasure. And, um, yeah, it's the next war, you know, like if this Taiwan thing happens, God forbid, I have a feeling like it's going to be a bunch of humans in container ships running AI drones and robots against each other. It's going to be very strange for us to comprehend, in the same way, uh, when you and I were growing up and we watched Desert Storm and Desert Storm II and all these things. We're like, wait a second, we're fighting the war from, you know, Boise, Idaho?

Yeah. With container ships, with pilots doing the original drones, you know, Yeah, the Predator drones and all that, like, '90s and aughts technology. Yeah, exactly.

Here we are, folks. Okay.

All right, let's go off duty.

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

So there was a viral tweet the other day, Jake, if you could pull it up, that I responded to. That guy was saying, it's unthinkable how Star Wars seemed to be this massive, unshakable franchise, and then Disney came along. And this is a sentiment I've seen a lot. To me, I feel like this is not— this is— all of Star Wars history is an up and down. It, it, it's in, it's hot, everybody loves the most recent thing that came out, and then it's out, the fans hate the most recent thing that came out, it's never been worse. And, and we're always on— if you take the long view, I think Star Wars fandom is always like that. You know, people loved Empire, then they hated Return of the Jedi. People hated Phantom Menace, But then they loved Revenge of the Sith. You know, people hated a lot of the Disney+ shows, but then they loved Andor. You know, like, we're always on this ride. So I feel like it's a narrow view to be like Star Wars is at its lowest point ever right now. But I got— I got— I'll tell you, Jason, I got a lot of pushback. I got a lot of angry responses from people who do feel like we are in the nadir. Some of the evidence points— Mandalorian and Grogu, that new one that came out this summer. Only grossed $345 million worldwide in theaters. Even Disney concedes it came in below expectations. It was a budget of $145 to $165 million before marketing, and it was the first theatrical Star Wars release since Rise of Skywalker all the way back in 2019. Also, a lot fewer shows coming out now on Disney+ than we had. Ahsoka, which I know you're a fan of, now the only active ongoing live-action Disney+ Star Wars franchise.

Yes.

It's back in January for season 2. But we had stuff like Skeleton Crew, The Acolyte, which failed to make an impression, and Andor is over. There's a new Star Wars movie coming out next year with Ryan Gosling, Starfighter, from Shawn Levy. That's May 2027. But what I'm curious as to what you think, are we at a historical low point for the Star Wars franchise, or is this just, you know, Mandalorian and Grogu didn't hit, maybe this Gosling one did? It's just sort of an up and down thing.

The sequels were a disaster.

Hmm.

Just straight up. They should have just gone with George Lucas's vision. Instead, they had no plan. They had no plan.

They did not have a good plan, no.

And they made 3 incredibly sloppy, disjointed, you know, trio of films that if you're going to make a series of films, there should be some cohesiveness to it. Uh, there was like a sprinkling of wokeness to it, but the main problem was they didn't use the characters that we all wanted to see. We wanted to see what happened to Han, Luke, and Leia, and they wouldn't give us just the finishing of that story, the Jedi Temple and the Jedi School being recreated by Luke Skywalker. They decided to go off on this crazy tangent with this new character that may or may not be a Skywalker. Who knows who they are. They screwed the whole thing up. They need to take those 3, retcon them out, just burn them to the ground, and then give people what they wanted, which they're kind of doing with Ahsoka. And they wanted to see Luke Skywalker rebuild the Jedi Temple. When they did The Mandalorian— spoiler alert— and Luke Skywalker comes back as peak Jedi, and he's getting Grogu to become one of his first students, That's what people wanted. They wanted to finish that story. They totally screwed it up, but there is redemption for them. The Clone Wars, which I've watched with my children, is exceptional. And there's so much story there that somebody made their own film. It's called The Ultimate Edition, I think. I've been trying to get it because it's like one of these fan edits. It's a 5-hour version of Revenge of the Sith that includes the Battle of Mandalore.

Mm-hmm.

It includes stuff from The Bad Batch, The Clone Wars, interspersed into Revenge of the Sith. And then they found the deleted scenes, anything. It's like a 4 or 5-hour thing. That whole time period is the most interesting period, like, in Star Wars. It's, it's, it's arguably more interesting than the original, uh, trilogy. They just need to do that live action with Ewan McGregor and—

Hayden Christensen.

And Hayden Christensen, and Padmé—

Natalie Portman.

Natalie Portman. Just do that. Take The Clone Wars, make it a TV show, do 5 seasons, 10 episodes a season, everybody will be happy. Which is kind of what they tried to do a little bit with the Obi-Wan series, which takes place between 3 and 4. That's what they did with Andor, which takes place between 3 and 4. That's what they did with the— what was the film that everybody loved?

Rogue One?

With the Death Star.

Rogue One, the one that leads into Andor.

Rogue One.

Or the randomly picked— That's all anybody— Yeah.

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

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

Just give it— I mean, Filoni will figure it out. In Filoni I trust.

Hopefully he has better taste in spinoffs than Hatt. I think the cowboy hat. He's that guy who's always in a cowboy hat, Dave Filoni. Have you seen him?

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

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

You see it on the right?

There it is. Yeah, that's— that's— come on, like, the t-shirt cowboy. Let's take that hat off. It looks ridiculous.

No, he's— he's a genius. Dave Filoni is going to— Kathleen Kennedy, disgrazia.

Kathleen Kennedy produced so many of everybody's favorite movies, and then she ended her career on She's an icon.

She was an icon. She destroyed her career with the sequels.

Oh.

That's my position.

I still like them.

That's Ben Shapiro's position. That's all. You like them.

I like Last Jedi.

Sequels?

No, I don't, uh, I don't love the other 2. I, I don't like the first one, or Force Awakens. It's okay. I really like Last Jedi, and then I don't like Rise of Skywalker. I don't think J.J. Abrams got it, but I like the Rian Johnson one.

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

Anyway, I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it when I saw it.

There's a, there's a bunch of fan films that are fantastic. You mean the animated ones?

No. Oh.

There's a guy who does Star Wars Theory. He's got over 3 million.

Oh, sure.

He's in sync with me and everybody else.

Yes.

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

Yeah.

And the stuff— he's made 2 of these episodes. They're just absolutely fantastic. He's got 3 million views already. This thing came out 3 weeks ago. The first episode of Vader he did, um, I don't know, maybe 5 years ago or something like that. He, he gets all of the people who watch his channel to donate to this. He does it as a nonprofit, and he sells sabers. He is fantastic.

Doesn't he think it's It's like fan service is not— that's never been what Star Wars was. It was always about challenging and pushing to the next. Like, it's easy to make things that, you know, people are gonna like because you're just recalling what they've already seen, but that's not interesting in an artistic way. That's just, you know, endless merch and fan service. And sure, I mean, that Star Wars for most of our lives, there weren't new Star Wars movies. It was just merch.

Yeah.

It was just comics and books. and video games and stuff about the movies. Like, I like when the movies take chances and move things in different interesting—

That was Andor. Andor took a chance.

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

All right, folks, there you have it.

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

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

All right. Literally, you and Kathleen Kennedy are on an island.

I think she and I were right. They were right. They were right all along about that one. All right.

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