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…uh was all done on the edge on the robots. No image ever left the robot unless you gave explicit permission to the exact image that we showed you that we are going to share. Uh all opt in and uh iroot adheres to the highest uh level of cyber and security. you know, we were the first consumer product company to ever uh meet the requirements of uh a um you know, sort of the gold standard in data security. >> So, if it wasn't the privacy concerns that you think led the FTC to block this acquisition, um and if you don't think it was ignorance on their part, what was it? Why do you think the government stepped in to prevent this merger from happening? >> I have no logical answer to that question. I do not believe there is any economic rationale which would say that the FDC or the European Commission had any evidence that the consumer was going to be negatively harmed by the acquisition of iRoot by Amazon and I view I believe that passionately the consumer only lost and so that if that's not the reason Why did the Federal Trade Commission with the Commissioner Lena Khan outspoken in her opposition of big tech choose to take a position contrary to the formal charge of the FTC to protect the interests of the consumer? Uh, and answer it with your own gut. >> What What is your own gut? I believe iRoot had nothing to do with the blocking of the deal with the FDC >> that it was essentially just Lena didn't want Amazon to get bigger and that was the end of the conversation. >> I believe iRoot was this is Colin's personal view. We were roadkill. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, so let's talk about you know as we sort of are running out of time here. what you think the implications of this are for future efforts to get robotics companies off the ground in the United States. We've had some uh robotics companies on the show uh over the past several months. What does your experience tell you about their likely path forward? And you know, what concerns do you have about the future of American manufacturing? you know, uh the the tragedy of of the blocking of the transaction is we did it to ourselves. And the net result, um which I have argued was done with eyes wide open was putting the consumer robot industry in a box, gift wrapping it, and handing it to someone else. Markets are difficult to create. They're fragile. They need to be nurtured. They need to be cared for. And there are many, many people who are working incredibly hard to take any scent of an exciting new market away from the inventor. We as a nation need to decide what we want to have happen. Right now, here we're sitting around with physical AI, uh, humanoids. Uh, it's at an exciting point. Billions of dollars have been invested in leadership and creating American companies that are uh doing tremendously exciting research and the ramifications is worth trillions of dollars of value creation in the future. Uh if you know what has been written and invested in is to be believed. And so, uh, are we going to protect and catalyze American companies to continue to lead? We need to reestablish confidence that the FDC's role is to prevent the abuses while catalyzing American competitiveness. M are we going to protect and catalyze American companies to continue to lead? We need to reestablish confidence that the FDC's role is to prevent the abuses while catalyzing American competitiveness. M >> uh and uh you know I have real concern that uh that may not be the commonly held view of the role of the FTC. So uh let if nothing else the tragedy of of of the events of of uh the Amazon attempted acquisition of iRoot to serve as a lesson as we think about uh an industry which honestly could be a thousand times larger than robot vacuuming. Now let's not screw it up. Let's treat this as the golden goose that could help the US economy drive uh economic leadership for decades to come. Um because it is in our hands. >> Well, Colin Angel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here and thank you for the conversation. Well, Casey, we're coming down to the end of 2025, and as is our custom on this show, it is time to stare into our crystal balls and look at our predictions for the coming year. >> Let's look at those balls. >> So, Casey, remind me what your predictions were last year. Well, Kevin, uh, as you know, each year we make three predictions uh, at different levels of confidence. So each year we say something that we are highly confident is going to happen, something that we are medium confident is going to happen, and something that we have a low confidence is going to happen. Right. And so let's dive into them. >> Yeah. >> Well, last year I said with high confidence, I think that in 2025 the AI culture war is going to begin. >> Yes. And you really nailed this one. >> Thank you. Uh yeah, I had basically predicted that we were going to see congressional hearings about the way that ChachiBT responds to certain questions and outrage about the way that LLMs respond with sort of, you know, politically sensitive topics. And uh if you sort of go back through the past 12 months, you can see that in March, Representative Jim Jordan subpoenaed 16 tech companies in an effort to discover whether the Biden administration had pressured them to quote censor lawful speech in their AI products. And then in July, Missouri's attorney general announced a new pressure campaign against uh many of those same companies by complaining that when it came to President Trump, uh chatbot makers weren't being nice enough to him. Uh that found that he it was sort of ranking him low on various uh lists that the attorney general thought that he should be ranked highly on. So this was exactly the sort of thing that I thought was going to happen. Honestly, it seemed obvious to me and it did in fact happen. >> Yes. And we also saw the woke AI executive order in July, which sort of put some sort of shiny government gloss on this requirement that chatbots remain uh ideologically neutral if they're going to be sold to the government. So yeah, I think this was a good prediction and you made it with high confidence and it came true. >> Yeah, look at you. Look at me. What was your high confidence prediction? My high confidence prediction for 2025 was that a newly released crypto memecoin would briefly reach a market cap of hundred billion dollars before crashing. And the s your high confidence prediction? My high confidence prediction for 2025 was that a newly released crypto memecoin would briefly reach a market cap of hundred billion dollars before crashing. And the closest we came was the Trump memecoin, which peaked in value in mid January at a market cap of around $15 billion uh and then crashed. As of this recording, its uh market cap is just over $1 billion. Um, so it did not kind of reach the high point that I thought maybe it would, but I think in spirit I'm going to chalk this one up to a win. >> Yeah, I don't think it's a win. You got 15% of the way to it being true and failed. That's an F, my friend. >> All right. All right. Let's talk about our medium confidence predictions. Mine was that in 2025, Whimo would go mainstream. And I think I got this one right. Uh, I thought maybe there might be an SNL sketch about it. That did not happen. But Whimo is now about to start operating in New York City, which I do think will be the gateway to it becoming more mainstream. There was also a question about Whimo on Jeopardy and it just announced that it was going to expand into a lot more cities including Miami and Washington DC. Uh it currently operates in the Bay Area, LA, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta. Next year it's going to Nashville and London. So I do really think that Whimo went mainstream this year. Kevin, wait. I if I get a a fail for my prediction about a crypto crypto memecoin, you do not get a passing grade for predicting that Whimo would go mainstream. >> How? Why not? >> There was no SNL sketch. That was your resolution criteria. And I would say for the most part like Whimo is still mostly a California phenomenon. Sure, it's operating these other cities, but it's been slower to roll out than expected across the country. There's been some resistance to it uh in some of the East Coast cities where it has announced plans to launch. So, yes, I agree. It has been a big year for Whimo, but I still think there is more to come as far as the public's embrace and understanding of the driverless car. >> Well, of course, there is more to come, but I think Whimo has become a household word in 2025. >> Okay, I'll let you have this one because I'm a fair and generous co-host. >> Thank you. What was your medium confidence prediction? >> My medium confidence prediction for 2025 was that Apple would acquire Snap. >> And Casey, I did not get this one right. >> You know what? You have my sympathy here because I thought that was a pretty good prediction. Snap has sort of been languishing for well over a year now. Snapchat is a very widely used product, but the business they built around it has just never been very good. And I think there was at least some thought that Apple might kind of pick them up and do something with its hardware uh which I think they could have really turbocharged. But uh they had other plans which was um to do nothing with Siri. >> Yes. >> Yes. They were busy not building AI features. >> So this one will have to wait if it happens at all until next year. That brings us to our final predictions for last year, our low confidence predictions. And my low confidence…

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