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

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups — Why AI Has No Taste and How to Fix It

Host: Jason Calacanis
Guests: Thais Costello Branco (Taste Labs), Lon Harris
Episode: E2319
Date: July 31, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores why AI-generated creative work lacks “taste” or aesthetic judgment and what can be done to fix it. Jason is joined by Thais Costello Branco, founder of Taste Labs, to discuss the limitations of current AI models in subjective domains and how curated human expertise can improve AI’s creative outputs. Broader topics covered include the loss of the “curator class,” AI’s effect on culture, startup news, the rise of personalization, and notable trends in tech and society.

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Main Themes & Discussion Points

Why AI Has “No Taste”

• AI excels in objective, rule-based domains (e.g., coding, math) but falls short in subjective areas like design, writing, and creative curation.
• Regression to the Mean: AI often produces average, uninspired outputs due to its reliance on statistical averages from its training data.
  • Thais: “You have models that can solve CyberHack, can solve PhD level math problems and they can't write a good tweet or make a good design... The average is that thing that you're going to not even take a second glance at, that you've seen a lot.” [00:00]
• Lack of Personalization: AI outputs tend to be generic and fail to adapt to unique user intent or contexts.
  • Thais: “Why should this look the same? This almost fits to the prompt and fit to the user intent. And almost like personalization is almost missing from.” [07:31]

Causes:

• Training Data: AI seeks the “most likely” answer, which is effective for logic and code but not for creativity.
• Missing Nuance and Variety: True “taste” comes from exposure and deep domain expertise, which AI struggles to model.

The Loss of the Curator Class

• Historic Role: Cultural critics, reviewers, and tastemakers brought discernment and uniqueness to media.
  • Jason: “We used to have a curator class...intellectuals who made it their life's work, you know, to go to restaurants, to study food, to study art...” [13:15]
• Current Situation: Social media and AI aggregation have hollowed out these roles, but nothing has fully replaced their function.
  • Lon: “Everyone I know who used to work in, in media as this kind of cultural critic. Curator class. Those people are all struggling to find work.” [14:21]
• Opportunity in AI: Taste Labs employs human “tastemakers” to integrate expert judgment into AI systems, thus preserving human curation within technology.

Taste Labs’ Approach to Fixing AI’s Taste Problem

• Two-Pronged System:
  1. Improving Foundation Models: Collaborates with AI labs to benchmark and push models toward more creative, out-of-distribution outputs.
  2. Application Layer Tools: Builds APIs and tools to help end-users and application companies inject more context, personalization, and taste into AI-generated content.
     • Thais: “Half of our business, maybe it looks more like that half is more like data RL environments. But the other half is tools, it's API...” [12:12]
• Leveraging Human Tastemakers: Taste Labs employs a network of ~1,000 human experts to rate, critique, and curate creative outputs, shaping AI judgment.
  • Thais: “We actually have this awesome community of about 1,000 tastemakers...spending years honing their craft, developing critic sense.” [15:27]
• Compensation & Collaboration: Experts are paid for their time, sometimes join full-time, and share their own portfolios or designs for indexing.
  • Jason: “And these are pay. They get paid 50 bucks an hour, 100 bucks an hour or something like that.” [16:09]

Philosophical Tensions: Can Taste Be Commoditized?

• Risk: By encoding taste into AI, do we risk commodifying and diluting the uniqueness that defines true taste?
  • Lon: “Once you're commodifying taste...don't you lose that? And now the AI is recommending the same kinds of things to all sorts of people, and it loses that rarity that made it special.” [17:11]
• Response: The first step is to raise the bar for quality; the next is personalization and variety to avoid “sameness.”
  • Thais: “The bars are so on the ground and the first job is just, let's lift the bar. Off the ground and even get to a place where these models can output like high quality things, then I think it becomes more a problem of personalization.” [17:43]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Taste Formation:
  • Thais: “Taste is such a rare skill because it takes this combination of seeing many things and having that exposure...It's impossible for every human to develop taste in everything.” [08:46]
  • Jason: “Most design, most tweets, most blog posts are average. In fact, when you take everything, you're guaranteed to have regression to the mean.” [07:31]
• On AI Stagnation and Quality:
  • Lon: “We don't want Substack to turn into LinkedIn...LinkedIn has become the definitional. Like, this is a place where everybody [posts AI slop].” [54:56]
  • Jason: “This is a good moment in time...everybody's gonna have to make a decision, do we want to live in an AI slop world or not?” [56:31]
• On Curation in Practice:
  • Jason (on personal approach): “I have a number of curators that I trust...then I programmed my own cool hunter and I said, you are a cool hunter.” [22:50]
  • [Jason’s process for hotel and food recommendations is to aggregate trusted sources via assistants and AI “cool hunting.” (23:12–24:56)]
• On the Value of Taste in a Mass-Production World:
  • Thais: “The more you have of this mass production of things...the peak of the peak of the peak becomes valuable.” [26:50]

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Interesting Segments & Timestamps

• Why AI Output Lacks Taste, and Regression to the Mean [00:00–07:31]
• Discussion on “Curator Class” & How AI Hasn't Replaced It [12:44–14:31]
• How Taste Labs Works with Human Tastemakers [15:27–16:59]
• Philosophical Discussion on Commoditization of Taste [17:11–18:24]
• Jason’s Personal Tech Stack for Taste/Curation [22:50–24:56]
• Tastemakers' Feelings About Working with AI [26:16–26:50]
• Taste Labs’ Hiring/Company Update [32:35–34:04]
• Rapid Fire: News & Analysis Segments
  • Situational Awareness AI Fund Drama [39:32–46:21]
  • Google “Nano Banana” AI Image Generator Woes [51:16–56:31]
  • Emerging Anti-AI Slop Tools & Labeling [54:33–56:37]
  • Automated Solar Installation Robots & Green Energy [69:42–74:23]

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Additional Notable Quotes

• Jason: “If you're ambitious, now's the best time ever.” [03:08]
• Lon: “We already were in that situation where like, is this class going to be applicable now? It's like, is anything applicable? What is the skill of the future?” [01:50]
• Thais: “As long as we push for that diversity where it's not meant about it having one correct answer, but it's about...the ability to execute well in all those different directions, then I think actually could help the problem in a good way of pushing people towards actually more directions rather than compressing to the mean further.” [21:40]

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Tone and Atmosphere

• Conversational, candid, and rich with personal anecdotes.
• Humor, philosophical musings, and practical startup wisdom interwoven.
• Occasional jabs at Silicon Valley stereotypes and the current AI hype cycle.
• Repeated focus on the importance of human discernment and tradition, even as technology advances.

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Conclusion

The episode thoroughly examines the deficiencies of AI in subjective, taste-driven fields and what can be done to address them, particularly via hybrid human-in-the-loop systems like Taste Labs. There is a nuanced discussion about whether taste can or should be systematized, the broader cultural trend away from human curation, and implications for both AI builders and creative professionals. The episode is rounded out with news about AI, startups, and the shifting tech and economic landscape.

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For more information on Taste Labs and their open roles: tastelabs.com
Listen to full episode or check out key segments as highlighted above for deeper dives!

Transcript

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

I don't feel like we have figured this out yet. Everyone I know who used to work in media as this kind of cultural criticism curator, class curator, class curator, all struggling to find work.

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Lon Harris]

This week in Startups is brought to you by Odo, the all in one business platform. Get started for free at o d o o.com twist that's odo.com twist mongodb AI assisted and agent coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start [e-mail] AI and why? Security the on demand security team for startup need enterprise grade security without hiring a $400,000 CISO. Wisecurity gives you 40 plus expert engineers matched to exactly what you need by the hour with your first six hours completely free. Go to Ysecurity IO twist. That's the letter Y Security IO twist.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right everybody, welcome back. It is Friday. It's July 31, 2026. I'm in New York City where world tour. Hawaii, Paris, Tokyo, New York. You've been everywhere. Austin next week and get ready for the big school Everybody. School starts August 15th. Now Lon, did you know that I

[Lon Harris]

think they added more holidays for the kids during the year when, when I was going to School this September 2nd week of September you go back. This seems shockingly early to me.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like I broke out of the matrix a while ago. I told these schools like listen, we live a non traditional like situation. We're going to take the kids on a ski week. We're going to start, you know, Christmas a week early. We're going to come back two days later and you know they get put all this kind of pressure on you and I'm like, but we're going to have a tutor and we'll keep up with the stuff. And I want them to see the world. And I was really excited because my three daughters came with me to Paris and they came with me to Tokyo, but they came to Founder University Japan and Got to see some of the content. So I'm really excited about that because how do you raise kids, Lon, in this new world, in this new AI world where like, you could be taking a class and never put it. We already were in that situation where like, is this class going to be applicable now? It's like, is anything applicable? What is the skill of the future?

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Read Hamlet.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's good.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

My business is growing, not going away. We need newsletter writers, but most jobs are going away.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

We do.

[Jason Calacanis]

So we're going to do guest and then news. We're bringing in the news to tease it a bit.

[Lon Harris]

Sure. Well, we got it. We got to talk about situational awareness. That's Leopold Ashen Brenner's fund. He's only 25. His public portfolio had been sold off to Citadel. But there, there is more to this story. I think everybody initially, we're going to get into it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Lon Harris]

And everybody initially was like, haha, Wall Street. This kid got blown out. He's done there. There's a lot going on here behind

[Jason Calacanis]

the scenes and I have strong feelings about it. What else is in the news? Well, there we go.

[Lon Harris]

We got to talk about. Google made this insane decision to add. They added Nano Banana to Google Earth. Did you see this? So you could use their AI image generator to manipulate images from Google Earth. I think you can immediately see why that might be a questionable idea.

[Jason Calacanis]

Shenanigans are. Might ensue.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, just to be clear.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

So we'll talk about. And we're going to go off duty at the end.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, let's introduce our guest because I think this was a suggestion from jcal.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

Thanks for having me.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Welcome to the show.

[Thais Costello Branco]

I'm already up on the other side.

[Lon Harris]

You're very, very good position.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Looks the same, same.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

That's exactly. I think people's frustration is you have models that can solve CyberHack, can solve PhD level math problems and they can't write a good tweet or make a good design. And I think a lot of this honestly goes back to how are these models trained. I think a lot of the logic is how do you arrive at the most likely answer of something that should be the correct answer. And in math or coding that's kind of exactly the behavior you want. But then for something that's more subjective, what's considered great in real life, things that you encounter that are like, hey, this is really great writing, or really great design, they tend to be things that are a bit more unique, that are a bit more out of distribution. It's not the average. The average is that thing that you're going to not even take a second glance at that you've seen a lot. And so I think that variety is one of the core things that are missing, but also that nuance. Right. I think the other piece that's very weird is the fact that both of you could, for example, prompt for two completely different things, but then the end output would look the same. And why I'm asking for a totally different use case. Why should this look the same? And so I think this almost fits to the prompt and fit to the user intent. And almost like personalization is almost missing from.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, and it, it makes sense in two ways to me. Have you been ever tyus to Palo Alto or Atherton? You know, driven up and down El Camino Real? It is a wasteland architecturally, design wise. Have you ever gone to a rich person's $40 million house? They all look the same. Restoration Hardware descritiad you. You can barely keep a Michelin star restaurant below San Francisco. The people who build these things have no taste. Let's be honest, they don't have taste. They have taste in like private jets. And then it's a big drop off from there. Like they know which private jet is the best one. They could talk to you about it for hours, but they can't do anything else. Like that's it. I mean, it's. They have no taste. And then second, if you were to take everything as opposed to skimming the cream, most design, most tweets, most blog posts are average. In fact, when you take everything, you're guaranteed to have regression to the mean that is like the term that exists. So I guess, how do you reverse that? And then who are your customers and how are you working with them?

[Thais Costello Branco]

Both great points. And by the way, I think quickly on the first point of like, kind of who has taste or like how to develop taste. Think it's very hard, right? Taste is such a rare skill because I think it takes this combination of seeing many things and having that exposure in whatever domain it is. And I think it's impossible for every human to develop taste in everything. There might be one area you pick that you're like, okay, I'm going to obsess over this specific thing. And for example, half my family are architects. So the side of interior design they're obsessed over, they have great taste in, they might have less good taste in code because they didn't spend their life perfecting that. And so this process of developing really strong opinions and intuition for what is good or what is right when there isn't a clear right answer just takes a lot of work and trial and error. And so yeah, I think we have to find the people that have it to help us go and then train these models and determine what good is. And yeah, I think a lot of our challenge now. So we work in two ways. We work half with the Frontier Labs on how do we benchmark their models, eval their models, understand where they're breaking and figure out exactly how do we pull them more out of distribution into this direction of great. And how do we both fix it from a capability perspective in terms of more mistakes that they're doing or inability to do things like vision or 2D reasoning, which are more foundational, but then also these higher order things of creativity and style and aesthetics. And then on the other side is like, okay, great, let's assume we're making these foundation models better. How do we work with application layer companies and agent companies that aren't necessarily touching the model layer but that want to still make the outputs better? So what can we control there? And I think a lot of our answer there is both context of how do we help the generation be better before it even starts by feeding it the right context. So most users nowadays that are using things like, I don't know, lovable or Cursor or Codex or Claude or Figma design to create are not experts. Right? They're not designers professionally. They're regular people just wanting to make interesting great things. And of course they're not going to know how to express what they want in the exact right terminology or write really good prompts.

[Jason Calacanis]

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[Thais Costello Branco]

It's hard because we kind of don't like boxes. I would say we like. So half of our business, maybe it looks more like that half is more like data RL environments. But the other half is tools, it's API. So I come from Axop before I started Taste. And so I love this infra side of like how do you build the tools for agents? What needs to be true in the world? What needs to exist for agents to do great work? And we're also building those very opinionated tools and products that look more like infrastructure or like API shaped things. So yeah, it's both. Multiple things at once.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was going to ask you a question Lon here because I think one of the things, an observation I've had is we used to have a curator class and the curator class were restaurant reviewers. Lon was part of it, I was part of it. We had incredible reviewers of movies. Elvis Mitchell, Ayo Scott. And then who was the one from the 80s that like Brett Issanallis was from the New York Times. There was a very famous movie critic in the 80s and 90s. You can look it up on Claude or something. Yeah, that's producer Claude.

[Lon Harris]

I'm not sure. I'm thinking of a few different ones. I'm not sure which one you need. I'll see something.

[Jason Calacanis]

Maslin.

[Lon Harris]

Oh, Janet Maslin, sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, the list goes on.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Curator class.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

And these are pay. They get paid 50 bucks an hour, 100 bucks an hour or something like that.

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, great.

[Thais Costello Branco]

And we've been. We've been testing some different things. So even, like partnerships, they're testing this

[Jason Calacanis]

new concept of equity for poor.

[Thais Costello Branco]

Like, we're testing almost like allowing them to contribute their designs to our index. Because part of it is like, we're building this design index. So if they can, like, contribute their portfolios or things that they've done in

[Jason Calacanis]

the past and get credit when the LLM does output.

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I suggest money, for sure.

[Lon Harris]

Money.

[Jason Calacanis]

Money seems to work pretty well for this class. All right, so can I take it

[Lon Harris]

in a little bit of a philosophical direction? Sure, why not?

[Jason Calacanis]

Let's do it.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

I think that would be my. My fear. That's what I think we're trying not to do. So I think it's more so about execution of us doing it well. Okay, but I don't. Yeah, that's definitely not the goal, I think, because part of it right now is the bars are so on the ground and the first job is just, let's lift the bar. Off the ground and even get to a place where these models can output like high quality things, then I think it becomes more a problem of personalization. But I don't think we're there yet. I think it's like we have to first fix just quality. And I think there's elements of quality that more people would agree on in terms of just like craft and polish. And then there's things that people would more disagree on depending on style or fit or audience. But yeah, I think quality is the challenge first. But yeah, definitely don't want to end up in that scenario.

[Jason Calacanis]

So this is an interesting philosophical thread and let's keep go pulling it and see where it leads us to. If everyone knows in 1982 that U2 is this really cool band before, you know, the Joshua Tree comes out and you know, then all of a sudden everybody knows about it. We kind of all feel like it's been commodified, the knowledge of it, right. So it's a never ending task. And you know, this is happened very acutely in Japan. I go to Japan twice a year. Have you been, by the way, to Japan?

[Thais Costello Branco]

No, I actually haven't.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

It's neat.

[Jason Calacanis]

If taste and refinement and kaizen, the constant improvement concept that comes from Japan is like gets you excited. Oh, my Lord.

[Thais Costello Branco]

You're gonna.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's gonna blow your mind to watch people kind of just operate in the world. But there's a problem. Tiktokers, Instagram influencers. I can't stand these people now because what they do is there's places I've been like. I started talking about Niseko where I ski like seven years ago, I guess. And now everybody knows about it. I can't get a hotel room. I can't get a reservation. Then in Japan, somebody finds out that this noodle shop that's 150 years old is like the best one. And then everybody who goes there feels the need to go there and TikTok it. And now those places have crazy lines, some of them now. And I'm making the X here. This is what the Japanese people do when they say no. They don't allow Americans, no tourists. So they change their menu all to Japan. They change their Google listing. All Japanese lawn.

[Lon Harris]

Oh my God.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then they make it hard to find the place. So they make the signs. And then you may have experiences.

[Lon Harris]

Tokyo is hard to find everything. You go to the building and you're Like I'm at the right building. It's like, oh no, it's three floors underground. Or like, oh no, it's at the top of this thing and you got to go around.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

AI is writing code, reviewing that code and then shipping that code. But it's important to remember your workflow is only as fast as the slowest thing that it touches. And for most of you, that's going to be your database. Hey, with today's tools, you can generate a new feature in 90 seconds, then spend three days bending it to fit your rigid decade old schema. But this is where MongoDB can help. MongoDB gives you the flexibility to ship at the speed of AI. The asset compliance guarantees you get to actually sleep at night while it scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. And the best part is developers swear by it. Literally. I can't use the actual words they said in this ad. So let's just call it a really great database. The MongoDB for Startups program is here and it makes it easy for eligible startups to get started with free credits. Apply [e-mail] startups once again, that's mongodb.com startups. So your thoughts on this particular issue, which is, you know, there's a half

[Thais Costello Branco]

life to cool, I think. Yes, but I don't think that's a function of AI. I think that's always been true. Right. You've always had this like class of curators or the tastemakers that are at the forefront. They kind of pick the thing that is the cool thing next or they're at the avant garde, let's say. And once it starts getting more ubiquitous and more people start knowing about it, it loses the cool and then they move on to the next thing. But I think that's always been true. Even before social media, even before AI. I do think though that social media accelerated the speed of that cycle, let's say. And AI could have that potential too. I think so far it honestly hasn't. Just because it's still so bad that I don't think the actual tastemakers are being like, oh yes, this is the exact thing I want my sites to look for or to look like. And so I don't think we've seen that effect yet. But I think as Long as we push for that diversity where it's not meant about it having one correct answer, but it's about it having both breadth and the ability to execute well in all those different directions, then I think actually could help the problem in a good way of pushing people towards actually more directions rather than compressing to the mean further.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let me tell you my stack.

[Thais Costello Branco]

Tell me.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay. So you should subscribe to and support them. And so I was having my Athena assistance last year take Monocle and about 15 other sources where I find things and specific searches I use on those places. I'm not going to say anything else. I gave you one. Then I would tell them, hey, aggregate what I'm looking for when I go to Singapore. I went to Singapore for the first time. I like design hotels, I like hip, I like funky, etc and so if you were to put in Singapore here, put in Singapore hotels. And this is how I picked my hotel for Singapore. This beautiful like cyberpunk hotel that had like trees on the side of it. I think I showed it to you on. If you search for Singapore hotels and I find it there and yeah, let's see if it's there when you pull it up. It's like a garden hotel that's like really tall and it looks like something out of like a positive version of Blade Runner. Anyway, you're just seeing like Singapore pictures. That's not it. But there's like a ton of things that are like this, where they make it like a rainforest. Incredible. So then they did a really good job of finding the places I like to eat food, which I'm looking for things that are, I'll just say Anthony Bourdain esque, you know, street stuff, one dish they're known for, etc. So then I programmed my own cool hunter and I said, you are a cool hunter. You're looking for things that would appeal to these specific people, you know, in these categories that have these specific design elements, etc. And it works, that's all I'm saying.

[Thais Costello Branco]

I want to test it, but it's

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think it. By the way, I don't actually fundamentally believe that tastemakers are going to go away by any means. With AI, I actually think it's the opposite. I think they become more valuable because the more you have of this mass production of things and kind of creation of outputs, which is just going to happen because everyone now in the world can click a button and create something, the more I think the peak of the peak of the peak becomes valuable. Similar to what you're describing about the specific restaurant in Japan. Right. It's like those really specific things that become really good, I think, become more valuable, not less. And I think we're infinitely far of having the power of a true creative direction and choice and this kind of craft. And so I think, yeah, being a tastemaker kind of becomes more valuable in terms of how they feel in terms of the work. We actually ran this survey with the community a couple weeks ago of asking why you're here, why are you excited about working with us? And it was really cool to see how a lot of responses were almost around curiosity. I was like, I am excited about the problem and I hate SOP and I want to help. It was very motivational in terms of purpose, of why they were interested in the work. And so I think people want to be a part of the solution. Maybe as the conclusion I've gotten interesting.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, when you look at the jungle area.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like if you look at any jungle area, there's rooms to the left of it. There's rooms above it like in. Typically in like 8 and. Yeah, it was. And then on the roof there's a infinity pool. Go to the roof there. That whole area up there, that's an infinity pool type situation. And the. There it is. So you go up to the roof. I would go up there and work. And I would have never found this if I didn't have my system because it didn't come up anywhere. It's not like this is a giant hotel. It's got like whatever.

[Lon Harris]

Probably like a boutique room hotel.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it would be in the boutique hotel, not a chain artisan art. Y, Z, E N. You know what, it looks like these things so consistently.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Check this out. Look at the cut out there.

[Thais Costello Branco]

That's really cool.

[Jason Calacanis]

No.

[Thais Costello Branco]

By the way, half my family are architects so if you're like the side of interior design and hotel hospitality I love. I gotta give you some Brazil tips for next time you guys go.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

of Sao Paulo or something.

[Thais Costello Branco]

Let's see, Paulo has a huge, huge like fabric community.

[Lon Harris]

There you go. Make that happen.

[Jason Calacanis]

So do you have aspirations to do anything public facing with this collection of people or have you thought about buying and this is the idea I had if I. Because I think you raised money at a pretty decent valuation. Yes, yeah, yeah we did. Do we have that in the notes? Lon? We do.

[Lon Harris]

I have that. It was a.

[Jason Calacanis]

And who the investors were.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, CRV. I know the team over there. Oh, nice. Congrats. Founders are scrappy by nature and many like you like to dig in and get started building without worrying about admin. They run the whole business on Excel, then keep adding on more random tools as needed. But here's the problem. None of these tools and platforms know how to talk to each other. So you wind up playing go between with a cluster of different systems. It's a Franken business, it's a Franken site and it's a huge waste of time. But now there's odoo, the all in one management software that's serving 16 million users across more than 170,000 companies in over 120 countries. Now your CRM, sales, accounting, manufacturing, website, inventory and point of sale, they're all in one easy to find place. And most importantly, every app talks to every other app. Sell a product on your website and the invoice gets created instantly and your inventory gets updated automatically. So if you're stitching together spreadsheets and keeping track of five different logins, get started today at odoo.com twist that's O-O-O.com twist to level up your business, what it would cost to buy Monocle Magazine or to say I want the exclusive license to Monocle Magazine would be a fraction of what these large language model, frontier model companies or even the mid tier ones. Have you considered maybe acquiring some of those assets and putting them together or the archives of them? Paper magazine got sold in a fire sale I think sadly and that it was just like I used to write for Them back in the 90s, like, incredible archive of like, history and art and taste. Like somebody could actually own that and, and get the writers involved in one of those. And it could be like the rebirth of the magazine business, which was the ultimate coalescence of taste curation.

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, very much.

[Thais Costello Branco]

But yeah, I think when we eventually get to something like creative writing, it would be really cool to explore some of these. These partnerships because to your point, it's like, it's one of one. Right. Like, you don't have. You don't have magazines and so. Yeah, totally.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Sounds like you'd hire a professor. The website is tastelabs.com and yeah, look at the careers page. A lot going on there. Hey, just give us an update as we wrap here. I know San Francisco is on fire. I might have to. I have a loft that I rented and it was like, underwater for four years, but now I think it's probably a good time to sell it. What's it like operating in San Francisco with no housing stock in, you know, people. Yeah. Say a little bit. Explain to the audience people who aren't there exactly how crazy it is and hard it is for employees that you try to hire.

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Crazy.

[Thais Costello Branco]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

I don't even want to think about it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Bonkers.

[Thais Costello Branco]

Yeah, it really is bonkers. But I do think that this concentration of people in one place just creates the type of magic you can't reproduce.

[Jason Calacanis]

I had a dozen great years there and now I'm in Austin and love it there. But it's something you should think about. Imagine if you were running in Austin. The housing stock has gone down three or four years.

[Lon Harris]

They're like, hey, y', all, first three months free, no rent. Come stay here. That's what I was talking about. Crazy.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

That's our latest. If you got in for 4k, you'd feel lucky. All right, listen, continued success, and we'll check in with you in a year.

[Lon Harris]

Thanks so much. Taste. Yeah, that's really. I'm curious. After design, I wonder if they're going to try to go comedy, because I feel like that's the one area where we all know LLMs aren't funny. They're not good at writing jokes. Everybody seems to have sort of given

[Jason Calacanis]

terrible at Twitter threads. Right? Like, they don't understand Twitter.

[Lon Harris]

Right?

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Good for brainstorming, though.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

So you're collecting data, correct?

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Nothing more valuable right now than preference data. That's the goal.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

There was some travel, there were some delays, but now that you're back around and in the mix, we'll definitely, definitely get that bad to go.

[Jason Calacanis]

And the software is great right now, right? Yeah, software's great. So I want to build this app. You know what I'm going to work on is try to get somebody who has a tool like you know, Perplexity Computer or Claude Co or a lovable. I'd like to get one of these people as my partner on this and put up like some serious bounties. That's what we have to do next.

[Lon Harris]

There you go.

[Jason Calacanis]

But go ahead, check that out. All right, we got a lot of news to do.

[Lon Harris]

Let's get so much news. All right, well, we got to talk about situational awareness or lack thereof. So famed AI focused hedge fund was led by 25 year old former open air Leopold Aschenbrenner. It was founded in 2024. He started out with a few hundred million, Jason. He amassed over 45 billion in assets under management by July. In June, Wall street journal said 20 billion. So it went wildly up. The fund had a 439% net return through June 30th. He was placing very large leveraged bets. No professional investing experience prior to launching this firm. Early backers included the Collison brothers from Stripe, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman from Meta. Many others investments included SK, Hynix, Micron, SanDisk, Bloom Energy, CoreWeb, Nebius Group. There was a paper that he wrote in 2024 also called situational Awareness. The argument, the thesis was basically like, we know AI is going to explode. We know the demand for compute is going to increase exponentially. So he was let's place our mats. He was placing bets in the infrastructure and the hardware that was going to allow for this build out to happen. So then what happened? He compared it to a bank run. He got margin called by a number of his biggest investors, Goldman B of A. And so eventually he had to in order to access cash. He sold the public portion of his stock portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel. Everything that had been financed with borrowed cash is gone. However, private investments he's still holding onto. It's going to just continue on as a fund for his private investments. That includes what Financial Times tells us is $5 billion of anthropic stock. So TBPN this morning published the letter Leopold sent to his LPs this week.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, we took ownership of it.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Got a question for me at the end there or just going to drop it?

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

No, this is I guess the folly of youth and a lack of experience for sure that played some sort of a role here. He was running, according to the reports, something like forex leverage, which means for every dollar he held in a share, he was then ballooning it up by 4x. So if the market goes down 25% or 50%, you basically get four times that kind of volatility. I guess and downdraft. So that was a mistake. And then there were other things at play here. The South Korea stock market was having a crazy run where like a million different levered accounts, again, having leverage, AKA debt is. It's different when you have a home and you have debt than when you have equities or when you have crypto. When you have a home, they have to foreclose on it, which means they got to kick you out of it. It's a process. It's emotional to kick somebody out of their house. And there's laws around it. And it's a slower process. You can miss some payments, you get some penalties, you can do a partial payment. Or what happens when you're on margin, you know, either for crypto or for stocks, is you get margin called. What does that mean? Whoever your banker is that gave you that loan then starts selling your equities automatically. Now, they may give you a correct period as a grace. You know, in a grace period, hey, you got 24 hours, 48 hours to put up the collateral. But generally speaking, they will just liquidate you. This happens in bitcoin all the time. People lever up their bitcoin. You know, they own a million dollars in bitcoin. They're like, okay, give me another 500,000. I'll buy another 500,000 in Bitcoin and go long. I'll pay 7,8% interest on that. But I believe bitcoin's going to go up 100% this year. Then bitcoin goes down. They got to sell bitcoin to cover it and those lenders. So that's what's like technically happening here. Schadenfreude is really, really high in finance, especially in hedge funds and stuff like that. Have you ever watched the TV show Billions?

[Lon Harris]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

There is a pile on that occurs. So he kind of outlined this in his letter, where when this occurs, people know that you're, you know, experiencing this downdraft and that you're going to get margin calls. So what do they do if they have the same positions, if we all own? Let's say it was pick a public company that's in A.I. nvidia, Nvidia Micron. You and I sell all of our position so that it makes it go down more. So we're flooding it with stock so there's more supply available to put pressure on them. Then we shorted. We create more pressure and just more pressure, more pressure. And then at the same time, you're talking to that person about buying their position. So Citadel Was talking to them about buying the position, other people. And I don't know if Citadel was involved in this, but this is what they do on Wall Street. They are just like knives out. Somebody starts falling, you just push them in the back. Like if they're stumbling, you don't want them to recover. You want to buy the asset from them. I will tell you this.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

This is not sbf. Sam Bankman, fried. This is not the same situation. Sam was making great bets and he would have been one of the great betters of all time because he also bet on anthropic, et cetera. And they wound up selling his positions for peanuts. When they liquidated ftx, he was stealing money. Allegedly went to jail for.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

He was involved in real fraud where he's taking people's assets that they put in their essentially bank accounts. In their accounts. And he was investing it and giving it to celebrities. That would be like bank of America goes into our accounts and then sponsors the super bowl and invests in, you know, SpaceX and Uber with the money he was doing. Not allowed to do that.

[Lon Harris]

Crypto exchange and the investment fund and intermingling funds in ways that the SEC says you absolutely cannot do.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Taking a little bit of glee in it. I mean he's like, he's a very young.

[Jason Calacanis]

Shouten Freuder.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, he's a very brash guy. He's a good looking guy. I think there was a little bit of like.

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't know if he's good looking,

[Lon Harris]

but maybe you don't think so. Pull up, pull up one of the memes. Pull up.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

That's him as Mitch McConnell.

[Jason Calacanis]

But that, that, that's not cool.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, sure, like a As a German or Scandinavian, whatever. He is.

[Lon Harris]

Preppy German guy.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

People were taking a little bit. I think people were taking a little bit of excessive glee. Too much guy. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

He does have a lot of layers in that photo. So, like, layers are for players. I'll give him the layer game was pretty good there. Look at the layer game in the brown. Yeah, he definitely had the layer game going. He was playing the role. Looks like clavicular. He was. Yeah. I don't know what he was. He was. He was leverage maxing. He was leverage maxing.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Anyway, the lessons here are.

[Lon Harris]

Spiked his cortisol levels.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, he was cortisol maxing for sure the last week. But this is not an example of like, something fundamentally wrong with the industry if you have leverage. It's just not something anybody with any experience does at this level. If you want to have a margin loan against like 5% or 10% of your stock, so you got like a billion dollars in stock and you have 50 million, you're not going to get called until it comes down to like one to one or something. Like, you have plenty of room. This was the opposite. This would be like somebody who's got a billion dollars trying to put $4 billion to work. Very, very dangerous. But he's going to come back stronger, is my prediction. If it doesn't bring him.

[Lon Harris]

He's got 5 billion in anthropics still. He's sitting on. Plus other investment. I. I wouldn't be too worried about this guy.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Jacob's got a few more memes for us to.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Next one.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Jonah Hill from Wolf of Wall street there.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, he was great. He should have. Did he win? Did he get a. Did he get Nomed?

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Wonder who he lost against.

[Lon Harris]

I'd have to.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

He was.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's my hot take.

[Lon Harris]

Yes, he was. He was nominated. It did. That movie didn't win any Oscars.

[Jason Calacanis]

Any. Any. And he. And this. I was at the year like for moonlight and other woke stuff.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

I literally fell asleep four times.

[Lon Harris]

You're wrong. You're wrong about Moon. You're wrong about.

[Thais Costello Branco]

Okay,

[Jason Calacanis]

that was La La land. Moonlight year. Two terrible picks.

[Thais Costello Branco]

Go ahead.

[Lon Harris]

Yeah, no, let's see. Best directing went to Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity. I'm on the Oscar sites, of course,

[Jason Calacanis]

they don't have Gravity. No.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Thais Costello Branco]

Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a perfect example. I listen, I think. Actually I thought Dallas Buyers Club was great. And those two guys. Well, I thought those two guys had great performance, let me say that. But I do think Oscars go. If Oscars are given a choice. A bunch of debaucherous 80s cocaine taking, stripper paying debauchery from the 80s or 90s versus people dying of AIDS. Yeah, well, that was, you know, in a tragedy. We know what the Oscars are going to go for.

[Lon Harris]

There was a lot of weird discourse around Wolf of Wall street too. Like, is Marty praising these guys? Is it pro Jordan Belfort? There was a lot of that stuff that might have hurt.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

He's awesome. Gravity is so good.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, it's okay.

[Lon Harris]

It's not you.

[Jason Calacanis]

You're telling me. Wait, hold on. Who's your best picture then of 24?

[Lon Harris]

Let me see. All right, let me, let me, let me look at the 20.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm gonna force you on this one because you know I'm right. You would die.

[Lon Harris]

You're definitely 2014 best picture nominee.

[Jason Calacanis]

Run me through this.

[Lon Harris]

I might have been a. I might have been a wolf of Wall Street. Street. Let's see.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

What is what?

[Jason Calacanis]

Sandra Bullock.

[Lon Harris]

Oh, you know. You know what? Google's AI here. Really awful. Like you would think this is such an easy thing to look up. Like, what were the movies that were nominated? All right, Here are your 10 best picture nominees for this year. It was the 20. 2013 movies. It was the 2014 Academy Awards.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, go ahead, give him.

[Lon Harris]

Hit me the nominees that you want to hear the winner last? I'll do the nominees first and then.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure.

[Lon Harris]

The nominees were American Hustle, Captain Phillips. Remember, this is the 10 nominee years. American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club. Gravity. Her, Nebraska. Philomena, the Wolf of Wall Street. And your winner was 12 Years a Slave that year. 12 Years a Slave. 1.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, it's just. That's not it. There is no contest there. I mean, I did like Nebraska, though, artistically. Great belt. I like our films. I have to say, I would say

[Lon Harris]

to me, her and Wolf of Wall street, it was between.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Of those nominees, it's between those.

[Jason Calacanis]

But you know, this is just the problem with the Oscars is they go for max suffering and, you know, whatever put your hand over your heart is the most.

[Lon Harris]

Her did win best original screenplay that year.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

All right, we got. Yeah, we got to talk about this. So Google Ear Alphabet embedded their AI image generator Nano Banana into Google Earth. Yeah, Nano Banana. Amazing. Google Earth, amazing. Now you can go to Google Earth and with a simple prompt, you can change things the way things look on Google Earth. Visualize streets and intersections as they might have looked in history.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, no.

[Lon Harris]

You can even infographic based on anything you can pull up and did that street view. But people have already.

[Jason Calacanis]

You got to describe what's happening here. You got to describe what's happening. So here's an image.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh my God.

[Lon Harris]

You can create that, like what's going

[Jason Calacanis]

on in Spain, right?

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

I'll tell you what happened here.

[Lon Harris]

What is the use case here? Like, Well, I tell you what happens.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, no, it's very simple there. Everybody at that company is going, hey, AI is the next big thing. Sprinkle a little AI on everything. So Google, local, Google flights, you know, Gmail, just put some AI on it. Get a little AI on there, just a dab, a little dash, let's see. And then if it's good, maybe we just coded in AI, maybe we deep fried in AI, whatever it is. So somebody was like, oh, would this be cool to share? To say, hey, here's my lot. What happens if I put a five story building over here? Which like an architectural basis, I can come up with 100 uses for this. That would be really like a city planner might look at this and say, hey, let's put bike lanes in instead of doing something nefarious.

[Lon Harris]

The problem is you can do fun stuff too. Like, to test it out, I pulled up downtown Austin, like right where we produced the show, and I made it like, what if this looked like the lunar surface? Like you could do fun stuff like that.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Grog is like refuses to do almost everything with a real picnic picture because it got in trouble.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Yeah. Well, we got a related story this week, actually, I wasn't sure we were going to get into, but I don't know if you saw LinkedIn added a report, a slot button.

[Thais Costello Branco]

Yes.

[Lon Harris]

And they've gotten rid of the let I help you write your post button that they put in that originally. That's gone. So there's no more. Like, enhance your LinkedIn post with AI because so many people were just hitting that button and lazily posting AI slob. And I don't know if you saw last week, Substack added a bunch of anti AI tools. And Chris Best, this is going to

[Jason Calacanis]

be, this is going to be a big trend.

[Lon Harris]

Of course, Chris Best, the CEO, in his blog post explaining the new tool was like, we don't want Substack to turn into LinkedIn. Like, LinkedIn has become the definitional. Like, this is a place where everybody.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, Well, I mean, if you are a busy salesperson and somebody tells you, hey, if you write your five secrets to sales, you're gonna, like, get more sales. And so, you know, there is, you know, and then back to being AI being pushed by the boss. And I'm one of these pushy bosses saying, hey, let's use AI, let's use AI. You know, you're going to have situations where people don't do it thoughtfully.

[Lon Harris]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

They're just, okay, I'll just produce slop. I've had that happen. I had team members here who are like, okay, JCAL wants us to use it. And they just make a full business plan that they haven't even read or they, you know, scanned and they presented to him. And I'm like, no, no, I'm paying you to write the plan.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

This feels like, interesting you say that. So there is this company Pangram that we were talking about on Wednesday Show.

[Lon Harris]

These are the guys who design substacks anti AI tools.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. And so what Substack should do is when you actually publish it they should tell the writer, hey, our AI's checker says it thinks this is a 92% chance it's not. Whatever it's AI produced, you will not because it's AI. We're going to put a label on it and we're not going to feature on the homepage. And this is what has to happen on social networks now, doing this.

[Lon Harris]

If they think you're posting AI, they flag it and they say, hey, maybe consider rewriting this so that it sounds more human.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

I've had this exact. My neph, Dougie loves trains. And so I had. We had YouTube up and we were just pulling up, you know, videos of trains going by. Trains pulling trains are great, but who doesn't love trains, right? But there's tons of AI slap now. So it's like fake train. He doesn't want to see fake cartoon trains. He wants to watch real trains. Like, it's terrible, terrible experience.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

All right, do you want it? Well, let's get to some of these rapid fire items because I'm worried we're not going to get to everything. All right, so first one that you share with me. So Suta is a Spanish controlled territory on the northern tip of Morocco in North Africa. I pulled a screenshot from Google Earth. Not doctored, folks. This is the actual image. So that's where it is. You could see it's essentially a small city on the North African coast right now to Morocco, across from the Strait of Gibraltar, from Spain, but it is considered Spanish territory. So what's going on is thousands of migrants are attempting to cross into Shuda from Morocco. The border fence has been breached. 18 migrants or so. We're not. It's very chaotic, so we're not sure. They think about 18 migrants have died so far from either being drowned or being crushed in a stampede of people trying to get across this border.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, from much of a border we're looking at here, it's like it's

[Lon Harris]

a fence along an urban beach. So that's a beach. There's a border fence. But it is.

[Jason Calacanis]

You could swim around it in 10 minutes.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

So that's a one for one almost.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Was there a inciting event here that I am trying to catch up on this and my entire feed is venture capitalists retweeting this.

[Lon Harris]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm like, dude, you're a venture capitalist. Nobody cares your opinion on migration. But I guess people have strong feelings about migration.

[Lon Harris]

Elon is one of the people who really started this trend that made it sort of go bigger and VIRAL in the U.S. a lot of people are number one account.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, all kinds of reasons.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

crises, I mean, in which this is a literal migrant invasion. I've never seen anything of this scale. Like, if you have boats show up in Italy, you know, okay, there's 50 people on a boat. But I think you said the number 60,000. Like, that's like four Madison Square Gardens. Five Madison Square Gardens with a lot of people.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

I mean, we've got all kinds of little islands and stuff still.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, there's a number of them. I know which one?

[Lon Harris]

Jacob. Jacob already guessed in our chat room

[Jason Calacanis]

which guy I was talking. Hold on, let me take a look in the chat room here. Oh no, I was gonna go for. Yeah, that's an interesting.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Two other guys, I agree with that one. But there's two other guys.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

And you're like, anyway, I think this

[Jason Calacanis]

goes to show that VCs have a lot of spare time. Okay, let's keep.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

It's those two sided, it looks like a little mini bus thing but there's no like front to the car. It's just like no driver.

[Jason Calacanis]

And with no driver, no steering wheel, no paddle, there's no nothing. So I think, you know, if students can start to build this on their own and hack it together, doesn't mean it's like ready to compete with Waymo. But if students can start building this, what we're going to see is a plethora. A plethora, an unbelievable number of people with these. So what is the self driving race going to come down to? It's going to come down to scale. Who can build and manage and get licenses for this? And there's a news story and you can look it up and I just want to talk about, and everybody assumes I'm talking my book here with Uber, but I can assure you I am involved in probably got investments in over 10 self driving companies. A lot of them are public. And the reason I say that is I'm not just talking the Uber. But there is very quickly going to be a lot of bad feelings about self driving because people are gonna, the first wave of people losing their jobs to AI is gonna be drivers. And like when I say wave I mean like they're, they're not, they're literally gonna lose their jobs and the pay is gonna go down.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

This week Stanley Tang, friend of mine, debuted the Zipline which I'm an investor in Zipline and I'm an investor in Doordash through a venture fund I was in that invested in Doordash. I've been a shareholder, they did their drone company and we had another drone company from Ireland on the program recently here. So there'll be like three or four drone companies doing. Would be four or five drone companies doing this. So that gets rid of like burritos or just coffee. Small things, larger orders obviously going to go in cars or small things. The reason I bring this up is in China where they embrace technology at a pretty rapid pace and they have a top down government, they have stopped allowing licenses for self driving. So you can look that up. There's many stories about it but China is freezing the number of self driving cars on road. Why? It's not about safety, it's about protecting jobs. What's going to happen? And I asked this on this Week in 8 oh what I asked on this Week in VC this week when we did the VC show. So here it is. China suspends new autonomous vehicle permits after Baidu outage. Bloomberg news reports it's nothing to do with baidu outages. It's nothing to do with pony. Nothing to do with anything other than they don't want thousands in fact millions eventually of self driving, of drivers protesting this. So get ready.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

and there's been like this has been brewing. So that story we show was from April but there's some more recent stories in June and July.

[Thais Costello Branco]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Of this kibosh being put on it. So be prepared for that folks. And I think I am in favor of and I'm going to be called like a libtor for this but I do think some licensing of these collecting of revenue to smooth out for society the unemployment and or retraining of those individuals would not be out of line and I think it would be smart for self driving companies to offer that so that they can deploy the technology.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, very simple. Okay, next.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

What about the automated solar one?

[Lon Harris]

All right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Video was crazy.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

And this is real or this is AI?

[Lon Harris]

No, no, this is real. The, the, the robot. They have trained the robot to be able to unload a solar panel. It can transport it to where it needs to go and it begins the installation process. You do need a human in the loop. The human then comes and fastens it into place. The robot can't do that precision work. But it drops it, as you can see, right where it needs to go. So the human just needs to come along and boom, zip, zip, zip. Like right, zip it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Until they make an R2D2 that goes underneath that giant and does the zip, zip, zip. Or they build a system that has clamps in it. So this is, you know. Sure.

[Lon Harris]

That's very problem they're solving is how to get that human out of there in time.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, it's super easy. Like if the thing drops into place and in the factory it has a clasp that fits into a hole and locks in place. You don't need to put bolts on it. So obviously they're using like the classic system that wasn't designed for robot deployment. What I found really interesting about that video, and if you can cue up this one moment in it, is they show a very long field of them. Yes, there are very long fields being built. Just recently in California, we hit 51% of energy coming from solar and batteries. That's also happened in Germany on a couple of sunny days and it's happening in Australia continuously and some places in South America. We can build a factory in the desert that has the ability to build solar panels. And then out of the back of it have a robot place them.

[Lon Harris]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Lon Harris]

Yep, you got it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Fait accompli. The robots keep making them and then the distance they have to drive, maybe it gets to three, four or five miles. Who cares? The robots driving it. You place this one factory in the center and then you just have solar panels go in all directions. Now somebody will complain about the cacti, but let me tell you something. Losing some cacti and a couple of rabbits get more shade. I think it's going to be okay.

[Lon Harris]

If you drive right now from LA to Vegas. There's a huge solar farm like 3/4 of the way when you're almost in Vegas. But it could be. I mean, it's really big, but it could be 20 times as big. And nobody would really notice because there's nothing. There's like three guys out there, you know, in a trailer most of the time. There's like, you know, Walter White burying his meth. And that's about all that's out there.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, and then what I will say to add to this is to break my reference. You know, there's. There's very few NIMBY people to complain and you don't need a lot of space. And there are water bodies of water and tracks of water. When you drive from San Francisco to la, there's like this. These canals of water, they're putting solar on top of them. They started by covering them so they would get rid of evaporation. But you could now take this and I've talked about this maybe a thousand episodes ago with Molly Wood when she was co hosting Shout out to Molly, Everyone in the Pool is her new podcast. Go subscribe to it. 100 bucks a year. Well worth it. You could. You could. There it is. So I don't know what date this is, but this is California roof. These June 27th this month. Okay, so California roof two irrigation canals with solar panels that makes electricity and cut the evaporation off the water lawn by 70%.

[Lon Harris]

There you go.

[Jason Calacanis]

So this is all within our ability. Now what you could also do is you could do desal desalination powered by the solar panel and batteries and in a canal. And all of this fighting over water and electricity would end. And there's nobody to complain. Because if you're complaining about the solar being put over a canal and it reduces water, then you are a certified idiot. You're a moron. Now, there must be people protesting this. Please. Somebody asked Producer Claude or Producer Grok or Producer Deepseek, is anybody protesting these solar farms and these solar on top of rivers? This is like. There must be. I just can't wait for somebody. Somebody's going to. You know, it's true, Lon, somebody's protesting this.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, poltergeist. There's some Native Americans burial ground.

[Lon Harris]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

This is this Week in hope. Last Week in hope. I'm just giving a little hope here. Everybody's angry about immigration. Trump this. That AI doomerism.

[Lon Harris]

You soaking up all the water for your data centers.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is great. This is great. You can stop complaining, people. We're about to solve energy. If we solve energy, we solve water. If we solve energy and water, we solve agriculture. Good things are happening, folks. See you next week on this Week in Startups.

[Lon Harris]

Bye bye, bye, bye.