This Week in Startups - Rapid fire news: OnlyFans bans sexual conduct + Boston Dynamics, Disney & Tesla bet big on robots | E1269

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

Jason breaks down the OnlyFans' pivot away from sexual conduct (1:54), then he covers all the robot highlights from this week, Boston Dynamics robots doing backflips (23:34), Disney creating AI characters (31:25), and Tesla's announcement of "TeslaBot" (38:21) & more.

All right, rapid fire news Fridays are back on this week in startups. Do me a favor. Visit YouTube.com slash this week in and subscribe over there. Put the alarm bell on because I've been doing live streams. And go ahead and subscribe on iTunes. Just search for this week in startups. If you feel like it, write a review. That'd be really great.

Today we're going to talk about the only fan situation. We're going to talk about Boston Dynamics and their robots doing parkour and back clips. We're going to talk about Disney creating AI characters and having a $6,000 experience for a family of four. I have strong feelings on that. Elon and Tesla announced that they're making a robot, but it's a robot that you can beat up so it's not going to kill you. Don't worry. And I talk a little bit about Rude AI and CafeX, two robotic companies that we've invested in and had great experiences with. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Ladder for fast, easy term coverage life insurance. Choose Ladder. Check out Ladder today to see if

you're instantly approved. Go to ladderlife.com slash twist. That's L-A-D-D-R-Life.com slash twist. Calm for business. Healthy and happy employees create successful companies, and that's a fact. Calm for business can help your employees be their best selves at work. Get a free well-being e-book and one month free of Calm for business after you attend a free demo at calm.com slash Twist. Notion is one place for notes, docs, projects and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki. Go to Notion.S.O and use promo code Twist to get $250 off an annual team plan. Our next Founder University is August 23rd and 4th, a free online two-day course for pre-series A startups. The August class is for underrepresented founders. Application and Agenda are at

founder.University. Okay, in our first story, OnlyFans, the subscription service known for adult content, has banned explicit conduct. So let's explain what that means. Not explicit content, explicit conduct. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that OnlyFans is going to prohibit users from posting any material that contains sexually explicit conduct starting in October, i.e., people having sex or pornography.

So it's very strange because OnlyFans sent a statement to a few media sources. like Bloomberg and Dan Primrack at Axios, who was an excellent journalist. But they didn't share it with the creators or users. And then Dan tweeted a screenshot of the statement, which was called fake by multiple people in the replies. And then because OnlyFans obviously hadn't shared anything yet. And then Dan purposely cropped out the OnlyFans' employees' email address and a screenshot. From the statement, it appears the content creators will still be allowed to post nudes, right,

and videos even, if they remain consistent with OnlyFam. policy, but sexually explicit conduct will be prohibited, i.e. people actually having sex, i.e. adult entertainment or pornography. So there's some semantics here that have people confuse content, conduct, etc. That's pretty obvious. And OnlyFans had a cleverly worded statement basically saying sexually explicit content is okay. We support you, explanation point. And then, you know, kind of makes them look like the good guys, obviously. But they're banning sexually explicit conduct, pornography, which is how many of those creators make money. And obviously during the pandemic, we all know that a lot of people who were sex workers, which I think is the positive framing of prostitution that a lot of people have come to.

I'll let you make your own judgment on that. I have my own feelings, but who cares about my point of view? That sex work moved online. And then that was safer for people. Obviously, if you're not going and meeting random people off of Craigslist or whatever services, I think Backpage had been shut down at this point, if you're not going to. meet with people, you take out a lot of danger, and maybe you make more money, and you do it safe in the comfort of your own home without taking risk, obviously, and everything else that comes from sex work. So, OnlyFans doesn't disclose how much of their content is adult-related.

You may have remembered that story about the millennial influencer Bella Thorne made a million dollars, but she wasn't actually doing sex work on the site. In fact, I don't think she was naked. That was a big, big controversy. But this has become a very big site and a source of income for a lot of people, especially during the pandemic when people couldn't go out. So this led everybody to ask the obvious question. Why is OnlyFans doing this, right? This is their golden goose. This thing is printing money for them. Well, it turns out that the payment systems, the banking partners are giving them pressure. And so the journalist here, and we've talked about this on this program a bunch, and we're going to keep talking about it since I'm now covering the news. I'm going to talk a little

bit in a meta way about journalism because I started as a journalist. I had two magazines, cyber surfer, then Silicon Allie Reporter, and then I started Weblogs Inc, which created Engadget, Autoblog and Joystick with Brian Alvey, Peter Rojas, and Ryan Block, and Sean Gold. So I had a nice, I have a nice history of doing, as a publisher and a journalist, so I kind of understand how this works. Journalists are trying to triangulate on the truth. You can think of them as detectives. They're following clues in trying to figure this out.

Well, here's what's probably happening here, according to Bloomberg and other people. Onlyfans has having problems with their banking partners. they have to rein people in on the service. And it might be that legal action has been taken against them. Maybe there's underage people performing on OnlyFans because what is the vetting process to get on OnlyFans? How do they know that the people who are on OnlyFans performing whatever acts or being naked or not underage? And then how do you deal with different ages of consent in different regions when this is an international service? It's a can of worms, obviously.

And there have been other situations like this recently. Because of course you're thinking to yourself, well, people go to stores to buy pornography. Why can't they go online to buy pornography? And isn't it better that the adult entertainment companies are not taking all this money, paying a flat rate to adult entertainer, sex workers, and they get to keep all the margin. You're literally taking out the middleman in that case, which would be the adult entertainment, company. Well, the studio produced content versus UGC user-generated content, the studio actually has a function there. They are going to verify that people are of the right age, and they will go to jail

if they don't and they have legal liability, et cetera. So while they are taking a huge fee and that could be unfair, there could be other issues. So there could be some issues here around vetting problems. This is super complicated. We live in a world where these services get very big and it might be that OnlyFans is managing the service in the review mirror in the same way YouTube does. YouTube would let anybody post anything and then if they got complaints, they take it down. Okay, so if SNL has Lazy Sunday stolen and YouTube benefits from that, okay, that's one level of problem or legal issue, copyright infringing. If an underage person is involved in sex acts, okay, now we're talking about child pornography.

That's a different level of evil and people are going to go to jail, rightfully so for the maximum long amount of time, we hope. So the quote from OnlyFans, because of all this, in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform and continue to host the inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines. Now, remember, Visa and MasterCars suspended payment processing on Pornhub due to pirated content and at-risk amateur content,

the thing I've been describing here, right? Because it is kind of the Wild West on these services. And Pornhub responded by only allowing verified, users, which makes total sense. How you police a service like, say, Medium or blogger.com, or WordPress, or YouTube, or Vimeo, or TikTok is going to be radically different than how you would regulate adult entertainment or finance. That's why regulations are coming to things like OnlyFans and to crypto.

This is actually a parallel trend we're seeing here. People create things on the internet. They grow very fast. they get big, fast, then they have unintended consequences. Those unintended consequences have to be addressed. And let's face it, technology has a big tradition of move fast and break things, which is sometimes referred to in our industry as, you know, better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission. Okay, if you're Airbnb and you take that approach because you're reinterpreting the laws for who can rent a room, that's one level of risk. What is the risk if I

rent, you know, my apartment out. Okay, it could get trashed. Okay, somebody could bother my neighbors. Those are actual risks. Sure. That's different than somebody getting fleeced in an ICO scam like so many people did or the horrible nature of what could happen in sex work. So they have over 130 million users at OnlyFan and they have two million creators. Let that sink in for a second. There are two million people using the service to make money. And I think it's primarily, of those two million, I would think a large percentage of them are doing some kind of nudes or adult entertainment. They're currently trying to raise that evaluation over a billion, according to Bloomberg. They did $2 billion in sales in 2020, and they're on pace to double that in 2021, according to sources.

They take 20%, which means $400 million in 2020. 20% is less than the app stores take, but a lot more than Airbnb say takes. So it seems like a fair rake, as we call it in the business, you know, the take rate or a rake, R-A-K-E. You know, Patreon takes 5 to 12 percent. They've been incredibly generous with theirs. And then Gumroad, we had Sahil on the program back in the day. They take 8.5 percent or 6 percent, depending on if you use your PayPal, et cetera.

As founders, investors, and executives, we spend so much time building up the companies and products that we love and care about. But at the end of the day, life is fragile and it can get taken away at any moment. You know that. So it makes sense why people get life insurance, especially term coverage, which is surprisingly affordable. Why not pay a little bit each month to protect the ones you love? It's a no-brainer. If you're asking yourself this question, choose ladder. Ladder makes it really fast and easy to get covered. You just need a few minutes and a phone or laptop to apply. Ladder smart algorithms work in real time so you'll find out instantly if you're approved. And that's one of the great things about the service. It's just so quick and easy to use.

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Only fans working with banks could be one brand. And then they can make another brand, which is an adult brand, that only uses OFC, only fan coins. And that could be only fans after dark or only fans adult, whatever it is, or even better, come up with another brand. Then those people would only be available to people who buy coins. You're like, oh my God, how do people get coins? It's so hard to get crypto payments, which Dan Primrack actually said in a tweet. By the way, if you're watching us

at YouTube.com slash this week in, you would see the video, in the video, Dan Primrack's tweet. So love that you're listening on iTunes or overcast or Spotify, but do know that on the YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash this week in, I'm having the team of producers here at this week's startups, edit the videos to put in visual stuff. So my picture would get small and you'd actually see this.

Dan Primrach's tweet, one thing the OF news reflects is that crypto payments are still not anywhere close to mainstream. He's half right, half wrong. Crypto is mainstream based on Robin Hood and Coinbase and how easy those services are to get on board. Paying is the problem, as he's pointing out, but a lot of people are participating in crypto, and that's fairly easy.

So the only thing that really has to get done here is how do you get that crypto and how do you buy OFC, only fan coins, let's say. And that would be the harder part here. But I think we're getting close to that point where crypto is becoming ubiquitous enough that you're going to be able to buy it on any financial service. it's going to be built into every cash paying app on the planet, and then you need only figure out a way to transfer it over there, and you can't stop the transfer of crypto from wallet to wallet,

and that actually might be really good for OnlyFans and for the people on it in the space, because they could then just direct the payment directly from one wallet to another, and in that case, it takes out a lot of the friction. Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of verifying all the users. So I don't know the verification process of OnlyFans. I would love to get some information on that.

If anybody has that, send it to the Twitter handle, TWA startups, where you can reach the three full-time producers on the show, Rachel, Nick, and Justin, who do a great job preparing these notes for me every day. You could send them that information. I'm wondering if they have to get KYC in the form of like a passport, a driver's license, etc. And then if they have to actually do an onboarding where they make a video and somebody verifies, hey, the picture of the person in the passport is the person in the videos, right? Because I remember when I was in New York, the taxi drivers used to tell me all the time.

Yeah, that's my cousin's license. When he's sleeping, I drive and I use his license because they would be like nobody looks and nobody checks, right? And I'm a male and he's a male and he's my cousin. We look close enough to each other. We just share the license. That can be a similar situation here. Somebody could make a fake driver's license, fake passport, or use somebody else's passport.

So it's not enough to just even get that information. If they're doing adult content, you're going to really need to think about how to do verification in a major way because you can't be on the set verifying that's the person. Maybe they have to get to the point where they're doing a biometric where they scan somebody's iris or a fingerprint in order to do this kind of stuff. And I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to that. I'd have to think it through in terms of what's people's right. Now, in December of 2020, the information reported that OnlyFans was going to make $300 million

in profits of 2020. That means they only spent $100,000. million running the business, which actually seems directly correct to me. These businesses can throw off massive amounts of money because they don't take a lot of people to run. Their only expenses really is just a small base of employees of around 350 people according to the information. And you can obviously infer there some web hosting fees, but those go down every year as cloud computing becomes cheaper and cheaper. The providers on OnlyFans, the members, were devastated from this. And so were the people who are on the platform. A lot of people.

people on Twitter were accusing OnlyFans of using the sex worker community to grow their business only to basically pull the ladder up behind them as they try to legitimize, which was the Bell of Thorne issue. I remember reading about that. You know, because I saw, wait, this person made a million dollars. That's when I first became aware of OnlyFans. A person made a million dollars in a day. And then the sex workers was like, okay, this person gets to make a million dollars and everybody else is actually having sex on the service and making a fraction of that.

What's going on here? Now, as for OnlyFans operation, the company is run by a founder named Tim Stokely and owned by Leonid Radvinsky. And Radvinsky is an internet pornography entrepreneur, according to the notes here, who purchased a majority stake in Onlyfans back in 2018. Interestingly, the company being in the news brought some scrutiny to Radvinsky's past, which is a bit sketchy, which might be part of this. The banks might be getting complaints and they're concerned about his background. Back in March, an independent investigative journalist website called Forensic News. I've never heard of them published an article with a bunch of suspicious activity reports. Those are called SARS that were filed by major banks like Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan, and they were directed at Red Vinsky.

We vetted the source. Forensic News was founded in 2019 by an investigative journalist Scott Stedman. Again, I don't know who he is. and he runs off money from Patreon donations and merch sales. So maybe we'll have him on the program. Sounds like a good guest. Now, very important. These SARS don't mean there's proof of wrongdoing or any criminal behavior.

You know, somebody could, I'm just taking a guess here. Maybe somebody used a stolen credit card and, you know, or many stolen credit cards. And maybe that's what it's about. Who knows? Most of these reports are not followed with charges and the documents themselves should not be considered conclusive according to what we've read. So the report's labeled over $1 billion. dollars worth of suspicious transactions at Radvinsky's previous company, MFCXY, which I don't know.

It operates an adult webcam site called My Free Cams. The article notes SARS from Wells Fargo in 2016 aimed at Radvinsky's My Free Cam's website. And the SAR from Wells Fargo highlights a bunch of red flags. Here's the notable quote, the possibility of underage children operating this platform and the appearance of layering, one of the three steps of money laundering wherein one conceals the source of the money through a series of transactions and bookkeeping tricks. Yeah, I mean, if these are webcam, there could be people from all around the world, like I talked about, jurisdiction matters. So if you're using this website and it's underage participants from one region and you're in America, I'm absolutely certain that you

would be participating in child porn. So be very careful people. Like, you might think this person is of age and now, you know, you're getting tricked into participating in something. You definitely do not want to be involved in as per the iPhone reading your iCloud to see if you have child pornography on it. In some cases, people might not even know. And that difference could be but, you know, one or two years and, you know, you could go to jail for a long time. This is the nature of a global intranet. Let's be candid. I mean, if I was the banks and I'm running this, I'm not working with this guy. I would turn it off myself. I mean, that's my honest feeling. If this person has this many red flags, they're involved in this kind of shady business, I don't blame the banks for

wanting to be involved. Now, I do have sympathy for the sex workers in the United States or in regions where all this stuff is verified. So what we're probably seeing here is to save the business, a bifurcation of maybe the shady activity and the absolutely, you know, verified activity, if it is in fact verified. But man, this is a brave new world, folks. According to the article, some of the most concerning allegations in the SARS are the bank's written warnings that MF, CXY may be operating in areas where underage children and other vulnerable. individuals might be forced to provide services. Absolutely gross and disgusting.

I mean, if any of this is true, this guy should go to jail forever in my mind, and if not worse. So here's the quote, though the banks did not detail specific incidents of underage activity. They highlighted the fact that money was being sent to performance in high-risk areas, such as Colombia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, Philippines, and Russia. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, you know, this should not be allowed to operate in the U.S. If those are high risk areas, I would just say, this should be a U.S. only service and it should be absolutely regulated and it should be verified and at a level that's even higher than banking and certainly much higher than crypto.

Here's another quote. A BBC study in 2020 found multiple examples of underage individuals advertising, sexually explicit activity on only fans. So if there's one or two of these going on, you know, I think you got to shut the site down. That's it. One case is too much. So if the service can't do it correctly, shut it down. And then the people who are the top performers on this service should just make their own. It's not hard to replicate the service, to be totally honest. The top 100 people should just leave and make their own only fans, take back that 20% and just kick the service out of the United States if they have but one of these claims against them. It's their job to make sure this doesn't happen.

I have zero sympathy for them. So again, the banking partners, they're well within their right to pick who they work with. If they don't feel that this person is an upstanding individual, then that's the end of the line. And if there's but one instance of anything horrible happening on the service, I think you shut it down. Period. End of story. It's just how this has to be done.

It has to be zero tolerance for this. It's just so horrific as a parent. One instance, psych it shut down. That's my feeling. Some people might feel differently about it. And yeah, I don't. Okay, now, if 90% of this business is, in fact, pornography, there's a very simple solution here.

OnlyFans becomes the, you know, photo and no contact version where people who want to sell nudes, but not pornography, live. And they just, and I'm sure they're doing this, they make an offshore company that is run a different way explicitly for adult content. And then consumers can, say, you know what, I want to subscribe to essentially what is Playboy magazine on OnlyFans. It becomes

just Playboy S. And then everybody else can subscribe to pornography separately. So let's get to the next story, which is about dystopian robot. Backflips. Welcome to the future, folks. Happy Friday, everybody. Healthy and happy employees create successful companies. That's a fact. And Com for Business can help your employees be their best selves at all. work. Don't I know it? I was one of the early investors at Com. You can partner with the number one mental fitness app to provide support and tools for your employees right now. Com can help kickstart mental well-being initiatives by empowering employees to stress less and to rest better and finally build resilience. And that's what you need because work is hard and you're going

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What a domain. Com.com slash twist. Boston Dynamics robots are now doing parkour, and it is absolutely terrifying. Boston Dynamics was in the news earlier this year when South Korean Automaker Hyundai acquired an 80% stake in the company from SoftBank valuing the company at $1.1 billion. You remember Boston Dynamics had been bought by Google and then flipped because Google employees, I believe, were not stoked about military customers, especially not for robotics. I think that's un-American by the employees of Google who benefit from being Americans and protected

by our military for Google to not support our military. I think is, I wouldn't say treasonous. but I think it's quite an American. I think if you're an American company and you benefit from this company and our military and the fine people who work in our military, you should build them the technology they need

to protect your ass because when things go down, you can be sure Google employees would want to be protected and Google shareholders. I'm going to put that aside for a second because it is their right in America to not service the military.

But on Tuesday, Boston Dynamics tweeted the following along with a video of their robots doing, not kidding, parkour. Parkour is the perfect sound for the Atlas team to experiment with new behaviors through jumps, balance beams, and vaults. We push Atlas to its limits to discover the next generation of mobility, perception, and athletic intelligence. Wow.

When you watch this video, and I'm playing it right now as we're talking, it is truly terrifying. You have this robot doing all kinds of jumps across boxes and tables and, you know, pieces of plywood that are angled very difficultly, maybe a 15 degree angle. And then doing backflips off of like really high roofs and balance beams. And then a second one comes and runs along the balance beam. I mean, this stuff is insane. The backflip, of course, is the best part. The dexterity is mind-boggling.

One of them leaps over using its hand as a prop, the balance beam. And then they both turn around and do a backflip from, you know, basically double black flips from two robots in perfect unison. And the first one's off of like a three and a half foot desk onto a maybe an 18 inch box. And then off of that. I mean, and then they flex, you know, pumping their fists. If you look at this, I don't know if you've seen the Terminator movies in a while, but I took my daughter to see Terminator 2.

When the pandemic ended, they were playing some, because they were out of movies. They were playing some classic movies. I went to the theater. Literally, I kid you not, we were two of two people in the theater, and we saw Terminator 2. And they're walking across basically, you know,

a war-torn city, I think it's Los Angeles, and they're walking across, you know, debris and rubble of buildings. It's less challenging than what those robots just did. The only difference is

those robots aren't holding guns. And you can be certain that robots can hold guns, and you can be certain that certain military organizations have robots today holding guns. Now, Google and Boston Dynamics might not be willing to do that for our government, but I am certain that South Korea's government bought Boston Dynamics so that they can have these robots holding guns because they have North Korea ready to

basically cross the border and annihilate them with a crazy leader at any point time. And I don't blame the South Koreans. They should have bought Boston Dynamics. They should put guns on these things. If I was living there and I want, and I had North Korea as my neighbor, I would want a million of these robots on the, on the border ready to go. So if you think this through, you can go onto the YouTube and you can find different folks playing with their drones and putting paintball guns on, et cetera. I think this is the future of the military, not just drones that are airplanes, But, you know, like the small quadcopter drones. Here is a T-CAD drone.

This is made by Duke Robotics, and it is a remotely operated firing-enabled drone developed for the U.S. military. Now, this looks pretty janky, but it's obviously going to work. They just strapped it. It looks like, you know, a military rifle onto the bottom of this drone. They didn't make a purpose-made gun, it looks like. This is just a gun floating in the air, shooting at people. I mean, this is going to end a skirmish pretty quick. If we had these with the Taliband ban in Afghanistan, I think we would be able to put up a heck of a resistance.

I think they would have to run for the hills. We didn't have to send troops in and we sent this in. In an article by Design Boom, they say the robot is adapting its behavior based on what it sees by repeating the parkour exercises. By this, no pre-programming of all possible motions is required. But instead, the team to find a smaller set of behavior templates that can be related to the environment. This is a fancy way of saying that this robot hasn't exactly been programmed to do that course. That would be one level of impressive. That's saying they taught this robot heuristics, basic rules, and how to navigate them.

So if you were to go into that course and move stuff around and say to the robot, run around, the concept here is they would be able to adapt and do it, which anybody who owns a commercial drone knows, because when the drones land or when they are going to fly into a tree, they have a void in systems. Now, they're not completely intelligent. You can't just talk to your commercial drone and say, hey, go fly, find somebody, shoot them, and come back. And if it can be built with today's technology fairly easily, that means the military has us already. Here's a quadcopter. It's got a gun on it.

Here are, you know, if you remember from the Iraqi war, we had the deck of cards with all the bad guys on it. They can just put the deck of cards in there. Do facial recognition. you see the person, headshot, done. That's coming, folks, and this is the world we live in. Okay, if this has been too dystopian for you, some good news. Disney is getting into sentient robots. Westworld is coming, hopefully without the same outcome.

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I love the product. Congratulations to the team there. I am addicted to Notion. Okay, let's get back to this episode. Okay, Disney, according to the New York Times, wants the robots in its parks, I'm reading a tweet here, to come alive, one goal, setting them free from the confines of the rides and letting them wander walkways to turn the parks into, as one executive put it, inhabited places. The article covers how Disney's secretive R&D division called Imagineering is building AI robotics, that model some of the brand's most popular characters. So, a buzz light year that walks around, hopefully with that, not with a real ray gun, is pretty interesting.

According to the article, one of Disney senior robotics experts, Scott LaValley, came from Boston Dynamics. While at Boston Dynamics, LaValle contributed to an early version of Atlas, which is the robot you just saw

doing parkour. So, from the same article in the New York Times, Disney said it has no plans to replace human performers, Winnie the Pooh, Curella DeVille, Peter Pan, Princess Jasmine, and other beloved walk-around characters

will continue to be played by people wearing costumes. Instead, Disney's new focus on robotics will bring extreme Marvel and Star Wars characters to life. The article uses the Hulk, Baby Yoda, and a swinging Spider-Man as examples. I would put into that also, R2D2. That would be a layup. Maybe, since they own Pixar, Wally would be a layup. There's a lot of characters they could do that are not human, and that would be a stormtrooper comes to mind,

although that's quite terrorizing. But would be a layup for the folks over at, Boston Dynamics. In fact, stormtroopers are not as dexterous in Star Wars as those Boston Dynamics robots are. So they're a little overqualified for the job. The article also references Disney's project Kiwi, in which they created a fully atomatronic Groot. If you remember the Marvel character from Guardians of the Galaxy, who would say, I am Groot. If you're on YouTube, you can actually see the Groot, which we're playing in the background here. It is amazing. It's a bit terrorizing. It kind of reminds me of Chuckie from the Child's Play series. And the interesting

thing about Disney's Groot is it's not just Groot. According to the article, the Groot Robot is a prototype for small scale free roaming robot actors that can take on the role of any similarly sized Disney character. In other words, Disney does not want a one-off. They're going to do this across all of their character lines. So Snow White might be real. The seven dwarfs could be robots, obviously. So, just like the actors and actresses can change wardrobes, Disney's AI robots will be able to take on new identities, movements, and reactions at the push of a button. Here's the quote, cameras and sensors will give these robots the ability to make on-the-flight choices about what to do and say. Custom software allows animators and engineers to design

behaviors, happy, sad, sneaky, and convey emotions. Maybe they'll act differently towards a four-year-old than a 40-year-old would be what I would think. You know, if they could tell the eye level, how tall you are. Maybe they'll even be able to tell how old you are, because there's a website right now. You can go and it guesses your age pretty accurately. Leslie Evans, a senior engineering executive, told the New York Times the following, and all of this technology must disappear,

which takes a crazy amount of engineering, just like the Michael Crichton novel, Westworld, which became a movie, which became a great HBO series. We don't want anyone thinking that's the most sophisticated robot I ever encountered. It has to be, look, it's Groot. I think she's right about that. That's a plain English way of saying that these must pass through the Uncanny Valley.

If you don't know Uncanny Valley, you can just look it up on Wikipedia. When's it going to be available? Well, Project Kiwi has to advance to a play test stage, which is a short, low-profile dry run at a theme park to gather. Guess feedback. Disney declined to tell the New York Times when or where this test would occur. Later in the article, the author reveals that Disney Imagineering's team are also working on a full-body exoskeletons for massive characters like the Hulk

and Thanos, or what looks like to be a Wampa, the Yeti from Star Wars, if you remember that rips Luke's face when Luke is on Hawth, and then he gets saved by Hans Solo, who cuts open a Tontan and says, this doesn't smell great, but it will keep you warm, and then proceeds to shove Luke Skywalker into the guts of the Tontan. But of course, that's not before Luke Skywalker has a vision and sees Obi-Wan who tells them you will go to Dagaba to train with Master Yoda. I've seen the Empire Strikes Back no less than 100 times. One place where Disney could utilize the new robots is the Galactic Star Cruiser, Disney's new fully-immarsible Star Wars experience, which is supposed to mimic a cruise ship in space. This fully immersible hotel will open in spring of 2022.

According to an article by CNN, the hotel experience is a multi-day journey with entertainment food and beverages and I really want to do this with my kids. It is amazing looking. And there seems to be story points so you can make a decision with your group and, you know, then go through almost like it's a choose your own adventure. There's a term for this where people do this in person, like nerds and they get together at hotels and they do like little conventions where they act like characters and there's some storyline. It's kind of like real world Dungeons and Dragons. I think it's called LARPing, live action role playing.

Anyway, it's for nerds. And now Disney's going to mainstream it. So cultural appropriation by Disney from the nerds in is happening. The prices are bonkers. A two nights day is $4,800 for two guests in a cabin, $5,300 for three guests, $6,000 for four guests, which I guess what I'm paying. So basically $6,000 for a family of four for two nights. That is bonkers.

That is ridiculously expensive. And I think that's not cool by Disney. I think Disney should look at this and maybe reconsider that kind of exclusion. pricing. I don't think it's very good for their brand. That would be per person, like $1,500. Staying at a hotel and eating meals for, you know, a middle class family going to Disney would probably be, I don't know, $1,500. You'd probably be 25% of that. I think Disney's making a huge mistake here with this. If I was running Disney, I would look at this and say, we'll make it a loss leader until we can't or just break even on it and maybe explain that to the public. But that

price gouging is just actually kind of gross, I'll be honest. And as I said, it's going to be this choice dependent experience. You get to make some light side, dark side consequences, etc. It's wildly overpriced. I'm totally going to do it. I don't like the pricing. I'd rather they charge less.

I don't know if there's any way for them to do, you know, it's kind of interesting. Their brand is supposed to be accessible and this kind of goes against everybody in the world being able to afford to go to Disney. So I don't I don't like it.

I do like the robots, though. I think the robots are going to be awesome. Okay, speaking of robots and artificial intelligence, Elon unveiled the Tesla bot, a humanoid robot that utilizes self-driving AI technology. Fairly clear to everybody that the self-driving technology that's in a car could also be used for a robot. Because the car is moving at a really high speed and processing a lot of information. And the robot is moving at a slow speed, which means it's processing a much smaller, set of information. Think about it. Car going 65 miles an hour, a robot going five miles an hour.

These things are going to have an easier time figuring out what's going on the world. The Tesla bot will weigh 125 pounds. It'll be 5.8, so I'll be slightly taller than it. And it's going to move up to five miles per hour, which I just guessed. And it's going to be able to carry 45 pounds. Planning on launching next year, here's a one-minute clip from Elon talking about it. If you think about what we're doing right now with the cars, Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company because our cars are semi-sant robots on wheels. And with the full-soft driving computer, essentially the inference engine on the car, which we'll keep evolving obviously, and at Dojo and all the neural nets recognizing the world,

understanding how to navigate through the world, it kind of makes sense to put that onto a humanoid form. They're also quite good at sensors and batteries and actuators. We think we'll probably have a prototype sometime next year that basically looks like this. and it's intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate through a world built for humans and eliminate dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks. We're setting it such that it is, at a mechanical level, at a physical level,

you can run away from it, and most likely overpower it. So, hopefully that doesn't ever happen, but you never know. So obviously is having a little bit of fun with it, but it is correct. As I said, you know, they have so many miles driven with their robotic cars and their AI-driven cars that this is actually easier. And all the factories that Elon are running to build these cars have tons of robotics in it. So he's got a ton of robotic experts working for him.

And he's obviously been very thoughtful about AI and the dangers. So even though he's joking in this, that actually is a possible solution here. If all of these things were five feet tall and they only have a certain amount of battery life, the chances of them doing an uprising is very low. Or even if they get hacked, well, what's the downside if they get hacked and somebody tries to do something with them if you can just walk up to them and push them over and overpower them? Thus, putting in those safeguards makes a lot of sense. In a 2018 documentary, Do You Trust this Computer, Musk said AI doesn't have to be evil to destroy

humanity. If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it'll destroy humanity as a matter of course, without even thinking about it, no hard feelings. So an example of that would be, and many people have made this kind of observation, if the computer decides that we need to protect the environment because it's essential for humans to live in and humans are destroying the environment, well, then the computer might make the jump, okay, we'll just get rid of the humans. or if they say we have to keep humans from dying of cancer, it could be misinterpreted and the robots could then kill the humans because they don't want them to die of cancer, so better they die of something else. That's kind of a funny one. But that's what Sam Harris and some of the other, you know, binkers on this topic will talk about them. Clearly, you know, Elon's being straight up about this. I saw some people dunking on him. And this one is kind of the most silly. It's from the verge. They covered Tesla's AI Day. Some people were less charitable and even this quote. I just want to point out how little journalists actually know in some cases about the topic they're covering because they're journalists. They have to cover a hundred different topics, Tesla AI batteries being but three of them. And so if you have to cover 100 topics, you're going to be in some cases guessing or relying on other people's research or opinions, right? So here you go.

This is the quote. Tesla's history is littered with fanciful ideas that never panned out, like a solar powered supercharger network, battery swapping or a robotic snake-styled charger. So it's anyone's guess as to whether a working Tesla bot will ever see the light of day. Pausing for a second and talking about this, each of those, I actually kind of know a little bit about this just from being a user of Tesla's and owning four of them, I own like four out of the five models and have for over 10 years. The solar power supercharging network, there are solar power superchargers, but the

supercharger network has grown so quickly. There's no way to power it by solar standing next to them. The company's been too successful to do that. And a lot of the superchargers, which were supposed to be on highways where there's plenty of land available, have now wound up in city centers because Tesla's are so popular. In a city center like San Francisco, New York, or Tokyo, you cannot possibly put up the solar panels to charge it. So this is just actually would be not.

a fanciful idea that didn't pan out, that would be the inaccurate description of the solar power issue. It would be the supercharger network has become so prolific that it's not possible because of physics to do it that way. It could be possible, though, with all the solar going on the roofs of people's homes and with the battery packs in the homes for that solar power to then go back into the grid and that grid then goes to the superchargers, obviously. But this journalist didn't choose to do a little research on that. Battery swapping I know all about. the original Model S could battery swap. Elon and Tesla had shown that many times. What happened with that situation was they got so good at producing batteries and supercharging. In other words,

you went from 150-mile-range Teslas to 400-mile-range Teslas. The number of people who needed to swap their batteries because they were driving more than six hours a day went down to almost none. And then at the same time, supercharges went from putting in 100 miles an hour to 200 to 300 to 400. And I think I got 600 miles in an hour recently. So with those two things happening, you don't need to do battery swapping. And battery swapping is a pain in the neck because I drop my battery off. You got to hold it, you know, in Barstow or wherever in between cities. And then I get somebody else's battery. And then I got that battery. And then do I go back and they give me my battery back or do I get somebody else's? It was just way to.

too complicated and unnecessary. So in a business, you try different things. They actually built that technology, and they built the solar technology. They just decided there were better solutions that emerged. So those aren't fanciful ideas that didn't pan out. Those were actually economic and reality-based decisions

because they found a better decision. And then the robotic snake-style chargers, again, that was to power the robo fleet, I believe, so that the robotic cars and taxis, which I think is still a possibility. I might think that's five years out. Other people might think it's shorter, and it depends on the city,

the location, obviously. They might want to be plugged in. So that's just kind of a lame one. That's just like a fun little project that they did. The more likely solution is going to be inductive charging. So imagine your car drives in and there's a plate on the ground. And a third-party company actually made this for Tesla. It was just too janky and unnecessary to use it.

But the idea would be you pull into a parking spot. You don't have to plug it in. There's just inductive charging. The problem with the inductive. charging, obviously, is that you lose a certain percentage of the energy. So it's not energy efficient. So if you're trying to use less energy, asking a human to plug in a car that goes over 400 mile range is not too much to ask. You don't need the robotic style snake chargers. So just want to make sure that when we talk about journalism on this program and they make a bad

take like this that I unpack it for you. And I can tell you why. So I don't want to beat up on the journalist here. But the journalist got a full of certain number of words and the story. Beating up on tech companies is something people like to do because, let's face it, technology was given high fives for 20 years because the amount of positivity coming from technology was so great and the downside was so low. So when you got your first PC, it was all upside. You play chess master. You can write, you know, documents, do spreadsheets. It was incredible. You play games. There was no downside. Then AOL, you get online. Okay, there's very little downside, okay, maybe some people are behaving poorly online, it wasn't a lot of downside. Then you get

to Airbnb and, you know, ride sharing and all of a sudden things are operating the real world. Yes, of course, you can have a downside. And people are kind of anti-success and anti-capitalism at this point. So dunking on people is, you know, going to be in almost every story, especially tech people, especially successful ones. So this is kind of silly. If Elon says he's going to make this, the chances are it's going to come out. I don't know how much. more proof the world needs, especially these cynical journalists and people on Twitter, I mean, hundreds of thousands of cars are on the road. You cannot go to a parking lot without seeing Tesla's everywhere. I mean, give him some credit. It's just a silly, silly take.

So I'm all in on the Tesla robot. I think it's going to be great. I think it'll be a great thing for business. There are going to be many instances where sending humans into a situation is less desirable than sending a robot. And we were investors in Rude A.I, which used computer vision, to have a very delicate hand, pick the perfect strawberry or tomato off the vine at the right time. That company got bought by a company that's back that does vertical farming. And we're obviously investors in CafeX,

which a lot of people don't want to be baristas. Maybe people don't want folks touching their food and coffee. and 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, you'll be able to go to a cafe X at SFO, there's a test one there or any other place, and get a coffee. So the idea that you get to the airport early and there's no coffee store open,

or you get to the airport and it's in the middle of the day and we've all had this experience, I've had it recently, there's 20 people online for Starbucks or for the coffee bean and your flight's leaving. A robot's going to make 600, cups of coffee a day, a human's going to make 60. It's pretty obvious what we're talking about here. Robots are the future. We have 10 million jobs open in the United States today. There are 10 million

jobs that people are not taking in America. We need robots to do the work that other people don't want to do or we need to allow immigration. Pick one, pick both, but society must move forward. And the way for society to move forward is robots doing the really bad jobs that no humans want to do or giving people who are desperate for an opportunity, the ability to do those jobs that Americans who have moved up their stature in life and their expectation of what a great job is, in fairness to them, they're not wrong. If they don't want to make coffees for other people, if they don't want to carry luggage, if they don't want to work in a factory, let the robots do it. I mean, I think we can all agree, right? We can all agree on that. That's a better solution.