Why is Gen Z hates AI?

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups — “Why Gen Z Hates AI?”
Host: Jason Calacanis | Guest: Alex Wilhelm | Date: May 18, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm delve deep into the surprising backlash against artificial intelligence (AI) among Gen Z, especially visible during recent college commencement ceremonies. The discussion touches on the generational divide around AI, the complexities of the current job market, economic anxieties, privacy issues, startup challenges, and the evolving landscape of AI technology. The hosts also explore societal reactions to AI, how automation is affecting tech industry jobs, and the future of entrepreneurship in the face of rapid technological change.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Gen Z’s Disenchantment with AI

• College Commencement Booing (05:01–15:00)

  • Eric Schmidt’s University of Arizona commencement speech about AI’s transformative effects was met with skepticism and even boos.
    • Eric Schmidt: “There is a fear in your generation, if the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating...” (06:20)
    • Jason: “It felt a little bit condescending…It might not be that they're scared, it might be that they feel like they've been double crossed.” (07:43)
    • Graduates are not “afraid” per se, but skeptical due to economic realities and the sense that tech leaders underplay the negative impacts on job prospects.
  • Second Example: Gloria Caulfield (UCF) brings up AI as “the next industrial revolution” and receives an audible wave of disapproval from students. (12:13–13:51)
    • Jason: “She's shocked. They both were kind of taken back. Okay, I struck a chord.” (12:59)

• Underlying Causes of Gen Z Resistance

  • Students have practical experience with AI tools like ChatGPT, used throughout their degrees.
  • They observe tech layoffs and hear industry leaders touting jobless futures.
  • Culturally, many see AI as “inauthentic” and contributing to the “toxic” side of tech.

2. The Generational and Cultural Divide (15:15–18:04)

• Alex: “It would be weird to have kind of a countercultural moment a la the hippies in the 60s, Jason. Because of AI, but we could actually have one from that perspective.” (15:15)
• Jason compares the current rejection of AI to the anti-war protests of the 1960s: “They do not want to be drafted into your AI Army. I think that's it.” (15:23)
• Data from the University of Utah’s Kim C. Gardner Policy Institute shows that while data centers provide some jobs, tech layoffs far outpace job creation in AI infrastructure—deepening the employment anxiety among graduates. (16:03–17:22)

3. AI’s Disruptive Impact on Academic and Work Life

• NYT essay “What AI Did to My College Class” (Theo Baker, Stanford): AI’s arrival led to widespread academic dishonesty and cynicism about the value of education. (18:04)
  • Alex quoting Baker: “I don't know a single person who hasn't used AI to get through some assignment in college.”
  • Jason: “That's the p doom that people are feeling. What is the point of anything if the machines can do everything?” (19:24)
• Rising wealth inequality within academic and tech circles as some “hit the AI jackpot” while others face bleak job prospects.

4. Startups, Economic Anxiety, and Radical Self-Reliance (23:33–28:59)

• Layoffs signal investor prudence and automation—not personal or company failures any longer.
• Alex: “If you own your own company...you have some buffer or bulwark against these layoffs.” (23:40)
• Jason advocates for “radical self-reliance”: “Anybody can do it at this point in time, anybody can do it.” (24:54)
• Discussion of healthcare, childcare, and social safety nets as barriers to entrepreneurship. Jason suggests relocating to countries with stronger social infrastructure as one solution. (27:25)

5. The AI Startup Landscape: Duopoly Worries (28:59–36:16)

• Vast majority of AI startup revenue is captured by Anthropic and OpenAI; smaller players make up a negligible “long tail.” (28:59)
• Jason: “So I guess the question is, is it a duopoly now? Certainly is starting to look like one in terms of how people are using tokens.” (31:48)
• Most startups are built on top of foundational model providers, which could outcompete them by integrating features directly.
• Gross margins at major companies are negative due to high infrastructure investment—“Uber vs. Lyft on tokens.” (33:39)

6. Privacy, Surveillance, and AI in Public Security (49:19–63:00)

• Case Study: Flock Safety debacle in Austin, TX
  • Flock’s AI-powered license plate cameras helped police solve a multi-site shooting after Austin itself had removed the system for privacy reasons. (49:50)
  • Jason: “Am I willing to give up my license plate data...for catching criminals more quickly? Now, how does this relate to Austin?...Put it all aside. Austin City council got rid of Flock…[but] suspects were found…as they entered Flock-supported Manor.” (53:35)
• Debate around privacy versus public safety; examples of public backlash against surveillance tech (e.g., Ring and Amazon halting police partnerships).
• Alex: “The idea that those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither does come to mind. Why did this happen without a national conversation is what I'm kind of stuck on. A bit like AI earlier.” (54:39)
• Jason suggests audit trails, local agency, and retention limits as privacy safeguards; emphasizes bottom-up adoption vs. state surveillance. (57:32–60:51)

7. Audience Q&A and Notable Startups

• Using AI for Patent Filing: Jason is wary; “Patents are a pretty sophisticated area of the law...You could use AI with human in the loop.” (63:48–65:27)
• Running AI Models Locally: Not a fad; “it’s the future,” especially for privacy- and cost-conscious organizations. (65:49–67:03)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the generational divide:
  • Jason (07:43): “It might be that they feel like they've been double crossed—that Google and Eric Schmidt representing Google has bad intent. They know that the horse has left the barn...there just aren’t going to be the number of jobs for them.”
• AI impact on education:
  • Alex quoting Theo Baker (18:04): “AI is everything. We talk about it at the dining halls and in history classes, on dates and while smoking with friends…Cheating has become omnipresent. I don't know a single person who hasn't used AI to get through some assignment in college.”
• On anti-AI sentiment as counterculture:
  • Jason (15:23): “They do not want to be drafted into your AI Army. Like, really interesting analogy between now and the 60s.”
• On embracing entrepreneurship:
  • Jason (24:54): “Anybody can do it at this point in time. Anybody can do it.”
• On privacy and surveillance:
  • Alex (54:39): “Why did this happen without a national conversation is what I'm kind of stuck on. A bit like AI earlier.”
  • Jason (57:32): “If crime is above a certain level, these things are deployed. If crime is below a certain level, maybe it’s not as necessary.”
• On the future of AI startups:
  • Jason (31:48): “So I guess the question is, is it a duopoly now? Certainly is starting to look like one in terms of how people are using tokens.”
• On local agency over surveillance:
  • Jason (59:59): “These are deployed locally...that actually to me means people have agency and are making their own decisions.”

---

Important Timestamps

• 05:01 – Eric Schmidt’s commencement speech and student backlash begins
• 12:13–13:51 – UCF’s Gloria Caulfield gets booed discussing AI at commencement
• 15:15–15:23 – Comparison of anti-AI backlash to 1960s counterculture
• 16:03–17:22 – Job market stats: data center jobs vs tech layoffs
• 18:04–19:24 – Stanford NYT essay on how AI transformed college life
• 23:33–28:59 – Entrepreneurship as answer to automation and layoffs
• 28:59–36:16 – Startup AI revenue concentration and duopoly concerns
• 49:19–57:32 – Surveillance tech debate (Flock Safety, Ring, privacy vs safety)
• 63:48–65:27 – Audience Q&A: AI and patent law
• 65:49–67:08 – Audience Q&A: Running AI locally vs cloud

---

Tone & Style

The episode is driven by Jason Calacanis’s characteristic blend of directness, skepticism, and pragmatic optimism. The conversation is fast-paced, data-driven, yet laced with candid admissions (from both hosts) about generational anxiety, uncertainty about AI’s social impacts, and a willingness to question prevailing tech industry narratives.

---

Closing Thoughts

This episode presents a nuanced and multifaceted exploration of why Gen Z’s relationship to AI is increasingly fraught, tying together job insecurity, authenticity, privacy, and generational skepticism. It offers founders, investors, and tech enthusiasts a deeper understanding of where the AI backlash is coming from, and why addressing cultural as well as technical realities is vital for the future of innovation.

Transcript

[Jason Calacanis]

Young people have been told their jobs are going away. It might not be that they're scared. They feel like they've been double crossed that Google and Eric Schmidt representing Google has bad intent. They know that the horse has left the barn and they understand that there just aren't going to be the number of jobs for them.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Suddenly they're trying to get an apartment, pay for their own healthcare. This really just highlights the gap between business, excitement about AI and the average consumer.

[Jason Calacanis]

A lot of them did their degrees in the age of ChatGPT. These people have had ChatGPT for two years. They' been using it. They understand it really well.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think this week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a Sock2report fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com twist century, your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.org iotwist and use the code Twist and Deal founders scale faster on deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com twist to learn more.

[Jason Calacanis]

Hey everybody. May oh my God. It's May 18, 2026. Ski season long behind us. Summer long gone, right around the corner. My Lord. I've got a lot of summer plans. I gotta be around the globe doing all in stuff in Paris and Foundry University in Japan. But we're going to have a Twist All Star summer. We're going to do our All Stars again. The top 10 guests of all time. We're going to try to get them to come back and then reveal them. So over like six weeks of the summer, we're going to have the top 10 twist all stars. If you want to just tweet at us, DM us on all the social platforms, give us your best suggestions. But I know people are going to want like Chris Sacca back or Brian Alvey, my friend. He always interviews me. Kind of fun. Just so many great guests we've had over the years who have just been Rory Sutherland. Everybody thinks I vibe with Rory really well. So we're going to try to do those Twist All Stars for the summer so we have something to look forward to when we're at the beaches or whatever. You know, you get your Kindle, you read a book, whatever. You can also listen to a great pod.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We Love a summer. We love traveling. And we're going to make sure everyone. That twist does not stop no matter what goes on. Three shows a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the train rolls on.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, this thing has been going for 15 years. I'm like, somebody's like, are you ever going to stop? I'm like, I like it. So, no, it's. It's a lot of fun. So let's keep going.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, let's keep going. First though, Jason, I think we should give a quick applaud. Applauds. Applause. Applaud. There you go.

[Jason Calacanis]

We could applaud. Applaud and. Yeah, I'm just going to press here. Get my haptic. I wear my plot on my wrist some days because I don't like the way it hangs on my T shirt. I prefer it on my wrist when I'm wearing a suit. I prefer it on my suit. Okay. Different shorts for different folks. This thing has been incredible for me. Hiking and rocking. Yesterday I did massive rocking. I had dropped my daughter off at like a game show, kids birthday party. They didn't want the parents in there. So I got two hours to walk around the Dominion, which is like this incredible, like, super mall in North Texas. Like, you just like, everything's there. Patsy Grimaldi's pizzeria from Brooklyn open an outlet there. There's an Apple store, obviously, and everything in between. But I'm walking around, I put my notes on, I walk. That's when I get all my great ideas. So I'm rocking with a 20 pound pack on my back, and, man, I'm just giving all my ideas to my plod. Sync it up when I get home, look at my notes, and I am back in business. No ideas left behind.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Is this the Dominion Ridge Shopping Center, Jason, that you refer to.

[Jason Calacanis]

Am I pronouncing Chris? Is it the Domain or Dominion?

[Alex Wilhelm]

There's Domain in Texas, in Austin, I mean, and then there's the Dominion in San Antonio.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, here.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's big, y'. All. Trust me, I looked it up.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's large, it's giant. And it is like. To call it a shopping center is a huge understatement. What it is, is a town. Like, it's almost like they made a town. And the town has some streets that are open to cars. Most streets are not. And they put a bunch of housing there and then they put a bunch of retail there. It's nuts how much stuff there is in this sprawling complex. It's about 15 minutes north of, like, 6th Street. If everybody knows going to 6th street,

[Alex Wilhelm]

you need to plod note pen s And if you want to save a couple bucks when you turn your note taking life on its head for the better, go to Plaud AI twist P L A U D A I slash twist Use the code twist save 10%. Don't lose track of what matters. All right, Jason. The biggest news, I think, over the weekend that everyone couldn't stop talking about was the popularity of bringing up artificial intelligence at university and college commencements. People just ate this up. They couldn't help themselves.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it turns out AI surprisingly unpopular at commencement addresses. We're in that commencement season, and of course, you want your most successful alumni to give a commencement speech or your biggest donors. I don't know how it exactly works, but Eric Schmidt, famous former CEO of Google, essentially went to University of Arizona, I guess, and he gave a talk that. I guess I should just play here, or we should play here. And I'll just give some feedback on it. Here's two minutes, and I'll. I'll talk over it, I guess, but it's pretty wild. And I'll say pause if I want to interject.

[Alex Wilhelm]

All right, here we go.

[Eric Schmidt]

So today we stand on this edge of another technological transformation, one that will be larger, faster, and more consequential than what came before. It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have.

[Jason Calacanis]

Relationship.

[Eric Schmidt]

I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear.

[Jason Calacanis]

A fear?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, that's a serious boom.

[Eric Schmidt]

There is a fear in your generation, if the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create. And I understand that fear. It's rational. And it's amplified every day by social media platforms, with algorithm that earned, with

[Jason Calacanis]

great Facebook, TikTok, fear earns Instagram, Twitter,

[Eric Schmidt]

and their anxiety drives engagement.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, okay.

[Eric Schmidt]

But I want to say something to you this evening as clearly as I can, okay? To speak of the future as though it has already been decided is to surrender the one thing that actually matters. You are surrendering your agency. The future does not simply arrive. It gets built in laboratories, in dormitories, in startups, in classrooms, in legislators. And the people building it will be you and people like you. The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. We do not know. We do not know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, so let's pause this is, you know, and there is like a six minute version. The whole talk has not been released. Young people have been told that their jobs are going away and they are hearing this and then they're talking to people who've graduated ahead of them, right? So they were freshmen at one point, now they're seniors graduating. They've got friends who went into the job market already and they're probably going into the job market. They might have siblings and certainly they have parents. And they're seeing that Big tech is laying off a ton of jobs. The leaders of Big Tech are talking about ubiquitous, about no work, about half the jobs going away. When they hear Dario at Anthropic or, you know, Elon talk about, hey, it's going to be a world of abundance and working is going to be optional. And this kind of stuff, you know, I think resonates with young people because they're thinking, well, what am I inheriting here? Like, what is the job that I'm going to have? And the problem with his speech is he was kind of talking down to them a bit. It felt a little bit condescending. He's like, hey, I know you're scared. It might not be that. They're scared, it might be they're, they feel like they've been double crossed. It might feel to them like you have bad intent, that Google and Eric Schmidt representing Google has bad intent. So instead of him saying, hey, the AI industry needs to listen and the AI industry has to be thoughtful about this and let me tell you all the ways this is gonna be great. And then he kind of lectures them, hey, and you know what, you guys can't pretend like you're not going to have a role in this. You're gonna have a role in this. And they know that's kind of bullshit. They know that they don't have a role in it. They know that the horse has left the barn. They see it because a lot of them did their degrees in the age of ChatGPT. These people have had ChatGPT for two years. They've been using it. Their students are like startups. They're looking for edge, they're looking for ways and tools to try. They've been using ChatGPT to get through school. They understand it really well, I think, and they understand that there just aren't going to be the number of jobs for them. I know we're going to keep having this debate over and over again and people are going to look at different numbers, but they're going to just have A harder time in the job force. That's my personal belief. That's their belief. Clearly founders scale faster on deal. That's the deal. You can grow your company without borders and you can set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere like a modern startup or large company does. And deal is gonna get all the visas handled fast so you can get back to building. There's a great talent war that's going on right now and you need people with superpowers for your startup to be competitive, to beat your competitors, to get your products to market. But anytime you try to grow your team with overseas hires, oh my lord, you've got to reinvent the wheel and you gotta navigate a team tangled web of international laws, regulations and you can't get these things wrong. Folks you want to onboard new staffers in other countries, you want to get them set up on your network nice and secure it access, all that good stuff. You want to manage their benefits. Trust me, this is all a nightmare unless you partner with Deel. They are the people stack for startups. They're going to take care of all the onboarding payroll, hr. It benefits, everything you need quickly in one place done perfectly. So visit deal.com twist that's D E L.com twist and they think AI, I think is also lame and inauthentic. I think there's like a little bit of a cultural thing, but I don't know the nature of the school. I think there's also like the anti billionaire thing. Like why is a rich guy coming here telling me that like my relationships are going to be mitigated by AI? That was another weird one. Like he's like your relationships like hospitals, everything's going to be AI. I don't think people want that future. Certainly these kids don't want that future.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, I think this really just highlights the the gap between business excitement about AI and the average consumer. Especially I would say the recent college graduate who is going into the workforce probably for the first time. Suddenly they're trying to get an apartment, pay for their own healthcare and then they're com coming to age in this kind of AI era. But Jason, this is not the only clip from this commencement cycle that shows a very public complaint about AI. So go ahead and give a quick listen to this.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay. This is one I haven't seen.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, University of Central Florida. And watch how surprised this woman is.

[Jason Calacanis]

Who is this woman?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Gloria Caulfield. She's a real estate development exec. That was one of the speakers. Oh, it's Right there on the screen at the Tavistock Development Company. VP of Strategic Alliances. So a local business leader is how

[Jason Calacanis]

I think about her. Here we go. That said, we are living in a time of profound change. That's an understatement, right? Profound change. Change is exciting. Very exciting. And let's face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

She's shocked. They both were kind of taken back. Okay, I struck a chord. Yeah, you did, yeah. She's. She's a bit frazzling.

[Alex Wilhelm]

There's one more round of booze.

[Jason Calacanis]

Was not a factor in our lives. Interesting. Okay, we. We've got a bipolar topic here. I see. Okay. And now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands and

[Eric Schmidt]

wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

Can't believe it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

She can't believe it. Also. I think she meant polarizing, not bipolar. But you know what, when you're extemporizing on the podium, I forget.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I mean, sure, two. Two different polars. I think we get the drift here. She's hit on something. I think both of these have hit on something. This generation maybe feels like this isn't in the best interest of humanity, by the way. It's kind of what we've all been saying in our own industry is like, this is good. Is screen time good? After what people saw from social media and screen time and the algorithm, which, by the way, the algorithm which Eric Schmidt mentioned in his first one, that was kind of the first manifestation of machine learning that hit consumers in a major way that they became aware of as well. Self driving would be the other one. So when they think about AI, they think, oh, it knows what I'm thinking. It's listening to me, it's giving me targeted ads, it's sending me videos it thinks I'm going to be interested in. And then if I interact with them, it sends me more. And self driving is like the other piece. And I think they're probably looking at it going, yeah, this tech stuff is toxic and it's not good for society. And we probably want to hang out with our friends and not have this in the palm of our hands. I think it's. They're going to opt out of it. I think they might be looking at it going, if you don't want us as workers, we're going to figure something else out.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It would be weird to have kind of a countercultural moment a la the hippies in the 60s, Jason. Because of AI, but we could actually have one from that perspective. I.

[Jason Calacanis]

It feels like the anti War movement. I think that's a very good observation. It does feel like Vietnam or something. They're like, this is their Vietnam. Like, we don't want anything to do with this. You guys are shoving it down our throat. We do not want to be drafted into your AI Army. I think that's it. Like, really interesting analogy between now and the 60s. I don't want to be drafted to go to Vietnam and go to this war halfway around the world. And I. I think these kids are like, I don't want to be drafted into some AI slavery where I'm using these tools that's sucking my life out of me and it's replicating me, and then I'm out of a job. Yeah. Well, this is an interesting moment in time.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I want to bring up a data point that I saw that I think is really salient to this conversation. So the University of Utah's Kim C. Gardner Policy Institute put out a very interesting paper, Jason. And these are the critical charts. So when the kids are talking about, you know, concern about the job market, I think this is a good data point. For those on the audio version, this is four charts. Essentially, we're looking at the construction workforce for all US data centers through 2030, those in Utah, and then the US data center operations workforce growth over time, and then the same for Utah, because again, it's from a Utah university. But what matters, Jason, is if you look at this, the construction jobs that data centers are supposed to create will dramatically decline after those projects are done. Which kind of makes sense. But what about the jobs that will be created by them directly? Well, the answer is in the low automation case here, they total about 65,000 by 2030. Technology companies have already cut 100,000 jobs this year. So all the data center jobs by 2030 are less than the layoffs we've seen in the first year and a half. And that, I think, just underscores why people are worried, and maybe, maybe rightly so, I don't think we can afford to not invest in the future. I'm still a free market capitalist guy, but I empathize with these poor students. I remember being an afraid college graduate worrying about getting an apartment and buying forks.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. And there's a socialist movement kind of moving. The democratic socialist movement. The. The government should take better care of its citizens. We should have universal health care. There should be more job loyalty. All of this stuff is kind of coalescing in a anti billionaire, anti progress, pro socialist kind of maelstrom. And here we are, folks. It's I guess a commencement address is when the generations come together. And this generation apparently does not like to be talked down to and told how exciting this is. Because they don't see it as exciting.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, no. There was a viral essay from the New York Times that came out over the weekend. It was called what AI did to My College Class, written by a Stanford University senior called Theo Baker. Jason, I'm just going to read you a couple of quotes from this and I think it explains why college students who are the most AI forward, I think generation correctly, as you said, are maybe a little bit skeptical. So quoting from Theo here, AI is everything. We talk about it at the dining halls and in history classes, on dates and while smoking with friends at the gym and in communal dorm bathrooms. For some, AI has opened the door to staggering wealth. But for many who came to Stanford when a degree seemed like a guaranteed ticket to a high paying job, the door has been slammed shut. Going on Cheating has become omnipresent. I don't know a single person who hasn't used AI to get through some assignment in college. Moving on. In our tech enabled, newly AI powered world, students were increasingly fudging just about everything. They would embezzle dorm funds to spend on their and lie about having Covid to get the Uber Eats credit the school offered to those in quarantine. Half of laptops in any lectures seem to be open to ChatGPT or Claude, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it seems that AI arrived all at once to universities and instantly dissolved the foundations of kind of a liberal arts higher education much faster than it crushed the workforce. So these students in their cynicism are saying we're up to our necks in this and we don't like it. And that makes me legitimately concerned about the future.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's the worst nightmare of every founder. You've built a product, everything's working great, then real users start flooding in and suddenly it all breaks. What a disaster. You need to get it back up and running, and you got to do that fast. You're looking like an amateur. That's why you need a partner like Sentry. Applications can break in many different ways, but Sentry sees everything. You'll get all the relevant details like stack traces, commits, releases, and even the developers who push that problem code in the first place. With Sentry, you're not going to be jumping around between different tools trying to figure out what happened. And Seer, Sentry's AI debugging agent, uses all this data and context to identify the root cause of the problem and suggest a fix. It can even take a look at your code before it ships and warn you if any problems are likely. Try Seer and Sentry for free. If you're a this week in Startups listener at Sentry IO Twist, use the code Twist for $240 in Sentry credits. Make sure you use that code. Make sure you use that URL Sentry IO Twist. So they know your uncle jcal sent you. Will they get jobs? Yeah, I think that probably most of them will get jobs. They're super smart. There is a weird thing going on in the Bay Area where the people who did go work for the frontier models are like instantly being worth $10 million in liquid stock, that there's like a massive secondary. And so there's been a lot of hand wringing about that. Basically a have and have nots in Silicon Valley where one group of people hit this generation's Google slash, Uber slash. Pick the company that meta Facebook and if you hit one of those, you made a couple million bucks in your stock options. If you held them for a couple years, you made maybe 10 million, 20 million bucks and you could buy a house. Well, now it's really weird because the frontier models are in such competition for this specific type of person. The people at those are now they're the haves and they have a lot because these companies went to a trillion dollar valuation very quickly, which previously only happened with like a handful of companies got to a trillion. Right? We're talking about rarefied air there. So yeah, there's a little bit of resentment between the 0.1% and the 0.5%. No, it's like literally like the top tenth of a percent versus the bottom tenth of that same first percent. Like they're all in the 1%, but there's some animosity there or some hand wringing about it. And then there's also like, what is my. What is the point of all this? That's the p doom that people are feeling. What is the point of anything if the machines can do everything? And once you've experienced that, where you're like, I can do my homework with ChatGPT and nobody cares and my professors like reading the essays with ChatGPT. This is all a farce. It's all performative or I'm building something at my company and there was an Atlassian employee who got laid off who explained everything they built and obviously super competent person and he was kind of lamenting like, I did all this stuff and then I basically trained AI to replace me. There's people who are well aware in our industry that the work they're doing replaces themselves. And so we're getting to. Yeah, there it is. Former Aussie tech employee reveals what he built in viral video. It's a very interesting video. I watched, like, half of it. It's incredibly technical. He goes through step by step, everything he built. And then he got laid off. And you're like, this guy's a genius. How did he get laid off?

[Alex Wilhelm]

He fired that guy. Well, I mean, ultimately, I think now layoffs, Jason, have gone from a shameful act to actually one that signals to investors two things. One, that you're finding efficiencies from automation already, and two, that you're conserving capital, AKA gunpowder, if you will, for the future to be more AI first. So I think investors dig it, but sucks for people who are suddenly cut loose. It's brutal for them.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is a level of choppiness I didn't exactly expect all at once. Pretty interesting.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can I actually underscore something you told me a few months ago? So we were talking about this issue because we've been talking about it now for 18 months or so.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You said that people should go out there and start a company, and I thought that was a little bit tricky because not everyone has resources, access, never. But I think the reason why I like that now is, to me, it is the only way to escape the permanent underclass. Because if you are a worker for someone else, you're a cost center. But if you own your own company at any size, you're at least in control of your own destiny. So I don't know if that's the way to, you know, dramatic wealth as we consider it in technology circles. But I think if you own your own company, in whatever it is you do, at a minimum, you have some buffer or bulwark against these layoffs we're seeing. So I think I've come around to your thinking on that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, the writing was on the wall, and I just extrapolated. If this continues, if the layoffs continue, and there's not a lot of hiring, so then what is the best thing to do? Now there is this preconceived victimhood, like talking down to people like, oh, you know, not everybody can start a company. Not everybody has the motivation, not everybody has the skill set. Like, I've been doing this for a while. I've invested in six or 700 companies. Like, I can tell you, anybody can do it. Like, anybody can do it at this point in time, anybody can do it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

Anybody can put up a shingle, Anybody can build a website. Anybody can start, you know, a sales process. All the answers are out there. Chat, GPT and you know, quad and everything will do half the work for you. So if you are going to get laid off and you don't want to do this dance anyway, building, you know, a large number of small companies, and small companies means, like making 500k to $5 million a year. Not venture scale, but delightful scale for the people who own them. Okay, here we go. And in media, we've seen this happen. So if you look at the substack podcasting, everybody leaving big media, they've already experienced it. They experienced massive layoffs over the last 20 years since newspapers and magazines contracted. Buzzfeed and Huffington Post and Vox, all the things that were supposed to replace them, they also imploded. They also either shut down or laid everybody off. Vice is the other one. You know, all those are gone. So what did they do? They went and they started independent publications, podcasts, consultancies to

[Alex Wilhelm]

work.

[Jason Calacanis]

Those are the same people. Those are the same journalists in a lot of cases who are like, that's terrible advice. Jake Howell. You know, not everybody can start a company. And I'm like, except you guys all just did that. Except you all just did that. And it's like, then people realize, oh, if necessity forces me to start it, then I will start it. And so that is when there's a fire, you know, and like, you're running out of money, you will get very creative. And the fear of starting a startup is a lot better than working at Starbucks as a professional. You know, like, that would be the disaster case for like somebody who is a writer at Gawker or Vice.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Why isn't someone right now talking about removing obstacles and barriers and friction to making small companies more viable? Like, why haven't we talked more about healthcare portability? Why aren't we actually trying to support these people? Because I agree with 98% of what you just said. Call it that. And I think that you're right, it is possible. But if you have kids and you're a one income family and you need to quit your job to go do a thing, that's a big barrier. I want to.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, that is for sure down.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I want to, I want to decimate it. I want to let people be free. But I feel like we're not addressing some of the structural things that would take your point and just turbocharge it and help A lot of people, if

[Jason Calacanis]

health care is the issue, just move to Europe and start a company there, you know, and then you get the health care and then you have to just pay more in taxes and there's some regulations and it might take you six months to get your company fired up. So what you have to do is keep your company domiciled in America and then live in, and live in Spain or Italy or France or Canada somewhere where they have socialized medicine and the problem is solved. But of course, people are also scared of moving. But we've lived for many decades with a beautiful, safe employment environment that maybe we should have appreciated more when we were complaining about it. And now it's a bit chaotic and you're kind of on your own. You were on your own all that time. You just had companies that would keep you employed for 20 or 30 years. And Americans, when they came to America, guess what? They were on their own too. They had to go figure it out. So we just had like a hundred year delusion where it was just like really easy. Now it's going back to like it was for our forefathers and mothers who came here. And it was hard. It's just going to be hard folks, and you're going to have to figure it out for yourself. Radical self reliance. Self reliance is what people need to learn in school. Self reliance like radical self reliance like I will survive through sheer force of will. And you know, for some people it's like I would rather survive through Mondami making the buses free and you know, whatever, you know. And then other people are like, I'll just move to Texas, I'll figure it out.

[Alex Wilhelm]

The information reports that Anthropica and OpenAI generate 89% of all AI startup revenue, or basically revenue made by AI startups. Jason. And there's this particularly terrifying chart. I'm curious what you think about this and if this is bad news for startups. But as you can see here going back to July of 2023, there's been a dramatic ramp in revenue from the major AI companies. And then if you see those little gray bars, that's pretty much everyone else in the AI startup game. Kind of a shocking data set.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure. Tokens are being sold at an alarming rate by two major companies. Cursor has a couple of billion in revenue. 2 billion, I think 3 billion cognition. And then 29 others are sharing like 7 billion it looks like. If this is correct and this is a quarterly chart, I think this is

[Alex Wilhelm]

as the data is released. I don't think we have exact monthly.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, no, it's monthly. Yeah, it looks like it's monthly. So the scale is monthly or is it 1, 2, 3, 4? No, it's quarterly chart. Are there indentations between the quarters? Yes. Okay, so it is a monthly chart. So it's a monthly chart based on estimates that the information pulled together from a total of 30 companies. 32, 34.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Including OpenAI and Anthropic. Yep.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's not your imagination. Risk and regulation really are ramping up quickly. Your customers don't just want assurances from you. They expect proof of your security just to do business with you. That is why Vanta is a game changer for you and your startup for your business. Vanta's AI powered platform automates your entire compliance process. Whether you're Preparing for a SoC2 or you're running an enterprise GRC program or you're doing an audit. Van is going to worry about the security so your team can focus on building a great product, moving your business forward. Some of our favorite companies like Ramp and Ryder, they're spending 82% less time on their audits right now because they work with Vanta. We've all heard the rumors about shady compliance and security companies. I don't need to get into the details. They were taking shortcuts apparently with their clients accounts. Allegedly. That's why you need a trusted partner like Vanta now more than ever. So get started today at vanta.com/twist. That's V A N T A dot com slash twist. Okay, so there's a long tail of companies obviously providing stuff and this is only startups. This doesn't have the revenue from Amazon web Services, Google Cloud and Azure. Right. They're not included in here.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Not included in here. But it's worth noting that Anthropic doesn't take out the 20% or so it pays to certain cloud providers when reporting its annualized run rate. So there is a little bit of that kind of hidden inside the data JSON, but not enough to really change the overall picture.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. So I guess the question is, is it a duopoly now certainly is starting to look like one in terms of how people are using tokens. Yes, it would be a duopoly. And the companies that the interesting thing is those other 30 companies, many of them are probably using, there's like a double counting here. So like some number of them are using Claude or OpenAI as their back end. So maybe the revenue is getting double counted. There is the other possibility, but 80 billion in revenue is the total here or something?

[Alex Wilhelm]

80 billion in annualized revenue, about $6.6 billion per month. One more data point for people following along. Six months ago, the two major labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, were actually 4 1/2% less of the total startup AI revenue out there. So they're actually gaining share on these startups, which is a little staggering because we've seen companies like Cursor grow quickly, cognition grow quickly, 11 labs is a rocket ship, Harvey Lagora, etc. And they're still losing ground. This actually has me worried, like legitimately concerned about startups in the app layer for now.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like, it's really two different things. This is like combining the app layer and the infrastructure layer. It tokens feel more like infrastructure to me than the actual end product. So these companies are selling tokens at a massive loss right now. So the other way to look at this is this is like Uber versus Lyft in those days where they were both losing a lot of money per ride, and then at some point they've got to make these profitable businesses. But they did kind of build a duopoly and it looks like now then, who's the Uber, who's the Lyft in this?

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's interesting. So you think that their gross margins on inference today are negative?

[Jason Calacanis]

Of course, yeah. With all the infrastructure they're building out, all the. I mean, the humans they have working for them, even if they're paid massively, probably a small percentage of their costs, it's really the infrastructure. So they're certainly losing money as they build out this infrastructure. And the infrastructure is questionable how long it has a practical use. You know, four years, five years, six years. Core weave, Amazon.

[Alex Wilhelm]

All we've talked about this on the

[Jason Calacanis]

show have had this debate and discussion of like, what's the reasonable life? And then what do they do after their primary lifespan? Do they have a use or not? They probably do have some use.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay. But the anthropic Space Xiai deal, I think actually puts a good floor underneath the value of GPUs, because I think most of the processors in Colossus 1 from Xai are like H1 hundreds, I think, which is now a pretty dated chip, frankly. But anthropic ones, that they're going to power up the whole data center using their stuff.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, they're two years old. So if they're two years old,

[Alex Wilhelm]

it's a little bit less time than I thought, I guess.

[Jason Calacanis]

I guess they're probably in year three of their own life. Somewhere between year two and three, maybe they're at like 24 months, 30 months of lifespan. So they probably have half of it left to go. Yeah, there is to be a consolidation in this. And then this obviously doesn't show open source tokens or other services. So it's, it's an interesting, it's an interesting mental model to start building, is where is the revenue going? And right now it's on tokens. People want to buy tokens and that means there'll be many people selling tokens soon.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You've talked a lot about how you know there's a risk to building on top of other people's models because you're at risk of training them with your own use about what they're so. So when I look at this chart, Jason, I wonder if these major AI labs now have access to so much information from startups that use them, that actually. Application layer startups today that are building on top of these models are just going to fall backwards down the slope because look at how fast coworkers advancing, look at how fast Codex is improving. They're building OpenGL into Codex. I mean, it feels like if you're a startup, you're just hoping that your market is not big enough to warrant a new set of anthropic cowork plugins that could just rip the ground out from underneath you. And it makes me bummed that startups seem to be at such a disadvantage to these companies.

[Jason Calacanis]

If you own the tokens and you have the foundational model, building an application like Harvey into OpenAI or building Codex into OpenAI, like, yeah, that is a significant risk to those other products. You do need to actually think, are they going to, in their search for revenue and profits, going to go direct? And there'll be OpenAI for lawyers, OpenAI for accountants, OpenAI for creatives, et cetera. But this doesn't account for Gemini's revenue because it's not a startup. So this is not a complete picture. This is defined as startups and it removes many of the players.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What happened to Google's AI prowess? Do you remember the end of last year when Gemini 3 preview dropped and everyone was like, oh, they're on top. Google's run away with it, back from the dead. And then they just didn't say anything for like six months?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, people, well, they're, they've got, I think, more users using AI than OpenAI because of putting it at the top of search. So I think they have more technically users, not dedicated AI users. Yeah, but this really is just about selling tokens. And you have two token providers and then you have applications all put into a bucket of startups. Startups design, I guess, is divine, defined by not yet public. So this is a look at private companies. Not. And it excludes the public ones, which gives it, you know, a bit of. I'm sure if you put Google and Amazon and Azure's revenue from this space, it would look much different.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, actually that's fun. I'll do that for Wednesday because I think we got some better, more concrete AI revenue reporting from the hyperscalers. So I'll see what I can dig up for us.

[Jason Calacanis]

Are they breaking that out? I wonder if they're breaking out, what percentage of their revenue is tokens being purchased from them? Because if they're selling H1 hundreds for six bucks an hour, H200 for six bucks an hour, that's different than providing tokens. So this is like apples and bananas and a, you know, a fruit bowl all being counted in the same kind of, you know, bucket. It is interesting to look at though, for sure. Two companies are running away with the

[Alex Wilhelm]

revenue a lot of things. Like Google saying revenue from products built on gen models grew by 800%. That's not so helpful.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Anyways, they're not going to break it out.

[Alex Wilhelm]

All right now, Jason, I want to do a shout out to everyone who's done our bounties. We have two bounties running. We have the AI sidebar, which by the way, we just got a demo turned in that takes into account your changes. Just getting the two people talking through. I played with it this morning. Incredible. Oh, really, Jason? I almost wanted to declare it the winner when I started playing.

[Jason Calacanis]

But we wanted to do one thing just so we are clear. Just do the fact checking. I think I made that decision on the last one because we had so many different Personas, I can't even follow it when it's doing it. So we said just do fact checking. I see here the Personas should have a troll and a comedy writer. That's not actually accurate. We said last week. So Jacob, make sure this is correct and everybody understands it. Just do the real time fact checker. One simple solution, one simple part of this, that we should then judge everybody buddy by and we're going to give everybody another week to just finalize what they're working on. But you actually used one.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And was it doing the fact checking in real time?

[Alex Wilhelm]

It was doing the fact checking in real time and it had these simply amazing customization features. You could say, only give me answers after 80 words. Only give me responses after 160 words. You could change the personality, you could change how they talk. And it's a website. You don't have to download it. I didn't have to download a GitHub repo build codex, install it on my damn Mac.

[Jason Calacanis]

Awesome.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Friday, we're going to have another round of demos for that. And then also, Jason, tell people about the annotated.com bounty. This is one that we're all very excited about internally.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure. And we have this week in startups.com bounties plural, or bounty, singular.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Bounties.

[Jason Calacanis]

Go to either one. Yeah. Or you can go to bounties. So I always tell everybody, make both in case we make a mistake on air. So if you type in bounties or slash bounty, it should work. This is like a little tip from JCAL to employees who don't think about the users. If you think about users, like, they may hear bounty and type in bounties. Or I might say bounties instead of saying bounty, why not have both redirect to the right page? So we have a page here. We're going to keep doing these, I think, on this week in startups, because it's fun and it's interesting and we get to meet people who are builders for Annotated. I wanted to build a service that let you clip something on the web. And so at the web page, if you click on it, you know, the concept here, whoops, sorry, I'm on the page, is to create a sidebar. Anywhere you are on the web, you highlight something. Let's say it's a YouTube video and it says, okay, what do you want to clip from this YouTube video? You pick this starting point, this ending point, you know, these 30 seconds of this podcast. It then makes a landing page with a piece of that media. It could be text from a New York Times article. It could be the transcript in the video of Eric Schmidt we talked about earlier on the program when he was getting booed. And then you could put comments under it. So you log in with your Twitter, your Google, whatever. You have a sidebar. You can clip it. It makes a landing page. So annotated.com Alex Ericschmidt commencement. And then it always links to the original author's work. So it's not stealing. It's fair use, because you're doing commentary. So this is a fair use. This isn't like Archiviz or other places that let you remove a paywall. The intent is not to be remove. Paywall.com, which, listen, everybody uses, is very popular. If you don't have some niche St. Louis Herald subscription and people want to jump the paywall, I think people are kind of cool with it, but we don't want to be wholesale stealing. What we want is you take a small piece and you annotate it, and you put your opinion, you put your thoughts on it. Now, if Alex and I both put in the URL of the same New York Times story, now we can see this New York Times story was also annotated by these other users, and then you can see what they annotated, but nobody can take the whole story. You could take a paragraph. I take a paragraph, that I could respond to yours, you could respond to mine, and it's clear who the original author is, but you get to do some commentary on it. And this came from my frustration with places that just steal content. And also, very often I want to take something and make a new landing page and comment on it and then share it with somebody. Yeah, kind of like a bookmark, but a little bit more with these modern tools. That's my goal.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Now, if I go to, let's say that I have the Chrome extension sidebar installed for annotated.com and I go to a website that I've annotated and you've annotated, do I automatically, under your vision, see both annotations, or do I have to go into the app itself to kind of see the collection of notes about that page?

[Jason Calacanis]

Great question. I mean, I don't have the answer. I do know when you're on that New York Times story, it should show in the annotated sidebar, like the number seven. And if you click that, then when you're walking around the web and you're on a YouTube page and it's like, here's some new audio track. Here's the know, or here's a dire straight song that three people have commented on. It shows you the number three. So it's basically a global annotation system for the web, for podcasts, et cetera. So during a Joe Rogan podcast, you could put in the link to Spotify or the YouTube link or wherever it's hosted, and you can see multiple comments on it. But it's not on Spotify, it's not on YouTube, it's on annotated, not the whole podcast, just the part you want to comment on. And then if that gets taken down, eventually, this acts as a mini archive of that moment.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes, which, by the way, really fricking matters. All of fivethirtyeight. Com just got taken offline. Talk about linkrot. Just gone.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, just gone.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's so depressing. Now, while we're talking about bookmarks, Jason, can I show you something really cool, really quick?

[Jason Calacanis]

Of course.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I don't know if people are building this anyway. And then I reserve the right to split the prize if I think there's, like, multiple good winners.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Fair enough. It is literally the Jason bounty. So I believe you are in charge of it. There's a company called Think With Mark, has their website, thinkwithmark.com and they made an AI bookmark about a year ago. It was, like, $129, and I forgot about it entirely after it came out. They're back with a new one. I want to show this to you because I think this is the first real AI gadget, apart from Plod, that I really want in my life. Take a listen. Last year, our viral Mark launch blew the Internet away.

[Jason Calacanis]

A bookmark that kept track of what you're reading.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But amidst all the noise, we wanted to create something that truly felt like it was built for you. It highlights passages, records your thoughts, and

[Jason Calacanis]

builds a personal library of everything you choose to keep.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And with customization, it's a great way to show the world your taste. Highlighter is where magic happens.

[Jason Calacanis]

It has a scanner allowing you to

[Alex Wilhelm]

save your favorite quote and a voice recorder for your favorite ideas, allowing you

[Jason Calacanis]

to engage with their readings without leaving the moment.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes. So you can literally just take half this bookmark. Take your book or your E reader or whatever it is you're reading in 100 languages, scan it, and then you don't forget the cool quotes. Literally. I just had to return my copy of Gulag Archipelago to the Athenaeum Upstreet. And that means that I lost all the sections that I had marked for later reference, but it was overdue, so I had to give it back. Yeah, I would have literally used this in my life, like, 20 minutes ago. $159. And it's an AI gadget that rocks. See, it's possible.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think there's, like, personal gadgets that are down the long tail. Like, I wouldn't use this one myself. Sure. Why? Because I buy books. I don't ever want to rent books or use a library. I like to buy them and have them because they're so cheap anyway. And then I have a stack of them, and I use my Kindle. My Kindle has all those type of features in it. You can take notes in your Kindle, you know, and the same thing with audible. So since my primary place is those two place places, this doesn't super appeal to me. But I do think for people who are readers, they're going to love this. Just like plod, you know, and these note takers, they have unlocked, you know, a very specific use case for a very specific group of people. If you are a leader, if you're a writer, if you're a researcher, you need these kind of tools. And I could see this one getting better and better. Now there is this axiom. The best camera is the one you have with you. And so the question is always, what do you have with you at the time? And if you have your phone, what would be nice with this device is if you forget your device or you're doing something else, you can take a picture with your phone of that page. And it also allows input from that. So I'm always thinking of multiple ways to get input into it. But what would be great about this is putting it in your brain eventually and being able to have your agent have all this knowledge. And that's really something I've been thinking about. There's something called Obsidian that people are obsessed with, which is some sort of bookmarking knowledge tool for nerds. I've been thinking about this with the domain name begin.com where I just annotated as kind of like in my same thinking, which is I just want to have all my bookmarks in one place, but I use the bookmarking system in TikTok and I use the bookmarking system in Instagram and the bookmarking system in Twitter with folders. I want all of those to be collected into one location and then my agent to have that knowledge. I'm like, you know, I really, I was, you know, in this book, I remember talking, they were talking about this specific designer and I also bookmarked that designer and their, you know, perfect T shirt. Okay, tell me about that. And it knows, it's like, oh, yeah. Well, you read this book and you heard about Calvin Klein and Calvin Klein made this T shirt and then this Japanese company was the origin. Boom. It all comes together in one place. I think that's what we're all trying to use AI for is to build like a little backup brain before neuralink kind of does this for us.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I agree. I kind of a mind palace of our own. Before we move on to flock safety and preventing tragedy. I just want to say libraries do have a. Have a use case that we didn't mention. And I agree with you. I mean, look behind me. This is a fraction of my family's library. We're huge fans of books. We buy more than we can read. But the best part about a library is you're browsing for free. Like, you just walk around. I found, like, six or seven books about Soviet economics, and I just took them all home. I read, like, 10 pages of some of them, and I read the whole book, but I just don't care because it's free anyways. It's wild.

[Jason Calacanis]

What did you learn about Soviet economics? It's fucked.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Did you know that central. That centralizing authority in one country as part of a larger union doesn't work? I mean, for like, 10 billion different reasons. If you want to get really, really opposed to centralized planning, just go study the Soviet economy. It'll radicalize you in a funny way. All right. Jason Garrett Langley, the founder and CEO

[Jason Calacanis]

of Flock, he's been on the program.

[Alex Wilhelm]

He's been on the program several times. You talk to him. Episode 1249, July 21st. I talked to episode 2134 in June of 25. So last year. Now, what's going on? Well, this is the thing that you flagged, and it's him discussing how his group, Flock security, they make cameras and such, helped solve a crime while looking at data from a town that wasn't where the crime was committed. So why does this capture your eye?

[Jason Calacanis]

So there was a shooting in Austin yesterday when I was doing my rucking and I was at the domain. I got like, these alerts, but my daughter has a phone now. It came up on her phone, and it was like, hey, stay out of this area. There's police activity. Then it gave the all clear or whatever, and apparently there was a shooting. Now, block is very controversial because privacy. And do you want your license plates and where you're going in a database? No. Is everybody's answer, like, just, of course I don't. But then if there is a shooting or a robbery in your neighborhood, do you want the criminal's license plate recorded so you can capture them and get your money back? Or arrest them before they harm anybody or rob another house? Of course you want that. So most people have a hard time deciding my personal privacy and where I was and where my license plate got picked up, or the edge case, which is a certainty in the United States, you're going to have a crime at some point. Unless, I don't know, maybe you live way out in Montana. But if you live in a City, there's crime happening all day long.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

So if you assume there's, you know, tens of thousands of crimes in a city, there's hundreds a day, you then have to make a very simple equation. Am I willing to give up my license plate data and somebody could abuse that and then publish it or it could get hacked? And every single place I've been, every single location, let's say you were at a casino. Let's say you were at a. An adult entertainment venue. Let's say you were at, I don't know, a place you're not supposed to be in the middle of the day. I don't, you know, pick your vice that somebody was involved in. I don't know, somebody was scoring drugs in a. In a drug alley, or you just were out late at night. Maybe you don't want people to know you're. Are you willing to give up that privacy and risk that abuse for catching criminals more quickly? Now, how does this relate to Austin? Austin is incredibly democratic and woke in the middle of Texas, so we do have some of the same issues that San Francisco has, like a prosecutor who wouldn't prosecute, you know, crimes as maybe it you would get in Dallas or Houston or San Antonio.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

Put it all aside. Austin City council got rid of Flock for privacy reasons.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yep.

[Jason Calacanis]

Intellectual people. Whatever the shooting happened, they couldn't find the guys driving around who were involved in a multi shooting spree. I don't know what the motivation for this spree was, but they went to multiple locations and discharged a firearm multiple times. They then went to. Was it Lockhart County? They went to a county outside of Austin, got picked up on Flock immediately because somebody had the license plate number, and they were captured immediately. So here. Yesterday, 12 shootings reported across Austin led to a manhunt that involved 200 officers, including SWAT, air and K9 support. Over several hours, the suspects were found and arrested as they entered. Flock supported Manor. I'm sorry. It wasn't Lockhart. It was Manor. M A N O R. If Flock safety wasn't able to aid Manor PD and Austin PD in this case, how many more could have been harmed? So that's basically the message from Garrett Langley. I thought I would bring it up because I am conflicted on this issue myself.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I am too. I just thought I'd go ahead and show some people what this looks like in practice. So there's a. How to phrase this, a community activist group of people who are finding these cameras and putting them on a map. So here is a data set from dflock showing my town of Providence. And these are all the cameras that have been reported. Now, these are not all flocks. There's 177 cameras in this shot of my local area. 155 of them are from flock. So mostly when we're talking about license plate readers and such, we're talking about flock. Their argument to Jason, as I had this talk with the CEO about it, is if you're on a public road, you have no expectation of privacy. And that to me, is actually a pretty good argument. The problem is, I also share your unease about this. I don't really want to be surveilled, and I don't mean to dredge up old, you know, 1776 quotes, but the idea that those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither does come to mind. Why did this happen without a national conversation is what I'm kind of stuck on. A bit like AI earlier.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, technology moves quick and everybody had security cameras. So then if you have a security camera and AI comes out, AI all of a sudden is like, I can tell you what type of car that is, what model it is, what color it is, what the license plate is, and I can tell you who's driving it. And literally, my security systems at my residences sure have a plate reader, face reader, car reader, animal reader. It reads everything, puts it all into a database. And I know when a license plate comes onto the ranch, if that license plate or not is in the database and approved. So I have approved license plates. And then you can take these things a step further. Now, the gate can open or close based on license plates. You can open and close doors and gates based on facial recognition. Now, on a private property, you can do whatever the heck you want. I was about to say public property. Okay, you can also do this. So this is a technology that didn't exist when the forefathers thought of all this stuff. So what is the concern? The concern is the police state abuse. The Stasi nightmare scenario. How do you solve for that? Well, with new technology, it's a very easy solution. You track every single request that gets made and authorized and you audit it. And then the data is kept for six months or a year, and then it is destroyed. And destroying data pretty hard these days because everything's backed up and in cloud. So even when people think they've deleted something, is it actually deleted? We saw that with Savannah Guthrie's mother being kidnapped, they didn't have a subscription to the Nest camera. And Google was able to recover the Clip of it. So you're like, wait a second. It's like, okay, Google is running the paid version on everybody's camera, even if they don't have it. Or maybe they're running the last week.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, Recover is doing a lot of work in that. In that room. I saw the same word that you did. I will say that there does seem to be a public backlash to this stuff. Do you recall the super bowl advertisement from ring that was going to call the cops if dogs were out and about in the neighborhood?

[Jason Calacanis]

My friend Jamie Siminoff's company.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, there was enough blowback to that. Ring is actually Amazon. The parent company has scrapped that police partnership because people were so mad their pitch for public safety became a privacy nightmare. So there is still a limit about what people will take and won't take. And I, you know, we were talking about states rights a week or two ago, and this is going to be one of those issues. But I think it's reasonable for people to be concerned about this. I think that there's been a lot of people that are like, oh, you just want murders, then you're a murderer. Calm down, everybody. It is.

[Jason Calacanis]

I have. I have another concept here. So number one is there has to be an audit trail. There has to be a cost paid if you abuse it. Just like Facebook had to deal with and Google had to deal with people spying on their exes, Right? Yep. Pretty well documented cases of that. They put audit trail. So an audit trail basically means if somebody looks at something they're not supposed to, they get fired, they get sanctioned, et cetera. And then retention is the other piece. So there has to be a retention policy. Then there's another idea. If crime is above a certain level, these things are deployed. If crime is below a certain level, maybe it's not as necessary. So, you know, if you lived in the Tenderloin and you went to anybody who lived in the Tenderloin in the

[Alex Wilhelm]

neighborhood in San Francisco that's famously rough and tumble.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, as rough and tumble as this kid from Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s would tell you, it's bad. It was scarier to me than the scariest places in New York I'd been because there were hundreds of people out at night high as f and chaos and no police presence. And just you would literally feel like you were in like, literally hell. Like anything could go wrong if you told 100% of the people who are not addicts in that group and not homeless, we want to put up these cameras to like, you know, dissuade this stuff and have facial recognition, they would say, thank you so much. I appreciate you so much. So I think people's belief in these systems versus giving up privacy depends on the chances of a crime happening to them.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, I think that's right, because people. The. The people's preferences will shift dramatically based on what they're seeing and what they need. Now, when you think about state, where it's being deployed, though, Jason, I want to show this map again and show you Texas.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is D Flock.

[Alex Wilhelm]

This is the D Flock map which we're using because I don't think there's as public A1 from flock itself. This is roughly Texas. You can see Dallas, and I think this is Houston down here. Tons and tons of cameras. I'm a little surprised that in Texas, the, you know, the Lone Star, Freedom State, there's this much surveillance and it's acceptable by people that are there. I would have thought there'd be more of a pushback. So I wonder if I'm actually over indexing on people's aversion to these cameras, given that they seem to be all the rage in a place that's famous for independence and straight shooting.

[Jason Calacanis]

Here's the thing. These are deployed locally. So this is bottoms up, not top down. Your local community makes the decision and pays for these. It's not like the state of Texas deployed 21,000 flock cameras. If that's the right number, that means Manor and Lockhart and Dripping Springs and Westlake. And, you know, if it was the Tenderloin, whatever, each of those communities has to opt into it. So that actually to me means people have agency and are making their own decisions. In my community, I want to know what's going on. And I don't mind security cameras, everybody accepts. So then is it AI enabled security cameras becomes the issue.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, I think the problem is that it's not the Stasi. It is a third party that is that is fueling the Stasi. So there's two potential boogeymen here for people to worry about. It's not just the central government.

[Jason Calacanis]

Then Flock shouldn't have access to the data. So that's an easy solution. I don't remember from my conversation with him, but he told me everybody sets their local standards, so the retention policies, local, etc. And I think I did ask him, like, do you have like a minimum or a maximum? And he's like, yeah, no, we don't. And we have to think about that. If I remember correctly, but it was very early on this Was like five or six years ago. Yeah. So today, you know, he could just say, listen, we don't have access to this. It's encrypted. You are the only people with the keys. We do enforce a log system, so you have to have a log, you have to use a biometric. So our software is designed that in order to look at the reader you got to put in your thumbprint and you got to do an IR scan. If you don't want that, you can't have the system. That's our safeguard. So they could create like a very low benchmark or you know, for basic use of their system. You can't keep data over 36 months. You can set it from 01 month to 36 months. So they probably will self regulate their own system and then the government will probably come to them at some point if they're not self regulating and then regulate them. And that's what you really want in a vibrant, high functioning democracy is that local folks can have input and make decisions and then people self regulate to the point at which citizens feel like they've done a decent job. Nobody's complaining about the rating system for movies or explicit language on music. When I was a kid, that was the entirety of the discussion. In the 80s, this album, you know, NWA or Shocking Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, you know, that's where the PG13 rating came from. Now people are like, yeah, there's a rating on it. Just read the rating and yeah, smoking's dangerous. There's a label on it. So you know, at a certain point society just labels things properly. People have decisions and there's some personal freedom. So I don't see the. When I see that chart of Texas, I don't see people not having personal freedom. I see people having personal freedom. They're making a decision in their community and they're electing to put these cameras in. I may not like it as somebody who's privacy concerned, but it is what it is.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I don't, I just from a very high level, I don't love that. I don't recall voting for cameras in Providence. And also I don't like that my location information on my phone is so widely commercially available. It feels like I am now not able to functionally live in society and maintain a private location. And that to me is a bit of a bummer. But also, I don't know how we could have not gotten here given our generally permissive approach to technology and the pace of its expansion. But it does make me slightly Leery. Anyways, Jason, putting that aside, be vigilant. Be vigilant. Do you have time for a couple of Nodey gang questions?

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure, let's do it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So Channing Hodges and I've cleaned up his question just a little bit here for you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What does Jason think about startups using AI to help file patents instead of using expensive lawyers?

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, that's a great question. Patents are a pretty sophisticated area of the law. It's not like just filing a trademark or incorporating a business or doing an employment agreement or doing a convertible note. So if you were to look at all the things you could possibly work on as a startup, that would be litigation and patents would be like amongst the most high risk areas, high stakes areas where you wouldn't want to rely on AI. You could use AI with human in the loop. In other words, you could do all you want with AI and then go talk to an attorney. Now if you didn't have money and you thought, hey, I can just file a bunch of patents and this AI is making it work and it's the only option you have, okay, fine, do it. You just might need the wisdom of a patent attorney at some point. And if people are filing patents, it tends to be a lot at stake, like you're building some rocket or some incredible technology and some, you know, something that really needs to have IP protection for some period of time, like a drug. And so yeah, that would not be the place to try to save money. But most startups don't need patents. That's the other piece is like these business process patents, all these patents, like, I almost never see them come into play in business.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's the world's most annoying vanity metric. Do you know who has the most patents per year? IBM.

[Jason Calacanis]

IBM does a lot of core research. Yeah. They have a lot of patents.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. Big impact. All right, Russell again translating here says, what does Jason think about people buying high end or lower end hardware to run AI models at home? Are this, is this a FAD? Essentially? The MacBook minis, the Mac Studios, Mac Studios.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's not a fad, it's the future. So it's my personal belief is these models are going to be so good you're going to want to run them without looking at the price tag of the tokens. And until tokens become much cheaper, it's going to be much easier to just run these things locally for a certain group of people, depending on the application. And I don't see a time when you wouldn't want a corporation to have the privacy and not educate the, you know to. Our first story today about or second story about all the money being made by the top two token providers. You also have the privacy issues like do you want your venture capital company secrets and all your investing secrets and all your documents and knowledge being uploaded to Anthropic? Probably not. People are doing it, but, you know, now Anthropic understands the entire venture business or understands your documents and then when the next person makes documents they just draft off of yours. It's kind of got to be thoughtful about it. And then data leaking, something leaks into one of these LLMs. It could be really problematic.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It could be incredibly problematic. All right, Jason, before we let our friends go, do you want to do a quick ro Co plug?

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure. Ro co I take it to get GLPs, you can go to Ro Co Twist and they'll tell you if your insurance will cover it. And here's the good news. When I started on my weight loss journey four or five years ago and lost 40 pounds, I did it through fasting, I did it through rucking, I did it through getting better sleep and I did it through GLPs. At that time, they were $3,000 a month. Two or $3,000 a month.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Really?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. It was absurdly expensive to come out of pocket. They were only for these drugs were only for people doing who had diabetes. And the off label use five years ago was, hey, maybe these work for weight loss. That's when I started using them. I heard Kevin Rose talk about it. Now you can get into them for 150 bucks, 300 bucks a month. It's literally 5, 10% of the cost of five years ago. Don't be scared about paying for it out of pocket and your insurance will probably cover it. I think you have to probably have a BMI. I think my BMI at the peak was 32, which was crazy. And I was technically obese. And so it got covered or some portion of it got covered and now you don't have to worry about that. So road co Twist.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Absolutely.

[Jason Calacanis]

I highly recommend looking into it hard.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Agree. And for everyone who's a big Twist fan on Wednesday, we have two absolute banger guests coming on the show, Jason, including one in the fintech banking space. Let's say that you're not going to want to miss. So we'll see everyone here live on Wednesday.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, bye bye.