China Kills Meta / Manus Deal (Story Of The Year) | E2281

23:31Lon Harris: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 conveniently placed. Are you looking at this image? Is there a more iconic picture? I don't know who he's running with here. 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? Look at the top right of this image. What do you see on the lampposts? Oh, it's a surveillance cameras, huh?

24:10Lon Harris:Precisely. 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. 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, but for government stuff. And then here's a little clip for the, and if you're Chinese and you're a member of the Nodi gang, the notification gang, please let me know how he did. Let's introduce the founder of Facebook, Mark Dahlberg. Thank you. Hello. Hello.

24:51Hello. Hello.

24:53Lon Harris:I'm Yasheng Zai, Beijing. What I do.

25:09Okay.

25:11Lon Harris:But supposedly he was going like multiple times a week, multiple hours a week. 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 be sure. I'm thinking she's Chinese, but you can't make an assumption there. We should definitely fact check that. Get the synagogue on here. She's not Chinese. She's 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 an Asian household, I know this because I've made this mistake before.

25:53Lon Harris:Okay. Anyway, this is the story of the year now. Could this escalate? Will Trump get involved? Is this going to then relate in some way to Taiwan? Will this in some way relate to the TikTok action? 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, 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 going to have to keep watching this one.

26:34Lon Harris:Again, I'll just say it. Performative or is this going to be a go to the Mac kind of issue is what we're going to be looking for in the coming weeks. All right. Final story. Okay. So we got a few choices. 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 have a lot of investments, not just in Uber, but in, you know, 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. So this is a, yeah, I'll give a little context.

27:13Lon Harris:Disclaimer, please, if you don't want to watch it. Yes. First of all, we should say this is upsetting. If you are like we're about to show a dash cam video of a 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 dash cam. 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.

27:53And Epoch Times, just to be clear,

27:56Lon Harris:is that the one that Fulongong is producing? No, no, I think that's a different one, but this is - Anyway, Epoch Times is like a, I don't know if it's a US look at 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 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. Falun Gong. They're the Falun Gong. Yeah, they're they're that that Chinese spiritual movement that is the the government is suppressing it.

28:37They'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. 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, the Communist Party does not like that.

29:02Lon Harris:And so the Uyghurs, who are Muslim, in jail, sterilized, tortured, slave labor, and Fulongang is banned. They're banned. And you'll see that 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. And so I guess - This looks like a back alley in China, like a side - Not just back alley. This is like a side street in China.

29:42Lon Harris: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. Who knows? But there's the child. There's the child. And the car clearly runs it over. Seems like it disappears under the tire.

30:23So what Epoch Times says, here's the quote. A Harmony OS-enabled vehicle that is Huawei's operating system. It runs on smartphones, tablets, TVs, wearables, and self-driving cars. There's an increased speed from 24 kilometers per hour to 31 kilometers per hour. Two seconds later, a toddler, approximately two years old, steps from the sidewalk into the vehicle lane. The car speed drops, but it does not break 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 OK? I mean, this looks like you could have killed the kid.

31:04I do not. Sadly, I do not have any confirmation on what actually happened and if the child is OK. A similar instance happened in Santa Monica, paradoxically, the People's Republic of Santa Monica.

31:15Lon Harris:a Waymo came around a vehicle and hit a child. It did break in time. It did hit the child at, I think, five 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. So very interesting 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 in San Francisco. I like to stay active. You know, I'm getting a little older, but I've started drinking IMH Daily Ultimate Essentials, and it is delicious.

32:02Lon Harris:I'm starting to notice a real shift. I drink it every morning, and I just feel less tired, which allows me to really 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 post-biotics. 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 slash twist and use the code twist to get a free welcome kit, five free child roll sachets, and 10 % off your order.

32:45Lon Harris:These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Kit Kat, Stray Kat, Bodega Kat, murdered by Waymo. Yeah. Hit by Waymo. 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. A human is not expected. If a human pulled out of a spot and there was a cat under the car and it got run over, it'd be like, okay, sorry for the cat, but you're not required as a human driver to look under your vehicle.

33:26And it is sadly a thing that does happen all the time where people accidentally hit animals or stray animals or don't realize that their animal is under the car. Yeah, correct.

33:35Lon Harris: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. It's 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 show kids in Japan getting hit by a car, a kid running into the street in front of a car. So look for that. It's how they educate kids in Japan about running into the street. It's really effective. And they should be doing this all over the world. You've got to scare kids about running into the street and you're done.

34:15You 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 - Where you see footage of the aftermath of car accidents?

34:24Lon Harris:Watch this. Here you go. This is 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. 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.

35:10If you were inebriated, if you were, if you had been driving, like if they, if they, if the police came and found you were intoxicated or something and you hit somebody, then yes, that would be vehicular manslaughter.

35:20Lon Harris:But that reaction time to me looks like a human's reaction time, not a computer. Yeah. I mean, well, as a driver, I think you are constantly sort of concerned about kids running in the, 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 line, the one that's Epoch Times. 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, I mean, it looked like a great human reaction time.

35:53Lon Harris:But my point is, we're going to judge. When there's 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 we could say the model failed. But I'm making a different point. Right. Completely different point I'm making one. The point I'm making here, let me try one more time. The video from China shows human reaction time, but a computer driver.

36:29Lon Harris: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.

37:11Lon Harris:I think it was 5 miles an hour, if I remember correctly. Somebody can check. Like, I would say Waymo would be banned right now. 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. 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 U.S., there would be no question about, well, is it real? Is it authentic? Is it right? But it would be on the front page of every newspaper.

37:44It would be all we talked about for a week. Kit Kat, the bodega cat getting killed was big news for three, four days. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So, I mean, I think this is clearly a China versus the U.S. 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.

38:20Lon Harris: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 three 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. It's 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 seven days, I believe it's called. And so Piers Morgan says, well, you brought your Bible here to the studio. I believe this is the same Bible you were reading in court.

38:51We'll show the clip.

38:53Lon Harris:He can put it on 2X speed just for the giggles. This is 2X speed of being asked. Yes, if you want to. That was the one you took into court. You know, very one. Okay. What was your thinking of taking it into court? And what you were seeing, looking at some passages, what were the relevant passages for you? All right. Thank you for asking me. Thank you. I didn't know that. A little bit. It was this from Isaiah. You know, be chill. Sometimes I lose the chill now. It's pretty.

39:17Lon Harris:It's getting awkward. He wrote a book 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, write like that. You should be able to come up with one if it's so important to you that you wrote a book. What's it says here? This is a masterclass by Piers Morgan. Yeah, I love him looking at the camera. He just looks at the camera. He's letting them go. The first I was looking at that day was not this. I can't actually find the rest I had that day. He still hasn't found it. We're on double feed.

39:53This is from Isaiah 12.

39:54Lon Harris: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 yulon might be no 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.

40:35And this whole thing is just a gimmick. I think 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 is really funny. Like, this is a really funny.

40:51Lon Harris:Oh, so he's a bit. He was leaning into it. Part of me does feel like, I mean, if you were going to do this 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 oh i believe this is from iziah and then he keeps flipping 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 He's certainly a weird, you know, character at times.

41:29Lon Harris:It's like he is a shticky 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 tirades. I don't know, like monologues. They're monologues. He does these incredibly 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.

42:09Yeah, right. I think that's the...

42:11Lon Harris: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. That's such a popular refuge. So I don't want to besmirch the man's religion. Maybe it's clear, 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. OK, that's number one. What do you got for number two?

42:40Here's another. I found this viral thread. I will I will pull it up or Jacob can. Linus Ekinstam 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 chat GPT 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 see 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 A.I. Like, is this an op, Jason? Like, is this the FBI is writing this thread and telling you to put your fingerprints in their open AI database?

43:25Because this is very suspicious. Wait a second. I don't understand the story. One more time. OK. Linus Ekenstam, this guy, he said an 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. He's giving him the whole. And then if you go down, he says, I didn't know if this was going to work, but I also outputted my handprint.

44:06And 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 open AI is sharing. Okay, so putting aside the privacy thing,

44:23Lon Harris:this is just the perfect example of AI slop. There are people who've 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 chat GPT during training, there is no such thing as palm reading.

45:11Right. That's nonsense. Yeah. It's sucked in so much writing about palm reading, astrology, tarot, all that stuff. It was trained on like all those Reddit threads from those communities of people who believe in this got sucked in as data. So 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 GPD. Personally, I would not do that. 100 % the love of God. Don't do that.

45:51And 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 open AIs. Okay.

46:04Lon Harris:What's your third? Give us your third and final, Lon's third and final off duty. We'd like to go off duty. Yeah. I've been asking my team, please make me an off-duty jingle and video. Then 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, first I'll mention we got a comment in the YouTube chat from at ConsistentOne saying, 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 watch Dust Bunny after I talked about it here on the show who enjoy it.

46:38So 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 two on Apple TV. It's called Criminal Record. I really like this one. It's about, it's a cop show, but a lot of cop shows, it's like the cops are geniuses, and it's about these like hero genius cops. And they can't, they, you know, like, and I like Special Victims Unit or whatever 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.

47:17It'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 Kush Jumbo is DS June Lenker. She's always investigating these cases where she thinks the cops got it wrong. You know, she's 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. 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.

47:56It's a really engaging show. So six 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, the guy who did Veep, Armando Iannucci, he did a show. Yeah, not 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 movie.

48:15Lon Harris:90 % of the audience doesn't know who you're talking about, what you're talking about, which is great. They're great. It's great. I like to get introduced to a new actor. A great British actor. So this is a really cool show. Season two just kicked off on Apple. so you've got plenty of time to go back and catch up on season one and then jump into season two 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 and editor producer here salas said oh you should try the elgato yes pedal this thing's got way to it it's three different pedals one on the left one on the right one in the middle Now, I'm talking to you right now.

48:55Lon Harris:I'm not using my hands, but if I press the right pedal, it pulls up my Comet browser from Perplex. If I press the right one, it pulls up my Zoom. Wow. Right? Yeah. Left. Now, I'm always trying to put these two things on the screen, and then I have to 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 Uline. Dock it. You can't see it. Dock it. Me. Boom. And it's 90 bucks. The cheap one I got for my other computer that just does one button, yeah, is, you know, it's 25 bucks.

49:37Lon Harris:It can do whisper. It feels cheap. It's light. It's 20 bucks. This one's 90, but it's got three buttons, so it's averaging 30 bucks 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 two foot pedals and having six 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.

50:10You just hit the pedal for the thing you want. And I used to use it when I was doing a lot of transcribing, like doing subtitles, you would have a foot pedal.

50:17Lon Harris:And you know what? 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, 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.

50:48Lon Harris:There's a company called Nothing. and they make these AirPod competitors called Nothing Ear 3s. And they are really great. 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 they started using this. So here, I'm just opening up a new pack of them. So there's a button over here. and when you press the talk button, you press talk, it uses this like enhanced microphone.

51:23Lon Harris: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. They're pressing it right there 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, and it's got to do a bunch of funky stuff. Anyway, these have great weight to them. They fit perfectly. They've got a cool vibe.

51:53Lon Harris: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 at handle. We'll add you. and you can also DM the at 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, yeah, there it is. That's the Twist Noti Gang in there.

52:31Lon Harris:And 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 it's a lot of fun. You just get to meet some other founders. We're going to have to, I think it limits, X is limiting with our X chat. I think it's 350 people. 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 the most hardcore people, one for the more casual people. Or maybe we just wind up having multiple ones fire it off. But yeah, we'll have a community manager soon. And we'll see you all on Wednesday.

53:02Lon Harris:Bye-bye. Bye-bye.