Drones, Deepfakes, and Disruptors with Lon Harris, Remento and Cuby | E2058

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website! Go to https://www. 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 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist Oracle - Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Save up to 50% on your cloud bill at ⁠https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Lon Harris kick off the show (2:06) Welcome back to Lon Harris and discussion on current events (6:04) Drones in New Jersey: Security issues and speculations on their origin (11:01) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (13:04) Privacy concerns surrounding drone technology (15:27) The future of drone delivery services (19:32) OpenAI's launch of the video generation tool, Sora (20:04) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (21:34) The emergence of new mediums from AI tools (31:04) Oracle - Try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist (32:28) Startup of the Day: Remento (43:06) Uber's milestone and the future of ride-sharing (51:14) Alex Gumbel from Quby Technologies joins the TWIST500 (56:00) Economics of mobile micro factories and deskilling labor in home construction (1:04:09) Market demand and strategic focus in construction innovation (1:07:10) Business model, customer base, and production goals for Qubii Technologies (1:11:11) Challenges and future prospects in the construction industry Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Mentioned on the show: Check out OpenAI's Sora: https://sora.com/ Check out Cuby: https://www.cubytechnologies.com/ Check out Remento: https://www.remento.co/ * Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/Lons LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonharris * Follow Aleks: X: https://x.com/agampel1 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamaleksandrgampel * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (11:01) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (20:04) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (31:04) Oracle - Try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland v Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  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 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 to listen to whatever QR code.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 0:27Jason Calacanis?

  Is there something a little creepy about it?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Like, I, I, I don't, I don't 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, at least you're-

• 0:45Jason Calacanis?

  Why is that troublesome to you? It's just creepy or you have a concern about it?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  It is creepy. I don't have like a concern like it's going to ruin the world or anything. But I, I think it's, if there is something a little ghoulish about it, because I don't believe 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-

• 1:05Jason Calacanis?

  So you're raw dogging-

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Hold on to them forever.

• 1:08Jason Calacanis?

  You're raw dogging, uh-

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Grief. Yes, I'm raw dogging grief. Yes, exactly.

• 1:13Jason Calacanis?

  I want to feel it. I don't need to augment it. I respect it.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. 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.

• 1:57Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's a Tuesday. It's a Tuesday, and we've got a great interview with the founder on the back half of the show. But at the front, we're going to do some news, and the original news reader from This Week in Startups is back. My guy, Ron Harris. How are you doing, pal?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Good, good. But many years, 15, 16 years later, I'm back to do the news?

• 2:18Jason Calacanis?

  I think 14 years, 2,000 episodes. Boy, my arm's tired.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Jeez, what a, what a, what a run. What an impressive run.

• 2:26Jason Calacanis?

  It's one of those very interesting things about podcasts, you know, if you love doing it, it becomes like exercise. I consider, you know, doing 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 and tech. Of course, all in is me, that goes supernova as well.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Well, those people, they're into startups and tech and other, other topics.

• 2:52Jason Calacanis?

  Politics, Ukraine, Ukraine.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Other topics, yeah. A few international relations gets a decent amount of traction.

• 3:00Jason Calacanis?

  And so what was your take on seeing Sacks named as the AI?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Wow, what, what, yeah, I've never had any kind of this kind of proximity to power, like, like working on a show with a guy who's in the White House. It's very, I'm not going to try not to rub him the wrong way anymore.

• 3:19Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know, it's great David is an awesome executive, so I'm very excited. 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 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 hopefully steering the country towards smaller government, less regulation, and just more efficiency, which, hey,

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, listen, I don't agree with David Sacks 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.

• 3:54Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I think it's such a great point 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. That's really like one of the great things I think about what we're going to see in 2025 is hopefully a great one there. God, there's so much news going on.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  A ton, yeah.

• 4:18Jason Calacanis?

  It feels like the world is spinning very fast right now.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Normally, this is when everything kind of slows down until the next year. Not 2024, though. We're barreling through.

• 4:28Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is going to be like another frenetic, you know, couple of years. Uh, you know, which was a hallmark of the first Trump presidency. I think it's going to be frenetic as well.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, aside from anything practical that he actually does once he gets into office, like there's, there's all that stuff. But there's also just, he is such a divisive figure. He divides people in the create, and I'm not saying it's, it's all his fault personified. But he creates this environment where it is really like combative. And I feel like we did have a few years sort of a little bit off from that and we're jumping right back.

• 5:04Jason Calacanis?

  It's a good observation. I, I did say, I, I don't know if you caught Trump on the Sunday shows, but I listened to the first half of his interview. It was his first meet 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 in my interest. My retribution is going to be the performance of the country. So we'll see if that happens.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Well, you, you was, Donald Trump just says things. So who, who knows? We'll have to wait and see. It's a, 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, Donald Trump.

• 5:43Jason Calacanis?

  Or you can't, uh, or, or the other way around. When they say they're going to deport 15 million and then he says, well, maybe we'll just do the 500,000.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  And I know, absolutely.

• 5:50Jason Calacanis?

  Right?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  I, and I think this is an important thing. Exactly. Like, I think what gives 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 there were, there were, 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.

• 6:24Jason Calacanis?

  Crypto.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's gonna support like what? He's literally said he's in favor of and against everything at this point. Like TikTok is another great example. Where he ran now on, I'm gonna save TikTok, but the TikTok ban started in the Trump administration. That's not a Biden thing.

• 6:42Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go. So what's gonna, I mean, it's really interesting on a business basis. I have friends who are shareholders in TikTok, you know, ByteDance, the parent company.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 6:51Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:01Jason Calacanis?

  You know, a little bit of chaos right now in New Jersey. I hate to get all conspiracy theory here.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, this isn't even a theory. Just look up.

• 7:10Jason Calacanis?

  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 it is a technology related story.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So starting in 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?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  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, it's a very murky sort of area right now.

• 8:29Jason Calacanis?

  It is very murky, yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's what a lot of the mayors were 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 looking at them, they can go dark.

• 9:01Jason Calacanis?

  Turn the lights off, the safety lights. Okay.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  You know, so it's 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 going to start spewing out Joker toxin or whatever, any second. But it's hard to know how certain they really are if we don't know who sent them and what they're doing there. The FAA 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,

• 9:49Speaker 01

  but we do not have confirmation. That is just witness.

• 9:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. It sounds like a military group or some commercial venture is doing this, like they're playing with their drones. The reason I say that is if they're larger, those are very expensive. You're talking five, $10,000 quadcopters, those big, large, commercial ones. Those ones are also customizable or self-built or assembled in many cases, as opposed to a DJI one that I ordered off of Amazon. I played with. And I 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,

• 10:23Speaker 01

  I didn't think that was allowed.

• 10:24Jason Calacanis?

  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 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 they'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.

• 11:02Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:47Jason Calacanis?

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• 12:31Jason Calacanis?

  That's Squarespace.com/twist. Make sure you go to that URL so they know you listened to the pod. The ones that are made for retail use, let's say, 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. 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 certain places.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:12Jason Calacanis?

  Where a lot doesn't allow you to go there. 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. This is how the next terrorist attack is going to happen is people are going to start using these things.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know what this reminded me of is that Chinese weather balloon story. You remember 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 there. We're, 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, 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.

• 14:23Jason Calacanis?

  You know, the thing about the balloon story that's super interesting is we actually shot some of those down.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  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 crashed on somebody.

• 14:36Jason Calacanis?

  If later over Montana, yeah, where the, it went over Montana where we keep our nuclear missile silos.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Right. So they waited until, I think it went over like North Carolina, like over the water and then they shot it down.

• 14:46Jason Calacanis?

  That's when they got it. Yeah.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:47Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this does speak to, we probably need to have more insights into what's going on in the sky. Local police need to have that. And a lot of local police now have their own drones. 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 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 the local police to see over the whole space.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  And on the other side, I mean, listen, I want to be safe from drone warfare, but the the flip side of that is it does feel like a privacy issue as well. Like the cops aren't supposed to be able to see into your house unless you let them in or they have a warrant that 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, eh, that kind of disappears.

• 15:50Jason Calacanis?

  There are a lot of instances of kids taking these drones and being peeping toms in cities and whatever. So they're flying them all over 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 croissant. You know, I do the double mocha sometime.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I'm only a little skeptical about this because I live in, I live in Silver Lake, which is a very high traffic delivery area like

• 16:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  I live among, you know, like I'm, 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 constantly have drones whizzing by me, bringing people their burritos? That doesn't sound ideal.

• 16:59Jason Calacanis?

  They are quieter than cars typically, like an ice combustion car. They will be quieter on average. So 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.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I will, I guess we'll find out, but I, that is a thought that I've had is like, are, are the skies above us just going to be constantly buzzing with drones? Cause everybody wants their

• 17:23Jason Calacanis?

  That is the vision.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Brush from Amazon.

• 17:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it, it really work, it's not necessary in Manhattan. It's not necessary in Silver Lake, but if you were to live.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Well, LA is very spread out, so.

• 17:34Jason Calacanis?

  Right, but it's something less than Silver Lake. What would be a more spread out area? Even Santa Monica, too dense, you don't need it. It needs to be.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  But like in the valley and, you know, once you get up towards Upland and Simi Valley, then it's, you know, yeah, it would be more practical there.

• 17:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think what we're seeing here is a zipline. Is this a zipline, folks?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is zipline.

• 17:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, these things are going to work really well in areas where the houses are a mile from each other.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:02Jason Calacanis?

  When you're out in the country or the suburbs where, you know, people 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 a, 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 in 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 ever before.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Without a doubt. I mean, already Amazon can do same day delivery here, so I can order something right now and it'll be here in two, three hours.

• 18:52Jason Calacanis?

  I tell you, the thing I noticed when I was in Austin is Austin has better delivery than the Bay Area. And I was like, how is that possible? In Austin, I don't know what they're doing here, but you'll order and they're like, can we deliver it from 4:00 AM to 8:00 AM? They kind of ask you if you want your stuff during that window.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  I wonder if it's the Whole Foods thing. They already had a huge infrastructure. That's where Whole Foods is from.

• 19:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, they have the infrastructure. I think what it is really is they have now found that there are drivers willing to work that shift, say the 4:00 to 8:00 AM shift.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Well, if you have another job, that's perfect. You can free before work, you pick up four hours, you know.

• 19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Precisely. All right, great story. Uh, let's keep going.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  All right. Uh, so our next story, Sora, OpenAI finally launched. They announced it first in February, let some beta testers and other people sample it. But their video AI video generation tool Sora has formally launched this week. It's available right now in the U.S. across Asia. We're waiting to hear details about launching in Europe and the UK. And current ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers don't need to pay anything extra. They get access to Sora included in their subscriptions.

• 20:05Jason Calacanis?

  All right, 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

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  using lemon.io because they handle all that for you. They only offer handpicked developers with three years of experience at a minimum, and they have to be in the top 1% 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 your 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 smarter and faster at lemon.io/twist.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Interestingly, OpenAI, they helped to kickstart the entire 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 Sora will output a high-definition clip based on your specifications. In a blog post, OpenAI says they want to give society, and I quote, "Time to explore the possibilities and code-develop norms and safeguards for AI-generated videos." 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

• 22:17Speaker 01

  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. OpenAI, the big difference there is what I was talking about, that what they call multimodality. 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.

• 23:01Jason Calacanis?

  It does seem to me that 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 know, hey, they're probably up to something.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, a bad actor. But I do think that touches on something interesting that a lot of the reviewers are talking about, which is we keep talking about this in terms of like photorealism, like people are going to mistake Sora videos for the real life and the dangers of it are all tied up in 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, they all have that. It's like halfway between animation and reality like there's an uncanniness.

• 23:49Jason Calacanis?

  It doesn't cross the uncanny valley for you.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  I don't think any of these, I mean, you could take a look and see what you think.

• 23:53Jason Calacanis?

  What about the 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 it. That's really, I'm looking at the website for Sora right now and there's.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, we're good at it.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And be able 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 figure out that angle of it, or the tech is not, can't do its job.

• 24:53Jason Calacanis?

  Precisely. And if you were to look at the Sora homepage right now, there's one here of those two towers. I don't know if that's Qualul and Por, the two towers that have the bridge between them and the snow. Let's zoom in on that one there. When you look at that one.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  That might not even be a real place. I mean, that might just be.

• 25:07Jason Calacanis?

  It could may not be real, but that one looks real enough to me that I wouldn't do it. The Komodo dragon obviously looks fake. Some of these are 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 will cross the uncanny valley. Right now it feels like Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorian when he shows up, spoiler alert.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:29Jason Calacanis?

  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 that happened?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  But it's still, even the, the best version of that, like to, to, to this day, you could go see movies where they do that. You could, you can always tell, like Robert Zemeckis just did that one Home where he de-aged Tom Hanks. You can still see.

• 25:52Jason Calacanis?

  You can still see, okay.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I. 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. But it knows you can put the headset on and maybe your eyes are fooled, but your body knows you're still in.

• 26:17Jason Calacanis?

  The trick is to downgrade the video quality. So I saw people were taking the um. CEO shooters image and him going to get his degree. I guess it's like a graduation.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Now Luigi Mangione.

• 26:33Jason Calacanis?

  Luigi Mangione and 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.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Does seem like he's pretty smart.

• 26:49Jason Calacanis?

  It does seem 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 is up. I'm just like.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:02Jason Calacanis?

  Is it fake?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  We've all been trained now to to to yeah, and and and that's I I'm not the only one who has pointed out some of the limitations. Uh, in one of the first big reviews on YouTube, uh, Marques Brownlee notes that uh, Sora 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 uh, OpenAI 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 ideas.

• 27:43Jason Calacanis?

  It feels like a storyboarding tool and it's awesome for that. Or if you were 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 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. 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.

• 28:19Jason Calacanis?

  Computer animation versus traditional animation, Snow White versus, uh, you know, claymation as a genre, you know, uh, Coraline, whatever. They kind 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 going to 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 going to fall into something where it's like Pixar where everybody was like, ah, this is just nonsensical. It's never going to 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 animation.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't, I don't know. I'm, 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 a, a, a brain. It, it, 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

• 29:41Speaker 01

  technology, but they're still designing and creating its creative expression. A, 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. 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 is ever going to be able to do what a person is because it doesn't have 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

• 30:25Speaker 01

  a hundred percent definite like. No computer is 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 foot. 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?

• 30:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  What a ridiculous idea.

• 30:48Jason Calacanis?

  I felt the same way about Airbnb. I'm going to sleep on a

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:50Jason Calacanis?

  Serial killer's couch. Like, are you crazy?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  I've, I've learned humility in my time in the world of tech, that my first instincts about something are not always the, sometimes things work out in a way that I'm not prepared for.

• 31:05Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

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• 32:30Jason Calacanis?

  My gut is telling me we're going to see a new 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, maybe 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,

• 33:16Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:29Jason Calacanis?

  And so, I like that as a possibility.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  I 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. But you know, if along the way, these tools are being utilized in an interesting way, I think that, you know, who, who knows? Your creative process is your own. Um, who am I to say you're doing creativity right or wrong? If you're a person, it's up to you.

• 34:02Jason Calacanis?

  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 1% of the audience who maybe figures out what to do with this.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  We've all got an iPhone, but Sean Baker was like, I'm gonna make a movie on this thing. And now he made Anora, one of the year's most, uh, respected movies.

• 34:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, and it was shot all on iPhone.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't know if Enora was, but Sean Baker, that was his big claim. He did Tangerine, that, 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 Enora probably was mostly shot on phones.

• 34:45Jason Calacanis?

  I just saw the, the trailer for 28 years later, obviously building on 28 days later and 28 weeks later.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Weeks later. But that was also 28, 28 days later was one of the very first like DV features. Yeah, yeah. Where it's shot all on digital video.

• 34:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they did a bunch of these digital, which when I did a digital video movie back in the day, Center of the World with Wayne Wang, though that film, uh, which I'm in, uh, and I was consulting to, that film with Peter Sarsgaard, they shot on these digital films. When you blew them up, they were a little pixelated on the big screen.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:16Jason Calacanis?

  But they were kinda like that is.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  They had that kind of fake digital, you know, look when you projected, but that was part of the, that's part of the aesthetic. Yeah.

• 35:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. It's interesting.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Mike Figus did that one Time Code back then. It was an interesting time.

• 35:30Jason Calacanis?

  I, I think now with these iPhones, 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.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  The other interesting thing about all that shot on iPhone stuff is that now iPhones have so many add-ons. Like you can take your, 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. Uh, so there's so many add-ons and, and other accessories that it doesn't make as big a difference anymore.

• 35:58Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Oh, so the lens can be.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  If you've got really good lights and lenses and everything else in your camera department is top 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.

• 36:14Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I wanted to, um, show you a startup here. This is, um, you know, something we used to do on the show all the time would be the startup of the day, product of the day. Uh, and this one's called remento.co. And the, I saw this on Product Hunt and this is a service that I have been pitched over and over again. So this idea to make a book or, you know, a, a memorial of my, you know, deceased parent, my aunt, whatever, has been around for a long. Long time. 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 book of their stories.

• 36:53Jason Calacanis?

  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 $10,000 to do this. 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. Uh, 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 result.

• 37:36Jason Calacanis?

  So if you use Grammarly or 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 $10,000 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, maybe more people will try it. What are your thoughts on this one?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I mean, it, it is, it is 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 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.

• 38:37Jason Calacanis?

  Why is that troublesome to you? It's just creepy or you have a concern about it?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  It is creepy. I don't have like a concern, like it's going to ruin the world or anything. But I, 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 Alley and pretends the mentalist pretends he can haul up your the spirit of your dead wife from beyond.

• 39:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  I feel like that there we're we're lying to be we're we're telling them the AI is actually able to recreate

• 39:08Jason Calacanis?

  I mean.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  mind and the consciousness of their dead loved one.

• 39:11Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's doing an impersonation.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  It's a trick and like I feel like it's.

• 39:15Jason Calacanis?

  An impersonation, yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  I feel like it's kind of a cruel trick. So that's not this. This is thankfully using the real people.

• 39:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Like they record the stories themselves. So like I, you 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.

• 39:38Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. If I had this for my grandfather, my grand, I'm just thinking about it.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  I miss my grandparents every day, but like that's part of being alive is you miss people.

• 39:46Jason Calacanis?

  Loved my grandfather's stories and we never recorded them because you know, he, he, he, he died before we all had phones in our pockets. So you would have had to set up a VHS. So just that like simple structure of like, here are prompts that, you know, documentarians use.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:03Jason Calacanis?

  You know, where you say, what's happening in this photo? Or do you remember this day? Or, uh, you know, just when did you meet grandma? You know, like all those kind of things. I kind of love it.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  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 now. Especially because now I have, you know, my, my little nephew Dougie never got to meet them. They, they died before he was born.

• 40:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, yes.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  You would have gotten to see this were your great grandparents that you 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 need to like

• 40:42Jason Calacanis?

  So you're raw dogging.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Hold on to them forever.

• 40:44Jason Calacanis?

  You're raw dogging, uh.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Grief. Yes, I'm raw dogging grief. Yes, exactly.

• 40:50Jason Calacanis?

  I want to feel it. I don't need to augment it.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Like not watching, like not, I, I tried to do that on a, on the flight. I went to Florida. Did you read that? All those Twitter threads about X threads about raw dogging flights?

• 41:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's kind of what I was making light of is like raw dogging.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  The whole time. You don't 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.

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  It is like a very interesting uh mental exercise because we now have done the opposite. You and I are film fans. It's 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.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Right, make him watch.

• 41:35Jason Calacanis?

  Lock him in a chair and make him watch dopamine hitting clips. Sound familiar? We're literally optimizing now for flipping through dopamine hits in scrolling vertical video, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, they all have it now. Uh, and I think that's like very interesting.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're all getting the Ludovico treatment, yeah.

• 41:57Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, is that what they called it? Ludovico?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the movie, that's the Ludovico treatment uh where they they they but they also their 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.

• 42:17Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, it's like would be like making me watch like that stuff while listening to Dire Straits would absolutely kill me.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Really, exactly. Associating Mark Knopfler with feeling nauseated all the time.

• 42:27Jason Calacanis?

  God, please no. Super interesting. There was also a device in the Fifth Element. When the Fifth Element, played by uh Milla Jovovich, I believe, when she is um.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  That's what she's learning about our world, right?

• 42:41Jason Calacanis?

  She learns about our world and she just like downloads it all at once and you just see her cry because she's she sees Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Holocaust, and then everything in between civil rights movement.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  That classic sci-fi trope of the outsider watches like instantly catches up on our world through the TV or through the internet, yeah.

• 42:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, pretty, pretty good trope. I like that. I like the trope. All right, uh, let's wrap up here before we get to our amazing startup interview. I think there was one more story on the dock that we wanted to touch on.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Well, we just had this uh this tweet from uh our Uber CEO.

• 43:12Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Dara Khoury, so new first for Uber last Friday, one million concurrent trips.

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  That's bizarre.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  More than the entire population of San Francisco. All at once, using Uber, getting rides at 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 people around the world. So I'm assuming that means just people riding in Ubers, not also food delivery. That would be a separate division.

• 43:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know, when they say trips, I think they include food in it.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. So this is both people getting food delivered and people riding in Ubers.

• 44:02Jason Calacanis?

  That's my guess. I could be wrong, but I think the routing of food is the same as the routing of people as far as they're concerned.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  The infrastructure is the same.

• 44:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, this is a massive achieve achievement 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 scaled to such enormous. And obviously I'm long, I'm still long the stock, 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 they're planning on buying back their stock on a business basis. Speak volumes, but now it's self-driving and Waymo and Tesla Cybercab and BYD.

• 44:50Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, self-driving little robots that deliver your food 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 it 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, cause again, he's quiet about it. He's just like, look at the numbers, the results are 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 1% 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.

• 45:33Jason Calacanis?

  But it also proves is if there's a million concurrent rides going around in the world right now, that means you need a million cars at any given point in time to just do those rides. A million cars is a lot of cars, folks.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Be on the road at one at any one moment. Yeah. Cause it's not, we're not talking a million cars in the fleet. It's a million cars working that shift right then. Yeah. I, 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.

• 46:11Jason Calacanis?

  You got such great food there. I mean, when I go, I was staying in Manhattan beach over the summer. I mean, I, there was a, a Gwyneth Paltrow's goop kitchen was really good. You have to want to eat healthy there. I mean,

• 46:23Speaker 01

  It's just, and it's also all spread out.

• 46:25Jason Calacanis?

  Sugar fish sushi was on it. Just a lot of the great places.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Santa Monica and 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.

• 46:38Jason Calacanis?

  City.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  City.

• 46:39Jason Calacanis?

  I had Hi Ho Burger. That was great. I love the Hi Ho Burger. It's really good in Santa Monica.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  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, the how many people are taking rides versus how many people are ordering sandwiches. It's gotta be, you know, incredibly diverse.

• 46:59Jason Calacanis?

  The writing is on the wall though, you know, I think we will be sitting here in another decade and it's going to be, instead of 1% of rides in the United States are ride sharing or, you know, whatever, 2% of them. It's going to wind up being like 10 or 20%. I think car ownership.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  We need to get these cars off the road. However, we do it, I, I'm, I'm fine with ride sharing as an option. Whatever we do, ride sharing, mass transit.

• 47:24Jason Calacanis?

  Is gonna be incredible because the, you'll be able to recapture that time. And so, and then you take out parking and storing your car.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 47:32Jason Calacanis?

  Those are major costs in cities. And so all that's gonna get.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Thing we ever did in cities was fill them, fill them with cars. It not, 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.

• 47:45Jason Calacanis?

  In Manhattan, they, I'm always amazed now, I guess Bloomberg did this towards the tail end of his tenure there. But in Manhattan, they, you know, you get, you're coming down Broadway and you get to like Herald Square or whatever. You're usually, you leave, you leave Times Square, 42nd, Herald Square is 34th. It just. Broadway's closed. It's all people.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 48:06Jason Calacanis?

  And they've shut down the roads and they have tables and outdoor cafes and pop up booths and coffees.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  It's nice.

• 48:12Jason Calacanis?

  And you're like, oh, this is beautiful. It's like the Santa Monica promenade.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  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 run across.

• 48:31Jason Calacanis?

  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 on about, oh, my God, you know, people are being abused by, you know, the ride sharing companies, the delivery companies, DoorDash, 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. 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.

• 49:12Jason Calacanis?

  Now those jobs are gonna go away. We're sitting here 10 years. The idea that you're delivering food is gonna go away. 10 years, it probably gonna go away. The, you know, having a human driver and then a truck driver. I mean, this is you're talking about millions of jobs in the US, like millions and millions. And people pay their rent. People pay their credit card bills. People pay for their kid's school by doing an extra DoorDash shift or on the margins or being in 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 those jobs. I don't think there's like a quick plugin.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  There's so many things we sort of could do, but 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 eliminating

• 50:30Speaker 01

  millions of jobs that ago, you know, and, and, and, 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. We already eliminated the 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-

• 50:48Jason Calacanis?

  I go work at the Gap.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  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-

• 50:54Jason Calacanis?

  Waiter.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  To tide you over. Right. Uh, and we've, we're now innovating ourselves out of all, like, Amazon ate all of those businesses. DoorDash and Uber Eats are eating all the restaurant businesses, turning them into ghost kitchens.

• 51:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  You know, we don't need delivery drivers. We're not going to need warehouse and factory workers. Like, what are all these people going to go do?

• 51:15Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, another great episode for you today. And now 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 onsite, running 24 hours a day, building homes that are 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.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Bye-bye.

• 52:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So next up 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 and a city called Minsk that I had actually yet to visit, but is on my list. Only raised 6.4 million in known capital. Their ability-

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Building mobile micro factories. I think this company is awesome. Ah, there he is. Alex himself. How you doing?

• 52:29Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome to the show, Alex. 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 hard space to build homes. And you have a similar model, which is you like to build homes in factories. 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 debatement going on in there. Um, and you could be warm and you have all these incredible tools that you can bring that you don't want to have on a work site with a bunch of mud. Correct me if I'm wrong. The key difference here, and I'd like to see some videos,

• 53:12Jason Calacanis?

  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 the, the, the basic overview here?

• 53:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me. Big, big fan 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 volume on three boxes, 3D printing, et cetera. Meaning the more you deviate away from what a traditional home is, the more you run into regulation risk and incumbent adoption risk.

• 54:04Speaker 04

  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 Lennar 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.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  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 one fifty two. But in short, we're a full stack technology company. We build hardware and software. It's all for the purpose of improving building processes in new home construction. In a TLDR, we design, develop and deploy mobile micro factories, exactly what you see behind me. It's a containerized solution to a factory.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  So that factory is like a pop up building. That's got one of those inflatable roofs, I think, or a Botris roof like we you might see on tennis courts. Yeah.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  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 air hangar 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 fifty percent of the hardware in house. And we deploy that hardware into containers. So then we can send, call it sixty to a hundred containers later, anywhere in the world. A factory that gets erected in eight weeks.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Eight weeks. Okay, that was my first 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 costs with bringing the equipment, getting it set up, training and so forth.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, we no longer think this is past theoretical. We've deployed one of these already. So it's past kind of this technical risk stage. So we're at about four hundred thousand 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 ten million dollars in terms of sources and uses. Which if you guys know manufacturing or have spent 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 services 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.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  Which is why we replace a general contractor and all the 22 different subcontractors involved. Which most folks don't do in our ecosystem.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  How many people would work to be the the crew for one of your MMFs? Both at the factory itself and also on the actual job sites in that radius?

• 57:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  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. And now there are a 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 a total of around 260 folks, all in all.

• 57:53Speaker 03

  Four, four unskilled workers onsite, that's it?

• 57:55Speaker 04

  In two shifts, yeah, building a home over the course of 60 days, essentially.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  That that feels incredibly minimal on the human capital side. So I presume, Alex, then and therefore, there's going to be quite a lot of um repeated work that there's probably some panelization of these products you can take out of the factories that are easier to put together?

• 58:15Speaker 04

  So the factory really consumes about 600 different bill of materials. Those bill of materials, they do one of three things. One, we're producing items from scratch. Think windows, think foundation systems, think framing, think certain non-structural wall elements. Everything else for just prepping. Sheet rock is technically a finished good or a PEX pipe, but we're prepping so there's no dirty work done onsite. 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 of 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.

• 58:55Speaker 04

  It's a massively retiring workforce, meaning that about 50% 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.

• 59:20Jason Calacanis?

  It's really interesting, Alex Wilhelm, I mean, with these MMFs, these, I think that means micro.

• 59:27Speaker 04

  Mobile micro factory.

• 59:28Jason Calacanis?

  Mobile micro factories, 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 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 not a fun life. And 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 in a factory, you've now eliminated weather.

• 1:00:12Jason Calacanis?

  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, et cetera. 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?

• 1:00:41Speaker 04

  Kind of. We actually have a bit of a slightly different thesis 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 onsite. No one's done that before, and I'll talk to an example of how we're doing that. Usually, in, in building a home, that skilled labor typically brings their own tools, which is crazy.

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  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 onsite 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 lean manufacturing process onsite as well.

• 1:02:02Jason Calacanis?

  So it's kind of like putting together IKEA furniture. It's not easy necessarily. It takes some thoughtfulness, but if you're given really good instructions, clear instructions, and it seems like you're building 3D models and videos for people to do, and you're numbering the tools and you have consistency with the tools. Uh, it gets a lot simpler, huh?

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's a hardware, software-enabled process improvement 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.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:03:04Speaker 04

  Because we're not volumetric modular, which Jason, you said 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 designing an entire home off-site, which is finished product. 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. 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

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  from hiring a home builder that like Alex or you, Jason, can hire 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.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 1:04:10Jason Calacanis?

  You're doing this in Europe to start? Why Europe as opposed to...

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  No, 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 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 $2 trillion 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 have needed to raise, let's talk about 400,000 engineering hours we've done. We would have had to raise $50 million seed. It seems kind of, you know, a bad bet to make with the value 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

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  terms of great engineers. So, we set up a big engineering R&D 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 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 the dollar. That it costs to build. So naturally, it's Europe, US, Australia, Canada.

• 1:05:28Jason Calacanis?

  And these are single family standalone homes. You're not doing multifamily.

• 1:05:32Speaker 04

  Not yet.

• 1:05:33Jason Calacanis?

  Three, four story, you're gonna, you're gonna make your bones in the single family, American, classic home, row houses, essentially.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  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 build to rent, for sale, single family homes.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  Okay. So then I want to know how many homes are going to be constructed using QB Technologies' technology in the next, 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 technology.

• 1:06:17Speaker 04

  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 it in 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, about 200 single family homes per year. So we're looking to do that 275 times over the next decade or so.

• 1:06:58Jason Calacanis?

  So 2,000 homes, 200, 300 factories, you start to get to a lot of homes. Hundreds of thousands of homes you hope to build in the United States at a minimum. Yeah.

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'll tell you something interesting about the market. At scale, if we get to 275 mobile micro factories, we're only building about 55,000 homes per year. What's ironic is the US builds about a million homes a year today. That's what they build and we're undersupplied. 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 volume that's built. That's why it's such an interesting problem to work on is it just, you can't claw back enough. You can't get big enough to even be, you know, remotely.

• 1:07:40Jason Calacanis?

  So your customers will be the home builders or landowners? Or are you going to pop up like an LLC where you have a home? We 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?

• 1:08:09Speaker 04

  Jason, we should get you as an investor. You seem to get it. It's all the above. 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 2,000 to 3,000 homes. Eventually, what we think is interesting is to launch our own factories and then have a bunch of Bob Smith,

• 1:08:52Speaker 04

  the home builders in a local market that build 20, 30 homes dying to compete at the cost basis that Lennar can build at 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. They built 50% of the US 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 plan entitles us to launch a home builder ourselves. You know, call it five to 10 years from now.

• 1:09:24Jason Calacanis?

  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, they just want the lowest cost 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 half return. But there are investors who are interested in that. So, you know, I think popping up, dare I say, an SPV. For each project or for different projects and having the core IP in the main company is potentially

• 1:10:08Jason Calacanis?

  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 100% of the output of the factory. Maybe they give you a little taste of some of the upside in the homes when they sell. 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

• 1:10:52Jason Calacanis?

  different. You know, many people know this because they put in flooring now. That's tile based flooring. So it looks like you put in this incredible wood floor and you just put in panels.

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Jason Calacanis?

  You put in a driveway, right? Like, some of these driveways look incredible. Like you're going to the Palace of Versailles and it's just panels, right?

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:11:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, I don't think it's corny at all. I think that's exactly.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  You go through 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 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 superpower when we can't, you know, when 50% of the US folks can't afford, you know, $250,000 homes.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. One last question before we let you go, Alex. You keep saying 275 MMFs. Why is that the number you keep coming back to? Is that based on upcoming financing? Is that just based on near-term goals? Like, it feels a very random number to me.

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  It started out as a joke because I ran out of space in our corporate financial model. 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.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:12:25Jason Calacanis?

  So you've got to build a factory to build factories. And you know, the great news here is Alex 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.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:43Jason Calacanis?

  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 sheet rock, knows how to use 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.

• 1:13:25Jason Calacanis?

  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, uh, 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, one bedrooms. You know, they could make an innovation in the HVAC system. That could save, you know, a hundred dollars a month across a hundred apartments.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 1:13:52Jason Calacanis?

  Across a hundred apartment complexes, across a hundred years. They could make innovations in, you know, just building a trow 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 resistant 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, the sprinklers go off, 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. Warped wood floors are getting ripped out.

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  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 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 multi varied equation of 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, 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, and just generally deep tech, like type one, at one, et cetera.

• 1:15:21Speaker 04

  The way they look at us is if we hit our mission and we get to scale, we become the biggest conduit of some of these alternative materials. Because it's hard for them to sell directly, but eventually if we're the, you know, the engine, we can just feed all those alternative materials to us.

• 1:15:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, it's almost like a tragedy of the commons. 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 forty? Going to experience with the home, are they going to experience the windows falling out and cracking and, 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.

• 1:16:22Jason Calacanis?

  And the housing company will have sold it already, or maybe the housing might have sold it twice.

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  I forgot who said 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. Uh, from say that the sixties, the seventies, it's kind of wild because no other product you pay more and get worse quality.

• 1:16:46Jason Calacanis?

  So wait, what's an example of that? Like, you're saying if you bought an older home, it would be a higher quality than a newer one that's made with more disposable. It's like Shein or Sheen, what is the?

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  Shein.

• 1:16:58Jason Calacanis?

  Shein, where everybody buys their 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 sixties or seventies, she just gave to my daughter, it looks great, it's gonna last. And then my daughter will give it to her daughter.

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:17:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a disaster. A real tragedy of the common short-term thinking. Hey, Alex, we wish you great success on this. It's awesome and I can't wait to meet you and go see the factory in Nevada. And yeah, 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 might want to write a check and meet you, Alex, and come on this adventure again because 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 Wilhelm, 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.

• 1:18:10Jason Calacanis?

  So you have to keep that resiliency and enthusiasm for big markets and solving big problems, which Alex, you're doing, cannot wait. Alex Gumbel, am I pronouncing your last name correct, Gampel?

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  That's correct, yep.

• 1:18:22Jason Calacanis?

  All right, well, let me know when you're in Austin. I'll take you for some brisket and a beef rib over at Terry Black's or some brisket at La Barbecue and let's break bread and talk soon.

• 1:18:32Speaker 04

  Perfect, guys, thank you so much. Really appreciate you reaching out and doing this. Talk soon.

• 1:18:36Jason Calacanis?

  Congratulations on being in the Twist 500. Created by Alex Wilhelm. So I don't, people don't know my secret plan, Alex, but with this Twist 500, I want to have an event where I invite all the Twist 500 founders to come hang out for a weekend. It'd be awesome.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Jason Calacanis?

  And it's gonna be a index fund eventually. So my, my. Idea is to

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  I love it.

• 1:18:58Jason Calacanis?

  You know, raise a hundred million dollars and buy five hundred thousand dollars worth of secondary and 200 of these companies, eventually all 500 of them, and then have a proper index of all 500. It'd be pretty hilarious if you could

• 1:19:10Speaker 04

  It's smart.

• 1:19:11Jason Calacanis?

  Actually own a little bit of each one. It would be fun to have like a private market index. All right. Well, we'll see you soon, Alex.

• 1:19:17Speaker 04

  You guys, talk soon.