This Week in Startups - All-In Summit Highlights, Schools Could Block Social Media, FTC Chatbot Investigation, and Zoox hits Vegas | E2177
Episode Date: September 13, 2025Today’s show:On Friday’s TWiST, Jason, Alex, and Lon look back at some highlights from this week’s big All-In Summit in Los Angeles, including a fiery, no holds barred presentation from Palantir... CEO Alex Karp, Elon Musk delving into the key challenges facing Optimus, and Tucker Carlson debating Mark Cuban on Ukraine. PLUS… why schools may start blocking social media apps, the FTC’s new investigation into social chatbots, AND omnidirectional Zoox robotaxis are headed to Las Vegas.Timestamps:Welcome back to TWiST!(1:52) Jason’s thoughts on the killing of Charlie Kirk(10:34) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(10:52) Show Continues …(12:15) Reacting to All-In Summit highlights (Elon Musk, Alex Karp, Tucker Carlson, Mark Cuban)(21:23) AWS Activate - AWS Activate helps startups bring their ideas to life. Apply to AWS Activate today to learn more. Visit https://www.aws.amazon.com/startups/credits(22:18) Show Continues …(26:09) Palantir, Alex Karp, and debate dynamics(31:03) Public - Take your investing to the next level with Public. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn 4.1% APY on your cash—with no fees or minimums. Start now at public.com/twist(32:13) Show Continues …(45:03) How the internet used AI tools to make sense of Charlie Kirk’s death(56:22) Why Jason thinks it’s smart to block social media during school hours(1:03:43) The FTC chatbot investigation leaves out Anthropic’s Claude… here’s why(1:13:27) Zoox robotaxis make their Vegas debut… Here’s how they’re different from Waymo(1:19:38) Are Tesla robotaxis headed for CA soon? Polymarket says… maybe(1:27:21) Closing remarks and banterSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWISTAWS Activate - AWS Activate helps startups bring their ideas to life. Apply to AWS Activate today to learn more. Visit https://www.aws.amazon.com/startups/creditsPublic - Take your investing to the next level with Public. Build a multi-asset portfolio and earn 4.1% APY on your cash—with no fees or minimums. Start now at public.com/twistGreat TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916
Transcript
Discussion (0)
We could all disagree about so many things, but the senseless murder is just there's no place for this.
And it's in no way going to change what those kids are going to go through.
But we made a donation here on behalf of this week in Startup's family to Charlie Kirk's kids' funds.
And encourage everybody to do the same.
And gosh, you know, there's nothing to say here other than I'm thinking about his family.
and we're all thinking about that.
And senseless murders for trying to model debate on college campuses is senseless, tragic, infuriating, and depressing.
And it's time for leadership from everybody who is part of these debates to step up and just say there's no room for this.
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All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups.
I apologize for not shaving today and not being suited up.
Gentlemen, I am on the road.
no rest for the weary had the amazing all-in summit Monday, Tuesday, an incredible celebration
of vibrant debate.
And we'll get into that.
We'll have some videos of it.
But I had to go Wednesday in order to book Vlad, my friend from Robin Hood, Alex.
I said, hey, you got to come to the summit.
Things are going great.
Let's chop it up.
He said, of course, but I'll come next year because I have the Robin Hood Summit in Vegas
on and I said, well, what days is that?
He said, Tuesday, Wednesday. I said, perfect. Come Monday.
He's like, well, it's a bit much for me to come Monday and then go to Vegas.
I got this big thing. It's a production. I should probably be out there the day before, yada, yada.
But I'll make it happen for you, Jacob.
And I said, oh, that's my guy. All right.
Members that I put that insignificant seed check in before they launched.
Thank you for the ski house.
And if a 10x is from here, thank you for, you know.
The ski mount a P-J.
Thank you for the upgrade to Yellowstone Club.
Putting all that aside, he said, but I have a request for you.
And I said, oh, that's fine.
Anything.
You need a tweet or something, some air cow.
And he said, no, I want you to do the closing keynote for my event on Wednesday.
You know, me and you on stage, you're a big hit these days.
And sure enough, I had to then wake up on Wednesday after being out dancing to Diplo
at Universal Studios for the closing party.
Got to bed at 1 a.m., got up at 7 to the airport with me.
But got to fly Jet Suite X, which is quite delightful.
And zip-zip to Vegas and then had a nice keynote there.
And then had dinner with Jared Leto, a friend of mine in Flads,
and a couple of other folks at Carbone.
Oh, so delightful.
Carbone, delicious.
Unbelievable.
And we'll get into all that.
But here I am back in Los Angeles.
my mother-in-law had her birthday party. She's just so delightful. I couldn't ask for a better second mom.
And I got a pretty great mom myself, which leads me just to a quick opening statement. I woke up today, profoundly sad, just a huge weight, thinking about those two poor kids growing up without their dad.
And so I just want to send.
You're talking about Charlie Kirk.
Yeah, and I just want to say to Charlie Kirk's family, we're thinking about you. And a lot of my friends are purses.
personal friends with him. And, you know, I've tried to balance out people's feelings about politics
and vibrant debate here on the swing and startups and obviously on All In. And, you know,
could probably disagree, you know, Charlie and I and Sax and I and any number of people.
You and I, Alex, even, Lon, we could all disagree about so many things, but the senseless murder.
It's just there's no place for this.
And it's a, it's in no way going to change what those kids are going to go through.
But we made a donation here on behalf of this week in Startup's family to Charlie Kirk's kids' funds.
And encourage everybody to do the same.
And gosh, you know, there's nothing to say here other than I'm thinking about his family.
And we're all thinking about that.
and senseless murders for trying to model debate on college campuses is senseless, tragic, infuriating, and depressing.
And it's time for leadership from everybody who is part of these debates to step up and just say there's no room for this.
And it's unacceptable.
And it's not the time to play the clip game or the what about game.
it's the time to be sad and to think about those kids.
And I don't really have anything else I could possibly say here.
Except I'm sad.
Yeah, Alex, of course.
I know you have feelings as well because you're part of the vibrant debate in the American experiment.
And I know you care deeply about this.
Yeah, I know.
Enormously.
Also, I've got kids too.
So, you know, you think about that.
Just to everyone out there who gets a lot of emotional impact or residents when major news events like this happened,
just a reminder that if you take your phone,
and you turn it off and you put it down and you walk outside and put the sun on your face,
you get some more perspective. And I literally still do this with myself. So during the,
during the breaking news cycle of this horrible week, I did quite a lot of that. I put on the
way to invest for a while. I took the kids to the park. And you just need to get a little
distance from things. Remind yourself that the world is mostly as it was. Tragedies happen. But I think
I think we can all get a little bit caught up in them and the discussion about them. And I think
I think we've seen some deleted tweets today, which is probably a positive sign.
But just a reminder that going outside and touching grass is a meme, but it's also a very good piece of mental health advice.
Yeah, I think maybe a little meditation and reflection and journaling.
Any of that stuff could be helpful.
I haven't slept for, you know, I mean, partially due to my schedule, but also just woke up thinking about this.
And, yeah, Lon, I don't know if you have any thing other than sadness at this time.
It is very sad.
I clearly I was not a fan of Mr. Kirk's his rhetoric or his style, but I think what's so important
to stress is that this kind of political violence is not just immoral, not just wrong,
not just leads to more violence and it's a vicious cycle, intensely counterproductive.
No matter who you are, what side of the spectrum you're on, there are 100,000 other people
who will be more than happy to take over Charlie Kirk.
audience, reinforce Charlie Kirk's message. It's not like you get these messages to go away.
All you do is raise the temperature, continue this cycle of more and more vengeance, more and more
anger, more and more violence. It achieves nothing. It creates only destruction. And it doesn't,
it doesn't matter how you feel about Charlie Kirk and what he was particularly saying.
You don't, you can't, that's not a solution. No matter what somebody's message.
is shooting them is not a solution.
It only makes things worse.
And I think that's the feeling that I come out of this.
You know, a lot of people are trying to sort of make it a larger reflection of,
well, it's this political debate or it's that or it's about this or this is the theme we should take away.
To me, that's the only theme.
It's like you can't ever move forward by shooting somebody.
That's not how it works.
It's got to end, folks.
All right.
So we'll take a deep breath here.
And change the tone a little bit.
Yeah.
It's heavy folks.
I get it.
And I get a lot of people are suffering.
So we're with you.
We're all Americans.
We're all humans.
Some of us are parents.
All of us are sons and daughters.
So yeah.
Jason, though, before the awful part of the week,
you had the All In Summit.
Big thing in your calendar every year.
A lot of people showed up.
I was home with the kids changing diapers sadly,
but you and lawn were there on site.
So, you know, for everyone out there like me who wasn't there,
take me through it.
How to go?
Will we best talk?
Best moments?
You know, the theme of it was vibrant debate and speaking up for what you believe in,
which is, you know, quite paradoxical and resonates even more after Charlie Kirk's murder, assassination.
And, you know, for me, it's like intellectual Disneyland for kids, you know, like it's an intellectual vacation for me.
I get to not only hang out with all my besties.
I had Lon there, you know, one of my best friends
over the last 25 years, helping me with the docket,
helping me with my jokes.
People always like wonder, oh, you're so witty.
And it's like, well, Lon and I are witty.
And we have a, you're getting there, Alex, but, you know, we'll keep my friend
handbook.
Lon's the funniest writer we have a twist.
Absolutely.
So he workshops everything with Uber.
I was also lucky to have Amanda from the league and my friend Will Barnes from Uber,
make the trip.
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Lon, which is a tribute to your contribution and Amanda, my wife, Jade, Will Barnes, all who helped me think about, hey, you know, I get two questions maybe with my three other besties there. We each get to get maybe two questions. And so I want to make them count. And I want to make them important for a positive discourse. And, you know, I just got some wonderful compliments from people who said I was on the top of my game. And really, that's because I don't have to run the event anymore in the logistics. And we have an incredible team, John Hale, Kim,
producer Nick, and just everybody down the line,
there's a dozen people working over at All In to make that event spectacular for,
I don't know, if it was 3,500 or 4,000 people there, literally double last year.
It was about 3,500 people, they said.
And, I mean, it was amazing to be backstage and how tight everything was,
the amount of people coming through, going up on stage, coordinating.
They were the whole documentary crew making behind the scenes footage, security.
I mean.
I was about to say security.
When you have a lot of people going through a green room or a backstage, that's, that's tricky.
A lot of security parts of this production were amazing.
I mean, there was so much going on.
It was really impressive to see it all that together.
Super next level.
And, you know, a lot of important discussions.
My bestie, Elon showed up for me for the fourth year in a row.
So I really appreciate that.
You know, you really tell who your friends are.
You, you know, have a show.
And you're like, hey, just always, I always tell them.
Like, you know, if it's good for you and you want to hang with the boys, you know,
love to have you.
And I don't obviously put any pressure on him because he's super busy running 752 different projects.
And he always just says the same thing.
Okay.
Sure.
Do you want to play the clip?
Oh, we do have a clip from Elon.
Yeah.
I don't know what the clips are, but sure, let's play the clip here.
Law and why don't you talk us through over and I'm about to show as I pull it up?
Yeah.
Which Elon clip is this, Oliver?
I don't remember.
Oh, this is the humanoid robots Starlink.
Oh, okay, great.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I think this is the party was talking about the difficulties and complexities of humanoid robots.
All right, here we go.
Optimus is, I think, going to be the greatest product in the history of humanity.
What's the progress like and how many of your cycles are going specifically to Optimus?
What's the timeline?
I think you're on version 3, maybe 4.
Tell us everything.
Well, yeah, everything would be take a long time.
We've got time.
We're finalizing the design of Optimus Version 3.
And that really is going to be a very remarkable robot.
It will have the essentially the manual dexterity of a human, so meaning a very complex hand.
An AI mind that can navigate and comprehend reality.
And we made in very high volume.
Those are the three things that are missing.
Like if you see any other robotics company, they're missing those three things.
Those are the three really hard things.
And I spend actually at this point, it might be more of my mental cycles than anything else,
any other single thing on Optimus.
That's solving for real world AI, all of the electromechanical issues of Optimus, the supply chain
and production challenges of it.
Because there is no supply chain that exists for humanoid robots.
So it has to be, we have to recreate it from scratch,
and which requires doing a lot of vertical integration.
None of the actuators in Optimus are available from an existing supply chain.
So, but I think it is accurate to say that if successful, Optimus will be the biggest product ever.
There you have it.
I mean, that was a theme that came up a lot, actually, was the sort of connection between AI,
in robotics and how the whole robotics industry is sort of waiting for AI to like get to the
point where these robots can sort of begin training themselves and we can automate the training
a lot more like that that came up I think a few times during different presentations yeah and
Alex obviously you and I have discussed this in granular detail the real magic here and why I think
Elon's got a tremendous advantage is he knows more about factory.
than anyone with the possible contemporary of, say, like the Apple, right?
There's really only two people in the world, the team at Apple and Elon's team,
that have done at-scale creation of factories to make at-scale products like an optimist
or a smartphone.
And you then have at the same time, you have to put a brain, right?
So if you start thinking about this Wizard of Odd style, you know, it's got to have the courage and dexterity of the lion to be able to move the arms, right?
Okay.
So that's a unique challenge that Elon hasn't done before because that doesn't exist like, say, in a Tesla or in a rocket.
However, the factory to make things is something that he is just unprecedented in his firsthand experience.
So then you look at the brain, if he only had a brain.
and that brain comes from
who's the who's the brain the tin man i guess yeah scarecrow no no scarecrow if i only had a
man needs a heart tin man needs a heart okay so you know if i only had a brain and um you know
in that case groc chat chappity gemini claude the brain is being worked on and then you have
vision which real and you have the real world vision not just oh here's a flat picture but hey something
moving through space. So who has moving through space? Tesla, Waymo. There's a small cohort of people
who are moving through space in real time with very sophisticated chipsets and computer vision
assessing the world. Now, they're assessing the world at 55 miles an hour, at 35 miles an hour,
you know, with thousands of pounds of steel moving around. This is going to move around at three
or four miles per hour, five miles per hour, maybe eventually like, yeah, four or five miles
per out would be probably the top speed you'd want these things to go at like a jog and probably even then
that won't be until version six, seven or eight that you'd actually want them, even if you could
technically do it to run. It would do it. So really interesting, you know, the position he's in and,
you know, having known Elon for 25 years, I can tell when he's deep in it by, this is my Elon
towel after countless dinners together is when he goes and he looks down or looks up, puts his hand on
his chin and he's thinking because he's not thinking about my question he's parallel processing
17 problems and cycling through them the actuator the forearm the computer vision he's thinking
about these things got a very active brain and he parallel processes them so i do think if anybody's
going to make this into you know a a billion unit product it's going to be him and i i do believe
we'll be sitting here in 20 years hopefully if we're all still here and saying yeah tes
used to work on cars.
They were a car company, remember that?
And you're just going to be like, oh, yeah, they had a car line.
Yeah, they still have that, right?
It's going to be almost like, you know, the merch store compared to the cars is what we're
going to look at the cars.
Oh, yeah, you can also buy Tesla branded car or tequila if you want.
But your optimist is going to be really the show.
And they're going to be able to produce these for $1 an hour, all in, maintenance, support,
etc.
right? So you start thinking about that, you know, 10,000 hours a year at a dollar an hour,
10,000 hours a year or something like that. I don't know how many hours or any year, but,
you know, close to 10. So that's pretty miraculous if you think about it. Alex, any thoughts as we
move on to our next clip? And maybe you can see up the next step, yeah. Yeah, very briefly, I just wanted
throw in. We didn't get to talk about it because we didn't have a live new shirt earlier this week,
but Alibaba dropped an R1 robot earlier this week. So just lots of competition out there and the
startups in the 2,500 are Apptronic, 1X, and figure are three names to put out there in the
robot game.
So, I mean, we talk a lot about Optimus on the show for obvious reasons, but startups are also
barking up the same tree.
So let's see how it goes.
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credits. Yeah, it's going to be a pretty vibrant fight. Twist500.com to see the 500 most important
private market companies, private only. Shastard producer Claude, 8,760 hours in a regular year.
So I think these things, overestimating. I think anybody would pay a dollar an hour to have these
$24 a day. Maybe they would.
They work 23 and they charge for an hour.
But you can imagine when you're asleep, it could be doing the yard work.
You could imagine while you're sleeping, it could be walking to the grocery store and picking
up fresh croissant for you at 6.01 a.m. when your bakery opens and the robotic, the optimist
behind the counter will give you your pan of chocolate and walk it home to you.
I pay a lot more than $1 an hour for someone to carry my croissant back to me.
Let me tell you, because currently I do it myself and it sucks.
All right. Next up.
Moving on.
Social media bans and investigations.
Jason, this is something that you flagged directly.
There is a new bill in the house from Representative Angie Craig called the No Social Media at School Act.
Oh, were we going to do a couple more guest segments.
Sure.
Oh, I thought you were just to move on to the next story.
I'm sorry, Jason.
I got a few more.
So Alex Carp was on there and he's, you know, he's got, he's a high energy guy.
He's got a lot of bold opinions.
He is not afraid to tell the besties.
He doesn't like their question, and he's going to answer a different question.
That was great.
Yeah, he's certainly a very active and engaging speaker.
So here he is just responding to criticisms and complaints about his company, Palantir Technologies.
Pallentire, like, there's a technical version, which I'm going to give you.
But we had a Democratic administration come to us and basically ask us,
to do a Muslim database.
Now, you would think, given the way I'm kind of besmirched
as like some kind of, I don't know,
it's like a Jewish conspiracy,
that would be the first thing, according to them, I would do.
We've never done anything like this.
I've never done anything like this.
To actually understand the answer,
and I love these questions about the skeptics,
I actually love skeptics.
Like I tend to divide the world into,
you have Pallentier derangement System syndrome,
which I don't spend a lot of time on,
and I think they're anti-
builder. You have
Palantier skeptics and you have people who don't like
a manager. If you're a palisier skeptic or you don't like us, I want
to engage. And any technology that
works can be abused. We are
this single worst technology
to use to abuse civil
liberties, which is, by the way, the reason
why we could never get the NSA or the FBI to actually
buy our product.
And until recently, like,
SIGN institutions would never buy our product.
Yeah, you laugh because it's like obvious. If you want to
do data analytics in a way that eviscerates our civil liberties, you don't want
accels, you don't want branching, you don't want pipelining, in more like...
You don't want logs?
You don't want serialization and deserialization in your product.
If you have serialization and deserialization in your product that's intelligible, you are basically
creating a product that's going to be really, really hard to abuse.
And the logs are immutable in Palantir.
So, like, and by the way, the single most civil liberties heavy place in the world is
hating on us every day. And you know what they're buying every day? Poundeer. It's called Europe.
And you know why? Sorry, I want to get to this because this is important. Because I get basically
attacked by skeptics and anti-Palanchier people that deserve any. And by the way, do not,
this is a lesson for you. Do not believe anything I'm saying. And if you're online watching,
I don't know, Nick Flentes, call me the Jewish conspiracy, do yourself a favor and say, yeah,
that could be really interesting. Spend 20 minutes looking at the product. 20 minutes looking at the product
and say, is this not the hardest product to abuse in the world?
So what he's referring to here, Alex, is,
and he used a bunch of different words for it.
And Chimoth correctly, you know, did the right thing by the one.
It's just saying logs.
If you want to use certain products, you'll always see in detective films,
you know, like the mob guy saying,
I need you to run a couple of license plates for me.
Some detective who's, you know, got gambling debts,
runs a couple of license plates, gives it to him.
And they ask their friends.
who works on the computer.
You know, it's a little bit of a high-risk behavior because, hey, why did you run these people's
license plates?
You got to explain it and who asked you to do it?
You know, in previous iterations of software, et cetera, there were ways to do that without having
a bell go off.
In Palantir and these other products, they've designed it.
So, you know, you have the history of this person.
You have all the different data.
And you can think of it like a blockchain.
Sure.
You can't abuse it because you have to log in.
They're probably using biometrics when you log in.
I'm just taking a guess and speculating here.
So if you build a system really redundantly where it checks your thumbprint, your iris,
two-factor, all that kind of great stuff.
You can't be like, I checked on my ex, and their whereabouts using Palantir because
it will send an alarm.
And then those logs get checked by other people.
So I think he makes a great point.
You did see a lot of facial contortions from different besties, including myself.
because at one point,
Chabat just said a really funny thing.
He's like, you know, I just want to say one more thing.
And Chabh just said something to the effect.
I just want to ask a question.
And he's like, and then he admonished me.
I was like, well, you know, to my original question,
he's like, yeah, your original question is not important.
I said, you know, you kind of like broke it out into 17 questions.
Yeah, that's because your original question was bad.
I don't know if you said my question was bad or not good.
He said your original question was bad.
He's like, no, it wasn't a good question.
So I reformatted it into something interesting.
It's incredible, though, to see someone out.
And I say this with love.
Out Yap, the yappers.
Of course.
You guys are good at talking.
And then he was just about to fall off his couch, drinking a full sugar, Mexican Coke, just riffing.
Yeah, the full sugar Mexican Coke.
I did get a good one liner in where I said, I'll patch.
And I offered him one of Tucker's patch.
He said, don't eat it.
Yeah.
Don't eat it.
I was about to say unnecessary.
If there's ever a person who did not need to have an upper, I think.
And I was sitting here a year ago on my Disney vacation last year, you know, in Los Angeles.
And at dinner last night, my brother-in-law reminded me that I told my wife Palantir is overpriced at $25 when she bought it.
And it makes no sense because it's, you know, 50 times the revenue or whatever it was at the time price of sales ratio, we'd talk with that stuff.
And here she is.
I don't know if the stock's at 150 or something outstanding.
I regret you informed you, Jason.
It's at 171.22.
So you need to resign and give your wife.
So my wife's at 7X on this bet, you know, like she really is like one of the great traders of all the time.
but Roblox at $40 she bought, she's made some real estate deals that doubled in five, six,
seven years.
And she bought Palantir and she bought Bitcoin at a buck 50, so $150.
So she's an incredible trader.
And even though my Uber and Roberthood investments are one and two in our portfolio, I think
she's three, four, five.
So shout out to my amazingly beautiful and intelligent and deft investor wife, Jade.
So guess what the price sales multiple for Palantir is right now.
It's got to be over 100, right?
121.
But here's the thing.
We have seen NVIDIA and other stocks do that kind of movement when they are sitting there building, building a great product, and the market then embraces it and the founder finds some huge innovation.
And I think the huge innovation with Palantir, and again, there's tons of conspiracy there is he points out the derangement syndrome.
He points out, you know, there are skeptics and all that stuff, and he loves it all.
But the bottom line is people need – the future of war being anti-terrorist, et cetera, is going to be AI.
And if you're building platforms that are just flat databases to kind of try and accomplish anything,
so they'll be dwarfed just like Optimus, powered by AI, will dwarf those.
So it was really a treat to have him there.
And he was incredibly generous.
You can always tell, like, a speaker's character by how they behave.
when they wind up backstage
and everybody asked for a selfie, whatever.
My wife was backstage and she just introduced herself
and he was incredibly kind to her,
took five or ten minutes in his busy schedule to talk to her
and then invited her to come on a tour of Palantir.
So I just want to say thank you to Alex.
I judge people on their
the absolutely unnecessary interactions backstage
that they could easily skip with their security
and being flowed to a private area.
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And he also walked the floor, I understand, and talk to the audience.
He's a very gregarious guy.
Amanda, too, had really enjoyed his presentation.
And as soon as he came up, like, literally, she's tenacious.
The moment he came backstage, she was, like, in his face.
great job and he he chatted with her and sort of gave her the whole kind of spiel and you know
yeah a very regardless how you feel about him and his company i mean it's like robin william
he's like robin william combined with you know sergey or lag larry page you know like
those are maybe slightly understated cerebral brilliant guys uh you know and then you have him
cerebral but highly extroverted, highly verbal, willing to engage.
It's a rare combination to see, actually.
You don't tend to see those two overlap as much than they do in this case.
I do kind of feel like it's a meme stock.
Not that they're not doing business, you know, making money, whatever.
But I do feel like there is an element of meme stock just because he's that guy.
And I feel like people see him speak and they get excited about him.
It's a great topic.
Yeah, it's a great topic to unpack, which is retail investors and their
vision. I think the retail investors can, you know, were playing fun games with GameStop and
AMC. But now I think they're quite sophisticated. And when they assess a company like Palantir,
Tesla, open door, hopefully someday Uber, they've done it to Robin Hood clearly.
I don't benefit from the Robin one. Not that I'm banking on, you know, that kind of fervor.
but they do tend to have an optimism and they vote with their dollars.
And that means, you know, you could have shenanigans that we saw with GameStop and AMC
where they're trying to use the float or some technical things to outlast people shorting stocks.
Put all that aside, Tesla Q, that all happened.
Now we're vented a phase two of meme stocks, which I think is manifest stocks instead of meme stocks.
they manifest that this company could break new ground by doing the following things, replacing the CEO.
So I yolode, as I said here on the pod, a cranberry 25K into Open Door.
And I told you what I was going to do, right, gentlemen?
I said, I'm going to cover my base.
I'm going to put in some limit orders.
So I sold like a thousand shares.
I tweeted it at $6, $7, $8 or $9.
I can't remember.
I just put those in the second I bought it.
And I said, I'm going to get 2,000 shares for free because these people are lunatics.
and they will get it to $10 a share.
Sure enough, it broke down yesterday.
All my limit orders were filled.
And now I'm sitting on 2,000 free shares,
20 grand for free.
And they also replaced the CEO.
They brought back Keith Rabeau.
Keith Rabeau was on CNBC today and re-engaged.
So what they're doing is they're saying,
hey, there's this carcass over here
and this great potential called Open Door
that you all don't see.
It's too low.
If you got Keith Rabeoy, a proper CEO,
and you compensated them properly, and you use these assets, you could actually build something
really important here. The original vision for Open Door was brilliant, and they've got some other
ideas around fractional ownership, blockchain ownership, I hear around letting people buy into
rental properties, et cetera, which is a good business, actually, historically. So they're different
now. They're really sharp, and they put in their homework. Now, they also have fun, and they try to
create an arm and they do stuns to get attention. But, um, you know, all that energy then winds up
with people knowing and understanding the company. One of the great complaints, Alex, as you know,
is I can't, even though we have half as many stocks, some stocks can't get coverage. So if nobody will
cover open door or, you know, I yolo'd into next door a couple of years ago and I've been
waiting for that one to, to get picked up because I do think that's a, got the same kind of potential.
they do bring that energy for people.
And then I think it energizes management to, you know, maybe reconstruct the management team.
And these don't become forgotten zombie stocks.
And that's pretty interesting to me, your thoughts, Alex.
Well, I think as we have stocks that are worth not just one trillion now,
companies that are worth one trillion, but two, three, four, five trillion.
If you're a one, two, three, four, five billion dollar company, you're just not very big.
So you're not going to get as much coverage.
but you can take a charismatic leader with a good take on technology where things are going
and really leave them to a much larger profile.
And not to point you any fingers at Boxes MarketCat, but I think Aaron Levy kept that company
in the news and in people's minds for years when it was in the wilderness.
And to your point about having a manifestation or a place you're going, they've actually done
relatively well in the current Gen AI era and they've reunited growth and they've made it
through the trough of despair.
But would that have happened without someone like a Keith, like an Aaron out there,
kind of beating the drum? I don't think so. So I think, I think these individual leaders can,
can really matter. Palantir, incredibly valuable. Would I buy it right now at a hundred and 25x
trailing revenue? Probably not, because I'm cheap. But I'm glad people are having fun.
Shout out to Palantir for, um, I forget the number off hand, but I think their USGov revenue
grew like 50 some percent last quarter. It was excellent. Awesome. Okay. We're, we're,
we're running along here on time here with this clip. So maybe we'll do, we'll do some more clips on
Monday, but maybe pick, pick your favorite of the next four or so.
L'LON.
Oh, I think we got to do...
Ladies' choice, as we say.
I think Tucker versus Mark Cuban is where we end up today.
Costplusdrugs.com.
Yeah, we had Mark Cuban came out.
We talked a lot about costplusdrugs.com, his online pharmacy and his issues...
Was that dot com on?
It is the dot com.
No spaces, no dashes.
Dot com.
And then we brought out, or they brought out Tucker Carlson to sort of mix it up with Mark Cuban
in real time.
A lot, a lot got covered.
It was a wide-ranging talk, but the clip we pulled was the two of them.
This is actually blown up on MAGA social media.
They're discussing specifically the conflict in Ukraine.
They have very different takes on America's involvement.
I'll let the clip take it from here.
All right.
Let's do it.
Mark, let me pass you a question.
What's your take on whether we should be sending money to Ukraine or not?
Were you in favor of that?
Man, they need it.
I mean, honestly, I don't have a good answer.
I don't have a good answer.
You know, I can make an argument both ways.
And half my family is Ukrainian from my grandparents.
And so, you know, personally, I think we should help.
But I don't have a studied answer for you.
How much money have you sent to Ukraine?
None.
Oh, so what do you mean by we?
You're the one who's families from Ukraine.
Like, why don't you send them a billion dollars?
Because I'm trying to fix health care.
Why don't you fix their health care if you're like so deep?
If you think we need to help, why don't you start?
How about you first?
Yeah.
I noticed that's never like even an option for anybody.
It's like, we need to help.
That's not what charity is.
Forcing other people to help is not charity.
It's vanity.
The good news is all the weapons were on loan lease.
We're getting it back.
And our dear president, Trump, has negotiated that we own half the minerals.
So he turned this horrible tragedy of a war into a profit center, which is one of his unique gifts.
I think we can all agree.
All right.
So, um, I am shocked that as a,
we pulled the Tucker Carlson clip.
What we had was a bad faith argument punching against someone who's trying to make the world
a slightly better place because nothing to me says Tucker like being a complete bleep, bleep,
yeah.
Well, you know, here.
You can cut that out.
But oh, my God.
What a fucking smarmy asshole.
I really feel, Alex.
Here's the thing I'll say about Tucker because I do get a lot of feedback on like Tucker being included.
He's an entertainer.
I'm fine with having entertaining people who are bombastic on All In.
And I don't mind anybody speaking.
I did think it was necessary for me to correct the record because there's a little cherry-picking that occurs.
And hey, hey, we're talking about vibrant debate at the top of the show.
He's a great vibrant debate.
It's important we have these.
And it's important for somebody like me who is a moderate independent call balls and strikes and remind people it was a loan lease.
Trump enforced a loan lease.
Biden set the loan lease.
And Trump actually negotiated like plus plus plus on top of it.
So this argument that like anybody needs to worry that we're not going to get our money back, just like World War II, we got all the rebuild contracts we did fine with the loan lease we did with the UK and other folks.
So I think, you know, Mark's reaction maybe is genuine. You know, you can only focus on so many things in the world. Okay, that's fine. Tucker makes a good point that charity starts at home.
fine for him to bring it up. I don't necessarily consider it bad faith. There's a little bit of
a, you know, debate club between, you know, for folks like Mark and Ezra and Cuban and Rachel
Morrow. They're all like the debate club folks who love to debate these things. And they use that
like personal technique. Oh, you know, are you doing it personally, et cetera? Putting all those
techniques aside, we do all, and I sent this tweet out to just give a little coverage for
Mark and fairness and balance it out.
we all pay into taxes. Mark has paid more taxes than anybody on that stage, I'm sure. And those
taxes go then to our leaders who then make thoughtful decisions of where to send stuff. It's not like
Mark can legally form a militia or back a militia to do this or donate extra taxes earmarked in
our democracy for weapons for Ukraine. That's just not how it works, folks. And so, you know, I thought it was an
entertaining exchange. I think it's good for people to think about these things. And I'm fine with a little
bit of the debate club back and forth. Oh, no, no, no. I'm not saying don't have them.
Let's let's let Lon have a lot of swing at it. I do wish that people understood or this
distinction sunk. We were talking about Charlie Kirk. We've talked about, you know, you've had Ben Shapiro on all
in, Megan Kelly. Ezra Klein. As recline. I'm sorry, who was the former, who came on? Larry Summers.
Larry Summers.
It's not just, and we had Dean Phillips, and we have Reed Hoffman, and Mark Cuban.
It's a very diverse group. It's a very diverse group.
I think what I was going to say is less about the partisanship is that these people are all professional broadcasters and entertainers and masters of the algorithm and social media, how to get, how to be very culturally loud, how to get a lot of people's attention.
That's what they're good at.
We remarked this every time behind the scenes, Nick and I talk about this all the time.
when we have a guest on All In who is a professional broadcaster, a Ben Shapiro, a Tucker Carlson, a
Nasra Klein, somebody who spends their whole career talking into a microphone on a camera like I'm doing now.
And I think this is true, as much as I disagreed with him, I think this is true of Charlie Kirk as well.
You get so good at how to speak in a compelling way, how to grab people's attention, how to say something funny at the right moment,
how to say something sincere at the right moment, how to calibrate your appearance, that it makes you extraordinary.
ordinarily compelling, regardless of the content of what you're saying.
And I think that's what you can really see on stage.
Mark Cuban's a smart guy with a lot of good things to say, but he does not have that
20, 200,000 hours behind the mic and camera like Tucker Carlson has.
And it just makes him a force.
I mean, you watch Ezra Klein.
You know, Ezra Klein is, I don't know that he's ever built a product or service in the world.
I don't know that he started a company or been a builder, a capital allocator.
He co-founded Vox Media.
Yeah, he did actually.
But I don't think he was involved in that.
I don't think he was running it day to day.
He wasn't a business guy.
It was sort of my point, but he is an incredibly gifted debater.
And, man, he's super compelling.
And you know he's compelling when both sides hate him.
The left hates Ezra Klein for, you know, half his editorial.
The right hates him for the other half.
Today it was his Charlie Kirk op-ed this morning that's got a-
which, you know, which I'm just like, okay, he has sympathy.
and empathy.
I think he called, he said he was like he was great at debate or he was doing debate
in the way, the right way, or he was doing politics in the right way.
And I think that did rub a lot.
If you look at the content of what Charlie Kirk said, I think there was a lot of upsetting
stuff there.
For some people, and there's people in the left who say upsetting stuff, let's keep going.
All right.
We did also have the, this is not about Charlie Kirk content-wise, but the internet reaction
and the use of AI to try to find.
his killer? Did you want to talk about that? I thought it was...
I think actually this is kind of very interesting, and I think people need to always understand
breaking news stories. And, you know, you need to have a skill set as an adult, and even with kids,
I would say young adults as well, because they have to process this, and I'm processing it with
my daughter and her friends are all talking about this because Charlie was so dominant in TikTok
and short clips that they're all very aware of him and they're having their own discussion.
In a breaking news story, you really don't know what the circumstances.
In fact, even post a breaking news story, we still don't know about the person who shot
President Trump.
That seemed to have gone away.
We never got the recap of that person's motivations or manifesto.
I love to get a deep dive on that one.
Well, I think it might be similar to, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but, you know,
There might be aspects to that that they don't want to release in the same way Unabomber manifesto could motivate people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So I'm going to give them a little bit of grace there that maybe they made a thoughtful decision in not unpacking that at this time.
But there was a lot of speculation, a lot of gumshoe detectives on Reddit.
Yeah, the FBI.
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
No, I'm just going to say, if you were just speculate all you like.
Fine.
Social media.
The mind has to process things.
I get it.
You know,
whenever somebody dies in your immediate family,
your mind tries to go through every permutation possible to figure out for you to process the emotions.
Collectively,
you know, unfortunately,
while scrolling,
I saw the close-up video of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and it's like scarring.
And when it,
something hits you that emotionally.
It's just really hard to watch.
And I wish I had not seen it,
although in some ways,
I feel like,
I don't want to say civic duty.
I'm going to go ahead and say it's so scarring
that maybe that's a good idea.
Yeah,
I could understand people not wanting to see
and I can understand people wanting to understand
exactly how horrific it is
to process it as well,
and I'm not an expert on it.
But you do need to,
while you're speculating through this,
just hold a little bit of space
that there could be any permutation here.
Could it be a conspiracy that,
you know, the CIA or another intelligence agency could be involved in something.
Of course, that's possible, just not probable.
Could it be a mentally ill person?
Almost certainly that's what we'll find out.
That's almost certainly what happens in these cases.
Is it somebody who-
Well, that does seem to be the case this time?
And that, of course.
Extraordinarily online guy who was just deeply troubled.
So I don't think we have to ban people from speculating and there's new AI tools.
Maybe it's helpful, actually, when you crowdsource this stuff because you could find
the video that maybe the FBI hasn't found yet, but just tell us what people were doing with
AI. Yeah, well, here's the twist. So the FBI posted some blurry images of a person of interest
in the shooting. You can see that one on the very far left here of this graphic. And so what people
did was they took this image and they tried to enhance it or upscale it using all of our generative AI
tools that are so popular now that, you know, people are often using for memes. And you can see here
three examples that people tweeted out. And the thing to notice about these three examples is that they all look very, very different because these generative AI tools, I feel like this is a misunderstanding of what these tools do, that people are thinking it's going to extract the authentic image from out of these blurry images and make it look clearer to the naked eye. But what the tools are really doing is filling in the details to make it look clearer or smoother based on previous.
images they've seen and their best guess as to what this guy's face look like.
So that's why you're getting very, very different.
And in fact, you'll notice some of the AI tools rendered his shirt as just random patterns
and images.
Others turn it into a bald eagle in front of the American flag.
I still, I don't think we've got confirmation of what was actually on the shirt.
So you could see how this could lead to all sorts of potential problems that people either
don't understand how these tools are working or don't.
understand how they could use them.
And I feel like that to me is the interesting question.
Like, how bad do you think this is going to get?
Do you think eventually people will figure out, here's what AI is good at and not.
Alex, what's your take here?
I could use it.
I could maybe steal me on the other side.
Maybe these tools could come up composites of potential.
I'm sure the FBI has tools or, you know, artists.
They've always had artists, sketch artists say, you know, here's potential just based on the human
averages of what this person could potentially look like and they could make 10 versions of
it based on, you know, a probability of here's what, you know, this person appears to be of
this nationality. They're in America. They're in this city. Here's some potentials and then run
those potentials against databases of students at, and the Facebook or the bookface of students
at that university. It certainly they were doing that. So I guess how close is the public to being
actually helpful here in pretty far away, I think. Yeah, it might, so I've had the misfortune of having
been online through a lot of school shootings and similar acts of violence. And pretty consistently,
90% of what you see and hear and read and is put before you on social media is wrong.
That was the case during the catastrophe, the tragedy. And that was also the case again when the name came
out and everyone found the wrong person who had the same name and jumped to nine conclusions and wanted to
you know, make their same point. I don't think we're going to fix human behavior. I think we're
always hunting for the why very quickly. And so I think these tools will become part of the conversation.
So I would put the on is this kind of the bright thing to do with the wrong thing to do. I think
it's what humans are going to do. So I think what we should really focus on is individual education
of ourselves to spot what seems to be legitimate, what is confirmed, what has been reported
by several different news groups, and what is AI slop that people might be trying to push upon
you. And I think as social media becomes more algorithm heavy, I think,
people get rewarded by the platforms for doing very poor detective work.
And so I would just caution everybody to take a break during breaking news.
Unless you're directly reporting the story, you don't have to be there every single minute and let these things settle down.
But Jason, back to you.
Well, I was going to say, you know, there is a passion for crime stories.
There always have been they are very popular in entertainment and we have documentaries now.
And there is one thing that is helpful.
which is asking the public for help in identifying people.
And so...
Well, that's how we caught this guy.
His father turned him in because he confessed to his dad and to a friend on Discord,
and then they turned him in.
So that's the only reason we caught the guy.
So, yeah, there it is.
And I think sometimes there have been these cold cases, podcasts, and documentaries that raise awareness.
Again, the human mind tries to solve problems.
and resolve conflict, cognitive dissonance of how these things happen, and all that energy,
although it will be wrong in the majority of cases, it will be spastic, it could be offensive,
and could certainly rub people the wrong way. I'm sure victims' families don't always feel
so great about people becoming obsessed with it. They do sometimes lead to maybe not the detectives
and the investigators going, oh, I never thought of that possibility.
but it could lead to a piece of evidence or a person coming forward who previously had not.
And it could, you know, potentially, and so I'm just, you know, I think there is something to crowdsourcing aspects of these.
I do think we will see folks when they leave social media footprints, especially if they're on private accounts or in deep into forums.
that are not easily queried because they're behind paywalls or logins.
There does seem to be an opportunity there as well.
Is this person in a Facebook group and a subreddit with a handle?
And can I identify their way of talking or maybe they use something in their handle,
you know, a character, a series of words or keywords that could then help you find people.
But you've got to be careful as well because I'm trying to remember the case recently where
everybody went after the wrong person.
It was the Boston Marathon
bombing is the one.
The Reddit thought they'd identified
the guy and there was like
12, 16, 18 hours
between them all looking for
this wrong person and the Sarnov brothers
who were the actual party's
responsible being arrested. Yeah, thank you for
remembering. If you have a tip that you come up
with, if you have a brilliant insight, if you have something
that you see, you can turn it into the relevant
legal authorities. I think that
the tip lines. Yeah. The tip lines, yeah. The tip lines,
I think my more negative take Jason was more predicated on.
I don't think a lot of the people sharing stuff in the last couple of days
have been trying to help solve the case before we caught the shooter.
I think they were more trying to drive more attention to themselves.
I believe this is called chasing clicks.
And to me, it's a gross form of news, Jackie.
Yeah, I think that's why I'm just...
I just also worry that we're not informing people about what these AI tools really do.
and there's a lot of people that believe it's just like this genius that lives in your phone
that can answer any question and don't have a good applied sense of like what it's actually
doing and how it actually works. And like I think this is just the latest issue that highlights that.
That's going to, yeah, you certainly saw that with the psychosis stuff where people have thought like, oh,
and the South Park obviously lauded that and featured that in one of the recent episodes where it's like,
oh my God, you know, I want to turn French fries into salad. That's my startup idea.
That's a great idea. That's a great idea. And it's like, it's not actually.
a great idea. It's sycophantic. But, you know, that is part of the process of any new technology
is people kind of learning how it does what it does. The great irony of this technology is that as
it gets better, people's perception of its genius will actually become closer to the reality of it.
These things do have a level of rigor that will emerge over time, where if, if,
prompted correctly if you said, you know, instead of just give me a better picture of this person,
make it clearer. If you said, based upon, you know, the average look of somebody this height,
this weight, et cetera, give me some permutations and the probabilities that the person looks like this,
that could be interesting, you know, and I'm sure, like I said earlier, the FBI has had those
tools for a little while. Maybe Pallinger makes them. Who knows? All right. Let's keep going. What else do we
down on the docket. All right. So let's talk about social media bans. Jason, you called for a story
on this. There's a new bill in the House from Representative Angie Craig, Minnesota. It's called the
No Social Media at School Act. Kind of says what it does on the 10. The nuance to this particular
bit of legislation is that she wants social media companies to geo-fence around schools to effectively
block students from being able to access social media services during those times of the day.
She wants people to learn and not scroll.
To me, this seems like a very complicated way of saying no phones at school, but I'm curious what you thought.
I think it's brilliant.
Okay.
If you can geofence me to create a anonymous bullying app like some of these anonymous apps became, not that the creators intended them to be bullying, but they did say, hey, yik-yak.
All of that cohort was a mobile, social, geo-fant.
mobile social geo application, and you put those things together.
It's in your pocket.
It knows where you are.
And it identifies conversations or limits them by location.
And obviously we do that.
You know, whenever you're in Dubai or Austin or New York, you're going to get ads that are geo targeted.
Sure.
Very easy to do.
And so if a school opts into it, the administration should be able to say no, no,
targeting of students and let's turn off
Instagram, Facebook in this one mile
on the campus.
If the school board there decided to do that, I think
actually it's productive. And phone lockers, if you pull up
producer Oliver or Claude, or maybe both,
the phone lockers available on
Amazon. I have been
lobbying about this.
And this is a very...
of yes. Yeah, it's a very simple $100, $200, depending on how many phones you can do. And they're made
a plexiglass or metal. You slide your phone in. In some cases, that one I think, you know,
somebody has to administer it. And other ones, they're little lockers that each have an
individual key and you can see into your phone. And then you wrap the key around your wrist so you
don't lose it. And then if you need your phone, you can go to the front desk or to the vestibule,
the lobby of the school.
Just like when I was a kid, we had the rock at Severian High School,
which is a big giant rock in the back,
where you could go smoke.
Think about how crazy that was.
We were allowed to smoke in high school.
You could go to the rock and smoke.
And there were teachers smoking there with the students hanging out
and bumming cigarettes off each other.
It was a different time, folks, is the 80s.
That was still the 90s.
I went to high school in the early 90s,
and you could go smoke at the back by the flagpole.
You could not smoke in the 2000s.
No.
It was totally acceptable.
So, you know, if you think about what's worse for kids today,
smoking or social media,
I'm going to go,
I'm going to give social media the edge.
Tough call, yeah.
I literally would
do social media edge.
Not to take us down too far a rabbit hole here.
Did either of you watch
Unknown Number, the high school catfish
documentary that's on Netflix?
I have been hearing about this one.
I have not.
All you'd have to do is watch that and you will be like,
yes, we should absolutely shut down social media.
Like, those kids would have been saved
from this whole ordeal if they weren't,
if they weren't allowed to use their phones during the school day.
It's such a distraction.
You know, I was at dinner just the other night, as I mentioned earlier on the top of the show,
with Vlad and some friends and Jared Letto was there and we're all talking.
And, you know, I just said, you know, I was talking to Jared about movies and attention spans,
et cetera, and having that obvious debate that we've had here before.
And I said, yeah, I think it's coming back because look at all of us.
We have our phones on the table face down.
Every single person had their phone face down.
I said, we all took the time to put it face down.
for a reason. We're signaling to each other unconsciously that you have my attention and that we
enjoy this time together having the spicy rigatoni and the veal parm. Although carbone
failed me, they'll usually make me a chicken parm off menu, which I prefer to the veal parm,
but they were very busy. They were very busy. And so...
Chicken parm is superior to veal parm. Oh, that's incorrect. Just to throw in my...
Listen, guys, guys, I got to stop us here. We're going to go down a rabbit hole.
But if we've got to stay.
Got a lot of docket, guys.
This could take us to 10 minutes over the purchase.
But I think the onus should be on the social media companies to support the educators in this regard.
This is where somebody like Zuckerberg, who I think has made the wrong decision every time it comes to our children could actually show some leadership.
Why doesn't Zuckerberg come out and say, this is something we could technically implement?
Oh, because it doesn't make him money.
It doesn't make the stock go up.
And he could put five engineers on this and five product managers,
10 of their 100,000 people, whatever it is, a de minimis cost to him.
And he could make a big impact.
So somebody clipped this, send it to Zuckerberg and his lieutenants,
and let them know that I expect them to take action here.
And I want to see them for the first time in their lives as a company to take proactive action
to protect our children.
And yes, Zuckerberg, three people sent this to you.
You can all guess his email, just put it on social media, on threads, put it on Instagram,
and that mentioned him and just say, J-Cal says this is a time when you could actually do something thoughtful and proactively,
as opposed to getting pulled in front of Congress constantly and having whistleblowers determine your action,
which is the lowest form of leadership.
If you want to be a leader, Zuckerberg, and I'm not going to make this personal and get into a
other Palmer Lucky situation. I'm talking about an organization that has a track record of not
being proactive in safety concerns with our children. He has children. I have children. You have
children. Alex. Lon, we don't know. You can find out. Probably not. I don't think. 23 and me will find out
if anybody emerges. But the truth is, I really think, you know, at this point in Zuckerberg's
career being fabulously wealthy, powerful, having every dream he could imagine. Just having come off this
major controversy about his own internal AI team allowing the bots to flirt with children.
Like what a perfect way to respond to that.
Get ahead of the curve, Zuck.
Right.
Now, now we're going to go proactively defend the children.
Like, wouldn't that be a great way to rebound?
This is a message to Zuckerberg.
Proactive once?
Once?
Can you do it?
Just try it?
I mean, for giggles.
All right, next story.
Let's keep moving here.
Speaking of meta, just add a code to that, the FTC announced this week.
It's looking into AI chatbots interactions with kids from Alphabet, which makes Gemini, character
AI, Instagram, meta, open AI, snap, and XAI, notably not anthropic, maybe because they're
just not as popular on the consumer front, but the FTC wants to better understand how these
companies, quote, monetize user engagement, process, user inputs, develop and approve characters.
And then Jason, I think this one's very important.
measure, test, and monitor for negative impacts before an actual deployment,
mitigate negative impacts, particularly to children.
This is essentially in response, I think, to the meta-chatbot fiasco,
but a lot of other companies are being dragged into this.
There was a character AI suicide or a suicide.
Let me just be crisp in my, I don't want to be framing these things non-elequently.
So I'll just give myself a second chance at it.
A suicide that occurred based on somebody who was using character AI and was overly enthusiastic about that usage was clearly was not a healthy use of it.
In no way am I saying that character AI killed that child.
But I do think as these tools go into the real world, there needs to be a discussion.
It would be great if it was proactive that when a child gets on these systems, you age verify.
I don't see why age verification is so difficult.
for people to understand.
If you are going to engage in adult discussions with these powerful technologies,
just do an age verification.
We need to have a global age verification system that is run in an opt-in way by the two major platforms,
Android and Apple.
They should, Apple already has a designation between children and parents and family.
You already have my credit card.
You know I'm an adult, et cetera, et cetera.
They should set that on the device level.
And they shouldn't be forced to do it.
They should do it as a group.
They should say, hey, we have an idea of the person's age.
And if they want to upgrade to an adult account, they should put in a credit card,
take a picture on the phone level, and say, I'm an adult here.
Now, of course, privacy concerns yada, yada, but this would be something that platforms could opt into
and say, here's a free version of chat GPT.
You don't have to log in.
It's got these guardrails.
And then they could say, and this is our one that doesn't.
doesn't have the same guardrails, and you do have to log in.
And we would like to know your approximate age range based on your iPhone stuff.
Now, you do get into registration and privacy issues with all of this.
So, again, it doesn't have to be for everything you use.
There'll be anonymous platforms, Reddit, or pseudo-anonymous like Reddit or fully anonymous
ones, if you want to go use the dark web and the Tor network.
You'll be able to find those things as well.
but why not have this as an option for companies to say my technology is so powerful?
Yeah, you need to have some registration.
I've run into this all the time.
I ordered kombucha the other day and I needed to show my driver's license.
And I'm like, for kombucha.
It's got a little kick to it that kombucha, you know, it's for men.
0.1% alcohol.
I mean, some can't get to drink two gallons of it and get a buzz?
I mean, really?
Okay.
Can you imagine what drinking two gallons of kombucha would do to your body?
By the way, shout out to producer Claude.
he has an answer for why no anthropic on that list.
The FTC is specifically targeting companies offering and a quote,
AI companion products or services defined as chatbot's designed to mimic human characteristics,
emotions and intentions designed to communicate like a friend or confidant.
Claude is an AI assistant for productivity and research.
That's why they're not included.
Which would be, Alex, such a simple thing to do is to separate out these products into their own app.
So as everybody experiments with personalities, if the personality is designed to build relationships and be a companion, just make it a separate app.
We had the CEO of Eli Lilly.
Dave Ricks was at the event.
Really nice guy.
And I gave him a big hug.
He was very nice.
I chatted with briefly.
It was very nice.
And we talked about our shared passion for skiing.
And I thanked him for my 40 pound weight loss at GLP.
have done, and I've given it a lot of thought. I didn't talk about that weight loss during the
first two years because when I started using GLP-1s, they were an off-label use.
Ozempic, if you remember four years ago when I started, thank you to my friends, Tim Ferriss
and Kevin Rose, who had a discussion about it on their random podcast, and they call it Random Show.
You know, and they're biohackers, obviously, and they had been using it off-label for visceral fat around
Kevin's hard and lungs, kidneys, whatever that is.
I can't remember exactly how I framed it.
And so I went to a doctor and I convinced them to let me try it off-label for this weight
loss, which I struggled with after gaining two pounds a year for maybe 20 years.
Used to be a marathon runner, weighed 165 pounds.
That way, 172, 173, lost 40 pounds.
I'm literally almost in my marathon running weight, which I don't actually want to hit
because I've gained muscles since then doing weights.
So it might be within five pounds of what I would consider optimal 166, 167, something in that range is probably where I want to get to.
And I was speaking to the CEO of Roe.
You guys know row.com, yeah?
Of course.
And Ro.com.
Roe.C.O, yeah.
And so let me find, is this in the docket for me?
I don't have any details of it.
Let me find it in the docket.
It is there.
Yeah.
It's under row.
dot CEO shoutout.
Top bottom.
Why can't I find it?
On the top.
Yeah, right under the lawn stuff culture beat story.
Oh, there it is.
Okay.
So I was talking to the CEO of row.com, R.O.com.
And he said, listen, we're going to do something.
And I know you've talked about GLPs and you're passionate about it.
And again, I didn't talk about it for the first few years.
I lightly talked about it for the next two because I don't want, I know that there's a certain
number of people who will try things because they trust me. And I wanted to wait for, you know,
more data to come out about these things. And a lot of data has come out. And when people
ask me in my family or friends, hey, should I try a GLP1, I say, you should talk to your doctor?
and it's had a profound impact on me.
In talking to the team at Roe, they said,
you look great, would you consider being a spokesperson,
you know, for GLP-1s on our platform?
I said, thank you.
That's incredibly flattering, but I don't really do those things.
And then I thought about it, I talked to my wife,
talked to my kitchen council, kitchen cabinet,
is that what you call it?
Kitchen cabinet is what we were calling.
Talk to my kitchen cabinet,
and they said, well, do you think you could do,
well by being a
spokesperson for row.co.
And I said, yeah, I think
now's the time. And so
they signed Charles Barkley,
Serena Williams.
Yeah, Serena's on the front page right now.
And
I'm making the announcement today that I have signed on
as a spokesperson for
GLP1 specifically on row.com.
And I don't have a promo code or anything,
but if you go to RO.com, you can start
getting some information on it, do a consultation. And in talking to Dave Ricks at the summit,
Dave Ricks, yeah, I got the name right? Yep, you got it right. Dave Ricks of Eli Lilly.
Of Eli Lilly, you know, they're finding out all this other great benefits to these GLP-1s. These are
obviously new drugs. And I mean, Zep bound is their, their GLP one. That's the Eli-L Lilly brand.
Yeah. And so if you're overweight or you're, you know, struggling with this stuff, I,
It worked for me.
Maybe it works for you.
Again, you probably have friends and your family who have had a life-changing experience on these.
Alex, you've always been Schfeldt.
I don't let you wear your tank tops on this program, but once in a while you'll rip your shirt off at the end of the program.
We go into a production meeting and I see those cannons.
You look great.
You don't need it probably.
But yeah, go to road.com for real FDA-approved weight loss options from a provider who you can trust.
Can I just say how surreal it is
that it's like Seria Williams?
And I love you, Jason.
But like, you know, like famous athlete.
And then podcaster.
Famous podcaster.
Yeah.
Well, I think this could be,
this could be the start of something really great.
If Tom Ford's listening and,
and the Chevy Corporation and makers of Corvettes.
And if the May block had a driver testing.
I like Corvettes.
And if there's a ski company,
wants to gear me up.
I mean, anything's possible.
I think being in the top ten on Apple podcast,
it's just like being the winningest tennis player of all time.
It's the right there in terms of achievement.
Terms of achievement.
Champions, both champions in our respective fields.
Winners, yeah, winners.
Of course, she's known globally, and I'm known, yeah, I guess I'm known globally.
Globally, I mean, I don't know.
Maybe there's no difference.
When people...
To me, it's surreal.
When people at the Universal Studios all-in after party, when Amanda would be like, this is Lon, he works on all-in sometimes.
People's eyes lit up.
Like you said, I worked on jaws sometimes.
It's like, it's a big deal.
It's a big deal.
All right.
Well, they have the folks.
I'm really happy about that.
Okay.
We're an hour in 10.
We're an hour in.
Do you have one or two more important stories that we should cover?
Pauseing.
Pauseing really quick.
We have to do a polymarket.
Yeah, do you want to do the polymarket?
Yes, I love polymarket.
I have a polymarket for us.
Let's do a polymarket.
I'm going to do Zooks, the news story, as a short intro,
and then I'm going to pivot that to the polymarket.
So just pull a thing.
All right, tell me about the Zook's progress.
I was just in Vegas.
I was going to go try it, but I was there for a short period of time,
and I wanted to play PLO and donate my money to the grinders there.
But I played 55.
You played PILA the same way.
The big story from Zuc.
which is Amazon's self-driving companies that they have launched in Las Vegas.
The service is currently free.
I think because they're not allowed to charge people for it yet, Jason.
Okay.
But Zooks, keep in mind, is not a Tesla.
It's not a Jaguar that has been converted to self-driving.
They have a purpose-built self-driving robot taxi.
So you sit facing one another.
It's super cool.
To me, it's a little bit of the vision of the future in which we call a car.
We sit in it, but we don't have to deal with the usual setup.
And I'm just really excited about this.
There's no front.
And there's no back.
That's the thing I find very interesting about it, Lon.
So if it pulls up into a dead-end street or it's going into the Hollywood Hills eventually to drop you off, it doesn't need to ever do a U-turn.
It can drive equally well the other direction.
This is going to be a huge benefit.
It also has large sliding doors on both sides.
So getting in and out of these is distinctly different than a car, as you point out, Alex, because you have to swing
the door open and have it get clipped in traffic.
Here, the door slide open.
There's no, you know, like a minivan or more accurately a bus.
So this thing has some very unique advantages.
You can imagine if you went into the parking lot of Terry Blacks, which is the final boss of Austin self-driving because you got 16 people parking, circling, blocking each other.
nobody gets frisky in that parking lot because everybody in Austin has guns.
So, but it is the final boss.
Here it is.
This reminds me of, you remember Minority Report, which I think was one of the first big
sci-fi movies that had that driverless cars was just like they're all driving in these automated vehicles.
And I think one thing that was interesting is those cars had no windows.
You're inside and it's all LED screens projecting things.
And so that felt like, oh, the future, like if you have driverless cars, they don't need.
windows so a driver can see out.
And that's what this reminds you of.
We get to really rethink vehicles from the ground up now that we know there's not
going to be anybody piloting them anymore.
The most important thing here is...
There's going to be so many of these interesting kinds of changes.
If you could pull up the safety test, producer Claude, there are safety test videos of
this.
So then to go to an even deeper sci-fi poll, I believe it was Judge Dred where one of these
cars gets into an accident and it does a bunch of foam lawn.
Yes.
I think, hmm, I think that is Judge Dredd.
Is it Judge Dred?
Yeah.
That sounds right.
It goes flying in there.
You are right.
It's secure foam.
No, it's not Judge Dread.
It's from the movie Demolition Man.
Oh, Demo Man, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
1993's Demolition Man featured secure foam.
Yeah, so you can show a picture of that or just a still or if you have the video.
and then show the video, because this will be good for our clip game.
Shout out to Cleo.
The video that I found is real grainy, not good.
No, there is a great video, though, of the Zooks in testing.
So the Zooks safety test video.
Let's just play that for a second here.
So, Alex, you find that one.
Lon, you find the other one of the movie.
I found the Demolition Man one, but it is blurry.
I think I can find that one.
I think it's fine to show it.
So you find a better one.
Alex, you find the safety video from Zooks.
It's on...
I have a...
a Zooks being hit with various things at high speeds by the companies.
Is that what you want?
Yes. Yeah, that's the safety tests.
And it shows the airbags going off.
If you scrub through it, you'll find it.
And I've watched this video before.
Because it's a unique giant box, you're in a giant box.
You could have a lot of padding on either side.
I believe the Zooks is for low-speed cities.
So I think these things are designed for 35 miles and below, maybe 45.
Certainly they're doing a testing.
So these are these sleds they use.
You know, basically you'll have a sled go at 50 miles an hour and smash into the zooks.
Now, because the tires are used, these giant tires are the height, Alex, of a car fender.
So if a car goes and hits one of these, they hit these giant tires.
And as you can see, yes, they compromise the tires.
And then inside they have so many airbags.
It's absurd.
I think you could roll this thing down Mount Everest and people would walk away from it.
Which is amazing because we can be safer in these cars because they're designed differently than we are on our current cars.
There's no steering column facing your chest.
There's no windshield right by.
Yes, absolutely.
No engine.
This makes me very excited, Jason.
I love that we're doing this in Vegas.
For folks who want to try it out somewhere else, they're going to do.
San Francisco access, I believe next.
And then Austin and Miami are on the way, which brings me to something that's also very important,
which is Tesla and its robo taxi group are also moving out around the nation.
Security drivers, as you like to talk about.
Safety drivers, I'm sorry.
But that brings me to this week's polymarket.
There's a polymarket all about whether or not Tesla is going to launch robotaxies in California this year.
And as you can see, their betting has really picked up in the last couple of weeks.
and people are becoming increasingly optimistic.
So Jason, no inside information, no calling on your friends.
What do you think from what you know is the chance?
Well, let's, you know, on Polly Market, they have a definition section.
If you scroll down a bit, we need to understand the definition of Robotaxy here.
So maybe you could take a look there.
Any taxi service available to the general public, which operates without a human driver,
actively controlling the vehicle will count, regardless of membership or other financial restrictions.
services which are limited to Tesla employees or a limited test group without general access
do not qualify.
Okay.
So this is properly priced at 50-50, basically.
The reason there's spike is because people who use the self-driving from Tesla,
and even if you look at something like the FSD tracker,
are reporting high 90 percentage.
I think it's 96 right now for the consumer grade software that I use every,
day and other people use every day without and without a critical disengagement. So if it's 96,
97%, they're kind of in the end game, if you will, which is why people think 50-50.
And the reason it's not 90 is because of regulators. Right now, my understanding is with the
safety driver, you're categorized as level two because you have somebody who's actively
monitoring the vehicle. And no shame in the safety driver game. Keep the safety driver.
ever in for a year or two is my best advice to all these folks. It'll happen when it happens in
each city and it's happening if Zooks and Waymo can get it done, Elon will get it done,
but what we don't want to see is an accident. And one of the things I am concerned about is
there seems to be extraordinary pressure being put on these companies to get this technology
out there by market participants. And I just, I will admonish these market participants who are
pumping stocks to secure their bags that they're bad actors when they are pushing people to go
fast because they want to see their stock price go up. I have exposure to all of these stocks,
Amazon, Tesla, Uber, Google with Waymo. I have access to all them and I'm going to start
buying, I think, some of the foreign players to just increase my access to all because I believe
in the category so much. I haven't made a J-trade on things outside of those.
Xiaomi coming soon?
Yeah, all of them.
I mean, there's a ton.
Pony, uh, Nuro is not public yet, but I could probably get access to private shares.
And the reason I'm really admonishing these, uh, folks who use their affiliate codes to try to
make money or they're using the energy of the public to try to get more views on their YouTube
channels or chasing cloud is because you're putting pressure when it is not necessary.
All of it, you don't need to like have your stock go up 10% every week or month or quarter.
If you believe in the category, place your bet and then go sit on your fucking hands like I do.
Just sit on your goddamn hands and go live your life.
Stop pumping stocks and putting pressure on these companies to do things.
too quickly. Safety is number one. And I know this because when I was a private shareholder of Uber,
third or fourth investor I hear, they... So they say. So they say, not for me to say. They had a
terrible accident where a safety driver is playing Candy Crush and trusted the software too much,
and Uber shut down their Phoenix test. Then Cruz dragged somebody. They didn't make the initial hit,
but they dragged somebody. And then because of corporate pressure, stock pressure,
pressure humans feel, they tried to cover it up, allegedly, and they lost their license.
If one of these companies, God forbid, has a fatality or just any loss of life or even just hurting
somebody, the whole thing is going to be put on ice for a year or two.
The public will not embrace it.
The regulators will do CYA up and down the stack.
Too much pressure on too many people.
Everybody chill out.
And it's going to, if people keep trying it, right now, people who try it are uniformly
are almost uniformly delighted.
That's all the feedback we always hear.
You want to keep that going.
You need that as the foundation that everybody who rides in a Waymo today or a Tesla, they're evangelizing
it to five more people.
I wrote in a Waymo, totally safe.
I never felt like I was in danger.
It's great.
You don't have to tip.
That's the virtuous cycle that you want to keep going if you're an investor in one of these
companies or all of these.
Yeah.
So ignore these, you know, stock promoting, you know, kind of relates to the meme stock stuff.
The meme stock people are, you know, talking their bet, diminishing the other bets,
you know, Waymo is never going to scale, Tesla's never going to work, Uber's going to be toast,
all this stuff.
And it's silly.
There's obviously this category, and I talked to Dar at the Allent Summit about this.
Thank you to him for coming.
He's very busy.
and he explained it deftly, which is, you know, this category is going to expand massively.
There's going to be many winners, and it's a global deployment of upwards of a hundred million cars.
There'll be a hundred million cars over the next 10 years put on the road.
There's nobody capable of making 10 million cars a year except for Toyota and Volkswagen, I think, can get to 10 million cars a year.
Eventually, Tesla could. They do 2 million right now. 1.8 million was their record.
So it's, I mean, it is conceivable one person could maybe, you know, do that.
But they would also then have to incur tens of billions of dollars in expense.
Because that's another issue is-
The CAPEX to create all of those cars.
It's crazy.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So there's like a physical constraint.
There's a regulatory constraint.
There's a capital constraint.
And there's a consumer trust constraint.
Let's just take our time, folks.
Take a beat.
and place three or four bets and then go live your lives.
Go touch grass and kiss your kids.
That's what I do.
You think when I'm skiing 33 days a year in Japan and all around the world,
I'm sitting there sweating this, I'm not.
It's going to happen.
It's going to be a great opportunity for everybody.
And if you think of Uber today, it's not like you only get one kind of car when you dial up Uber.
Maybe you're going to get a suburban.
Maybe you're going to get a Range Rover.
Maybe you're going to get a Tesla.
It's like it's all different.
Yeah, maybe you want a two-seat car.
Me and save money on a robotac, on a cyber cab.
Yeah, sometimes you get a Waymo and that's part of the experience.
Sometimes you've got a family.
You need a Volkswagen ID Buzz, which is going to be all over the place.
Or you want to be in luxury and you want the lucid SUV with seven seats and room for five bags.
So I feel like that is not hard for me to conceive it all, a future where you dial up and you know you're going to get an automated ride from Uber, but who knows.
It could be one of ten different varieties of cars.
Or you use the Waymo app or use the Roemo app.
or use the Robotaxi.
You'll have five choices.
The real winner here is the safety of humans,
recapturing all that time in the car.
So people talk about movies going away.
Hey, you know what?
If you're in one of these gorgeous zooks
and you're traveling, you know,
you have an hour commute from, let's say,
you live in the, or even an hour and a half commute,
you live out in the country
and you take a long ride into your office three days a week,
guess what?
Maybe do, you know, my discussion with Jarlett.
about attention spans, you would invest in a Kurosawa film and watch that on the way in and out
and just give yourself over to lean back.
A plane ride, you know, just like a plane ride.
Like a plane ride.
Like a movie or a TV show when you're on the plane.
Yeah.
Awesome.
All right, everybody.
It's been another amazing episode.
Thanks to our partners, Polymarket, Claude, um, and Prophic.
And now to the family, ro.c.
Get your gLP one on after your consultation with a trusted provider if you are.
So inclined and you could be shelt like.
your boy, Jake, howl, not talking to Yulon?
Not not talking to Yelon.
You lost a little bit of weight.
You look great.
I don't know, maybe.
All my own.
I did not, not.
What do you?
How far are you from your ideal?
I could still probably lose another 25, 30 and be totally fine.
But I was up to, I was near 250 pounds and now I'm a little under 200.
You up for the Roe Challenge?
You are interested?
I might, we'll see.
We'll talk about it.
I'll pick it up.
I might, I might, I don't love the needles, but I'm, I'm, I'd be.
It's the tiniest little microfilament of a needle.
When you do it, it's so tiny the needle and you just do it in your belly fat or your butt fat or whatever or your fat on your arm.
And I got plenty of that.
I didn't know if the needle had worked or not because it's that then of a micro needle.
So if you're scared of a needle, something to do, I'll pick it up for you, Lon.
All right.
Hey, okay.
We'll talk after this.
And I would be willing to do a weight incentive bet with you.
Oh, man.
All right.
Could get spicy.
Yeah, we're the biggest loser here on this week at Starz.
All right, everybody.
We'll see you next time.
Bye-bye.
