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Alex (1:10)

Oh, man.

Alex Wilhelm (1:11)

Yes. You just plug it in and your nonprofit can become a for profit and just.

Alex (1:15)

Well, if it's Sam Altman's Cap Table, I'm pretty sure no matter what investors are on there, Sam Altman ends up with 100% of the equity.

Jason Calacanis (1:20)

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Alex (1:29)

I'm in favor of this. The problem is Mark messed up the application of it and has only applied his hair tonic on his beard area, and he should try it on top. I'll give a Spiderman 4 facts.

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Jason Calacanis (1:38)

This is Tim Waltz applied. This is for his travel guide to China.

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He can take a tour with Tim.

Alex (1:44)

I don't think I would take that tour right now with the political climate or with Tim Walls, to be totally.

Sponsor Voice / Announcer (1:48)

Honest, I don't know.

Jason Calacanis (1:49)

Put Tim foil hats on here. And JD Vance also applied. Here's a JD.

Sponsor Voice / Announcer (1:53)

JD's Guyliner.

Jason Calacanis (1:54)

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Alex (1:57)

Guaranteed to make you look like a serious politician overnight.

Jason Calacanis (2:01)

Overnight, absolutely. And this is another one from J.D.

Alex Wilhelm (2:02)

Vance. Someone is a little spicy. Oh, no, no, no.

Jason Calacanis (2:06)

Get that off the screen. That's too much. Too much.

Alex (2:09)

Let's do the show.

Sponsor Voice (2:11)

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Jason Calacanis (3:00)

All right, everybody.

Alex Wilhelm (3:01)

Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm Jason Calacanis, an angel investor here in Austin, Texas, and with me is my partner in crime from the east coast. His name is Alex Wilhelm. How you doing, brother?

Alex (3:14)

I'm doing fantastically because I had a weekend full of sport and food and fall fun. I had the most wholesome time. Jason, I'm feeling fulfilled.

Jason Calacanis (3:22)

Did you, now you're in the northeast. Did you do the apple picking? Did you do the pumpkin patch? Describe what's going on there in the northeast. That was one of my favorite things to do was going apple picking picking with my family as, as a youth.

Alex (3:34)

So we didn't go apple picking this last weekend that is on the agenda, but we went to a fall festival at a farm and there was like pumpkin slingshots and a corn maid. It was just the most wholesome thing. Something people who don't have kids don't know is how much stuff is out there for people who do have children. Because you would never go there if you're like 27 just hanging out. But it was, it was just so child friendly and lovely and I, I. It's a great weekend. It's warm and good. Jason. I don't know, I'm just feeling it.

Sponsor Voice / Announcer (4:03)

Awesome.

Jason Calacanis (4:04)

That's fantastic. And yeah, I'm getting ready. My kids are making their own outfits, so, you know, we're always trying to do crafts.

Alex Wilhelm (4:11)

My kids are a little bit older.

Jason Calacanis (4:12)

Than yours, so we're always trying to do some crafts or creative projects and make them independent humans in the world. Maybe less consumption, more creation. So we made ice cream this weekend. We got our ice cream machine back out of the closet and we did two different types of ice cream.

Alex (4:27)

I am looking forward to the Halloween twist episode in which you And I are both going to dress up as vampires, I think was the agreement.

Alex Wilhelm (4:33)

So I think we should both go as like people from the industry. I'm going to cosplay Palmer Lucky. I will do a cosplaying Palmer Lucky as my cosplay for Halloween.

Alex (4:43)

So given my head.

Alex Wilhelm (4:45)

Yeah.

Alex (4:46)

And lack of hair, I do think that the only person I could really do is Marc Andreessen or Bezos.

Alex Wilhelm (4:50)

You could go Bezos.

Alex (4:51)

Oh, that's true. I can go Bezos. Yeah, Bezos Yacht, Andreessen pack, you know.

Alex Wilhelm (4:56)

Plus, I think Andreessen's the best pull. Andreessen's the best pull.

Alex (5:01)

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

Jason Calacanis (5:56)

Okay, so a prime number, it's a natural number greater than one that has no positive divisors other than one and itself. Yep. For example, two, because. Yeah, two goes into two once.

Alex Wilhelm (6:09)

Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (6:10)

Or three are all prime numbers. So somebody found the largest one at 41 million digits. Oh, my Lord.

Alex (6:19)

41 million digits. That is so many digits. Like, I can't even. What would that be? Like a septillion Subtilian. Subtilian to the subtilians. Like it's. It's insane. But it goes to show GPUs are awesome.

Jason Calacanis (6:31)

And then what do we do with this?

Alex (6:33)

Oh, we look at it.

Jason Calacanis (6:34)

Got it. I mean, if we find like a certain size prime number, is it going to open up like the Marvel Universe and like all the different timelines collapse on each other or something? Or we just don't know.

Alex Wilhelm (6:46)

We don't know.

Alex (6:47)

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

Alex Wilhelm (7:14)

And GPUs are in, you know, short supply. Everybody's buying up all the, the H1 hundreds and all the GPUs. And there's a startup angle here. Datacrunch is a new GPU cloud. I guess they call those Neo clouds now. New clouds. And it's based in Finland. They just raised 7.6 million in equity and 5.4 million in debt. That's goes right to Nvidia's bottom line. And they'll compete with other Twist 500 companies like Cor Weave and what's the other one?

Alex (7:46)

Lamb Lambda Labs.

Alex Wilhelm (7:48)

Lambda Labs, yeah. So there's a bunch of people who are now providing GPUs as a service. We got a packed show today and you know, I have been following a really interesting person on Twitter. His name is John Leor and he is the co founder of Blacks Black Box Infinite. They put together really interesting prototypes of the future. And I started following this guy a couple years ago and I've been tweeting him, so let's just bring him on. John, are you there?

John Leor (8:19)

There we go. What's happening? Jason, how are we doing?

Jason Calacanis (8:22)

Alex, how are you doing Twitter? Twitter, buddy.

John Leor (8:25)

Doing good, doing good. Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

Jason Calacanis (8:29)

Sure. So tell us what you do for a living and then maybe we'll do some show and tell of cool stuff.

John Leor (8:36)

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

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Alex Wilhelm (10:25)

And when you're done, you could spin.

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Alex (11:14)

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

John Leor (11:53)

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

Alex Wilhelm (14:08)

Right.

Alex (14:08)

But you know, you didn't build it though. You put out the idea, you showed it off on YouTube, everyone liked it. But you guys didn't actually go out there and build it yourselves.

John Leor (14:17)

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

Jason Calacanis (15:02)

What do you do that for? So you came out of the, the if I understand correctly, and the way I discovered you was you, you do this with movie studios. So when we saw all this like incredible stuff In Iron Man 2, you had done some of that work of what Iron man sees through his heads up display, etc. So you do visual effects for movie studios primarily.

John Leor (15:26)

So before founding Black Box, I used to run all of the creative at a VFX shop in New York called Perception. And there I worked on somewhere north of 30 different Marvel films and all sorts of other movies and had this focus around creating the kind of like fictional tech that appears in those, in those stories. Now as soon as that work started, immediately started getting inquiries from real world technology brands who all were basically, you know, you can, you can imagine what they were saying. It was effectively how do we close the gap between our practical technology and what we see in, in film? Which is a pretty natural thought, but it's a really chaotic or convoluted way of trying to close the gap. And so back in around 2010 or so I think was when Iron Man 2 came out, that was the first film that I had worked on. I sent myself off to like user experience and digital product design boot camp and just got really immersed in what does it take to not just make a painting of a house but how do you make the blueprints, how do you engineer every different aspect of it, create something a little more, a little more sound and a little more feasible. And for me there's this really wonderful tension and overlap.

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Alex Wilhelm (18:05)

And now there is a limit here.

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Jason Calacanis (18:17)

Because it did seem like Minority Report felt like man, that is way in the future. Like when he was doing the pinching and zooming and the self driving cars. And then there's iRobot. And then we see in the last week, you know, the starship gets caught, a 23 story building gets caught with some toothpicks and you know, the bus and the, and the self driving car at the robo taxi event was pretty.

Alex Wilhelm (18:44)

Compelling, all of the stuff. And then, you know, let alone what we're seeing with VR and ar. Is the gap tighter now between Westworld and the real world?

John Leor (18:56)

The, the gap is the gap is either tighter or it's farther apart than ever.

Sponsor Voice / Announcer (19:02)

Okay.

John Leor (19:03)

Because we now, I believe we're now being equipped with all of the possibilities. But we have a lot of baggage of the way that we've been making products and experiences and tools and sort of, you know, digital product design has, through its maturity, had a lot of the imagination just sort of drained right out of it. There are all of these, you know, patterns and processes and whatnot and it's, it's this amazing, it's this huge field, right? Digital product design. But there's so many people that are just, you know, stuck in this kind.

Alex Wilhelm (19:44)

Of following rules and those rules are.

Jason Calacanis (19:46)

There for a reason. If you think about how much money is at stake for a company like Meta, yes, you know, if they put.

Alex Wilhelm (19:53)

The pixels for an ad in a.

Jason Calacanis (19:55)

Certain spot, it might not look good in a Marvel film, but it might print an extra billion dollars a year. So they are obsessed with the click.

Alex Wilhelm (20:04)

Through rate of advertising. And that's their master.

Jason Calacanis (20:08)

Whereas in a film, the master is.

Alex Wilhelm (20:09)

What'S elegant, beautiful and inspiring. And so I guess those two things we have to close the gap.

Jason Calacanis (20:13)

But let's look at one more time and I'll describe it for the audience.

Alex Wilhelm (20:16)

This unbelievable F1 experience.

Jason Calacanis (20:18)

Because when I saw this, I was like, well, John did it again. And so here, if we pull it.

Alex Wilhelm (20:23)

Up, you have in front of your computer monitor essentially the entire track. And so you see the track and you see the cars going around it, which is amazing. And then when you hover over it.

Jason Calacanis (20:38)

I, I suppose this would be on.

Alex Wilhelm (20:40)

Hover or whatever, you can see the. A little monitor go above the car that shows the driver's perspective. So now you're seeing multiple drivers perspectives and you're seeing it go around the track. And I, I'll be honest, I don't. This kind of driving sport was never super interesting to me. But when I saw this, I was like, I actually don't want to go to F1 in person. I do want to experience this because the being able to switch between the first person perspectives to me and watching it on the full track, that makes sense. But watching go by you in person sounds quite repetitive. What are your thoughts on that, Alex? Am I too simple here in describing what I'm seeing?

Alex (21:25)

No.

Alex Wilhelm (21:25)

You are an actual fan of zoom, zoom, zoom.

Alex (21:27)

Yeah, no, I'm a huge fan of F1, but you actually make a really good point, which is that a lot of the camera angles during the race are kind of lame. They often do like shots of cars coming towards you so you can't tell how fast they're going. They cut too much. You can't follow individual drivers. And also they can only show you one shot at a time. But there's 20 cars out there, so you often miss interesting battles. And so what I think this, this, this prototype that now became a thing called Laps with a Z for the Vision Pro is so cool because it'll highlight so much more information. So it's not just showing us what we had before in a slightly remixed fashion. It's expanding the aperture. More data, more information, and therefore more enjoyment. And that's why it does feel like something a little bit new and different. So, you know, points to John. Because other people haven't made something that's made me want to go out and buy a Vision Pro right away, but this did. I mean, honestly, I think I just lost $3,500. Screw you, John.

Alex Wilhelm (22:18)

Well, and also, John, like one thing.

Jason Calacanis (22:20)

I also noticed about this Building on.

Alex Wilhelm (22:21)

What Alex just said is there's actually multiple things going on in a race.

Jason Calacanis (22:26)

I never thought about that. I just thought, well, who's in the lead? And that's where you're going to focus. But there could be things going on.

Alex Wilhelm (22:31)

In the back or the middle of the pack that are also super compelling. Right. And so this would give you the ability to dynamically switch between those and it. I noticed in golf when. And I don't watch golf on tv, they have this sort of lightning round or super cuts now where you go from one to the next hole so you have no downtime. It's almost like playing multi, multiple hands of poker simultaneously. Multi tabling and poker. So maybe talk a little bit about how you study the experience and then make the interface, if that makes sense.

John Leor (23:06)

Yeah. So there's a lot of factors that made this like the perfect storm for us of this will be a special experience. And a lot of that has to do with the feasibility. Right. It can't just be. There's a lot of demos out there that show like basketball players running around on your kitchen table or whatnot. And that's technically not possible during a live NBA game. Right now you can reconstruct a replay from camera arrays in an arena, but it's complex, takes a lot of time. It's pretty expensive process and you can't watch the sport live like that. And anyways, when you're watching a basketball game, like you want to see the physicality of the players in 4k as we get during our broadcast. Race cars, really easy to render in like a real time game engine. Right. And have them look realistic. Formula One has been capturing live telemetry data for generations now. The data already exists for car position, speeds, position of the steering wheel, all of these different sort of factors. It's all been out there basically, you know, in the sport just waiting for someone to grab ahold of it and do something interesting with it. And then on top of that, it's exactly the factors you were both describing, which is that with F1 you're often stuck just seeing whatever cars can fit within the 16 by 9 broadcast feed. And there's a story going on beyond those three cars at all times. And so having this global view of the race, of the stories, even of just the, the. The greater kind of like geography of these events. Like I'm a hardcore racing junkie, my dad is a racing instructor. I've spent a lot of time on track when I'm watching a race. I can't even Tell, like, is that turn 7 or turn 15? Like, it's really hard to track and stay aware of this stuff. And so we found that this resonated really well. Got a lot of people really inspired and excited about the tech. Got a lot of comments from people saying, you know, just like you did, like, I don't care at all about F1. This would pull me into it, and that gets us really excited. Now, the really fun part of this story, or the most recent update of this, is that there is a fully functioning beta of this, that if you've got a Vision Pro headset and you're on test flight, you can jump into the beta and you can experience this. It's called Laps. There's an amazing team of developers in Prague who, upon seeing the initial concept film, they basically said, well, can we. Can we build this? Can we make this? Do we have the ability to put this together? These guys spent several months. Brilliant, brilliant guys. Simon Martin, Jan Yarrow, they've been working their tails off putting this together as a pet project. This is a very much an unofficial beta product experience. And if you were to watch the race yesterday that was unfolding, watch it live in this experience, Lapse, you would swear this was the official Formula one experience. It is so polished, it's so sophisticated, so well executed. And so we at Black Box have teamed up with these. These guys to just continue to develop this further.

Jason Calacanis (26:45)

Amazing.

John Leor (26:46)

Keep pushing the boundaries of where this can go. And we're just loving it because it's this, like, ultimate sort of manifestation of this concept that we saw kind of light the Internet on fire several months back. And to us, it's very, very gratifying to see this.

Jason Calacanis (27:03)

I love this concept for you. Make some brilliant design and then find people to build it and then partner with them and share the equity in it. It's very like. You're almost like a venture capitalist like me, you know, betting on people. And your contribution is, hey, here's what we. Here's. Here's a design. Anybody who want to build it, I love that as a concept.

John Leor (27:23)

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

Alex Wilhelm (27:59)

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

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Alex Wilhelm (28:42)

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Alex Wilhelm (29:35)

100. That's kalsheet.com twist as your most inspiring from your youth today, anywhere in between television show, comic book, novel, but mostly movies, I guess what is the most compelling for you and inspiring?

John Leor (29:53)

So that's a, that's a tough question. There's a lot of them out there that I absolutely adore. And I think for me, because I spent a lot of time doing this work, I have come to really respect how challenging it is to convey complex, rich depth technology concepts when they're only seen like at a glance. Like my favorite that I had worked on was Black Panther. This vibranium sand that you see throughout the whole film it's like a physical interface rather than a hologram or the sort of traditional, like, glowing blue shit, as I call it. Like, to me, anywhere where you see something that's very distinctly different or. But. But where you can also understand what's driving it. So Mission Impossible 3, I believe it is the one where they. They go up the side of the tall building. There's a point in the story where they're breaking into the Kremlin. And they unfurl a projection screen in a hallway, and they have cameras behind the projection screen tracking the position of the security guard's eyes. And it's rendering an illusion of the hallway continuing.

Jason Calacanis (31:09)

Amazing.

John Leor (31:10)

Moving along with the guy's eyes. And I saw that in the movie theater. I turned to my wife and I was like, honey, you gotta understand. What's happening here is they're tracking their eyes because that gets the right perspective. And she's just like, you dumbass. I get it. It's obvious, like, why, like, everybody in theater understands this. And I was just like, there you go. That's. That's. That's brilliant.

Jason Calacanis (31:33)

Well, and if you think about invisibility.

Alex Wilhelm (31:35)

As a concept, you know, Wonder Woman's invisible jet.

Jason Calacanis (31:38)

I know you're Team Marvel, but any of these concepts, if you actually know.

Alex Wilhelm (31:42)

Who the audience is and you have a screen, you could make something essentially disappear in the world. And so here is that hallway scene where they set it up and they are tracking this guy's eyes. That's the scene where they track the eyes. And there it is. We now have a security guard who cannot tell that these guys are walking down the hallway with a projector screen. So such a great combination.

Jason Calacanis (32:09)

What a great pull.

Sponsor Voice / Announcer (32:11)

Just like.

John Leor (32:11)

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

Jason Calacanis (32:46)

And you're talking about the HBO series of Westworld.

John Leor (32:49)

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Jason Calacanis (32:50)

Done by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, who I've met and I've told the story before. Like, I remember talking to them. My friend Sam Harris and my friend Elon Musk to drop a bunch of names in one sentence about artificial intelligence. We had these conversations like 10, 15 years ago over dinner or parties. And here it is like improvisation. Do this. And yeah, you don't need to. And just think about how much this.

Alex Wilhelm (33:20)

Alex, what we just saw with that, how much of that predated by 5, 10 years what we saw happen with ChatGPT01. So this is one of the really interesting things I love about science fiction and the work you're doing, John, and writers do, Alex, is all of this inspiration is like a flywheel. You build something, put technology out into the world like Vision Pro or Oculus or ChatGPT, and it just inspires creatives to take it to the next level and then bring it back. And if you look at her, another great seminal film, the earpiece in her predated, I believe, AirPods possibly, but maybe not.

Jason Calacanis (34:04)

And you know, this whole concept of like, you're talking to somebody, but you don't. Nobody knows you're in a conversation with another entity and that entity is doing decision trees to make you feel good.

John Leor (34:14)

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

Jason Calacanis (35:31)

No, it's not a time period that's coming. But yeah, it could be 70s or 60s art deco, kind of like we're seeing there with like this weird green cushion and you know, and then you could have something like Fifth Element, which I always found really interesting. Another future vision. You know, my poll was. I don't know if you remember the character who kept saying super green. He was like the talk show host.

John Leor (35:56)

Yes. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (35:57)

And he has a, A staff, which.

Alex Wilhelm (35:59)

Is his microphone, and it really does predict podcasting and what do we call influencer culture? And he's running around with his basically morning zoo crew and he's got his little Madonna stick microphone and he's got. And he's basically doing a show from anywhere. So he's, he's a live streamer breaking everybody's chops on his show and has no sense of, like, what's appropriate or not. Just like these YouTubers.

Alex (36:38)

Yeah, I was gonna say people of the future look just as annoyed about having a microphone shoved right in their face as modern people do. I know we gotta let John go here, but, like, I just want to throw away one more idea to the science fiction interface idea. Because in the expanse the, the film series that Amazon picked up, they had this great method of showing orbits and intersections in space using, I think like a hologram. And it's so awesome. And now I can't stop thinking about how we can make a game that actually uses that style of interface inside of the Vision Pro. And then I could finally have the space sim I've always wanted. The future is going to be awesome. I'm stoked, guys.

John Leor (37:11)

The future is going to be absolutely insane. Like, I cannot, I cannot overstate enough how much we still can't even. You put all the best science fiction minds together and we're still not going to be able to tap out what's possible with the future of Spatial, with the future of AI. Like, there are some insane things that are going to be coming and they're going to be happening unbelievably quickly. So we're, we're super stoked here at, at Black Box.

Jason Calacanis (37:41)

People want to hire you to do something or collaborate with you. How can they get in touch?

John Leor (37:46)

Yeah, just reach out to us. It's blackbox infinite.com where we're easy to find. We, you know, our, our typical way of approaching projects is installing ourselves within certain brands or certain teams. Is like a secret special ops innovation team. And we love it. Quickly iterate through concepts and ideas and figure out how we can get to prototypes and start building pathways and strategies forward from, from there. So, yeah, don't, don't ever be a stranger. And if it's, if it's not evident already, I'm always down to geek out about any of these things around where all of this stuff is headed.

Jason Calacanis (38:22)

All right, well, thanks for coming on the show and we'll talk to you soon.

Alex Wilhelm (38:26)

All right, Appreciate it, John. Alex, how mind blowing was that?

Alex (38:31)

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

Alex Wilhelm (38:53)

I love it. When I saw it, I was like, this would be great for Alex to start the week. In other news you and I were talking about, and we've been getting into data, right? And we're trying to understand the world deeper. So yeah, we did this great robo taxi model and how many cars would it take? And then I guess the next piece of that puzzle is regulation and safety, right? And that's the number one thing that Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, Uber, everybody involved is obsessed with safety.

Jason Calacanis (39:25)

And I drove here on fsd. I've been using autopilot to fsd. Every day I drive, I use it. I never don't use it because I'm always trying to stay up on the technology. It is getting really good. The number of times I have to intercede is I would say now once every 30 minutes to 45 minutes. And listen, I'm on the back roads in Hill country, often in Austin, and the technology is now such that you don't have to worry about sunglasses or, you know, doing the nag feature on your thing. So we're getting close. I think everybody agrees on that. And so I, I saw some people talking and listen, Tesla is a very charged subject. You have the Tesla cube movement. If you remember the people shorting Tesla, you got the Tesla longs. There's a lot of religion around Tesla and you know, self driving, generally speaking. But I thought we would talk just a little bit about FSD and safety because there are people on X talking about like, oh my God, there's like.

Alex Wilhelm (40:28)

Literally a guy who is obsessed with, with trying to get the technology taken off the road.

Jason Calacanis (40:32)

I don't know if you've been following.

Alex Wilhelm (40:33)

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

Alex (41:25)

I'm going to have to confess to something very, very honest here. I don't drive anymore. I really haven't since I moved to San FRANCISCO Back like 10 years ago, 10, 12 years ago. And my wife does all of our driving because we live where she's from and she's a great driver and she does not really like lane assist technology, but she's a very vigilant person. So it doesn't bother me. But the thing is, Jason, the data that I found because you had a discussion with Mr. Dan O' Dowd and your argument, just so people know, was that there were 40,000 automotive deaths per year in the U.S. give or take millions of Teslas, 40 deaths over five years, eight a year seems to be very small. But you were curious, what about fsd? So I went back to find some information about this just to kind of get a feel for where accidents have been trending. And the nice thing for us here in the States is that the number of fatalities per 100 million miles driven really fell from 24.9 back in 1921 to just 1.33 per 100 million miles in 2022. So a trend that points in one direction. But the question then becomes, inside of that kind of modern world, how do driver assistance systems do and how do Tesla's FSD do? So pulled some more data, did a lot of digging around. Tesla says that inside of its driver base, people who use Autopilot. And actually, Jason, for folks out there, can you define autopilot versus FSD and where they kind of end?

Jason Calacanis (42:49)

Okay, sure. Autopilot is, I believe, level two, and that is staying in the lane and adaptive cruise control. So two features. And I think this is what they refer to as level 2 in and then FSD is a brand autopilot and FSD are terms that I believe Tesla put out into the world. FSD is their full self driving, which means if you put a destination on a map and this is where I'm going to my office at the Capital Factory. Shout out to Josh and the team at Capital Factory for hosting us here. It's going to make the turns now. It's supervised fsd. Supervised FSD means you have to be supervising it. Your hands on the wheel, your eyes on the road. It has a camera inside the car that is watching my eyes when I'm using fsd. If I look down at, I don't.

Alex Wilhelm (43:42)

Know, the map or my phone in its cradle, it will start beeping and disengage. And if you get more than two or three of these disengagements, you lose FSD for like 30 days or until the next update. It basically penalizes you. That happened to me a whole bunch because I would go change my podcast and it'd be like, sorry, doom. And so it's, I thought FSD was actually being a little too precious with drivers. Like if you didn't move the, nudge the steering wheel, even though I had my hands on it, it'd be like, nudge it. And I'm like, well my hands are on the steering wheel. Can't you see that from the internal camera? Right, so this thing is hyper vigilant. But I do think there is something also occurring here, which is there are people who, I don't know if you've ever seen this. Alex will take their motorcycle and do a wheelie or a stand on it and then they make a video of this and they put it on the Internet.

Alex (44:37)

Oh, interesting.

Alex Wilhelm (44:38)

Or you know, and they'll do crazy stuff on public roads. I do believe that there are drivers of all vehicles who will do crazy stuff. And we've seen this over and over again with self driving technology, including Teslas, where some idiot thinks like it's called supervised so they can sleep or they can drive drunk and use FSD that is abusing the technology. Just like some people throw parachutes out of an airplane. I don't know if you've ever seen that video. And the guy chases the parachute down, puts it on in the air and.

Alex (45:09)

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

Jason Calacanis (46:16)

All right, so this is a website called TeslaDeaths.com, it's a little bit charged obviously, but people are keeping track of this like in a very detailed and granular way, which in some ways is fantastic. Like, but there's a little bias here because they're kind of like, I noticed they frame this as like FSD caused deaths, which is FSD is turned on when somebody dies in a car, that the car could have been T boned by another car. And that has nothing to do with the fsd.

Alex Wilhelm (46:41)

Right, because it takes two to tango in many of these cases.

Jason Calacanis (46:44)

So there were over 400 deaths of.

Alex Wilhelm (46:46)

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

Jason Calacanis (47:31)

So let's, let's go over this data and see if we can figure out the truth here.

Alex (47:34)

Yeah, yeah. So the number of deaths for Tesla drivers who had autopilot enabled is 51 total. Of the more than 400 that you noted, there's only two known fatalities involving Tesla crashes with, with FSD turned on, so it's not that many. Now we don't, we don't probably have every single data point that's ever been come out of a Tesla collision, but certainly two known fatalities from FSD usage against now more than 1.6 billion miles driven. Using FSD to me implies a rate of about 1 in 800 million miles, which is much better than the 1.33 fatalities we're seeing in general for 100 million driven miles in the US. Much better.

Jason Calacanis (48:18)

Okay, so there you have it folks. Fun with numbers. And I think we gotta have John come back and create some interfaces for FSD and for driving in general that would make people safer. I, one of the things I notice.

Alex Wilhelm (48:36)

Is we should have a heads up display. When I have my Corvette C6, it would project my speed and my RPMs, you know, onto the dashboard. This was an incredible feature because you didn't have to take your eyes off the road to know your speed or what you were revving or what gear you were in. If you're using the Tiptronics, a lot of fun to have that. And you can move it up and.

Jason Calacanis (48:54)

Down to your eyeline.

Alex Wilhelm (48:55)

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

Alex (49:22)

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

Alex Wilhelm (49:41)

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

Alex (50:14)

Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (50:15)

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

Alex Wilhelm (50:48)

Right.

Alex (50:48)

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

Jason Calacanis (51:30)

I think both of these things are exactly correct. We hold new technology to a standard that we don't hold accepted societal traditions too.

Alex Wilhelm (51:44)

And it is nuts that we give 15, 16, 17 year olds these cars.

Jason Calacanis (51:50)

But we don't trust them to, you.

Alex Wilhelm (51:52)

Know when they're 17 or 18 to drink a beer.

Jason Calacanis (51:54)

No, but we do trust them to take a 5,000 pound, 6,000 pound vehicle and do whatever they want from should be required that anytime a child is in a car that that car is got an attachment that throttles the speed, reports the speed. Anybody under 18, it should track everything.

Alex Wilhelm (52:16)

You do in the car.

Jason Calacanis (52:17)

I know this sounds crazy and I'm privacy experts but when my daughters start driving and I have in my Tesla the Ability to watch their ride, to know their speed, to know. And it would be great if I could geofence. Like I should be able to geofence.

Alex Wilhelm (52:31)

My car and say, this car cannot go out of 50 miles from my.

Jason Calacanis (52:35)

House unless this code is put in.

Alex Wilhelm (52:37)

And that code would be something my wife and I knew, but nobody else knew.

John Leor (52:40)

Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm (52:40)

So if you steal my car or my daughter or, you know, anybody's child decides, hey, I'm gonna go rogue, I'm.

Jason Calacanis (52:46)

Gonna go somewhere I'm not supposed to go, I'm gonna.

Alex Wilhelm (52:50)

Which we did when we were kids. We decided to drive down to Wildwood, New Jersey one day, which is like a two hour drive from Manhattan or New York. We didn't tell our parents, you know, they would not have allowed us to do that. And we just decided, well, if we drive really fast on the highway, we can get there and back without them knowing.

Alex (53:06)

The solution is crime, naturally.

Alex Wilhelm (53:08)

Yeah, precisely. So anyway, this is like such a really good idea, I think, is to put those things. I mean, when you look at the scrutiny that we put, I don't know, psychedelics or, you know, cannabis under and.

Alex (53:20)

Then alcohol, oh, it's craziness to me. But here's the thing. The difference between you and I, Jason. Jason. Is that of the two of us, only one of us is friends with one of the leading EV manufacturers in the world, who also has a space satellite system that could be used to geofence that car. So why are you telling me this?

Jason Calacanis (53:38)

I feel like I'll tell you.

Alex (53:40)

Get that phone out.

Jason Calacanis (53:41)

Well, you know what, it's interesting. We did have conversations about this with our kids early on, and he, he did mention to me that, well, we could put a speed regulator on it. And they have a speed regulator on it. The speed regulator on your Tesla wasn't exactly for your kids.

Alex Wilhelm (53:52)

You know what that was for?

Jason Calacanis (53:54)

To make sure that you don't get speeding tickets.

Alex (53:55)

Oh, interesting.

Jason Calacanis (53:57)

Because any person who drives a Tesla, I think, has had the experience. Or if you drive a Mercedes or a BMW or an Audi, the cars are so smooth that you don't actually feel the speed. Now if you're in a Corvette or some car that RPMs, you're going to feel it because the engine revs up. You don't actually feel the speed in a Tesla. You could be going 85 and think you're going 50. You could be going in a Mercedes 95 and think you're going 65. It just, just you don't feel it.

Alex Wilhelm (54:24)

And I think that's like one of the things to keep in mind.

Jason Calacanis (54:27)

But yeah, geofencing would be a great feature and then tracking each ride and there are third party services that do this already. So that's why I think the od, what is it? ODBP port that there's a port on.

Alex Wilhelm (54:39)

Every car that lets you do telemetry and other things.

Alex (54:42)

Oh, I know what you're talking about. Yes.

Alex Wilhelm (54:43)

Yeah, that should be like a really, you know, a standard item for folks to use.

Alex (54:51)

Well, we're going to stick with the geofencing concept and we're going to stick with robotaxis and talk just for a second everybody about the upcoming pony AI ipo. We've talked a lot on twist lately about distribution diaries.

Alex Wilhelm (55:02)

Obd. Obd. Thank you, John. Oh, our guy John Lepore is here. John, come on air for a second. Pull John on air for a second. This is great. When you have the guest, he just like hangs out in the green room. The guest is in the green room. John, you heard our conversation about self driving tech. What should happen? Happen? Go ahead. Your brain's been going over time hearing our.

John Leor (55:20)

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

Jason Calacanis (57:10)

Yeah, I mean, the safety could be improved just by making the pilot more aware of what they're doing. Like, people don't understand exactly how speed.

Alex Wilhelm (57:24)

Is involved in the death rate in accidents. And if you were to alert somebody when they go 90 miles an hour that they just increased their fatality rate by 7x, you know, like just that, just general awareness and reminder. It's almost like showing somebody who smokes cigarettes. Like, here is the lungs of somebody, you know, who died of it.

John Leor (57:48)

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

Jason Calacanis (58:30)

Tesla had this. Tesla had this score. There's a safety score that Tesla has in the app. And it was interesting because in order to get on fsd, I think early, they invited people who had over a 90 score. My wife and I both shared the same vehicle. It turned out like one of us had a really good score, one of us didn't. I'm not going to talk about that.

Alex Wilhelm (58:51)

That.

Jason Calacanis (58:52)

And it, one of the things it told you was how close you rode. Other people rode behind other people. And it turned out somebody in my household was driving a little too close to other people's bumpers. And then there was how much you stay in the lane and if you made it a game to say, like, how perfectly am I in the lane? And you just went ding, ding. When you were perfectly in the lane, where you went. It vibrates when you get out of.

Alex Wilhelm (59:20)

The lane, which is what it does now.

Jason Calacanis (59:21)

Man, that kind of like coaching would be great.

Alex Wilhelm (59:24)

And then telling people what their drowsiness level is or what you perceive their tiredness level is and their attentiveness level on a percentage basis from the internal camera, that would be another one. Because I, you know, and you could do all that.

John Leor (59:36)

It's, it's just calculating the Fluctuations in the pupilation of the, of your, of your pupil. There's. So I've been doing a ton of work on generating the sounds that EVs make, which is this whole crazy concept of, you know, we've finally got a vehicle that can be completely silent and now we're figuring out ways to have it make noise just for, just for fun. But there's. This is, this is my pitch. This is a freebie I'll put out there to anyone who wants to make it. Sound is the ultimate tool for communicating like subliminally. And you could even just have like a white noise that like shifts slightly in tone or harmonizes depending on whether or not you are centered in your lane or driving more efficiently or more effectively.

Jason Calacanis (60:26)

What a killer.

John Leor (60:27)

I do this in a way because you don't, because you don't want warning beeps. You don't want it. The, the doing the fighter. You know, like steer left, no steer right. You know, you don't all off you. You, you want something that you're not even actively paying attention to, but it's, it's guiding you and it's coaching you through that process.

Alex (60:46)

A terrible idea.

John Leor (60:48)

Perfect way for.

Alex (60:48)

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

Jason Calacanis (60:59)

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

Alex Wilhelm (61:10)

Ding dong, ding dong.

John Leor (61:11)

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

Jason Calacanis (61:34)

Also look out, look out. Like if it's, if you're, if crashes imminent, if it blared an alarm, that.

Alex Wilhelm (61:40)

Would be good too. I don't know.

John Leor (61:41)

There's a few, there's a few vehicles that are sold that have a, what they call a city horn, which is a gentle horn that you can choose to use that doesn't sound hostile and aggressive. And it's just this way of gently, you know, communicating with Say, you know, cyclists or pedestrians or what.

Alex Wilhelm (61:58)

Love it. Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System.

Sponsor Voice / Announcer (62:01)

Avas.

Alex (62:02)

Wow.

Jason Calacanis (62:03)

Required accessory for electric vehicles in many countries. AVAS system generates sound for nearly silent electric vehicles to improve the safety of vulnerable road users. VRUs such as pedestrian cyclists and children. Amazing.

Sponsor Voice / Announcer (62:16)

Also like deer.

Jason Calacanis (62:17)

This is another thing. I didn't know how many, how much.

Alex Wilhelm (62:20)

Roadkill there was until I started living in Austin.

Jason Calacanis (62:23)

I see a dead deer every day. There is a dead deer on the side of the road. There are deer everywhere because we have no natural predators for deers in Texas.

Alex Wilhelm (62:30)

For anymore or very few. And so they're everywhere and they're constantly getting hit on the road and man, just being able to see them because when I drive at night, they're kind of hidden in the sides of the roads that they're, they're stealthy by design, by evolution. If this thing could actually look for deers and just highlight deers, my lord, that would be incredible as a, as a, as a heads up display item. All right, listen, John, you're amazing the heck out of here. Go back to work. This guy, I love the fact that he hung around and he was giving us these great ideas. All right, Alex, we got a, we got, we got time for one more story. But one more. So I'm going to do, we'll do ladies choice here. What do you want?

Alex (63:10)

We're going to talk about the biggest deal that happened today which is the stripe bridge deal. But I'm just going to say if you do want to take a look at a self driving IPO, the pony AI F1 filing. Hard recommend. Very interesting. Good stuff in there. F1 they are a Chinese based company so they filed the foreigner version of the S1. It's an F1 filing. You'll recognize it. But it's really a lot of fun. Just before we went to air though, Jason, a company called Bridge was purchased by Stripe And I'm curious. No lying. Had you heard of Bridge before this deal came down?

Alex Wilhelm (63:42)

I had not heard of Bridge, but I understand that they are, Are they somehow involved in stablecoins? That's my understanding, yeah.

Alex (63:52)

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

Jason Calacanis (64:21)

Here we go. It's a interesting maneuver because stablecoins are essentially free or close to free to transact. Right. So if you're trying to lower transactions, and this is the thing I never understood about Stripe and a lot of these folks, is if we're going to, in fact make transactions cheaper, we need to make transactions cheaper. And every time you use a Visa, MasterCard, etcetera, there's some amount of load involved in that. And I think, aren't we supposed to.

Alex Wilhelm (64:55)

Be paying like 10 bips, not 2.

Jason Calacanis (64:57)

Bips when we do transactions? So shouldn't this lower it?

Alex Wilhelm (65:01)

I mean, when you do an event. When I do my events and we sell tickets all in Summit this week in startups events, founder, university, whatever. I'm always amazed by, you know, if you sell a million dollars in tickets, that you're giving $30,000 to MasterCard card, or if you sell 10 million tickets, you're giving 300,000 or $250,000 in merchant fees. Wow. It actually is a large number when you start thinking about that. And that's why some of these large events, like TED or whatever, I think they'll put a fee on top of it. If you want to use a corporate card, but they ask you to send a check or they ask you to wire the money to have that fee go down. Because if you're Ted and you're selling $20,000 in tickets, do you want to give $600,000 to Stripe or Adyen or whoever? You know, maybe, maybe not. Or Visa, because that's all going to Visa, MasterCard anyway. So, yeah, I think that's what this is about.

Alex (65:54)

Well, don't forget we had the CEO of Circle, the company behind the usdc, stablecoin, Jeremy, on the show very recently. I know you had about them back in the day. And so stablecoins you and I have discussed are kind of this awesome use case for crypto. An actual use case, everybody. Here it is. Turns out everyone wants dollars, and dollars around the world are popular. And so I can really, really see why this stripe bridge deal makes sense. But Jason, very expensive. So the company was last reportedly valued at 200 million during its series A. And people are saying about a billion, 1.1 billion for this sale.

Alex Wilhelm (66:28)

Okay.

Alex (66:28)

But the way that I think about it is this stripe's worth 80. Let's just say for the sake of conversation for 1-80th of stripe's market cap equivalent.

Jason Calacanis (66:38)

Yeah, 1% and change.

Alex (66:39)

Yeah. It feels it feel expensive, yet also cheap in my view.

Jason Calacanis (66:43)

When you do these kind of deals, you're just going to look at what does the, what is the acquirer's theory here? If the acquirer's value increases greater than 1 point x percent, 1.1 or 2% here, then they essentially will get the acquisition for free. And you've seen this when people acquire a company, I think when Amazon bought Whole Foods for I think it was 14 billion or 12 billion, the stock went up like 30 billion. And so in your mind you're like.

Alex Wilhelm (67:10)

Okay, they just made $15 billion buying this company.

Jason Calacanis (67:14)

And there is some truth to that. If you look at a really expensive purchase, WhatsApp was 19 billion.

Alex Wilhelm (67:19)

Right.

Jason Calacanis (67:20)

And that was a significant portion of.

Alex Wilhelm (67:22)

Facebook's market cap at the time.

Jason Calacanis (67:24)

But they took out a potential competitor.

Alex Wilhelm (67:27)

And I think they probably made that money back many times over in terms of the cash that they made from advertising, just from having that as part of the network and not having Google own it or Microsoft own it.

Alex (67:40)

Yeah, but I think that at the time was More like a 10% of Facebook's market cap.

Jason Calacanis (67:43)

Yes, it was a large percentage of their market cap. Might have been 15%. I think they might have been worth a hundred and billion and change. Yeah, these things are, you know, these things you have to be thoughtful about it. But this is a really good sign. We've been talking about tuck in acquisitions. I think Lina Khan is kind of in her last hurrah. I don't know that she can actively block something between now and the end of this term, so.

Alex (68:07)

Well, I was going to say getting done, Jason, but that's being announced and neither one of us think there's going to be regulatory, you know, stuff here. So it could be a really big cash on cash return for Sequoia, Han Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Index. They put I think a total, a combined amount of 58 million into this business and they're going to get a lot more than that back. So dpi, everybody. It's back on the menu.

Alex Wilhelm (68:30)

There you go.

Jason Calacanis (68:32)

DPI is back on the menu. We've got an exciting week for you. We're going to be taping live tomorrow and on Wednesday, tomorrow at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern, 12pm My time here in Texas. And I think on Wednesday we're going to go a little bit earlier, 9:30am Pacific, 11:30am my time because I got to catch a flight but tomorrow we're going to have one of the executives from Heritage.

Alex Wilhelm (68:58)

I've been talking about the Heritage foundation.

Jason Calacanis (69:00)

And we've been talking about election interference, election integrity.

Alex Wilhelm (69:05)

We had votes on last Wednesday and so I asked Alex to keep pulling that string. I saw Heritage had released information. Again, back to fun with numbers like we did today where we talked a little bit about, you know, safety in EVs and last week we talked about fun with numbers. We did back of the envelope stuff. What would it take to create a robo taxi fleet?

Jason Calacanis (69:27)

We'll do a little bit of that around Election integrity. They created@Heritage.com I think that's their domain name, an election integrity database. And now this is a partisan organization, but we'll get their side of the story. They are very concerned about election integrity and they made a database of 1600 cases from the 80s till now. And I did some back of the envelope math and where that was like 40 cases caught a year or something to that effect. Very similar to what we just did with the safety of Tesla so we can get to ground truth. And Alex, I see that as like a really great way for us to evolve.

Alex Wilhelm (70:03)

The show here this week in startups.

Jason Calacanis (70:05)

Is to tackle the biggest societal issues, self driving, election integrity, energy, solar, nuclear, and then just really get into the numbers, since you're great with numbers and say what, what is the truth? And that means having some of these biased people or partisan people on the pod, right? That we get their perspective and then we can put it against the numbers and see.

Alex (70:26)

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

Jason Calacanis (70:58)

Yeah, a lot more coming. And we will be starting our cold open.

Alex Wilhelm (71:04)

So I'm trying to have the creative energy to do a cold open every episode like we did on today's episode. So look for a little comedy. Alex is going to be my straight man here and we'll try to do a little something funny for you every day like I do on all in here at this Week in Startups. Follow Alex on Twitter. I'm Jason on Twitter. That's a great way to communicate with us. Your ideas for the show go to this Week in startups on YouTube and hit subscribe. Hit the bell and you can listen to us live. And just like Elon's giving away a million dollars a day for people who sign the package PAC, his political action committees, his super PACs, constitution, sign up, we're going to give away a million dollars a day here on this Week in Startups to somebody who tunes in live. So just tune in live, give us a thumbs up on YouTube and win.

Alex (71:53)

A million monopoly dollars. Just to be clear.

Alex Wilhelm (71:56)

Million monopoly dollars. Yes, you can win.

Alex (71:59)

You cannot afford a million dollars a day, sadly, yet. Give us six months and then, yeah.

Alex Wilhelm (72:03)

Yeah, give us more. You never know. No, no, we will. We'll see you in the chat room. We're not giving away a million dollars a day. And we'll see you all next time on this Week at Starbucks. Bye.