David Friedberg: all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups i'm jason calacanis he's alex wilhelm and we have a huge huge docket today we're going to start off with the tesla robo taxi reactions

SPEAKER_01: then i'm going to show you how to build a model with chat gpt and this incredible new feature called canvas that i've been playing with that came out last week alex and it's going

SPEAKER_03: to blow your mind and then i understand we have two live guests today a twofer yes we have the

SPEAKER_04: founders of lightship rv they're building the l1 and all electric trailer that is pretty much the

SPEAKER_06: coolest thing i've seen in some time jason you saw us on twitter we're obsessed we're going to talk about it and then we have the co-founder and ceo of a company called votes v-o-a-t-z that's nimitz sawny and we're going to talk about election security and the startups that are working to make democracy

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SPEAKER_07: offer on hiring elite latam talent today last week finally after a delay tesla sat down and said hey

SPEAKER_06: everybody we're going to talk about robo taxis big self-driving fleets and the future of the economics

SPEAKER_13: of driving yeah it was a big announcement on thursday followed by i guess elon had a big sunday

SPEAKER_01: and spacex caught a giant rocket with a pair of chopsticks unbelievable week pretty good 72 hours for for my pal um but let's go to the robo taxi one this was lukewarm in terms of reception the markets didn't like it because it lacked specifics as uh they said and an uber actually conversely and lyft went up because i think people felt like okay as cool as what elon showed is it's going to take a little while so let's go through it there was uh the cyber taxi which will begin production i think he sort of said 2027 would be when these things hit the streets maybe a little bit earlier but here's what it looks like let's start there alex what were your thoughts uh aesthetically and then

SPEAKER_06: uh conceptually with the robo taxi okay so first of all i thought the we robot branding of the event was simply an homage to the i robot movie like it's not i it's we it's all of us we but it turns out they pulled actually a little bit more from the aesthetics of that film than i thought so people are comparing the cyber cab to the car that i think it's will smith drives in that and the robo van the the large kind of like multi-person bus type thing that tesla showed off also has some overlap with that movie works for me i'm a science fiction guy so aesthetically i'm in i was surprised that the robo taxi the cyber cab was a two-seater jason i thought it might be more just for capacity's sake but i am i i am encouraged that big companies are putting more weight and money behind self-driving cars on moss because that is what i want so i would say i'm bullish about it but i also understand

SPEAKER_19: criticisms that this does feel a little bit far away and not quite as nailed down as some investors might

SPEAKER_13: have expected i think the two-seater is inspired i wish this was the model too and i could buy it

SPEAKER_01: that's what i heard from a lot of people and in the biography uh that they did on elon a couple years ago they talked about this big debate internally should have a steering wheel and pedals or should they just go for it and kind of burn the boats and it looks like they went with the burn the boats i tell you if that was if that has steering wheel i would have ordered two immediately because i love

SPEAKER_22: the idea of a of a two-seater that's cheap i could zip around and most rides in the united states the overwhelming are one or two people in the car we all know that so for a fleet uh you want to go with two because that means you can produce more of them cheaper and they take up less space on roads so you know there's a million reasons to do it that way i was super bummed you couldn't buy it if you could buy that i think he would have sold one to two million i think he would have sold one million of them if you could put the full deposit down as even like if they said ten thousand dollar deposit i think a million people would order that car so um i wonder if at some point that will be available for purchase um i like the design too because it's kind of somewhere between the model three which i aesthetically find pleasing my daily drivers the model y and the cyber truck which i also like because it's futuristic on the minority report and like is it a ripoff or whatever minority report

SPEAKER_01: obviously was inspired by the delorean for their car and then somebody showed a bunch of 1930s 1940s 1920s whatever trains and it's kind of like minority report ripped off those designs or was inspired by them so and then there's only so many ways to make c3po i would say that you know if you're making a humanoid robot it's going to look like c3po and i think both of them have that so i thought that was

SPEAKER_13: aesthetically you know that aesthetic thing like it's a ripoff of um minority report was like well i think everybody's been inspired by the same source material right it's the old like did apple

SPEAKER_27: started microsoft steal uh graphical user interfaces from apple no apple stole it from xerox and on down the

SPEAKER_06: chain uh why though do you think tesla's not going to go ahead and just call this the model two two seats ship it with the steering wheel because i agree with you it would be a hit and i have my own

SPEAKER_27: guess but i'm curious why you think the company is moving towards robo taxis versus selling the model

SPEAKER_22: two it's a great question i i i haven't talked to elon about it i don't know the thinking other than

SPEAKER_01: at some point you have to make a commitment to take the steering wheel out and build for production without those in there so i guess you know sometimes you want to this is just me taking a guess i think sometimes you want to force your team to do the hard thing and take off the uh the training wheels kind of right and also regulators like regulators are going to have to get used to no side mirrors no steering wheel at some point and there's a long list of things that they're going to

SPEAKER_22: need to figure out to get these into production uh but before we build our model and i'll show you uh

SPEAKER_34: gpt with canvas in a moment i think let's see the next thing is the bus and so the bus to me was super

SPEAKER_22: inspiring because as i tweeted and this is what resulted in um the rv company we're going to talk

SPEAKER_01: to on the second half of the show i thought this was this stole the show and the reason i think this stole the show is because this is a platform this reminds me of a shipping container we've been talking about shipping containers on the show and this to me is a sled i think this is like a skiff if you know like what they used to call boats uh s-k-i-f-f i think is how you pronounce it not to be confused with skiff.com the travel website i'm an investor in uh my uh you know shout out to rafat um but this thing you know he it's beautifully designed for a night out or you know a bus but imagine this at a bathroom a bed a desk this is a mobile home if this was a mobile home it would be a mobile home with enough battery power for perhaps a month of usage if it wasn't moving around and if it's got that big roof you could actually put solar on the roof so the reason solar arrays don't exist

SPEAKER_22: on top of cars just because obviously it's not enough to make a difference you could add like one or two miles or something diminuous and you know maybe eventually 10. but this you know if it did have solar arrays on the roof or ones that opened up wide you know like they do in space you could actually plot these around and i gave a couple of scenarios hey people are fleeing florida because of a hurricane you could if airbnb owned a fleet of these or if they owned it and joe jebb is on the board of tesla and he's working on an adu company imagine a million of these or ten thousand of these going to

SPEAKER_01: walmart parking lots autonomously in the middle of the night and then people fleeing a hurricane situation terrorist attack i don't know you know pick fate or you know opportunistically it's coachella it's the super bowl and you need extra housing or you know you have a ski resort and there's always this issue with ski resorts with housing you don't need it in the summer you do need it in the winter you could ship a hundred of these in put a bunk bed in them or two and then you'd have housing with a hundred of these for 200 to 400 people and so and then there's also obviously transportation of goods and services imagine an amazon truck where the amazon doesn't need a driver it just

David Friedberg: needs somebody to be in the back you know with the safety harness on taking the packages and when it gets to a donation jumping out ringing the bell putting the package taking the picture and leaving

SPEAKER_01: uh so this has got massive application i think that this thing could change the world

SPEAKER_27: so it sounds like what you're really excited about is the the skateboard element of this thing with the self-driving technology because the cab is highly variable based on do you want seats do you want a bathroom do you want beds do you want this that cargo whatever but i love the idea of there being several million self-driving multi-purpose vehicles in and around our nation just going around doing

SPEAKER_19: cool stuff and making life better because i would attend a heavy metal festival in the uk if i could stay in a luxury thing i'm not going to go in the mud and the tents i mean i'm too i'm too old for that now so that that hits me but another thing you didn't mention i'm shocked because you have kids is can you imagine um you and some other parents putting together your own private bus for your kids to

SPEAKER_39: get to school i mean wow i didn't think of that and you know when you know that you have a really game

SPEAKER_01: changing uh product when you can do things like you're describing uh so yeah i do think that you nailed it um if you could purchase these or program these and it was a platform like sprinter vans there's an entire genre called van life and this is adjacent to fire uh and this alternative lifestyle uh economic alternative economic lifestyle we could call this in our themes but you know like sort of opting out of capitalism or opting into fierce capitalism whatever you want to call it man you could do some really interesting things couldn't you you could very simply um you know send these to a beach and you know with your family you could work off the beach for the entire summer so you have

SPEAKER_13: two kids now congratulations imagine you could take one of these to the cape or two of them to the cape

SPEAKER_22: one's your office one's for the kids or three of them and you know somebody owns a five million dollar home that on two or three acres and they just parcel out put three of these in the backyard and you know now you and your family can join your in-laws or whatever so i just a million uses for this i think it's absolutely fabulous the robots are obviously making progress there was a little back and forth of where they remote operated obviously if you're going to put i have no inside information on any of this but um and i couldn't make the event sadly because i had to travel earlier in the week

SPEAKER_01: but um the uh robots obviously you do need to have remote monitoring of robots and robo taxis until they're perfect so it doesn't surprise me that they were being remote controlled and in fact that's how you train these uh the best way to train these is to have a human with gloves on and doing like essentially ar and have it make i don't know pancakes and then after you've made 100 pancakes the robot knows that's the scary amazing part of all this all right squarespace is the place to build

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SPEAKER_06: to be talking a lot about robotaxis clearly over the next couple years but you had a thought experiment you wanted to run and this run actually ran head first into your i'm not gonna lie absolute

David Friedberg: love affair with chat gpt lately you've been raving i have been and um i want to show you uh canvas here because uh on wednesday uh we're going to do um a model so one of the things we're going to try to do

SPEAKER_22: here on the show we've got a little extra production resources is we are going to follow some of these threads you know over multiple episodes so we're going to follow the thread that we've been is self driving you know deployment going to happen or not and how long is it going to take how much is it going

SPEAKER_01: to cost and in order to do this i started using chat gpt because you know just work so here you'll see my screen and this is chat gpt 4.0 with canvas and so when you use chat gpt 4.0 with canvas if you say use

David Friedberg: canvas the chat room moves to the left hand side do you see this on the left here and here's my initial prompt build a detailed model for those of you who are watching or just listening i said to it build a detailed model estimating the cost of creating a robo taxi fleet for all car trips in

SPEAKER_13: the usa including waymo cruise as a case study of the model should account for number one total car trips in the usa two uber and lyft trips three fleet efficiency estimate how many trips a single robo taxi complete per day assume 20 to 30 trips factoring in time for charging cleaning and downtime for maintenance fleet operation determine how many days a year a robo taxi can operate assume six hours a day for charging cleaning in five hour five days annually for major maintenance uh required fleet size you get the idea so i gave it all these qualifiers and here it is it's

SPEAKER_34: now given down a breakdown and it says here total car trips in the usa the federal highway

SPEAKER_22: administration estimates 1.1 billion and that's 400 billion annually so daily car trips annual car trips it puts it there then it says uber lyft trips uber and lyft uh account for approximately 6.9 billion trips annual in the u.s combined but they don't have the daily there so what i could do here is i could um and this says this implies that they represent around 1.7 so i could just highlight this section here and i could say um whoops sorry i can highlight a section here and this is what canva does that's unique is when you highlight it it gives you yes chat gpt a little pop-up so i click and i say uh include daily trips and a citation for this information and then i hit uh you know the query and

SPEAKER_41: what it will do is it will go do this query and it will rewrite you see it rewriting it rewriting that

SPEAKER_22: section and so daily uber lyft trips 18.9 million sources ubers 2022 annual report lifts 22 statistics right so this is where things get really uh interesting here you can see um you know how many

SPEAKER_13: trips per day operation per day the required fleet size and required fleet size i think is a super

SPEAKER_01: interesting one um you're going to need 44 million cars based on these rough estimates to replace all cars in the united states right then you could say well um how many public transit rides are there a day they say 34 million rides i think that's incredibly low and i think it's wrong but we could say here let's say 20 of them got replaced by taxis uh by robo taxis that adds another 7 million rides a day and then here's the cost and this is where it gets super interesting if it's a 30 000 car you know what elon said his cars will cost you need 53 million of those cars for 1.6 trillion dollars to replace the fleet in the united states and then you have a hundred thousand vehicle costs for

SPEAKER_13: um waymo or cruise that's five trillion dollars is a lot of money and uh you can do very interesting

SPEAKER_01: things here like if you didn't believe this public rides a day i can highlight it again ask chat gpt i

SPEAKER_69: don't think this is right how many individuals ride public transit per day in the usa and give me stats on the new york city um subway per day so just to check the work kind of situation and this is what

SPEAKER_01: canva does really nicely it's one document so we've moved from um we've now moved from a chat room alex

SPEAKER_22: to one document being edited and cleaned up this is a pretty big deal i think and this is um i think claude had something like this already but you can see how this will make you bionic in your work um and any

SPEAKER_04: thoughts there you know i have so many thoughts so first of all on the the number of cars that we need i know we're going to get into this more later i know this is just a tease but it turns out the

SPEAKER_19: average pace for cars sold in the us right now is about 16.2 million so it's only three or four years of total car sales uh to get to this self-driving number which is less than i would have thought be honest so that's actually optimistic to me too this is super cool and it's the end of homework like i mean there's you there's no way you're going to get an eighth grader to not use this and get good at it i i don't see a way around that this must be this is that it's a report maker where you can edit individual sections live with intelligent ai and nearly perfect data uh critical thinking is

SPEAKER_34: going to go down but oh my gosh look at this it's it's a section on how many cars tesla can make per

SPEAKER_22: year and how many years it would take to build a fleet to service the usa and so it just added

SPEAKER_82: another section uh you know of um i attempted to add a section uh i don't know why i didn't do it but

SPEAKER_01: anyway i had done that yesterday and you know if they're making 2 million cars a year right now or 1.8 or something you can kind of really start to understand um how long this is going to take to i have even put in regulation here so here it's putting in tesla's production in how long it would take if they're doing 2 million um per year it's you know it looks like it failed to do it so i'd have

SPEAKER_84: to do a new one it's interesting to watch it same um so if you're listening to the podcast uh on audio

SPEAKER_06: right now first of all we love you that's great no worries at all but you might actually want to pull up the youtube of this one just to watch the last two minutes because this is an interesting example of kind of current state of the art but jason uh one question for me why not use chat gpt oh one

SPEAKER_01: does that not work with canvas yet it doesn't yeah and it doesn't have the most um it doesn't have the um ability to search the web so although it does advanced reasoning you know it doesn't

SPEAKER_67: do it so i guess they got to put these things together and glue it together but you know here's

SPEAKER_22: interesting assuming uh tesla dedicates 50 of their production to robo taxis and grows at 30 i didn't even ask it to do that it's like showing how many years it would take year one one million year two 1.3 year three 1.69 it would take approximately 11 to 13 years for tesla to accumulate a fleet of 50 million robo taxis which i think they could do and i think that's actually what's going to happen and i think toyota waymo cruise all these other folks are going to be doing the

SPEAKER_01: same thing and what we will see is the wholesale replacement of all cars in the world over 30 years i would say uh with robo automated taxis and then the retirement of all those old cars and that's going to be absolutely wonderful for society youtube.com uh and search for this weekend startups and you can subscribe and watch the video of us doing all this modeling we're going to have a model finished and we'll share it with the audience but anyway this makes me super bullish on you know both waymo cruise uber tesla byd etc because this is not going to be winner take all that's my prediction and i if you

SPEAKER_22: look at the model as incredible at production as tesla is and as incredible as their self-driving is and then waymos is obviously and crews are actually active and and making it happen in the real world already these things take time to build maintain and to get those fleets out there is going to be a multi-decade process and of course regulators are going to have a say in this and you know when we had a person get dragged and it wasn't uh the fault of cruise they've been off the road for over a year i believe so you know just keep in mind every time this happens um you're going to have a year of a jurisdiction or a country saying not ready so i think it's completely possible these things get taken off the road completely in a city like or a state like california because a waymo a cruise or a tesla kills somebody the second that happens it'll be a one-year pause and you're going to see that happen in multiple jurisdictions in china maybe they won't because they value life slightly differently in that jurisdiction but it's going to be a stop and go kind of situation is my

SPEAKER_96: prediction what are your thoughts i'm actually more bullish than you on that part of it i i think

SPEAKER_97: that the fact that we have waymos operating around the clock for pay in san francisco which is a place

SPEAKER_27: that i have walked on nearly every street and so i know how wild that city is the trolleys the people the tourists the buses the ups and downs the blind corners the pusty roads the fact that waymo is right

SPEAKER_06: now as we record this doing paid self-driving rides there to me implies the technology even in difficult jurisdictions both regulatory wise and also geographically i think this is going to be faster the thing that i think is going to take a long time is getting people to give up their cars so

SPEAKER_19: i think urban centers spreads out but i'm i'm more bullish on regulation not getting in the way here

SPEAKER_49: we switched to beehive and it has been huge for this week in startups we have this twist 500 newsletter i've been working on this entire platform where we're trying to find the 500 most important private companies so twist 500.com and we've been using beehive for this email newsletter beehive b-e-e-h-i-i-v it's a service that's built for growth and when you're doing an email list or a podcast you want growth and they've baked it into it beehive was co-founded by one of the minds behind morning brew you know that incredible newsletter well you can get access to the tools that helped build morning brew to millions of readers and if you're interested in making a little money with your

SPEAKER_22: newsletter beehive can do that too because beehive has an ad network so it's a no-brainer for folks who want to drive revenue and want to grow there's a million platforms there's a million tools out there but a tool that solves those two problems growth and revenue that's the winning tool in my mind that's why we moved over to it they have an ai post builder they got a referral program the list

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SPEAKER_27: your point about the robo van and the idea of solar and the idea of expandable solar because we happen to have the two guys from lightship rv on the show today and they are building something that i think

SPEAKER_06: you're gonna love because once you get inside it's a lot of what you were talking about so please welcome to the show it's ben parker and toby kraus the co-founders over at lightship rv hey guys hey

SPEAKER_01: jason alex how's it going what's up guys nice to meet you both uh tell us uh and show us a little bit about what you're building remember 90 of the audience is um going to be um listening so we have to

SPEAKER_117: describe what they see yeah okay well i guess for those who are viewing maybe i can i can talk and toby can do a pirouette inside of our our prototype oh yeah oh he's in the prototype there it is okay yeah yeah i sure am yeah exactly uh here so here's a quick background we're lightship is america's first all-electric rv manufacturer a little bit of the backstory is actually that toby and i were both both at tesla about five years five or six years a piece i was there as a battery engineer from around 2015 to 2020 worked on the the model 3 battery from its early days and actually the the origins of the cybertruck battery as well did a few years living out of a suitcase in reno again the first the first gig factory ramped up which was fun and and crazy all in one toby can speak more to his background he led the finance team and did amazing things for for tesla they're kind of an earlier generation as well more 2009 to 2015 and uh where lightship came to be was i i had a i had a pet project once once i was back uh out of the factory working at the headquarters again in palo alto my idea was to try to electrify all the food trucks in the bay area because there's a circuit of food trucks that come to the headquarters and you're always kind of yelling over the generator to put in put in your order and the the irony of having power walls and and the rest uh on the other side of the wall from inside of the building just killed me and i felt like i felt like these these trucks should shouldn't can go electric and uh one thing led to another i would tell people about the electric food truck project and rvs would would often come up in conversation because there are similar needs uh between electrifying all the appliances on a food truck just as just as you know a rolling vacation home an rv and when covet hit i took the plunge rented a 30-foot winnebago motor home lived out of it that first summer of of covet and covered about 6 000 miles around the whole american west it was a pretty pretty amazing experience i talked to a ton of rv-ers on the road and was really getting into the lifestyle of it um we can we can talk more about the opportunity but let's show it yeah let's show it

SPEAKER_01: i mean people want to see it there's a big build up but i mean people want to see this thing it's gorgeous and it's got some very unique features um we're we're as biased as they come but we think it is the

SPEAKER_117: perfect travel trailer for for the electric age uh okay show us let's go let's see it this might be

SPEAKER_127: the the instagram video you you caught um somebody had cut and pasted this i think to to x so i saw it

David Friedberg: on x when i was talking about you know yeah uh yeah the cyber bus yeah yeah yeah yeah so so so here's

SPEAKER_133: what we're doing so we're building a um a towable rv and and if you know anything about rvs at some point they might go autonomous but right now 90 of them you tow with a truck or an suv um and so that's that's really the target market for us to start and and we're reinventing it from scratch right like this is meant to be a vehicle that is built for the age of electrification and what you're seeing here is um is is sort of just that like if you can start from a clean sheet of paper what are you going to do you're going to make it hyper efficient when you're towing it there there you know you can see it

SPEAKER_01: we call it road mode so okay so what we're seeing on the screen is a gray uh trailer that you would

SPEAKER_22: hitch to your cyber truck or your f-150 it's got glass windows and just like um if you've ever been in an rv you can expand them out when you have those celebrity trailers and they get wider at burning man or on a movie set here it's becoming vertical and becoming very tall so the whole thing raises up

SPEAKER_01: what is the height when it's parked where it's in drive mode i guess versus when it's parked and you're

SPEAKER_13: in living it mode what's the height differential it goes from six and a half feet to to about 10 feet

SPEAKER_138: tall so oh wow it's almost double it grows yeah it's uh it's it's pretty cool okay and it looks like

SPEAKER_13: it's all windows 360 almost around it talk about that design decision yeah and this you can almost

SPEAKER_133: actually get a little bit of a of a better concept for it i'm sitting i'm sitting in our our prototype we call it the alpha right here and you can see you can see my my ring light but this is in our factory and and yeah it's it is wide open we're in the factory um right now and and so i you know for us like it's really about building a product that's you know you're you're taking this to to a natural environment and most rvs are are built kind of like a cave right like you didn't show up to to you know rocky mountain national park in a submarine you you showed up to like experience the the the mountains and uh and we really want to connect you to that so if you're gonna if you're gonna start from scratch we said like we're gonna do it completely differently and we're gonna like just build the entire uh what we call the top of of the vehicle the canopy um in glass i mean it is

SPEAKER_13: stunning and uh it looks like it's very large how big is this on the inside and then alex

SPEAKER_133: any questions you might have oh yeah it's uh so it's a it's a you know full-size camper so it's a you know four to six person about 27 foot vehicle so it's it's pretty big and um and you know on the inside it's really you know designed to have all the modern amenities of of kind of like a studio apartment um another thing you'll find in your in your typical rv is it's like everything you'd have in your house but it's really small so you like multiple bedrooms a bathroom and then if you talk to somebody who rvs a lot they're like yeah we don't really use the kitchen because it's small and cramped and we don't really like it and we don't ever use the bathroom and so we're like hey we're gonna do this you know very differently and really design a space that's wide open um sort of like multi-use and uh something you'd really want to use so this is where i i begin to get worried

SPEAKER_04: because if i showed my spouse this she would immediately fall in love with it because she

SPEAKER_19: loves the idea of going out she loves um the old kind of uh windstream trailers the the silver ones that are so beautiful yeah airstream thank you this has a lot of vibes like that the reason why i'm not going to show it to her is that back in 2023 tech run said that this was going to cost uh between like 125 and 150. is that still the rough price range for it um yeah that that's right

SPEAKER_133: that is um that is sort of where we're starting and uh you know airstream is a really iconic brand super popular it's the one that like it's a heritage brand people really know it and um and we you know as we you know think about like our story like and this this i think was not something we invented as something tesla did well but when you are a hardware company building a new brand a consumer market you really do need to start at a premium price point where you can sort of like you know build the company through the technology and move down and for us that is that is a high high sticker price and we don't we don't pretend to say that it isn't but that actually is really where you're

SPEAKER_138: you're going to start out for an airstream as well and and that's that's where we're going to yeah no

SPEAKER_19: i didn't mean to say that you guys are unfairly high price you're offering a lot here i mean just the fact that there's the solar wings that come out to expand the the on top grid that's awesome yeah we

SPEAKER_133: we uh we want to be able to like you know power everything you need when you're out there you know uh having fun with your family and friends and so yeah we get about two kilowatts of solar just on the roof alone um and uh we have an 80 kilowatt hour battery so it's like

SPEAKER_132: six tesla power walls um it's it's it's uh it's significant and that how how much can you charge per

SPEAKER_01: day from the solar i'm curious because that was something we had in our previous discussion talking about this the cyber bus which you know doesn't have um solar on it because obviously they have uh you guys built out a huge super charging network so probably doesn't need to have solar but if you're out there you know in the wilderness you probably would want solar and this could be like an off-grid living so you know while 100 100k 150k might seem like a lot when you compare it to

SPEAKER_22: buying an adu and having to do all this adu work of you know putting it in this is like an instant adu

SPEAKER_117: yeah i think um if you know it depends on where you are but if you have really good sun assume maybe a 20 charge in a day so if you leave it out for for a week you'll go zero to full amazing are you

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SPEAKER_85: one because i want to buy it now like literally i want one of the first 10 and i don't like to buy the

SPEAKER_22: first 10 of anything because i know that you got kinks in it or whatever but i got a ranch man if i put this on a ranch and we've got an extra bedroom and a a place to go work i mean this solves a lot of problems for me in a very short period of time so when can i buy one when when are you going to have these ready and they're bespoke to start heck yeah um you can put your reservation

SPEAKER_127: in right after we're done recording um and then we're we're building our first production units

SPEAKER_165: behind me right now um we'll have uh we'll have some done at the end of the year and be delivering

David Friedberg: them early next year holy cow and uh how much you because you guys watched elon's playbook at tesla

SPEAKER_01: and you worked there tell me about the playbook of funding a startup when we when i bought the 16th roadster 150k down for the first 100 reservations when i bought my signature the model s i think they did a thousand signatures i have the first one i put 150k down and those were actually turned out to be really good trades because those are collector's editions now and they're worth more than i paid for them but um this was a financing strategy people don't know this when elon almost went bankrupt twice with tesla this is how they funded the company was on those deposits so how are you doing that you have a signature 100 where you put a full deposit down and then how much

SPEAKER_85: have you raised for this uh you know incredibly intensive capital intensive project great questions

SPEAKER_133: um i love thinking about some of the early days in history i ben mish i i love the finance team my my first job there was uh working on tesla's ipo and so i got to be involved in all all sorts i hope

SPEAKER_172: you held some shares toby you still have your shares i do i i've kept a bunch so you're funding this

SPEAKER_133: company yourself uh no i didn't keep enough of shares for that i'm i'm keeping a symbolic number to to to pass on to my kids um i like it this yeah so so i'd say we're um maybe a little less creative in in our financing you know strategy than um than tesla back in the early days so we've we've gotten some really awesome you know venture capital investors we've raised about 60 million dollars and that's really how we're funding the business we certainly will have um you know a more sizable deposit as we begin configuring what we call the the founder series so similar to tesla i think uh model s they call like the signature series we we will have that um and we'll have a deposit associated but not not really to fund the business um to fund the business we're going about it in a little bit more traditional way um but i mean to your point like this is it's a um it's a you know it's a capital intensive business it's it's not as capital intensive as automotive the the you know the scale is is slightly different so uh you know tesla to you know do a car program this is you know back 10 years ago it's like a billion dollars these days a car program is a couple billion dollars an rv program here you know we mentioned airstream there you know they invested in a whole new plant this is about a decade ago and it's like 50 million bucks so it's it's it's a little bit of a different scale um but it's hardware and i mean hardware is you know hard you don't have to hear that from me um and in a lot of ways is not a traditional venture pack you know company it's a it's a a big complex product um but uh but yeah it's also it's also like a part of americana i think and this is something that you're seeing now is in in electric vehicle world we're we're super stoked we're ev people through and through you know we've been working on it for 15 years now but uh in the broader movement if you've been paying attention last year has been a little bit mixed and i think what's happening there is because we're really entering the mainstream markets right like you're starting to to to see products enter categories that um are not necessarily just your early adopter markets and that for us we're stoked like we are selling a product to people who might not have an ev in their driveway they have like a dodge ram 1500 and that is that is how we will make a difference

SPEAKER_19: so i want to talk about the market a little bit because um toby one thing i i realized prepping for the segment today is that the rv market went through a period of really rapid growth and it's since come down a little bit so let's pull up the chart that shows rv shipments in the us

SPEAKER_14: recently um you guys founded the company i think it was back in 2021 yeah yep um yep that's right yeah

SPEAKER_19: and that was the peak year for rv sales in the us there were about 600 000 sold and i think it was

SPEAKER_27: about 544 000 of those were the kind of toe behind trailers that we're talking about here since then things have come down interest rates went up i know that the rv market is sensitive to that i'm just

SPEAKER_179: curious how do you guys feel about the company versus the market today versus back in 2021 when

SPEAKER_133: things were absolutely popping off i mean we feel great it's it's no question is it a cyclical industry like automotive right yeah but we're still talking about one of the largest vehicle segments in the united states next to cars like it might be tied with motorcycles or something like that but it is it's massive so a big year it's 600 000 units a bad year it's like 300 000 units you know but by by comparison cars are like 12 to 14 million and then like other really big the next biggest vehicle categories that are on people's mind they're like semi trucks or something like that that's it's like 200 000 units so this is this this is sort of you know massive scale on an up market or a down market and we're just getting started right like um you know we're you know going to be scaling up to low thousands of units so so certainly like there's some cyclicality here but we're this is this is one of the benefits of being a startup right we're going from zero to one

SPEAKER_165: uh we don't have like a market cap and you know public company investors that we have to explain

SPEAKER_13: things to um but uh i think you're going to induce purchases like i think that this is such a unique

SPEAKER_01: product in the same way tesla was there's a million people who want this who wouldn't pull the trigger on a traditional rv but are technological enthusiasts they're not price sensitive and they'll look at this as an adu an extra office for their remote work at home part of their airbnb or

SPEAKER_22: they're going to start their own little you know retreat center like we have here in the hill country

SPEAKER_158: uh outside of boston well jason even beyond that too you you see there's there's like huge overlap

SPEAKER_117: between the people who are early adopting ev pickup trucks and folks who are who are in the market for something like a light ship because there's i mean basically all of those ev trucks are awesome cyber truck f-150 lightning the rivian they're all really cool they all have an achilles heel around

SPEAKER_188: towing range and so our you know the the reason that it does the telescoping motion the reason that it looks like a bullet when you're when you're pulling it down the road is all about drag efficiency and aerodynamics because if you're not with our our approach to solving this range this towing range issue with ev trucks is twofold one you have to be really passively efficient so we spent an enormous amount of time even before we were doing any industrial design just on getting the aerodynamics right this thing is for comparison uh it is as drag efficient going down the road at cruising speed as a model three which is a tiny passenger sedan and this is a 26 foot long eight and a half foot wide trailer that weighs double a model three so that that that drag efficiency was everything we then went twofold and added uh this is totally non-standard for a trailer we added an ev battery roughly the size of a model three battery plus a motor on board and so that drive unit propels the rear axle of the trailer so this is a self-propelling trailer which is to say that the trailer is helping

SPEAKER_190: itself or it's helping the truck how does that work that's fascinating um we agree i think it's a very

SPEAKER_76: very new way to build somehow when you're pulling it it knows it's being pulled and it says instead of

SPEAKER_22: being in neutral i'm going to add a little bit and it somehow intelligently knows the speed it's going

SPEAKER_188: so it doesn't impact let me tell you yeah let me tell you so it's a sensor suite there are a few few inputs to a control system that you know that we've developed and and run on a piece of custom hardware the main thing is a force sensor that goes between the truck and the trailer in the hitch in the connection point and so if you know the force between the two like imagine the trailer is trying to drag the the truck back now you can tell the trailer motor to spin up and assist and then the same thing works in reverse so if you're slowing down or if you're coming downhill now you can sense a compressive force between the two tell the motor to go into regen and the trailer continues to float on the hitch so it's an awesome towing experience and there's also next to zero range loss ballpark

SPEAKER_13: where are you where are you at with pre-orders hundreds thousands tens of thousands just give

SPEAKER_133: us an idea like where's this project at um we we try not to disclose our pre-order and amount

SPEAKER_198: over a thousand it's got to be over a thousand because i want a hundred right now it's significant and

SPEAKER_199: we'll we'll hook you up um okay yeah what's the down payment you're asking for you're the finance

SPEAKER_22: guy so toby how do you think about down payments and getting to the front of the line and all that

SPEAKER_133: um so right right now it's it's it's still just refundable orders and it's 500 bucks um so so you can you can you can put in 20. um uh we we are when we when we uh begin our our sort of customer deliveries we'll start flipping it over as you mentioned to sort of more significant um you know payments so we're talking about probably like you know 10 or so of the of the

SPEAKER_165: sticker price um but yeah you could get your get your reservation in today okay can i tow it behind

SPEAKER_19: my subaru outback this is probably not um dang it because if you slapped a starlink on one of these took the front took the bed out put in the desk my wife could just tow me around and i can have my

SPEAKER_205: entire setup and then i will be willing to go like the woods you know like i can totally see my

SPEAKER_117: family loving this thing well thinking about the craziest you know talking about avs earlier the craziest instantiation of something like this in the future is platooning where you're you're like

SPEAKER_188: platooning with a pod behind you that follows your your tow vehicle come come back to the present because we you know we got to build a company that we can scale now um the main thing you have

SPEAKER_13: to think about tuning means it is not hitched it's just following you on an autumn as a full self-driving

SPEAKER_158: that's the audacious thought yeah yeah exactly oh yeah i'll take three in that case i'll have my own

SPEAKER_64: freaking like we'll have your family congratulations gentlemen you you created a train yes yes but

SPEAKER_207: jason it's a very fancy train that's very cool with blinky lights and that's why i want i mean

SPEAKER_01: this was a big part of the self-driving vision you know 20 years ago when they were doing the darpa challenges was that you would daisy chain a bunch of trucks into the right-hand lane left-hand lane whatever cars and that would you know um you know for resistance reasons and efficiency and safety

SPEAKER_22: i don't know if that's still in the cards right now but uh it seems like we're gonna yeah just have them

SPEAKER_209: blow with traffic but yeah it's a really interesting idea just to answer your question quickly the main

SPEAKER_188: thing to think about is how much weight can my can my car support so of course we're going to make a bunch of different trailer types over time that are right size for different different tow vehicles right now

SPEAKER_06: you want to have a truck or truck or a big suv okay um and then just one last question guys before we let you go pebble is another company kind of similar to you guys they're building an all-electric travel

SPEAKER_19: trailer um they're theoretically going into production i think they said at the end of this year

SPEAKER_06: so are you gonna buy them are you gonna crush them like how do you think about the competition

SPEAKER_133: inside of your relatively new niche i think it's cool that we got some people you know following on our heels like you know that's never a bad thing um especially like it's a massive market our products are pretty different actually theirs is much smaller single axle uh camper and we kind of went with like the full size uh you know pretty premium vehicle but we don't need to crush pebble i don't think they need to crush us like i think we can we can both succeed it's a it's a big market um so yeah we're

SPEAKER_165: we're we're excited that that they're out there and hopefully hopefully doing good things too and this

SPEAKER_142: is going to be amazing thanks so much for coming on the program yeah thank you guys we really appreciate

SPEAKER_209: it awesome i'm going to definitely order one of those i know i haven't seen you this jazzed in some

SPEAKER_220: time i mean i uh i have a lot of acreage now uh and where where's the ranch uh it's uh out in uh

SPEAKER_01: like the hill country dripping springs kind of outside of austin 30 minutes or so outside of austin it's just fantastic and you just i could park these any number of places uh and it would be just absolutely fantastic and it's obviously got air conditioning and an hvac in it it's not the solar so

SPEAKER_22: you know half of like the issues you have when you own a ranch is getting water electricity and internet across the ranch and so i'm learning all of that it's bizarre but like as about one example

SPEAKER_13: when you're running electricity on a ranch like if you try to run electricity to two different places on your ranch that could be very expensive to do or you can order another uh electrical from your

SPEAKER_01: electric company they put it on a different part in the ranch and they pay for it and then you have just like two electrical bills or three electrical bills to different parts of your ranch as if it was like different lots and so and then water obviously is super complicated so like do you if you've got a large enough ranch uh is it easier to do plumbing from one side of the ranch to the other or just drill another well and have redundancy in your wells all of these like really fun interesting things that you can do with your ranch life so i think distributed power is really going to be a

SPEAKER_117: huge unlock for a lot of you know more these more rural sparse settings and sterling's already got you know distributed broadband covered universally so this is this is the other the other piece to solve

SPEAKER_13: right now i have three different power sources diesel generator propane uh and electrical from the city so i have three different and i'm putting in solar and battery so i'll have four different electrical sources then we have three different two well two different wells 300 feet 700 feet

SPEAKER_01: and then city water so three waters and right now two internets spectrum and starling and then there's a third one you can get on this very fancy router i have where you can actually get an at and t 5g card put it into your router and then it will do a series of failover so we lost internet from spectrum

SPEAKER_22: nobody in the house knew and i got a text oh my god spectrum's down and i was like oh i got to check and they're like no internet's not down and i looked and the router successfully felled over to starlink and i was like wow this is the future like every home will have a starlink as their backup and i hear people are doing starlink as their backup now and not activating the service they just buy it they put it on a shelf where they install it and then if they do have an outage that's more than an hour or two then they will you know turn it on so there's going to be like a interesting you know redundancy and obviously electrical redundancy and uh all this stuff for when the civil war happens

SPEAKER_228: in uh january 6th uh hopefully not but let's yeah yeah it went down your uh your sphere of redundancy

SPEAKER_01: let's not have a civil war folks let's be cool all right boys we'll talk to you soon toby and ben uh when you ship come back on and uh i'll have you by the ranch when you deliver mine and we'll have a little party here uh ranch water well done you'll have oh yeah a little ranch water oh that's nice with that now you can't use the all in tequila all in.com slash tequila for ranch water okay it's it's a premium tequila you gotta get a more you know uh yeah but i do like that ranch water i have to say uh bill gurley turned me on to that ranch water and uh for people who don't know ranch water is just a topichica with a a lime or a lemon and then just a little tequila in it so you literally take a couple of sips out of the topichica and then you pour the tequila in and you drink it out

SPEAKER_124: of the glass bottle it sneaks up on you it does sneak up on you where you got where's your factory

SPEAKER_235: is it el segundo or we're uh we're in colorado here oh sweet yep brinkfield colorado so that's

SPEAKER_01: actually a good location for shipping right because you'll get whole texas southern california northern california and that's and then arizona and all those places you got all those people who love to do that

SPEAKER_22: circuit all right boys thanks guys these guys thanks bye okay uh one of the things uh we're

SPEAKER_01: trying to do here is look at the biggest issues alex that are happening in our country in the world and then you and i and our production team trying to get smarter ourselves on topics so we can speak with uh more authority on them while educating the audience through individuals who are builders in the world as we just saw with that incredible uh rv company uh and that was just awesome huh alex to

SPEAKER_27: get them on the program so fast absolutely i i love talking to people who are building stuff one of the best parts of being a journalist in the technology startup space has been getting to talk to an

SPEAKER_239: endless number of founders because they always leave you with infectious enthusiasm yes i i've never

SPEAKER_01: gotten tired of it ever okay well and one of the big issues we have today and you and i have been talking about this and this is not a political program uh although all in talks about politics a whole time you can get your politics fixed there election security um is something we all care about as americans and i think globally and so this seems to be a huge topic right are our elections secure and today i want to talk a little bit about that so maybe you could queue up our next guest and uh we'll start talking about election interference uh our people actually do and we're going to do this over a couple of episodes so we'll start today with a you know one founder who you're about to meet but we're going to talk over the next uh couple of episodes of this week in startups about the technology the challenges and you know even maybe some of the politics of this

SPEAKER_22: without having you know any particular horse in the race here i think we can what can we agree

SPEAKER_49: on alex what can americans agree on if you were going to tee this up yeah so the question is what is

SPEAKER_27: the state of election security clearly we're heading towards a massive election here in the united

SPEAKER_19: states jason made a joke about that in the previous segment so according to the office of the director of national intelligence or odni on the presidential side russia and iran are looking to influence the election and on down ballot races russia iran and china so many countries would love to tinker with

SPEAKER_27: our elections this is not usually done through actually changing votes but more disinformation misinformation that sort of thing um but we do also have a very decentralized structure to elections here in the us we have different state municipal and federal elections that creates many different systems now on one hand that's great because we can try many things at once on the other hand decentralization doesn't mean that everyone has the best cyber security at all times so one thing we

SPEAKER_06: have uh done is prepare a list of a couple of startups that we think are really cool that are working on the issue of election security through different means um clear ballot to democracy live voting which

SPEAKER_27: might be struggling and then also votes v-o-a-t-z and i'm very happy to say that we have the co-founder and ceo of votes with us today uh nimit sani nimit thanks for coming on the show really appreciate it

SPEAKER_06: thanks alex for having me here so i want to start with how much progress votes has made you guys talked about having taken part in 130 successful live elections in six countries from the state

SPEAKER_27: municipal and federal level how active is votes in the upcoming u.s election cycle so our system

SPEAKER_246: has so far been used in six u.s states it's primarily available to a group of voters who are called as yokawa voters so these are u.s military any u.s citizen living overseas voters with disabilities and now in some jurisdictions first responders as well so as far as the u.s is concerned it's currently only available to a smaller group of voters but internationally for example in canada 15 cities have selected us there everybody is allowed to use it for their municipal elections and then

SPEAKER_247: recently we just completed the federal elections in mexico almost 10 million overseas mexicans were

SPEAKER_04: eligible to use the system but you guys talk about you know basically making voting secure and

SPEAKER_27: possible in a mobile setting with you know biometrics and real-time id verification and so forth so to me my question to me is just why isn't this more widespread why is it currently conserved for first responders military overseas and so forth versus me in my house why can't i why can't i use technology

SPEAKER_250: to avoid having to go and you know actually pull a lever and so forth so it's primarily a regulatory hurdle

SPEAKER_246: uh as you might think there is the perception that if you were to use online voting or digital voting on

SPEAKER_253: a wide scale scale that somehow it's going to be a massive compromise and you know the whole process is going to fall apart so that's one reason there's a lot of fear-mongering and the other thing is

SPEAKER_246: because of that fear-mongering and as you know in the u.s the states conduct the election so it's not the federal government and so state laws are like 10 20 years behind the technology norm so that's that's why it's so slow you know it's a hard work process and we've managed to get laws changed in a few jurisdictions but it's it's hard long uh you know long work yeah walk us through how this works so i'm a

SPEAKER_01: military member i'm stationed in afghanistan or you know uh in japan somewhere and i get my ballot how and then how do you collect the information and ensure that i wasn't hacked by the russians or you know a democratic operative a republican operative who says you know what uh i'm gonna go just intercept these votes and you know walk us through how the product works you download an app

SPEAKER_22: you you get a special link and and then how do the biometrics work walk us through the the the the

SPEAKER_253: best case scenario yeah sure jason so the first process is you register as an absentee voter so

SPEAKER_246: that's a normal process like you would do with your county or city elections clerk and there you have an option to choose mobile or digital instead of getting a postal ballot so once the county approves your application then you receive an invitation to download the votes app so this is a smartphone application you can get on your iphone or android you start the process by you know verifying yourself so you have to take a picture of a government issued photo id us passport driver's license state id then you take a live video selfie so make sure you are you know it's a liveness check it checks whether

SPEAKER_34: you know you're trying to impersonate somebody so you basically do a zoom and is that with an operator

SPEAKER_22: or some other human being who says you know hey alex uh wilhelm uh you know we're doing your vote can you just confirm your social security number or something like that or it's just the the app asks

SPEAKER_253: you a couple questions how does that work so the app does that automatically in the default case so you will take a picture of your id in the app front and back it's called two sides then you do a live video selfie in the app and for most people that's sufficient it matches your selfie to the photo in your id it'll then check your id with the state databases and the state order registration system that takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes and if everything is good you get approved your documents are deleted for privacy reasons and then your kind of your hardware identifier is is mapped in and then you receive your ballot on the phone you can mark it submit it and then what happens is this is unique to us elections you also have to sign up on the screen so your signature is also matched with the signature on record on the state voter registration system and then once you submit the ballot you get a receipt which you can use to audit your ballot on the blockchain and then at the county or the city side another cool thing happens actually prints out a paper ballot on election day which is as if you would have hand marked in person or if you had submitted a postal ballot and then that's used to tabulate just like any other ballot on election night so every voter gets the option to audit you know for sure your ballot reached on time wasn't tampered with and actually counted so that's the best case scenario for uh for these groups of voters i want you to

SPEAKER_14: double click on the blockchain element about this because one of the cool things about votes and one

SPEAKER_19: of the reasons why i wanted to have you on the show is it feels like the blockchain element of the

SPEAKER_06: votes technology isn't the main selling point you guys aren't a blockchain first company you're a voting company but you're using the blockchain so which chain are you using and then also you know our

SPEAKER_27: governments savvy enough to actually know what that means and favor it yeah so blockchain serves a very

SPEAKER_253: specific purpose in our in our solution so once the ballot is submitted it then makes sure that the ballot cannot be tampered with by anybody us the government third party hackers anybody so that's the process

SPEAKER_270: it doesn't have a role to play prior to the part when you submit submit the water so that's one thing

SPEAKER_22: to keep in mind i'm sure people ask how can this be hacked and how is this different than let's say the average or even the weakest um in-person voting and or absentee voting it seems to me and this is not political in any way that if a political operative were to go to a nursing home you know this is always the scenario people talk about and you know there's 10 people who are kind of out of it god forbid they're suffering from alzheimer's or whatever collect their ballots put the votes they vote you know

SPEAKER_01: down one party line and then mail them in that obviously has uh happened i'm sure in some small number in the world and i'm sure it probably hasn't been enough of them or i hope um but in your research in this space that seems to be an attack vector am i correct that that's the attack vector that would be the easiest one to do take a bunch of old people who are out of it intercept their mail-in votes or even register them if they're not registered intercept it and then vote for your preferred

David Friedberg: candidate in a local or even a federal election am i correct that that's the easiest attack vector are

SPEAKER_253: there other ones that are even easier yes as far as traditional postal mail voting is concerned that's indeed um the most common or most obvious attack vector how often does that happen well there isn't authoritative conclusive data available for every jurisdiction but your sense is correct it does happen nothing is um you know foolproof but as far as the data we've seen it doesn't happen at levels or quantities that's large enough to sway or swing an election so that's one thing to keep in mind

SPEAKER_34: have people been arrested for doing that because my understanding is interfering in an election

SPEAKER_01: or taking other people's votes is a very serious crime so the person who is going to do that would have the ability i don't know alex i'm going to make up a number here if you worked at a giant

SPEAKER_22: apartment complex or place you could probably get dozens and if you did that with dozens and you got caught faking let's say three dozen votes 36 votes you would be facing a really serious criminal charge so there is a major cost here and the benefit would be 36 votes and i'm not sure there's any election that ever came down to dozens of votes at a federal level for sure but am i crazy here alex in terms of my handicapping of this and again i i i'm sure both sides have done shenanigans like this and individual lone wolves have done it i'm having a hard time alex conceptualizing a widespread strategy here of stealing votes i'm not counting influencing votes like going over grandma's shoulder and saying hey you want to vote for this party because this person's going to save your social security fact

SPEAKER_27: check me here steel man me so the the things that i found prepping for this segment because i was really curious how much fraud is there and how much fraud do people think there is and the amount of fraud that i could find from to pick one example of this not the one you're talking about but one that i think about a lot which is non-citizens voting it turns out as far as we can tell it's incredibly

SPEAKER_19: low level and so i i agree with you that you could go to an apartment building or a senior citizens you

SPEAKER_06: know care home or whatever and go about this but i think the problem is it would take so much effort to do that for so few votes especially given with gerrymandering and you know um the electoral college often individual votes aren't super impactful so i just don't think it happens that much but the thing that i'm cool about with votes and other startups is making the process less opaque perhaps with the blockchain perhaps with something else to increase trust i feel like the trust issue is the real crisis versus stamping out the last teeny bit of voter fraud that we're aware of it is just helping

SPEAKER_27: people understand what's going on so for example the heritage institute said in a post non-citizens

SPEAKER_06: don't illegally vote in detectable numbers cool heritage by the way right leaning to pick that for that reason but according to a marist poll from this year 58 percent of americans say they are either very concerned or concerned that voter fraud will occur so we have more fear than fraud and that's why i'm hoping we can just get the fear down and then stamp out the rest of the fraud at the same time

SPEAKER_57: nimit does that make sense or am i totally talking off base here no absolutely fear is the is the main

SPEAKER_253: sort of source of problems when it comes to elections whether it's in person or even digital even with online or digital voting there's a massive amount of fear-mongering and just the analog to what jason just said it's equally hard to compromise an online election based on the the new technologies

SPEAKER_246: that are available you're better off actually creating fear and misinformation than actually

SPEAKER_27: being able to compromise a vote so i'm curious about the business here because you guys have raised money you're out in the market it just strikes me that selling to governments to help them do better

SPEAKER_04: at their job is going to be a tough road to hose so nimit what's the sales cycle like here for votes

SPEAKER_253: yeah it's it's super hard um when we started really really small 2018 first election was in the state of west virginia midterms two counties 20 military voters so since then we've come a long way but it's a hard sell but then it's a hard problem i think it's it's worth solving we saw that no one else was tackling it

SPEAKER_246: in a manner that we think we should and the elections industry needs to catch up with the rest of the industry rest of the economy and so that's um that's our hope and um i think there's enough um enough optimism i mean governments around the world are uh waking up to this look at estonia where you know nearly half of the country votes online and they're sitting right next to a big country who's always trying to you know break their government hack their elections so it's possible and there's no reason why america with all its power and might can't do it well i actually think of a couple reasons why

SPEAKER_27: america with all its power and might can't do it because we get in our own way uh but that's actually a segue to my last question for you nimit before we let you go uh is there been an increased urgency at the state level inside the united states for what you guys are building because it does seem that the fear is at pretty much an all-time high right now so i'm hoping that that's converting into action there

SPEAKER_266: is urgency for this small group of voters i mentioned because traditionally they haven't been voting or

SPEAKER_253: their mail ballots arrive late or some jurisdictions actually allow them to vote by email or fax where you lose your privacy it's not exactly a safe way to submit your ballot so definitely for this small group there is there's been a lot of movement a lot of states have updated their their laws to get new technology in but for the wider country the normal citizens it's still um still not not there yet

SPEAKER_01: we had um fox news uh was reporting on the dominion voting machines i know you're not doing voting machines and um they won a huge judgment against fox for this whole thing what is the repercussions of these voting machines and their um the ability to hack those is is any of that in any way um real to use a word uh and this dominion voting scandal or is it all just fear and uncertainty and doubt

SPEAKER_93: fud being spread by folks like fox or something yeah it's mostly fud because the traditional voting

SPEAKER_253: machines they don't connect to the internet so there's no way to getting from there the only place where you could actually compromise them when they're actually being programmed which happens before the

SPEAKER_246: election begins and that's done in usually a very controlled manner by each individual county or the state so it's it's hard to break in you would have to have a massive insider compromise in the state

SPEAKER_253: or the county governments to you know compromise those machines so i would say that's that's mostly fud and even if they were i mean there are new voting machines being designed now which use data diodes where you can actually connect out or connect in but it's one-way traffic and so even in that sense in the future you'll see technology that's that's pretty foolproof but for what we use right now is

SPEAKER_250: it's all fud well that's i mean i'm glad it's fun versus reality jason you know it's better to be

SPEAKER_39: afraid than dying i mean i i would like to see us you know after this election is done really focus

SPEAKER_01: on this issue to take it off the table and you know i i i think there's a small set of things we can all agree on like we want everybody's vote counted maybe everybody should get the day off to vote and it should be a federal holiday that doesn't seem like a big deal maybe it should be like voting occurs over three days and one of them is the official day and there's one day you know there's two days before that you can you know sort of drop your ballot off and i i think id sounds like a

SPEAKER_22: reasonable thing like this idea that you need id to get it on an airplane or to i don't know uh rent a piece of equipment uh or like to buy something at the store you sometimes have to show id but to vote you don't have to show id and so how do you think about id as we wrap up here nimit and i really appreciate the candid thoughts and the work you're doing tell me about id and why this is a controversial issue or is it because it seems like a bunch of people are fighting for people to be able to vote without showing an id an id does not seem to be hard to get in the united states i've done it for my daughters for me you can get all kinds of like and that's for kids who are under 18. this just does

SPEAKER_253: not seem too hard to get an id yeah it it's it's mostly a political argument i mean if you look at maybe 10 15 years ago there was actually a problem with getting ids in some some places now you're right there isn't and if for some reason you know you're an elderly person or you know otherwise can afford an id there are non-profits now which will get you an id for free so absolutely no reason to not have an id in today's you know us so the argument against ids is is mostly political um on our system ids are mandatory so for everybody to have an id and no not even one voter has objected i think people know the fact you want to get on a plane you want to get into a government building you need an id so why not why not for voting so it's it's a moot argument and i think it will uh eventually die off right now it's it's stuck in in politics and one thing i'd like to add to your list uh i think receipts i think you talked about this lack of trust yeah how come we don't have

SPEAKER_296: receipts that that's so dumb i mean do some places have receipts yes we do give a receipt but let's

SPEAKER_253: say even in the traditional method of voting if you were to give every vote of a receipt and then allow them to audit their ballot maybe it's on a blockchain maybe a different system that would remove so much of the doubt and that's a simple thing we can implement which would you know solve a lot of this

SPEAKER_246: this mistrust which exists right now so i would add that to your list i mean seems like a simple punch

SPEAKER_01: list uh uh nimit thank you for your hard work uh the domain name it's a votes v-o-a-t-z and is it

SPEAKER_93: votes.com yes okay i appreciate the work you're doing to secure elections thank you for having me thank you

David Friedberg: so thanks to our guest today uh i have seen some news about solar in australia uh going greater than

SPEAKER_01: 50 percent of the power used in the country they seem to have the biggest investment in solar uh and

SPEAKER_22: texas also is installing the most solar and i'm here now in texas as a citizen of texas this year so i wanted to start just like we're doing this election thing maybe talking about solar a bit because i feel like this is an underrepresented uh under reported story uh and so we'll uh be talking about australia and their solar on monday or wednesday or monday and so the production team's working on if you have any information about that you can dm alex or i uh or you can email tips

SPEAKER_06: at thisweekendstartups.com on the solar front especially if you know a cool solar startup either a financing company and just technology company a new way to store solar energy we are always looking to expand the twist 500 and we are going to be taking a look at solar so lots more to come there but jason i feel like this was an optimistic show we did very well i think we did great i

SPEAKER_01: love having the dynamism of the gas and kind of doing the quick hits with them as opposed to like an hour and you know 15 minute interview just getting like you know the best of on a topical thing from the founder's perspective is like i think something we can do very innovative here on the show and for twist 500.com nominate so if you want to do that you can do twist 500.com nominate

SPEAKER_22: we'll have the nomination form up in the next day or so and if you want to nominate somebody we just want to have like a pretty good dossier on them you'll increase your chances by telling us how much revenue if you nominate yourself you can nominate yourself we just want to know like hey revenue year over year for a couple years uh and funding and those basic things uh to to to consider your nomination and of course it's tips at thisweekendstartups.com we'll see you all on wednesday on this week search thanks to our partners and thanks to alex he's x.com alex first

SPEAKER_305: name club yes sir and he's x.com jason first name club we'll see you we'll see you guys in two days bye