To the left of this of thumbnail i want to add a chinese flag to the left destroying the meta logo. because the title is China Kills Meta / Manus Deal (Story Of The Year) | E2281

This is more revenue than Microsoft will make in the next 10 years. So they made this extraordinary bet.

Microsoft owns about 27% of OpenAI Group.

Let that sink in. What could Microsoft do with $900 billion, with a B? Perhaps the greatest investment of all time. If OpenAI becomes a trillion-dollar company, now triple that. Then what if it goes to $10 trillion?

China is blocking Meta's attempted takeover of Manus, another AI company.

They disappeared the head of Alibaba, Jack Ma. What would they do to the families of the Manus founders if they don't return? This to me feels like the story of the year. This is huge.

This Week in Startups is brought to you by IM8 Health. Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to im8health.com/twist and use the code TWIST to get a free welcome kit, 5 travel sachets, and 10% off your order.

Sentry.

Your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST. And Deal. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deal.com/twist to learn more.

Should we talk about some news? There's lots of news.

People want me to talk about the news, so let's do it.

Which— is there a story people want you to particularly talk about? Is it the opening?

Why don't you Tell me your top 2 or 3 here and we'll just go through 'em.

So OpenAI and Microsoft, this is probably the biggest traditional tech story of the day. They have altered their ongoing partnership. Jason, as you recall, they, they, they've been working together again, yet again, they've been working together. It's very complicated. There are all these different rules. They've sort of smoothed things out and simplified them. So, uh, the companies have agreed to drop Microsoft's exclusive rights to sell OpenAI models. So OpenAI is now free to pursue deals with especially Amazon. They're already working on a joint deal to develop products for Amazon Web. They're going to continue doing that and then they can open up to even more. OpenAI— Microsoft has— was sort of weighing legal action over the AWS deal, but now that is off. However, Microsoft will remain OpenAI's quote unquote primary cloud provider and new OpenAI products are going to debut first on Azure before they're available across other cloud services. Now, in exchange for all of this, Microsoft no longer has to pay OpenAI a revenue share on the products it resells in Azure, and the revenue share paid by OpenAI is going to be capped, though we don't know at what level. They didn't specify exactly where that cap will be. Microsoft now receives rev share through 2030 regardless of the AGI. Remember, it was always like, It's contingent on OpenAI maybe reaching AGI. So that now they've just locked it in through 2030 and they're sort of kicking that can, the AGI can, down the road.

What's important here is how much equity Microsoft has in OpenAI.

Microsoft owns about 27% of OpenAI Group, uh, now, uh, according to Bloomberg.

So why would Microsoft agree to give up the exclusive to OpenAI's models, right? This wasn't a two-way exclusive, so it wasn't like Microsoft couldn't do Claude or Grok. They're, they're hosting things like that, I believe, on Azure. So why would Microsoft— why would Satya Nadella do this? The answer is that if this becomes a $10 billion company, a $10 trillion company, and they own 27% of it, The 27% of a $2 trillion OpenAI or a $3 trillion OpenAI is $500, $600. It's an incremental $600 billion.

Yeah.

In their equity stake.

Yes.

Let that sink in. What could Microsoft do with $900 billion with a B dollar?

Yeah. That's most—

this is more revenue than Microsoft will make in the next 10 years. So they made this extraordinary bet, perhaps the greatest investment of all time, up there, in OpenAI. This might be— if OpenAI becomes a $3 trillion company, it's a $1 trillion, or just under $1 trillion, let's call it $600 billion to $800 billion, but we'll round it up in the public markets, it'll become worth a trillion, it'll get run up. Now they own $270 billion. Now triple that. Okay, now you're at $800 billion.

Yeah.

Then what if it goes to $10 trillion?

That's what most of the—

$7 trillion in cash money.

Yeah. This is what analysts were saying today is that OpenAI wanted this greater flexibility. Microsoft just wanted to lock in their part ownership and make sure they were going to benefit down the road. But it seems to be all about just like the, the widest possible avenue for OpenAI to sort of get as big as it can.

Also, there was probably something about this AGI, you know, when it reaches AGI, they probably put the gun to their head and said, we're going to claim we're at AGI and we're going to be in a huge lawsuit.

AGI progress is now going to be independently verified. That's the change now. So it's not up to OpenAI to say AGI has been reached. We're going to have to bring in some expert third party to make the official judgment.

I'm going to press the button on my plot pen. Boom. It gives me a haptic.

It shakes.

I've got this on my suit. I didn't pin it like Lon on the nice custom suit I got. Lon, you don't pin a suit like that. You use the magnet so you don't damage the suit.

Lon, this isn't going to hurt it. This is fine.

This is the problem. You need to— this is another lesson here from your big brother. Here's the thing. You use the magnet like this. This is the magnet that goes behind your plot.

I have it.

If you take care of your suit, your suit's going to take care of you, Lung. Okay? That's what you need to learn here.

I appreciate it.

And I'm constantly learning. I have my plot pin on. I give it action items. One of the action items is I have to get engaged with the new community manager. I need to explain who we're trying to connect with in each community, what our standard is, and what our goals are. Okay. J Cal, make a note, action item. Let's define what we're trying to accomplish with the community before the community person gets here and get that on the ground running. You know what? It's all now in my notes. I take this off, I put it into the cradle, it connects to Wi-Fi, it syncs. Then I'm on my desktop, it's translated, it's put into bullet points. There's like 1,000 templates. You can do all kinds of different things, a mind map, this, that, the other. People are constantly making new templates for what to do with this audio file. It's absolutely fantastic. Over time, it learns about you. It learns about who you're talking to. So it knows Lon. Lon's Plaud knows me. I applaud Plaud. It is one of my breakout products for 2026 for sure.

And if your work relies on conversations, you need a Plaud NotePin or NotePin S. Check it out at plaud.ai/twist and use the code TWIST to get 10% off.

Here's the problem. I'm so enthusiastic about Plaud, I give them like triple the amount of airtime they're paying for.

I always end up talking a lot about—

and then somebody's like, well, can you do a triple for me? I'm like, I'm sorry, I, I'll try my best. Anyway, thanks for supporting the show. That's how I pay Lon's ridiculous salary. I appreciate it. One month trip to Italy.

3 weeks. 3 weeks. 3 weeks.

I'm rounding up. All right, let's get to it. And, uh, it's always interesting when people use the term interesting. Does anybody— this is a good tweet by Jessica Lesson. Jessica Lesson's like, who thinks this is interesting? And then I open up my Twitter and what comes A very interesting announcement from OpenAI this morning.

We're excited to make OpenAI's models available directly to consumers on Bedrock in the coming weeks. Uh, that's from Andy Jassy, of course, from Amazon. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

So this is super interesting development here. Uh, and wow, I mean, yeah, I think it's a big deal. And this is Um, going to be very interesting as well for the race between, uh, them and Claude— OpenAI and Claude. Um, but this is, uh, great for Microsoft. I mean, the Azure revenue, the equity value— this just unlocks a lot.

So is this a win-win, you think? Like, but everybody benefits from this new agreement?

I'll tell you what this is. This is OpenAI and Microsoft agreeing to go polyamorous. Yeah, this is a polyamorous agreement, the first one in the history of tech companies. Well, I mean, I think this is like they're going to a polycube here. Yeah, anything's possible. You can see other people, we can see other people. We're opening this relationship up. Anybody can do anything, which means there's going to be a lot of bad feelings and it's going to be dicey. Anybody who tells you like they're in a polycube or whatever, the translation for that is chaos.

It's the old Arrested Development bit like, well, no, this never works out for people, but it might work for us.

Yes, exactly. This has never worked out in the history of relationships. Maybe for us it will. Yeah, it's not going to work out. This is going to be chaotic. There'll be a second or third lawsuit perhaps. But, um, I do think it cleans things up. If I was Satya Nadella, I would have just said, I'll do all this, just give me another 3 points, round me up to 30%, and I'm good. Because I think Microsoft is going to be able to, with their resources, build enough compute and build a competitor to OpenAI. I think they just need to build their own models. Microsoft needs to get in the game. They should have an open-source model. Apple should do open-source models. Google should stick with proprietary. But if you're this far behind and you're Microsoft and Apple, this sounds like a crazy idea. Microsoft and Apple should just literally work together on open-source models and just embed them into their devices and operating system, and they could just build a third company and they could each contribute $100 billion to compute, uh, and talent and just make the greatest open source model ever. That would be the power move. And it's crazy to think Apple and Microsoft joining up— they're the two furthest behind people, right? They are the furthest behind, and they have the most distribution of anybody. They are the two that own the operating systems. The only other people that have billions of consumers are, of course, Meta working on their own proprietary model now, and Google, the owners of DeepSeq. This is an incredible chessboard. What else is in the news?

Uh, so, uh, we got two big stories about China. First, China is blocking Meta's attempted takeover of Manus, another AI company. Uh, the government's National Development and Reform Commission ordered the deal's cancellation. Their— the ruling was like one sentence. It just says, we're prohibiting foreign investment in this startup in accordance with the law and regulations. And that's it. So no further details there. So of course, Madness was founded in China. The founders then relocated their HQ and staff to Singapore in 2025. Then Meta— but here's the thing, Jason, the CCP is canceling the deal. It's already in progress. A lot of Madness employees already have moved over to Meta and are working out of Meta's Singapore HQ. Bloomberg reports that capital has already been transferred. So we're putting the brakes on a deal that is very much like—

now was Manus. Yeah. And I believe Manus was backed by Benchmark, the venture firm. Correct. Controversially. Yes. And so if they—

they received $75 million from the US firm Benchmark in May 2025. That was the big thing with the Singapore move. They moved to Singapore so that they could start taking this far an investment.

Founder scale faster on Deal. That's the deal. You can grow your company without borders, and you can set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone anywhere like a modern startup or large company does, and Deal is gonna get all the visas handled fast so you can get back to building. There's a great talent war that's going on right now, and you need people with superpowers for your startup to be competitive, to beat your competitors, to get your products to market. But anytime you try to grow your team with overseas hires, oh my Lord, you've got to reinvent the wheel, and you got navigate a tangled web of international laws, regulations. You can't get these things wrong, folks. You want to onboard new staffers in other countries? You want to get them set up on your network, nice and secure IT access, all that good stuff? You want to manage their benefits? Trust me, this is all a nightmare unless you partner with Deal. They are the people stack for startups. They're going to take care of all the onboarding, payroll, HR, IT benefits, everything you need quickly in one place, done perfectly. So visit deal.com/twist. That's deal.com/twist. Okay, this is an escalation of epic proportions. I don't know if this is saber rattling or serious. I don't know if this is performative or serious. If this is legit, the CCP might just go to the Manus office, seize everything. Yeah, and just take all the employees. The ones who haven't already fled. Well, and then the ones that fled to Singapore, will they go to Singapore, right, and say we want them extradited? And I don't— listen, I'm not suggesting this at all, but they're known for strong-arm tactics. What if they say they disappeared their Jeff Bezos? They disappeared the head of Alibaba, Jack Ma. Yeah, for 2 years. If they're willing to disappear, somebody at the public level of Elon or Jeff Bezos or Sergey Brin, what would they do to the families of the Manus founders if they don't return?

It's a—

and I'm not suggesting all this, but it's, it's a— this is a discussion here, um, and obviously that's something they're capable of doing. This to me feels like the story of the year.

It's a big one.

This is huge. Forget about OpenAI and Microsoft.

Well, it's also interesting from the Chinese, like so many of these Chinese companies making these AI products, the idea is to go international. It's not just Chinese users they're chasing. Everybody's using Qwen models and KIMI and, you know, so like what is this going to have a freezing impact on international AI collaboration at a much larger scale than just Manus?

Let me just say this one more time. The Chinese Communist Party canceling Meta's acquisition of Manus is the story of the year. This is the ultimate escalation of AI wars. Why? Because they could now escalate this, and the United States could escalate this. They couldn't go— China can go lean on Singapore and say, give us those founders. In other words, like a red equivalent of a red notice. Now, I, I don't think China is able to do— I don't know if China's part of Interpol as a communist country. I don't suspect they are, but the countries in the West can do this kind of thing if they're part of the Interpol. Singapore does not have the wherewithal to fight China. If China says to Singapore, please, uh, deliver us the founders and the money, the bank accounts, the servers of MANAS. There is no choice but for Singapore to then either go to the United States and say, are you defending us from this? Or to China, say to the MANAS founders, you're not welcome in this country, you have to leave, you can't stay here. And then wherever they go, if they go to the United States, that's another escalation.

True.

This is as provocative as you have to sell TikTok, if not more. This is provocative stuff, folks. Well, because we're gonna have— yeah, we don't have a solution.

We don't tell companies where they can headquarter. If an American company wants to go headquarter another place, and we're not chasing after them around the globe.

We're not. I don't know of another instance of this, but I think this is starting to speak to sovereignty, the importance of AI, AGI, superintelligence. The CCP looks at companies formed in China as their property. That is why they have this, uh, golden board seat. I think it's called the golden board seat or the golden vote. There is a concept with TikTok that they get this golden vote. What that means, practically speaking, is if something's going down with a startup— TikTok's algorithm being another, uh, portion of this— they get that golden vote and say, you know, TikTok algorithm's not leaving China, it's staying here.

Yeah, it's a golden share. They, they give a golden share, symbolic 1% equity share, which grants them the power to appoint a director on the board and gives them veto power. So that's That's how the Chinese government is expressing so much control over these local companies.

Now Meta's got to make a decision. Does Meta unravel this and say to the VCs and the shareholders, okay, send us the money back? Yeah, it's a weird, uh, whatever taxes you were going to pay on that in capital gains. And did you distribute it? Did Benchmark distribute it to Harvard or Duke or whoever there? I don't know who their LPs are.

It's very complicated.

Oh God.

Well, and also, what impact is this going to have on Meta? They're behind in the AI race. They, they probably needed this infusion of talent. Mark's not throwing out these billions of dollars to buy Madness for no reason.

So is, is the CCP's decision here performative, or will they go to the mat? That's the question. Yeah, I think this is a performative, like, okay, we're unwinding it. Whatever servers are still in our country, whatever employees used to have in this country, they all work for us. We're going to move them to this sovereign— this other AI company. They do stuff like that. Remember the history of Uber in China? Uh, Uber and Didi were in a dogfight. Didi lost their license eventually. Go look that up. Didi lost the license to operate in China. Imagine President Trump just unilaterally saying to Uber or to Waymo, You can't do any more rides because you didn't have enough privacy in your app. And I believe it was over privacy. They lost their ability to provide rides in China. Yeah, that was a crazy moment for Didi. The stock tanked.

I'm looking it up. Give me a—

sorry, I was giving you the handoff. I'm like, alley-oop.

No, I'm trying. I'm trying. Yes, uh, Chinese. Yeah, so this was in 2016, it looks like. Uh, Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chinese action.

They basically, if my memory serves me correct, they put them in the penalty box for 6 or 12 months. They could not provide rides. And they came up, I believe it was trumped-up charges, what I was told on the backside. I don't know where, how it ever revolved, so we're using my, my memory here of something 10 years ago. I believe they said they weren't protecting consumer privacy or they were breaking consumer privacy, therefore you're out of business. And so luckily Meta has no— you know, there's no Instagram, there's no Facebook in China. Famously, Zuckerberg learned Chinese and spoke Chinese to like people over there in the government and was desperate to bring Facebook to China. It was an obsession for Zuckerberg, I understand, to operate in China and get those billion customers. He didn't— wasn't able to pull it off.

It says this was 2018. Uh, Didi suspended its carpooling service after there were 2 murders of female passengers in 3 months. China's police and transport ministry said Didi had unshirkable responsibility for passengers being raped and killed by a driver in the city of Wenzhou. Uh, so after 2 murders, yes, they, they, they canceled this product. Didi sacked 2 members of staff and suspended the hitch service nationwide. It was never relaunched in its original form.

You know, there's a great tweet, uh, from @DeniseWu. @DeniseWu says, that's the end of Singapore washing. If you hadn't heard that term before, uh, you know, this is what, uh, Twitter— I'm not Twitter— TikTok was accused of doing. Remember, the TikTok CEO was like, we're not a Chinese company, from Singapore. Yeah, yeah, I'm from Singapore.

Yeah.

You know, like this, I think this is, she's, she's pretty accurate here. Singapore washing door has closed from the Chinese side. They bolted that two-way door. So if there's a two-way door, you know, you get that hotel thing where like the adjacent room, they can make it your room into a two-bedroom. Au contraire, mon frère. That's the end of that. They're locking that door. So anybody who's a Chinese entrepreneur who says, I'm going to move my management team to Singapore, I think that's over.

That they're, they're, they're closing that loophole. It seems for sure.

Yeah. Wow. I mean, for Meta— is Meta— what's happened to Meta stock today?

We should take a look. Let's see.

I wonder. That seems material to me.

Yeah, it's at $679.60 right now. It's, it's up about, uh, 0.68% today.

Okay, so no impact?

No, no real impact yet on Meta.

That's fine. I mean, I think probably people don't believe AI has a material impact on the earnings, um, certainly not having its own thing. But what this does to MSL, which is Meta's superintelligence lab, I think is significant.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you just got to figure they were making this mega deal because they really needed that Manus talent to come join, and now they're not getting it. So exactly like Elon bringing in Cursor to XAI, you know, you presume he needs some sort of thing, magic secret sauce that they've got that his lab doesn't have.

It's the worst nightmare of every founder. You've built a product. Everything's working great. Then real users start flooding in and suddenly it all breaks. What a disaster. You need to get it back up and running and you gotta do that fast. You're looking like an amateur. That's why you need a partner like Sentry. Applications can break in many different ways, but Sentry sees everything. You'll get all the relevant details like stack traces, commits, releases, and even the developers who push that problem code in the first place. With Sentry, you're not gonna be jumping around between different tools trying to figure out what happened. And Sear, Sentry's AI debugging agent, uses all this data and context to identify the root cause of the problem and suggest a fix. It can even take a look at your code before it ships and warn you if any problems are likely. Try Sear and Sentry for free. If you're a This Week in Startups listener, at sentry.io/twist, use the code TWIST for $240 in Sentry credits. Make sure you use that code. Make sure you use that URL sentry.io/twist. So they know your Uncle J Cal sent you. And remember I told you they had big aspirations? You know, Zuckerberg specifically had big aspirations. But here's a tweet for you. Look at this. This is from Steve Hou, H-O-U, from Bloomberg. And he says, we've come a long way since this. Just to jog our memory, Meta, Facebook, once had big ambitions in China. And here is Zuckerberg going for a run. And I don't think it's overcast in this photo. You look in this photo here. with a certain picture of a politician behind him, uh, conveniently placed. Are you looking at this image? Is there a more iconic picture? I don't know who he's running with here, uh, but if you look, there's a certain picture of a certain politician on that building.

Yeah, Chairman Mao.

Okay, thank you, sir. I don't know what it says over there. And then do you notice the two lampposts here? And look at the top right of this image. What do you see on the lampposts?

Oh, it's a surveillance camera. Is that it?

Precisely. Yeah, Mao, Zuckerberg, and surveillance cameras running in a smog-filled— I'm going to assume Beijing or Singapore. I'm not sure what that building in the background is going to be.

That's got to be Beijing, right? Come on.

It's probably— I would think he was in Beijing. Most people are going to Singapore, uh, but for government stuff. Uh, and then here's, uh, a little clip, uh, for the— and, uh, if you're Chinese and you're a member of the noti gang, the notification gang, please let me know how he did. Let's introduce the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Okay, but supposedly he was going like multiple times a week, multiple hours a week, uh, to learn Mandarin. Yeah, and I don't think it was just— I believe his wife is Chinese. I'm not certain of that. Priscilla Chan.

Yeah, that sounds right. I'll look it up to make sure.

I'm thinking she's Chinese, but I— you can't make an assumption there. Um, we should definitely fact-check that, get the synagogue here. I mean, she's not Chinese.

She's, she's ethnic, ethnic Chinese. Her family fled Vietnam, grew up speaking Cantonese, not Mandarin. So she speaks Cantonese.

Got it.

Okay.

Well, that's why you always check. Coming from, coming from an Asian house, mixed Asian household. I know this because I've made this mistake before. Okay. Anyway, this is the story of the year now. Could this escalate? Will Trump get involved? Oh boy, is this going to then relate in some way to, uh, Taiwan? Will this in some way relate to the TikTok action? This is an— this is the kind of escalation that occurs that can be quite difficult. There's supposed to be a Trump and Xi meeting that got pushed back because of what's going on in Iran.

They're still thinking May, that could happen in May. So obviously, like, this seems like a topic that may come up.

Looks like there's a new bullet item on the docket.

Add that to the list.

We're gonna have to keep watching this one. Again, I'll just say it, um, performative or, uh, you know, is this going to be a go-to-the-mat kind of issue is what we're going to be looking for in the coming weeks. All right, final story.

Uh, did you want— okay, so we got a few choices. Uh, I think we should talk about this. Do you want to talk about this accident video that you sent?

I think this is critically important. I sent this video, you know, I am, uh, I have a lot of investments, not just in Uber, but in, you know, uh, many companies in the self-driving space because I believe this will be the next wave. And I did okay in the first wave with Uber. I do believe this. And, and, uh, this is, um, yeah, I'll give a little context. Disclaimer, please, if you, uh, this is a— don't want to watch it.

Yes. First of all, we should say this is upsetting if you, uh, like, we're about to show a dash cam video of an accident involving a child and this self-driving car. If you think that might disturb you, give us a minute or two and then come back to the show or turn off your visuals. It is disturbing. So this is a shocking dashcam clip. Now, the caption on X and some other evidence we found suggests that this is real. It was recorded on March 9th, 2026. The far-right international paper, the Epoch Times, has confirmed it.

They say it happened in Chongqing, And so here at Epoch Times, just to be clear, is that the one that Fu Longgang is producing?

No, no, I think, I think that's a different one. But, but this is—

anyway, Epoch Times is like a— I don't know if it's a US— oh, you're right, it is China.

Yeah, this is the Falun Gong one. So it is very— they're very anti-Communist Party. They're very anti-communism in general. and they're usually seen as being to the very far right. And they're the only news source that I could find that actually confirms that this is real footage. Hey, fool. Falun Gong. They're the—

Falun Gong. Yeah. Is—

They're that Chinese spiritual movement that is—

Yes.

The government is suppressing it. They're most famously in this country, they do that Shen Yun show that you see billboards for. The Chinese Dancing Cultural Exchange, that's actually Falun Gong's organization, and they put that on as a fundraiser. Uh, but yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a spiritual movement in China that's being repressed by which spiritual movements in China, no good. Yes. Well, right. The Communist Party does not like that.

And so the Uyghurs who are Muslim in jail, sterilized, tortured, slave labor. And Falun Gong is banned.

They're banned. And it's like, you'll see that it's— they do a version of what looks to us like tai chi, where they do different movements, and it's supposed to be like a spiritual daily practice.

Correct. So they could have— they could want to— they have a penchant for negative stories about China.

They're going to be on the anti-CCP, anti-China sort of beat. So they're confirming that this is real.

Um, and so I guess this looks like a back alley in China, like a side— that's just back out— it's like a side street in China. As you can see, there's double-parked cars. China's driving situation is a bit chaotic. If you've ever been to China, people will drive, park on the sidewalk, go in the opposite lane. They'll make a left turn way ahead of the intersection to cut people off. It's a bit emerging market in some locations. So it makes self-driving pretty challenging. And here, as the car is coming up the street, a young child runs into the street with a mother following it. This could all be fake. This could be AI, right? It's important. But there is the child.

There's the child. And the car running out and then clearly runs it over. Seems like it disappears under the tire. So what Epoch Times says— here's, here's the quote: A HarmonyOS-enabled vehicle— that is Huawei's operating system. It runs on smartphones, tablets, TVs, wearables, and self-driving cars. They're saying increased its speed from 24 kilometers per hour to 31 kilometers per hour. 2 seconds later, a toddler, approximately 2 years old, steps from the sidewalk into the vehicle lane. The car speed drops, but it does not brake in time and appears to, to hit the child. Locals confirmed to Epoch Times reportedly that the toddler is the child of a local shopkeeper. From this street.

Is that kid okay? I mean, this looks like it could have killed the kid.

I do not. Sadly, I do not have any confirmation on what actually happened and if the child is okay.

A similar instance happened in Santa Monica, the paradoxically, the People's Republic of Santa Monica. A Waymo came around a vehicle, right, and hit a child. It did brake in time. It did hit the child at, I think, 5 miles an hour or something incredibly We'll pull up the story here in a moment. And the child was fine. The child got knocked over. So it would be like a dog running into the child. Um, so very interesting. Um, here, what we're getting to in self-driving, what I think this speaks to is in self-driving, the only thing that matters is edge cases. The edge case of a cat being under a car and getting run over The Bodega Cat. RNT KitKat.

KitKat.

I like to stay active. You know, I'm getting a little older, but I've started drinking IM8's Daily Ultimate Essentials and it is delicious. I'm starting to notice a real shift. I drink it every morning and I just feel less tired, right? Which allows me to really, you know, catch up and attack the day. IM8's Daily Ultimate Essentials packs the benefits of 16 different supplements into one tasty drink. It's loaded with 92 nutrient-rich ingredients, including vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, along with pre, pro, and postbiotics. It's giving me a great energy boost. It calms your digestion, and it's an easy habit to stick with because it tastes delicious. So start feeling like your best self every day with IM8. Go to im8health.com/twist and use the code TWIST to get a free welcome kit, 5 free chavril sachets, and 10% off your order. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. KitKat, um, stray cat, bodega cat murdered by Waymo. Yeah, hit by Waymo. Um, and then here, the child getting hit in Santa Monica. And then finally, this child getting hit. If you look at those instances, these are the edge cases of edge cases. First of all, the cat was under the car. The cars do not have cameras underneath them. Yeah, a human is not expected, right? If a human pulled out of a spot and there was a cat under the car and it got run over, be like, okay, Sorry for the cat, but I— you're not required as a human driver to look under your vehicle.

And it is sadly a thing that does happen all the time where people hit— accidentally hit animals or stray animals or don't realize that their animal is under the car.

Yeah, correct. And then we look at the one where the child got hit in Santa Monica. Waymo did the right thing. Waymo slowed down. It was, I believe, the child's fault. The child darted into the street. Because every parent's nightmare, you have to teach this. And there is a video— I'll ask producer Jacob to go find it— of kids learning in Japan about— they, they show kids in Japan getting hit by a car, a kid running into the street in front of a car. So look for that. Um, it's a— it's how they educate kids in Japan about running into the street. It's, uh, really effective, and they should be doing this all over the world. You gotta scare kids about running into the street.

You didn't have to watch any of those driver's ed films in high school, like Blood on the Asphalt or something. We had to. No, but this is for math of car accidents.

Yeah, watch this.

Here you go.

This is, uh, Japan. So in Japan, they make kids learn about safety. They send them to a safety track. They make them wear There it goes. And you notice the kids all have numbered vests and they have the hats on or whatever. When they go to events, they are very thoughtful about not losing a kid. Um, yeah, this is the kind of thing you have to really think for an edge case. The software is going to make mistakes in edge cases, and the edge case means a kid could die. No human would ever be judged based upon what we saw there. Like, if that was a human in China, that terrible instance of the kid being hit, I don't think a human— a taxi driver would be brought to justice for that.

If you were inebriated, if you were— if you had been driving, like, if they—

oh, sure.

If they— if the police came and found you were intoxicated or something and you hit somebody, then yes, that would be vehicular manslaughter.

But that reaction time to me looks like a human's reaction time, not a computer's.

Yeah. I mean, well, as a driver, I think you are constantly sort of concerned about kids running in the path. You know, like, that's a thing that occurs to me driving around neighborhoods all the time is to look out for kids.

But when you look at that China one, Lan, the one that's— Yeah, it darts out.

It's very quick. I mean, I—

if that was a cab driver or if that was you and I, God forbid, would you blame any of us?

No.

Probably. Obviously, that was as fast as you can react.

Probably not. Yeah.

It doesn't look like that. I mean, it looked like a great human reaction time.

But my point is, when we're going to judge a human driver, there's someone to blame. And I think that makes people feel better in a way, like somebody's life is going to be ruined if they hit a child in their car. And that kind of puts us all in a place of being cautious and responsible. And robots don't have that. They're not looking, you know, like you can't blame a robot like that. We could say the model—

But I'm making a different point.

Right.

Completely different point I'm making. The point I'm making here, let me try one more time. The video from China shows human reaction time, but a computer driver. We will not accept a human's reaction time from a computer. It will be judged based on a computer. This video feels like human reaction time from a computer, not acceptable. Computers have to have computer reaction time, not human, superhuman. This is the end of self-driving if this happens in America. I will predict here this will happen, sadly. In America. It won't be a cat next time, it's going to be a human. I'm not trying to be a doomerist, but I don't think— if that kid had been killed in Santa Monica or had broken his leg and it was at 12 miles an hour, and the difference between 5 and 12 is nothing— I think it was 5 miles an hour if I remember correctly, somebody can check— I would say Waymo would be banned right now.

And yeah, well, I mean, the other thing is, if this happened in America that would be all over, like, we wouldn't have to guess about whether it was real footage. And I think we could stop showing it, Jacob.

Yeah, please. And again, I'm just going to say for the fourth time, this may not be real. We may be reacting to an AI setup.

And if something like this did happen in the US, there would be no question about, well, is it real? Is it authentic? Is it real? It would be on the front page of every newspaper. It would be all we talked about for a week. Kit Kat, the bodega cat getting killed, was big news for 3, 4 days.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah. So I mean, I think this is clearly a China versus the US and the government, which has a very strong interest in promoting self-driving cars and automation. They have a lot more control over what Chinese people see, what gets out from Chinese media to the rest of the world. So that's why we're playing this guessing game in the first place of did this really happen? Has this just been silenced? Or in America it would be like the whole world would be talking about that kid who got killed by the Waymo.

Tell me what you have in Off Duty. Maybe we'll make it— we'll tape it now and save it for another show.

All right. I got 3 goodies for you in Off Duty. The first, did you see this clip of Russell Brand on Piers Morgan's show?

I did see it. Let's play it for the audience.

Incredible. So Russell Brand is—

you may have to speed it up. Yeah.

Russell Brand is on. He's promoting his new book about Christianity, How to Become Christian in 7 Days, I believe it's called. And so Piers Morgan says, well, you brought your Bible here to the studio, uh, I believe this is the same Bible you were reading in court.

We'll show the clip, uh, and he can put it on 2x speed just for the giggles. This is 2x speed of— yes, if you want. Thank you. That was not the one you took into court? You're the very one. Okay. What was your thinking taking it into court and what you were seeing, looking at some passages? What the relevant passages to you? All right, thank you for asking me. Thank you. I didn't know that a little bit. Um, it was this from Isaiah.

You like bread?

They say, you know, be chill. Sometimes I lose the chill, man. It's bread.

Hmm.

Is this— It's getting awkward.

What do you think about being a Christian?

This is from Isaiah.

So you would think, what's your favorite Bible passage? What's a Bible passage that means something to you? You would think like, I don't know, like right like that. You should be able to come up with one if it's your— if it's so important to you that you wrote a book.

It says here. This is a masterclass by Piers Morgan.

Yeah, I love him.

He just looks at the camera. He's letting him go. The verse I was looking at that day was not this. I can't actually find it. He still has his bound. We're on double. This is from Isaiah 12. Yeah, and he then picks another one to read. I just want to say, Piers Morgan, exceptional job of just letting the person, you know, cook because they're you could— the benefit of the doubt is, you know, he's got— it looks like he's got a lot of earmarks and Post-it notes in that Bible, right, when he shows it from the side. So maybe just had a hard time finding the specific one that he said in his court case, and he wanted to be accurate, Russell, and he's a podcaster. Or the cynical take from Yulan might be, yeah, that is full of it.

I actually have two— I actually have two— I think there might be two things going on. One, he can't really find the right verse because he doesn't really read the Bible. And this whole thing is just a gimmick. I think, I think that's, that's the most obvious thing to draw. But the other one is part of me feels like he is a comedian and a comic actor. Maybe he was looking for the Bible verse for a second and then he realized like, this, this is really funny. Like, this is a really funny—

Oh, so it was a bit. He was leaning into it.

Part of me does feel like, I mean, if you were going to do this on a, on a Curb Your Enthusiasm, on a VEEP on Extras, one of those Ricky Gervais shows. Like, that's exactly how you would do it. You would let it play out. You would let it play out. You— he keeps saying like, ooh, I believe this is from Isaiah, and then he keeps flipping and it's like a Spinal Tap bit. So I don't know, the cynical part of me is like, Russell Brand is just a liar and he's posing as a Christian and he's not sincere in his beliefs. But I don't know, it's so funny and it goes on for so long that I'm almost like, maybe this is just— he couldn't resist. A little moment.

He is definitely a weird, you know, character at times. Yeah, like he is a sticky guy by design. Maybe that's an interesting one.

I interviewed him on the red carpet one time, long before we knew any accusations. He was just funny British man Russell Brand, and he was very in-the-moment, spontaneously funny. So I do—

I heard a clip of him on Megyn Kelly recently, and he goes off on like these you know, incredible, uh, tirades. I don't know, like, I mean, monologues. They're monologues. He does these incredibly, uh, well-spoken monologues. But then I'm like, what's the substance of this? And I was trying to find the substance in it. And it's interesting, a lot of people find Christ when they're being criticized the most.

Yeah, I mean, right. I think that's the—

sometimes there's a correlation.

The cynical take would be, yes, he's got all this sexual harassment stuff going on, it's a bad look. Oh, I'll embrace Christianity, and then a whole bunch of people will be fans of mine. And that's such a popular refuge. So I don't, I don't want to besmirch the man's religion. Maybe he's sincere, but it is a very funny clip. And part of me does feel like when you're watching it, like he's leaning in to the joke, like he's playing it so well that it is very funny. So anyway, I wanted to show—

interesting.

I wanted to get your thoughts on that one.

Okay. That's number 1. What do you got for number 2?

Here's another. I found this viral thread. I will, I will pull it up. Or Jacob can. Linus Ekins. Dave Erickson shared this. So do you see these, these threads a lot? This one is almost too far to be believed. He's telling people, take an image of your palm, feed it into ChatGPT, and ask it to read your palm. And he's got full instructions on how to do it. And then if you scroll down a little bit, Jacob, you'll see, uh, he's even got, oh, you could also have it extract a palm print and show what you're— and it's like, so you're feeding your biometric signals into the AI. Like, is this an op— Jason, like, is this— the FBI is writing this thread and telling you to put your fingerprints in their OpenAI database? Because this is very suspicious to me.

Wait a second. I don't understand this. All right, one more time.

Okay. Linus Ekenstam, this guy, he said AI evangelist and optimist. He's got 235,000 followers on X. So this is the thread. He says, you must try this. GPT Image 2 can do 'Palm reading,' and I'm so here for it. And then here's his full prompt. You attach a photo of your palm, and then you say, 'Based on my hand, I want you to make a complete palm reading guide. Analyze the palm. The style of the guide should be clean and minimal, thin lines, rounded cards, blah, blah, blah.' All right, he's giving him the— and then if you go down, he says, 'I didn't know if this was going to work, but I also outputted my handprint.' And if you look at the image there, he got OpenAI to make an image of his handprint complete with his fingerprints in it. And he's loading these into these public AI systems. We don't know who OpenAI is sharing.

Okay, so putting aside the privacy thing, this is just the perfect example of AI slop. There are people who put onto the open crawl on the open web, palm reading nonsense. Palm reading is obviously nonsense. It's quackery. But large language models don't understand quackery. They don't understand chiropractic arts, which I believe are quackery. Doesn't understand palm reading is quackery or telling the future or whatever. Right. Or astrology. All this stuff is quackery in my mind. But because there's people who take quackery seriously online, it ingests that, right? Yes. It believes it. And nobody's gone through the trouble of saying to ChatGPT during training, there is no such thing as palm reading. Right. That's nonsense. Yeah.

It's sucked in so much writing about palm reading, astrology, tarot, all that stuff was— it was trained on like all those Reddit threads from those communities of people who believe in this.

Correct.

Got sucked in as data. So it is— it has expertise on these things, even though it may not be a thing that is real expertise. But I'm sure that palm reading chart is as good as if you went to a professional palm reader, it's probably very similar kinds of stuff. I'm just like, I don't think you should give your fingerprints to ChatGPT. Personally, I would not do that.

100%. For the love of God, don't do that.

Don't do that. And part of me does actually feel like if you were in the FBI and you wanted to get millions of people's fingerprints, that's exactly what you would do. You would create a prompt and tell people, here's how to do it. Give it to us. We're reading your OpenAI. Uh, anyway, okay.

What's your third? Give us your third and final, Lon's third and final Off Duty. We like to go Off Duty.

Yeah.

I've been asking my team, please make me an Off Duty, uh, jingle and video thing. Let's have that for next week. Off Duty. Everybody loves Off Duty when we talk about things that have nothing to do with startups.

Well, one, first I'll mention, uh, we got a comment in the YouTube chat from @consistentone saying, uh, Lon's recommendation from last week, Dust Bunny is recommended. I've gotten a lot of feedback by the way, Jason, on social media. From people who watched Dust Bunny after I talked about it here on the show who enjoy it. So big, big recommendation for me. It's on HBO Max now, Dust Bunny. Another thing I will recommend, there is a show, a British crime show that is back for season 2 on Apple TV. It's called Criminal Record. I really, I really like this one. It's about— it's a cop show, but a lot, a lot of cop shows, it's like the cops are geniuses and it's about these like hero genius cop. And they can't— they, you know, like, and I, I like Special Victims Unit or whatever that, uh, that, you know, Law Order show, but the cops are— they're superheroes on that one. And what I like about Criminal Record is it's very realistic about what it would be like to be a cop. It's not anti-cop, it's not pro-cop, it just really digs into all of the sort of BS and administration and the complexities of being a cop in the modern world. So Cush Jumbo is D.S. June Lenker. She's always investigating these cases where she thinks the cops got it wrong. You know, she's trying looking into cold cases, trying to figure out what really happened. And then Peter Capaldi is this veteran cop, very powerful in the force. And he's sort of on the side of like, we made the arrest. It like, let's, let's let this die. Let's move on. And so they kind of come to heads, but also sort of work together. It's really well done. It's a really engaging show. 6 episodes.

I don't know any of these actors, so I'm kind of looking forward to it.

Well, Peter Capaldi, he was Doctor Who. And if you ever watch those Armando Iannucci, uh, the guy did Veep, Armando Iannucci, he did a show—

for me either—

he did a show in the UK called The Thick of It that starred Peter Capaldi, who was also in the movie version. In the—

90% of the audience doesn't know who you're talking about, what you're talking about, which is great. They're great, great. I like to get introduced to a new actor, a great British actor.

Uh, so this is a really cool show. Season 2 just kicked off on Apple, so you've got plenty of time to go back and catch up on Season 1 and then jump into Season 2.

Uh, you know, these foot pedals, uh, everybody knows I talked about my foot pedal for doing Whisper. I like to do Whisper when I'm writing a long prompt, etc. And then, uh, you know, my, uh, my, my studio, uh, and editor producer here, Salah, said, oh, you should try the Elgato pedal. This thing's got weight to it. It's 3 different pedals, one on the left, one on the right, one in the middle. Now I'm talking to you right now. I'm not using my hands, but if I press the right pedal, it pulls up my comment browser from Perplexity. If I press the right one, it pulls up my Zoom.

Wow.

Right, left. Now I'm always trying to put my— these 2 things on the screen, and then I have to go switch back and forth. So when you see me looking down or I'm doing my mouse, you see my keyboard, I'm on a live stream, pain in the neck, right? Yeah, because sometimes I have to look at the docket. Now I'm looking at the docket, then I press again, now I'm looking at Yulan. Docket, you know, you can't see it. Docket me, boom. And, uh, it's $90, the cheap one I got for my other computer that just does one button. Uh, yeah, is, uh, you know, it's $25. It can do Whisper. It feels cheap, it's light, it's $20. This one's $90. But it's got 3 buttons, so it's averaging $30 per click. And then I put the middle on my Whisper and I can do my long thing. This is a game changer. I don't know why I never had foot pedals before, but I'm thinking of eventually having 2 foot pedals and having 6 options here. It's great for a performer.

Yeah, I think people feel like, you know, it's going to be hard physically to sort of get in the hang of, but it's just like driving a car. Like at a certain point, muscle memory takes over and you just don't even think about it anymore. You just hit the pedal for the thing you want. I used to use it when I was doing a lot of transcribing, like doing subtitles. You would have a foot pedal.

And you know what? I, I have both my feet resting on the pedal, which is a nice feeling as well. So my feet are on the pedal right now and I'm just clicking back and forth. And this one has weight to it. Like you push it down, it's got weight, and then it comes with a bunch of springs. So if you don't like the weight it comes with, oh, you can change and have different pedal stoppers and has a different spring set. So I don't know why you'd ever do that, but maybe there are some people who actually really care about this. But Elgato makes a lot of interesting products, so kudos to them. I'll give you one more, please. Um, there's a company called Nothing, and they make these AirPod competitors called Nothing Ear 3s, and, um, they are really great. Uh, we'll pull it up on the screen. They're known for making an Android phone, but I'm not going to get on Android. I keep an Android backup phone. But anyway, these Nothing Ears are really great, and what's pretty interesting about them is they come with a case and there's a button on the case. And I started using this. So here I'm just opening up a new pack of them. Um, so there's a button over here and when you press the talk button, you press talk, it uses this like enhanced microphone. It's part of the case.

Oh, interesting.

So you hold it like this and you talk into it like this. So if you're driving, you're on the subway, now you've got like a podcast microphone in the case. See, they're pressing it right there.

Yeah.

And she's talking into it. And I found the fidelity is much better. And you can hold it, turn the microphone on there, and then when you're talking, you're just having a conversation with somebody like she's doing there, like it's a CB. AirPods, you put them in, it's got to do a bunch of funky stuff. Anyway, these have like great weight to them, they fit perfectly, they've got a cool vibe. I like Nothing. Nothing. I like Nothing. I like Nothing ears.

There you go.

All right everybody, it's been another amazing episode of Twist. If you want to join the TWIst Noti Gang, show up to our YouTube channel, join the chat. If you ask us, we'll put you into the group on the Twitter. Requires you to give us your handle, we'll add you. And you can also DM the @TWI Startups handle on Twitter and say, would you add me to the Noti Gang? Is that people have notifications turned on and join us live. And then you'll also get to see The, uh, yeah, there it is. That's the TWiST Noti Gang in there. And, uh, there's about 300 of us in there and just talking about startups, talking about the show every day, day in and day out. And, uh, it's a lot of fun. You just get to meet some other founders. We're gonna have to— I think it limits— X is limiting with our X chat. I think it's 350 people. Yeah, so we're almost there. So what we'll do is we'll do TWiST Noti 2. We'll do a second Noti Gang, and maybe we'll have one be for like most hardcore people, one for the more casual people, or maybe we just wind up having multiple ones fired off. But, uh, yeah, we'll have a community manager soon and we'll see you all on Wednesday.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.