SPEAKER_00: This Week in Startups is a show about startups and technology and that journey of trying to

SPEAKER_01: find product market fit and solve really challenging problems in the world. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Fundrise. Fundrise provides access to diversified portfolios of private real estate to all investors with their industry-leading, easy-to-use platform. Sign up today at fundrise.com slash twist. Brave. Brave is an internet privacy company on a mission to protect your personal info online. Download Brave today at brave.com slash twist to browse faster, search privately, and so much more, all in a single click. And OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for

SPEAKER_02: your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. I have a co-host here. His name is Alex Wilhelm,

SPEAKER_03: and he has an incredible 15, 20-year resume of working at places you've heard of like TechCrunch, Crunchbase, and Cautious Optimism is his newsletter that you can subscribe to for about 100 a year.

SPEAKER_05: How are you doing today, Alex? I'm doing fantastic. If you have young children, you'll know the feeling when you wake up and you're like, wait, I'm not exhausted. And I must have slept well last night, so I am flying today. And we have a really great show. I'm actually really

SPEAKER_07: excited about this. Jason, I'm going to tell people what's coming up. So first of all, new subscription rules. Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in Twist history, we are going to have Jason Calacanis

SPEAKER_05: say nice things about Lina Khan. So if you want to say history made, stay tuned. Then we have the CEO of Density On. They have a new thing called a waffle, but no, you can't eat it. Just wait, lots of cool stuff to come there. We have a first look at our AV fleet financial model, then nuclear power rising, and the startups looking to make solar possible. Jason, we are loaded today,

SPEAKER_07: but first up, Lina Khan. The FTC has some new rules out, and this caught your eye.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Yeah. You know, uh, we've been very critical about Lina Khan. I did a meme today from one of my, uh, I have an army of meme, uh, builders for me now. So if you pull up my Twitter,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you'll see this meme. So it's the, uh, Vannos meme. Did Lina Khan get us click to cancel? Yes. What did it cost? No exit market for four years. So this is somebody clipped this and said, it's Lina Khan. Thank you, Lina Khan, for your service. We do like the ability to cancel our gym membership, but please, please Lina Khan. If you get another four years before you go to

SPEAKER_00: Andreessen Horowitz or Y Combinator as a partner and secure the bag, please Lina Khan, let us sell

SPEAKER_03: companies for under a hundred million dollars without any approval process. Please just singles.

SPEAKER_14: We won't even ask for a double. A double would be 500 million. Okay. I'm going to ask for the double anything under a billion. Just let us sell it under a billy makes no difference. Let us sell.

SPEAKER_05: You just went from a hundred million to a billion in like two sentences. And I don't, I don't disagree. I actually think a billion would be a perfectly fine threshold, but have at it. Right. Here's the thing though. We are talking about this new FTC rulemaking in terms of Jason and Alex want to cancel the wall street journal sometimes and their gym. Here's the thing though. What about businesses

SPEAKER_07: that sell to consumers that currently make, let's say a good chunk of their revenue, Jason, buy folks for getting their pain $5 a month. So there's a pro business, pro consumer kind of

SPEAKER_19: tension here. And I'm curious how you think it's going to net out for business. Okay. So I think

SPEAKER_21: one of the great things about subscription businesses is that it creates a North star.

SPEAKER_22: When somebody unsubscribes, they get that box. Why are you unsubscribing and you get information back. I don't live in your city. And I moved to, you know, new England somewhere. I'm in Boston. I'm

SPEAKER_03: in Cape Cod, wherever you are. I'm in Brooklyn. Well, that's giving you a signal. If a hundred people move to Brooklyn, that's where you should open your next location. It's short-term gain as an

SPEAKER_14: entrepreneur to not let people unsubscribe. And you don't want people locked into a product that doesn't work for them. And there is a counter to this, which is you can come up with different subscription terms. I have no problem paying a year in advance. And the person saying you can't cancel you're buying it for the year. Like my ski pass when I just bought my epic passes. And last year,

SPEAKER_03: I bought an icon pass because I thought I was going to go icon and my schedule changed and I couldn't go on the icon trip. And I had bought a $1,100 icon pass. I skied zero days on it. But on my epic pass, I had skied 25 or 30 days. So I felt fine. You know, I put the two passes together, divided the number of 2000 by whatever number of days. And it was half the price of if I had bought lift tickets per day. So if you want that reservation added a nice hotel,

SPEAKER_14: there's a cancellation period, right? If you're booking a hotel during the Super Bowl, you can't cancel it. It's the Super Bowl. Or you can't cancel a week out. So there's reasonable things to be had here. And if you're a SaaS company, and it requires onboarding, you could say you can cancel any quarter, you know, or with 90 days notice in your to just make the just make it up front, right? Is I guess the goal. And this creates a weird tension where you have a group of people inside companies, Alex is such a great question, trying to do what are called dark patterns, and dark patterns no bueno. Because now you're, you've got really smart people trying to figure out how to trick people. That's not how business should work. You don't want people tricked into using your services, like you don't want people tricked into being in a relationship with you. This goes for, you know, the ultimate dark pattern in the United States is employment, and healthcare. If you are working at a company, and you've got kids, and you've got healthcare, and they've got a good family plan, you stay at that company because of the healthcare, and people will stay at IBM, or Google, or Microsoft because of the healthcare. And if the healthcare was portable, or was provided by the government, or independent of employment, or you picked it, and your company gave you a

SPEAKER_27: contribution to it, which is how I think it should work. Man, things would be so much better, so much

SPEAKER_07: better. You came here first, everybody. Welcome to this week in startups where we're in favor of Lena Khan and universal healthcare is on the table. All right, I'm okay with it. I think we should have a

SPEAKER_22: basic healthcare system just for the basics that everybody gets, and then you should pay for on top

SPEAKER_14: of that, and you should always be a fee. So if you go in, you should always pay 25% or 20% of the cost so that you know the price. Yeah, that's I think would be reasonable. I mean, just for things like

SPEAKER_30: basic checkups, that would save us so much money later on. But I do want to give a plug for myself,

SPEAKER_07: which is that while we're talking about smaller deals, acquisitions, acquisitions, and startup M&A, I do have the CEO and co-founder of Cashflow coming on Twist this Friday. They just sold the HubSpot early stage company. I'm going to figure out how the hell they got that done, and if there was any regulatory pressures, Jason. So more coming on this topic.

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SPEAKER_00: we have a great guest today. And he's got a new product. And I think it's time to transition to that.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Alex. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So I used to run a conference called launch festival. And before

SPEAKER_00: that it was called TechCrunch 50. And I might bring launch festival back, we stopped it during COVID. But at this event, 50 people launched a new product, one of those new products was a people counter. And it was at Phil's coffee in San Francisco. And it had a laser at the door. And when you broke the laser, it counted the number of people coming in or out, and it had to kind of figure that out. And then there was also one that used Wi Fi, which is a little creepy because you

SPEAKER_27: could identify people. And you would know that the same person came in connected to the Wi Fi,

SPEAKER_03: because even if you don't log into a Wi Fi, your phone might connect to it. That founder

SPEAKER_27: is Andrew Farah, and I am on the board of his company density. And I was I believe the first investor in the company. Welcome to the program. Andrew has a big product announcement today. Hey, happy to be here. Andrew, meet Alex. I don't know if you two have met before.

SPEAKER_34: No, it was the first time. Although since we've met, we've talked about skiing half the time. So now,

SPEAKER_05: later on, we need to talk about snowboarding. Okay.

SPEAKER_03: There we go. Andrew, we have been on this journey with density and the domain name is density.io, I believe still, and you can go see this incredible software. And tell everybody what the mission of density is today. And then let's go right into the announcement. We won't prolong this. Yeah,

SPEAKER_47: I'd really like to know how the world is used. And I think there are a lot of other people that would to about 3 trillion square feet of physical space in the world,

SPEAKER_50: residential and commercial. And we don't know how any of it's used. Something like 99% of it is unmeasured. So today we work with predominantly like large workplaces, large corporate offices. And we deploy radar sensors, kind of like wireless access points. So like above, you know, on the ceilings, and then we get a heat map of use inside buildings. And so we spend a lot of time about about 10 years trying to count people in physical space. And that's sort of our core customer is large corporate offices. And then we just announced something yesterday called waffle. That has been, you know, sort of like part, I described it as part love letter to our customers, and part return to our roots. Because it's something that we wished we could have bought when we started the company. And we just couldn't, we like couldn't find it in in the world. So

SPEAKER_00: technology wasn't there. And for people who don't know, the way density works today is you have to put a sensor in each of the conference rooms. I'm in a conference room here at Capital Factory in Austin, who is nice enough to house us while I look for our permanent office here. Shout out to my friend, Josh. And if you're a startup, Capital Factory is a great place to hang out.

David Friedberg: Um, I'm in a conference room with a producer. This conference room has seating for 10. And

SPEAKER_00: for a work, a coworking space or incubator like Capital Factory would be great for them to know the utilization of different rooms. What people do is they use conference rooms for 10, typically as phone booths. And so, you know, with density, if you were Amazon or Google or Microsoft or LinkedIn,

SPEAKER_03: and you have all this office space, wouldn't it be nice to know the utilization level? Yeah. And of the conferences, maybe you find out, hey, we've got too many conference rooms and not enough phone booths. Let's convert these two offices into eight, into a phone booths. And that would be a better use of space. So space planning for organizations space is typically the

SPEAKER_02: second or third line item. Is that right? Uh, Andrew?

SPEAKER_50: Yeah, second effort payroll. Second effort payroll. In fact, over the last year, something like 53% of all meeting room use was by a single person, regardless of size tracks. Yeah. Uh, so those

SPEAKER_03: have a limitation when you put the sensor arrays that density currently uses. Um, it requires power

SPEAKER_27: over ethernet, I believe, and you have to put these door sensors in and I don't know the approximate cost, but maybe you could give people an idea of what that costs. And maybe you could show that graph,

SPEAKER_50: you know, $1,000 all in installation hardware, software, and something like between 50 and 65%

SPEAKER_00: of that cost is installation. Got it. So it is hard and it costs money, but once you have it up and running, now you have perfect visibility into your campus. And if you had a lot of space, if you could

SPEAKER_65: cut 10% of the space or 1% of the space, I would assume, uh, sublet 1% consolidate, not add space.

SPEAKER_50: It would pay for itself. Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, to give you a sense of scale, like, you know, we work with many of the fortune 500 fortune 100, they'll have 65 million square feet of office space, office space, not, not warehousing, not like other sort of medical or infrastructure. We're just talking offices. Um, and when you're in the tens of millions of square feet of space, even north of a million square feet, you just lose visibility. Like, so you just like, can't, you can't know, you can't put eyes on all the space. The pandemic put a very like sharp point

SPEAKER_72: on how limited our visibility was in buildings. Cause everybody went home. Andrew. So when I'm

SPEAKER_07: thinking about this though, will I put the new product, the waffle into each one of the rooms at my fortune 500 company office footprint? Or do you think that the new product is more aimed at companies

SPEAKER_05: that have, I don't know, a couple of hundred employees, I'm going to sort it out and kind of put it into a market category. If that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, the, the, we were solving a problem

SPEAKER_50: that we faced, you know, every day doing deployments, which is like, it sucks to spend $700 on installation and $300 on the technology. Like that sucks. Yeah. So if you could, the question was two years ago, like, can you delete the installation cost? So we deleted the installation costs. You, you now self install the unit on a wall.

SPEAKER_79: So you went into founder mode, let's call it what it is. I was there. I saw it is, you know,

SPEAKER_76: it's been a rough couple of years. Eve and rice and going to the gym and then working on density. That's essentially all that I've been doing. Founder mode. Congratulations. Okay. So let's

SPEAKER_03: show the product. And I love this chart talking about, you know, what you did in terms of,

SPEAKER_00: you know, what Elon does in founder mode or Brian Chesney from Airbnb. So here's waffle, gorgeous. It sits on a table. I guess it gets attached to the wall. It looks like a hockey

SPEAKER_82: puck or a waffle. Um, and I suppose you could put this into an Airbnb as well to know if they're

SPEAKER_50: partying, huh? I mean, sure. I mean, I think, I think the, the, the thing that's exciting about self installation is that it, it immediately addresses the biggest pain point our primary customers have, which is cost, but it also opens up the world to lots of creative uses for count inside space. Um, yeah. So I, I'm excited to, to make this extensible to developers, especially, and also folks that are just interested in like, if this, then that style things,

SPEAKER_85: because I think the uses are, are, there's a very long tail.

SPEAKER_05: Oh, that's a lot of fun. So if you did, if this, then that, you could say, if there's more than five people in the room, turn the walls purple, and then there's less than three people turn them blue. And then you can have the DJ know how many people music. Oh,

SPEAKER_76: that's actually really fun. I was thinking totally boring. I will say it is capped count.

SPEAKER_50: So, so wall mounted self installed units, um, have an occlusion problem because you know, they can't see the entire space. And so at launch, the product will do what we call capped count, which is zero, one, two, and three plus. And then over time we'll sort of iterate on the algorithm and kind of update it, but it gets to most of the use case of is a room in use and how.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And here's, um, really where this gets super powerful. Um, people don't get to see

SPEAKER_00: this all that often, but here is an example of a building and here's floor number five office 403. And what you'll see is you can see that basically a heat map at different times. And when you're just looking at the floor plan, even if it was desks or, you know, um, office space, conference rooms, you just see the density of the space. And this gives a facilities person or somebody who's doing return to office and wants to know if there's asses and seats, uh, if it's working or not, right? Cause now you have Amazon saying, Hey, everybody's gotta be in the office. Andrew,

SPEAKER_27: Jesse said, uh, Apple's doing three days a week. People are starting to come back to the office and realizing the value of it, including myself. And so here we go. You're getting to see the,

SPEAKER_63: the, the rooms light up. So when you, um, can I mention what this is? Can I mention what this is?

SPEAKER_76: This is live wayfinding. This is for occupants. This is for employees. Got a screen, uh, over by the elevators where it says you are here. It is real data. So, um, and, and the way it works is we have a grid that shows the major highways or floor plan. That's sort of, this is ways for your office. It's ways for buildings, uh, ways for buildings. So, and so, uh, the, the sort of aquamarine color is in real time available. And the red is currently occupied in real time. And real time is defined as essentially sub seven, it's sub 700 milliseconds. So if you walk into a room, it will instantly turn red. Um, so this is fantastic. Cause one of the big complaints

SPEAKER_00: people have with office suiting as a concept or conference rooms is, oh my God, I got there.

SPEAKER_03: Somebody was in the room who didn't have the room. And not only were they in the room, they were in the room with a bunch of Chinese food and eight people. And then I have the room reserved and I got to tell them to clean up all the Moogle guy pan and the general so's chicken,

SPEAKER_103: the sauces everywhere. It's a disaster. I mean, we've all had this experience.

SPEAKER_105: Uh, I mean, we should have called the product Moogle guy pan. I think,

SPEAKER_103: I mean, I'm just rattling off dishes here. I like, but, uh, yeah, it's such an incredible product. And so this, you had a chart. I thought that would be very interesting. This took four months

SPEAKER_76: to deploy. Oh, you're looking at right now took four months to deploy all the devices, all the planning, all the PoE, all the ethernet cables, like all the ladders that you had to climb up on after hours. Cause you can't do work when people are in office. This took four months to deploy with waffle. Um, you can do this in an afternoon. Yeah. Wow. You do it literally in like two

SPEAKER_74: hours. This is how many sensors do you think we, how many waffles will we need Andrew to make this

SPEAKER_07: work today? One per room, one per room. So there's one, two, three, four houses. I don't know, 15 rooms here. So call it 15, six, 20, 20. Is that a reasonable estimate? Yeah. Okay. So it's nice. You know, somewhere around there. Yeah. 150 bucks a piece, eight bucks a month seems pretty cheap. I mean, when we think about the cost of office space, eight bucks per month per sensor,

SPEAKER_05: which I think is what you're charging for waffle doesn't seem like a lot. Frankly, I, I almost wonder if you're under charging. He's under charging. That's my advice as a venture capitalist.

SPEAKER_115: Jason wants you to add zero to that. If you don't mind. No, I mean, one of the great things,

SPEAKER_00: Andrew, I'll let you answer the question is when you under price something, um, people will use it more and they'll deploy it and get value from it. And you can scale. Yeah. Uh, you, you remove an objection. Cause I could see people saying, oh, a thousand dollars a room to install these 40,000 per floor, 10 floors, $400,000. That could be a blocker for somebody who's got a company.

SPEAKER_03: That's really penny pinching or consolidating at that time, even though they would save it in the

SPEAKER_76: next year with what they would learn. Right. I mean, this utilization, the sensing of buildings,

SPEAKER_50: like buildings becoming aware of humans, I think is going to follow a similar adoption curve as wifi.

SPEAKER_76: Um, wireless wireless buildings 30 years ago did not have wireless connectivity. They were all hard lined. Yeah. And if you look at the history of like Aloha net and like all of these is a very rich history to wifi. It wasn't until 2011 when we hit like 450 megs down per second that it became, it was like, this is as good as hard line. I should just have that. This is silly. And I'm now talking to you on a

SPEAKER_50: laptop as a result of that infrastructure being deployed, but it took literally 25 years. Um, so I, I think sensing is, is kind of similar. We're not replacing an existing system. It's net new infrastructure for buildings. And so if you can keep the, if you get that cost curve, if you're on the

SPEAKER_76: bottom end of that cost curve, you can rapidly accelerate the adoption of new infrastructure, which then opens up new possibilities like dynamic HVAC or real-time availability of spaces or notify me when a place is quiet, or is that cafe currently super busy right now, or we should like totally change the structure of our, our buildings because we've got 53% of meeting rooms being used by a single person. All of those are outflows of making the infrastructure low cost and scalable.

SPEAKER_05: There's also an environmental impact here. Cause you guys talk about on your website, knowing what's been used and therefore avoiding cleaning, clean spaces. And so I can also see

SPEAKER_07: saving water, chemicals, paper, et cetera, in larger offices with lots of rooms and boats.

SPEAKER_50: Yeah. So, uh, about $6 a square foot. So assume like $30 a square foot is the average cost for a lease in the U S premium class A is about 60, $65 a square foot. Your, your facilities cost is about $6 of that 65. Um, and so you can optimize that six with cleaning where the real returns are

SPEAKER_76: on energy or on, I'm sorry, on, um, sort of sustainability is that 39% of all global carbon emissions come from buildings. Half are from energy, operational carbon half are from building materials in the construction of buildings. And we add to the net new buildings every year. I'm sorry, every day, 13,000 net new buildings every day. And we, and that is going up.

SPEAKER_03: So if we just didn't turn on air conditioning and heat on floors that were unoccupied or areas that were unoccupied, we could do a massive amount of not only, um, saving the environment, which is awesome and virtuous. We could also take a load off the grid, which we're having grid problems. And then on top of that, uh, the person who runs the office and the facilities would save money. It's like a win, win,

SPEAKER_14: win, win. All right, everybody, you know, my favorite browser that I use on my mobile phone and my desktop every day, all day is brave. Why do I use it? Well, it's privacy first. And I don't want people knowing what I'm searching for. I don't want to be tracked. I don't like ads really. It's for two reasons. One, I think it's creepy, but two, it slows me down loading web pages with pop-ups and ads. It's just insufferable. And brave also has a built-in search engine and it's awesome. Brave search is powered by one of just three global scale web indexes. And unlike other independent search engines, it isn't a skin over big tech technology, right? It's their own search. And they have 7 million daily users, 35 million queries, and it's the fastest growing independent search engine since Bing. And you don't need the brave browser to use brave search. You can just go to search.brave.com using any browser. I mean,

SPEAKER_48: I of course think you should use brave for so many reasons. It's also got a VPN built in, which is really cool, especially when you're at a cafe. So search all day long, every day at search.brave.com. And if you want to try brave search today, go to brave.com slash twist, get better results, protect your privacy and get the answers you need faster. Go to brave.com slash twist. So they know

SPEAKER_131: that we sent you and download the browser. It's awesome. What happens if New York City knew how it

SPEAKER_50: was used? Like that, that is kind of the core question. If you could snap your fingers and on like on Monday, New York City knew how it was used, had perfect data on use. Would anything change?

SPEAKER_134: Everything would change. Everything would change. Like,

SPEAKER_136: how do you change the subway pattern? You would change how cars move. You would change the cost of rent.

SPEAKER_00: You would change where you would build buildings. You would change how many

SPEAKER_63: Starbucks baristas were at one cafe versus another. Just, I mean, and all of this is done with privacy. So I think maybe you could speak to privacy here, Andrew, and why that's important.

SPEAKER_27: Cause this was something you and I had a bunch of debates about early on. And I was like, why don't

SPEAKER_47: we just use a camera for this? So the answer to that question. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, so this is,

SPEAKER_50: it's, it's really small. This is the board. Um, and it's, uh, it's about 75 millimeters by about 20 millimeters will be sort of like the final, final device. And you can see the renders, um, and the final product shots on the website. If you want New York city or any city to know how it's used, you have to solve the distribution problem. How do you get an intelligent device into every relevant room in the world? One of the interesting barriers to that is, um, if you're deploying surveillance tech, people get really uncomfortable using spaces in certain ways when they're observed and this,

SPEAKER_76: and the second that they feel like they're not being observed and you see this play out in Airbnb, right? Airbnb has a global policy of no cameras allowed in any of their spaces. If you are a host,

SPEAKER_50: the reason they do that isn't because cameras aren't useful, uh, or because hosts don't want them. They do want them. It's because guests really don't, it doesn't drive, uh, a distribution of use. On the guest side. And so if you can achieve the vast majority of what you need to achieve and use with a, an anonymous at source system, I think that's good for business.

SPEAKER_144: Yeah. I was in an Airbnb recently and they had cameras on the outside of it and they had it in

SPEAKER_00: the backyard where we were hanging out and there was a hot tub and a dinner place. And I'm like, that camera's on. And it's obviously could be recording every conversation I'm having is recorded at this Airbnb in the backyard. And I was like, yeah, how do I unplug it? And I can, they had obviously strung the cable up to make it so you couldn't easily unplug it. And I was like, well, this has gotta go in the rating system here. This is not cool. I mean, obviously covert cameras,

SPEAKER_14: but yeah, putting the, it is very nice to know for a hotel, if a guest is in the room so you can clean it. That's right. And this would be such a game changer. Well, when you stay at an Amman hotel,

SPEAKER_00: they have a door monitor sensor system. So they do know a door opens and closes. If a door opens and closes, they will send the cleaning crew there, uh, to go clean it, but they don't know if you're

SPEAKER_14: actually in there or not. They just have a guess here. You would know there's two or three people in the room, whatever. And I had an Airbnb for a while. And, um, we had, you know, no party rule and somebody threw a party. I found out about it. Cause I had a driveway cam. And in the morning,

SPEAKER_27: I woke up and like from 3 AM till 7 AM cars and Ubers were dropping off and I had like 30 notifications when I would normally have none, uh, during that time period. So it was very weird. Um, do you have the chart of the cost? There was a really cool, uh, chart you had with the cost. And I think for entrepreneurs, this is super important. You've been working on this company for a decade. And, you know, it's just another one of these, uh, as we call it in the business, uh, overnight successes, 10 years in the making a decade in the making. So maybe you could show that. Um, so here we go cost per sensor over time. And you, uh, had the depth sensor cameras or optical sensors, radar,

SPEAKER_50: the battery, everything. Yeah. So, so you can see the, uh, and you know, a more detailed breakdown would include what portion or percentage goes to installation, what portion is sort of core hardware software, but ultimately the total cost of ownership has a huge impact on adoption. Um, and, uh, what's interesting is like all, and you can, you actually see this similar chart, you know, with space X, they'll show a similar chart on like cost per kilogram to get to orbit, um, or, or, um,

SPEAKER_76: you know, essentially a weight measurement of how much does it cost to get a certain amount of weight

SPEAKER_50: to orbit and all of the interesting stuff. I don't know if you can see my cursor, but all of the, all the interesting stuff happens sort of in the bottom right. Um, and so if you look at waffle relative to these costs, um, it just has like a really big impact on what types of new places

SPEAKER_144: you could deploy in the world. Yeah. I mean, if you're a cafe and you don't want, you know,

SPEAKER_00: a cafe owner doesn't want to spend this kind of money or a hotel, you know, doesn't want to spend the money. This is a way to actually do that. Uh, wow. Continued success here. This is amazing. And if you look back on your journey here as an entrepreneur, um, what, what have you learned, you know, in your, if you were to mentor folks who are starting a hardware startup specifically,

SPEAKER_27: because hardware is hard and your hardware and SAS and SAS is on the easier side of businesses.

SPEAKER_00: That's why a lot of people like to do them. Cause you know exactly who you're going after you get all that benefit. Um, and you have like a very narrow, specific problem you get to solve and it

SPEAKER_27: doesn't have the, I don't know, um, randomness or lightning in a bottle of consumer, but man, adding hardware, hardware is hard. So as a hardware founder, what have you learned and what advice can

SPEAKER_50: you give other entrepreneurs? Well, in a world where, you know, you can ask cursor to help build a piece of software and replicate, you know, split wise, uh, in about an hour and a half, I think physical systems, um, you know, going after hard problems and building physical systems is a hard problem. It will be def will be defensible, much more defensible than I think sort of just like pure software layer that said, um, but you have to really want to do the thing. We're wandering into a world where the infrastructure is so much better than it was when I started. There's so many new things that you can build with on really good rails. And the companies that are going to win, I think are the ones that are willing to be playful. Um, and you see this in, in Tesla, you know, you see this in, uh, Andrew, Andrew is a defense contractor and they're still playful. Um, and, and I think the folks that are willing to sort of like, you know, not take themselves too seriously, but also build, you know, exceptional stuff

SPEAKER_76: are probably going to win. Also go to, go to the office. If you're a startup, like don't do it distributed. Um, and that that's not, that's not because that for me, unpack that. Well, what trust is built in person and it's lost virtually. And, and I have this theory.

SPEAKER_50: Um, I was talking to someone just yesterday about this, uh, and they brought up a really interesting point and I, I, it never really occurred to me, but you can't read body language

SPEAKER_76: as well distributed. You can read some, but it's actually deeply muted. It's like wearing socks on your feet, you know, or gloves on your hands. But as soon as you get in person, all of a sudden, like the conversation is funnier that you want to know about their lives. Like it's sort of rounded out. And I'm, I'm reasonably convinced that it actually has to do with just like physical

SPEAKER_00: body language. It's like somatic. It's like somewhere deep in our human existence connecting in person, uh, resonates. Here's an image, uh, from the visual capitalist, uh, who does really nice graphics of, um, the cost of space flight. And as you can see here, uh, the cost per kilogram of like the space shuttle delta heavy. Exactly. Uh, here comes Falcon one, Falcon nine, Falcon heavy. And then here's the starship estimate. And what this chart shows is a slow curve coming down and then

SPEAKER_03: it falls off a cliff very beautifully. So the slope just, you know, angle straight down. This is the reverse of the hockey stick, or it's an upside down hobby hockey stick cost plummeting. Uh, and when costs plummet adoption goes up, if you were to build, uh, you know, a six lane freeway and you previously had a two lane, you know, Avenue, uh, what you'd find is people would, it would induce

SPEAKER_00: traffic. People would get on that highway and explore new places. And that's what the highway

SPEAKER_27: system did in America. It just inspired people to go for rides because you could go 60 miles an hour and go somewhere 120 or 300 miles away from your house, uh, quite easily and comfortably.

SPEAKER_76: So if you're a founder, like nail your unit economics and then do that, because what happened in the run up, you know, in sort of the Zerp era is, um, this would happen, right. But, but it was with negative unit economics. And so after you grew, uh, like it did drive demand. Um, uh, but, but the faster you grew, the faster you died. If you nail your unit economics and, and, and you, then you go crush your costs so that you can bring to market like the, uh, um, essentially a democratized version of a technology. You do all sorts of amazing things. You unlock all sorts of amazing

David Friedberg: things. We're going to go to Mars because of this Uber X comes to mind, uh, you know, with, uh, Uber

SPEAKER_00: and that whole race with Lyft, the Lincoln town cars were fabulously profitable at the beginning. You know, economics were beautiful. All that Zerp era money went into building Uber and Lyft into tens of thousands of cities globally. Um, and then they had to work backwards to change the unit economics. This is what Brian Chesky had to do. He had to reorganize, um, Airbnb over since

SPEAKER_03: COVID to now to being a money losing machine to a money printing machine. Uber went from a money losing machine to a money printing machine. Tesla went from a money losing machine to a money printing

SPEAKER_00: machine. It's also known as the J curve where you invest, invest, invest, but unit economics is at the core of it. You have to understand, you know, how much you're charging for these things and how

SPEAKER_27: much they cost to deliver. Cause selling a hundred dollar bills for 50 bucks is quite popular. Alex.

SPEAKER_29: Well, it's a super popular, but I feel like Jason, you're dancing around the, the, the obvious question for our fine friend here, which is what are the gross margins then on the new waffle?

SPEAKER_167: Well, that's a good question. Um, I mean, they're definitely positive. Um,

SPEAKER_76: good start. That's, uh, they're definitely positive. Um, they're, we are not wrapping dollars around hardware or software. Um, software has sort of typical, like, you know, 80%, 80 plus percent

SPEAKER_50: software gross margins. Um, and then hardware, um, you know, first run stuff always costs a bit more,

SPEAKER_136: but even our first run stuff will be profitable. What will consumers be able to, uh, buy these? Is this like a consumer could just come to the website or buy 10 of them?

SPEAKER_50: This is also the first time we're publishing price. Um, and allowing people to self-serve. Uh, like if we're going to allow you to self-install, you should be able to self-serve. So in January, um, we will open up, uh, the ability to just kind of purchase a unit.

SPEAKER_171: Oh, wow. Can you pre-order now? Is that, is that on the website or no?

SPEAKER_50: Uh, you have to reach out to us. Um, then you got to talk to me. Okay. Um, Andrew at density.io.

SPEAKER_76: Then you can buy, cause we have a lot of demand from core customers. And so we're trying to make sure

SPEAKER_72: to meter where those initial volumes go to the right customers. We want to make sure that a customer like is fabulous, successful. How many units are in the first run?

SPEAKER_50: So typical like EVT, DVT, PVT, which is just like engineering design and then production validation testing. Yeah. Um, usually going from like 25 to, to a hundred units in your EVT builds to, um, to call it a couple hundred in your, uh, DVT build. And then you, once you break a thousand units, you're that's usually you're in your production validation testing, and then you're in sort of continuous manufacturing. So you can sort of imagine thousands of units, uh, becoming sort of initial, initially available. And then you go into continuous manufacturing, which is a supply demand forecasting. Like you wander into a different, different about a different math.

SPEAKER_181: So when we're in, you know, this are Q3 of next year, this has been out for, you know, six, eight

SPEAKER_07: months. How many units do you think you're going to sell of the waffle per month or per quarter?

SPEAKER_183: I don't know. You should talk to me then. Uh,

SPEAKER_184: I mean, I'm just curious to see how fast this can grow because there's a lot of space in the world.

SPEAKER_122: There's just so much space in the world. And I think, you know, I, I, I want to hear the end of

SPEAKER_76: your question, but I would just say, um, what, what is, what will be interesting is the mix of core

SPEAKER_50: enterprise workplace customers and, and sort of like expansion within existing customer sets and how this drives net new adoption, even within core ICP, like ideal customer profile.

SPEAKER_76: Um, and then there's the other category and I'm most excited about, well, I'm actually thrilled about all three because like, we want to serve core customers. We want to drive top of funnel pipeline, but we're also really excited about the experimentation people will do.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I also just want to say you ruined coffee badging for all the people out there who like

SPEAKER_07: to go and swipe the badge and go home and work. So that means that you are now the biggest narc

SPEAKER_192: in corporate America, Andrew, I think. Well, okay, hold on. So I don't know who you are.

SPEAKER_76: No, this is actually a fair criticism. Uh, but, but probably not of us. We, we don't know who you are. And we also don't know if you've, how long you personally have been in a space. All we know is how the space was used and how many people, uh, were maybe assigned, like what teams were assigned to that space. Yeah. So you keep coffee badging all you want and you can take up with HR and density

SPEAKER_160: will have zero to say about it. Unless you're a senior executive and have your own office,

Chamath Palihapitiya: then we could safely assume if you're in the CEO office, we know the CEO's ass in seat. It was a funny moment. I, we were in a board meeting years ago and I was like, why don't we put a sensor in the seats? And you would actually literally know asses in seats. Yeah. And Andrew was like, no, that's a little much. We're trying to figure out how cheap could it be. And I was like, a weight sensor in a seat would be really interesting now, but that could be an interesting product for a bus

SPEAKER_03: or a subway is to actually know the utilization of the seats, right? Because you could actually then know in a cafe or a park. Hey, we need more seating. It's, you know, we have enough seats. We don't have enough seats. People counting is amazing. The leader in this space is density.io.

SPEAKER_00: I am super excited to be a board member and a friend of Andrew's for the past decade. It's one of the great joys of my life to watch an entrepreneur absolutely crush it and hit these,

SPEAKER_27: as rule off would call them crucible moments and a crucible moment. This was for the organization. Can we get the waffle out? And here we are, we did it. And by we, I mean, you and the incredible team. So I just want to say thank you to the density team. It's just an honor to watch how hard everybody worked, Andrew. And I know that you had to make

SPEAKER_00: a lot of very difficult decisions or layoffs, restructuring, get back to office. You know,

SPEAKER_206: it just, it's hard. Startups are hard and hardware startups are hard. And just, you have my complete respect for the hard work on this journey.

SPEAKER_122: Andrew. There's still so much to do. Um, that's right. Yeah. Excited to touch base with you all again

SPEAKER_48: soon. All right. We'll talk soon. All right. Are you still using multiple devices and apps to run

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SPEAKER_05: lot more on the docket and yeah, I'm going to give you a taste Jason of our upcoming robo taxi fleet

SPEAKER_07: modeling spreadsheet. Kabir and I are working on this. Uh, it is not quite done, but I can show you a couple of things. If you want to show on Monday, Jason walked us through a chat GPT 4.0 canvas

SPEAKER_34: demonstration. Make it two sizes bigger. If you don't mind, maybe one or two sizes bigger.

SPEAKER_05: I do not mind. Okay, perfect. Okay. So what we've done is we've taken your work and we have broken it down into individual, um, questions that can be answered. So for example, Jason, if we wanted to say that the max number of trips per day that a robo taxi could do is 20, and let's say it takes about 90 days off for service, six hours a day. That's about 91 days a year. Call it 90, just to be simple. That leaves 275 days, theoretical trips. And then we can calculate pretty easily how many AVs we would need to replace all U S trips, just lift Uber, public transit, et cetera. Now we also worked in the costs per unit and then not changing overall demand. We have estimates now for what would cost to replace all cars, just lifts and Ubers or parts of public transit. And then also Jason, you asked for a

SPEAKER_07: inclusive of 20% search. So let's say people don't go out more because there's more options. Those, the numbers there, and we can also tinker with the slide. So if we want to change all the numbers,

SPEAKER_05: make it easier, we can just make this 30 and then everything changes. So, okay, great. So we'll

David Friedberg: put the robo taxi fleet modeling into the show notes. So, uh, you'll be able to see it very

SPEAKER_00: easily. And here we go, folks, the total trips, uh, annually are in the United States, 400 billion,

SPEAKER_07: according to, uh, national highway. Travel household national household travel survey, 2022, which is

SPEAKER_03: the most recent. Yeah. And Uber and, uh, lift trips in the United States, 4 billion public transit,

SPEAKER_00: 20 billion. I think that number's very low, but we'll see if it is or not. Um, and then trips per

SPEAKER_03: day. If you were driving a, an actual Uber, uh, you could probably do about 20 trips a day in a car because you have to charge the car. You have to clean the car. So if we take six hours out, there's 18 hours left. And if each ride took 45 minutes is my estimate, 20, 30 minutes per ride, and then maybe 10 to 20 minutes to get to the next destination. Remember, you have to get to your next ride. Now in Manhattan, that might be much smaller where, you know, you're only taking, you know,

SPEAKER_00: short rides and your next pickup will be very close. If you're in the suburbs, you know, if you're out in the hill country, uh, in wine country, uh, you know, might take half an hour to get to your next ride, or 45 minutes to get to your next ride. And your ride might be 45 minutes. So we, we just came up with this 20 trips that obviously would very, very dependent on suburb country or city or infill,

SPEAKER_03: you know, different areas. Um, and the number of days, the AVs on the road. So that's an interesting

SPEAKER_00: way to do it. You're taking out six hours a day and you probably have to take out maybe five days a year, I would say to change the brakes, the tires, inspect the car. But anyway, 90 days, Misty 95 days,

SPEAKER_63: miss per year is based upon the six hours of daily maintenance. And what I wanted to point out was

SPEAKER_14: when I did the back of the envelope math, what I saw was this would take a long time. Yes. And this doesn't take into account two factors that we want to add here, which is regulatory consumer adoption. And the third piece, um, of course is actually building the car. So when we look at this, we've estimated that Waymo cars on the low end would cost 5.5 trillion. That's 80,000 per car or 75,000 per car. Um, and then Waymo on the higher end, I think is 120,000 is what I was told.

SPEAKER_27: So maybe we put 120,000 in there. Um, if you don't mind in cell B 25, that's about 120,000 is what I was

SPEAKER_14: told those cars cost right now. So to, to replace the entire fleet at the Tesla, uh, BYD and Baidu prices, which is 30,000 per vehicle, you're talking about 2.2 trillion just for the United States. 2.2 trillion

SPEAKER_00: is a lot of money. Alex, just to give you an idea, probably Tesla has $30 billion in the bank. Uh, and, uh, Apple maybe has 200 billion. It's, it's a big number. Um, now, which means it's a big opportunity, obviously. And so two to $9 trillion is the cost estimate, depending on who's doing this. Uh, so this is the Tesla advantage is that Tesla and Baidu and BYD those three companies build stuff very cheap. Then you have Waymo prices very high and somewhere in the middle is, I guess what the average will be. Uh, and then if we scroll down here, uh, the, so we have regulatory risk or regulatory

SPEAKER_14: cost and capture, then you're going to have consumer adoption. Maybe 50% of people will want to give up their cars. Is it 80% of people? Is it 20% of people that's unknown? And then there's how quickly

SPEAKER_27: can cars be built? So did we, in this model yet talk about the time it would take to make this many

SPEAKER_225: cars? No, I, uh, I had to jump into the recording, but I will have a much better model. By the time you hear this, for instance, we're listening to the podcast model will be improved. The link will be public.

SPEAKER_103: Um, very simply, you know, uh, Tesla, uh, since they have the biggest ambition here made 1.8 million

SPEAKER_14: cars, I believe last year, let's assume they put half their factory space towards this. They make a

SPEAKER_00: million of these robo taxis a year. Let's say they can increase production by 20% a year. That means

SPEAKER_14: every three years they would double production. So, you know, to get to 50 million cars, 70 million cars, we can actually estimate that that's going to take Tesla. If they did a million and let's say they

SPEAKER_27: did 500,000 in the first year, that would be very aggressive, right? 10,000 a week. Yeah. I don't know if they could do 10,000 a week, um, for a new car line, but let's say they could 500,000 in the first

SPEAKER_14: year. Let's say they double it to a million. And then from that point forward, they grow 20%. So 2026, 2027, they put 500,000 on the road, 2027, they put, uh, no, no, I think he said they're going to start coming out in 2026, which means like full production year will be 2027. Okay. Let's say, let's say 2027, 500,000, 2028, a million. And then we just go 25% more a year, which would be like a very aggressive production ramp. At what year could they replace, you know, half the cars in it? Could they take up the entire us and then we could do the world, right? And, and you can kind of see that

SPEAKER_00: this is going to be, and then all car manufacturers do about 70 million cars or sold a year. I think I

SPEAKER_27: read. So you can start to really think about if all car manufacturers had this technology and put it to work, we could actually do all the cars in the United States. If everybody from around the world

SPEAKER_03: stopped providing cars to everybody else and just send them to the United States and they had the ability to put self-driving in it and regulatory happened, you know, it's going to take years, uh,

SPEAKER_05: is I think what everybody will come to. The, the thing that I learned though, putting this together and we'll, we'll clean it up. So if you're watching this live, you've seen me taking notes is because

SPEAKER_07: it's all working, but the thing is efficiency is such a safety because every time you increase the trips per day, Jason, the number of cars you need, the costs, the maintenance expenses, it really comes down. And so the biggest lesson for me is if you can do more trips per car per day in a robo taxi fleet, your economics are going to be just so much better. That opens up opportunities for, you know, cleaning maintenance and so forth being done kind of at the micro scale inside of cities, tune ups, fixes, that sort of thing. Anything to keep the expensive assets that depreciate on the road during their, um, their prime is going to be absolutely clutch, but it's a lot of dollars. I'm very excited about this. And I really do think, like you said, it's going to be a J curve and we're going to have a very changed world quickly. It didn't take that long to get rid of horses.

SPEAKER_03: Once they add carbs. Yeah. And, and the rollout probably that would actually be a really interesting

SPEAKER_00: thing to compare this to is how many years did it take for horses and buggies to transfer to cars? I don't actually have that information. Chad, she could probably give it to us in 30 seconds. So anyway, let's keep moving here. We're made this model. There were some other stories in the news

SPEAKER_27: that we can get to. We're about 50 minutes into this live show. So what do we got left in the docket?

SPEAKER_07: Well, let's touch quickly on nuclear because there's quite a lot going on here. And then I think we'll end up teasing our solar startups and batteries for the next episode. But, um, Jason and I, you flagged that Google has now put together a deal with Kairos for nuclear power. This is a deal. They're calling the world's first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors

SPEAKER_05: or SMRs guys. That's an acronym you're going to want to know because everyone is talking about small

SPEAKER_63: modular reactors. Jason. I love this. Yeah. Uh, Kairos K A I R O S Kairos is how it's pronounced. Am I correct? Yep. Yep. Yeah. So Google is purchasing these, uh, and I guess when will they have the first one live, but, uh, you know, we also saw Microsoft turn on three mile island. Now you have Google. I don't know who else in the mag seven or, you know, in big tech has committed to nuclear in the U S uh,

SPEAKER_07: Amazon big news this week. They have three deals coming up. They have a deal with energy Northeast for four advanced SMRs in Washington state. They are also doing a deal with Dominion energy to build an SMR, um, in Virginia, where a lot of us data centers are located and they're putting money into X energy, which is a nuclear power startup we've talked about here on the show. So really, Jason, I think if you are a hyperscaler on the cloud, you are going to be involved in nuclear power, either paying for it, investing in it, or purchasing from it just for the rest of time.

SPEAKER_00: This is the new reality. Yeah, this is fantastic. And these small modular reactors are different than the giant ones you see that look like the ones from the Simpsons, you know, the giant towers that Wolverine and Deadpool fought on top of like, those are different than SMRs. These small module reactors are smaller as is in the name. They're don't take up the vertical space. They're not eyesores and they're incredibly safe because they don't melt down. And you can look up all that technology. I think one of the interesting things here is, um, we went from after Fukushima, which

SPEAKER_63: was less than 10 years ago. Uh, I believe he and that terrible, uh, tragedy, which was completely

SPEAKER_14: avoidable because they put an old style nuclear reactor below sea level. They were told not to do

SPEAKER_22: it. Like literally they were told this is too dangerous to do. They did it anyway. And then that led

SPEAKER_14: to the Germans, uh, you know, and, and you're up to being anti nuclear and this like incredible turning off of nuclear power plants in Germany. Now here in the United States, we had three mile island. Obviously, uh, there was a tragedy in Russia as well. And so all of a sudden we are now in a

SPEAKER_03: position where everybody believes we're going to be able to have nuclear power everywhere in the United States. What happened, Alex? What explains this comp? Cause I don't hear anybody saying stop this. I don't hear one politician. I don't hear Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, you know, somebody in the pocket of oil, somebody who's a green person. I don't hear anybody saying no, or we have to stop this. I don't hear the press. I don't hear any groups of, uh, greenies saying this is terrible environmentalists. Why the vibe switch? What happened Alex?

SPEAKER_225: Well, the environmentalists, uh, who are anti-nuclear energy, which in my view, aren't environmentalists because they're insane, um, are still making some noise, but I do think it's been

SPEAKER_05: dampened because the, the, the reality has changed for a long time. Energy consumption

SPEAKER_07: rose with GDP. There was a pretty good correlation between it. However, in the last decade or two in much of the developed world, there was a divergence. Energy consumption was roughly flat. Well, GDP kept growing totally fine, but power growth demands have now very much changed. We're talking about putting nuclear energy in Washington state all the way to Virginia, because that's how many data centers, which I think of as digital brains we're building. They're going to get bigger. If you recall from the liquidity summit, Gavin said that, uh, in our lifetime, the biggest buildings in the world will be data centers. And that just goes to show how much more power we need. So everyone's looking around going, look, we can't just go build 30, you know, coal-fired power plants to solve this. We have to do something else. And we are going to talk about solar and batteries later on, but if you want good base load power, once you get past the startup costs, nuclear is really, really efficient and hyper

SPEAKER_248: clean. So I just think it makes sense. What's incredible here. And I think people should take

SPEAKER_00: away from this discussion about nuclear is where there's a will, there's a way, and then things can

SPEAKER_03: change. And a little bit of scary global chaos can actually motivate people. What's happened is over time,

SPEAKER_00: people saw what happened to Germany in relation to their dependence on a dictatorship, Russia. And they're seeing China do their belt and road strategy and spread influence through nuclear power. They're building three, 400 reactors, not just in their country, but in other countries that they want to have dependent on China. And I think all politicians now are aware of this. And when you compare what happened with the moral panic around nuclear, um, and the technology getting safer, because entrepreneurs invested in it, including Bill Gates, investing a lot of money in this one, it was incredibly unpopular and losing a lot of money billion. He's losing billions of dollars trying to pursue this vision entrepreneurs, global events, and then AI comes in and you actually have a

SPEAKER_14: customer who is willing to pay like Google, like Microsoft, like Amazon in advance, some large amounts of money. All of that has conspired now. Uh, and this is going to change humanity, putting aside AI and data

SPEAKER_22: centers. We have a perfect storm occurring right now. The giant companies are customers to the smaller, uh, modular nuclear reactor companies, and that will give them a lifeline. They don't need people to throw money and hope that someday these things happen. Politicians have flipped their position on this and the United States will become the leader in nuclear again. This could be transformative for humanity because we already have hit two other important points. One is we, the natural gas and fracking in this country has made us a net exporter and solar has plummeted. And on Monday show, we're going to do a similar modeling. And this is what we're, I'm trying to do here with Alex and the team is level up the show here. So you, as a listener this week in startups, get a lot of data. So you can be the smartest person in the room when talking about these issues, whether it's going into self driving and how long it's going to take and how much money it's going to take. I want you to be the smartest person in the room because I try to be the most informed person I can be to make decisions. And that's what this combination of, you know, new, we'll call it twist 2.0 the twist in the second decade. And that's why I brought in Alex, you know, to be really smart about this stuff and work with my analysts, I'm trying to understand the world quicker and deeper. And on Monday, we're going

SPEAKER_00: to go into solar, because there's a trend happening in solar now that will dovetail with fracking and

SPEAKER_03: the United States becoming an exporter, Alex, and the small module nuclear reactors getting customers

SPEAKER_00: and government stepping out of the way. And when we look at what happened in Australia,

SPEAKER_27: what's the term for when you have too much energy being created in a day, there's a technical term for it. Minimum system load event. So explain what happened in Australia. We'll just tease it for

SPEAKER_00: Monday because we're going to do another model for Monday around solar and some of the startups. And maybe we'll just make that let's make that a tab in the in this Google sheet. So the first tab will be the model of that we did for self-driving. The second tab will be for solar.

SPEAKER_27: And we'll just talk about what would happen if we get to 50% solar or something.

SPEAKER_07: So answering your question though, so what's happening in Australia is that rooftop solar and also solar arrays have become so popular that there's there's times in which there's too much power generation. And so they have to actually dampen certain sources that are non-baseload that are variable like solar just to keep the grid healthy because you can't overproduce without the ability to store it. And so this sent me down a complete rabbit hole of looking at different European countries, solar installs, changes in solar power. And then I went through a list of startups. I went through probably 20, 25 this morning, all in the power storage space. And there are companies just literally around the world who are doing awesome stuff. Everything from flying wind turbines to using offshore, uh, water storage for power. It's, it's awesome. So come Monday, because I'm going to have some really cool stuff. Yeah, we're going to, we're going to really pull

SPEAKER_00: this thread of what's happening in energy and then what impact that could have on society in India. I've been reading some stories and we'll, we'll dovetail with India here. Uh, and you as a listener can be a producer here as well. Um, he's Alex at launch.co. Are you Alex W or Alex? I'm Alex W at

SPEAKER_34: launch.co and I will read any email anyone sends me as long as it's not. So yeah, you just, uh,

SPEAKER_63: educate us as to, you know, what you think we should have in these models. And, you know,

SPEAKER_22: in India, what's happening is these solar cells have become so cheap that people in India now are buying solar cells, batteries, reclaiming batteries and building their own energy for their homes. And they're doing it themselves. And then I said, I want to put a solar farm on the ranch

SPEAKER_00: and I got a bunch of inbound. So I'm trying to figure out if you have unlimited space, right?

SPEAKER_03: Let's just say you have like an acre you could put towards this. Yeah. What would I do with an acre on my ranch in solar? Because I probably would never be able to use that much stored in batteries.

SPEAKER_00: And then I was talking to Friedberg and there are power walls and, you know, things that people put into their garages when they're space constrained, when you're not space constrained, I think the

SPEAKER_03: power walls and other offerings are designed to have a small footprint and a lot of density. But when you don't need that, and you have a shipping container, say, and you can just fill

SPEAKER_00: it with batteries, you can have a much cheaper solution is what I'm told. And so I'm trying to pull the string and just learn about it myself. Redundancy in the world is a is a theme. People

SPEAKER_03: want to live off grid, because they don't want to be dependent on the government on a foreign country. And I think COVID kind of added to people's awareness of resiliency in their homes in their

SPEAKER_19: countries. And that's kind of part of this theme. I think Alex, is that an anti is that an anti globalization

SPEAKER_07: theme? Or is that something that sits next to it and doesn't actually counteract? Because if you're thinking about the guy who's going to put a shipping container full of batteries on their property, less grid dependent right off the grid. But then again, that technology is dependent on, you know, a global supply chain. And so I'm always torn between personal, lack of dependence, and then also in a way that against how much it takes for the world to get that person there. But at the same time, I want my own battery shipping container. Now that you've

SPEAKER_103: mentioned that, that sounds great. I'll take two. I mean, there's going to be all kinds of versions of

SPEAKER_63: this people are already like I told people about the router I have from Unify, I think it's a company. Anyway, the router I have, I have spectrum and Starlink into it. And they have a third option where you can buy an AT&T SIM card and put it in there. And what happened was spectrum went out,

SPEAKER_14: as it's prone to do goes out seemingly every couple of weeks. And I got an alert, Alex, that spectrum was down. And my wife was like, Oh, my God, spectrums down, we have no internet, but the internet's working. And I looked at the router and spectrum was indeed down for two hours. It felled over to Starlink. Nobody in the house noticed that we were on Starlink. And I was like,

SPEAKER_22: Well, here we go, redundancy and resiliency. To your question, is it about globalization? Or is it about feeling safe? I think it's a little bit of both? If you were dependent on Russia or China for oil,

SPEAKER_14: or PPE or medicine, you, you know, that would be a globalization issue. And if we, if you think about it, just in terms of weather events, think about how many people are losing their power and

SPEAKER_22: internet, and then having food security issues at different times. And then you think about cost and inflation coming into this, if you had solar, you are independent of, you know, grid issues and weather

SPEAKER_00: issues. In Texas, here, we have a lot of them. In Florida, you have a ton of them. And if you had chickens, I know, it sounds silly and stupid as one example. But there's a lot of people who are putting chicken

SPEAKER_03: coops in. So this is called homesteading as a trend. And having an unlimited supply of protein through eggs, at a very cheap price, it's, um, kind of dovetails with fire, you know, that financial independence kind of movement, take the retirement out of it, the fi and fire, the financial independence and

SPEAKER_48: resiliency of chickens is amazing. Because eggs are perfect food, and everybody likes them. And I just

SPEAKER_29: had a beautiful omelet this morning. And you don't have to be in Austin to do chickens. My,

SPEAKER_07: my big sister, my oldest sister lives in Sunnyvale, in the Bay Area. Yeah, and she has chicken. She has an enormous yard or lots there. Yeah. A while back. Uh, and she has chickens. And I thought that was just the most wild thing. I'm like, Emily, you live in, you live in

SPEAKER_266: Silicon Valley and you've got chickens. All over the peninsula, people are doing this. I had a lot of

SPEAKER_03: neighbors and the neighbors would bring us eggs because they couldn't go through them. They had 10 chickens and they were getting 20 eggs a day. Right. And so they were literally going to their

SPEAKER_00: neighbors with 20, 30 eggs in a basket saying, here's some eggs. So you start thinking about this on a cooperative basis. Um, you know, it's, it's really, um, yeah, I Peter's like, Jason is obsessed with fire.

SPEAKER_03: I am obsessed with fire, not because I want to retire, but because I think a counterbalance,

SPEAKER_00: I really care about humanity's, um, happiness. And I think we should, you know, if I was running

SPEAKER_63: government, I would have happiness of the populace as one of our most important goals. And when I do run, uh, for president or governor, uh, happiness is going to be my platform. How happy can people be?

SPEAKER_22: Well, part of being happy, Alex is not being scared, right. And not being fearful. And what are the, what do people fear running out of food, running out of money, healthcare, the safety issues, there's a whole cohort of things. And if you can take away those issues and people feel like, Hey, I'm independent in some way. I have agency. This is something that's missing from America and a large portion of Americans, for whatever reason, do not feel independent and resilient, and they don't feel they have agency. I think part of it's real. And I think part of it is a little bit of learned helplessness and that people can actually figure out how to become independent by learning certain techniques. And so I think it's like an interesting thing for us to talk about here on the program, because entrepreneurship is the pinnacle of independence, resiliency, and agency,

SPEAKER_206: right. Being an actual, and you are doing this with cautious optimism dot news, sign up for Alex's

SPEAKER_07: newsletter. It's only a hundred a year. All right. I have so many things to say off of what you just said, but we have to go away. So everyone stick with us. Twist is going to be around three,

SPEAKER_03: four times a week, Wednesday live show, 12 PM. My time in Texas, which is 10 AM your time in Pacific time and is 1 PM Alex's time on the East coast, 10, 12, one, you get us twice a week. We're locking into Monday, Wednesday. Eventually it might be Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That's my goal. Well, yum. I'm here for it.

David Friedberg: Live guests, live guests. Tell us who you want to be a guest and wrap us out here. Take us out,

SPEAKER_225: Alex. All right. This has been another episode of twist. He is Jason over on X. I'm Alex over on X.

SPEAKER_07: We have several fine newsletters. We have the twist 500 newsletter, which you should read and friends we're back soon. I'll see you on Friday. Bye.