This Week in Startups - Jason turned $11 and one tweet into 1.1M views | E2311

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

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  

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 11th 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 LEM list. 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. Which is probably 10 times more interesting to be done. This Weekend 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 Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist. PayPal. Built for payments, growth, and agentic.

PayPal Open, built for all business. Visit PayPalopo.com to get started. And Quo, formerly open phone, 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 slash twist. That's QUO.com slash twist. All right, bonsois, mon amies. It's your boy, J-CAL. I'm sorry I'm not suited up, but I am in Paris.

And it is hot. And they don't have air conditioning. And they rented an Airbnb and it has like three portable air conditioners. Yeah. 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. Yeah. They're digging in their heels. They're like, not for us.

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 I ask for ice. is a charming Airbnb, obviously. You can see if you're watching beautiful Airbnb and a great Androsman having time of my life here, but they put the portable air conditioning

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? Yeah. They just opened the door windows through the exhaust out but left the rest of the window open.

So you got all that hot air coming in. 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. Not even that modern.

Talk to Singapore. Not even that, like, before our time. You know, it was like the 1950s when the movie theaters were like, come in, it's air condition. So they've had a while. a while to get on. 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. That's miserable. 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. You can't enjoy a luscious,

delectable French meal while you're like sweating in your food. That's no good. Man, but I have been killing it. I had an incredible beef tartar. I had incredible. I saw the beef tartar. Yeah. You shared that. I didn't put the Do Confi. I had an incredible doc confi. And then I had the chicken with Morels at my favorite restaurant in Paris. Le Poul O Potte. It is the chicken in a pot.

But they also had to have a chicken with Morels. Last time I was at that restaurant. It was like 15 years ago. Me, David Sachs, and the wives went there and had this incredible chicken with Morales at the end of the Morel season, fancy mushrooms. Yeah. Tremantique. Tremantique.

And I had a great time at the Ray's conference. Those are dropping on the other podcast all in. But here we are. This week in startups. We've got to talk startups. Big show. Got a couple of guests. Got some news.

We do. So let's get to work. Well, before we get into all that, we got to talk about another patented J-Cal productivity hack. You'll see here at the top of our docket. This edition's 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.

What could be more glamorous? It couldn't be more glamorous. I'm here 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 capitals. It's a lot of work.

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 these are all areas where an executive assistant. in an EA, as we call them, can be a massive time saver. We can have Athena assistance coordinate with the guests, handle post-episode follow-ups,

keep the content pipeline moving. They can even pull an organized performance data so we can get a sense for which videos are popping and why at a glance. And I'll give you one that I did here related to what I was talking about earlier with the Airbnb. I was like, I got to call an audible here. So I know which hotels I like. I know where to find them.

So I now have projects in quad. I 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. Yes. So I was just literally authenticate my Monocle magazine.

and authenticate, my Michelin Star, because I have the Michelin Keys now for hotels, New York Times. I got all of those, but, you know, I'm logged into those paid subscriptions I use, and Condonest Traveler. So I go into those. I have it organized 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 LLM with my Athena assistant. then they, and I instruct them, hey, look at how I talk to Claude, look at how I talk to perplexi computer plugged into GROC, and then they can then fork the discussion and book the hotels from it, right? 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, which I think is Athena.com slash j-cow. Yeah. So we do want to say thanks for our friends at Athena for bringing you these productivity hacks. You can get $2,000 off your first EA by going to Athena.com slash J-Cal. Shamat's got one too. Oh, by the way, my wife is using the Athena

assistance 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, she's a, Mother of three. You need a dedicated assistant. All right. All right. So we got to bring up our first guest now. You may know him online as Tebow Maker.

His name is Tebow Louie Lucas coming to you also from France. It's a very francophile. It's a very francophile episode today. So he is the Product Hunt Maker of the Year, Jason, from 2022. Serial founder and entrepreneur. Some of the projects include most popular, most famous tweet hunter and Taplio. These were sweets of tools for Twitter. LinkedIn creators, schedule your pose, 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 B2B SaaS company. And now, 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 got a product in the market while you're still developing and workshoping. So he's going to walk us through some of the strategies around there. Tibo, thanks a much for joining us. Whoa, that's the intro. Thank you very much. So happy to be here. Yeah. All right. So you're

going to, this is our tactical practical practical section here on this week and start us. We're asking the team. Find us some tactical practical advice for founders. So you're going to walk us through some of your tips here on how to grow an audience. You're a startup founder and you want to grow an audience. What do you do? I think the, like, most people try to just share interesting things. And they don't have a specific paybook doing that. And so they miss that by doing interesting thing 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 Twitter in 2021 after fading for like many, many years. And I did that challenge where I started like, building and shipping one new product every week until something's thick. And that didn't go really well at the very beginning. Like I felt a lot. Like I built shitty products. But just building one after another, it just starts, you know, like every, at every new product that was shipping on Twitter, I got a little bit more following. I got a little bit more interests.

And so that directly compounded time after time. And so at every, every new product that 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. And it's in less than a year, it reached a million per year and got eventually sold to LAMLIST.

That was insane. Okay. So the playbook for you was, 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, and I just did this. Pull up the tweet I did. Now I have a, actually I looked up. I think I have over a million followers now. I think my follower accounts growing. Oh, you've significantly over a million now. I mean, I remember when it broke, like maybe six months ago, but it's growing fast now. But I did. But I did. This is your pod. This is your podcast, deep-linked podcast listener. Yeah. And so, and you like to go by Tebow, right, T-I-B-O?

Yeah, T-I-B-O underscore maker. Every time you miss a call, that is another cell. Just thrown right out the window. Every customer matters. Every lead matters. You need a reliable way to catch all that incoming business, even if the calls are coming during off hours or weekends. That's why today's episode is brought to you.

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Try Quo for free. Plus, get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash twist. That's QUO.com slash twist. But I think what you said, what you said is incredible because it's like it forced people to switch from setting mindset. Like, I am in love of my idea. I want to study it at all cost, it shifts people to a validation mindset. Like it forced them to just try to validate their product, gets 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. 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 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. Grock, the latest one, 4.5, built it.

And I said, go through the top 25 podcast. Now I have it doing like 75. Figure out all the segments because all podcasters do timestamps now. Right. Then I said, organize it not by podcast, but DeepLink. And I want to play a Deep Link stream. So it named a Pod meme. 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 costs 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? And I was like, 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 audio file. So, La, imagine you have 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, next up, this. And other people have done something. In fact, we invested in a company called Swell seven, eight years ago, that Apple bought. Anyway, so this is the concept.

Build something. I love it. Honestly. Yeah. Imagine going to a meeting and having like a 50 minutes, condensed MP3 of all the best thing that you can listen to about from every podcast in the world. That's amazing. 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 Friedman has good thoughts on this. I'm going to go check out in the show. You know what I mean. Like it's you would find new podcasts to listen to by doing this probably. Were there certain types of tweets that work better than others? Most people think that they need the best tweets to sell the products. And what I did there, it can seem a little bit crazy.

But on Twitter, 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 people feel that they have to create these audience themselves, but they don't. I don't see enough partnership between builders and influencers. And from both sides, people are craving for this to happen.

I don't understand why this is not happening enough. 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? The company was multi-products. So it was not really equity in the company. It was more like a profiture and expenditure related to a profit. 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? But that's the thing. You don't do this randomly. Like 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, 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 wanted to help creators setting more. And so every single product 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.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. The constant iterating. 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. And you are choosing your customers.

So you can choose very wisely. Like you can choose the kind of customers that you, know that have a high buying power. 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 Statsphere, 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 a hundred bucks, right? And then they just review your product. But how did you do it and what worked?

Most people, when they are trying to work with influencers, they are working, they are trying to find the perfect deal. They're going to pay like 10K for the sponsorship. And they are going to hope a lot that this is going to 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 a 50, or hundreds of much, much smaller inferencer that you're going to pay up small amounts for the creations and then a very high success fee on the results of their contents. And that way,

you're going to take advantage of where every social media other is going, which is like every single person or other can go viral. And you're going to pay for a small chance of them going viral. Right, because it's not about the follower account anymore. It's about how much hustle you put into the video and if the algorithm picture of, this is a really important insight long. 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. 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 GROC is like people aren't going to be interested in this particular tweet, you don't get shared on the 4-U 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. Exactly. So let's be more specific. We're here in 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 sign up. What I would do is I have multiple agents doing research on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube trying to find account that have like an average of about a thousand 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 a 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 and then recycle them and work much more with those people. This is awesome. Did you ever notice how you spend our shopping online? Then pause before you actually hit buy now, that tiny hesitation, where you wonder if this is trustworthy, can make or break a sale. And with AI changing how we discover and compare things, that split second trust question matters more than ever. That's exactly where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, PayPal has been a leader in online payments. And now they're at the forefront of agenetic commerce, making it work for businesses,

while letting them maintain control of their brand and their customer relationship. So even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most feels familiar and deeply dependable. Built for payments, growth, and agentic. PayPal Open, built for all business. Visit PayPalopopin.com to get started. 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, 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. Honestly, it's very hard to do that. So I think people should not expect a quick win out of that. But I'm breeding ravid.ai to help people build those videos and go viral on social media. And so if anyone want to check it out, that would be.

would be amazing. Where can they find more information, follow you, follow up with you? Yeah. So I'm on Twitter. I just got banned on LinkedIn again. What did you do? You did an automated DMs? You're doing automated email, aren't you? No, I built this amazing SaaS called Tapu, but that was two years ago. And so I think that they should not be allowed to ban it again for that. But it happened anyway. What are the other? What are the one they banned you for a due? You got to tell us what it did. Taprio, Taprio, that was an all-in-one LinkedIn management platform to post, get inspiration, do DMs, like everything. This one got acquired by LAMLIST in 2022. Ah, but 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 who 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 those 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 at 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 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 let you connect it to your quad, maybe not do automated in-mails. That would be annoying. I mean, they have to fix it. 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. They want you to go through in-mail for some reason. Yeah. And I think they have to realize they've lost that kind of race. Exactly. 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 Jason Calacanis at LinkedIn.com. And we're just going to give you a straight up email. And people can email that email. Yeah. And it's Lon Harris at LinkedIn.com, whatever. Would make my job a hundred times easy. 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 going to 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. They lack vision at LinkedIn. I think it was like too controversial at the time. But I would pay 50 bucks a month for that email. No one is in charge, I guess, in LinkedIn. It feels like they're securing everything. It still is.

I mean, it's still the best place to post a job. Right. And Mill 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 big filters.

Just make my LinkedIn email box work like my Gmail. Periodful 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,

Lon at launch.com. Sure. You can get me there. Yeah, Lon atlaunch.co. You could also use producers at launch.com. If you prefer, that one will get to me as well. Thank you to Tebow. Great job.

But I like this idea of like a little more structure to the show as we go into year 16, tactical, the interviews, news, and boom, a little off duty. Okay. All right. Before we go on, we should talk about one more thing, our friends at row.com, of course. Roe. Look at me. Look at me.

And that's eating chicken morels and beef tartar and everything he wants. I was eating all this stuff. You know, I'm on a GLP, thanks to row.com. 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 got to 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 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 was my big one, stress eating. I'd be stressed out. I'm like, hey, Lom, let's go get a donut and a latte, an extra 800K. I'll tell you, go get velvet tacos or whatever, yeah.

Whatever, you know, whatever it is. But even now, you know, I'll get two velvet tacos, call it a day. I used to go three. That's what these GLPs 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.

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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 encourage current Apple employees to study confidential materials prior to their interviews with OpenAI and even take hardware components and prototypes with them to OpenAI's offices. Open AI has denied these charges and says, quote, it has no interest in other companies trade secrets. A lot of this goes around a lot of the controversy, Jason, Jason, is centered around one person, a former Apple executive named Tang Tan. he oversaw design of the iPhone and the Apple Watch.

And then in late 2023, he told Apple he was going to 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. And he was sort of like bringing Apple information with him and sort of 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, as soon as he told Apple he was leaving for Open AI, 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 standards, this seems particularly... You're baiting me. 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? Yeah, I mean, Apple wouldn't bring this suit if it didn't happen. So let me just start there.

So they're two professional successful of an organization, just game there it out. Would Apple file this lawsuit that they know is going to be the front page of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the case is going to be followed, like the Waymo Uber case when. I also have that in the document. I talk about that. Yeah. So, like, 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 going to give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email, and of course a phone number. And that's going to take just 10 minutes and 10 clicks.

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They got him like 90 times, I bet. 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. Yeah, like two, three months. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Stick around. For a few months, yeah. And then use that as the top. 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 investorian 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 is dead to rights. The crazy thing here is chat GPT 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,

to make Chat ChippyT the opening default. I don't know, it wasn't exclusive, you remember, but they were going to 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 I, 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. You are going to poison that relationship in order to

take them on and hire their team members. And suppose 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 Open AI equity. I think Johnny Ive has more equity in Open AI and the value of that than he ever had an 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. 6.4 billion in an all equity deal.

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 going to guess it was when the company was at two or 300 billion evaluation. But even if it was at a $600 billion valuation, that means he has 1% of open AI. My lord, folks, if he's got 1% of Open AI, and he owns 50% of his company, I mean, oh my God, he's sitting on billions of dollars, billions of dollars personally in Open Air Shares. So this was an example of them, I think, not realizing the big picture here. They got two cutthroats. They're never going to beat Apple at hardware. They're not. I'm sorry. I don't see it. I think like there's going to be.

a dozen new AI first products. I think Apple will have two of them. Maybe chat GPT has one. Maybe Elon creates one. You know, maybe Android has a couple. Obviously, we're fans applaud. And obviously, there's like smart glasses like Met is doing. But let's just pump our breaks here. Being the default on the iPhone and providing chat GPT, white labeled to Apple for their other products, would have been a much bigger business. What happened then with Google? Now is making a billion dollars a year off of the Apple relationship. They're doing Gemina. So they lost the ChatsyPT deal because of this.

Talk about the worst decision ever. 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. technology company in the world, Apple. It was about $300 billion was Open AIs valuation when they did that deal. So they own 2%. Yeah.

Company becomes worth $2 trillion. When it starts probably trading, they own $40 billion. He has to own a third or half of the company he sold at least. So he's going to make $10 or $20 billion. They gave Joddy Eye $10 or $20 billion to make a hardware product that has a 5% chance of working. not because there's anything wrong with Johnny I. 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 of this. This is an unmitigated disaster for Sam. I guess 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 be bad. Is that still bad? Do people care about this? 2026, does it matter that that is his reputation? If you're winning, you can get away with a lot. Yeah. Right? Because you're winning.

And everybody's making money. And so when you have a lot of people on the cap table, they're going to 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, they're, you know, analysts, their partners rooting for them. Yeah, like, hey, yeah, we're all on the team. We have equity. We have a stake in this.

We were betting on a certain future. Totally fine. But what you have to realize is open AI, 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. Yeah. And so that's the other problem. Somebody told me early in my career, enemies accumulate.

Enemies accumulate. 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 continued to be part. He 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 to say, hey, we want you 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'll be 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. Your Times would love to have a billion or $2 billion in equity. You can buy it for a newspaper. It's not that expensive.

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

Bruce McGill. I believe it's Bruce McGill is that actor. Yeah, he's fantastic. Greatest scene ever. He's fantastic. 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 going to assume here for this meeting. We'll just do a little scenario here. You can still be hot and with the calling on. We can assume here that you're going to, win the case. Well, of course we're going to win the case. I have a mountain of evidence.

They couldn't be more clear. We're going to put you in the forehouse, sir. Okay. We are going to 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 and we would like you to teach us, teach us how to work with concreteers. We want you to be customer zero. We want you to be partner zero for our firm. Well, stop stealing our data. That's step number one.

Or am I not? Am I coming around now? No, yeah, I think it's fine. You're irate. Okay, we assume you're going to 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 going to give you $100 million a year for the next 10 years to license your content exclusively.

And we're going to power your website with chat, GPT, for free. How might that sound? All right. Well, I'm getting a chunk of that as the lawyer. So I'm in. There you go. Boom. Here we go.

I'm sold. So that's the way they have to approach these things is what's it going to take? Yeah. What's it going to take for us to make your business double and to have you be so happy with us that you tell Washington Post in L.A. Times, an economist, and financial times and CNN to work with us. We want to develop a standard with you. It's interesting.

It's exactly what Mark Cuban said these AI companies should do about the data centers. It's just like 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? 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. Yeah, I'm just going to like just write a check and make the problem go away. 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 opening. And I think they're probably dead to right. Probably. We have a question, a viewer question from Nodie at Sparker 770, but bunch of numbers. I'm not going to 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? I think Apple is going to go to the mat like New York Times is. When you have somebody like ChatGPD, that's such a powerful organization that's firing on all silly. is going to be worth two or three trillion dollars, you don't stop. And 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 going to be infected. I think they're going to go after the injunction, which is you can't release a product and you got to like reverse this. And then I think they really just want them to stop poaching as well. Right. So there's probably all of those things. So they're just going to try to exact maximum pain.

I was 18 months in jail for trade secret theft that that Google, our Uber executive was sent this too. Yeah, a 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 insight 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 want to be touching that. I don't want to get to posed.

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. No. And apparently... It sounds like they were encouraging it. 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.

Which is... which is chaotic. Yeah. That is chaotic behavior. I mean, it's so, it's so brazen. I'm almost taken about, like, maybe this didn't happen because it seems so obvious that you would know not to do that. I'll be honest.

I don't think Sam knew. Hmm. Okay. I think they may, because 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. Yeah, just not. encourage somebody to do this. I mean, you already have Johnny eyes. 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. There is a new newly proposed legislation in Washington, D.C. itself. It's an update to their autonomous vehicle act of 2012, and it would allow driverless testing and commercial driverless operation. So currently in D.C., 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, D.C. 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 can offer robo taxi rides as part of an overall ride share service that also has human drivers because they argue that 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 want to ride. And they argue that just a fleet of autonomous vehicles with though human drivers creates congestion because the cars are rolling around unoccupied or they're stalling or they're waiting around places. So 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 ride shares that you could already use in the city like Uber. So you're saying it won't impact Uber. You can still get a human driver from Uber if you want. Waymo would just be sort of a separate option. There's actually a hearing today in D.C. about this legislation and both companies have sent representatives that are going to sort of pitch their view. 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. But there's also legislation going on New Jersey and somebody started, you know, every time this happens, people were like, oh, well, Jake Howell is the chairman of the board at Uber. So let's, I mention

him. You owe 30% of the company, Jason. So. No, no, I don't own 30 fifth anymore. Come on, relax everybody. So, you know, we have this situation where one group of people are going to want absolutely no regulations for self-driving. They're going to want to 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 want to 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 want to say hell Mary, it'd be like splitting the arrow type outcome. Yeah. Because 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? As we've seen, I mean, localities, different regions have different challenges when it comes to things like Ruching.

Like it makes sense for a town in Colorado that's in the, the Rockies to want to have different rules than, you know, Austin, Texas, nice and flat, easy to get around. And how paradoxical that Uber fought that battle for a decade. And now we're going to fight it all over again. Instead of for it being ride sharing and you can use your own car to give somebody a ride, it's going to be, I can use my autonomous feeling of right. So it's going to be localized. What happened in China, China has stopped giving licenses for automated cars. It is the Wild West. 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. Yes. This is pretty recent, this April. Yeah, 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 going to, 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 as much as it sounds great logically

for there'd 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, 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 Weiride and Zooks, you know, and Nura. and the lucid gravity. So you're going to have, there's at least 15 players here in the U.S. 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, lift, DoorDash, etc. DoorDash has their own hardware now. But now think, let's take Uber out of it for a second and just think from 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? Percentage of their tips that they get. There's all sorts of ins and outs, yeah. And we're 15 years into that for DoorDash. Right. 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. Jacob, see if you can find that for me. 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 health care and benefits.

So they have to be loyal to them. What are those people want? They want to keep their jobs, rightfully so. Uber has put $10 billion into self-driving companies. So 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 Robotoxy or Zooks. 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 after it's four, year after it's eight, year after it's 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. DoorDash realizes 100% of deliveries are going to be robotic. Zipline, DoorDash, whatever is. But it's, It's there's a gulf between now and then that you've got to get through if you're DoorDash. So managing the transition is what's occurring here. It's fascinating. So everybody's going to dunk on them and say, oh, they're trying to be decals. I think it's more like we're trying to manage, you know, millions of drivers in the United States from riding in the streets and burning down Waymo.

Yeah. Yes. I mean, I think there's so many things to look out for. I mean, it's if your DoorDash, you know, like next year, you still need humans. So you can't have all the humans who are door dash drivers immediately go do other things because they realize robots are going to take their job. Just like you said, 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 to 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.

I did not. And this is after everybody is suddenly swung to the other side of the ship. And it's like, everybody's like, oh, no, there's going to be no AI displacement. I'm like, guys, the ship is like, everybody's opinion is massive job destruction. Now it's no job destruction. 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 U.S. 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 Open AI and Anthropic, also. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vanad Kosla, friend of the show. 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.

It's going to update productivity. We're going to find new jobs and new sectors we don't even think about today, and we'll be fine. But they're saying 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. 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 abstent. not have accidents and try to build these hybrid networks.

Do you think they should do that or do you think it's hypocritical? 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 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. 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 door dashers lift 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? Yes.

In fact, I like those kinds of systems. 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 tank for other people who are getting laid off. Like, I like ideas like that. I think managed capitalism.

By the way, we already have that in most states. You have to put money away as an employer into your unemployment fund. Exactly. And then, yeah, people take that. I don't know exactly how it works. The AI version of the unemployment fund. But I think I'm not like, you know, I used to be when in college I was like a socialist full-on comedy. 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 have an ideological problem with that at all. I think we should do more of it. Yeah. So, I mean, listen, everybody wants to know where I stand. I think we should have licensing and safety is 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 still think the rollout

is not coming that fast. 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-chairing rides, maybe less than 1% are automated now. It might be two. 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%. 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 Zooks and

Tesla will want to do it is going to go relatively at the same pace as these proposals that are the transition. That makes sense. So it's going to be moot at the end. Right. It's just people lobbying for something that's going to be a pace to rollout anyway. It's going to take five years to get to 30%. Yeah. Your numbers were really close. One to two percent of all rides in the U.S. currently are ride shares and 0.2 to 5 percent. This is according to Gemini. Zero point two to zero point five percent of those ride shares are in AVs currently. Got it. Okay. So let's say it goes from 1 in 200 this year. And that's max.

It's 0.2 to 0.5%. So 1 in 200. We'll give it the better bit of a doubt. 1 in 200 this year. One in 100 next. I'm saying doubling. So 1 in 100 next year. 1 in 50 in 2028.

Yeah. One in 25, 29. One in 12 in 2030. One in 6. That's if it's perfectly consistent. 31. One in 3 in. in 32, so maybe be half in another seven years.

I think that's actually kind of realistic. We may be sitting here at this clip and be like, Jake Allen nailed it. Perfect. I mean, I think it's really like it's jumps when it comes into a big new market, because 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 a fantastic.

I'm going to do this. As often as I can't, like, you see, it sells a lot of people after one ride, I think. 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. Yes. 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. Oh, man. Yeah, the video, if there's a graphic video out there, yeah, that's a problem. By default, it is on video. Right. Because it all have ten cameras. If it gets out there in the world and we are all on social media watching a graphic video of a Waymo killing somebody. When there's a lawsuit, there'll be a FOA, 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 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 a flock camera, whatever. Somebody's going to pick it up and we're going to have it. There's cameras everywhere. So, yeah. I'm going to make two predictions. 50% of rides are automated 2032. Okay.

232, 233 years. About six years from now. 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 desaling DoorDash and Lyft are going to desal. 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 think there'll be a, one-year pause in all of this, 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. 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 place a bet on Tesla stock and then they release five videos a day pushing Tesla to go faster

and go faster. And they're like, I've never gotten an accident with FSD. and it's like, of course you haven't. Like, you're doing a ride a day. And, oh, Waymo hasn't had an accident. But still, I mean, statistically. Except they hit a kid in Santa Monica at seven miles an hour. And, like, that could have been a lot worse.

Yeah. And I mean, 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 U.S. cities, like, people hit each other and they hit things and they hit other cars all the time. People die all 30,000 a year. Every single day. So, yeah, it's undeniable, just if you're looking at it, is 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. It just be emotional. 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's the mindset for a lot of people. That's exactly the mindset. Okay. All right. Great. You want to talk about flock real quick before we? Well, you saw my tweet. Yeah, so I'm happy to talk about it a little bit.

So Flock 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 U.S. Anybody can report new cameras that they spot. Justine Bateman, 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, 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 until there's no way for the issue to be debated in bad faith. So you want to unpack this for us a little bit? Yeah. So I think they took notes from Trump and said, we have to go on the offensive. We have to go on the 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, 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 there's surge pricing and he says, deal with it. You stop being poor. Right. If you were to say something that outlandish or that hyperbolic, it's going to make people a 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.

Because 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 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. 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 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. Right. 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. 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. Now, should they attack you? Absolutely not. But, you know, taking a bat or a paint gun or a shotgun to 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 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 action because I identified it back then. And what they said was every time I asked him, like, what's the data retention policy? How do you track who has access to this stuff? Like if a rogue cop wants to track 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 to use this 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, that says, Officer Krumbsky looked at Mrs. Smith's license plate. And he looked at it again on this day. 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 an organization that looks out for this type of abuse. We do not allow facial recognition. We do not take pictures of that. And all data is gone in 12 months. So if there's 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 we only install when the community is unanimous, when the community is

75% in favor of this. So if there's a community that is 75% in favor of it, we allow them to put this technology in. If 75% is 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. The end. 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 they had that Super Bowl lab that was like, we're going to use your doorbell cam to help spy on your neighbors and find your lost dog. And then they were. That was Ring. Well, it was the 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 just feel like every time, like there's that, the refrain seems to be, well, if you hate safety, like, would you rather have a safe neighborhood or your privacy? Are you pro-criminal?

Right. Yeah. You're either pro-criminal or your anti-floc or your anti-criminal and pro-criminal. And I feel like you just lose people right away. There's no nuance. Yeah. It's not a binary. these are justifiable concerns.

And you just, people are going to shut down if that's your response, I think. 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 want to add the lost children lost dog feature, they can opt into it. Yes. And right. I think it makes total sense.

If you don't want to 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 99% 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 24 hours with an emergency order from a judge. But we don't just do it willy-nilly. So they say, listen, we heard you. Yes. And I'm friends with Jamie Siminoff, and he was like, I can't believe this. Like, we just want to help find dogs.

And it's really a communication issue. Exactly. And we're at a moment in time where people are like, wait a second. I'm like, wait a second. I'm like, wait a second. Disceptical. 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 licensed play 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. Yeah. 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. I feel like it comes down to the authorities. Like people know that their neighbors are filming them and one another. I think it's like, are you going to give me up to the Fed? It's the concern that people have. And general, justifiably, flock works with a lot of police departments. And I feel like... What are we looking at here?

Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sharing this. Oh, this is unified. Yeah. So 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. Yeah.

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. Yeah. Like a large number of cameras.

It's a big ranch. You know, it's a property. 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 somebody comes on, look at this.

This is the facial recognition. And if somebody comes onto the property, like I have the pool cleaner's face in the database. Oh, okay. Pool cleaner comes on the property. Doesn't send me alert. Right. 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 data. is like, that's an Amazon delivery. Yeah. But I mean, I think stuff like that is so much less controversial

because nobody, the Amazon driver's not worried you're going to send his photo to the FBI. People are worried that their ring doorbell camera is going to send their photo to the cops or something. Anyway, 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. and they should not leave it up to the local jurisdictions to run amok. Fair. They shouldn't let them run amok. They got to just tighten that up. And I think they actually have. I don't have inside information.

Well, I kind of do. But anyway, they've tightened that up from what I understand. They need to communicate it now. Yeah. So the way I said, would you be in favor of having it in your neighborhood or not? I'm not a huge fan of being surveilled everywhere I go. I'll be out. I accept if I go to somebody's ranch or whatever,

that they're going to be filming or whatever. Okay, so in your neighborhood. But cameras pointed out to the street. If your new dog got loose, if your new dog got loose. She did already. I had to chase her. I know. And if you could have the cameras track her, you're like, that's not enough benefit from it.

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 worked well enough. And I didn't have to give up my. What about robberies and stuff? If you had 10 robberies in your neighborhood, let's say it was in Los Angeles, where you did have lost of robbery. I got broken. My house got broken into multiple times in Los Angeles.

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? Really? I got to be, I'm not a huge fan of a survey, living in a surveillance state. It makes me feel. Even if it was just a license plates? Really? I'd rather, I'd rather, I'd rather, I'd rather get, I'd rather double bolt my,

I'd rather double bolt my door than be filmed around the clock. 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. 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.

Rich people can afford. As I just said, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on my, you know, estates. Sure. And I totally accept that. When I'm on private property. To do this. But poor people, by the way, poor people in my estimation, like I know this from Turk Street and when we had our office in the tenderline, they wanted a camera.

the people who were in really high crime areas, 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 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? Barry. My dog's name was Barry. Barry, like the HBO show. Barry, like the blueberry, strawberry. Okay, so you pour a little Barry. Yeah. I saw you saying, maybe for Barry.

I would be devastated of Barry got out, but Barry gets eaten by a coyote and you could have saved it by giving up your rights. This is the 50-50 I have to decide on. You're close. You're close. Dead Barry or Big Brother. I don't know. Barry gets eaten by mauled

by coyotes. Goffrabid. Charming little girl. She's so sweet. Here's my flock commercial. Flock is going to keep your community safe and it's going to keep little Barry from being mauled by a pack of It's going to keep your dog a lot. Coyotes.

Lon Harris is the terrorist who want your dog to be eaten. Five pack of wild coyotes. No, I'm, I have to deal with the white coyotes. I'm willing to take. 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 cameras, 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. I understand. I think you're probably correct about that. I think kids if your dog dies, that's on you. Flock security. Don't do that. Don't listen.

Lon Harris. Oh my God. I love that. I can shop. I want to say a quick shout out. We lost one of the greats, one of the acting greats this morning. Iconic New Zealand actor Sam Neal. You know him from playing Dr. Allen Grant.

Jurassic Park. Dr. Alan Grant from the Jurassic Park series. He's dead this morning at age 78. He had been treated for blood cancer for the last several years, but it had been cancer-free since April. So this was unexpected that we lost Sam Neal 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 Neal. So he will be missed. And the word is on him that he was a great guy. I never met him, but apparently Sam Neal, a charming and, lovely man. So we're going to miss him. I've heard about this possession one. It's quite controversial, isn't it? Yeah, it is. So the setup is that Sam Neely 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 when she wants a divorce. It causes him to sort of come mentally unglued, and then things go in a variety of bizarre, terrifying, you know, directions. It becomes almost sci-fi horror by the end. I don't want to give away too much, but these are incredible lead performances from Sam Neal and Isabella Johnny. They're both, it's like when Klaus Kinski used to work with Herzog, where they're going, or Nicholas Cage, where they're going to a level of insanity, they're reaching this, like, fever pitch that few actors, I think, could ever get to it. I got to say, Event Horizon,

I watched it recently, like, in the last year. Um, because I was like, tell me some like, like, interesting sci-fi, like intellectual. I like that one. Yeah. 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, torture. Yeah, it's gross. Adult content, like really bad stuff. stuff is happening, yeah. Yeah, like people's teeth are being pulled out, like dentistry, like all kinds of torture. Tentical stuff, yeah, yeah. Terrible.

But it was so bad that they decided to put it into like, it's only like 30 seconds in the film and like a flashback. The theatrical cut made it into a quick little montage so you only get a glimpse. There is a director's cut where you can see more of the really gruesome stuff. There isn't. Oh, really? The director's cut was never released. Oh, okay. They were going to release it.

Then the warehouse where, like, all these outtakes were, had had some problem were burned down or something, like it was destroyed, or they didn't pay their bills, storage bills, something like that. All right. Long story short, they made a comic book about the original event horizon ship that went through that torture. And then there's people online considering, considering using AI, speaking of AI, to recreate it. Yeah, yeah.

Correct. Interesting. Which is, oh, there it is. That's the eventorizing. It's basically with the devil kind of situation. Yeah, 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 other dimension that it went to was like hell, basically.

Yes. There is a fan cut version of, speaking of sci-fi. of Prometheus. Oh, okay. And I have a friend who is not me who has gotten a copy of it. Oh, wow. Definitely not me.

And this friend who's not me, it puts together Prometheus and Alien Covenant and like the, there was like, and it's called the alien Paralympath. It's Prometheus plus Alien Covenant plus there were some like DVD specials like a TED Talk. Yeah, the extras. Yeah. Online stuff.

And so that is going to be my pick, a friend who is not me, swim, someone who is it me. Oh, right. Oh, I did hear about this where it's focused on David. It's like it's from David's perspective through both of those movies. Now this got me down the rabbit hole. there is a website and a community that I just joined, or I'm sorry, a friend who's not me just joined. It's a fan website, fan website.

So I'm a fan of Superman 2. I don't know if you're just Superman 2. Of course. Yes, there are two cuts of that. There's the Richard Lester and then the Donner cut. There's the Donner cut. And so, and like I had this weird thing happen since we're off duty here. This guy's made somehow a long...

The unity cut. edit of these. Yes. Yes. And I think it includes some of Superman 3 and 4, yada, yada. I see. Sure. Yeah. It was, it was that Richard Lester's version of Superman 2 was very sort of joky. And the studio thought it was going to be too sort of jokey. So they reconfigured a lot of the stuff for the final release. So I just want to put out there. I think this is going to be like one of the great things we're going to see. These folks are doing it with collateral material. Oh, and then there's one final one. Look up the Rogue One, the Andor cut. Rogue one, the Andor cut.

And so, yeah, it's on fan at it. Rogue one, the Andor cut. A friend who is not me, someone who is not me, has made Andrew the Rogue One cut. And it's basically Rogue One, but with a bunch of the Andor. And the friend who's not me, who watched some of it, it's really interesting because it uses a lot of the speeches and overlays. 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 series, TV show, or movie, and fan edit it in some way to get a new experience and use AI to fill in certain parts of the story and make a either. I already have it in my mind. I know exactly what I want to do. Not Sopranos, is it? No. Did you ever watch the TV series Hannibal? The NBC show that they made.

I watched the first couple of episodes. With Matt Mickelson as Hannibal Lecter. So they did, the season three of the show Hannibal is Red Dragon or the movie. Oh, really? Yeah, it's the story. Oh, that's my favorite of the series. 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 series of. The Lambs, but the show got canceled. So we never got to see... What? I know. So we never got to see Mads-Micholson'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 CG AI Mads-Mickleson as your Hannibal Lecter. There you go. Now, which Hannibal was the one where he had a patient who he'd already eaten who was in a wheelchair? I think you're thinking of the movie Hannibal and it's Mason-Burger, the

Harry Oldman character who was eating. Yes. He was, he had to, Hannibal had him sliced parts off of himself and eat them was the, was the video. So he's all scarred horribly. And then he wants to feed Hannibal to the hogs.

Yes, yes. Correct. Oh my gosh. That's the movie. That's interesting. The third one. I'm going to go back to that because I had watched the first couple of episodes of it. I thought it was brilliant.

It's great. I love the Hannibal series. I've read actually. I've read Red Dragon. Yeah. Red Dragon has, who were the actors in it? The detective.

They did Manhunt. Michael Mann did Manhunter in the 80s. Manhattan is Brian Cox is. Brian Cox is Hannibal Lecter. William Peterson is Will. Incredible. And then they did Brett Ratner did the movie version. And it was Anthony Hopkins reprises his role as Hannibal Lecter. Not as good as the Ed Norton.

It's not as good as the Michael Mann. Watch this Michael Mann version. Man Hunter. It is as Man Hunter. As great as. Yeah. Manhunter, 1986. I believe is second only to the silence of the lens.

At Brian Cox, it's a very different take. It's interesting to see... Oh, look, what's that guy's name? Go one picture back. That's Chris Elliott. Yeah, that is Chris Elliott. Is that? Yeah, I forgot Chris Elliott's in this.

That's definitely Chris Elliott. Yeah. Chris Elliott is in it. Incredible. And yeah, incredible. All right, what else do you got for us? 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 Burning Man. It's the whole history development of Burning Man. But with a specific focus on 2021, when they had to decide, are we going to do a burning man this year or because of COVID regulations? Are we going to 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. 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. And it's really, it's really fascinating to.

I got to watch it. 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 an organization too. It's a company as well. And it's really fascinating to go back and forth.

I really enjoyed the first episode. 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. And there were, I think, 12 or 14,000 people there this year. Now it's 70,000 people, 80,000 people. 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, like wealthy people. So a lot of, I've got to tell you,

I was very cynical about it as a New Yorker. And then I went and I was like, if you like art, music, you know, 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. 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 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, and with Instagram and influencer culture combined with Internet access, Starlink, you know, there's like a billion starlinkes 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.

I mean, you're on a very popular podcast. It's not that surprised. Yeah, this week is starting. It is a week. And also all in. And so literally, I have people asking to take selfies to me. So now I go. One of the great things is people wear masks and something that. I just mask up. And so when I'm wearing some kind of a mask or something, it goes down 90%. Yeah. So just one of those borat thongs and a mask. That's it. Basically. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm wearing a mankini.

Say it all right, everybody. Another amazing episode of this weekend startup is in the cam. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye, bye.