SPEAKER_00: what they've done here is they're turning memories into a keepsake book no writing required preserve a loved one's story the easy way remento turns their spoken words into a personalized keepsake SPEAKER_01: book of their stories now what they've done is with language models you can select prompts that you want your parent or your grandparent or whoever to answer or your family they record responses in their app then they create a book based on it and then you can like scan the book SPEAKER_04: to listen to whatever qr code is there something a little creepy about it like i i i don't i don't SPEAKER_07: know it's definitely better than using ai to like recreate your dead loved ones like i know there's that thing too where it's like feed their voice into our ai and you could chat with your grandma and like that really is troublesome to me like this why is that why is that troublesome to you it's just creepy or you have a concern about it it is creepy i don't have like a concern like it's gonna ruin the world or anything but i think it's if there is something a little ghoulish about it because i don't believe SPEAKER_13: that ai is really able to like i think it's a lie people are supposed to die and then you remember them and that's how it works and this idea that we need to like you're raw dog forever you're raw SPEAKER_16: dogging uh grief life yes i'm great yes exactly i want to feel it i don't need to augment it i respect it SPEAKER_20: this week in startups is brought to you by squarespace turn your idea into a new website SPEAKER_23: go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain lemon.io hire pre-vetted remote developers get 15 off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io twist and oracle oracle cloud infrastructure or oci is a single platform for your infrastructure database application development and ai needs save up to 50 off on your cloud bill at oracle.com twist all right everybody welcome back to this SPEAKER_28: week in startups it's a tuesday it's a tuesday and we've got a great interview with the founder on the SPEAKER_00: back half of the show but at the front we're going to do some news and the original newsreader SPEAKER_31: from this week in startups is back my guy lon harris how are you doing pal good good but many SPEAKER_32: years 15 16 years later i'm back to do the news it's a long time 14 years 2000 episodes boy my arms SPEAKER_36: tired geez what a what a what a run what an impressive run it's uh one of those very interesting SPEAKER_39: things about podcasts you know if you love doing it it becomes like exercise i consider you know doing SPEAKER_01: this week in startups a way for me to just really connect with people and to stay in the flow of the news and the zeitgeist and then just build a community of people who are really into startups SPEAKER_41: and tech of course all in is me that goes supernova as well well those people they're into startups and SPEAKER_32: tech and other other topics let's say there's a few other topics yeah there's a few international SPEAKER_44: relations gets uh gets gets a decent amount of traction and so what was your take on uh seeing SPEAKER_49: sax named as the ai wow uh what what yeah i i've never had any kind of this kind of proximity to SPEAKER_51: power like like working on a show with a guy who's in the white house it's very i'm gonna try not to SPEAKER_46: rub him the wrong way anymore well you know it's great david is an awesome executive so i'm very excited uh i don't have anything to add to it other than i'm so proud of him and i just love the fact that you SPEAKER_01: know if trump is the president you know people know it wasn't exactly my favorite candidate i'm just glad that my friends are around him and and hopefully steering the country towards smaller government SPEAKER_56: less regulation and just more efficiency which hey yeah i mean listen i don't agree with uh david SPEAKER_49: sax on a whole lot but i feel better having him speaking into president trump's ear than some of the other people he's going to be surrounded with for sure you know i think this is such a great point SPEAKER_01: you're making we don't all have to agree on everything in politics but you can know a person and trust them and think highly of them and know they're effective and you know have good intent right that's really like one of the great things i think about what we're going to see in uh 2025 is hopefully a great run there god there's so much news going on yeah it feels like the world is spinning SPEAKER_50: very fast right now normally this is when everything kind of slows down until the next year not 2024 though we're barreling through i think this is going to be like another frenetic you know SPEAKER_64: couple of years uh you know which was a hallmark of the first trump presidency i think it's going to SPEAKER_50: be frenetic as well yeah i mean aside from anything practical that he actually does once he gets into SPEAKER_07: office like there's there's all that stuff but there's also just he is such a divisive figure he divides people and they create and i'm not saying it's all his fault personified but he creates this SPEAKER_49: environment where it is really like combative and i feel like we did have a few years sort of a little SPEAKER_68: bit off from that and we're jumping right back it's a good observation i i did say i don't know if it David Friedberg: caught trump on the sunday shows but i listened to the first half of his interview was his first beat the press interview and i was pleased that he said a lot of the things that i was concerned about the deportation of 15 million people he said like listen we're going to start with the criminals and get that done you know it's like okay well everybody agrees on that and then he said yeah i'm not doing retribution that's not my interest my retribution is going to be the performance of the SPEAKER_32: country so i mean we'll see if that happens yeah with you he was donald trump just says things so who SPEAKER_75: who knows we'll have to wait and see it's you can't you can't trust like well he said he's not going to do retribution so i take him at his word like you right donald trump or you can't uh or or SPEAKER_77: the other way around when they say they're going to deport 15 million and then he says well maybe SPEAKER_49: we'll just do the 500 000 right and i think this is an important thing exactly like i think what gives SPEAKER_07: trump so much of his power is that whether you support him or don't at this point everyone knows he just says things and so you can pick and choose what things he says that you like and that's what donald trump stands for in your mind but it could be different for everybody like right there were there i was just reading this like you know they interviewed voters who voted for trump like why did you vote for trump and it's all over that he's going to fight insurance companies he's going to end homelessness he's going to end all these foreign wars crypto yeah he's going to support her he's literally said he's in favor of and against everything at this point like tick tock is another great SPEAKER_85: example where he ran now on i'm going to save tick tock but the tick tock ban started in the trump SPEAKER_10: administration that's not a biden thing here we go i mean so what's gonna i mean it's really interesting SPEAKER_64: on a business basis i have friends who are shareholders in tick tock you know byte dance the parent SPEAKER_89: company sure how do you even you know know what to do with your shares he's against it he wants to ban it uh or divest it or keep it i mean it's just hard to keep track of yeah you know a little bit of chaos SPEAKER_90: right now in new jersey i hate to get all conspiracy theory here well i mean this isn't even a theory SPEAKER_01: just look up yeah there have been um a bunch of drones large ones in fact in new jersey tell us what's going on with this storyline and yeah it is a technology related story yeah yeah so starting in SPEAKER_07: mid-november people in central and northern new jersey specifically morris county is where it started they started noticing a large number of drones in the skies at night over their heads you can see from the video these are larger than the usual commercial just like we've all seen drones in our neighborhood that hobbyists are flying around but these seem much larger in in scale than those kind of hobbyist drones so that's raising concerns but also they seem to be flying around sensitive areas military installations president trump's bedminster golf course other other places that are it seems a little suspicious why would there be a bunch of drones swarming around these places at night so earlier this month the mayors of 21 towns across new jersey sent a letter to governor phil murphy calling for an investigation into the drones specifically their origin their purpose and like are these complying with all of our local regulations and if there aren't regulations against this why not it's kind of like shouldn't this be illegal like it's a very murky sort of area right now it is very murky yeah yeah and i think that's what a lot of the mayors were uh concerned about so on monday murphy gave a press conference governor murphy and he said he still they still don't really have answers they don't know whose drones these are why they're flying around uh murphy basically said he understands why he's like i hear your frustration i get it so he was doing that kind of political thing he did say the drones seem to be very sophisticated and that they have the ability to when we start SPEAKER_50: looking at them they can go dark turn the lights off the safety lights okay you know that so it's SPEAKER_07: harder for us to get a clear look because once they realize they've been detected they can sort of shut themselves down or go dark but so far governor murphy said homeland security the fbi the secret service the new jersey state police they're all looking into it and none of them say there's any immediate reason for public concern like these don't seem to be a threat to public safety they're not SPEAKER_49: going to start spewing out joker toxin or whatever any second right it's hard to know how certain they SPEAKER_07: really are if we don't know who sent them and what they're doing there the fbaa has also imposed flight restrictions on the area pending further investigation some witnesses are saying they've also seen a fixed wing aircraft flying near the drones but we do not have confirmation that is just witness okay it sounds SPEAKER_112: like a military group or some commercial venture is doing this like they're playing with their drones David Friedberg: the reason i say that is if they're larger those are very expensive you're talking five ten thousand dollar quad copters those big large commercial ones those ones are also customizable or self-built SPEAKER_01: or assembled in many cases as opposed to a dgi one that i ordered off of amazon i played with and i SPEAKER_89: was shocked that you could just fly this thing in manhattan i was in manhattan flying it in between buildings looking at rooftops and then i was like i didn't think that was allowed how is this even possible my friend had one and he was having a good time with it and so i just bought one and started SPEAKER_01: playing with it with my daughters in the summer it was fun to do we were flying it all over the piers on the west side making videos it's tremendous fun they feel relatively safe for something that's flying above you because you're so stable now they will not slam into an object as one example but you do not have complete control over your drone it's not allowed to hit things it's not allowed to turn its lights off so that leads me to believe that this ability to turn the lights on and off would be something that a more military or handmade drone would be able to do this week in startups is brought SPEAKER_33: to you by our friends at squarespace the all-in-one platform for you to build a beautiful website and for SPEAKER_121: you to grow your business whether you're starting out or you're scaling up squarespace is going to make it easy to create an incredible website that engages your audience allows you to sell whatever you need to sell products content or even your time all in one place and here's what makes squarespace a game changer first their new design intelligence feature this combines two decades of design expertise with cutting edge ai to help you craft a stunning personalized website in just minutes there'll be no other website like it basically it's squarespace putting a high-end designer right at your fingertips and second squarespace payments this makes managing your payments seamless with fast onboarding and support for popular methods like apple pay or quarna you'll be up and running in no time at all and ready to take payments however your customers prefer and that's what you want to do meet your customers where they are finally built-in analytics hey if you can measure it you can manage it and the built-in analytics at squarespace are second to none it's everything you need to scale from understanding your sources of traffic to understanding sales trends squarespace is going to deliver insights that help you drive growth all fully integrated all for the same price here's your call to action squarespace.com twist for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com twist to get 10 off your first website or domain purchase that's squarespace.com twist make sure SPEAKER_00: you go to that url so they know you listen to the pod the ones that are made for retail use let's say SPEAKER_01: as opposed to business insider use or military use those commercial drones as opposed to the retail ones consumer ones i think are very different um in fact you're not allowed to fly my drone in certain areas so if i wanted to fly it i think at my ski house some of that land is like protected federal land and in federal land they will not let you fly it in certain places if you try to fly it over SPEAKER_11: certain places in la too like there's some parks and areas where you're not allowed to have them but like at the park across from my street from my apartment software doesn't allow you to go there SPEAKER_01: so they have in the map in the gps you cannot fly your drones over certain parks or certain military things so if these can then that means it's one of those hand-built ones which is what's you know you see in ukraine when people are using them in the military sentence they make those themselves you just buy the parts you assemble them you have your software kits boom and you just drive them out of there this is how the next terrorist i mean i hate to say this but your terrorists already know this SPEAKER_56: this is how the next terrorist attack is going to happen is people are going to start using these SPEAKER_130: things yeah well you know what this reminded me of is that chinese weather balloon story you remember SPEAKER_07: that when all of a sudden we started seeing this chinese weather balloon over the country and why don't we shoot it down and we don't know what it is and i think we imagine that we live in a world where everything in our skies is just everything in our waters is just like we could see it we know it's SPEAKER_49: there we're we're constantly on guard we've got perfect vision of everything happening around our country and it's really kind of the illusion of safety like a really dedicated person who had the technology and knew what they're doing could definitely fly a drone over an american city with some sort of payload in it like it seems pretty obvious you could use this for something nefarious SPEAKER_132: you know the thing about the balloon story that's super interesting is we actually shot some of those down SPEAKER_07: well we did after it was already over it had passed over i believe north carolina and was headed they didn't want to shoot it down when it was over land in case it flew over montana yeah where the it went SPEAKER_01: over montana where we keep our nuclear missile silos right so they waited until i think it went over like SPEAKER_49: north carolina like over the water and then they shot that's when they got it yeah right i mean this does David Friedberg: speak to we probably need to have more insights into what's going on in the sky local police need to SPEAKER_01: have that and a lot of local police now have their own drone so there's been a bunch of startups that have been making drones we've had a couple of them on this program and it's really interesting when the police have a drone they can send the drone to the location it gets there before the squad car arrives SPEAKER_64: typically so when the squad car is arriving now they've got an overhead view of i don't know if there was a burglary like in a home or a store you have the overview it's almost like the military when they you know are going to a compound to whack osama bin laden now you got like the ability for SPEAKER_89: the local police to see over the whole space and on the other side i mean listen i want to be safe from SPEAKER_49: drone warfare but the the flip side of that is it does feel like a privacy issue as well like the SPEAKER_07: cops aren't supposed to be able to see into your house unless you let them in or they have a warrant that's kind of baked into the whole system and now if they could just fly a drone look into your windows look in your backyard like yeah that kind of disappears there are a lot of instances of kids David Friedberg: taking these drones and being peeping toms in cities and whatever so they're flying them all over SPEAKER_01: the place i'm really interested when if and when we'll even see these drones start delivering food for doordash i know uh the doordash team was testing it in a location there's a company testing it in ireland and it's really interesting that you can get things there quickly but with autonomy at the same time we're now going to have a race for who can get you your burrito or your mocha and your chocolate SPEAKER_89: croissant you know i do the double mocha sometime i'm only a little skeptical about this because i SPEAKER_49: live in i live in silver lake which is a very high traffic delivery area like yes i live among you SPEAKER_07: know like i'm not one of them but i live a lot of my neighbors are well off and they're people who order a lot of their meals amazon constantly all sorts of delivery so we're constantly like anytime you go out onto my street there's two or three delivery drivers arriving to drop off food or a package or something when that's drones isn't it going to be like living on an airstrip like am i going to SPEAKER_11: constantly have drones whizzing by me bringing people their burritos that doesn't sound ideal SPEAKER_46: is they are quieter than cars typically like an ice combustion car they will be quieter on average so David Friedberg: i think if you were to choose if that doordash could be delivered in somebody's backyard by drone or by a car on the front of your house you probably go with the drone backyard yeah i mean i will i guess SPEAKER_11: we'll find out but i that is a thought that i've had is like are the skies above us just going to be constantly buzzing with drones because everybody wants their that is the vision brush from amazon SPEAKER_68: yeah it's it really work it's not necessary in manhattan it's not necessary in silver lake SPEAKER_69: but if you were to live well la is very spread out so right but it's something less than silver SPEAKER_01: lake what would be a more spread out area even santa monica too dense you don't need it it needs to be SPEAKER_49: like in the valley and you know once you get up towards upland and simi valley then it's you know SPEAKER_154: yeah it would be more practical there yeah i think what we're seeing here is uh zipline is this a zipline David Friedberg: folks yeah this is zipline yeah these things are going to work really well in areas where the houses are a mile from each other right when you're out in the country or the suburbs where you know people SPEAKER_01: have a couple of acres you know let's say two three acre lots and you're a half mile quarter mile from your neighbor these things are going to be able to zip right to your backyard and save you uh you know like the 45 minute drive that's what this is for so if you were in lake tahoe let's say or sacramento and you lived in that the burbs i think the area that would i think even the valley is too dense like i don't think something like east of la would be a better example or out of new jersey somewhere anyway where these drones are flying uh it's going to be interesting to see which proves to be uh the better solution but the truth is you're going to be getting things cheaper and faster than SPEAKER_49: ever before that's without a doubt i mean already amazon can do same day delivery here so i can order SPEAKER_60: something right now and it'll be here in two three hours i tell you the thing i noticed when i was in SPEAKER_01: austin is austin has better delivery than the bay area and i was like how is that possible in austin SPEAKER_64: i don't know what they're doing here but you'll order and they're like can we deliver it from 4 a.m SPEAKER_89: to 8 a.m they kind of ask you if you want your stuff during that window i wonder if it's the whole SPEAKER_51: foods thing they already had a huge infrastructure that's where whole foods is from yes they have SPEAKER_01: the infrastructure i think what it is really is they have now found that there are drivers willing SPEAKER_90: to work that shift that say 4 to 8 a.m shift and there's another job that's perfect you can SPEAKER_168: free before work you pick up four hours yeah precisely yeah great story uh let's keep going SPEAKER_07: all right uh so our next story sorra open ai finally launched they announced it first in february let some beta testers and other people sample it but their uh video ai video generation tool sorra has formally launched this week it's available right now in the us across asia uh we're waiting to hear details about launching in europe and the uk and current chat gpt plus and pro subscribers SPEAKER_171: don't need to pay anything extra they get access to sorra included in their subscriptions all right SPEAKER_121: founders are you tired of doing all your own software development do you need help but you can't afford all this time it takes to find great talent are you dreading the endless interviews and email chains just to find somebody great it takes six months it takes a year well what you need is lemon.io lemon.io has thousands that's right thousands of on-demand developers who can help you and they've done the work already to vet these developers making sure that they're results oriented and that they're super experienced of course they got to have competitive rates so they're going to take care of that as well and great developers are so hard to find and integrate into your team unless you're using lemon.io because they handle all that for you they only offer hand-picked developers with three years of experience at a minimum and they have to be in the top one percent of applicants right something goes wrong don't sweat it lemon.io will find you a replacement developer asap so many of our launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they've had great experiences so here's your call to action go to lemon.io twist and find you're a perfect developer or the perfect tech team in 48 hours or less that's right and twist listeners get 15 off the first four weeks stop burning money hire developers SPEAKER_152: smarter and faster at lemon.io twist interestingly open ai they helped to kick start the entire SPEAKER_07: generative ai app fanfare a few years ago with dolly that was their image generation tool so this is kind of the next logical step now instead of just an image you can input a prompt or even use existing videos or images and feed those in as prompt and soar will output a high definition clip based on your specifications uh in a blog post open ai says they want to give society and i quote time to explore the possibilities and code develop norms and safeguards for ai generated video so their pitch is like this is not really a complete product this is a experiment they want everybody to play around with it and test so that we all get a better idea of like what ai video is all about and what it can do and what kind of rules and regulations we should one day think about applying to it several other ai companies and startups already have their own text to video generation tools google announced their product lumiere amazon has create with alexa stability has released its stable video diffusion product um open ai the big difference there is uh what i was talking about that what they call multi-modality so the idea that this can combine text image and video generation sort of all in one product so you can feed in anything as a prompt you can get back any of those kinds as a prompt it's sort of working from all of those different sort of formats at once it does seem to me that SPEAKER_112: they're doing a watermark on it so that to me seems like a really smart idea is to add the watermark to the bottom right so everybody knows and then if somebody clips the watermark out you kind of might SPEAKER_62: know hey they're probably up to something yeah a bad actor but i i do think that touches on something SPEAKER_07: interesting that a lot of the reviewers are talking about which is we keep talking about this in terms of like photo realism like people are going to mistake sora videos for the real life and the dangers of it are all tied up and like you could make it look like donald trump is saying anything but to me when i look at all of these examples they certainly look interesting but they don't look they all have that it's like halfway between animation and reality like there's it doesn't cross the SPEAKER_178: uncanny valley i don't think any of these i mean you could take a look and see what you think SPEAKER_64: shots of like well i think the establishing shots of like flying over a town or if i saw it in a movie or a tv show or going down a park i would actually think yeah that's that's really i'm looking at the SPEAKER_07: website for sora right now and there's to me that that's it speaks so much about human development and our our brains developing over hundreds of thousands of years we are evolved to recognize a human face and like read the expressions on a human face like that was so vital for our survival in the wild is like to be able to distinguish between a person and a bush and an animal and a shadow yes we're going to like and be able to like see a person and be like they're angry they're happy they're sad they're confused and we our brains are so fine-tuned to that that yeah it is much easier to fool us with like a field than a person's face but isn't that the but isn't that the goal like over time it we have to SPEAKER_44: figure out that angle of it or the tech is not can't do its job precisely and if you were to look SPEAKER_132: at the sora home page right now there's one here of those two towers i don't know if that's koala SPEAKER_186: and poor the two towers that have the bridge between them right let's zoom in on that one there that might not even be a real place i mean that might just it might not be real but that one looks real SPEAKER_187: enough to me that i wouldn't do it the komodo dragon obviously looks fake some of these are SPEAKER_01: designed to look fake but you know when you see a horse going across the field or the rabbit you know maybe i could get fooled but i think they're close enough that they're going to get there where they were crossing uncanny valley right now it feels like luke skywalker in the mandalorian when SPEAKER_112: he shows up spoiler alert right like you remember like the de-aging didn't work perfectly and then there was some kid who did his own ai software this is like what four years ago five years ago when SPEAKER_07: that happened but it's still even the the best version of that like to to this day you could go see movies where they do that you could you can always tell like roberts and beckes just did that one home where he dh tom hanks you could still see you could still see okay i mean i i i think it's to me i feel like we've undersold that as a challenge like our brains are so it's the same thing with virtual reality when they're first pitching virtual reality it's like you'll feel like you're in a cave or a castle or outer space and it's like your brain is so good at that it's so good at existing in 3d space that it knows you can put the headset on and maybe your eyes are fooled but your body knows you're still David Friedberg: in the trick is to downgrade the video quality so i saw people were taking the um ceo shooter's image SPEAKER_73: and him going to get his degree i guess he was like at the graduation luigi mangioni luigi mangioni and SPEAKER_01: he um they have him walking up to give the like the valedictorian speech but they kind of put it through a vhs filter so it looks like a little old and i got tricked and i was like oh my god this guy was the valedictorian okay that checks out this guy's like super high iq does seem like it seemed like it and then he gets on there and of course he says something inappropriate or whatever and it was like a short clip and i was like oh okay so i was fooled but now when i see anything on social media my guard SPEAKER_51: is up i'm just like right is it we've all been trained now to to yeah and and that's i'm not the only one who has pointed out some of the limitations uh in one of the first big reviews on youtube SPEAKER_07: uh marques brownlee notes that uh soar has a lot of problems with physics like objects in motion it doesn't necessarily know how things move through space and so some of the physics of 3d objects looks off uh and and open ai sort of conceded to all of this that they're they're saying their goal is not to create fluid perfect like movie quality images they describe it as a co-creative dynamic users can use this video to like brainstorm and explore it feels like a storyboarding tool and it's SPEAKER_01: awesome for that or if you're making a comic book you know when we had animation first come out from disney then you had pixar and then you had industrial light and magic uh you had this whole progression of people saying you know is it real or not miniatures in star wars and blade runner giving way to the prequels and blade runner 49 where they kind of did a little bit of both long story short we have this discussion every time and then these things kind of fall into place as its own genre so i wonder if this is going to be its own genre in the way pixar computer animation versus traditional animation snow white versus uh you know claymation as a genre you know uh coralline whatever they kind SPEAKER_89: of fall into like oh you can appreciate a marionette you know uh south park you know rough animation anime pixar do you think it's gonna fall into like okay this is a cgi thing i will go see you know a ai cgi let's say it's ai cgi would you go see do you think it's gonna fall into something where it's like pixar where everybody was like ah this is just nonsensical it's never gonna work and then you're like you know what i got lost in the story i get lost in a pixar story where i forget i'm watching SPEAKER_07: animation i don't i don't i don't know i'm i'm i i part of me the philosophically i'm tempted to say no because i think that part of animation any kind of creativity is um a brain it's sensory experience it's it's it's conscious thought it's living in the world like like it's not just drawing but every time you draw something you're putting your the way you see it and your emotionality and your perspective on it into the drawing and even on a computer like a toy story computer animator is still doing that they're they're using digital technology but they're still designing and creating its creative expression a computer it's always just running a calculation or an algorithm it's a predictive model it's looking at what other art looks like and guessing what the next thing it should do is based on that SPEAKER_11: so i feel like i'm just a i know getting like like a little existential here but like just on that level i don't feel like a computer's ever going to be able to do what a person is because it doesn't have SPEAKER_07: emotions and experiences it doesn't have a perspective on the thing it's drawing it's just drawing it based on specifications that were given to it having said that living in this world and seeing how quickly this tech progresses i feel like it would be foolish to say a hundred percent definite like no computer's ever going to animate anything that looks cool that i'm going to enjoy like to me it feels like i don't i can't say that with certainty like in this world where you know like there were all when you first showed me uber we'll get to more uber on the phone you first showed me uber on your phone before it launched i was like well this is stupid who's going to get into a stranger's car SPEAKER_209: what a ridiculous idea i felt the same way about airbnb i'm gonna sleep on a right who's gonna sleep SPEAKER_07: killer's couch like are you crazy i've i've learned humility in my time in the world of tech that my SPEAKER_11: first instincts about something are not always the sometimes things work out in a way that i'm not SPEAKER_211: prepared for all right let's talk about ai everybody it's everywhere self-driving cars breakthrough medical SPEAKER_121: research and of course business tools that make everybody better and faster at their jobs if ai hasn't hit your industry yet trust me it is on the way and it's happening fast but ai requires a ton of computing power you know that and those costs will skyrocket if you're not careful i have seen these bills come in it can get crazy quick and that's why it's time for you to upgrade to the next generation of cloud and that means oracle cloud infrastructure or oci oci is a blazing fast and secure platform that covers all the bases infrastructure databases app development and of course all your startups ai and machine learning needs now here's the kicker oci costs 50 less for compute and 80 less for network compared to other cloud options that's a lot of savings especially when every minute counts in the cloud thousands of businesses have already upgraded to oci including mgm resorts specialized bikes and fireworks ai so here's your call to action right now if you switch to oci oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half for new u.s customers with minimum financial commitment but you'll need to act fast the offer ends december 31st 2024 see if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com twist oracle.com twist my gut is telling me we're going to see a new SPEAKER_01: medium emerge here from these tools i think some artists are going to get their hands on it uh when i say artists i think maybe like authors right and now they wouldn't have the ability to or the they might not want to go do a tv show or write it make a short film but you might get some artists who's at home you know like let's say quentin tarantino was you know working at his video archive store he's written true romance he's written reservoir dogs he's writing like little scenes i could see him and roger avery using a tool like this if it existed back then in the way they used final draft to write stuff or whatever they chose to me they wrote it by pen and paper but i could see them making like little short animations telling a story and then sharing them on twitter or instagram and saying like here's an interesting scene and that's like i'm starting to see people make little creative vignettes five seconds 15 seconds 30 seconds that are interesting conceptually interesting like a storyboard might be right and so yeah i don't like that as a possibility i SPEAKER_07: definitely like this idea of integrating these tools into the creative process that just fundamentally makes a lot more sense than to me than them being the final like final step has always got to be human enabled well you know if along the way these tools are being utilized in an interesting way i think SPEAKER_13: that you know who knows your creative process is your own um who am i to say you're doing creativity SPEAKER_01: right or wrong if you're a person it's up to you yeah i think it's gonna like you know in the same way the digital camera allowed a lot more people to get creative and make stuff but most people didn't because most people aren't creative or don't have the energy or the desire to do it i think it's gonna be kind of like that people play with it throw it away but there's gonna be like one percent of the audience who maybe figures out what to do with this we've all got an iphone but sean baker SPEAKER_51: was like i'm gonna make a movie on this thing and now he made anora one of the year's most uh SPEAKER_221: respected movies oh and it was shot all on iphone uh i don't know if anora was but sean baker that SPEAKER_07: was his big claim he did tangerine that which was shot all in an iphone and then florida project which was mostly shot on phones so that's like his i don't know i i think anora probably was SPEAKER_225: mostly shot i just saw the trailer for 28 years later obviously building on 28 days later and 28 SPEAKER_130: weeks later weeks later but that was also 28 28 days later was one of the very first like dv SPEAKER_49: features yeah yeah where you were shot all in digital video yeah they did a bunch of these SPEAKER_00: digital video which when i did a digital video movie back in the day center of the world with David Friedberg: wayne wang though that film uh which i'm in and i was a consultant to that film with peter sarsgaard SPEAKER_01: they shot on these digital films when you blew them up they were a little pixelated on the big screen SPEAKER_186: yeah but they were kind of like that is they had that kind of fake digital you know look when you SPEAKER_30: project it but that was part of the that's part of the aesthetic yeah yeah it's interesting mike figures did that one time code back then it was an interesting time i think now with these iphones SPEAKER_236: you're going to get like some shots that might be as good as you would get on a red camera to the audience they might not actually know the difference the other interesting thing about all SPEAKER_50: that shot on iphone stuff is that now iphones have so many add-ons like you can take your SPEAKER_07: your professional grade lenses and attach them to an iphone so you really can like at this point the difference between like the core camera you're using and the iphone so many there's so many add-ons and and other accessories it doesn't make as big a difference anymore got it oh so the lens can be if you've got really good lights and lenses and everything else in your camera department is top SPEAKER_11: grade people won't even be able to tell it was shot on an iphone it's an iphone's as powerful as a lot of standard digital cameras especially if you go back a few years you know i wanted to um show your Chamath Palihapitiya: startup here this is um you know something we used to do on the show all the time would be the startup of David Friedberg: the day product of the day uh and this one's called remento.co and the re i saw this on product SPEAKER_00: hunt and this is a service that i have been pitched over and over again so this idea to make SPEAKER_01: a book or you know a memorial of my you know deceased parent my aunt whatever has been around for a long time what they've done here is they're turning memories into a keepsake book no writing SPEAKER_00: required preserve a loved one's story the easy way remento turns their spoken words into a personalized SPEAKER_01: keepsake book of their stories now when i've been pitched this it's been a marketplace where documentarians would interview your family and then write a book based on it and they would charge you two to ten thousand dollars to do this right it was like a bespoke service now what they've done is with language models um you can select prompts that you want your parent or your grandparent or whoever to answer or your family they record responses in their app then they create a book based on it and then you can like scan the book to listen to whatever qr code but this isn't like a super expensive thing to do now because they handle the writing so here on this page you can see our speech to story technology turns voice into narrative choose the writing style and customize the final results so if you use grammarly where you've seen the apple intelligence writing tools any number of these it will take you know whatever your parent says from the first person into the third person you have the transcript so kind of like the script i think you're able to go in there and and polish it up and i just thought this is a very interesting idea because it's better than nothing if you can't afford the two to ten thousand dollar person i think that this is going to get you kind of um uh halfway there or maybe two thirds of the way there and i think you know because it's more accessible SPEAKER_110: maybe more people will try what are your thoughts on this one um yeah i mean it it is it is SPEAKER_04: interesting i don't know i feel like there's something is there something a little creepy about it like i i i don't i don't know it's definitely better than the ai using ai to like recreate your SPEAKER_07: dead loved ones like i know there's that thing too where it's like feed their voice into our ai and you could chat with your grandma and like that really is troublesome to me like this why is that why is that SPEAKER_09: troublesome to you it's just creepy or you have a concern about it it is creepy i don't have like a SPEAKER_07: concern like it's gonna ruin the world or anything but i think it's if there is something a little ghoulish about it uh because i don't believe that ai is really able to like i think it's a lie like when the guy nightmare alleys and pretends the mentalist pretends he can call up your the spirit of your dead wife uh from beyond i feel like that they're we're lying to be we're telling them the ai SPEAKER_85: is actually able to recreate the mind and the consciousness of their dead love but it's doing SPEAKER_07: an impersonation it's a trick and like i feel like i feel like it's kind of a cruel trick so that's not this this is thankfully using the real people yes like they record the stories themselves so like i you SPEAKER_49: know it doesn't it doesn't have that element to it but i don't i don't know i i don't i don't know if you need uh this kind of an interactive digital archive so you can always go back and like i don't know if SPEAKER_264: i had this for my grandfather i'm just thinking about it i miss my grandparents every day but like that's SPEAKER_266: part of being alive is you i loved my grandfather's stories and we never recorded them because you know SPEAKER_269: he he he died before we all had phones in our pockets so you would have had to set up a vhs so SPEAKER_01: just that like simple structure of like here are prompts that you know documentarians use yeah you know where you say what's happening in this photo or do you remember this day or uh you know just when SPEAKER_11: did you meet grandma you know like all those kind of things i kind of love it i get it i get it and i totally get like if i could go back and do this with my grandparents you know it would be nice to have SPEAKER_07: now especially because now i have you know my my little nephew dougie never got to meet them that's the other piece yes so he would have gotten to see this were your great grandparents that you SPEAKER_13: hear us talk about all the time but i don't know there there also is a part of me feels like but people are supposed to die and then you remember them and that's how it works and this idea that we SPEAKER_16: need to like you're raw dog forever you're raw dogging uh grief yes yes exactly i want to feel it SPEAKER_50: i don't need to augment it like not watching like not i i tried to do that on uh on the flight i went to florida did you read that all those twitter threads of our x threads about raw dogging flights SPEAKER_275: yeah that's kind of what i was making light of yeah you just go sit there the whole time you don't SPEAKER_11: watch a video you know you just watch the map you just watch the the flight map as it tracks you across the country i made it for about an hour and then i gave up i couldn't do it it is like a very SPEAKER_01: interesting uh mental exercise because we now have done the opposite you and i are film fans as part of our friendship is based on that you know if you think about the uh ultra violence if you think about clockwork orange the torture they give him is to pry his eyes open right make him lock him in a chair and SPEAKER_89: make him watch dopamine hitting clips sound familiar we're literally optima optimizing now for flipping through dopamine hits in scrolling vertical video tick tock youtube instagram they all have it now SPEAKER_90: uh and i think that's like very interesting yeah we're all getting the ludovico treatment yeah oh is SPEAKER_07: that what they called it ludovico yeah in the in the movie that's the ludovico treatment uh where they they they but they also they're key they're playing his favorite uh they're playing beethoven his favorite music so they're associating the sickness that he the revulsion that he feels from the violence with listening to beethoven which ruins his life because that's his favorite music wow it's like would SPEAKER_284: be like making me watch like that stuff while listening to dire straits would absolutely really SPEAKER_49: associating mark knoffler with feeling nauseated all the time god please no super interesting that was Chamath Palihapitiya: also a device in the fifth element when the fifth element played by uh mila jovovich i believe when SPEAKER_43: she is um that's what she's learning about our world she learns about our world and she just like SPEAKER_01: downloads it all at once and you just see her cry because she's she sees hiroshima nagasaki SPEAKER_73: right holocaust and then everything in between civil rights that's that classic sci-fi trope of the SPEAKER_49: outsider watches like instantly catches up on our world through the tv or through the internet yeah SPEAKER_287: yeah pretty pretty good trope i like that i like the truck all right uh let's wrap up here before SPEAKER_112: we get to our amazing startup interview i think there was one more story on the doc we want to SPEAKER_11: talk about well we just had this uh this tweet from uh our uber ceo oh yes dara kajrushahi so new SPEAKER_44: first for uber last friday one million concurrent trips that's more than the entire population of san SPEAKER_07: francisco all at once using uber getting rides in uber more than 3 000 processes notes that ai also helps to ensure matching routing safety payments all working at scale you know like tremendous amount of rides happening every minute that they've got a service very proud of our tech team who effortlessly translates huge digital complexity into real world convenience for hundreds of millions of SPEAKER_49: people around the world so i'm assuming that means just people riding in ubers not also food delivery SPEAKER_294: that would be a separate division well you know when they say trips i think they include food in it okay so this is both people getting food delivered and people riding in that's my guess i could be SPEAKER_187: wrong but i think the routing of food is the same as the routing of people as far as they're concerned Chamath Palihapitiya: because most drivers structure is the same yeah yeah i mean this is um a massive achieve achievement uh to be able to do that at once i think he is also maybe he's always been let the results you know speak for themselves and the results at uber since they got to profitability raised the prices and you know basically uh scaled to such enormous uh and obviously i'm long i'm still long the stock um SPEAKER_01: although i'm diversified so it's not like an acute thing for me or a religious thing you know he's just letting the fact that they became a money printing machine and their plan on buying back their stock on a business basis speak volumes but now with self-driving and waymo and tesla cybercab and byd and you know uh self-driving uh little robots that deliver your food uh in in cities i think he's maybe wants to share more of what's special about uber just in terms of marketing or you know corporate communications maybe and i haven't spoken to him about or anything but i do think he's maybe just trying to explain to people how big uber is so they appreciate this you know uh because again he's quiet about it he's just like look at the numbers the results of the results everybody relies on this there's hundreds of millions of customers and a million at the same time you know if there was a 150 million customers it's almost one percent of them using it at the same time which is kind of interesting just in and of itself i wonder what the denominator there is for a million concurrent rides yeah but it also proves is if there's a million concurrent rides going around in the world SPEAKER_89: right now that means you need a million cars at any given point in time to just do those rides a million cars a lot of cars folks to be on the road one at any one moment yeah because it's not we're SPEAKER_51: not talking a million cars in the fleet it's a million cars working that shift right then yeah SPEAKER_07: i it's fascinating to me like los angeles i feel like uber as a transportation option has really fallen off there's there's fewer drivers rides are a little more expensive it's it's uber eats is the breakout everybody's constantly using uber eats here you got such great food there i mean when i SPEAKER_01: go when i was staying in manhattan beach over the summer i mean i there was a gwyneth paltrow's goop kitchen was really good you know if you want to eat healthy there i mean it's SPEAKER_306: just it's also all the fantasy sugar fish sushi was on it just a lot of the great places santa monica and SPEAKER_07: want something from hollywood or downtown you might be in the valley and want something from the south bay i mean so it is the perfect sort of uber eats uh city i had hi-ho burger that was great i love like i'm curious like i'm sure every this is another complexity to the uber business i'm sure every market is different like the yes the how many people are taking rides versus how many people are ordering sandwiches it's got to be you know incredibly diverse the writing is on the wall SPEAKER_01: though you know i think we will be sitting here in another decade and it's going to be instead of one percent of rides in the united states are ride sharing or you know whatever two percent of them it's going to wind up being like 10 or 20 percent i think car ownership we need to get these cars off SPEAKER_49: the road however we do it i i'm i'm fine with ride sharing as an option whatever we do ride sharing David Friedberg: mass transit is going to be incredible because the you'll be able to recapture that time and so and SPEAKER_132: then you take out parking and storing your car i mean those are major costs in cities and so all SPEAKER_49: that's the worst thing we ever did in cities was fill them fill them with cars that now we're stuck with it but it's it's a nightmare it would be so great to get all these cars off the road however in manhattan David Friedberg: they it was i'm always amazed now i guess bloomberg did this towards the tail end of his uh tenure there but in manhattan they you know you get you're coming down broadway and you get to like herald square SPEAKER_01: or whatever you're usually you leave you leave times square 42nd herald square is 34th it's just broadway's closed it's all people and they've shut down the roads and they have tables and outdoor cafes and pop-up booths and coffee it's nice and you're like oh this is beautiful it's like the SPEAKER_11: santa marco promenade well then you think about all these like great world cities how did they become great world cities it's like public squares and plazas and destinations where people can go walk around and not necessarily like every street is bordered by this expressway that you have to like SPEAKER_01: run across yeah it's gonna be fantastic i'm really excited to see more i am concerned now though i have to say about millions of people losing their gig jobs we have all this controversy lawn about oh my god you know people are being abused by you know the ride sharing companies the delivery companies doordash or whatever amazon they're not paying people enough while people flock to that as an option for extra employment or you know part-time employment whatever very few were actually full-time statistically you know the prices keep going up is you know they have to compete against working at starbucks so the salary has to beat or be as good as a starbucks or an apple store job uh in my mind SPEAKER_64: now those jobs are going to go away we're sitting here 10 years the idea that you're delivering food is going to go away 10 years it's probably going to go away the you know having a human driver and then a truck driver i mean this is you talking about millions of jobs in the u.s like millions and millions and people pay their rent people pay their credit card bills people pay for their kids school by doing an extra door dash shift or on the margins or being an amazon picking up an amazon shift like we talked about earlier in the show i'm a little worried about what happens to when we eliminate SPEAKER_50: those jobs i don't think there's like a quick plug-in there's so many things we sort of could do but SPEAKER_07: americans just have this huge resistance to any anything that could even be remotely mistaken for like welfare or or you know like socialism or like all you have to do is say well that's socialism and everybody gets upset about it but like the answer to all of this stuff is probably going to be some kind of universal basic income eventually we're just we are innovating everyone out of their jobs at a rate that's far beyond how we can train them for new jobs or even needing them in new jobs you know you know once you combine ai robotics self-driving cars all these things you're you're eliminating millions of jobs at a go you know and and yeah you know people that you can't just make them into like you can't just teach them all how to code there aren't jobs available you already eliminated the SPEAKER_11: retail sector so they can't go work at a store like that used to be when i was a kid that was the go-to it's like if you lost your job well you go work at the gap you go work at the gap you go get a job at macy's you go get a barnes and noble gig for a year or two to wait to tie you over hey right uh and we've we're now innovating ourselves out of all like amazon ate all of those businesses doordash and ubereats are eating all the restaurant businesses turning them into ghost kitchens yeah you know we don't need delivery drivers we're not going to need warehouse and factory workers like what are all David Friedberg: these people going to go do all right everybody another great episode for you today and uh now SPEAKER_00: we're going to have our incredible interview with qb technologies what do they do well they build homes and they build homes with mobile micro factories it's super interesting their business is to build a factory and that factory's business is to be on site running 24 hours a day building homes that are SPEAKER_01: delivered within you know 100 150 mile radius and this allows you to build homes faster quieter cheaper with higher precision i know because i was an investor in a company called blockable that tried to do something similar uh you're going to love this interview with qb technologies enjoy and thanks for juan for coming on the program he is x.com slash l-o-n-s see you next time bye bye all right so next up SPEAKER_343: from the twist 500 we have qb technologies and we have yet another alex in this case alex gumbel uh he's the co-founder and coo jason this company founded in 2021 based in new york city with manufacturing operations over in eastern europe in a city called mints that i have actually yet to visit but is on my list only raised 6.4 million in known capital they're building mobile micro factories SPEAKER_223: i think this company is awesome ah there he is alex himself how you doing welcome to the show alex SPEAKER_145: what i love about what you're doing is i had an investment in this space i'm sure you know about them blockable and it didn't work out very well for them maybe they were too early but it's a really SPEAKER_135: hard space to build homes and you have a similar model which is you like to build homes in factories SPEAKER_89: if you build a home in a factory well boy you are not constrained by the weather and you can work 24 hours a day because you have sound abatement going on in there and you can be warm and you have all SPEAKER_110: these incredible tools that you can bring that you don't want to have on a work site with a bunch of uh mud correct me if i'm wrong the key difference here and i'd like to see some videos is you bring the factory to the work site as opposed to delivering the homes that have been built in a work site or a factory 500 miles away am i correct in uh the the basic overview here yeah first of all thank you for SPEAKER_349: having me big big fan uh of both of yours um i'd say we're the antithesis to anyone trying to industrialize construction which is where you're placing the category our antithesis is really tied to three core pillars one yes our product is a factory and we bring it to site so we built a mobile micro factory that gets deployed near where there's construction demand and it makes a kit of parts that then we use our own labor to assemble that kit of parts into homes we have a second antithesis and it's around changing what a home is as soon as you start creating volumetric boxes 3d printing etc meaning the more you deviate away from what a traditional home is the more you run into regulation risk and incumbent adoption risk so we said you know what we're going to build homes on site traditionally we're not going to shove electric plumbing and whatnot behind panels we're literally going to build a home the same way that lenar builds a home except we're going to do it with better process information we're going to do it with a better supply chain procurement management system and the third pillar is really around cost no existing group in the space and probably by your investment you've seen has done this in a cost effective way that combats where existing costs are so the sales cycle becomes hey i'm more expensive but i'm better and there's better quality assurance we took a different approach you know you guys spoke about tesla a lot we don't like that analogy this whole thing of roadster to model three isn't going to work in this space this is a highly conservative space if you're not cheaper than existing home builders today you're almost irrelevant you'll never go that curve from roadster to model three where eventually you hit critical scale so we told ourselves we can't go to market unless we can consistently figure out how to build homes at around a hundred dollars a foot national average is around 152 but in short we're a full stack technology company we build hardware and software it's all for the purpose of improving uh building processes in new home construction in a tldr we design develop and deploy mobile micro factories SPEAKER_352: exactly what you see behind me it's a containerized solution to a factory so that factory is uh like a pop-up SPEAKER_89: building that's got one of those inflatable roofs i think or a boatress roof like we you might see a SPEAKER_349: tennis courts yeah the opposite of a tennis court because if you've played inside a tennis court it's super loud you know it's pressurized so as soon as the doors open it deflates we actually use a repurposed uh air hanger technology the pressures in the in these little tubes so there's you can keep the doors wide open but yes it's a containerized solution so we build about 50 of the hardware in-house and we deploy that hardware into containers so then we can send call it 60 to 100 containers later anywhere in the world a factory that gets erected in eight weeks eight weeks okay that was my first SPEAKER_343: question was how long does it take once you pick a site to unload all the shipping containers and then get it set up how many houses do you think one of these mobile micro factories needs to construct uh to be viable economically because there's cost with bringing the equipment getting it set up SPEAKER_349: training and so forth yeah we no longer think this is past theoretical we've deployed uh one of these already so it's past uh kind of this technical risk stage so we're at about 400 000 engineering hours trl of eight which means we're far enough where we're ready to commercialize this and we are commercializing this but each one is about 10 million dollars in terms of sources and uses which if you guys know manufacturing or spend time in manufacturing that's an insane achievement to be able to launch factories at that cost basis that allows us to bring down the output of one of these to be profitable at about 200 homes a year so about 430 000 square feet of output and each one of these service is 150 mile radius that's a perfect throw distance for us to deploy our own labor onto each construction site to put together the home which is why we replace a general contractor and all the 22 SPEAKER_361: different subcontractors involved which most folks don't do in our ecosystem how many people would work SPEAKER_343: to be the the crew for one of your mmfs both at the factory itself and also on the actual job sites SPEAKER_349: in that radius yeah so all in all each mmf is its own standalone business think of it as its own standalone business that's capable of producing end-to-end 200 homes a year okay that means that we're employing about 260 folks the way it works is there's 35 folks on the factory floor in two shifts another dozen folks that are gna and then imagine you can have 20 different homes being built within 150 mile radius at any given time of an mmf per each site you have about four unskilled workers in two shifts so that's SPEAKER_369: a total of around 260 folks all in all four unskilled workers on site that's it in two shifts yeah building SPEAKER_343: a home over the course of 60 days essentially but that feels incredibly minimal on the human capital side so i presume alex then therefore there's going to be quite a lot of um repeated work that there's probably some panelization of these products you would kind of take out of the SPEAKER_349: factories they're easier to put together so the factory really consumes about 600 different uh bill of materials those bill of materials they do one of three things one we're producing items from scratch think windows i think foundation systems think framing and certain non-structural wall elements everything else for just prepping sheetrock is technically a finished good or a pex pipe but we're prepping so there's no dirty work done on site and then there's things that are off the shelf like kitchen cabinets or toilets or you know certain fixtures but all in all we're breaking up a home into 35 stages sending just in time last mile those stages to be put together by unskilled folks we have one kpi and one thesis as a business there's not enough young people that want to go swing hammers and it's a massively retiring workforce meaning that about 50 percent of the workforce in construction today is going to retire in the next 10 years we're already at a massive housing crisis doesn't matter where you sit politically bipartisan issue we're screwed pretty much and most of it is because we don't have enough folks to to swing hammers so our thesis is around de-skilling the labor required to go build homes so how do you build more homes with fewer hands that's what we're trying to do David Friedberg: it's really interesting alex uh wilhelm and the with these mmf's these i think that means micro mobile micro factory mobile micro factories uh this term is the term you've come up with but alex wilhelm this is something we had with blockable which was a lot of people who are in SPEAKER_112: construction have to then go on the road they leave their family they do a construction job in another state they stay at a dingy motel with four people per room and it's kind of um not a fun life and SPEAKER_89: you're outside in the elements if it rains you stop working you get the idea when you're in the field and you're making cuts you cannot use the equipment that you see behind alex you know this high precision equipment you're literally using exacto knives and saws and whatnot so when you make these fa in a SPEAKER_112: factory you've now eliminated uh weather you now have shift work and people can work in a factory near their homes and they could pick up shifts work two shifts a double shift work at night etc uh work seven days a week and you don't have noise as well bothering the neighbors which is always a major issue but you you do eliminate somebody having to draw lines and look at documents to figure out if they've made the panels correctly because i would assume every panel is made with one of these high fidelity machines correct alex uh kind of we actually have a bit of a slightly different thesis SPEAKER_349: as well everyone talks about roboticizing the space the only reason why tesla was so quick to roboticize is because they had 50 years of toyota's production system to play off right lean manufacturing no one's even done lean manufacturing construction so we're first about taking away skilled labor how do you make that skilled labor hyper efficient then you can roboticize in an roi positive way what you're describing jason is kind of interesting because we extend the lean manufacturing process beyond just the factory setting but also on site no one's done that before and i'll talk through an example of how we're doing that usually in in building a home that's skilled labor typically brings their own tools SPEAKER_386: which is crazy imagine a tesla factory worker showing up with their own screwdriver it's weird right it doesn't exist in other industries so what we've done is we said okay we're going to deploy on site a container where the home is being built bathroom shower locker storage for all the equipment and tools for those four unskilled folks to then follow a process instruction saying go put together this uh this stage this kit of parts at that specific stage here's the tool you use and here's the unreal engine augmented uh instructions that tune every time you build a different home so they're pulling tools based on what they need at that time they don't need to bring their own tools anymore so you're you want to extend the lean manufacturing process on site as well so it's kind of like SPEAKER_112: putting together ikea furniture uh it's not easy uh necessarily it takes some thoughtfulness but if you're given really good instructions clear instructions and it seems like you're building SPEAKER_291: 3d models and videos for people to do and you're numbering the tools and you have consistency with SPEAKER_349: the tools uh it gets a lot simpler huh yeah it's it's a hardware software enabled process improvement SPEAKER_386: to traditional construction versus going a full 180 of let's reinvent materials let's reinvent what a home is again thesis number two the more you deviate the harder it is to sell into the system SPEAKER_343: okay so that's where i wanted to pick up because we saw a clip earlier that we had on the screen of a beautiful home that you guys had built and i actually watched a video of one of your founders walking around showing off this house but my question is about customizability because that house looks great it matches my own personal design aesthetics i love wood i love right angles but what if i was a more fussy um home buyer alex how far can you customize these homes inside of one mmf inside of one of these radiuses you're describing because we're not volumetric modular which jason you said SPEAKER_349: you invested in blockable in the past they were partially volumetric modular from my understanding so a lot of folks are approaching the space where they're they're designing entire home off-site which is finished product uh we're not doing that we've standardized inputs that go into a home with a non-proprietary supply chain that means we can have different iterations of those inputs which means when they come together that's hundreds of permutations of what can be built on site think of it as like lego blocks but not reinventing what traditional construction is we can go to home depot get the same materials you know we use very standard inputs there's really two differences in our homes by definition if you're going to be standardizing you limit yourself from hiring a home builder that like alex or you jason can hire um to go build you a custom home but that's what's wrong with construction today every project is a one-off relative to every other industry that's had this type of standardization lean manufacturing capability so yes hundreds of permutations but still more limited than traditional construction but for the most part we can back into you know pretty much anything the production home builders can build that's awesome you're doing this in europe to start while europe as opposed to no so so let me explain and jason you saw this from blockable this space is inherently hard whichever cohort whichever company gets this right could be the SPEAKER_395: biggest company in the world naturally you know you look at the us there's 3.8 million homes missing you multiply 500k you know a home that's two trillion dollars of market demand today that needs to be and can be absorbed but we physically can't build enough so we're talking about a company that can have a massive outcome oleg and i my partner we didn't want to play the venture game early on where we would SPEAKER_349: have needed to raise let's talk about 400 000 engineering hours we've done we would have had to raise 50 million dollars at seed it seems kind of you know a bad bet to make with the valley of death that's notorious in deep tech so we said okay what's another angle we can go to get through our technical risk eastern europe is a 7 to 10x cost saving in terms of great engineers so we set up a big engineering rnd hub in eastern europe we're obviously a us-based company our first commercial deployment is in nevada and we're looking to put up 275 mobile micro factories i'd say most of our uh target markets are first world countries where the coefficient of skilled labor is much higher than the cost of materials relative to the way you build like cost of labor higher than the cost of materials relative to that dollar that it costs to build so naturally it's europe us australia canada SPEAKER_306: and these are single family standalone homes you're not doing multi-family not yet three four story SPEAKER_46: you're gonna you're gonna make your bones in the single family american classic home row houses SPEAKER_349: essentially at our cost basis we hope to bring back a lot of master plan developments which i think are much needed with an aging millennial demographic that you know is being stuffed into studios and you know one bedroom apartments because that's the only feasible thing anyone can build in an urban core so we're hoping that folks through our process and the cost basis are incentivized to build more SPEAKER_343: built to rent for sale single family homes okay so then i want to know how many homes are going to be constructed using uh kubi technologies technology in the next uh i don't know three years alex i'm just trying to figure out like how far away you are from kind of early mass commercialization of this SPEAKER_349: technology yeah so we we didn't historically focus on like building homes out of our first of a kind because we're in the factory business we're not in the home business it's super easy to build a home so for us we kind of have grief around companies that raise a ton of capital build one home show it off to investors put in an architectural digest the hard thing is the process behind building hundreds and thousands of homes um it's not necessarily the home itself so we focused on let's call it you know as corny as it is the machine that builds the machine right that's what we focused on our first commercial deployment is in nevada that factory will output for 10 years SPEAKER_377: about 200 single family homes per year so we're looking to do that 275 times over the next decade SPEAKER_223: or so so okay 2 000 homes 200 300 factories you start to get to a lot of homes uh hundreds of SPEAKER_291: thousands of homes you hope to build in uh the united states at a minimum yeah yeah i'll tell you SPEAKER_395: something interesting about the market at scale if we get to 275 mobile micro factories we're only SPEAKER_349: building about 55 000 homes per year what's ironic is the u.s builds about a million homes a year today that's what they build and we're under supplied so we're like less than you know one and a half percent of the entire market share in the us that's at today's at today's undersupplied SPEAKER_395: volume that's built that's why it's such an interesting problem to work on is just you can't claw back enough you can't get big enough to even be you know remotely so your customers will be SPEAKER_306: the home builders or landowners or are you going to pop up like an llc where you have a home built we SPEAKER_112: have a home builder and a landowner and yourselves sharing economics how do you think about your business are you just providing the lowest per square foot price and beating out other construction companies are you going to sell direct to consumers what's the eventual business model here who winds up being your customer jason we should get you as an investor you seem to get it SPEAKER_349: it's all the above okay so we're very much focused on correct cost of capital venture at some point is not a creative cost of capital to us our business is built perfectly for project finance and eventually debt the way we grow is tied to that specific cost of capital today because we don't want to use our balance sheet we partner on our factories so for example in nevada our partners control 6 000 acres of land to them the economics are compelling enough to say guys no problem we'll back you know a big portion of that 10 million required to launch your factory you run it for us and we're the embedded customer off taker looking to build two to three thousand homes eventually what we think is interesting is to launch our own factories and then have a bunch of bob smith the home builders in a local market that build 20 30 homes dying to compete at the cost basis that lanark and build up because of their call it band-aid to their inefficiency which is scale and everyone's not everyone's overlooking kind of the backbone of american housing market which is small to medium sized home builders uh they build 50 of the u.s market they're the ones building 20 30 100 homes a year in that market that's who we want to unlock cost competitiveness for eventually though our master SPEAKER_395: plan entitles us to uh launch a home builder ourselves you know call it five to ten years from now David Friedberg: yeah i mean this is one of the challenges of this business having been on the board of blockable is if you sell to you know people who are building these projects um they just want the lowest cost SPEAKER_89: per square foot and you're in a race to the bottom and then there are landowners who you know they have land and they're like great we'll provide the land you build the home but you then need to finance it that's not how venture capital works venture capital is not looking for a coupon you know or you know some cap return but there are investors who are interested in that so you know i think popping up uh dare i say an spv for each project uh or for different projects and having the core SPEAKER_110: ip in the main company is potentially a viable solution here where you could do a jv use your technology you own all the technology all the innovation all the patents everything to do with your factory hey and that landowner is customer zero and customer 100 they just take a hundred percent of the output of the factory maybe they give you a little taste of some of the upside in the SPEAKER_112: homes when they sell um and it could be super powerful i love the idea also of having watched some videos of your product there's a lot of innovation that can happen here in terms of customization where panels that go on the inside or the outside of the home can be standardized or used industry standards can use magnets can use lug nuts you know that are very easy to hide and aesthetically they can look radically different um you know many people know this because they put in flooring now that's high old base flooring so it looks like you put in this incredible wood floor and you just put in panels you put in a driveway right like some of these driveways look incredible like you're going to SPEAKER_349: the palace of versailles and it's just panels right yeah exactly it's uh it's interesting because we want to be i don't want to say it it's very corny but we want to be like the aws of home building yeah no i don't think it's corny at all i think that's exactly whatever you need to do yeah and the way we think about it is 275 mmfs later if we just traded a 15x on ebitda we can build a 50 billion dollar business which i'm conservative i come from private equity it always irks me to say things like that but it's possible and i think whoever does it maybe it's not on us maybe it's the next cohort these are massive businesses in the making and obviously much needed hard to call the us a SPEAKER_361: superpower when we can't when 50 of the us folks can't afford you know 250 000 homes yeah one last SPEAKER_363: question before we let you go alex you keep saying 275 mmfs why is that the number you keep coming back SPEAKER_343: to is that based on upcoming financing is that just based on near-term goals like it feels a very random SPEAKER_365: number to me it started out as a joke because i ran out of space in our corporate financial model SPEAKER_349: so that's like the max i could draw it down over 10 years but then it fell perfectly to what will be constrained against the papa factory that makes the factories we'll get to like we're looking at a time horizon but eventually at scale we want to be doing 20 of these per year in terms of production David Friedberg: okay so you've got to build a factory to build factories and you know the great news here is alex SPEAKER_112: wilhelm when you look at a business like this we always talk about you know standing on the shoulders of giants there are people doing things in fabrication in water cutting you know in material science uh that and ai of course that are going to just be wind at the backs of this company because just like batteries from iphones led to tesla having an easier time with batteries because so many people were innovating on battery technology there's so much innovation going on in material science the problem is you know if you've got a labor force uh that knows how to use sheetrock knows how to use SPEAKER_89: studs and you introduce stuff that has to be cut in a factory that cannot be cut in the field but it's this new material and it lasts a hundred years and it costs twice as much you you have economic supply issues where the people who are building it only care about the per square footage price or the per square foot price but they don't care about the maintenance and the maintaining of the home it one of the great innovations that blockable kind of reached at different points in time were how much more affordable it was for each block and they would stack these blocks into little you know studio apartments SPEAKER_112: one bedrooms you know they could make an innovation in the hvac system that could save you know a hundred dollars a month across 100 apartments across 100 apartment complexes across 100 years they could make innovations in you know just building a trowel underneath each apartment that kept it from flooding so when there was a flood the water would flow underneath the blockable unit and go outside of it and as opposed to warping the wood and they could use wood and new material science that could be cut in a factory that didn't warp and that was water resistance because the two what i learned was the two biggest problems in apartments fires and floods and they kind of go hand in hand you have a fire and the sprinklers go up you get a flood these things cause massive damage if you if you could eliminate those two things you would eliminate like 90 of the damage cost to homes painting a home is easy SPEAKER_349: warped wood floors are getting ripped out it's kind of interesting because like logically the world would think like that but developers have one constraint it's yield on cost right they're looking for a return metric into the underwrite hard costs meaning day one cost they don't think about carry costs that future efficiency because it's not about finding the most you know innovative developer even if you find the most innovative developer people don't realize they're constrained by their lender they're constrained by their lps so it's a really multivariate equation with lots of layers to the onion essentially we actually the way you think is interesting because we want to be the conduit eventually like we have great investors and i think it's important in deep tech to have great long-term investors but some of our investors are very much focused on on climate and just generally deep tech like type one at one etc the way they look at us is if we hit our mission and we get the scale we become the biggest conduit of some of these alternative materials because it's SPEAKER_386: hard for them to sell directly but eventually if we're the you know the engine we can just feed David Friedberg: all those alternative materials to us yeah i mean this is it's almost like a tragedy of the commons SPEAKER_112: you the incentives matter so much and nobody's thinking about the incentive of hey what is the third owner of this home in year 40 going to experience with the home are they going to experience the windows falling out and cracking and warping they're not thinking about that but if you were thinking logically and you could spend i don't know 10 more money to get an extra 10 years life out of those windows it'd be well worth it but it's the opposite spend 10 less on it and you make a little bit more or you win the job and then maybe the windows start warping in your 20 or 30 but it's not your problem because you as the construction worker will be retired by then and the housing company will have sold it already or maybe the housing might have sold it twice i forgot who said SPEAKER_349: this but this is wild i think homes in the us are one of the only products where today you can buy new pay more but it will be a worse product than than before or something you can buy used SPEAKER_438: uh from say that the 60s the 70s it's kind of wild because no other product you pay more and get worse SPEAKER_356: quality so wait what's an example of that like uh you're saying if you bought an older home it would SPEAKER_89: be a higher quality than a newer one that's made with more disposable like it's like sheen SPEAKER_110: or sheen what is the shame shame where everybody buys their you know coachella clothes you buy those clothes you wash them twice alex as you know have you know going to so many music festivals they just disintegrate whereas you know some my mom's leather jacket her fringe jacket from the 60s or 70s she SPEAKER_443: just gave to my daughter it looks great it's gonna last and then my daughter will give it to her SPEAKER_361: daughter yeah no cost on the home building front will keep going up which means home builders will keep cutting corners we'll keep finding ways to use crappier and crappier materials yeah it's a SPEAKER_112: disaster uh real tragedy of the common short-term thinking hey alex uh we wish you great success on this it's uh awesome and i i can't wait to meet you and go see the factory in nevada and yeah we'll do dinner you know what i think my the scar tissue of blockable might have healed by now i might want to get back in on this i might want to i want to write a check and meet you alex and come on this adventure again because i'm i'm realizing how enthusiastic i was about blockable and being in this space because it's so obvious somebody will figure it out and this is like as a capital allocator alex willhelm one of the things you have to deal with is you know you might have a really traumatic experience lose millions of dollars and then the next person up the hill actually figures it out so you have to keep that resiliency and enthusiasm for big markets uh and solving big problems which alex SPEAKER_110: you're doing cannot wait uh alex gamble am i pronouncing your last name correct gamble yeah that's correct yep all right well uh let me know when you're awesome i'll take you for some uh some brisket and a beef rib over at terry black's or some brisket at la barbecue and uh let's break bread SPEAKER_352: and talk soon perfect guys thank you so much really appreciate you reaching out and and doing this SPEAKER_89: talk soon yeah congratulations on being in the twist 500 yes created by alex wilhelm so i don't SPEAKER_110: people don't know my secret plan alex but with this twist 500 i want to have a an event where i invite all the twist 500 founders to come hang out for a weekend it'd be awesome yeah and uh it's going to be a uh index fund eventually so my uh my idea is to try to buy you know raise a hundred million dollars and buy five hundred thousand dollars worth of secondary in 200 of these companies eventually all 500 of them and then have a proper index of all 500. uh it'd be pretty hilarious if you could smart actually own a little bit of each one yeah it would be fun to have like a private market index SPEAKER_383: all right well we'll see you soon alex you guys talk soon