Jason turned $11 and one tweet into 1.1M views | E2311

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Quo https://quo.com/TWiST PayPal Open https://paypalopen.com Northwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Today's show: *Jason spent $11 building out PodMeme, an AI tool that tracks down the best segments from top podcasts about a specific topic, then stitches them together into a single stream. His post laying out how he did it, featuring a simple screenshot of the product, got all the way to 1.1M views in just a few days. It's a simple fact: builders love to see what other people are building, and growing your new project "in public," sharing your journey on social media, is a great way to develop buzz around your product before it even exists. Today's guest Thibault "Tibo" Louis-Lucas walks us through how he grew products like Tweet Hunter and Taplio on his social media account, using social media buzz and a focus on tools for creators to very quickly expand to over $1M ARR. PLUS why Apple would only sue OpenAI if they knew they had them dead to rights… why Uber and Waymo are fighting over DC robotaxis… Jason's response to the public backlash against surveillance startup Flock Safety… and the guys remember iconic New Zealand actor Sam Neill. Guest: Tibo Louis-Lucas on X: https://x.com/tibo_maker Revid.ai: https://www.revid.ai/ Tweet Hunter: https://tweethunter.io/ Taplio: https://taplio.com/ Relevant Links: Lemlist: https://www.lemlist.com/ GRIN influencer marketing: https://grin.co/ TechCrunch: "Apple Sues OpenAI": https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-over-alleged-trade-secret-theft/ We Must Act Now statement: https://www.wemustactnow.ai/ TechCrunch: "Uber's Robotaxi Lobbying Effort": https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/ubers-robotaxi-lobbying-effort-has-put-it-on-a-collision-course-with-waymo/ DC Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Authorization Amendment of 2026: https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/2003462 DoorDash: Meet Dot: https://about.doordash.com/en-us/dot Flock Safety: https://www.flocksafety.com/ DeFlock: https://deflock.org/ Gigazine: Flock accuses Deflock of being a "terrorist org": https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20260209-flock-ceo-deflock/#gsc.tab=0 Unifi AI Security Systems: https://ui.com/physical-security Jason's PodMeme post: https://x.com/Jason/status/2076231055443440105 Jason responds to Justine Bateman: https://x.com/Jason/status/2076326740050206959 NYT Sam Neill obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/movies/sam-neill-dead.html "Possession" trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLXW-oVbTxE FanEdit: https://fanedit.org/forums/news-publisher/ "Manhunter" trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLqHlg2fAnE HBO "The Man Will Burn" trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRhUYPtp6Ao Timestamps: 0:00 There's no air conditioning in Paris 7:27 Tibo Maker's "ship 1 product a week" challenge 9:24 The power of building products in public 10:59 Quo (formerly OpenPhone) - Quo gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free at https://quo.com/TWiST 12:04 Excitement for JCal's "PodMeme" set-up 15:40 Compounding an audience and enlisting influencers 19:13 Your follower count is not important any more 20:59 PayPal - Built for payments, growth, and agentic. Paypal Open, built for all business. Visit https://paypalopen.com to get started 22:28 How Tibo got banned on LinkedIn twice 28:48 Apple sues OpenAI 30:59 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 38:44 How OpenAI should have handled the New York Times 45:10 DC's new robotaxi bill 52:06 Managing the AV and delivery-bot transition 53:23 Economists warn of AI job displacement 1:07:00 How Jason would fix Flock's messaging 1:17:26 Remembering Sam Neill 1:23:05 Lon's Dream AI edit 1:26:35 HBO's Burning Man docuseries Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I built shitty products. Every new product that I was shipping on Twitter, I got a little bit more following. That directly compounded time after time. At every new product that I was shipping on Twitter, I was a little bit more powerful, you know? The eleventh product was Tweet Hunter. That was a hit like at the very, very beginning. In less than a year, it reached a million per year and got eventually sold to to Lam List.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  I don't necessarily know which idea is going to work, but I build it in public, I share it with people. And I can tell you, Lon, if you share something on Twitter and you're a builder, people actually will engage with you and give you critical feedback.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Which is probably 10 times more interesting to be done.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. PayPal. Built for payments, growth, and agentic. PayPal Open. Built for all business. Visit paypalopen.com to get started. And Quo, formerly OpenPhone, gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free and get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/twist. That's Q U O dot com slash twist.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  All right, bonsoir, mon amies. It's your boy J Cal. I'm sorry I'm not suited up. Uh, but I am in Paris and it is hot. And they don't have air conditioning and I rented an Airbnb and it has like three portable air conditioners.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  But the French are like now, it's becoming a thing where they just are not going to give an inch on this air conditioning issue, I think.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  They're digging in their heels. They're like, not for us.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And you Americans are crazy. It's like the same ice issue I have in Italy. When I ask for ice and they give you two cubes and I'm like, no, no, pack the whole glass with ice. And then give you the Coke Zero next window. So now I'm going back and forth with my Airbnb, which is a charming Airbnb, obviously. You can see, um, if you're watching, beautiful Airbnb and a great and draws me having time of my life here, but they put the uh, portable air conditioners in like three of the seven rooms or something. So like a third of the place is air conditioning. These things are completely underpowered. It's 98 degrees outside. And then you know how it has the exhaust?

• 2:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  They just opened the door windows, threw the exhaust out, but left the rest of the window open.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  So you got all that hot air coming in.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  The hot air is coming in. We're trying to put the curtain around the hot air. It is hilarious. But I have learned a distinct lesson, which is, I mean, we have global warming, whether humans are creating it or it just happens to be a fluke. I don't want to get into it. But air conditioning is an incredible, modern innovation.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Not even that modern.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Talk to Singapore.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Not even that, like before our time, you know, it was, it was like the 1950s when the movie theaters were like, come in, it's air conditioned. So they've had a while. They've had a while to get on.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Well, and then Lon, here's the other thing. Here's your other tip. You go to a restaurant and they don't have air conditioning. I just went to Starbucks.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  That's miserable.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Uh, they don't have air, Starbucks has a portable air conditioner in it. So the doors are closed. It's swelteringly hot inside. And they've got an air conditioning pretending that it's doing something.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Enjoy a luscious, delectable French meal while you're like sweating in your food. That's no good.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Man, but I have been killing it. I, I had an incredible beef tartare. I had incredible.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  I saw the beef tartare. Yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Man, and I didn't put the doc confit at incredible doc confit. And then I had the chicken with morels at my favorite restaurant in Paris, Le Pool au Pot. It is the chicken in a pot, but they also have to have a chicken with morels. Last time I was at that restaurant, it was like 15 years ago, me, David Sacks and the wives, went there and had this incredible chicken with morels, the end of the morels season, fancy mushrooms.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Très magnifique, très magnifique. And I had a great time at the Raze Conference. Those are dropping on the other podcast all in. But here we are this week in startups. We got to talk startups.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Big show.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Got a couple of guests, got some news.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  We do.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  So let's get to work.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Well, before we get into all that, we got to talk about another patented J Cal productivity hack. Uh, you'll see here at the top of our docket. Uh, this, this additions hack, you know, we're talking about for busy content creators. There's a million little things. I mean, you see the glamorous part, us here on the air, hosting the podcast, welcoming the guests.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Could be more glamorous.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  It couldn't be more glamorous. Uh, I'm here in, in, you know, the lavish capital factory here in downtown Austin. But there are a lot of little things behind the scenes you guys maybe don't see that we have to do every single time we produce a new video or episode. We're super distributing the show across all kinds of different platforms. They each need their own captions.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  A lot of work.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  They each have their own titles, different uploads, and then we got to reach out. We got to book guests. We got to schedule things. We got to get a sense for the analytics, what's working and what's not. So, uh, these are all areas where an executive assistant, an EA, as we call them, can be a massive time saver. Uh, we can have Athena assistants coordinate with the guests, handle post episode follow-ups, keep the content pipeline moving. They could even pull an organized performance data. So we can get a sense for which videos are popping and why at a glance.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  And, um, I'll give you, uh, one that I did here, uh, related to what I was talking about earlier with the Airbnb. I was like, I gotta call an audible here. So I know which hotels I like. I know where to find them. So I now have projects in Quad, uh, have projects in perplexity computer. And I will start a search and this is like something people don't tell you. Okay. Yeah. Everything is going to AI. Sort of, kind of, but the last mile is the problem.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  So I was just literally authenticate my monocle magazine, authenticate, um, my Michelin star, because they have the Michelin keys now for hotels, uh, New York Times. Uh, you know, I got all of those, but you know, I'm logged into those, those are paid subscriptions I use and content as traveler. So I go into those, I have it organize everything. I have it put it on the Google maps. Then I look at it and I say, I'm really interested in these six or seven. But now I share the thread of me talking to the L L M with my Athena assistant. Then they, and I instruct them, hey, look at how I talk to Claude, look at how I talk to perplexity computer plugged into Grok. And then they can then fork the discussion and book the hotels from it, right?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  So I know people are saying, hey, do I go human? Do I go with an agent? Do I just do it myself? Why choose? Have all three. It's only $36,000 a year to have an Athena assistant. I have two. They work seven days a week. Go to athena wow.com and it will redirect you to a special secret landing page.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Which I think is athena.com slash.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  J Cal. Yeah. So we do want to say thanks to our friends at Athena for bringing you these productivity hacks. You can get $2,000 off your first EA by going to athena.com/jcal.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Shamat's got one too. Oh, by the way, my wife is using the Athena assistants now. So I'm just apologize ahead of time. She's a pretty, she's a tough cookie. She's got a lot of things she's got to get done. She's a, she's a mother of three.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Need a dedicated assistant. All right. All right. So we got to bring up our first guest now. Uh, you may know him online as TiVo Maker. His name is TiVo Louis Lucas, coming to you also from France. It's a very, uh, Francophile. It's a very Francophile episode today. Uh, so he is the product hunt maker of the year, Jason, from 2022. Serial founder and entrepreneur. Some of the projects include, uh, most popular, most famous Tweet Hunter and Taplio. These were suites of tools for Twitter and LinkedIn creators, schedule your posts, AI-driven content generation and strategy, relationship management, all that kind of stuff. They crossed a million ARR in their first year and then sold to a B2B SaaS company.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Uh, and now, uh, you know, he sort of helps out people with all of the lessons that he learned specifically, Jason, about building a social media following, building buzz around your product. Maybe even before you've got a product in the market while you're still developing and workshopping. So he's going to walk us through some of the strategies around there. TiVo, thanks so much for joining us.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Oh, that's, that's the intro. Thank you very much. So happy to be here.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. So you're going to, this is our tactical, practical section here on This Week in Startups. We've been asking the team, find us some tactical, practical advice for founders. So you're going to walk us through some of your tips here, uh, on how to grow an audience. You're a startup founder. And you want to grow an audience. What do you do?

• 8:44Speaker 00

  I think the, like, most people try to just share interesting things and that's, they don't have a specific playbook doing that. And so they, they miss that by doing interesting things outside of Twitter, it directly fuel their Twitter content. And so this is exactly what happened to me. Like, I started building on, I started building Tweet Hunter in 2021 after fading for like many, many years. And I did that challenge where I started like shipping, building and shipping one new product every week until something stick. And that didn't go very well at the very beginning. Like, I, I failed a lot. Like, I, I built shitty products.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  But just building one after another, it just, it just starts, you know, like every, at every new product that I was shipping on Twitter, I got a little bit more following. I got a little bit more interest. And so that directly compounded time after time. And so at every new product that I was shipping on Twitter, I was a little bit more powerful, you know? And so after fading, like shipping 10 products over four months, the 11th product was Tweet Hunter. And that was a hit, like, at the very, very beginning.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  And it's in less than a year, it reached a million per year and got eventually sold to to Lendis. That was, that was insane.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so the playbook for you was, hey, I don't necessarily know which idea is going to work, but I build it in public. I share it with people. And I can tell you, Lon, if you share something on Twitter and you're a builder, people actually will engage with you and give you critical feedback. Now you, because, and I just did this, pull up the tweet I did. Now I have a, I, I, actually, I looked up, I think I have over a million followers now. I think my follower count's growing.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Oh, you have significantly over a million now.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I remember when it broke, like, maybe six months ago, but it's growing fast now. But I did this.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  This is your podcast, deep link podcast listener, yeah.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, and you like to go by TIBO, right? T-I-B-O?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, T-I-B-O underscore maker.

• 11:00Speaker 01

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• 11:43Speaker 01

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• 12:04Speaker 00

  But I, I think what you said, it, what, what you said is incredible because it's, like, it, it forced people to switch from a selling mindset, like, I am in love with my idea, I want to sell it at all costs. It, it shifts people to a validation mindset. Like, it, it forced them to just try to validate their product, gets the, the hard no, or the hard feedback in order to move from the learning to the next idea, which is probably 10 times more interesting to be done.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  I know this to be true because I shared that I was building this. I had a little bit of jet lag. I'm here with the family. We're having a great time in Paris. And I just decided, well, let me just share what, I, I was like, you know what I really want? I was looking at my podcasting app and I was like, I want, yeah, here it is. So I explained, go ahead and click the button there. And I think what's important is you explain the why behind it. But if you look at what I made, it's called Podmeme. And I didn't come up with the name, by the way. And I did this with Perplexity Computer and Grok, the new Grok. So Perplexity Computer is like the harness. Grok, the latest one, 4.5, built it. And I said, go through the top 25 podcasts.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Now I have it doing like 75. Figure out all the segments, because all podcasters do timestamps now.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Then I said, organize it not by podcast, but deep link, and I want to play a deep link stream. So it named it Podmeme, and you can hit that Play Deep Link Stream. And then it was playing all the stuff about China and went to the next one and the next one. It cost me $11. It has now 1.1 million views, this tweet. So this is incredibly tactile and practical. Establish yourself on Twitter as a builder, build something, and I think asking people for feedback. And people actually did ask me, can I use it?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  And I was like, I, I don't want to support this product. I made an $11 podcast product for myself. So, but then I was thinking, killer next feature would be to export the, the audio file. So Lon, imagine you had like the China, you know, I don't know, GLM 5.2 gets released. 20 people comment on it. I said, make me one MP3 file, and then in between each one, say, uh, next up, this.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  And I, other people have done something with this. In fact, we invested in a company called Swell seven, eight years ago that Apple bought. Anyway, so this is the concept. Build something.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  I love it. Like, honestly, yeah. It, imagine going to a meeting and having like a 15 minutes condensed MP3 of all the best things that you can listen to about, from every podcast in the world. That's amazing.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  It's also good for discovery. You would, every time you do this, you would probably hear one or two podcasts you hadn't heard before. And if you were like, oh, this guy Lex Fridman has good thoughts on this, I'm going to go check out his show. You know, you know what I mean? Like, it's, you, you would find new podcasts to listen to by doing this, probably.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Were there certain types of tweets that work better than others?

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Most people think that they, they need the best tweets to sell their products. And what I did there, it, it can seem a little bit crazy, but on Tweet Hunter, I gave away 25% of the products to an influencer. And that seemed crazy at the time, but it's totally what made us work and what made the product super successful. So you, like, people, people feel that they have to create this audience themselves, but they don't. Like, they, I don't see enough partnership between builders and influencers. And both, from the, from both sides, people are craving for this to happen. I don't understand why this is not happening enough.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  I just want to make sure I clarify here. You're saying you gave 25% of the company, the equity in the company, to influencers?

• 16:06Speaker 00

  The company was multi-product, so it was not really equity in the company. It was more like a profit share and equity share related to profits.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  One thing you mentioned that I wanted to double click on a little was, you were creating all of these different kinds of products that you were building in public. And then every time you would sort of compound it, how do you keep people interested from two products ago in the next thing you're going to build? Like, what were you doing to create this, make this into like an ongoing narrative that people felt compelled to follow?

• 16:36Speaker 00

  But that's the thing. You don't do this randomly. Like, you, what, what we did, which I think was, like, we didn't really put some thoughts into this, but I think that was pretty smart, is that you just, you pick a target, you pick a very kind, very specific kind of people, and you pick a problem that they have. And so every single one of your product is going to talk to the same people and going to try to solve the same issue that they have. In our case, that was creator economy, and we, we wanted to help creators setting more. And so every single product that, that we have was relevant to the previous people that was following us before. If you work that way, you just compound your audience time over and over.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's really interesting, like, the constant iterating. It's not, it's not like totally new products. Like, now we're making a juicer, now we're making an AI pendant that you wear. It's like, you're aiming at the same audience and just coming at it from like these slightly different angles.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  And you are choosing your customers, so you can choose very wisely. Like, you can choose the kind of customer that you know that have a high buying power.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  You also employed. Influencers. I hear people talk about this a lot. We have a couple of companies we invested in. Captivate, which was purchased. Grin helps you manage a bunch of influencers at scales and Statusphere, which works with micro and mid-tier influencers. Explain to us how you found the influencers. Where do you find them? What's your pitch to them? How do you reach out to them? Most of them are looking, I think, to get 500 bucks or 100 bucks, right? And then they just review your product. But how did you do it and what worked?

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Most people, when they are trying to work with influencers, they are working, they are trying to find the perfect deal. They're gonna pay like 10K for the sponsorship and they are gonna hope a lot that this is gonna be successful. And this is really not how, like, what's the playbook right now. What I would do is seed your product to maybe like 50 or hundreds of much, much smaller influencer that you're gonna pay up a small amounts to, for the creations, and then a very high success fee on the results of their contents. And that way, you're gonna take advantage of where every social media other is going, which is,

• 18:58Speaker 00

  which is like, every single person other can go viral. And you're gonna pay for a small chance of them going viral.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Right, because it's not about the follower count anymore. It's about how much hustle you put into the video and if the algorithm picks you up. This is a really important insight, Lon, because it used to be, you know, Kim Kardashian would sell something for $10,000, then 100,000, then a million dollars a tweet. But even if she sells that, she doesn't get, she's not guaranteed to get picked up and get viral. She'll get a good number of views.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, the shift is, it used to be, you built up your follower count and then everything you posted got shared to all of your followers. And that was how you sort of had this locked-in audience. Now, even if you've got a million followers, if Grok is like, people aren't gonna be interested in this particular tweet, you don't get shared on the for you and people don't see it. So it's a real shift in thinking that now you're appealing to your audience, but also to this AI-driven algorithm.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  So let's be more specific. We're here at Tactical Practical. So you offered them exactly how much money to do their, to do each viral video? And then what did you offer them in terms of the commission per software download or signup?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  What I would do is, I have my people agents doing research on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, trying to find accounts that have like, an average of about 1,000 views over the last 20 content, as an example. And I would have my agents, like, reach out to a lot of them and suggest a base fee of something like 200 USD. And then if they break something like 50K views on their content, talking about my products, I would offer a bonus of about 500. My goal is run that and pick the most successful of those partnerships

• 20:54Speaker 00

  and then recycle them and work much more with those people.

• 20:58Speaker 01

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• 21:46Speaker 01

  I think you have the start of a really good startup talk for Founder University. I want to encourage you to keep working on this. I think if you put some slides into it and you just started evaluating, like, this could be incredibly helpful for people. But this is the tactical practical stuff I want to get into, you know, in 2026 and 2027. Any other tips you want to give to our founders in the audience? Or give yourself a plug for your product as well, the one that, whichever one you think is the best right now?

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Honestly, it's very hard to do that. So I think people should not expect a quick win out of that. But I'm building revid.ai to help people build those videos and go viral on social media. And so if anyone wants to check it out, that would be amazing.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Where can they find more information, follow you, follow up with you?

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'm on Twitter. I just got banned on LinkedIn again, but...

• 22:43Speaker 01

  What did you do? You did automated DMs? You were doing automated email, weren't you?

• 22:47Speaker 00

  No, I built this amazing sauce called Tapio, but that was two years ago. And so I think that they should not be allowed to ban me again for that. But it happened anyway.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  What did the other, what did the one they banned you for do? You gotta tell us what it did.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  Tapio. Tapio, that was an all-in-one LinkedIn margin platform to post, get inspiration, do DMs, like, everything. This one got acquired by Lam List in 2022.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Ah, but they, yeah, see, they're very cutthroat about this. Even when you're using an assistant, like, if you use the comment browser from Perplexity or any of the smart browsers, or you try to use your browser from Claude to like, search for people to do anything, they try to kill it immediately. So what they're doing now is, people are just using third-party tools built overseas where the scraping laws are different. Israel, Philippines, Japan, a couple of countries are a little bit more robust in terms of doing this. But I think Israel and the Philippines and India are the ones that do a really good job of it. So they're just scraping everything off of LinkedIn, and then they just sell

• 23:55Speaker 01

  the data. So LinkedIn really should just let you, if you have the $50 a month account, they should build some automation into it. You should be able to say, every day, give me five new leads that I should reach out to and, you know, let you connect it to your quad. Maybe not do automated in-mails. That would be annoying.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  I mean, they have to fix, they have to fix, like, the fact that when we want to book somebody on the show, and I don't have contact info for them, it's like 10 times easier for me to go to one of these sales lead services and just get their email than it is for me to use LinkedIn, which is ridiculous. I should be using LinkedIn. Like, why are they discouraging me for being able to do this work on LinkedIn? It's the perfect thing to do on their platform. I don't understand.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  They want you to go through email for some reason.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  And I think they have to realize they've lost that kind of race.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  It's okay, fine. But if you have a $50 a month account, which is a decent amount of cheddar, but every business will pay 600 bucks, if they just said, we're going to allow you to have like, an inbox that's like, [email protected], and we're just gonna give you a straight-up email, and people can email that email.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  And it's [email protected], whatever.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Would make my job 100 times easier.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Which, by the way, super, and then people could decide, do I want to forward that to my main inbox? Do I want to have it a secondary inbox? But I would be fine with having a LinkedIn email. By the way, that's what Raul from Superhuman, I understand, had pitched LinkedIn on, and that was gonna be their big thing. They would have like, a billion people with email addresses. It would have been the greatest product ever. They didn't do it.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  They lack vision at LinkedIn.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  I think it was like, too controversial at the time. But I would pay 50 bucks a month for that email.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  No one is in charge, I guess, in LinkedIn. Like, it feels like...

• 25:49Speaker 01

  It's a money printing machine. It still is. I mean, it's still the best place to post a job.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  And email does work. It's great for sharing content. I just think they have to, like, really, when you go into that web interface, it's too slow. So since it's too slow, I wind up giving up. I want to have, like, make it a modern-day Gmail, Superhuman-like app, so I can use quick keys, I can pick filters, just make my LinkedIn email box work like my Gmail. Period, full stops. There's no quick keys, there's no way to quickly sort stuff. It's crazy. Anyway, great job. And we'll have you back on again when you have your next cool tactical and practical tip. If you have a tactical practical tip that you want to share with the audience, just email Lon, [email protected] is your email, right?

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can get me there. Yeah, [email protected]. You could also use [email protected] if you prefer. That one will get to me as well. Thank you to Tebow. Great job.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  But I like this idea of like, a little more structure to the show as we go into year 16. Tactical, practical, the interviews, news, and boom, a little off-duty. Okay.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  All right. Before we go on, we should talk about one more thing. Our friends at ro.co, of course.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  ro.co. Look at me.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Look at, like...

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Look at me.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  And that's eating chicken morels and beef tartare and everything he wants.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  I was eating all this stuff. You know, I'm on a GLP, thanks to ro.co. Get your insurance checked. Yeah, you can pay a simple amount every month. Your insurance can pay for it. Anyway, it's the easiest way to do it. I gotta be honest with you folks. I was out of control eating. Now, I still, I eat whatever I want, but I don't eat too much. It's a, it's not about necessarily what you're eating. It's the amount of eating and it's also the snacking and the high pressure eating. That's what's my big one, stress eating. I'd be stressed out. I'm like, hey, Lon, let's go get a donut and a latte. An extra 800K, I'll tell you.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Go get velvet tacos or whatever, yeah.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Whatever, you know, whatever it is. But even now, you know, I'll get two velvet tacos, call it a day. Yeah, I used to go three. That's what these GLP's did for me. I'm running around here in Paris. I get this, there's a scale in my hotel. I was in a hotel last week. I jump on and I see kilos, I flip it over. It's got the pounds, I flip it over, I was 169. I was like, holy cow. That's pretty fantastic. People are noticing it, the look on my face, like you look good. Give him the code one more time.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  So, uh, Ro will let you know if GLP-1s are covered for you for free. You just submit your insurance card, they do the rest. Go to ro.co/twist for your free insurance check. See if you can get on these GLP-1s. This has got to be the biggest story in tech right now. Following what Bloomberg calls months of simmering tension between the two companies. Apple last week filed a 40-page lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company made a systematic effort to acquire and use confidential information to help them replicate Apple's consumer electronics business. Suit alleges that OpenAI encouraged current Apple employees to study confidential materials prior to their interviews with OpenAI

• 28:55Speaker 03

  and even take hardware components and prototypes with them to OpenAI's offices. OpenAI has denied these charges and says, quote, "It has no interest in other companies' trade secrets." A lot of this goes around, uh, a lot of the controversy, Jason, is centered around one person, a former Apple executive named Tang Tan. He oversaw the design of the iPhone and the Apple Watch. And then in late 2023, he told Apple he was gonna go become the Chief Hardware Officer at OpenAI, but Cupertino kept him around through February 2024 as part of his transition. And during this time is when they said Tan was already working with Johnny Ive and Sam Altman at OpenAI.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  And he was sort of like bringing Apple information with him and, and sort of, yeah, moving that stuff between the two companies. Recall also that key Apple staffer Paul Mead also departed the company recently for OpenAI. In his case, uh, as soon as he told Apple he was leaving for OpenAI, they were like, thanks very much for all your hard work. There's the door, please leave right now. To me, this seems, even by Sam Altman's standards, this seems particularly...

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Sam Altman's standards, you're baiting me.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  We've talked before, we've talked before about Sam Altman and he's not, maybe not the most reliable. But even by his standards, does this not feel a little brazen? Do you accept these Apple charges at face value?

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Apple wouldn't bring this suit if it didn't happen. So let me just start there. So there are two professionals, successful of an organization, just game their it out. Would Apple file this lawsuit that they know is gonna be the front page of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times? And the case is gonna be followed like the Waymo Uber case when...

• 30:39Speaker 03

  I also have that in the doc, we're gonna talk about that.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like, you, you don't have this happen, these lawsuits, unless it is, they have them dead to rights. I don't know that they have them dead to rights, but given my 30 years in technology, and that's why you're tuning in here, as I've seen this movie before, they got them dead to rights. Okay, so you've identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in. So you're all set to launch your new company, right? Not so fast. If you want investors and potential customers to take your new business seriously, you need to consider forming a Delaware C corp. And that's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. They're gonna give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email,

• 31:26Speaker 01

  and of course, a phone number. And that's gonna take just 10 minutes and 10 clicks. They don't charge hidden fees. Customer service is available around the clock. They're not overwhelming your inbox with spam. And they make it easy to cancel at any time. So get all the advantages of a Delaware C corp, independent, regardless of where in the US you're operating from. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist for more details. And the links are in the show notes. Not only do they have him dead to rights, they have him like cats nine lives. They got him like 90 times, I bet. They, and the fact, I didn't know this, but good job summarizing it. They kept him around for a couple of months to wrap up and do a transition.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, like two, three months, yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Anytime that happens, they were on him like white on rice. They were on him watching like hawks. They knew that he might do this, is what I bet. Now, I'm not saying that's entrapment, but you have to be incredibly brazen to give your resignation.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Stick around.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  For a few months, yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  And then use that as the, because once you know somebody's leaving, you know that that's a possibility. I've talked about situations that I've been in, either on companies I'm on the board of or an investor in where people do this kind of stuff. Or I had a salesperson one time that tried to abscond with the data, with the entire database and our editorial calendar for this very program. So he's dead to rights. The crazy thing here is ChatGPT had such an amazing lead and they had such a halo around them, such a halo. But a year ago, 18 months ago, that Apple did a major deal with Sam Altman specifically. Tim Cook and Sam Altman did this deal, if you remember,

• 33:15Speaker 01

  to make ChatGPT the opening default. I don't know, it wasn't exclusive, you remember? But they were gonna be the default LLM. So instead, instead of simply building a thoughtful, deep and meaningful relationship with the company, with the largest, with the majority of iPhone, with the majority of smartphone users here in the United States, with the most well-heeled ones, right? People don't realize that iPhone is now the majority of smartphones in the United States. It's not like a small thing with Android having two thirds and Apple having one third. Now it's 55% Apple, I think, because they came out with the lower end phones and the more accessible ones and they have the best product, you know, compared to Android.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  You are going to poison that relationship in order to take them on and hire their team members. And supposedly they've hired like hundreds of Apple team members and put salt in the wound to give Johnny Ive $10 billion? Johnny Ive, I think, has like billions of dollars in OpenAI equity. I think Johnny Ive has more equity in OpenAI and the value of that than he ever had in Apple. I think they got like some significant, when they bought his company, I think it was like $6 billion and I think it was equity.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  6.4 billion in an all equity deal.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Now, did they buy that at $100 billion? And he has 6%, 200 billion, he has 3%. So if we find that date and we just do a cursory look, I'm gonna guess it was when the company was at 200 or 300 billion valuation. But even if it was at a $600 million valuation, that means he has 1% of OpenAI. My lord, folks, if he's got 1% of OpenAI, that's, and he's owns 50% of his company. I mean, oh my God, he's sitting on billions of dollars, billions of dollars personally in OpenAI shares. So this was an example of them, I think, not realizing the big picture here. They got two cutthroats. They're never gonna beat Apple at hardware. They're not, I'm sorry.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  I don't see it. I think like there's gonna be a dozen new AI-first products. I think Apple will have two of them. Yeah, maybe ChatGPT has one, maybe Elon creates one. You know, maybe Android has a couple. Obviously, we're fans of Claude Pinn. Obviously, there's like smart glasses, like Met is doing. But let's just pump our brakes here. The, being the default on the iPhone and providing ChatGPT white labeled to Apple for their other products would have been a much bigger business. What happened then with Google? Google now is making a billion dollars a year off of the Apple relationship. They're doing Gemini. So they lost the ChatGPT deal because of this.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Talk about the worst decision ever. Now, listen, Sam is brilliant as a dealmaker, but this is a serious miss. If I'm a shareholder, I'm on the board of OpenAI, I am livid right now, Lon, that we threw and we incinerated the relationship with the most important consumer technology company in the world, Apple.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Uh, it was about $300 billion was OpenAI's valuation when they did that deal.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  So they own 2%. Company becomes worth $2 trillion. When it starts publicly trading, they own $40 billion. He has to own a third or half of the company he sold, at least. So he's gonna make 10 or 20 billion dollars.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Doing all right.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  They gave Johnny Ive 10 or 20 billion dollars to make a hardware product that has a 5% chance of working, not because there's anything wrong with Johnny Ive. The average person has a 1% chance of making a hardware product. Johnny Ive has five times that. Hardware products are hard, very hard. What a disaster this, this is an unmitigated disaster for Sam.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  I guess my, my final question would be, I feel like there was a time in my life that I could remember where the CEO of a very large, soon-to-be-public company, having a reputation like this as being like a rapacious schemer would, would be bad. Is that still bad? Do people care about this in 2026? Does it, does it matter that that is his reputation?

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Um, if you're winning, you can get away with a lot, right? Cause you're winning and everybody's making money. And so when you have a lot of people on the cap table, they're gonna rally around you. I've seen this up close and personal many, many times. When a company goes through problems and you see like their VCs, their employees, their, you know, analysts, their partners rooting for them, you're like, hey, yeah, we're all on the team. We have equity, we have a stake in this, we, we were betting on a certain future. Totally fine. But, um...

• 38:06Speaker 01

  What they have to, what you have to realize is OpenAI, when they stumbled, which they have this year, when you stumble, if you've built up all of this bad karma, then the knives come out.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And so that's the other problem. Somebody told me early in my career, enemies accumulate. Enemies accumulate. Be very, very careful. And this is, I think, what Sam's learned. He had the huge lawsuit with Elon, huge lawsuit now with Apple, huge lawsuit with the New York Times. I mean, in all of those cases, those could have been partnerships. He could have worked it out with Elon. He could have been, continued to be part, had the partnership with Apple teed up. He had won that. He fumbled that one. He could have a partnership with the New York Times. All he has to do with the New York Times is say, hey, we want you

• 38:59Speaker 01

  to be our primary partnership. We'll give you a billion dollars in equity and we'll do a 10-year deal for $100 million a year, for $200 million a year. Just buy your way out of it and tell New York Times they're the only one getting this deal. And as part of getting this deal, we just want you to encourage other people to license their content to us, whatever, you know? And they could have just paid off the New York Times. The New York Times isn't worth that much money. New York Times would love to have a billion or two billion dollars in equity.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  You can buy off a newspaper. It's not that expensive.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Come on, man. All we gotta do is go in there and be like, you know what? Let's just assume, let's just assume that you're gonna win the lawsuit and you're gonna win a couple of hundred million dollars. Let's cut to the chase. How do we win together?

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Remember the guy from The Insider who was like, I will take his deposition. You got left and right. This is a sovereign state of Georgia.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  Bruce McGill. I believe it's Bruce McGill as that actor. Yeah, he's fantastic.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Greatest scene ever.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  He's fantastic.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, four minutes in that movie stole the show. As a consumer and subscriber to the New York Times for 30 years, I am so sorry that we didn't come to you and work on a deal. We respect you. We covet you. And we want to make this right. Period. Full stop. We're gonna assume here for this meeting, we'll just do a little scenario here. You can still be hollering with the collar on. We can assume here that you're gonna win the case.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Well, of course, we're gonna win the case. I have a mountain of evidence. It couldn't be more clear. You're, we're gonna put you in the fourhouse, sir.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Okay. We are gonna be the number one AI company in the world. You are the number one journalism outlet in the world. If we work together, we can double the footprint of your business. And we will be your number one advocate. And we would like you to teach us, teach us how to work with content creators. We want you to be customer zero. We want you to be partner zero for our firm.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Well, stop stealing our data. That's step number one. Or am I not?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  Am I coming around now?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  No, I think it's fine. You're irate. Okay. We assume you're gonna win a 500 million to a billion dollar settlement. We're going to give you a billion dollars in equity right now. And we're gonna give you $100 million a year for the next 10 years to license your content exclusively. And we're gonna power your website with ChatGPT for free. How, how might that sound?

• 41:28Speaker 03

  All right. Well, I'm getting a chunk of that as the lawyer. So I'm, I'm, I'm in.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  There you go. Boom. Here we go.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  I'm sold.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  So that's, that's the way they have to approach these things is what's it gonna take?

• 41:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  What's it gonna take for us to make your business double and to have you be so happy with us that you tell Washington Post and LA Times and Economist and Financial Times and CNN to work with us? We want to develop a standard with you.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  It's interesting. It's exactly what Mark Cuban said these AI companies should do about the data centers. It's just to literally just buy everybody in the town off. Like if they, if they oppose it, just say, how much money do I have to give you for you to not oppose?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Hey, you got 100,000 people in this town? And you have, okay, and 20,000 of them are kids? We're putting a half million dollars in equity for those 20,000 kids.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  I'm just gonna like, just write a check and make the problem go away.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  And if you guys can get to 100% of the signatures, then whenever you hit 100% of the signatures, the money's deposited in your accounts. All right. So anyway, this is a disaster for OpenAI. And I think they're probably dead to it.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Probably. We have a question, a viewer question from Nody, at Sparkers770, but bunch of numbers. I'm not gonna read them off. What do you think the outcome will be of this lawsuit? What kind of restitution do you think Apple is looking for here?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  I think Apple is gonna go to the mat like New York Times is. When you have somebody like ChatGPT, that's such a powerful organization, that's firing on all cylinders, is gonna be worth two or three trillion dollars, you don't stop. And you, they had this experience with Google and you saw what happened with Uber. Uber, I believe, the person went to jail. I think that Uber didn't get infected by this. But in this case, since he was a full-time employee for a while and he did the recruiting, I think they're gonna be infected. I think they're gonna go after the injunction, which is you can't release a product and you gotta like reverse this. And then I think they really just want them to stop poaching as well.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  So there's probably all of those things. So they're just gonna try to exact maximum pain.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  I was 18 months in jail for trade secret theft that that Google, or Uber executive was sentenced to.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, million dollar fine and like 750 in restitution. So what happened in the Uber case, according to reports, I'm not, I don't have any, I literally don't have any inside information. If something like that happens on an investment, I don't, I'm not like asking Uber, hey, give me all the inside details. I don't wanna be touching that. I don't wanna get deposed. But in that case, when he showed up with the hard drive or whatever, with all the data on it, they rescinded their offer and they said, leave the building. In this case, they didn't do that.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  No.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  And apparently.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  It sounds like they were encouraging it. And Apple seems to believe that they have evidence that OpenAI was actively recruiting people to do this while they were in transition periods between the companies.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Which is, which is chaotic. That is chaotic behavior.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  Very chaotic. That's what I mean. It's so, it's so brazen. I'm almost taken aback. Like, maybe this didn't happen because it seems so obvious that you would know not to do that.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  I'll be honest, I don't think Sam knew.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Hmm. Okay.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  I think they may, cause I don't, I mean, again, it's like a fun thing for people to beat up on Sam and the lawsuits and all this stuff. I can't imagine Sam would, with the experience he has, would ever in his right mind.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, just not worth it.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Encourage somebody to do this.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  I mean, you already have sunny eyes.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  He's too savvy. He's way too savvy. Honestly, there's no way he knew, which means this guy went rogue. But here's the thing, if you have an employee that goes rogue and they work for you, you still got some liability.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  There is a new, newly proposed legislation in Washington DC itself. It's an update to their Autonomous Vehicle Act of 2012, and it would allow driverless testing and commercial driverless operations. So currently in DC, Waymo, Zooks, they can test vehicles out in the city, but they must have a human operator in the car. And so now there's a new bill being debated that would allow autonomous vehicles to just start operating commercially in Washington DC itself. Uber has come out against the bill. Waymo supports it. So Uber is saying that you can't have, Uber supports a hybrid, they call a hybrid model. So you

• 45:48Speaker 03

  can offer robo taxi rides as part of an overall rideshare service that also has human drivers because they argue that.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  The otherwise autonomous vehicles replace human drivers. And they also say there's a whole bunch of benefits to having human drivers that autonomous vehicles can't do, like helping out the disabled or elderly when they wanna ride. And they argue that just a fleet of autonomous vehicles with no human drivers creates congestion because the cars are rolling around unoccupied, or they're stalling, or they're waiting around places. So that's, that's what, that's what Uber is saying. Waymo, on the other hand, says that this bill allows them to safely deploy autonomous vehicles while also supporting public transit and without restricting the, you know, rideshares that you could already use in the city like Uber. So they're saying it won't impact Uber. You could still get

• 46:38Speaker 03

  a human driver from Uber if you want. Waymo would just be sort of a separate option. There's actually a hearing today in DC about this legislation and both companies have sent representatives that are gonna sort of pitch their viewpoint.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  So I'm giving you my like raw reaction here. I haven't read anything. I don't know, we don't know what's exactly true here or not.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  But there's also legislation going on in New Jersey and somebody started, you know, every time this happens, people are like, oh, well, Jake Howes is the chairman of the board at Uber. So let's, I mentioned him.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  You own 30% of the company, Jason, so.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Nah, no, I don't own 30 bits anymore. Come on, relax, everybody. So, you know, we have this situation where one group of people are gonna want absolutely no regulations for self-driving. They're gonna wanna be able to put cars on the road anywhere with any sensor stack and they want federal legislation. So that would be Tesla, right? Tesla wants federal legislation. They wanna override every state's ability, every city's ability to make their own decisions. That is like, you know, that would be like, I don't wanna say a Hail Mary, it'd be like splitting the arrow type outcome.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Because you, you do have local, we live in a union of 50 states and driving in roads is like one of the things that, you know, you have local control over it, as you should, right?

• 48:01Speaker 03

  As we've seen, I mean, localities, different regions have different challenges when it comes to things like ride sharing. Like, it makes sense for a town in Colorado that's in the Rockies to wanna have different rules than, you know, Austin, Texas, nice and flat, easy to get around.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  And how paradoxical that Uber fought that battle for a decade.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  And now we're gonna fight it all over again.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Instead of for it being ride sharing and you can use your own car to give somebody a ride, it's gonna be, I can use my autonomous feeling of right. So it's gonna be localized. What happened in China? China has stopped giving licenses for automated cars. It is the Wild West over there. There are 20 different providers in 10 different cities and there have been massive protests from drivers. And there are 10 million cab drivers. I'm not even talking about truck drivers. There are like. 10 million. And so if you look, China has suspended, this is from Reuters. What's the date on this one? April 29, 2026?

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Yes, this is pretty recent, this April.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, the two months, three months ago. So when you have these unrestricted and companies start YOLOing it, you will have protests in the street because drivers immediately start losing 10%. There's like a 10% downward pressure on pricing. And so they're gonna, AVs are going to be licensed. They're going to be limited by the number of them. And there are going to be rules for the road that are different in different cities. And you know, as much as it sounds great logically for there to be one rule for everybody, it's just not how America works. It's not a top-down thing. And as you can see, in the top-down place, China,

• 49:41Speaker 01

  which has a lot of regional actual autonomy, even though people like to think of it as top-down, they do have actually a lot of regional autonomy. The next phase is the unions and the drivers fighting it out with the AV companies. So you have the DoorDash, Uber and Lyft over here. You got Waymo and Tesla and Baidu and We Ride and Zoox. You know, and Neuro, you can, and the Lucid Gravity. So you're going to have, there's at least 15 players here in the US right now. And you've heard of probably 10 of them. Then you have the pure play, non-AV, and then you have in the middle, these aggregators, Lyft, DoorDash, etc. DoorDash has their own hardware now.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  But now think, let's take Uber out of it for a second and just think for first principles about DoorDash. DoorDash has DoorDashers that are doing 99.99% of deliveries. And in some cases, there are unions and they've been fighting over in every single locale, minimum wage, and do they get paid for downtime?

• 50:43Speaker 03

  Percentage of their tips that they get, there's all sorts of like ins and outs, yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  And we're 15 years into that for DoorDash, right?

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Then you have DoorDash, at the same time, they have their own robot that drives. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's not a car, it's like, it's kind of like a motorcycle. It's like, I think it falls under the e-bike situation. We'll play a video of it here.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Jacob, see if you can find that for me.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  They are going to be fighting themselves. Their unions and everything are going to be fighting and there's going to be a whole thing. So this is going to be a two, three-year battle in every city. Uber is in the middle of it as well. They have done all these concessions for drivers and insurance and healthcare and benefits. So they have to be loyal to them. What do those people want? They want to keep their jobs, rightfully so. Uber has put $10 billion into self-driving companies. So they're, they know that this is happening. So Uber, this isn't about Uber versus Lyft. This isn't about DoorDash versus Waymo doing deliveries or RoboTaxi or Zoox.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  This is about a civil war inside of these companies. They have to manage a crazy transition. So what would you propose if you were DoorDash or Uber or Lyft? And 99% of rides and deliveries are happening by humans and it's 1% robotics? And we assume it's going to double every year, so it's 1% this year, next year it's two, year after it's four, year after it's eight, year after 16. You want to give them some hope that they can keep their job for some amount of time. And that's what all this is. Now, people are going to say, oh, it's hypocritical. It seems hypocritical from the outside, yes. What it is, is DoorDash wants 100%, well, I don't know if they want.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  DoorDash realizes 100% of deliveries are going to be robotic, ZipLine, DoorDash, whatever it is.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  But it's, there's a gulf between now and then that you got to get through if you're DoorDash.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  So managing the transition is what's occurring here.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  It's fascinating.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  So everybody's going to dunk on them and say, oh, they're trying to be D cells. I think it's more like we're trying to manage a, you know, millions of drivers in the United States from riding in the streets and burning down Waymo's.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yes. I mean, I think there's so many things to look out for. I mean, it's, if you're DoorDash, you know, like, next year, you still need humans. So you can't have all the humans who are DoorDash drivers immediately go do other things because they realize robots are going to take their job. Yeah, just like you said, you need, you need a, there needs to be like a runway here to launch this. And so they're trying to protect the economy they've already created. It's fascinating you, you take that tack, because there was also, I don't know if you saw this letter today, The Economist published about AI job displacement.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  I did not.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  All right.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  And this is after everybody is suddenly swung to the other side of the ship. And it's like, everyone's like, oh no, there's going to be no AI displacement. And I'm like, guys, the ship is like, everybody's opinion is massive job destructions, now it's no job destruction.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so 200 economists, including 15 Nobel laureates, published an open letter today. It's called "We Must Act Now," warns that AI is going to radically transform the US economy and that we have to have a plan to offset potentially millions of lost white-collar jobs. It was signed by the chief economist for both OpenAI and Anthropic, also Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, friend of the show. So, but I think the point they're making here, Jason, is almost exactly the one that you and I were just talking about. They're saying, eventually, if you take a long enough view, the accelerationists are correct. AI is going to radically transform the economy and we won't miss those jobs.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  It's going to uptake productivity, we're going to find new jobs in new sectors we don't even think about today, and, and we'll be fine. But they're saying, in the gulf, in the gulf between today and that future, it's going to be a huge problem. And the transition is what's going to be so rocky and that we need to manage. And it's exactly like what you were saying, like, eventually, all DoorDash deliveries will be robots or most of them.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  So do you think Uber should, do you think Uber and DoorDash should slow down through legislation on a per-state basis? The deployment of self-driving in order to save jobs and ostensibly not have accidents and try to build these hybrid networks? Do you think they should do that? Or do you think it's hypocritical?

• 55:13Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't think companies should worry about being hypocritical, personally. Like, I think they should just worry about, you know, what the most important thing is in the immediate future for themselves, their own health and the people that work for them. I definitely think that we should be thoughtful. And if that means pumping the brakes a little bit, obviously, I don't think we should not pursue the future where automation is happening. I think that's coming, it's inevitable. But I'm, I'm not against ideas like this of like, let's slow down, let's make sure that we still have a functional economy next year as we wait 10 years now.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Would you be agree with licensing and say, New Jersey, if New Jersey has, I'm just going to make up a number here, 250,000 DoorDashers, Lyft and Uber drivers, 250 drivers. We're going to release 1% of cars per year, 2% next year, 4% next year. Would you be okay with that? And then they charge them $5,000 a year, $10,000 a year for that license. And that money goes towards, you know, like, maybe unemployment for those drivers or something? Would you be okay with something like that?

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Yes. In fact, I like those kinds of system. Well, I think we were talking about another thing. There was a proposal for like, we should put a tax on companies as they replace people with AI to offset, you know, like, every time you replace another human job with an AI, that's all right. But you put like an extra 5% in the, in the tank for other people who are getting laid off. Like, I like ideas like that. I think managed capitalism.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  By the way, we already have that in most states. You have to put money away as an employer into your unemployment fund.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, people take out of it. I don't know exactly how it works.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  The AI version of the unemployment fund. But I, I think, I'm not like, I, you know, I used to be, when in college, I was like a socialist, full-on communist. Like, I think I've adapted to where it's like, you can have capitalism. You just regulate it carefully to make sure it's not abusive to people. I don't, I don't have an ideological problem with that at all. I think we should do more of it.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, listen, if everybody wants to know where I stand, I think we should have licensing and safety as the number one thing. The great paradox here is even if this gets slowed down, and let's say people are right, Uber and Lyft and DoorDash are going to slow this down in order to catch up with their products, like, that's kind of the insinuation. They don't want to ban it, they just want to slow it down and they want to manage their own employees during the transition. Okay, let's say both of those things are true, and they might turn out to be. I still think I would want to see, I, I still think the rollout is not coming that fast.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  I still think it's going to be 1%, 2%, 4%, 8%, 16%. So let's just do that number. And I think right now, ride sharing is 1% of all rides that occur in the United States. And then I think of that 1%, so if we take, now we have 100% pie of rides. I think that like, with the exception of like, top markets, Los Angeles and San Francisco, of ride-sharing rides, maybe less than 1% are automated now. It might be 2%. So if we assume 2% a year, 3% a year, okay, 2027, it goes to 4%. 2028, it goes to 8%. 2029, it goes to 16%.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  2030, we hit our stride, it goes to 30%. It's still going to take time, right? And I think all these proposals are two-year proposals or three-year proposals. So I think the organic rollout, as Waymo and Zoox and Tesla will want to do it, is going to go relatively at the same pace as these proposals that are the transition.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  That makes sense.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  So it's going to be moot at the end.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  It's just people lobbying for something that's going to be a paced rollout anyway. It's going to take five years to get to 30%.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, your numbers were really close. 1% to 2% of all rides in the US currently are ride shares and 0.2 to 5%. This is according to Gemini. 0.2 to 0.5% of those ride shares are in AVs currently.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Got it. Okay, so let's say it goes from 1 in 200 this year.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  And that's max, it's 0.2 to 0.5%. So 1 in 200.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  We'll give it the benefit of the doubt. 1 in 200 this year, 1 in 100 next, I'm saying doubling, so 1 in 100 next year, 1 in 50 in 2028. 1 in 25, 29. 1 in 12 in 2030. 1 in 6.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  That's if it's perfectly consistent.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  In 31. 1 in 3. In 32, so maybe be half in another seven years. I think that's actually kind of realistic. I, I, we may be sitting here at this clip and be like, Jake Allen nailed it.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  Perfect. Exactly. I mean, I think it's really like, it, it, it's, it's jumps when it comes into a big new market. Cause I think there are a lot of people like myself, the very first time you take a Waymo ride, you're like, well, this is fantastic. I'm going to do this as often as I can. Like you, it, it, it sells a lot of people after one ride, I think.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  It's really a safety issue and that's actually what I'm very nervous about. Having seen this movie before, I think there is a very significant chance that all of this gets paused. If just two people get killed in.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  No, no, two people in a quarter, two people die in a quarter, or one person dies on video because of a mistake or gets hospitalized.

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. The video, if there's a graphic video.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  It is on video.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Out there. Yeah. That's a problem.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  It, it, by default, it is on video.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Right. Cause it's all, no, I mean, if it gets out there in the world and we are all on social media, watching a graphic video of a Waymo killing somebody. I think that would have a, that would have an impact.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  There'll be a freedom of information when there's a lawsuit and a pixelated version of it, or a version right before the person gets hit.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Will be released. So it's either going to be, you know, some grocery store's camera, speaking of Flock, some grocery store camera or Flock camera, whatever. Somebody's going to pick it up and we're going to have.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  There's cameras everywhere. So, yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  I'm going to make two predictions. 50% of rides are automated 2032.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  2032, 2033.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Six years. About six years from now.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  I'm going to say seven years. So seven years to 50%. So all of this hand wringing over this, oh my God, Uber's de-sailing DoorDash and Lyft are going to de-sell. It's going to be moot because they're all proposing three year, two or three year transitionary period. So it's going to be moot. Second thing, I, I think there'll be a one year pause in all of this. Uh, where I think it's a greater than 50% chance that we might hit like a one or two year pause during that seven years. When something very bad happens. I don't want to see that happen, but there's so much pressure on these companies lawn. Like if you look at the Tesla bulls, there are all these crazy Tesla accounts that are like, they've placed a bet on Tesla stock.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  And then they release five videos a day pushing Tesla to go faster and go faster. And like, they're like, I've never gotten in an accident with FSD. And it's like, of course you haven't, like you're doing a ride a day. It's, and, oh, that Waymo hasn't had an accident.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  I mean statistically.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Except they hit a kid in Santa Monica at seven miles an hour. And like, that could have been a lot worse.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I mean, I, I think both sides, like you could see the point, like statistically, these cars are so much safer than human drivers. Like if you were doing any kind of test of human drivers across US cities, like people hit each other and they hit things and they hit other cars all the time.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  People die, 30,000 a year.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  Every single day. So yeah, it's undeniable, just if you're looking at it as raw data, but the emotional impact of seeing an automated car. Hit a person invalidates all of that for people. The moment they see that.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  It'd just be emotional.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Exactly. It becomes emotional. It stops being about the numbers. And it's like, oh my God, that robot car murdered a human. We have to stop this. And I think that, that, that's the mindset for a lot of people.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  That's exactly the mindset. Okay. Great.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  We got, you want to talk about Flock real quick before we?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Well, you saw my tweet. Yeah. So I'm, I'm happy to talk about it a little bit.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  So Flock's safety CEO Garrett Langley did an interview where he called D-Flock, a terrorist organization. D-Flock, of course, an open source map of license plate cameras in the US. Anybody can report new cameras that they spot. Uh, Justine Bateman, the, the actress and filmmaker responded. She's criticized Flock's claims that they're not forcing Flock on anyone. And then you responded to Ms. Bateman, uh, claiming that Flock has a PR problem. We can bring up the tweet here. Flock is doing good work, but their comms are suboptimal at best. I've seen this movie before with Robin Hood and Uber, and it's an easy fix. CEO founder owns the issue and walks people through it step by step, over and over again, till there's no way for the issue to be debated in bad faith.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  So you want to, you want to unpack this for us a little bit?

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think they, um, took notes from Trump and said, we have to go on the offensive. We have to go on the, uh, attack and say, hey, these people who are burning down or taking down the Flock cameras and vandalizing them, they're terrorists. Okay. They're not terrorists, you know, like that's, we all know what a terrorist is. So when you use that hyperbolic language, and at the same time, people have valid concerns, then you are going to activate people. And that's what they've inadvertently done. It would be like Travis coming out and their surge pricing. And he says, deal with it. You're, stop being poor. Right?

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  If you were to say something that outlandish or that hyperbolic, it's going to make people concerned. So here's what you have to do. You do what Travis did. We worked on a blog post together back in the day about surge pricing. Cause when he would explain surge pricing to me, it made total sense and I was totally for it. When the public talked about it, when he wasn't talking about it, they would be like, oh my God, they're charging, you know, six times the normal price. To take me and my child to the doctor. And it's like, during a blizzard, you're taking your child to a doctor during the blizzard. Like literally that's what it was. It was a rich person. I can't remember which reality TV star was like, they just tried to charge me six.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Times as much to pick up my kid during the blizzard. And like, this is abusive. It was like, okay, there's no car service to pick up your kid either. Everybody just shuts down. Uber happened to build a system that says, we're going to double the price until somebody takes the ride. Would you like to have Uber never give an incentive for drivers to come out? Which means they're not available on New Year's. They're not available during a snowstorm or rain. They just stay home because why risk it? As a driver, or would you like to just have availability? And so the argument was not like price gouging. It was availability, but it took us a while to get there. Here, what Flock is saying is like, hey, don't pay attention to what we're doing.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  We have no culpability. We provide software to local jurisdictions. And there's a bunch of terrorists and they're attacking us and we're hurt. The reason people are attacking you is because there are a bunch of people who really value their privacy.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Now, should they attack you? Absolutely not. But, you know, taking a bat or a paint gun or a shotgun. To us, you know, a speed camera as an example, or a license plate reading camera, that's like a time honored tradition at this point. Like people hate being surveilled. It's also very European. In Europe, they shot, or not shot, they, they vandalized all the cameras on the highways there. Speed cameras specifically. People get the ick from this. So what you have to do as the founder is to explain it from first principles. And when I had him on the show, the founder, I was really walking him through this actually, because I identified it back then. And what they said was, every time I asked them like, what's the data retention policy?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  How do you track who has access to this stuff? Like if a rogue cop wants to track their, you know, uh, their divorce. And they want to track their spouse, can they abuse the system? Right? And they were like, well, the local community sets their things, whatever. And it was a much better answer to say, we only allow a local police officer or, um, to use the software. If they keep the license plates only for up to 12 months. They're not allowed to keep them past 12 months. Additionally, anytime they track a license plate, they have to put their badge number in. They have to put their password in and it tells us in a permanent log that we keep at our headquarters, not the police.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  That says, Officer Krumsky looked at Mrs. Smith's license plate. And he looked at it again on this day. And if we, and then all of that goes in an audit to the city council. And we only allow this product to be installed in places where there is a city council and a judge. And a, uh, organization that looks at, looks out for this type of abuse. We do not allow facial recognition. We do not take pictures of that. And all data's gone in 12 months. So if there's a, a, a series of robberies and it goes on for two years, the police can only get one year of data. And if it gets leaked, you know, we know it's going to get leaked. Now, if you said it the way I said it, and.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  We only install when the community is unanimous, when the community is eighty, seventy-five percent in favor of this. So if there's a community that is seventy-five percent in favor of it, we allow them to put this technology in. If seventy-five percent's against it, we don't want them to have the technology and you can't have it there because the police can't unilaterally put it in. They need to have community support. And all of the locations are publicly available and we're available. If there's an audit, any judge can come to us, we will give them the logs of potential abuse.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  The end.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like they are, like, your approach definitely comes from a place of, I'm aware that there are very justified concerns about this and we're going to address them. I feel like Flock keeps coming in from this perspective, like, why are you criticizing us? It doesn't make any sense. Like, like, they had that Super Bowl ad that was like, we're gonna use your doorbell cam to help spy on your neighbors and find your lost dog. And then they were-

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  That was Ring.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  Well, but it was the Flock, it was Flock, it was their, they were collaborating with Ring on this and then they cut, Ring cut off the collaboration with Flock after the negative backlash to that ad. And then I, I just feel like every time, like, there, there's that, the, the refrain seems to be, well, if you hate safety, like, would you rather have a safe neighborhood or-

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, are you, are you pro criminal? Yeah, you're, you're either pro criminal or you're anti, you're pro criminal, anti Flock, or you're anti criminal and pro Flock.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  I feel like you just lose people right away with that.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  There's no nuance.

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not a binary, these are justifiable concerns and you just, people are gonna shut down if that's your response, I think.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, you know, the way to say that is, hey, by the way, with AI, we know it's a dog. When it's a lost dog, if people in Flock wanna add the lost children, lost dog feature, they can opt into it.

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  Yes, I, I, right, I think it makes total sense.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  If you don't wanna have your Ring camera as part of this and you have privacy concerns, you don't have to. You can just record your property. But if a lost dog comes on your property, or a lost child, or a kidnapped child is kidnapped on your front lawn, or your back lawn, or whatever, in a car in your front of your house, you could have contributed that data, you didn't. With AI, we know it's a dog, we know it's a child. We have ninety-nine percent certainty in both those cases, and we only use this if a judge asks us, you have to get a judge to ask us, or a police department, and it's, you know, we'll do it within twenty-four hours with an emergency order from a judge.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  But we don't just do it willy-nilly. So they just say, listen, we heard you.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  And I'm friends with Jamie Simonoff, and he was like, I can't believe this, like, we just wanna help find dogs. And it's really a communication issue.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  And we're at a moment in time where people are like, wait a second. I, I'm like, wait a second.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  They're skeptical.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  But I'll tell you, on my properties, and I have a couple of properties, I use Unify, U-N-I-F-Y. I have facial recognition on all my properties, I have license plate readers on all my properties, I have license plate readers reading the street, by the way. So at my houses, I have a camera that looks out into the street, any private citizen can do this, everybody who drives by my places, I have them, and I keep it forever, by the way.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  So if somebody was casing my house and I have security concerns, I know. I know if the same car goes five times by my house in the same day.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  I feel like it, it comes down to the authorities. Like, people know that their neighbors are filming them and they, the one another, I think it's like, are you going to give me up to the feds? It's the, it's the concern that people have. And generally, justifiably, Flock works with a lot of police departments and I, I feel like-

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  What are we looking at here?

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know, I'm not sharing this.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Oh, this is Unify, yeah, so this is, this is, this is a very sophisticated system I have. So as you can see here, with AI, it knows those are people, it knows that's a car.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  It knows that's a dog. So it knows animals, so on my ranch, when deer or my bulldogs or whatever, it tells me that. I get alerts, I mean, and I have a large number of cameras.

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Like, a large number of cameras.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  It's a big ranch, you know, it's a property.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  I've spent tens of thousands of dollars building my security out, just on cameras alone and sensors. So like, somebody hops the fence anywhere, we know it, floodlights, cameras, and then what this protect does is, you might be able to find a screenshot of this, you can put license plates and faces into the database, and then if I, if somebody comes on, look at this, if some, this is the, the facial recognition, and if somebody comes onto the property, like, I have the pool cleaner's face in the database.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  Ah, okay.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Pool cleaner comes on the property, doesn't send me alert.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  I'm on the property, doesn't send me alert, hey, you're on the property. If there's an unknown face on the property, I get an alert that comes to my phone and my security team gets an alert that is, the picture of the person is on the property, nobody, this person has not been put in the database, it's like, that's an Amazon delivery.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I mean, I think stuff like that is so much less controversial because nobody, the Amazon driver's not worried you're gonna send his photo to the FBI. People are worried that their Ring doorbell camera's gonna send their photo to the cops or something.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, anyway, I, I think, I think Flock has good intent. I think they're good actors. I think we're at a moment in time where this software has gotten so powerful and it's so effective that they just need to do a better job with the comms.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  And they should not leave it up to the local jurisdictions to run amok.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Fair.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  They shouldn't let them run amok, they gotta just tighten that up. And I think they actually have, I don't have inside information, well, I kinda do. But anyway, they've tightened that up, from what I understand, they need to communicate it now.

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  So, the way I said it, would you be in favor of having it in your neighborhood or not?

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  Uh, I'm not, I'm not a huge fan of being surveilled everywhere I go. I'll be, like, I accept if I go to somebody's ranch or whatever, that they're gonna be filming or whatever.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so in your neighborhood-

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  But, I, cameras pointing out to the street-

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  If your dog got loose, if your new dog got loose-

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  She did already, I had to chase her.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  I know, and if you could have the cameras track her, you're like, that's not enough benefit for me.

• 1:14:40Speaker 03

  I, I don't, I don't, I think I would go back to just asking all the ladies in the neighborhood if they could spot her from their backyard. That, that worked well enough and I didn't have to give up my pride.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  What about for robberies and stuff, if you had ten robberies in your neighborhood, I'll say, let's say it was in Los Angeles, where you did have lots of robberies.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  I got broken, my house got broken into multiple times in Los Angeles.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're telling me, after getting broken into multiple times, you wouldn't want Flock on your street to catch the criminal who did it?

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm, I gotta be, I'm not a huge fan of a surve, living in a surveillance state, it makes me feel-

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Even if it was just the license plates, really?

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  I, I'd rather, I'd rather not, I'd rather, I'd rather get, I'd rather double bolt my, I'd rather double bolt my door than, than be filmed around the clock.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  I mean, some people feel that way, and so I respect people who feel that way. You don't have that choice in China, obviously, you don't have that choice in London anymore.

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  No, you definitely don't. In London, I feel like I was very aware of being surveilled all the time, the cameras are very prominent everywhere you go.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Rich people can afford, as I just said, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on my, you know, estates.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Sure, and I totally accept that, when I'm on private property-

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  To do this, but poor people, by the way, poor people, in my estimation, like, I know this from Turk Street and, and when we had our office in the Tenderline, they wanted cameras. The people who were in really high crime areas, they, you couldn't have enough cameras for them, they were like, yes, cameras everywhere, please, because my kids have to go to school. And I think once you, you don't have kids, you do have a dog, and I saw you were thinking about it when I brought up the dog. What's the dog's name?

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  Barry, my dog's name is Barry.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Barry, like the HBO show?

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Barry, like, like, blueberry, strawberry.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Okay, so you, poor little Barry.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  I saw you saying, maybe, for Barry, I would-

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  I would be devastated if Barry got out, but I, working-

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Barry gets eaten by a coyote and you could have saved it by giving up your rights.

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  How dare you? This is the fifty-fifty I have to decide on.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  You're close, you're close.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Dead Barry or Big Brother, I don't know, let me think about it.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Barry gets mauled by coyotes, God forbid.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  Charming little girl, she's so sweet.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Here's my Flock commercial. Flock is gonna keep your community safe, and it's gonna keep little Barry from being mauled by a pack of-

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  It's gonna keep your dog alive.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Coyotes.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  There are-

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Lon Harris is the terrorist who wants your dog to be eaten by a pack of wild coyotes. No, I'm, I have to deal with the wild coyotes.

• 1:17:07Speaker 03

  That's a risk I'm willing to take.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  You're willing to, I'm not willing to. See, if you had kids, I think there's nobody in the audience with kids who wouldn't want these cam, wouldn't want a Flock system. Once you have kids, you're just like, yeah, I don't want my kid getting kidnapped, if they do, I want that fucking license plate.

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  I under, I, I think you're probably correct about that. I think kids, kids would change the dynamic.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  If your dog dies, that's on you, Flock security.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  Don't do that, Flock, don't listen.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Lon Harris.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  I can chop.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  I want to say a quick shout out. We lost, uh, we lost one of the greats, one of the acting greats this morning, uh, iconic New Zealand actor, Sam Neill. You know him from playing Dr. Alan Grant.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Jurassic Park.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  Dr. Alan Grant from the Jurassic Park series. He is dead this morning at age 78. He had been treated for blood cancer for the last several years, but had been cancer free since April. So this was unexpected that we lost Sam Neill today. Also a horror legend, Jason, in The Mouth of Madness, Event Horizon, Dead Calm, Omen 3. I would really recommend 1981's Possession. You can rent that on VOD now. An incredible, bizarre, very scary Polish made horror movie from the early 1980s starring Sam Neill. Uh, so he will be missed. And the, the word is on him that he was a great guy. I never met him, but apparently Sam Neill, a charming and lovely man. So we're gonna miss him.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  I've heard about this possession one. It's quite controversial, isn't it?

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is. It's, uh, so the setup is that Sam Neill is some sort of international operative diplomat spy. It's sort of left vague. He comes home after a long trip and his wife is acting very bizarrely and she tells him she hates him now and she wants a divorce. It causes him to sort of come mentally unglued and then things go in a variety of bizarre, terrifying, uh, you know, directions. It becomes almost sci-fi horror by the end. Uh, I don't want to give away too much, but these are incredible lead performances from Sam Neill and Isabella Gianni. They're both, it's like, it's like when Klaus Kinski used to work with Herzog where they're going, or, or Nicolas Cage, where they're going

• 1:19:11Speaker 03

  to a level of insanity. They're reaching this like fever pitch that few actors I think could ever get to.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  I gotta say, Event Horizon, I watched it recently, like in the last year. Um, cause I was like, tell me some like, like interesting sci-fi, like intellectual.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  I like that one, yeah.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  And Event Horizon has a scene, which is this like, um, uh, kind of like going to hell type scene. And they filmed it for like a week and it was out of control.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Torture.

• 1:19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's gross.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Adult content, like really messed up.

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  Really horrific stuff is happening, yeah.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, like people's teeth are being pulled out, like dentistry, like just all kinds of torture.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Tentacle stuff. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Terrible. But it was so bad that they decided to, um, put it into like, it's only like 30 seconds in the film and like a flashback.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  The theatrical cut made it into a quick little montage. So you only get a, a glimpse. There is a director's cut where you can see more of the really gruesome stuff.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  There isn't.

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  The director's cut was never released.

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  Ah, okay.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  They were gonna release it. Then the warehouse where like all these outtakes were, had had some problem, were burned down or something.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Like it was destroyed or they didn't pay their bills, storage bills, something like that.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Long story short, they made a, a comic book about the original Event Horizon ship that went through that torture. And then there's people online considering, considering, um, using AI, speaking of AI, to make this work.

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  Which is, there it is. That's the Event Horizon. It's basically with the devil kind of situation.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Uh, I have a.

• 1:20:53Speaker 03

  It's like goes through a wormhole and they don't know where it goes. And then it comes back decades later and then they find out the, the other dimension that it went to was like hell, basically.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Yes. Um, there is a fan cut version of, speaking of sci-fi, uh, of Prometheus.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  And I have a friend who is not me, who has gotten a copy of it.

• 1:21:23Speaker 03

  Ooh, wow.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  Definitely not me. And this friend who's not me, um, it puts together Prometheus and Alien Covenant.

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  And like the, there was like, um, and it's called the Alien Paradise.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  It's Prometheus plus Alien Covenant. Plus there were some like DVD specials, like a TED Talk.

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, the extras, yeah.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Online stuff. And so that is going to be my, uh, pick. A friend who is not me has swim, someone who isn't me.

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  Oh, right. Oh, I, I did hear about this where it's, it's focused on David. It's like, it's from David's perspective through both of those movies.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Now this got me down the rabbit hole. There is a website, um, and a community that I just joined, or I'm sorry, a friend who's not me just joined. Um, it's a fan website, uh, fan website. So I, I'm a fan of Superman 2. I don't know if you're a Superman 2.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  Of course. Yes. There are two cuts of that. There's the Richard Lester and then the Donner cut.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  There's a Donner cut.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  And so, and like I, I had this weird thing happen since we're off duty here. This guy's made somehow a long.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  The Unity cut.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Edit of these. Yes.

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Um, and I think it includes some of Superman 3 and 4, yada, yada.

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  I see. Sure. Yeah. It was, it was that Richard Lester's version of Superman 2 was very sort of jokey and the studio thought it was gonna be too sort of jokey. So they reconfigured a lot of the stuff for the final release.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  So I just want to put out there, I think this is gonna be like one of the great things we're gonna see. These folks are doing it with collateral material. Oh, and then there's one final one. Look up the, um, Rogue One, the Andor cut. Rogue One, the Andor cut. Um, and so, yeah, it's on fan edit, uh, Rogue One, the Andor cut. A friend who is not me, someone who is not me, um, has made Andor, the Rogue One cut. And it had, it's basically Rogue One, but with a bunch of the Andor and the friend who's not me, uh, who watched some of it. It's really interesting because it uses a lot of the speeches and overlays

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  and they've made some unique images and collateral to put into this. So anyway, this is the future. And the reason I wanted to bring it up with you, Lon, is I wanted to ask you if you could take any serious TV show or movie and fan edit it in some way to get a new experience and use AI to make, fill in certain parts of the story and make a either.

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  I already have it in my mind. I know exactly what I want to do.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Not Sopranos, is it?

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  No. Uh, did you ever watch the TV series Hannibal? The, the NBC show that they made?

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  I watched the first couple of episodes. Yes, I did.

• 1:24:16Speaker 03

  With Matt Mickelson as Hannibal Lecter. So they did, the season three of the show Hannibal is Red Dragon or the, the, the movie.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  Ooh, really?

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the, it's the.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Oh, that's my favorite of the series.

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  It's the book Red Dragon adapted for TV with the characters from Hannibal. So the first two seasons are sort of prequel and then season three is Red Dragon. And then season four, the plan was Silence of the Lambs, but the show got canceled. So we never got to see.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  I know. So we never got to see Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal Lecter do Silence of the Lambs. That's what I would want. So you'd get an original actor to play your new Clarice, but then you'd, you'd CG AI Mads Mikkelsen as your Hannibal Lecter. There you go.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  Who, now which Hannibal was the one where he had a patient who he'd already eaten, who was in a wheelchair and then wants to feed?

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  The movie Hannibal and it's Mason Berger, the Gary Oldman character who was eating.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:10Speaker 03

  He was, he had to, he, Hannibal had him slice parts off of himself and eat them was the, was the thing.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  So he's all scarred horribly.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  And then he wants to feed Hannibal to the hogs.

• 1:25:21Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Correct.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:25:23Speaker 03

  That's the movie Hannibal, the Ridley Scott one, the, the third one.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go back to that because I had watched the first couple of episodes of it and I thought it was brilliant.

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  It's great. It's so good.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  I love the Hannibal series. I've read, actually, I read Red Dragon.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  Red Dragon has, um, who were the actors in it? The detectives?

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  They did Manhunt, Michael Mann did Manhunter in the eighties.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Manhunt is one I love.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  Which is Brian Cox is, uh.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Brian Cox is Hannibal Lecter.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  He's Hannibal Lecter and William Peterson is Will Grant.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  And then they did Brett Ratner did the movie version, uh, and it was Anthony Hopkins reprises his role as Hannibal Lecter.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Not as good as the Michael Mann.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  Ed Norton. It's not as good as the, it's not as good as the Michael Mann.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Watch this Michael Mann version.

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  Manhunter, it's called. Manhunter.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  As great as, yeah, Manhunter 1986, I believe is second only to the Silence of the Lambs.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, and Brian Cox, it's a very different take. It's interesting to see.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Oh, look, what's that guy's name? Go one picture back. That's, um, Chris Elliott.

• 1:26:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is Chris. Is that? Yeah.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  I forgot Chris Elliott's in this.

• 1:26:21Speaker 03

  That's definitely Chris Elliott. Yeah.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Chris Elliott is in it.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  From Get a Life.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Uh, and yeah, incredible. All right. What else do you got for us?

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  All right. One more thing I wanted to tell you about. I don't know if this is on your radar. I think you'd enjoy it. On HBO Max, they have a four-part docu-series that just started called The Man Will Burn. And it's about, it's about Burning Man. It's the whole history development of Burning Man, but it with a specific focus on 2021, when they had to decide, are we gonna do a Burning Man this year or because of COVID regulations, are we gonna take a year off? So these filmmakers got incredible access into the Burning Man organization and they're in all these meetings where they're debating, uh, you know, and Kimball Musk is very vocal that they should do it, but a lot of the other people at the organization are like, it's still not safe. We can't risk it. What if people, you know, there's a health emergency in the desert? Uh, and it's, it's a really, it's really

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  fascinating to.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  I gotta watch it.

• 1:27:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's really fascinating to sort of counter like, it gives you the usual stuff you'd expect from a Burning Man doc. Like here's people freaking out in the desert and all these people who love going, telling you about their experiences. But then you get this look at like, well, it's a, it's an organization too. It's a company as well. Uh, and it's really fascinating to go back and forth. I really enjoyed it. The first episode.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, the first time I went was 20 years ago and they told me to not go because it was over. This is when I lived in Los Angeles.

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  And, uh, there were, I think 12 or 14,000 people there this year. Now it's 70,000 people, 80,000 people.

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  A lot of that's what this series is about. It's like, how did this thing, how did this thing go from a few hippies hanging out on the beach, burning a wooden thing to this massive thing? And then what does that mean for its meaning, its cultural meaning and what people are getting out of it? That it went from being this like small collective of weirdos to like wealthy people, prominent people?

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  I've gotta tell you, I was very cynical about it as a New Yorker, like, and then I went and I was like, if you like art, music, you know, uh, costume, design, whatever, it is extraordinary. The most amazing art and music you've ever seen. And it's all free and you just drive around and experience it. It's absolutely worth going to. I have been, I don't know, five or six times. I don't go, I'm not like so committed. I go every year, but I go every couple of years and I always have a fantastic time. I go for a couple of days, but it has become very big. And there is one problem now. It used to be, uh, that I could go there. Nobody really knew who I was. It was like only some people in the tech industry. Everybody was kind of cool. Now everybody's going there

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  and with Instagram and influencer culture combined with internet access, Starlink, you know, there's like a billion Starlinks out there. Everybody's got high speed. People are live streaming or taking pictures. That's really against the ethos of it. And so when I go now, this is not like me in any way, like thinking I'm a celebrity, but people do recognize me from the podcast.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  I mean, you're on a very popular podcast. It's not that surprising.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, This Week in Startups. It is a week. And also All In.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the one I was.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  And so literally I have people asking to take selfies with me. So now I go. One of the great things is people wear masks and stuff like that. I just mask up. And so when I'm wearing some kind of a mask or something, it goes down 90%.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  Just, it's one of those Borat thongs and a, and a mask. That's it.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Basically. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm wearing a mankini. And that's it. All right, everybody. Another amazing episode of This Week in Startups is in the can. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  Bye-bye.