Anthropic wants to slow AI down and Bernie wants 50%: JCal Reacts | E2297

Summary

The cold open is a triple-shot: Anthropic published a blog post calling for a global AI slowdown, Bernie Sanders dropped a video proposing the government seize 50% of major AI companies’ stock through the “American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act,” and Jason predicts the 2028 presidential election will turn on AI job-displacement policy. The discussion winds through every angle — why Anthropic’s timing is bizarre (they’re on the verge of an IPO), why Bernie’s pitch will land with both MAGA and the left, and Jason’s pitched grand bargain: collapse SNAP/Medicaid/housing programs into a flat-rate-tax UBI funded partly by AI lab equity stakes.

The episode opens with a live ComfyUI demo from co-founder Yoland Yan, walking through node-based generative-AI workflows: an Ideogram V4 image generation with bounding boxes, outpainting Jason from a TikTok format for the Vegas Sphere Wizard of Oz show, and turning Jason into a Simpsons character. ComfyUI just raised $30M at $500M post from Craft Ventures (David Sacks). Jason gives Yoland his “build sales in Phoenix/Vegas, not SF” speech, name-checking Tony Hsieh and Zappos. Plus segments on Brian Chesky’s new AI lab, LA mayoral Polymarket odds (Spencer Pratt at 4% vs. Karen Bass at 66%), the rediscovered TWiST portfolio company Roam Around (a 2023 travel agent that pre-dated Chesky’s idea), Mandalorian and Grogu, the Smile horror box-office model, Alex Honnold’s Netflix free climb, and Pump.fun’s new “GO” bounty product.

Highlights

Anthropic Wants to Slow AI Down — But They’re Building Claude

“Shut down Claude then if it’s too dangerous. If not, what are you doing? You’re the ones behind all of this development.” — Jason Calacanis, 0:14

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Bernie’s “Seize 50% of the AI Companies” Pitch

“Bernie Sanders released a video. This is a completely insane, deranged concept. He wants to seize 50% of the shares of the AI companies.” — Jason Calacanis, 0:21

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Prediction: AI is the 2028 Election

“2028, the number one issue in the election in 2028, the number one deciding issue, it’s not going to be inflation, it’s not going to be wars. It’s going to be AI, and is AI a net negative or net positive for jobs?” — Jason Calacanis, 58:58

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The Grand Bargain: Replace All Social Programs with Cash

“Anybody making under 50k a year gets a percentage of that pool… Is it UBI? But what we’re saying is get rid of those programs. Stop operating food stamps. Just give people the money. Just give them the money.” — Jason Calacanis, 1:01:04

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Don’t Build Sales in San Francisco

“Let me give you a tip. You trying to do this in San Francisco, build the sales — big mistake. You’re up against so many lunatics right now who are going to overpay sales people.” — Jason Calacanis, 31:34

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Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Vegas Genius

“He optimized for the happiness of his staff, not his own. He didn’t want to live in Vegas. He was a billionaire.” — Jason Calacanis, 36:30

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Key Points

• Plaud applauded for group-Plaud at Liquidity Conference (1:32) - Sponsors plus a real testimonial about adopting a new dog
• ComfyUI as the “polar opposite of ChatGPT” (3:46) - Node-based workflow over a black-box prompt
• Ideogram V4 demo with bounding boxes (4:58) - Open-source SOTA image model from Canada/US lab
• The “slot machine” analogy for prompt-only AI (6:54) - 90 seconds to find out if you won
• Combination of models is the magic (12:00) - Claude prompt-writing → Ideogram generation pipeline
• ComfyUI runs locally or hosted (12:28) - High-end NVIDIA GPU recommended over Apple Silicon
• Outpainting for the Vegas Sphere Wizard of Oz (20:31) - How frames get scaled into the sphere without warping
• ComfyUI raised $30M at $500M post from Craft (28:38) - “From my pal David Sacks”
• Build sales in Phoenix/Vegas/Austin not SF (31:34) - JCal’s recurring advice
• The 4-city sales-hub-discovery hack (33:42) - Run ads in 4 cities, interview the talent, pick the winner
• Tony Hsieh’s downtown Vegas insight (35:19) - Happiness optimization for staff
• LA mayoral Polymarket: Bass 66% / Pratt 4% (38:46) - Jason putting “five dimes” on Spencer Pratt
• Anthropic blog calls for AI slowdown (41:26) - “Likely be a good thing” — internal research/policy team
• Anthropic withheld Mithos previously (42:24) - Lon: timing is bizarre, they’re verge of IPO
• Bernie’s American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act (44:18) - Government owns 50% of major AI companies
• AI companies trained on stolen IP (48:00) - Jason concedes this is a strong argument
• Anthropic Books3 case (49:46) - Vast bootlegged-books archive caused legal trouble
• The “buy it then scan it” workaround (50:11) - Legal precedent for training data
• Bernie’s pitch will land across the spectrum (51:07) - MAGA (anti-elitist) + Left (IP protection)
• Prediction: 10% equity to public service (52:02) - Anthropic + OpenAI’s likely compromise
• Sam Altman’s UBI study found work-VALUE rose (54:59) - $1K/mo for 1,000 people, control group $50/mo
• The grand bargain: replace welfare with cash (59:52) - Collapse SNAP, Medicaid, housing into a flat-rate-tax UBI
• Kevin O’Leary shrinks data center project (1:04:31) - Brief mention
• Brian Chesky’s new AI lab (1:04:31) - Travel-focused; staying on as Airbnb CEO
• Roam Around: the 2023 TWiST portfolio company (1:05:22) - Pre-dated Chesky’s idea by 3 years; founder Shy; acquired by Layla
• Brian Chesky should put Airbnb’s first $100M in (1:10:14) - Conflict-of-interest framing
• Mandalorian and Grogu review (1:14:51) - Jason recommends; Dave Filoni genius
• Pitch: synchronized cinema episode releases (1:16:54) - Two nights before streaming with bonus content
• Smile: $17M budget, $166M+ box office (1:21:09) - YouTuber-made horror with 10x ROI; Blumhouse
• Terrifier model: self-distribute through theaters (1:22:21) - Dark Age Cinema, Damien Leone
• Alex Honnold Netflix free-climb concern (1:27:22) - Jason calls it negligent; should require a rope at minimum
• Pump.fun’s GO bounty product (1:25:00) - Dystopian: anonymous crypto bounties for “any task”

Mentions

Companies

• ComfyUI / Comfy.org (3:32) - Yoland Yan’s open-source node-based generative AI platform
• Craft Ventures (28:25) - Led Comfy’s $30M round
• Anthropic (41:26) - Called for global AI slowdown
• OpenAI (48:14) - Discussed throughout
• Open Research (56:42) - Sam Altman’s nonprofit; ran UBI study
• Airbnb (1:04:46) - Brian Chesky still CEO
• Roam Around (1:05:22) - TWiST portfolio, AI travel concierge from Batch 28 (2023)
• Layla (1:11:40) - Acquired Roam Around
• Palo Alto Networks (43:23) - Nikesh from Liquidity referenced
• Pump.fun (1:24:32) - Meme coin service launched “GO” bounty product
• Fiverr (1:26:27) - Legit comparison
• Upwork (1:26:27) - Legit comparison
• Rent a Human (1:26:34) - Past TWiST guest, agent-rentable human
• Blumhouse (1:21:23) - Smile distributor
• A24 (1:21:28) - Mid-budget indie reference
• Dark Age Cinema (1:22:51) - Damien Leone’s Terrifier company
• Screambox (1:23:15) - Bloody Disgusting’s streaming partner
• Y Combinator (54:59) - Funded Open Research UBI test
• Zappos (35:38) - Tony Hsieh’s company
• Netflix (1:16:39) - Stranger Things theatrical experiment
• Render (29:18) - Sponsor read
• Vanta (19:26) - Sponsor read
• Grasshopper Bank (9:04) - Sponsor read

Products & Technologies

• Ideogram V4 (5:08) - Open-source SOTA image model
• Stable Diffusion (6:26) - Reference comparison
• Google Veo (20:31) - For Sphere outpainting
• LoRA / Loras (implicit) - Per description
• LTX Video (implicit) - Per description
• Claude (0:14) - Anthropic’s model
• Plaud NotePin (1:32) - Recording device used at Liquidity conference
• Polymarket (37:36) - Prediction market platform
• Books3 (49:46) - Bootlegged books archive Anthropic used

People

• Yoland Yan (3:32) - CEO of ComfyUI
• David Sacks (28:25) - Craft Ventures; led Comfy round
• Bernie Sanders (44:18) - Senator; AI sovereign wealth fund pitch
• Sam Altman (54:59) - OpenAI CEO; UBI test
• Elon Musk (46:57) - Bernie’s target list
• Mark Zuckerberg (46:57) - Bernie’s target list
• Jeff Bezos (46:57) - Bernie’s target list
• Brian Chesky (1:04:31) - Airbnb CEO + new AI lab
• Tony Hsieh (35:19) - RIP; Zappos founder; downtown Vegas genius
• Karen Bass (38:11) - LA mayor incumbent
• Spencer Pratt (38:08) - LA mayoral candidate at 4%
• Nithya Raman (38:46) - LA mayoral candidate at 31%
• Nikesh Arora (43:23) - Palo Alto Networks CEO; interviewed at Liquidity
• Jason Blum (1:21:26) - Blumhouse
• Damien Leone (1:22:51) - Terrifier creator
• Curry Barker (1:18:09) - Obsession movie YouTuber director
• Cooper Tomlinson (1:18:09) - Curry’s partner
• Alex Honnold (1:27:22) - Free climber; Netflix special
• Ocean Ramsey (1:24:00) - Shark free-swimmer in Hawaii
• Rick Perry (41:11) - “Blueberry in tomato soup” Austin quote
• Dave Filoni (1:15:28) - Mandalorian creator
• Sigourney Weaver (1:15:29) - X-wing pilot cameo

Surprising Quotes

“Shut down Claude then if it’s too dangerous. If not, what are you doing? You’re the ones behind all of this development.” — Jason Calacanis, 0:14

“Bernie Sanders released a video. This is a completely insane, deranged concept. He wants to seize 50% of the shares of the AI companies.” — Jason Calacanis, 0:21

“The time has come to reclaim what was stolen from us. Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg…” — Bernie Sanders (read by Yoland Yan), 46:57

“If you give people a small amount of money, not enough so they can quit their jobs, but a small amount, $1,000 a month, that might cover half their rent… That gives them more flexibility.” — Jason Calacanis (summarizing Altman’s UBI study), 57:59

“[Tony Hsieh] optimized for the happiness of his staff, not his own.” — Jason Calacanis, 36:30

“Famous Texas politician Rick Perry described Austin as, ‘it’s the blueberry in Texas’s tomato soup.’” — Lon Harris, 41:11

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 Anthropic, they want to slow down global AI development.

Lon Harris: 0:03 What?

Lon Harris: 0:04 Wait a second, why are they doing this now? Didn’t we just all go through this that they withheld Mithos? Acting responsibly, now they’re calling for a global pause?

Jason Calacanis: 0:14 Shut down Claude then if it’s too dangerous. If not, what are you doing? You’re the ones behind all of this development.

Jason Calacanis: 0:21 Bernie Sanders released a video. This is a completely insane, deranged concept. He wants to seize 50% of the shares of the AI companies.

Jason Calacanis: 0:31 2028, the number one issue in the election, not going to be inflation, it’s not going to be wars. It’s going to be AI.

Jason Calacanis: 0:41 All right everybody, welcome back to TWiST. It is June 5th, Friday, 2026. With me again, Lon Harris. How are you doing, brother?

Lon Harris: 0:51 I’m all right, I’m doing okay. I look a little banged up this week because I got a new dog and she clawed my face.

Jason Calacanis: 0:59 And we’ll talk about an off-duty. We’ll also talk about the Knickerbockers.

Lon Harris: 1:03 The New York Knickerbockers, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05 And my experience at game one here in San Antonio. So, but let’s get started. There’s a lot in the news.

Lon Harris: 1:19 I like it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20 Let’s get started, Lonnie Donny.

Lon Harris: 1:21 I think before we go any further, I think we should applaud our friends at Plaud and point out we’re both wearing our Plaud pins right here.

Jason Calacanis: 1:30 Yeah. Yes.

Lon Harris: 1:32 A million uses for these Plaud pins. I just adopted a dog named Barry this week. And the whole time that I [was at the vet]…

Jason Calacanis: 2:04 You go to see your doctor, you see a vet, you’re doing something important. Trusting human memory, not a good idea.

Lon Harris: 2:35 Wow, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 2:37 Now, after doing four hours of content, I have the entire live straight feed in my phone available to me. Liquidity Conference was our LP conference this week.

Jason Calacanis: 3:00 …out of the 550, 650 people there.

Lon Harris: 3:02 Yes, it’s amazing.

Jason Calacanis: 3:03 So it was a group Plaud, once again, we applaud Plaud. I met the founder, he’s awesome. Millions of users using this.

Lon Harris: 3:13 [Plaud sponsor read - plaud.ai/twist for 10% off]

Jason Calacanis: 3:30 [continues]

Jason Calacanis: 3:32 We’ve got our first guest I want to bring up. We’re doing an interview and a demo. It’s Yoland Yan, the co-founder and CEO of a great tool that I use very often, ComfyUI.

Yoland Yan: 3:43 It’s amazing to be here.

Jason Calacanis: 3:44 Yeah, great to have you. Are you going to show us a little demo here to kick us off?

Yoland Yan: 3:46 Way I usually tell people what Comfy is is the polar opposite of what a ChatGPT or a Midjourney prompt box is.

Jason Calacanis: 4:38 So we’re seeing like a TikTok story here of a gentleman skateboarding and obviously the dimensions are that of a TikTok story, but then you have multiple boxes connecting to each other.

Yoland Yan: 4:58 Yeah, yeah. So the prompt, the text itself in here describes the entire image you’re trying to generate. This is actually using a very new state-of-the-art open-source image model called Ideogram.

Jason Calacanis: 5:08 Ideogram V4. It’s an open source, and is it out of China, the US? Where is it from?

Yoland Yan: 5:14 It is out of a lab in I believe Canada and US.

Jason Calacanis: 5:22 I-D-E-O-G-R-A-M.

Yoland Yan: 5:25 Ideogram.

Jason Calacanis: 5:26 Yeah, they just dropped a new model this week. If you haven’t taken a look, definitely check it out.

Yoland Yan: 5:32 And then the prompt itself is…

Yoland Yan: 6:00 …describing what the final image is. What this model is actually really cool in terms of doing is you can set bounding boxes to say like, ‘Hey, I want the image to be generated exactly at this position.’

Lon Harris: 6:26 And it looks like balloons, and it’s in the air. So this is what you don’t get when you give a prompt to Stable Diffusion or any of these other Gemini banana nano banana.

Jason Calacanis: 6:54 One analogy that Yoland and Comfy have used a bunch that I really like is like it’s a slot machine. With most when you’re engaging directly with the model, it’s like 60% of the time, 70% of the time you don’t get what you want.

Lon Harris: 7:26 Well, and the lever takes, it would be like a slot machine that takes 90 seconds to tell you if you lost your money or won.

Jason Calacanis: 7:33 Yeah, exactly.

Lon Harris: 7:34 It’s pretty annoying as a slot machine.

Jason Calacanis: 7:37 That’s great.

Yoland Yan: 7:38 And actually, one thing that people keep on emphasizing a lot of times is that for a lot of these other models behind a single prompt box, what usually happens is even if you tweak the prompt slightly, the results differ wildly.

Jason Calacanis: 8:56 Is that prompt written by a human?

Jason Calacanis: 9:00 Or do you give an audio prompt with a bunch of details and say, make me a prompt?

Jason Calacanis: 9:04 [Grasshopper Bank sponsor read]

Yoland Yan: 10:05 Yeah, you can do many ways. You can send actually there’s more complex workflow in here where you can ask a Claude model to generate the prompt using the kind of structure.

Jason Calacanis: 10:31 This is something people miss. We were talking about on All In, David Sacks in month three of us doing this daily report on what topics are being discussed in the news.

Lon Harris: 11:29 Yeah, and this is one of the big things we talk about with different models. Some models are great for things like prompt writing, and then when you take that and you feed it into another model…

Yoland Yan: 12:00 A lot of the magic comes from the people miss who don’t use these tools is like the combination of models.

Jason Calacanis: 12:06 Yes, very important.

Lon Harris: 12:08 Yoland, all this that you’re building here, how do you run it? How do you run the prompt or does it change the prompt?

Yoland Yan: 12:28 Comfy is both open source and can run in a local environment. For anyone who wants to just use their computer locally…

Lon Harris: 12:58 Wow. So you’re the hosted version of Comfy UI. But I could download the open source version, pay you zero dollars, use my MacBook M5 with 48 gigs of RAM, I’m assuming that’s enough?

Yoland Yan: 13:21 It’s enough for some of the models. You’d be surprised how big the model performance requirement is these days.

Lon Harris: 13:26 Got it. So you’d probably need to have that… I think there’s a MacBook now with 256?

Yoland Yan: 13:32 I would actually recommend using Nvidia chips for running a lot of these models. It’s a much better performance.

Lon Harris: 13:46 So what would you run?

Yoland Yan: 13:47 Just get as comfortable as you can buy a high-end GPU from Nvidia if you were to run it locally. But if you don’t, you can use cloud.

Lon Harris: 14:02 Do people, Yoland, I’m unsure of this, but do people buy an Nvidia GPU and put it in its own enclosure and then attach it to their MacBook Pros?

Yoland Yan: 14:21 Yeah, I think that’s definitely a possibility. But a lot of times in those case scenarios, they’d rather just rent or use a cloud-hosted service.

Lon Harris: 14:31 Got it. So you could be like literally running this on the flight to Japan if you had the right laptop.

Yoland Yan: 15:00 Yeah. The complexity definitely can scale up. So what I just did was going taking one of the nodes from the outside and then entering into what we call a subgraph.

Jason Calacanis: 15:16 So what are we seeing in here? Like you had that mega prompt and this is kind of what’s going on under the hood?

Yoland Yan: 15:23 Yeah, this is the detail level. This actually give you control over everything.

Jason Calacanis: 16:05 Now I don’t have to do all this level of granularity, I’m just basically looking at the granularity behind the prompt and that’s what’s abstracted in current products like ChatGPT.

Yoland Yan: 16:41 I hope we’re on there.

Jason Calacanis: 16:42 Yep, we’ll see. I ran it for two hours last night.

Yoland Yan: 16:52 Yeah, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 16:53 Okay, so show us, show us changing comfy from white in blue skies, a white logo to an orange logo.

Yoland Yan: 17:00 Yeah, I just edited out here earlier and then now I run it again using the same configuration.

Jason Calacanis: 17:18 Yeah yeah. Here’s the moment of truth, demo or die here on This Week in Startups.

Yoland Yan: 17:23 Let me see if there are more blue, ah okay, there’s vibrant blue.

Lon Harris: 17:26 Playing around with a tool like this, Jason, it is a great way to learn. I got a lot better at making AI generated images because I worked with ComfyUI early on.

Yoland Yan: 18:00 Abstract a little like, you’d be amazed at how different your images will turn out just by tweaking a few of those kind of weights.

Jason Calacanis: 18:10 Well, there’s the orange.

Lon Harris: 18:11 Lon, crystal alabaster. There’s the orange in the background though.

Jason Calacanis: 18:17 Let’s move, I think we understand how the product works. This is industrial strength levels of prompting.

Yoland Yan: 18:27 Yeah, 100%. This is definitely like if there’s one takeaway for the audience, this is basically a production level of a product that enable people to give that fine-grained control and quality.

Jason Calacanis: 18:51 That’s so cool. I actually wanted to ask about that because I thought you guys worked on the Wizard of Oz sphere Vegas show as well.

Yoland Yan: 19:07 Yeah, we are the tool builder. We did not directly participate. I cannot take credit over the Wizard of Oz on sphere.

Jason Calacanis: 19:16 I’m not accusing you of ruining the Wizard of Oz, Yoland, don’t worry.

Yoland Yan: 19:21 Oh, I didn’t even know people were saying that.

Jason Calacanis: 19:26 [Vanta sponsor read]

Yoland Yan: 20:31 It was very cool because we were able to kind of be fairly close with the studios that ended up working with the Google VEO team and generating all of the results.

Yoland Yan: 21:00 Video for a sphere screen. Because a lot of times where if you scale this image into a sphere environment, what you’re going to get is Jason’s face being completely warped.

Yoland Yan: 21:30 Run all sorts of parameters to figure out, hey, what would be the best option of outpainting all of these imagery.

Jason Calacanis: 21:49 Alright, so what are we seeing here? You took a screenshot of me talking?

Yoland Yan: 21:52 Yeah, this is from a previous episode.

Yoland Yan: 21:57 This is an input video of Jason talking, a TikTok type of video. But what Comfy was able to do is…

Jason Calacanis: 22:17 It isn’t, but you filled it in you’re saying?

Yoland Yan: 22:21 Yeah, yeah, this is a—

Jason Calacanis: 22:22 Oh, this is generated? Based on the TikTok image they guessed at what is on the outside edges of your screen.

Jason Calacanis: 22:29 There’s a couple of accounts, Lon, that do this on the internet—

Lon Harris: 22:34 And they make tall versions of Star Wars or Goodfellas or Sopranos.

Jason Calacanis: 22:39 Exactly.

Lon Harris: 22:46 So there’s inpainting and outpainting. Inpainting is when you put something in the image that wasn’t already there.

Jason Calacanis: 23:11 Yeah, and it’s not perfect. Like it put me in a short-sleeved shirt. Obviously I’m not wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

Yoland Yan: 23:19 Yep, that’s a part of your prompt, so you can change all of the parameters in here.

Yoland Yan: 23:23 Yeah, and then all sorts of crazy things you can do, like this is actually using a ChatGPT image model to take this input video and transform you into…

Jason Calacanis: 23:59 Oh, Simpsons.

Yoland Yan: 24:00 Simpsons character.

Jason Calacanis: 24:00 I’m out for this for Cinco de Mayo.

Lon Harris: 24:03 Hilarious. Senor Calacanis.

Jason Calacanis: 24:05 Amigos. Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 24:08 So Yoland, where is all this going in terms of as a business? You’re building on top of open source models.

Yoland Yan: 25:06 These are great questions. From the first perspective in terms of whether Comfy is a wrapper or where is the business going fundamentally, Comfy actually… there’s many layers.

Yoland Yan: 27:00 So we’re an operating system for generative AI, visual generative AI.

Lon Harris: 27:06 Have you raised a ton of money for the company and where are you at in your journey?

Yoland Yan: 27:36 Pricing itself — we have the local, is completely free. You can actually use local while using some of the closed-source models using our API platform as well.

Lon Harris: 28:25 And you raised 30 million from my pal David Sacks over at Craft?

Yoland Yan: 28:30 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 28:31 Not that he did it, because I know he’s been pretty busy, but…

Lon Harris: 28:33 The UIs are David Sacks, no.

Yoland Yan: 28:34 No.

Lon Harris: 28:35 The UIs are David Sacks.

Jason Calacanis: 28:36 Memes are.

Yoland Yan: 28:38 Yeah, we raised from Craft most recently, 30 million round at 500 million post.

Lon Harris: 28:52 All right, Yoland, great job. Everybody can go to comfyui.com, do I have the domain correct?

Yoland Yan: 29:00 It’s comfy.org or comfy.com.

Lon Harris: 29:01 Oh, love it.

Jason Calacanis: 29:05 [Render sponsor read]

Jason Calacanis: 30:21 Who do you need to hire right now?

Lon Harris: 30:30 I think you’re thinking of Office Space.

Jason Calacanis: 30:38 The red stapler?

Lon Harris: 30:39 Yeah, that’s Office Space. Your non-descript office with the drop ceilings.

Jason Calacanis: 30:44 Or is that the actual office?

Yoland Yan: 30:48 No, that’s the actual office.

Jason Calacanis: 30:51 Where are you guys based?

Yoland Yan: 30:52 Oh, we are right next to the bridge.

Lon Harris: 30:58 The Bay Bridge?

Yoland Yan: 31:00 The Bay Bridge, actually.

Jason Calacanis: 31:01 Great location, by the way.

Yoland Yan: 31:10 Definitely on the most urgent need on our end is scaling up our sales team and also our front-end development team.

Jason Calacanis: 31:24 So you have a go-to-sales motion that you need to get going.

Yoland Yan: 31:27 Yes, we are actually only able to process above 100k inbound requests so far because of the demand.

Jason Calacanis: 31:34 Let me give you a tip. You trying to do this in San Francisco, build the sales — big mistake.

Yoland Yan: 31:42 Big mistake.

Jason Calacanis: 31:43 It’s just you’re up against so many lunatics right now who are going to overpay sales people because a lot of these sales executives have families.

Lon Harris: 31:58 Major companies.

Jason Calacanis: 32:00 And so they tend to — I’m not going to say entitled, but they have high expectations.

Yoland Yan: 32:11 First time to get to this stage.

Jason Calacanis: 32:14 Got it, okay. What a lot of savvy founders do is they open a remote office in a place where other people have already done so historically and added sales people.

Jason Calacanis: 33:00 Pick Austin, Dallas, Houston. There’s tons of sales people, grind it out sales people who are awesome. Instead of wanting to get paid 300,000 dollars and 1% of sales, they would prefer 80 base, 20 commission.

Lon Harris: 33:33 Great, appreciate that.

Jason Calacanis: 33:34 And the way one of my companies did this — they told the story here on This Week in Startups.

Jason Calacanis: 33:42 They put out ads in four different cities for sales people. They put a range of positions, a range of salaries. Then they set up…

Jason Calacanis: 34:29 And then they just collectively looked at the resume flow and who they met and they said ‘you know what this town’ — and I think it was an Arizona town — is the most amazing fit.

Lon Harris: 35:00 Working.

Jason Calacanis: 35:01 Give me five cities, two days in each.

Lon Harris: 35:11 And don’t spend more than 48 hours in Phoenix. Not recommended. That’s the max.

Jason Calacanis: 35:19 No, Vegas was one of them too actually. And my friend Tony Hsieh, rest in peace, with Zappos, he did a similar thing where he was looking for where to place Zappos.

Lon Harris: 35:38 Right. He had that whole plan. He was going to build a whole tech hub in downtown Vegas.

Jason Calacanis: 35:45 Yeah, and rest in peace Tony Hsieh, but Tony Hsieh was a genius. He wanted people to be happy and what he realized was people were profoundly sad in a lot of cities.

Jason Calacanis: 36:00 Had extremely high cost of living. When he found downtown Las Vegas—

Lon Harris: 36:05 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 36:06 He found an abandoned city next to the greatest home developments, downtown leisure, gambling, shows, restaurants, a boom town. And in the middle of the boom town was a just dilapidated downtown.

Lon Harris: 36:29 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 36:30 Genius. He optimized for the happiness of his staff, not his own. He didn’t want to live in Vegas. He was a billionaire.

Yoland Yan: 36:59 Man, I really appreciate this. It’s a type of tool, Lon, that makes me want to stay up all night.

Yoland Yan: 37:06 That was my exact experience with ComfyUI when I first started using it.

Jason Calacanis: 37:36 Hey, what’s the Polymarket for today? You and I — I did a hit on Jesse Watters last night on Fox, and you were helping me prep.

Lon Harris: 37:51 Yeah, you want to take a look at that Los Angeles mayor — the election odds on Polymarket?

Jason Calacanis: 37:57 I just want to understand what’s going on here.

Lon Harris: 38:04 Yeah, the California Governor race — oh, there’s the mayoral election.

Jason Calacanis: 38:08 This is what I want to know. I want to know if they’re going to let Karen Bass burn the city down or Spencer Pratt’s going to have a chance to save it.

Lon Harris: 38:14 Well, things are looking not so great for Spencer Pratt right now.

Jason Calacanis: 38:23 This doesn’t make sense to me. I’m going to go put money on Spencer Pratt because if he wins, I’m going to have a great sense of joy that an outsider won.

Lon Harris: 38:46 And the Polymarket says 66% chance of Karen Bass eventually becoming LA Mayor with Nithya Raman at 31%, Spencer Pratt at a measly 4%.

Lon Harris: 39:00 …of the vote, then Pratt 29.4% and Rahman at 23.4%. California elections — their laws are designed to get the most number of ballots in.

Jason Calacanis: 39:57 Got it. I got to tell you.

Lon Harris: 39:58 Go ahead. Tell me.

Jason Calacanis: 39:59 4% chance. Spencer Pratt. I might have to put five dimes on this.

Lon Harris: 40:06 Here’s like, when you’re talking about California, it’s so heavily weighted to Democrats.

Yoland Yan: 40:23 But he’s a Democrat.

Jason Calacanis: 40:25 Spencer Pratt, he’s a Democrat.

Lon Harris: 40:26 I think the other big problem for Spencer Pratt is that a lot of the neighborhoods where he has the most appeal, they don’t actually get out and vote.

Yoland Yan: 40:54 Listen, I can tell you about California. It’s the inverse of Texas. We have like a little drop of blue called Austin.

Lon Harris: 41:11 Famous Texas politician Rick Perry described Austin as, ‘it’s the blueberry in Texas’s tomato soup.’ I always liked that.

Yoland Yan: 41:17 That’s disgusting, but I would say it’s the blueberry in the somebody dropped a blueberry in the strawberry rhubarb pie.

Jason Calacanis: 41:24 Right. Let’s lightning round some news here.

Jason Calacanis: 41:26 In big news this week, we got to talk about this. Anthropic, in a blog post on Thursday, they said they want to slow down global AI development.

Lon Harris: 41:38 What?

Jason Calacanis: 41:40 Their heads of internal research and policy wrote that slowing down the pace of global AI development would, and I’m quoting, ‘likely be a good thing.’

Yoland Yan: 42:00 Temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.

Jason Calacanis: 42:09 Wait. I’ve been traveling, Knicks games, liquidity, Napa, Yountville, French Laundry, I’ve been living the life of J-Cal for the past week.

Lon Harris: 42:19 I saw your photos from Bouchon. I’m very jealous.

Jason Calacanis: 42:21 I’ll take it. It’s incredible. I love Bouchon.

Jason Calacanis: 42:24 Anyway, I’m a bit exhausted. Wait a second, why are they doing this now? Didn’t we just all go through this that they withheld Mithos?

Lon Harris: 42:54 The timing is bizarre, it seems crazy. It’s also, they’re on the verge of like an IPO.

Jason Calacanis: 42:59 Part of me feels like if Anthropic genuinely thinks that AI is too dangerous and we need to slow down, it’s like, well you first, buddy.

Jason Calacanis: 43:23 Okay. They have the ability to slow down and they did, and they did it correctly apparently.

Jason Calacanis: 44:14 Now, could please combine this story, Lon, with the other story I asked you to put on the docket?

Lon Harris: 44:16 Yeah, we had a few missed shows.

Jason Calacanis: 44:18 Do you remember the Bernie thing that came out on Monday, that I commented on? Bernie Sanders released a video. He wants to seize 50% of the shares.

Yoland Yan: 44:57 [Reading Bernie’s video] Hello everyone. I probably don’t need to tell…

Jason Calacanis: 45:00 You guys can hear?

Yoland Yan: 45:01 Yeah.

Yoland Yan: 45:01 [Continuing Bernie video] That artificial intelligence will almost certainly be the most transformational technology in the history of the world.

Yoland Yan: 45:21 There is also a very real fear that as AI becomes smarter than humans, it could eventually function independent of human control with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Yoland Yan: 45:42 Will AI be used to make life better for working families?

Jason Calacanis: 45:44 Great point.

Yoland Yan: 45:45 Or will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires?

Jason Calacanis: 45:56 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 45:58 Whoa.

Yoland Yan: 45:58 That is the fundamental choice before us.

Yoland Yan: 46:01 And let us be clear. AI was not created out of thin air. The foundation of AI is our collective human intelligence.

Jason Calacanis: 46:13 Training data.

Yoland Yan: 46:14 The foundation of AI is our collective human intelligence. Our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code…

Yoland Yan: 46:28 As Sam Altman himself acknowledged, AI models were trained on our, quote, ‘collective experience, knowledge, and learnings of humanity.’

Yoland Yan: 46:37 The reality is that big tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their AI models without permission, acknowledgment, or compensation.

Yoland Yan: 46:57 The time has come to reclaim what was stolen from us. Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg.

Yoland Yan: 47:12 Or the venture capitalists and Wall Street firms.

Yoland Yan: 47:20 And that is why in the coming weeks, I will introduce the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act.

Jason Calacanis: 47:40 Wow.

Yoland Yan: 47:41 It would do two extremely critical things. First, it would give the American people a direct role in determining the future of this technology.

Jason Calacanis: 47:49 Invest America.

Yoland Yan: 47:51 Secondly, it would guarantee that the trillions…

Jason Calacanis: 48:00 Everybody knows that AI companies stole people’s IP to train their models. How do we know that? There are an infinite number of lawsuits and settlements.

Lon Harris: 48:14 Yeah. And if you ask OpenAI, give me the plot of Wuthering Heights, like it knows it.

Lon Harris: 48:15 So basically advocates for 50%.

Jason Calacanis: 48:17 This is one of the great arguments that I think will play with the American public.

Jason Calacanis: 48:25 Or it read a summary of the book from the Open Crawl. So the fact is this has already been done. Now, the New York Times has a big lawsuit.

Lon Harris: 49:46 So far the precedent seems to be you’re not allowed to steal copyrighted material to train AI. Anthropic found that vast archive of bootlegged books.

Jason Calacanis: 50:11 So if you bought the book, ripped it apart, scanned it, you can.

Lon Harris: 50:15 You’re allowed. So far courts have determined that if an AI output infringes on a copyright, that’s actionable.

Jason Calacanis: 50:38 This appeals to people who feel the rich aren’t paying their taxes. It appeals to people who believe intellectual property should be protected. This appeals to people who feel like jobs are going to be lost.

Jason Calacanis: 51:00 America only, the sort of most MAGA of MAGA.

Lon Harris: 51:06 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 51:07 I think it’s a separate movement now. It’s going to appeal to them. And I know it’s going to appeal to the left because they are elitists who make content.

Lon Harris: 51:14 There’s a real split going on in the political right. On the left basically everybody is against AI.

Jason Calacanis: 51:57 I got a prediction.

Lon Harris: 52:01 I’d love to hear it.

Jason Calacanis: 52:02 I think Anthropic and OpenAI are going to sit down with Bernie Sanders and say, we’re willing to put 10% of our equity—

Lon Harris: 52:14 Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 52:15 Into Invest America accounts, trust accounts, or dedicated to public service in some way, job retraining, etc. That would be a non-trivial amount of money.

Lon Harris: 52:55 Right. Like a South American communist, you know, taking over, nationalizing.

Jason Calacanis: 53:01 That would be 20 — it wouldn’t even be 20 trillion. If you nationalize it, of course that would crater the stocks.

Lon Harris: 53:15 I think it’s directionally correct. I think this is an opening salvo. Bernie’s opening at 50% of the stock. I think it’s a negotiating position.

Jason Calacanis: 53:47 And here is the challenge. If you were to go through the top three AI labs, Anthropic is going to be in Bernie’s camp to a certain extent.

Jason Calacanis: 54:00 Anthropic has done licensing deals and settlements with publishers before. I believe OpenAI started doing some.

Lon Harris: 54:59 Sam Altman ran a UBI test, a long-forgotten UBI test he funded with Y Combinator in Berkeley.

Jason Calacanis: 55:28 So this is Elon Musk’s belief. Elon’s belief, OpenAI’s belief, and Anthropic’s belief is there’ll be job displacement to some extent.

Lon Harris: 55:49 Right.

Yoland Yan: 55:50 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 55:51 Bernie Sanders is going to be able to say, Anthropic believes in job displacement’s going to be massive.

Lon Harris: 56:32 This is from May 7th, 2026. So just a month ago.

Jason Calacanis: 56:42 You know, he did this study through Open Research in 2020.

Lon Harris: 56:49 Yeah, I got the details. The three-year study gave 1,000 low-income adults $1,000 a month, while a control group of 2,000 people received just $50.

Yoland Yan: 57:00 Found something different. Participants actually reported valuing work more. Belief in the importance of work rose slightly.

Jason Calacanis: 57:25 Bingo.

Yoland Yan: 57:26 One participant said the extra money allowed her to take a temporary pay cut for a role with better growth opportunities.

Jason Calacanis: 57:33 Bingo.

Yoland Yan: 57:34 So, the research ended up concluding it’s not about laziness. It’s the flexibility of being able to make larger picture decisions.

Lon Harris: 57:51 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 57:52 So what Sam Altman’s study proved — and it was a small study, but not an insignificant one—

Lon Harris: 57:58 No, it’s not insignificant.

Jason Calacanis: 57:59 Is if you give people a small amount of money, not enough so they can quit their jobs, but a small amount, $1,000 a month, that might cover half their rent. That gives them more flexibility.

Lon Harris: 58:22 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 58:23 Whereas if they joined an associate in training program like we run here, they might get paid 60 or 70.

Jason Calacanis: 58:38 This is all to say that there is going to be a reckoning. The reckoning is going to be 2028, because by 2028, that election — I’m predicting now — that 2028 presidential election will be the AI job displacement.

Jason Calacanis: 58:58 2028, the number one issue in the election, the number one deciding issue, it’s not going to be inflation, it’s not going to be wars. It’s going to be AI.

Jason Calacanis: 59:18 The attack vector for the 2028 election will be: these companies became worth trillions of dollars while jobs went down.

Jason Calacanis: 59:37 And the way that we’re going to resolve that issue is with the ability to take all of these social programs and have a grand bargain. I believe it’s time for a grand bargain.

Jason Calacanis: 59:52 The grand bargain should be anybody making under $100,000 a year, $75,000 a year, maybe it’s under 50 pays nothing, under 75 pays—

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:00 Under 75k pays a $750 1% token amount to the government. Flat rate, no deductions.

Lon Harris: 1:00:54 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:57 Give me that number, whatever that number is.

Lon Harris: 1:01:03 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:04 Anybody making under 50k a year gets a percentage of that pool. Is it UBI?

Lon Harris: 1:01:17 Kind of.

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:18 But what we’re saying is get rid of those programs. Stop operating food stamps. Just give people the money.

Yoland Yan: 1:01:25 Yeah. I think you get Democrats and Republicans to agree on that as a principle.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:31 SNAP, SSI, all these means-tested programs. There’s housing, there’s unemployment, Medicare, Medicaid, everything.

Yoland Yan: 1:02:44 And it’s all disconnected and it’s all very complicated and convoluted and the people who need help don’t necessarily get it.

Lon Harris: 1:03:00 Simplifies everything, which is obviously better. You take all these social programs.

Yoland Yan: 1:03:59 Yes, of course.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:01 That’s what any time you go back and pick apart a well-intentioned social welfare program years later, you figure out is like, oh, we spent 70% of the total budget just on administration.

Lon Harris: 1:04:28 What are we doing? Anyway, so anyway, I think this is kind of a very interesting moment in time.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:31 Yeah. We got Kevin O’Leary agreeing to shrink his data center project. And then we’ve got Brian Chesky’s new AI lab.

Lon Harris: 1:04:46 All right. So Brian Chesky, Airbnb co-founder and CEO. He’s going to remain on as the Airbnb CEO, but he’s also founding a new lab that is going to develop AI models. The focus at least for now…

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:22 Yeah. We had a company early on, even before I think ChatGPT 3.5, and it was called Roam Around. It was in Batch 28.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:00 And I think—

Lon Harris: 1:06:01 I think we looked for that before and it’s already gone.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:07 Okay, let me finish my sentence. If you check YouTube, you will find it because we have the demo day of it.

Lon Harris: 1:07:17 This would have been September 20th, 2023.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:20 Roll the tape.

Yoland Yan: 1:07:21 [Demo voice] Hey everyone, my name is Shy, I’m the CEO of Roam Around. Roam Around is an AI concierge in your pocket.

Lon Harris: 1:07:49 Was so impressive in 2023.

Yoland Yan: 1:07:52 With all that time saved, you can say, ‘add a beach day’. You can see day three in Costa Brava has been added.

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:04 Oh, multiplayer mode!

Yoland Yan: 1:08:07 You’re probably asking yourself, ‘aren’t you just a ChatGPT wrapper?’ Well, leveraging our first mover’s advantage, we’ve accumulated millions of—

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:16 Lon, this was like me going back and forth with the founder, begging them to keep spending our money, to raise money. And I just said, ‘you know, yes, you’re going to be accused of being a wrapper, but…’

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:00 Corvette engine today.

Lon Harris: 1:09:01 Right. It’s the Corvette’s engine exactly.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:03 Exactly.

Lon Harris: 1:09:04 In their high-end Corvettes.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:05 In the high-end Cadillacs. Does it make it a wrapper or not?

Lon Harris: 1:09:52 Yeah. The magic for me is multi-modal. You use different models and different tools.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:14 That being said, if I’m Airbnb and I’m a shareholder, I’m on the board, I’m an institution with a large holding, I’m going to ask Brian, hey, can Airbnb put the first 100 million in and buy 10% of the company?

Lon Harris: 1:10:31 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:32 And have a perpetual license to it for Airbnb to use?

Lon Harris: 1:10:35 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:36 But then the question becomes for Brian, no conflict, no interest.

Lon Harris: 1:11:18 I mean, if it’s even a language model, we don’t even know if it’s an LLM or if it’s something else.

Yoland Yan: 1:11:40 Layla, a travel discovery and booking app, purchased Roamaround.

Lon Harris: 1:11:44 There, yes. That’s right. RIP Roamaround.

Jason Calacanis: 1:11:48 I go mental every time I go down history like this. This is my gift and curse as an investor.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:00 Which is their decision as I said, it wasn’t my decision. I always think, oh god, if we just persevered for six more months or one more year.

Lon Harris: 1:12:08 Travel is so tough.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:13 But they were at it in 2023, this was three years ago, Lon. Can you imagine what Roam Around would have done in three years?

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:17 If the founder came back to me—

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:20 Tomorrow and said, can I come back to the accelerator? I have another spin on travel? I liked that guy Shay.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:49 As a founder, persevering in an important category is I believe the correct decision 90% of the time. But the wisdom of investors is trusting the founder.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:23 I love a great pivot, so many great companies are built around them.

Lon Harris: 1:14:30 There you go.

Lon Harris: 1:14:31 Roam Around, RIP. We’ll miss you. Should we go off-duty?

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:36 Let’s go off-duty.

Lon Harris: 1:14:37 Jacob wanted me to ask you your thoughts on Mandalorian and Grogu.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:51 Mandalorian and Grogu was a great season of excitement and fun, without lightsabers, without getting into the Skywalker saga…

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:00 Or the disgraced sequels. Just great summer fare.

Lon Harris: 1:15:28 Dave Filoni.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:29 Dave Filoni, yeah. He’s also a genius. Sigourney Weaver piloting an X-wing is just like incredible.

Lon Harris: 1:16:39 They have done some stuff like this. Stranger Things, you could go see the finale of Stranger Things Netflix played it in cinemas.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:53 Before or concurrent?

Lon Harris: 1:16:54 The night that the series finale debuted on Netflix, that night you could also go see it in your local movie.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:58 Yeah, I got a better idea. Two nights before.

Lon Harris: 1:17:00 Oh, there you go.

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:01 And the community go crazy. So what I think you do is you play the previous episode with five minutes of bonus material you can only get in theaters.

Lon Harris: 1:17:40 I like where your head’s at because part of my whole thing has been you save movie theaters by mixing it up.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:00 My understanding is there’s two movies in theaters that blew past—

Lon Harris: 1:18:06 Mandalorian and Grogu.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:08 The first one—

Lon Harris: 1:18:09 The first one is Obsession. I actually saw this one the other night. It’s by a YouTuber named Curry Barker. He and his friend Cooper Tomlinson, they used to do sketches.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:43 Oh god, I want to see it.

Lon Harris: 1:18:46 It’s really well done. The concept is very simple. This guy finds in a magic shop this device that you can make one wish on.

Yoland Yan: 1:20:31 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20:32 Yes. This is going back to Easy Rider days of the movies, which is a young generation who has not been at the helm of movies before gets the helm.

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:00 Could be the revival of the movie industry. If these YouTubers can make something for a million and have it generate 100 million in revenue.

Lon Harris: 1:21:09 Smile. It was 17 million was the budget. It’s so far grossed over 166 million globally at the box office.

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:17 So now I want to know what their take is of that because you can self-distribute that.

Lon Harris: 1:21:23 Well, it’s Blumhouse, so they’re sharing it.

Yoland Yan: 1:21:26 With Jason Blum, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:28 Okay, so Blumhouse just made 50% of every dollar I’m assuming. Blumhouse has now figured it out. A24 has started to figure it out which is there’s a place for one to ten million dollar movies.

Lon Harris: 1:21:43 I think their largest one may have been 50 or 60 million.

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:46 Yeah. This is the future and you don’t need to get everybody to go see it. There was a product called Blair Witch Project back in the day.

Jason Calacanis: 1:22:01 Incredible. 166 times the production cost. This feels like a business I want to get into. I would love to start a movie studio.

Lon Harris: 1:22:17 See, yeah, I mean…

Jason Calacanis: 1:22:18 Because the people, what’s the one of the crazy clown that…

Lon Harris: 1:22:21 Oh, Terrifier. Terrifier 2.

Jason Calacanis: 1:22:23 Terrifier. My understanding is Terrifier self-distributes Art the Clown.

Lon Harris: 1:22:28 Art the Clown. Right, there is a small production company that started doing roadshow things and then grew it out organically.

Jason Calacanis: 1:22:36 But they control the means of distribution. They don’t have to go to Blumhouse or Paramount.

Lon Harris: 1:22:51 Yeah, it’s really intense. Damien Leone, that’s the creator. He has his own independent production company, Dark Age Cinema.

Jason Calacanis: 1:23:04 Their idea is to go directly to the movie venues.

Lon Harris: 1:23:15 Yeah, they partner with Screambox, which is like Bloody Disgusting, that website that’s their streamer.

Jason Calacanis: 1:23:28 There’s a great documentary called The Dark Wizard. Have you watched it yet?

Lon Harris: 1:23:33 I have not, I was going to try to watch it last night.

Jason Calacanis: 1:23:40 It’s about an artistic autistic man. There’s no need to do this without safety gear.

Lon Harris: 1:23:51 Well, the gimmick, yeah, it’s like that makes it exciting because maybe he’ll die.

Jason Calacanis: 1:23:56 And I don’t like that as a gimmick because life is precious.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:00 Ocean Ramsey, swimming with the great white sharks and the bull sharks in Hawaii and like taunting them — they’re not meant to be ridden Ocean Ramsey.

Lon Harris: 1:24:18 Yeah, I understand that this is the hook, but I don’t like the hook personally.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:27 Pull this one up too, Jacob. Speaking of commerce sort of coming in and intruding here,

Lon Harris: 1:24:32 I saw this from pump.fun, they’ve got a new… pump fun, they’re the meme coin sort of service.

Lon Harris: 1:24:39 So they’ve got a new thing called GO, and it’s basically you can pay people to do crazy things anywhere around the world with this service.

Lon Harris: 1:24:51 I compared it to like that movie Money Plane or like Squid Game where people are betting on these people doing dangerous things.

Lon Harris: 1:25:00 But to put people in purposefully disturbing or difficult or crazy circumstances.

Lon Harris: 1:25:14 It’s dystopian. I feel like this world that we’re creating now, bounties for doing things in the real world that you might not want to do, it unsettles me.

Jason Calacanis: 1:25:28 All right, so pump fun is letting people put bounties on behaviors that are silly and/or extreme.

Yoland Yan: 1:25:38 Yeah, an all-encompassing bounty platform where anyone can create or complete bounties for any task for unlimited rewards.

Yoland Yan: 1:25:46 It’s the any task part that strikes me as the funny, the weird middle part.

Jason Calacanis: 1:25:52 Yeah, this is kind of running man Black Mirror. And is it anonymous so like because it’s a crypto group of people you can say I’ll pay you $10,000 to hang off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Lon Harris: 1:26:05 Yeah. How to create a bounty? Connect your X account and wallet, create your bounty.

Lon Harris: 1:26:22 So that’s it. There’s no public face disclosure.

Jason Calacanis: 1:26:27 Listen, we have things like Fiverr or Upwork.

Yoland Yan: 1:26:34 Yeah Rent a Human, we had this on the show.

Jason Calacanis: 1:26:40 There have been other platforms that do this.

Jason Calacanis: 1:26:56 What’s challenging about this one is I know which way they’re going. They want people…

Lon Harris: 1:27:00 To do disturbing things in public.

Jason Calacanis: 1:27:22 Alex Honnold…

Lon Harris: 1:27:23 And Netflix.

Jason Calacanis: 1:27:24 Having him climb a building without a rope. I thought this was negligence on Netflix’s part because nobody in their right mind wants to see him die.

Lon Harris: 1:28:13 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:28:13 It’s still exciting! He could do more challenging things. Would that be the worst thing in the world to watch him scale one of these things?

Lon Harris: 1:28:31 I do think part of it is, as sick as it is, I think there is that human impulse like people looky-loos on the freeway if there’s an accident.

Jason Calacanis: 1:28:54 All right, listen, this has been an amazing episode of This Week in Startups twist. We’ll see you on Monday. Bye-bye.

Lon Harris: 1:28:58 Bye everybody.

Yoland Yan: 1:29:00 Bye everybody.

Jason Calacanis: 1:29:02 Thanks for watching This Week in Startups. If you liked this episode, check out more. If you’re a startup founder, Founder University Cohort 13 kicks off this fall. Apply for Jason’s Angel Syndicate at thesyndicate.com. Check out This Week in AI. Check out the Twist Ticker.

Lon Harris: 1:30:00 Thanks again to our sponsors for making today’s show possible. Follow the show on Instagram. Follow the show on X.com. This Week in Startups publishes three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5:00 PM Central Time.