SPEAKER_00: You know, Alex, we got a lot of applications for Foundry University. I gave a little pitch for it on the All In podcast last week, and we're talking about it here on This Week in Startup. So

SPEAKER_03: I got a lot of applications. I'm really excited about this. I mean, you know that I love demo days. Can we take a look and see what people have cooked up? Yeah, absolutely. You know what? I'll

SPEAKER_00: do a live demo. This is an application we got actually from Kamala Harris. Kamala GPT. This is a language model from Kamala Harris. Let's give it a shot. Should we do it live? Yeah, let's do it live. Okay. Kamala GPT, how many people crossed the border while you were vice president? I

SPEAKER_06: can imagine what can be and be unburdened by what has been. Oh, yeah, that's a little rough.

SPEAKER_00: That's a little rough there. This is another application. Donnie GPT. Donnie GPT. Here's the Donnie GPT. Hey, Donnie GPT. If you lose the 2024 election, will you concede or will we

SPEAKER_09: have another January 6th question? Two showers with the other pros that came out of there and they said, oh my God. I think they're both hallucinating. There were other applications

SPEAKER_00: that came in as well. I saw Sam Altman had an application. Here it is. This is Sam's cap

SPEAKER_11: table software. Oh, man. Yes. You just plug it in and your nonprofit can become a for-profit

SPEAKER_12: and just. Well, if it's Sam Altman's cap table, I'm pretty sure no matter what investors are

SPEAKER_00: on there, Sam Altman ends up with 100% of the equity. Here's one for you. You and Mark Andreessen, he applied and he's got his hair growth tonic here. This is for you and Mark.

SPEAKER_14: I'm in favor of this. The problem is Mark has messed up the application of it and has only applied his hair tonic on his beard area and he should try it on top. I'll give us the

David Friedberg: climate report back. This is another one. This is Tim Walz applied. This is for his travel guide to China. He can take a tour with Tim. I don't think I would take that tour right now with the political climate or with Tim Walz to be totally honest. I don't know. I'll put

SPEAKER_17: Tim Walz hats on here. And JD Vance also applied. Here's a JD's guy liner. Guy liner

SPEAKER_19: from JD Vance. Guaranteed to make you look like a serious politician overnight. Overnight. Absolutely. And this is another one from JD Vance. The one is a little spicy. Oh, no, no, no. Get that off the screen. That's too much. Too much. Let's do the show.

SPEAKER_22: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Digital Ocean. Whether you're just

SPEAKER_26: getting started with AI or seeing projects take off, Digital Ocean is the cloud platform that lets you focus on what matters, building killer apps. Right now, get up to 100k in free credits at do.co slash twist. Terms and conditions apply. Oracle. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or

SPEAKER_22: OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs.

SPEAKER_26: Save up to 50% on your cloud bill at oracle.com slash twist. And Kelshi, the largest regulated predictions market now lets you trade on U.S. elections. Visit Kelshi.com slash twist to see live election odds, place a trade, and get $20 when you deposit $100.

SPEAKER_30: All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis, an angel investor

SPEAKER_32: here in Austin, Texas. And with me is my partner in crime from the East Coast. His name is Alex

SPEAKER_03: Wilhelm. How are you doing, brother? I'm doing fantastically because I had a weekend full of sports and food and fall fun. I had the most wholesome time, Jason. I'm feeling fulfilled.

SPEAKER_35: Did you, uh, yeah, you're in the Northeast. Did you do the apple picking? Did you do the pumpkin patch? Describe what's going on there in the Northeast. That was one of my favorite things to do was going apple picking with my family as, as a youth. So we didn't go apple picking this last

SPEAKER_03: weekend. That is on the agenda, but we went to a fall festival at a farm and there was like pumpkin slingshots and a corn maze. It was just the most wholesome thing. Something people who don't have kids don't know is how much stuff is out there for people who do have children. Cause you would never go there if you're like 27, just hanging out. Um, but it was, it was just so child friendly and lovely. And I, I was just like, it's a great weekend. It's warm and good. Jason. I don't know. I'm just

SPEAKER_40: feeling it. Awesome. That's fantastic. And, uh, yeah, I'm getting ready. My kids are making their

SPEAKER_41: own outfits. So, you know, we're always trying to do crafts. My kids are a little bit older than

SPEAKER_42: yours. So we're always trying to do some crafts or creative projects and make them, um, independent

SPEAKER_43: humans in the world, maybe less consumption, more creation. So we make ice cream this weekend. We got our ice cream cream back out of the closet and we did two different types of ice cream.

SPEAKER_03: I am looking forward to the, the Halloween, um, twist episode in which you and I are both going to dress up as vampires, I think was the agreement. And so I think we should both go

SPEAKER_32: as like people from the industry. I'm going to cosplay Palmer lucky. I will do a cosplaying

SPEAKER_40: Palmer lucky as my cosplay for Halloween. So given my head and, and lack of hair,

SPEAKER_03: I do think that the only person I could really do is Mark Andreessen or Bezos, you could go

SPEAKER_33: base. Oh, that's true. I could go Bezos. Yeah. Bezos, yacht, Andreessen, pack, you know, plus or minus. I think Andreessen's the best pull. Andreessen's the best pull.

SPEAKER_03: Doing a Halloween costume of someone who's blocked you on Twitter, I think is a mark of pride. Um, I do want to just point out a little, a little pre-show banter before we dive into the news here. Um, something really cool has happened. And Jason, we, we talk a lot about, uh, GPUs, GPU clouds, and how the AI boom is, is changing the way people handle compute. It's actually done something else. So, uh, recently the great internet, Marson prime search or GIMPS has discovered a new prime number. It is the, I think the largest known prime it's, uh, 41 million 24, 320 digits. So it's enormous. And it turns out there's a guy named, uh, Luke Durant, and he found this former NVIDIA engineer used GPUs in 17 different countries to help find this number as part of, um, a kind of independent community-based search. And so here we see GPUs meeting mathematics and actually moving our understanding forward. I thought it was just like a cool combination of stuff we've been talking

SPEAKER_52: about. Okay. So a prime number, it's a natural number greater than one that has no positive divisors other than one and itself. Yep. For example, two, because yeah, two goes into two once. Yeah. Or three, uh, are all prime numbers. So somebody found the largest one at 41 million digits. Oh my

SPEAKER_03: Lord. 41 million digits. That is so many digits. Like I can't even, I, what would that be? Like a subtillion, subtillion, subtillion to the subtillionth. Like it's, it's insane, but it goes to show

SPEAKER_13: the GPUs are awesome. Uh, and then what do we do with this? Oh, we look at it. Got it. I mean,

SPEAKER_52: if we find like a certain size prime number, is it going to open up like the Marvel universe and like all the different timelines collapse on each other or something, or we just don't know. We don't know.

SPEAKER_03: I, I wish that was the case, but my favorite example of how like pure science can actually impact the, the, the real world is some Microsoft research they used to do. They have their own, like basic reachers division. And they tracked, they learned how to track bone movements and people. And then that ended up becoming the basis for the connect that gaming device that sold like a bajillion units. So sometimes we don't know what's going to happen, but here we do have, um, an enormous number. So there you go, everybody. If you wanted a bigger number,

SPEAKER_40: it's prime. You got it.

SPEAKER_32: And GPUs are in, uh, you know, short supply. Everybody's buying up all the, the, uh, H one hundreds and all of the GPUs. And, uh, there's a startup angle here. Data crunch is a new GPU cloud. Uh, I guess they call those Neo clouds now, new clouds. Uh, and it's based in Finland. They just raised a 7.6 million in equity and 5.4 million in debt. That's goes right to Nvidia's bottom line. Uh, and they'll compete with other twist 500 companies like core weave and what's the other one. Lambda labs, Lambda labs. Yeah. So there's a bunch of people who are now providing GPUs as a service. Uh, we got a packed show today. And, uh, you know, I have been following a really interesting person on Twitter. His name is John Lepore and he is the co-founder of blacks black box infinite. They put together really interesting prototypes of the future. And I, I, I started following this guy a couple of years ago and I've been tweeting him. Uh, so let's just

SPEAKER_62: bring them on. John, are you there? There we go. What's happening, Jason? How are you? How are

SPEAKER_64: you doing? Twitter, Twitter, buddy? Ah, doing good. Doing good. Happy to be here. Thanks for

SPEAKER_07: inviting me on. Sure. So, um, tell us what you do for a living and then maybe we'll do some show

SPEAKER_68: and tell of cool stuff. Awesome. So, uh, I am the co-founder of a practice called black box infinite. We're a bunch of weirdos who have kind of woven together a bunch of different disciplines to solve what we describe as like the new problems that we see happening in technology and digital product design, right? Like we've got all these emerging paradigms that are falling out of the sky left and right. And the digital product landscape, like today, it's really mature. Like it's really mature in a wonderful way. If you need to make an app, you just follow the best practices and you end up with something that's going to hit your goals or your targets. Um, but none of that applies to AI. None of that applies to spatial interactions. None of that applies to these more immersive, like sensory experiences and things that are now showing up all over the place. And we found that our background and experience in a mixture of a little bit of user experience, a little bit of product design, but also a lot of like Hollywood VFX is something that helps us push the boundaries out for what's possible and, and kind of jumping into scenarios where we put a lot of pressure on a lot of our clients to make sure that they're fully utilizing all of the capabilities or just all the opportunities

SPEAKER_78: that are available with all the new, exciting things that are happening in tech right now.

SPEAKER_80: If your startup is all in on AI, well, DigitalOcean is the cloud platform that's going to help you scale faster without all the headaches. You're going to be able to do incredible things with their GPU powered virtual machines, like training your models or building AI agents, or just crushing massive data sets all in seconds. And when you're done, you did spin them back down just as quickly with options from single GPU configurations to setups with eight GPUs. DigitalOcean lets you scale computing power based on your precise needs without having to make upfront hardware investments. DigitalOcean is going to keep your infrastructure simple with an intuitive UI, robust product documentation,

SPEAKER_82: and on-demand support. And with all that on-demand support, you're going to spend all your time building the next big thing, not managing infrastructure. DigitalOcean is your best choice

SPEAKER_83: because it's simple, scalable, and cost effective. So here's your call to action right now. Approved listeners can get up to $100,000 in free credits on us. Visit do.co slash twist to get started and view

SPEAKER_82: terms and conditions. That's do.co slash twist. So this actually caught my attention originally

SPEAKER_03: because you guys have put out a kind of a prototype back in January of an F1 experience, something that you could build for Apple's new Vision Pro headsets. And it ended up getting something like 300,000 views, MKBHD talked about it, and there, and recently you guys announced that it's now an actual product. But I want to talk about the Genesis because at the time, BlackBox wrote that you guys were frustrated with many early use cases for the Vision Pro and that they were more kind of tablet and phone apps than, quote, the magical immersive hallucination machine and what it could do. So can you tell us a little bit about why you felt that the Vision Pro's apps were kind of a failure and why this was the

SPEAKER_87: way forward? Yeah. So, I mean, the Vision Pro to us, it's like clear as day. This is an incredible

SPEAKER_68: piece of technology, right? Like there's so much that this thing is capable of. There's so much that it can do. There's so much, uh, sophisticated things packed into this $3,500 visor. Right. And it was, yeah, it was heartbreaking to us to see as this thing came out to the world, like we're imagining like spent my career making fictional holograms and very augmented reality or spatial like experiences for movies and all sorts of other experiences and things that are out there. And so now it's finally possible. And every single experience that I had seen was just using this to look at like rounded rectangles floating in space. And. You know, like that's like it, there is something cool about putting on the headset and having as many monitor views as you could imagine or whatnot, but like you can buy a lot of monitors with $3,500, right? Like there's, uh, there's gotta be more that you can do. And so there was this idea that we had had gestating and actually it was an idea that originated from, uh, there used to be a innovation prize that formula one would give out every year. And in 2018, I had submitted this concept to formula one and was actually flown out to circuit of the Americas received a trophy from seven time world champion Lewis Hamilton himself. It was like one of the most insane days of my life. Um, but the idea never really went anywhere and it was just sort of, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't time yet for something like that. And so with the vision pro coming out, we figured, all right, we've got to put this idea out there into the world. And this idea to us was the perfect confluence of something that would be perfectly suited to this platform,

SPEAKER_87: something that would be extremely feasible and achievable, but also that when executed properly would feel super just magical. Right. But you know, you didn't build it though. You put out the idea,

SPEAKER_03: you showed it off on YouTube. Everyone liked it, but you guys didn't actually go out there and build it

SPEAKER_68: yourselves. Correct. So we, we published this as, you know, what we describe as like a motion prototype, uh, you know, for us just effectively the, we said vision pros coming out in a few weeks, what's the quickest way that we can make something that we can share with the world that just begins to put our own spin on it. And so we put, put that out there. It resonated tremendously. I mean, ESPN was reposting it. Uh, MKBHD featured it several times on his channel. Um, it, it went all over the place. I think we were at like 60 million plus views of the prototype across all the different platforms for us. It was also like the ultimate statement of kind of what we do at black box infinite, which is we look at the possibilities and we start cracking. Who would you do that for?

SPEAKER_41: So you, you came out of the, the, if I understand correctly and the way I discovered you was you, you do this with movie studios. So when we saw all this like incredible stuff in iron man two, you had done some of that work of what iron man sees through his heads up display, et cetera. So you do via visual effects for movie studios primarily. So before founding black box, I used to run all of

SPEAKER_68: the creative at a VFX shop in New York called perception. And there I worked on, uh, somewhere north of 30 different Marvel films and all sorts of other movies and had this focus around creating the

SPEAKER_62: kind of like fictional tech that appears in those, in those stories. Now, as soon as that work started,

SPEAKER_68: immediately started getting inquiries from real world technology brands who all were basically, you know, you can, you can imagine what they were saying was effectively, how do we close the gap between our practical technology and what we see in, in film, which is a, a pretty natural thought, but it's a really chaotic or convoluted way of trying to close the gap. And so, uh, back in around 2010 or so, I think was when iron man two came out. That was the first film that I had worked on. I sent myself off to like user experience and digital product design bootcamp and just got really immersed in what does it take to not just, you know, make a painting of a house, but how do you make the blueprints? How do you engineer every different aspect of it and create something a little more, a little more sound and a little more feasible. And for me, there's this really

SPEAKER_105: wonderful tension and overlap. I am probably guessing you've got a huge cloud bill coming in every month.

SPEAKER_83: And listen, you don't want to cut your team size, right? You need all those talented people you have. But if you use Oracle cloud infrastructure, AKA OCI, and you're hearing a lot about that today, because so many people are using it, you're going to cut your cloud computing bill, get ready for it in half. Such a great deal. All you need to do is move to the OCI, which is your one-stop platform for your infrastructure, for your database, app development needs, and it's got AI built in where you need it most. It's more cost effective than other cloud offerings. OCI charges 50% less for compute, and 80% less for networking. So you're going to save a ton in the cloud where you pay by the minute spending less ads up. We all know that. And these bills can get out of control. And that's

SPEAKER_80: why startups love OCI. So here's a very simple call to action. Oracle's very generous. Oracle has put together a special introductory offer that is available to you if you qualify. Oracle will chop your current cloud computing bill in half if you move to OCI. So check if your company qualifies at oracle.com slash twist. This is Oracle showing their commitment to me, your boy J Cal and the startup community here on the number one podcast in the world for startups. And now there is a limit here. This is limited to new OCI customers in the US minimum financial commitment and exclusions apply. Oracle.com slash twist. That's oracle.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_97: OCI is the gap closing because it did seem like minority report felt like, man, that is way in the

SPEAKER_52: future. Like when he was doing the pinching and zooming and the self-driving cars, and then there's

SPEAKER_41: iRobot. And then we see in the last week, you know, the, the starship gets caught, a 23 story building

SPEAKER_52: gets caught with some toothpicks and, you know, the bus and the, and the self-driving car at the robo taxi event was pretty compelling. All of this stuff. And then, you know, let alone what we're seeing with, uh, VR and AR is the gap tighter now between Westworld and the real world.

SPEAKER_68: The, the gap is, the gap is either tighter or it's farther apart than ever because we now, I believe we're now being equipped with all of the possibilities, but we have a lot of baggage of the way that we've been making products and experiences and tools and sort of, you know, digital product design has through its maturity, had a lot of the imagination just sort of drained right out of it. There are all of these, you know, patterns and processes and whatnot. And it's, it's this amazing, it's this huge field, right? Uh, digital product design, but there's so many people that are just, you know, stuck in this kind of following rules and,

SPEAKER_44: and those rules are there for a reason. If you think about how much money is at stake for a company

SPEAKER_52: like Meta. Yes. You know, it, if they put the pixels for an ad in a certain spot, it might not look good in a Marvel film, but it might print an extra billion dollars a year. So they are obsessed with the click through rate of advertising and that's their master. Whereas in a film, the master is what's elegant and beautiful and inspiring. And so I guess those two things, we have to close the gap, but let's look at one more time and I'll describe it for the audience, this unbelievable F1 experience. Cause when I saw this, I was like, well, John did it again. And so here, if we pull it up, you, you have, uh, in front of your computer monitor, essentially the entire track. And so you see the track and you see the cars going around it, um, which is amazing. And then when you hover over it, I, I suppose this would be on hover or whatever. You can see the,

SPEAKER_32: a little monitor go above the car that shows the driver's perspective. So now you're seeing multiple drivers perspectives and you're seeing it go around the track. And I I'll be honest, I don't,

SPEAKER_116: this kind of driving sport was never super interesting to me, but when I saw this, I was like, I actually don't want to go to F1 in person. I do want to experience this because the, being able to switch between the first person perspectives to me and watching it on a, the full track, that makes sense. But watching go, you, you, you buy you in person sounds quite repetitive.

SPEAKER_32: What are your thoughts on that? Alex? Am I, am I too simple here in describing what I'm

SPEAKER_13: seeing? No, you are an actual fan of zoom, zoom, zoom. Yeah, no, I'm a huge fan of F1,

SPEAKER_03: but you actually make a really good point, which is that a lot of the camera angles during the race are kind of lame. They often do like, um, shots of cars coming towards you. So you can't tell how fast they're going, they cut too much. You can't follow individual drivers. And also they can only show you one shot at a time, but there's 20 cars out there. So you often miss interesting battles. And so what I think this, this, this prototype that now became a thing called laps with a Z, uh, for the vision pro is so cool because it'll highlight so much more information. So it's not just showing us what we had before in a slightly remixed fashion, it's expanding the aperture, more data, more information, and therefore more enjoyment. And that's why it does feel like something a little bit new and different. So, you know, points to John, because other people haven't

SPEAKER_84: made something that's made me want to go out and buy a vision pro right away. But this did, I, I mean, honestly, I think I just lost $3,500. Screw you.

SPEAKER_32: Well, and also John, like one thing I also noticed about this building on what Alex just

SPEAKER_52: said is there's actually multiple things going on in a race. Uh, I never thought about that. I just thought, well, who's in the lead and that's where you're going to focus, but there could be things going on in the back or the middle of the pack that are also super compelling, right? Uh, and so this would give you the ability to dynamically switch between those. And it, I noticed in golf when the, and I don't watch golf on TV, they have this sort of lightning round or super cuts now where you go from one to the next hole. So you have no downtime. It's almost like playing multi multiple hands of poker simultaneously, multi-tabling and poker. So maybe talk a little bit about how you study the

SPEAKER_121: experience and then make the interface. If I, if I, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_68: Yeah. So there's a lot of factors that made this like the perfect storm for us of this will be a special experience. And a lot of that has to do with the feasibility, right? Um, it can't just be, there's a lot of demos out there that show like basketball players running around on your kitchen table or whatnot. And that's technically not possible during a live NBA game right now. You can reconstruct a replay from camera rays in an arena, but it's complex takes a lot of time. It's a pretty expensive process and you can't watch the sport live like that. And anyways, when you're watching a basketball game, like you want to see the physicality of the players in 4k as we get during our, our broadcast race cars, really easy to render in like a real time game engine, right. And have them look realistic. Formula one has been capturing live telemetry data for generations. Now the data already exists for car positions, speeds, position of the steering wheel, all of these different sort of factors. It's all been out there basically, you know, uh, in the sport, just waiting for someone to grab ahold of it and do something interesting with it. Um, and then on top of that, it's exactly the factors you were both describing, which is that with F1, you're often stuck just seeing whatever cars can fit within the 16 by nine broadcast feed. And there's a story going on beyond those three cars at all times. And so having this global view of the race of the stories, even of just the, the, the greater kind of like geography of these events, like I'm a hardcore racing junkie. My dad is a racing instructor. I've spent a lot of time on track when I'm watching a race. I can't even tell, like, is that turn seven or turn 15? Like, it's really hard to track and, and stay aware of this stuff. And so we found that this resonated really well, got a lot of people really inspired and excited about the tech, got a lot of comments from people saying, you know, just like you did, like, I don't care at all about F1. This would pull me into it. And that gets us really excited. Now, the really fun part of this story or the most recent update of this is that there is a fully functioning beta of this, that if you've got a vision pro headset and you're on test flight, you can jump into the beta and you can experience this. It's called lapse. There's an amazing team of developers in Prague who, upon seeing the initial concept film, they basically said, well, can we, can we build this? Can we make this? Do we have the ability to put this together? These guys spent several months, brilliant, brilliant guys, uh, Simon, Martin, Jan, Yarrow. They've been working their tails off, uh, putting this together as a pet project. This is, this is a very much an unofficial beta product experience. Um, and if you were to watch the race yesterday, uh, that was, that was unfolding, watch it live in this experience lapse, you would swear this was the

SPEAKER_87: official formula one experience. It is so polished. It's so sophisticated, so well executed. And so, uh, uh, we at black box have teamed up with these, these guys to just continue to develop this further, amazing, keep pushing the boundaries of where this can go. And we're just loving it because it's this

SPEAKER_68: like ultimate sort of manifestation of this concept that we saw kind of light the internet on fire several

SPEAKER_78: months back. And to us, it's very, very gratifying to see this. I love this concept for you.

SPEAKER_41: Make some brilliant, uh, design and then find people to build it and then partner with them and share the equity in it. It's very like, you're almost like a venture capitalist, like me, you know, betting on people and your contribution is, Hey, here's what we, here's, here's a design.

SPEAKER_52: Anybody want to build it? I love that as a concept.

SPEAKER_68: It's, it's honestly, it's been, I feel completely spoiled because it's been even easier than that. There's several different teams that without even having any contact with us, just took it upon themselves to put something together. This one is, uh, several levels ahead of all of the other, uh, variants that, that we've seen. And so we struck up a conversation with them and found a way to, you know, there's, there's no harm in just figuring out if we can help them continue to enhance it. And we love just seeing what they've done with it. It makes us extremely

SPEAKER_32: proud. And just brass tax, a little equity, and it would be nice, a little yum, yum. You get a little upside in these designs. And if only you knew a venture capitalist, early stage seed investor who could put a little bit of money behind this, man, we might actually have a great product. We'll talk about that offline as we wrap up here and just next time you do one of these, please debut it here first. And then, uh, we'll, we'll get, we'll get the whole thing started. I talk about prediction

SPEAKER_83: markets all the time on my podcast and prediction markets are brilliant because they allow people to buy and sell contracts on future events with prices set by market opinion. So if you're interested in this, we've got some amazing news. Hal She, the world's largest prediction market just made it legal to trade on the upcoming U S elections. That's right. For the first time in 100 years,

SPEAKER_82: U S citizens can now legally place trades on election outcomes. Political polls can certainly be inaccurate. We've learned that, but the markets tell you where the sharps are putting their money. Sharps are the smart people and election outcomes matter. They impact your taxes, the economy,

SPEAKER_83: and of course the world of investing traditionally only large corporations and the wealthy could hedge their bets against election uncertainties. But now Kalshi allows anyone to protect themselves if their

SPEAKER_80: preferred candidate loses. So go check out the real time election odds. And if you feel confident about who's going to win, why not play some trade? I'm going to do it. So here's your call to action. I want you to check out Kalshi. That's Kalshi.com slash twist. K-A-L-S-H-I. Kalshi.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_32: As your most inspiring from your youth today, anywhere in between television show, comic book,

SPEAKER_134: novel, but mostly movies, I guess. What, what, what is the most compelling for you and inspiring?

SPEAKER_87: So, uh, that's a, that's a tough question. Yeah. There's a lot of them out there that I absolutely

SPEAKER_68: adore. And I think for me, because I spent a lot of time doing this work, I have come to really respect how challenging it is to convey complex, rich depth technology concepts when they're only seen like at a glance, like my favorite that I had worked on was, uh, Black Panther, this, uh, uh, vibranium sand that you see throughout the whole film. It's like a physical interface rather than a hologram or the sort of traditional, like glowing blue shit, as I call it. Like to me, anywhere where you see something that's very distinctly different or, but, but where you can also understand what's driving it. So, uh, mission impossible, uh, three, I believe it is, uh, the one where, uh, they, they go up the side of the tall building. There's a point in the story where they're breaking into the Kremlin and they unfurl a projection screen in a hallway and they have cameras behind the projection screen, tracking the position of the security guards eyes. And it's rendering an illusion of the hallway, continuing amazing moving along with the guy's eyes. And I saw that in the movie theater. I turned to my wife and I was like, honey, you gotta understand what's happening here. Is there tracking their eyes

SPEAKER_87: because that gets the right person. And she's just like, you dumb ass. I get it. It's obvious. Like, why are you like, everybody in the movie theater understands this. And I was just like, there you

SPEAKER_19: go. That's, that's, that's brilliant. Well, and if you think about invisibility as a concept, you know, wonder woman's invisible jet, I know your team Marvel, but any of these concepts,

SPEAKER_52: if you actually know who the audience is and you have a screen, uh, you could make something

SPEAKER_32: essentially disappear in the world. And so here is that hallway scene where they set it up and they are tracking this guy's eyes. That's the scene where they track the eyes and there it is. Uh, we now have, uh, a security guard who cannot tell that these guys are walking down the hallway with

SPEAKER_19: a projector screen. So such a great combination. What a great pole. Just like, and it's all, and it's

SPEAKER_68: all show don't tell, right? Like they're not, they're not hitting the brakes on the movie to have a Ted talk about how this technology concept is, is functioning. No voiceover there. No voiceover. You just, you just see it and you just get it. And that's, to me, that's a miracle. Westworld also has an amazing one where they're doing the logic trees for how the robots are going to respond in real time. You just see someone glancing at a tablet and you see with every voice interaction, these new branches that, you know, start creating alternate, you know, potential. And you're talking about the HBO

SPEAKER_143: series of Westworld. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh, done by, uh, Lisa joy and, um, uh, Jonathan Nolan,

SPEAKER_41: who I've met and, uh, real, I've told the story before. Like I remember talking to them, my friend,

SPEAKER_52: Sam Harris and my friend, Elon Musk to drop a bunch of names in one sentence about artificial intelligence. We had these conversations like 10, 15 years ago over dinner or parties. And, uh, here it is like improvisation, do this. And yeah, you don't need to it. And just think about how much this Alex, what we just saw with that poll, how much of that predated by five, 10 years, what we saw happen

SPEAKER_32: with chat GPT 01. So this is one of the really interesting things I love about science fiction and the work you're doing, John and writers do. Alex is all of this inspiration is like a flywheel. The, you know, you, you build something, put technology out into the world, like vision pro or Oculus, you know, or chat GPT. And it just inspires creatives to take it to the next level and then bring it back. And if you look at her, another great seminal film, the earpiece in her predated, I believe AirPods possibly, but maybe not. Um, and you know, this whole concept of like,

SPEAKER_52: you're talking to somebody, but you don't, nobody knows you're in a conversation with another entity. Uh, and that entity is doing decision trees to make you feel good.

SPEAKER_68: So, and, and those two, I love just because they, they communicate so much understanding. I love the vibe of, and because you just mentioned it, I'm going to drop, uh, her, because I love the way that hers vision of the future all the way down to, and like, maybe my favorite part of it is the way they treated fashion in the future. And they depicted it as kind of dorky and goofy looking. And we ended up actually try like trending straight towards that. But just this notion that like, cause all the time the future is viewed through the lens of today. And that's why, like, you can tell, you can see a science fiction movie made where the spacesuits have bell bottoms on them. Right. And like things like that. And it just like, you immediately are like, well, that was, that was only what the future felt like during that three to six year period. And there's just this much broader concept of making sure that when you're working in these spaces, you don't get caught up in this notion of like, I almost, I almost hate the word futuristic. Like it, it just sort of is like to make things in the style of the future. And like,

SPEAKER_87: Yeah. The future's not a style. It's not a vibe. It's not a time period that's coming, but yeah,

SPEAKER_52: it could be seventies or sixties art deco kind of like we're seeing there with like this weird green

SPEAKER_41: cushion and, you know, uh, and then you could have something like fifth element, which I always found really interesting. Another future vision. You know, my poll was, I don't know if you remember the character who kept saying super green. He was like the talk show host. Um, and he has a staff,

SPEAKER_52: which is his microphone. And it really does, uh, uh, predict podcasting and, um, what do we call, uh,

SPEAKER_116: influencer culture. And he's running around with his basically morning zoo crew. And he's got his little Madonna stick microphone and he's got, and he's basically doing a show from anywhere. So he's lot, he's a live streamer breaking everybody's chops on his show and has no sense

SPEAKER_155: of like what's appropriate or not. Just like these YouTubers. Yeah. I was going to say people of the

SPEAKER_12: future look just as annoyed about having a microphone shoved right in their face as modern

SPEAKER_03: people do. Um, I know we're going to let John go here, but like, I just want to throw one more idea to the science fiction interface idea, because in the expanse, the, uh, the film series that Amazon picked up, they had this great method of showing orbits and intersections in space using, I think like a hologram and it's so awesome. And now I can't stop thinking about how we can make a game that actually uses that style of interface inside of the vision pro. And then I could finally have the space sim. I've always wanted the future is going to be awesome. I'm stoked guys. The future

SPEAKER_68: is going to be absolutely insane. Like I cannot, I cannot overstate enough how much we still can't even, you put all the best science fiction minds together and we're still not going to be able to tap out what's possible with the future of spatial, with the future of AI. Like there are some insane things that are going to be coming and they're going to be happening unbelievably quickly. So, uh, we're, we're super stoked here at, at black box. People want to hire you to do something or collaborate

SPEAKER_87: with you. How can they get in touch? Yeah, just reach out to us. It's blackboxinfinite.com.

SPEAKER_68: We're, we're easy to find. We, uh, you know, our, our typical way of approaching projects is installing ourselves within certain brands or certain teams as like a secret special ops innovation team. And we love it really quickly iterate through concepts and ideas and figure out how we can get to prototypes and start building pathways and strategies forward from, from there. So yeah, don't, don't ever be a stranger. And if it's, if it's not evident already, I'm always down to geek out about any of these things around where all of this stuff is headed. All right. Well, thanks for coming

SPEAKER_131: on the show and we'll talk to you soon. All right. Well done, John, uh, Alex, how mind blowing was that?

SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's so awesome. It reminds me of the first time I wore Microsoft hololens back when they were still like pre-production and I got to play a Minecraft version that interacted with the real world. So you could like push blocks around on a table, but they were digital. And I just was like, oh, this is different, exciting and awesome. And I love data viz. I love real time data viz. And I love racing. It's perfect for me. I like that when I saw it, I was like, this would be great for Alex

SPEAKER_32: to start the week. Uh, in other news, uh, you and I were talking about, and we we've been getting into data, right. And we're trying to understand the world deeper. So yeah, we did this great, um, robo taxi model and how many cars would it take? And then I guess the next piece of that puzzle is regulation and safety, right? And that's the number one thing that Tesla Waymo, cruise Uber,

SPEAKER_41: everybody involved is obsessed with safety. Uh, uh, and I drove here on FSD. I've been using autopilot to FSD every day. I drive, I use it. I never don't use it because I'm always trying to stay up on the technology. It is getting really good. The number of times I have to intercede

SPEAKER_42: is I would say now once every 30 minutes to 45 minutes and listen, I'm on the back roads and hill country, uh, often in Austin and the technology is now such that you don't have to worry about sunglasses or, you know, doing the nagging feature on your thing. So we're getting close. I think everybody agrees on that. Um, and so I've, I saw some people talking and listen, Tesla is a very charged subject. You have the Tesla cube movement. If you remember the people shorting Tesla, you got the Tesla longs, there's a lot of religion around Tesla and, you know, self-driving generally speaking. But I thought we would talk just a little bit about FSD and safety

SPEAKER_41: because there are people on X talking about like, oh my God, there's like literally a guy who is

SPEAKER_32: obsessed with trying to get the technology taken off the road. I don't know if you've been following that guy who does like TV commercials about it. I think he's got a horse on the race. Um, and I thought we'd just go through the safety here because when you have detractors, Alex, they make you better, right? Like they will look at everything you're doing and become like hyper vigilant, right? Cause they hate you or they love you. They've placed a bet to short your stock. They placed a bet to long your stock. So this guy, Dan O'Dowd is the guy who is like really hates Tesla and thinks FSD shouldn't be on the road. That's I think ridiculous. I use it every day. It, it makes you a safer driver 100%. And I, and I include like the blue. Um, I have something in my suburban that does lane uh, awareness and a down-hung cruise control. So I don't know what you have in your Subaru. Do you have something in your Subaru that does these kind of like level one or level two features?

SPEAKER_57: I'm going to have to confess to something very, very honest here. I don't drive anymore. I really

SPEAKER_03: haven't since I moved to San Francisco back like 10 years ago, 10, 12 years ago. And, uh, my, my wife does all of her driving because we live where she's from and she's a great driver and she does not really like lane assist technology, but she's a very vigilant person. So it doesn't bother me. But, but the thing is Jason, the data that I found, cause you had the, a discussion with Mr. Dan O'Dowd and your argument, just so people know was that there were 40,000 automotive deaths per year in the U S right. Or take millions of Tesla's 40 deaths over five years, eight a year. It seems to be very small, but you were curious. What about FSD? So I, I went back to find some information about this just to kind of get a feel for where accidents have been trending. And the nice thing for us here in the States is that the number of fatalities per a hundred million miles driven, uh, really fell from 24.9 back in 1921 to just 1.33 per a hundred million miles in 2022. So a trend that points in one direction, but the question then becomes inside of that kind of modern world, how do driver assistance systems do and how do Tesla's FSD do? So pull some more data did a lot of digging around. Tesla says that inside of its driver base, people who use autopilot and actually Jason, for folks out there, can you define autopilot versus FSD and where they kind of end? Okay, sure. Autopilot is I believe

SPEAKER_41: level two, and that is staying in the lane and adaptive cruise control. So two features,

SPEAKER_42: and I think this is what they refer to you as level two in, uh, and then FSD is a brand autopilot and FSD are terms that I believe Tesla put out into the world. Um, FSD is their full self-driving, which means if you put a destination on a map and this is where I'm going to my office at the

SPEAKER_41: Capitol factory, shout out to Josh and the team at Capitol factory for hosting us here. It's going to make the turns. Now it's supervised FSD. Supervised FSD means you have to be supervising it.

SPEAKER_52: Your hands on the wheel, your eyes on the road. It has a camera inside the car that is watching my eyes when I'm using FSD. If I look down at, I don't know, the map or my phone in its cradle, it will start beeping and disengage. And if you get more than two or three of these disengagements, you lose FSD for like 30 days or until the next update. It basically penalizes you. That happened to

SPEAKER_32: me a whole bunch. Cause I would go change my podcast and it'd be like, sorry, doom. Um, and so I thought FSD was actually being a little too precious, uh, with drivers. Like if you didn't move the nudge, the steering wheel, uh, even though I had my hands on it, it'd be like, nudge it. And I'm like, well, my hands are on the steering wheel. Can't you see that from the internal camera? Right.

SPEAKER_116: So this thing is hyper vigilant. Um, but I do think there is something also occurring here, which is there are people who, I don't know if you ever seen this, Alex will take their motorcycle and do a wheelie or a stand on it. And then they make a video of this and they put it on the internet. Oh, interesting. Or, you know, and they'll do crazy stuff on public roads. I do believe that there are

SPEAKER_32: drivers of all vehicles who will do crazy stuff. And we've seen this over and over again with self driving technology, including Tesla's where some idiot thinks like it's called supervised so they can sleep or they can drive drunk and use FSD that is abusing the technology. Just like some people throw parachutes out of an airplane. I don't know if you've ever seen that video. And the guy chases

SPEAKER_04: the parachute down, puts it on in the air. And then that, that makes me sweat through my palms. And I,

SPEAKER_03: I struggle. I don't have that much of a death wish. So that doesn't really appeal to me. But what's interesting is you're making a point that as we give people better technology to help them drive, how do we balance keeping their focus as technology improves? But even today, even with that concern in mind, the data to me is pretty clear. So I pulled Tesla's Q3 advanced driver assistance kind of like update. And what they said was in the third quarter, they had one crash for every 7.1 million miles driven using autopilot. So not the full self driving, just autopilot. And for Tesla drivers who weren't using autopilot, it was one crash for 1.29 million miles driven. And amongst the whole US, for all cars, it was one crash per 670,000 miles. So nearly a 10x, actually more than a 10x improvement for Tesla autopilot crashes per miles driven. So as a starting point, that helps. What about FSD? What about your argument that people are out there being cowboys and being a little bit risky? Yes. Well, I found a data set that tracked all deaths from Tesla drivers.

SPEAKER_04: All right. So this is a website called TeslaDeaths.com. It's a little bit charged, obviously,

SPEAKER_41: but people are keeping track of this like in a very detailed and granular way, which in some ways is fantastic. But there's a little bias here because they're kind of like, I noticed they frame this as like FSD caused deaths, which is FSD is turned on when somebody dies in a car. The car could have been T-boned by another car and that has nothing to do with the FSD, right? Because it takes two to

SPEAKER_32: tango in many of these cases. So there were over 400 deaths of people driving Tesla since they started this database, which is a 10 year old database, which is for, I don't know, 8 million Teslas on the road, a very small number. But maybe you could just frame what this data shows, because we have this great thing in the United States where we have regulatory groups that obsess over our safety. So there are times, Alex, when we're like regulatory capture and it's real and they're slowing things down and progress. And then there's, okay, obsessing over, I don't know, operating room cleanliness or Tesla debts or any kind of debts in cars and the NTSB and some of these other highway traffic associations are obsessive. And then people are obsessive

SPEAKER_07: on top of that, trying to read the tea leaves here. So let's, let's go over this data and see if we

SPEAKER_174: can figure out the truth here. Yeah. Yeah. So the number of deaths for Tesla, uh, drivers who had

SPEAKER_03: autopilot enabled is 51 total of the more than 400 that you noted. There's only two known fatalities involving Tesla crashes with, with FSD turned on. So it's not that many. Now we all, we don't probably have every single data point that's ever been come out of a Tesla collision, but certainly two known fatalities from FSD usage against now more than 1.6 billion miles driven using FSD to me implies a rate of about one in 800 million miles, which is much better than the 1.33 fatalities we're seeing in general for a hundred million driven miles in the U S much better. Okay. So there you have it folks,

SPEAKER_41: uh, fun with numbers. And I think we gotta have John come back and, uh, create some interfaces for FSD

SPEAKER_42: and for driving in general that would make people safer. I, one of the things I notice is we should have a heads up display. When I have my Corvette C six, it would project my speed and my RPMs, you

SPEAKER_52: know, uh, onto the dashboard. This was an incredible feature because you didn't have to take your eyes off the road to know your speed or what you were revving or what gear you were in. If you're using the tiptronics, a lot of fun to have that. And you can move it up and down to your eyeline. What if

SPEAKER_116: that showed you each of the cars in front of you and told you the distance of that car and the speed of that car. I don't know why nobody builds this, but I want a heads up display that tells me I'm 18 feet behind that car and how much stopping it would take, what my speed is, what their speed is. And then the distance it would take to stop. And if they slammed on the brakes, if I would crash, like there's all this data that could be in here. And I think John is still listening to the show.

SPEAKER_03: So wait, but wait, Jason, I feel like you're describing a really weird middle ground between like advanced sensors, advanced on car computation, super awesome HUDs. But to me, like with self-driving, we don't even need to care about that. I want the computer to be focused on how far ahead that car is. I just want to have my eyes loosely forward as I think about the novel

SPEAKER_32: I'm listening to, you know? I think you're, you're one of the folks who would prefer that. And then there's another group of people who still like to drive. So like John should get on this and like, make the two different versions of the HUD and the display. Because I do think like knowing that there's a car behind you and that it's approaching you quickly, like that's all done by, could be done by the technology. Like they already have a thing in my suburban and with the Tesla, where they turn the camera on automatically to show you if somebody is like on your left or right, or if it's safe to change lanes or not. Right? Yeah. Imagine if you had the AI telling you,

SPEAKER_42: there's a truck that's incredible, you know, that's closing in on you, J Cal. And it's the closing, there's, cause like, I don't look, I, I look in the review mirror every X number of seconds slash minutes, but what if it told you like you're in the left-hand lane, there's a Ferrari approaching at 110 miles an hour behind you. It's going to be on your tail in 13 seconds. You might want to change lanes. Like that's the kind of like intelligence I want my car to be interacting with.

SPEAKER_03: Mm. Right. Well, I, I don't think that's impossible to do today with what we currently have. It's just a question of getting all those pieces into your car with the right large language model kind of embedded inside of it. But, uh, back to the point about the future, not being that far away, that's possible. And we have self-driving cars that are much safer than humans on the point though, about regulation and concern and the scrutiny that self-driving cars are under. Do you find it really strange? Cause I do that every time a self-driving car clips something, we all freak out, but we give 16 year olds, like suburbans to drive that way, you know, four or 5,000 pounds and they go down that like, to me, I, I, I think the self-driving screen is correct. And we should probably not let people

SPEAKER_41: drive cars when they're so young. Uh, I think both of these things are exactly correct. We hold

SPEAKER_52: new technology to a standard that we don't, um, hold accepted societal traditions too. And it is nuts that we give 15, 16, 17 year olds, these cars, uh, but we don't trust them to, you know, when they're 17

SPEAKER_41: or 18 to drink a beer. No. Um, but we do trust them to take a 5,000 pounds, 6,000 pound vehicle and do whatever they want from it. Uh, it should be required that anytime a child is in a car, that that car is got an, uh, attachment that throttles, the speed reports, the speed, anybody under 18, it should track everything you do in the car. I know this sounds crazy and I'm privacy experts, but when my daughters start driving and I have in my Tesla, the ability to watch their ride, to know their speed. And it would be great if I could geofence, like I should be able to

SPEAKER_52: geofence my car and say, this car cannot go out of 50 miles from my house, unless this code is put in and that code would be something my wife and I knew, but nobody else knew. So if you steal my car or my daughter, uh, or, you know, anybody's child decides, Hey, I'm going to go rogue. I'm going to go somewhere. I'm not supposed to go. I'm going to, which we did when we were kids, we decided to drive down to Wildwood, New Jersey one day, which is like a two hour drive from Manhattan or New York.

SPEAKER_32: We didn't tell our parents, you know, they would not have allowed us to do that. And we just decided, well, if we drive really fast on the highway, we can get there and back without them knowing. The solution is crime, uh, naturally. Yeah. Precisely. So anyway, this is like such a really good idea. I think is to put those things. I mean, when you look at the scrutiny that we put, I don't know, psychedelics or, you know, cannabis under and

SPEAKER_03: then alcohol. Oh, it's, it's craziness to me, but here's the thing, the difference between you and I, Jason, is that, um, of the two of us, only one of us is friends with one of the leading EV manufacturers in the world who also has a space satellite system that could be used to geofence

SPEAKER_41: that car. So why are you telling me this? I feel like I'll tell you, get that phone out. Well, you know what? It's interesting. We did have conversations about this with our kids early on.

SPEAKER_42: And he, he did mention to me that we could put a speed regulator on it and they have a speed regulator on it. The speed regulator on your Tesla wasn't exactly for your kids. You know what that was for? To make sure that you don't get speeding tickets. Oh, interesting. Because any person who drives a Tesla, I think has had the experience, or if you drive a Mercedes or a BMW or an Audi, the cars are so smooth that you don't actually feel the speed. Now, if you're in a Corvette or some car that RPMs, you're going to feel it because the engine revs up. You don't actually feel the speed in a Tesla. You could be going 85 and think you're going 50. You could be going in a Mercedes 95 and think you're going 65. It just, you don't feel it. And I think that's like one of the things, um, to keep in mind, but yeah, geofencing would be a great feature. Um, and then tracking each ride and there are third party services that do this already. So that's why I think the OD, what is it? ODBP port that there's a port on every car that lets you do

SPEAKER_52: telemetry and other things. Oh, I know what you're talking about. Yes. Yeah. That should be like a really, uh, you know, a standard, uh, item, uh, for folks, uh, to use.

SPEAKER_03: Well, we're going to stick with the geofencing concept and we're going to stick with robo taxis and talk just for a second, everybody about the upcoming pony.ai IPO. We've talked a lot on twist

David Friedberg: lately about distribution. OBD OBD. Thank you, John. Oh, our guy, John Lepore is here. John,

SPEAKER_32: come on here for a second. We'll try on on here for a second. This is great. When you have the guest, he just like hangs out in the green room. The guest is in the green room. John, you heard our conversation about self-driving tech. What should happen? Go ahead. You,

SPEAKER_68: your brain's been going over time hearing. Oh my God. I'm going nuts, uh, over here, listening to you guys. So I've worked with over 10, um, automotive OEMs on in-car digital experience. The short version of it is across the board, whether you buy a really expensive car or a really cheap car. They're all the equal level of total trash. And there's so many opportunities for innovation. Um, there's enormous headroom just for safety. Like people do not appreciate that. This is a digital product that you interact with only when you're in the most likely part of your day to die. Right? Like that's just the way it is. Thousands of pounds of steel, uh, moving at speeds. The human body was never meant to travel at, uh, filled with the people you care most about in the world and topped off with gallons of liquid explosives or lithium ion. And you know, one way to describe it. You user experience becomes a very like mission critical sort of factor in that, in that context. And I think it's abysmal that we don't have the, and it's, it's interesting. We just wrapped a project with a new automotive brand where the biggest, the hardest thing that we did was convincing them that we could take the equivalent of like the grandma phone from the nursing home with the huge buttons on it and make that feel sophisticated and elegant, but also that if people had access to something like that and used it for a certain period of time, they would then step into every single other vehicle and say like the manufacturer of this vehicle doesn't care if I live or die. And that's, that's what it is when you're using any of this stuff in a, in a vehicle.

SPEAKER_200: It's, it's that simple. Yeah. I mean, the safety could be improved just by making the pilot

SPEAKER_42: more, uh, aware of what they're doing. Like people don't understand exactly how speed, uh, is involved

SPEAKER_52: in, uh, the death rate and accidents. And if you were to alert somebody when they go 90 miles an hour that they just increased their fatality rate by seven X, you know, like just that, just general awareness and reminder. It's almost like showing somebody who smoked cigarettes, like here is the lungs of somebody, you know, uh, who died of it. Like these cars are all equipped with tech

SPEAKER_68: that could also be channeled towards, um, improving the skills of drivers. We assembled a round table recently with, I don't know if you've ever crossed paths with, uh, Alex Roy. He's the guy that set the record for driving from New York to LA and, you know, 30 something hours. Yeah. Um, he is, uh, he's obsessed, you know, for a guy that broke every vehicle, vehicular, you know, law you could imagine. He is obsessed with safety and with driver training above all else. And all of this tech could be

SPEAKER_52: coaching people to just be. Tesla had this, Tesla had this score. There's a safety score that Tesla has in the app. And it was interesting because in order to get on FSD, I think early they invited people who had over a 90 score. My wife and I both shared the same vehicle. It turned out like one of us had a really good score. One of us didn't, didn't, I'm not going to talk about that. And it, one of the things it told you was how, uh, close you rode other people, uh, rode behind other people. And it turned out somebody in my household was driving a little too close to other people's bumpers. And then there was how much you stay in the lane. Uh, and if you made it a game to say like, how perfectly am I in the lane? And you just went ding, ding, when you were perfectly in the lane, where you went, it vibrates when you get out of the lane, which is what it does now. Man, that kind of like coaching would be great. And then telling people what their drowsiness level is, or what you perceive their tiredness level is and their attentiveness level on a percentage basis from the internal camera. That would be another one. Cause I, you could do all that. It's, it's just

SPEAKER_68: calculating the fluctuations in the pupillation of the, uh, of your, of your pupil. Um, there's, uh, so I've been doing a ton of work on generating the sounds that EVs make, which is this whole crazy concept of, you know, we've finally got a vehicle that can be completely silent and now we're figuring out ways to have it make noise just for, just for fun. But there's, uh, this is, this is my pitch. This is a freebie I'll put out there to anyone who wants to, to make it sound is the ultimate tool for communicating like subliminally. And you could even just have like a white noise that like shifts slightly in tone or harmonizes depending on whether or not you are centered in your lane or driving more efficiently or more effectively. What a killer ideas in a way. Cause you don't, cause you don't want warning beeps, you don't want it. The, the, doing the fighter jet, you know, like steer left, no steer right. You know, you don't want any of that. You, you want something that you're not even actively paying attention to, but it's, it's guiding you and it's coaching you through that. That's a terrible

SPEAKER_12: idea. It's a perfect way for no, no, no, because you're going to walk by a different machine later on. That is the right vibration to tell you to turn on your left turn signal. And you're going to be freaking out on the sidewalk as you walk by and just hit it completely off. No, I love the idea.

SPEAKER_42: And then think about people outside the car. This is one of the problems with Tesla's is, you know, people don't hear them coming and it would be great if, if a Tesla saw a pedestrian,

SPEAKER_64: if it just started chiming. Ding dong, ding dong. Uh, it's a, it's a, uh, legislated thing right now.

SPEAKER_68: It's called a vest. The cars have to generate a certain frequency at parking lot speeds. And now my kids' school drop off line sounds like a swarm of bees because every different EV has a slightly different, you know, version of spa sounds that it emits. And it's, it's kind of,

SPEAKER_143: I think also look out, look out. Like if it's, if you're, if it crashes imminent, if it blared an alarm, that would be good too. I don't know.

Chamath Palihapitiya: There's a few, there's a few vehicles that are sold that have a, what they call a city horn,

SPEAKER_68: which is a gentle horn that you can choose to use that doesn't sound hostile and aggressive. And it's

SPEAKER_215: just this way of gently, you know, communicating with say, you know, cyclists or pedestrians or

SPEAKER_80: whatnot. I love it. Acoustic vehicle alerting system, AVAS. Wow. Acquired accessory for electric vehicles in many countries. AVAS system generates sound for nearly silent electric vehicles to improve the safety of vulnerable road users. VRUs such as pedestrians, cyclists, and children. Amazing.

SPEAKER_52: Also like deer. This is another thing. I didn't know how many, how much roadkill there was until I started living in Austin. And I see a dead deer every day. There is a dead deer on the side of the road. There are deer everywhere because we have no natural predators for deers in Texas for any more, or very few. And so they're everywhere and they're constantly getting hit on the road. And man, just being able to see them. Because when I drive at night, they're kind of hidden in the sides of the roads that they're, they're stealthy by design, by evolution. If this thing could actually look for deers and just highlight deers, my Lord, that would be incredible, uh, as a, as a, as a heads up display item. All right. Listen, John, you're amazing. The heck out of here. Go back to work.

SPEAKER_217: This guy, I love the fact that he hung around and he was giving us these great ideas. All right, Alex, we gotta, we got, we got time for one more story, but one more. All right. So I'm gonna do.

SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna do. We'll do ladies choice here. What do you want?

SPEAKER_03: We're going to talk about, um, the biggest deal that happened today, which is the Stripe bridge deal. But I'm just going to say, if you do want to take a look at a self-driving IPO, the pony.ai F1 filing hard recommend, very interesting, good stuff in there. F1, they are a Chinese based company. So they filed the foreigner version of the S1. It's an F1 filing. Um, you'll recognize it, but it's really a lot of fun. Just before we went, we went to air, though, Jason, um, a company called bridge was purchased by Stripe. And I'm curious, no lying. Had you heard of bridge before this deal came down?

SPEAKER_40: I had not heard of bridge, but I understand that they are, uh, are they somehow involved

SPEAKER_135: in stable coins? That's my understanding.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So they do two things as far as I can tell. One is they help companies accept stable coins. So around the world, if you want to be able to kind of ingest them as currency, you can do that through them. And they also, according to their website will help you spin up your own stable coins. Now joining Stripe. I don't think it's too hard to see the overlaps here, but my, my, my read of this was Stripe thinks that stable coins will enable lots of global e-commerce. And so they want to be right there. So they bought bridge. I kind of love it, frankly.

SPEAKER_35: Um, here we go. It's a, uh, interesting, uh, maneuver because stable coins are essentially free or

SPEAKER_41: close to free to, uh, transact, right? So if you're trying to lower transactions, and this is the thing I never understood about Stripe and a lot of these folks is if we're going to, in fact, make transactions cheaper, we need to make transactions cheaper. And every time you use a Visa, MasterCard, et cetera,

SPEAKER_52: there's some amount of load involved in that. And I think, aren't we supposed to be paying like 10 bips, not two bips when we do transactions? So shouldn't this lower it? I mean, when you do an event, when I do my events and we sell tickets all in summit this week in startups, events, um, founder university, whatever. I'm always amazed by, you know, if you sell a million dollars in tickets that you're giving $30,000 to MasterCard. Or if you sell 10 million tickets, you're giving 300,000 or $250,000 in merchant fees. Wow. It actually is a large number when you start thinking about that. And that's why

SPEAKER_116: some of these large events like Ted or whatever, I think they'll put a fee on top of it if you want

SPEAKER_32: to use a corporate card, but they ask you to send a check or they ask you to wire the money to have that fee go down. Because if you're Ted and you're selling $20,000 in tickets, do you want to give $600,000 to Stripe or Adyen or whoever, you know, maybe, maybe not, or V because that's all going to

SPEAKER_33: Visa MasterCard anyway. So yeah, I think that's what this is about. Well, don't forget. We had

SPEAKER_03: the CEO of circle, the company behind the USDC, uh, stablecoin germinal layer on the show very recently that you had him out on back in the day. And so stable coins, you and I have discussed are kind of this awesome use case for crypto and actual use case. Everybody here. It is. Everyone wants dollars and dollars around the world are popular. And so I can really, really see why this Stripe bridge deal makes sense, but Jason, very expensive. So the company was last reportedly valued at 200 million during a series a, and people are saying about a billion, 1.1 billion for this sale. Okay. But the way that I think about it is this. Stripe's worth 80. Let's just say for the sake of conference nature for one 80th of Stripe's market cap equivalent.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah. 1% change. Yeah. It feels, it feels expensive, yet also cheap in my view.

SPEAKER_41: When you do these kinds of deals, you are just going to look at what does the, what is the

SPEAKER_42: acquirer's theory here? If the acquirer's value increases greater than 1.x%, 1.1 or 2% here, um, then they essentially will get the acquisition for free. And you've seen this when people acquire

SPEAKER_41: a company. I think when, uh, Amazon bought whole foods for, I think it was 14 billion or 12 billion,

SPEAKER_52: uh, the stock went up like 30 billion. And so in your mind, you're like, okay, they just made $15 billion buying this company. And there is some truth to that. Uh, if you look at a really

SPEAKER_42: expensive purchase, WhatsApp was 19 billion. Right. And that was a significant portion of Facebook's market cap at the time, but they took out a potential competitor. And, uh, I think they

SPEAKER_32: probably made that money back many times over in terms of the cash that they made from advertising,

SPEAKER_52: just from having that as part of the network and not having Google own it or Microsoft.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. But I think that at the time was more like a 10% of Facebook's market.

SPEAKER_41: I guess it was a large percentage of their market cap might've been 15%. I think they might've been worth a hundred and billion and change. Yeah. These things are, you know, um, these things,

SPEAKER_52: you have to be thoughtful about it, but this is a really good sign. We've been talking about tuck in acquisitions. I think Lena Khan is kind of in her last hurrah. I don't know that she can actively

SPEAKER_13: block something between now and the end of this term. So I was going to say getting done, Jason,

SPEAKER_03: but that's being announced and neither one of us think there's going to be regulatory, you know, stuff here. So it could be a really big cash on cash return for Sequoia, Han ventures, rivet capital and index. They put, I think a total, a combined amount of 58 million into this business and they're going to get a lot more than that back. So DPI, everybody it's back on the

SPEAKER_52: menu. There you go. DPI is back on the menu. We've got an exciting, uh, week for you. We're going to be taping live tomorrow and on Wednesday, tomorrow at, uh, 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern, 12 PM, my time here in Texas. And I think on Wednesday, we're going to go a little bit earlier, 9 30 AM Pacific, 11 30 AM my time. Cause I gotta catch a flight. But tomorrow, uh, we're going to have, um, one of the executives from heritage. I've been talking about the heritage foundation and we've been talking about election interference, uh, election integrity. We had votes on last Wednesday. And so I asked Alex to keep pulling that string. I saw heritage had released information again, back to fun with numbers. Like we did today where we talked a little bit about, um, you know, safety and EVs. And last week we talked about fun with numbers. We did back of the envelope stuff. What would

SPEAKER_42: it take to create a robo taxi fleet? We'll do a little bit of that around election integrity. They created at heritage.com. I think that's their domain name, an election integrity database. And now this is a partisan organization, but we'll get their side of the story. They are very concerned about election integrity and they made a database of 1600 cases from the eighties till now. And I did some back of the envelope math and what, uh, where that was like 40 cases caught a year or something to that effect, very similar to what we just did with the safety of Tesla. So we can get to ground truth. And Alex, I see that as like a really great way for us to evolve the show here this week in startups is to tackle the biggest societal issues, self-driving election integrity, energy, solar, nuclear, and then just really get into the numbers. And you're great with numbers and say, what is the truth? And that means having some of these biased people or partisan people on the pod, right? Then we get their perspective and then we can put it against the numbers and see.

SPEAKER_03: I'm curious to see what Hans has to say. I've gone through the heritage database. And in fact, we cited some heritage data next to some Brennan center data when we did the last Wednesday show. So we are not opposed to going across the ideological spectrum to find what people had to say, and then we'll poke at it. Uh, but Hans will be on the show tomorrow. And, um, um, that's a reminder that I have, uh, a metric pile of work to get done after we finished taping today. Um, cause we have a raft of interviews coming guys. We are bringing more people on the show, on the live show, off the live show. So if you like twist, get ready because there's a lot

SPEAKER_52: more coming. Yeah. A lot more coming and, uh, we will be starting our cold open. So I'm, I'm trying to have the creative energy to do a cold open every episode, like we did on today's episode. So look for a little comedy. Uh, Alex is going to be my straight man here. And we'll try to do a little something funny for you every day. Like I do on all in, uh, here at this week in startups,

SPEAKER_32: follow Alex on Twitter. I'm Jason on Twitter. That's a great way to communicate with us, your ideas for the show. Go to this week in startups, uh, on YouTube and hit subscribe, hit the bell, and you can listen to us live. And just like Elon's giving away a million dollars,

SPEAKER_52: uh, a day, uh, for people who sign, uh, the pack, uh, his political action committees, uh,

SPEAKER_32: his super PACs, uh, constitution sign up. We're going to give away a million dollars a day here on this week in startups to somebody who tunes in live. So just tune in live. Give us a thumbs

SPEAKER_13: up on YouTube and win a million. A million monopoly dollars, just to be clear. Uh, million monopoly dollars to be clear. Yes. You cannot afford a million dollars a day. Uh, sadly. Yes.

SPEAKER_217: No, we will. Uh, we'll see you in the chat room. We're not giving away a million dollars a day and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye. Bye.