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

0:00But what they've done here is they're turning memories into a keepsake book, no writing required, preserve a loved one 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. Is there something a little creepy about it? Like, I don't know. So it's definitely better than using AI to like recreate your dead loved ones.

0:36Like I know there's that thing too, where it's like feed their voice into our AI and you could chat with your grandma. And like, that really is troublesome to me. Like this. Why is that troublesome to you? It's just creepy or you have a concern about it. It is creepy. I don't have like a concern, like it's going to ruin the world or anything, but 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 hold on to them forever.

1:08You're raw dogging grief. Yes, I'm raw dogging grief. Yes, exactly. I want to feel it. I don't need to augment it. I respect it. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash 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 slash TWIST. And Oracle. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs.

1:52Save up to 50 % off on your cloud bill at oracle.com slash TWIST. 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 newsreader from This Week in Startups is back, my guy, Lon Harris. How are you doing, pal? Good, good. But many years, 15, 16 years later, I'm back to do the news? It's a long time. I think 14 years, 2 ,000 episodes. Boy, am my arms tired. Jeez, what a run. What an impressive run. it's uh 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 super nova as well well those people they're into startups and tech and other other topics let's there's a few other topics yeah there's a few international relations gets uh gets gets a decent amount of traction and so what was your take on uh seeing sacks named as the ai wow uh what what yeah i 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 gonna try not to rub him the wrong way anymore well you know it's great david is an awesome executive so i'm very excited uh i don't have anything to add to it other than i'm so proud of him and i just love the fact that you know if trump is the president you know people know is wasn't exactly my favorite candidate i'm just glad that my friends are around him and and hopefully steering the country towards smaller government less regulation and just more efficiency which hey yeah i mean listen i don't agree with David Sachs on a whole lot, but I feel better having him speaking into President Trump's year than some of the other people he's going to be surrounded with, for sure.

3:54You 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 run there god there's so much news going on and now yeah it feels like the world is spinning very fast right now normally this is when everything kind of slows down until the next year not 2024 though we're barreling through i think this is going to be like another frenetic you know 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.

4:38Yeah. 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. It's a good observation. i i did say i i don't know if it 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 my interest my retribution is going to be the performance of the country so i mean we'll see if that happens yeah well you 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 right donald trump 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 criminals right 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 right there were there i was just reading this like you know they interviewed voters who voted for trump like why did you vote for trump and it's all over that he's going to fight insurance companies he's going to end homelessness he's gonna end all these foreign wars crypto yeah he's gonna support her 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 here we go i mean so what's gonna i mean it's really interesting on a business basis i have friends who are shareholders in tiktok you know byte dance the parent company sure how do you even you know know what to do with your shares he's against it he wants to ban it uh or divest it or keep it i mean it's just hard to keep track of yeah you know a little bit of chaos right now in new jersey i hate to get all conspiracy they're here well i mean this isn't even a theory just look up yeah there have been um a bunch of drones large ones in fact in new jersey tell us what's going on with this story lon and yeah so it is a technology related story yeah 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 places that it seems a little suspicious.

8:00Why would there be a bunch of drones swarming around these places at night? So earlier this month, the mayors of 21 towns across New Jersey sent a letter to Governor Phil Murphy calling for an investigation into the drones specifically their origin their purpose and like are these complying with all of our local regulations and if there aren't regulations against this why not it's kind of like shouldn't this be illegal like it's a very murky sort of area right now it is very murky yeah yeah and i think that's what a lot of the mayors were uh concerned about so on monday murphy gave a press conference, Governor Murphy, and he said he still they still don't really have answers.

8:42They don't know whose drones these are, why they're flying around. 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. Turn the lights off, the safety lights. okay you know that 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.

9:31But 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 FBAA has also imposed flight restrictions on the area pending further investigation. Some witnesses are saying they've also seen a fixed wing aircraft flying near the drones, but we do not have confirmation. That is just witness. Okay. It sounds 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$5 ,000,$10 ,000 quadcopters, those big, large commercial ones.

10:07Those 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, 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 you're so stable now.

10:42They will not slam into an object as one example. But you do not have complete control over your drone. It's not allowed to hit things. It's not allowed to turn its lights off. So that leads me to believe that this ability to turn the lights on and off would be something that a more military or handmade drone would be able to do. This Week in Startups is brought to you by our friends at Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for you to build a beautiful website and for you to grow your business. Whether you're starting out or you're scaling up, Squarespace is going to make it easy to create an incredible website that engages your audience, allows you to sell whatever you need to sell products, content, or even your time all in one place.

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12:31That's squarespace.com slash twist. Make sure you go to that URL so they know you listen 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 um in fact you're not allowed to fly my drone in certain areas so if i wanted to fly it i think at my ski house some of that land is like protected federal land and in federal land they will not let you fly it in certain places if you try to fly it over certain places in la too like there's some parks and areas where you're not allowed to have them but like at the park across from my street from my apartment software doesn't allow you to go there 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 terrorists, I mean, I hate to say this, but terrorists already know this.

13:38This is how the next terrorist attack is going to happen is people are going to start using these things. 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 constantly on guard. We've got perfect vision of everything happening around our country.

14:07And it's really kind of the illusion of safety. Like a really dedicated person who had the technology and knew what they're doing could definitely fly a drone over an American city with some sort of payload in it. Like, it seems pretty obvious you could use this for something nefarious. You know, the thing about the balloon story that's super interesting is we actually shot some of those down 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 flared over montana yeah where they it went over montana where we keep our nuclear missile silos right so they waited until i think it went over like north carolina like over the water and then they shot when they got it yeah right 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 drone so there's been a bunch of startups that have been making drones we've had a couple of them on this program and it's really interesting when the police have a drone they can send the drone to the location it gets there before the squad car arrives 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 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 that kind of disappears 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 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.

16:21You know, I do the double mocha sometime. 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 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 there are 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 is 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 door dash could be delivered in somebody's backyard by drone or by a car on the front of your house you probably go with the drone backyard yeah you know well i guess we'll find out but i that is a thought that i've had is like are the skies above us just going to be constantly buzzing with drones because everybody wants their that is the vision brush from amazon yeah it really worked it's not necessary in manhattan it's not necessary in silver lake but if you were to live well la is very spread out so 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 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 yeah i think what we're seeing here is uh zipline is this a zipline folks yeah this is zipline yeah these things are going to work really well in areas where the houses are a mile from each other right when you're out in the country or the suburbs where you know people 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 that's 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 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 a.m to 8 a.m they kind of ask you if you want your stuff during that window i wonder if it's the whole foods thing they already had a huge infrastructure that's where whole foods is from 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 that say 4 to 8 a.m shift and there's another job that's perfect you can free before work you pick up four hours yeah precisely yeah great story uh let's keep going all right uh so our next story Sora open AI finally launched they announced it first in February let some beta testers and other people sample it but their uh video AI video generation tool Sora has formally launched this week it's available right now in the US across Asia uh we're waiting to hear details about launching in Europe and the UK.

19:55And current ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers don't need to pay anything extra. They get access to Sora included in their subscriptions. 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, that 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.

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21:23That's right. And twist listeners get 15 % off the first four weeks. Stop burning money, hire developers smarter and faster at lemon.io slash twist. 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 SOAR 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 co-develop norms and safeguards for AI generated video.

22:09So their pitch is like, this is not really a complete product. This is a experiment. They want everybody to play around with it and test so that we all get a better idea of like what AI video is all about and what it can do and what kind of rules and regulations we should one day think about applying to it. Several other AI companies and startups already have their own text to video generation tools. Google announced their product Lumiere. Amazon has create with Alexa. Stability has released its stable video diffusion product um open ai the big difference there is uh what i was talking about that what they call multi-modality so the idea that this can combine text image and video generation sort of all in one product so you can feed in anything as a prompt you can get back any of those kinds as a prompt it's sort of working from all of those different sort of formats at once it does seem to me that 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 yeah a bad actor but i 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 photo realism like people are going to mistake sora videos for the real life and the dangers of it are all tied up and like you could make it look like donald trump is saying anything but to me when i look at all of these examples they certainly look interesting but they don't look they all have that it's like halfway between animation and reality like there's an uncanniness it doesn't cross the uncanny valley i don't think any of these i mean you could take a look and see what you think shots of like well i think the establishing shots of like flying over a town or if i saw it in a movie or a tv show or going down a park i would actually think yeah that's that's really i'm looking at the website for sora right now and there's to me that that's it speaks so much about human development and our brains developing over hundreds of thousands of years we are evolved to recognize a human face and like read the expressions on a human face like that was so vital for our survival in the wild is like to be able to distinguish between a person and a bush and an animal and a shadow yes we're gonna 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 precisely and if you were to look at the sora home page right now there's one here of those two towers i don't know if that's them snow right let's zoom in on that one there you might not even be that might not even be a real place i mean that might just be it might 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 were crossing uncanny valley right now it feels like luke skywalker in the mandalorian when he shows up spoiler alert right like you remember like the de-aging didn't work perfectly and then there was some kid who did his own ai software this is like what four years ago five years ago i remember but it's still even the the best version of that like to to this day you could go see movies where they do that you could you can always tell like robert's and meckes just did that one home where he de-aged tom hanks you could still see you can still see okay i mean i i i think it's To me, I feel like we've undersold that as a challenge.

25:58Like our brains are so, it's the same thing with virtual reality. When they're first pitching virtual reality, it's like, you'll feel like you're in a cave or a castle or outer space. And it's like, your brain is so good at that. It's so good at existing in 3D space that it knows you can put the headset on and maybe your eyes are fooled, but your body knows you're still in. 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 at the graduation now luigi mangioni luigi mangioni 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 valed victorian okay that checks out this guy's like super high iq does seem like 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 right is it we've all been trained now to to yeah and and that's i'm not the only one who has pointed out some of the limitations uh in one of the first big reviews on YouTube.

27:12Marques Brownlee notes that 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. And OpenAI has sort of conceded to all of this that they're saying their goal is not to create fluid, perfect, like movie-quality images. They describe it as a co-creative dynamic. Users can use this video to like brainstorm and explore it feels like a storyboarding tool and it's 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 you had this whole progression of people saying you know is it real or not miniatures in star wars and blade runner giving way to the prequels and blade runner 49 where they kind of did a little bit of both long story short we have this discussion every time and then these things kind of fall into place as its own genre so i wonder if this is going to be its own genre in the way pixar computer animation versus traditional animation snow white versus uh you know claymation as a genre you know uh coralline whatever they kind 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 i don't i don't i don't know I'm, I'm, I, I, part of me, the philosophically I'm tempted to say no, because I think that part of animation, any kind of creativity is a brain.

29:18It'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 using digital technology, but they're still designing and creating its creative expression. A computer, it's always just running a calculation or an algorithm. It's a predictive model. It's looking at what other art looks like and guessing what the next thing it should do is based on that.

29:58So 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 100 % definite, like, no computer's ever going to animate anything that looks cool that I'm going to enjoy. To me, it feels like I can't say that with certainty.

30:36In this world, when you first showed me Uber, we'll get to more Uber on the phone. When 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? what a ridiculous idea i felt the same way about airbnb i'm gonna sleep on a right who's gonna sleep in a couch like are you crazy 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 all right let's talk about ai everybody it's everywhere self-driving cars breakthrough medical research and of course business tools that make everybody better and faster at their jobs.

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If you switch to OCI, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half for new u.s customers with minimum financial commitment but you'll need to act fast the offer ends december 31st 2024 see if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com slash twist oracle.com slash twist 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 to me they wrote it by pen and paper but i could see them making like little short animations telling a story and then sharing them on twitter or instagram and saying like here's an interesting scene and that's like i'm starting to see people make little creative vignettes five seconds 15 seconds 30 seconds that are interesting conceptually interesting like a storyboard might be right and so yeah i like that as a possibility 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 well you know if along the way these tools are being utilized in an interesting way i think that you know 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 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 going to be kind of like that people play with it throw it away but there's going to be like one percent of the audience who maybe figures out what to do with this we've all got an iphone but sean baker 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 oh and it was shot all on iphone uh i don't know if anora was but sean baker that was his big claim he did tangerine that which was shot all in an iphone and then florida project which was mostly shot on phones so that's like his i don't know i i think anora probably was mostly i just saw the trailer for 28 years later obviously building on 28 days later and 28 weeks later weeks later but that was also 28 28 days later was one of the very first like dv features yeah yeah where you were shot all in digital video yeah they did a bunch of these movie back in the day center of the world with wayne wang though that film uh which i'm in and i was a consultant 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 yeah but they were kind of like that is they had that kind of fake digital you know look when you project it but that was part of the that's part of the aesthetic yeah yeah it's interesting mike figus did that one time code back then it was an interesting time 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 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 so many there's so many add-ons and other accessories it doesn't make as big a difference anymore got it oh so the lens can be 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 you know i wanted to um show your 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 and this one's called remento.co and the re 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 memorial of my you know deceased parent my aunt whatever has been around for a long time but what they've done here is they're turning memories into a keepsake book no writing required preserve a loved one story the easy way.

36:49Remento turns their spoken words into a personalized keepsake book of their stories. Now, when I've been pitched this, it's been a marketplace where documentarians would interview your family and then write a book based on it, and they would charge you$2 ,000 to$10 ,000 to do this. It was like a bespoke service. 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 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 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 ten thousand dollar person i think that this is going to get you kind of um uh halfway there or maybe two thirds of the way there and i think you know because it's more accessible maybe more people will try what are your thoughts on this one um yeah I mean 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 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 yeah feed their voice into our AI and you could chat with your grandma and like that really is troublesome to me like this why is that troublesome to you it's just creepy or you have a concern about it it is creep i don't have like a concern like it's gonna ruin the world or anything but i think it's if there is something a little ghoulish about it uh because i don't believe that ai is really able to like i think it's a lie like when the guy nightmare alleys and pretends the mentalist pretends he can call up your the spirit of your dead wife uh from beyond i feel like that there we're lying to be we're telling them the ai is actually able to recreate the mind and the consciousness of their dead level but it's doing an impersonation it's a trick and like i feel like it's an impersonation yeah i feel like it's kind of a cruel trick so that's not this this is thankfully using the real people yes like they record the stories themselves so like i you 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 archives so you can always go back and like i don't know if i had this for my grandfather i'm just thinking about it i miss my grandparents every day but like that's part of being alive is i loved my grandfather's stories and we never recorded them because you know 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 yeah 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 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 he died that's the other piece yes so he 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 you're raw dog forever you're raw dogging uh grief yes i'm grief yes exactly i want to feel it i don't need to augment it like not watching i respect not i i tried to do that on uh on the flight i went to florida did you read that all those twitter threads about x threads about raw dogging flights yeah that's kind of what i was making light of is like you just go sit there 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 it is like a very interesting uh mental exercise because we now have done the opposite you and i are film fans as part of our friendship is based on that you know if you think about the uh ultra violence if you think about clockwork orange the torture they give him is to pry his eyes open right make him lock him in a chair and make him watch dopamine hitting clips sound familiar we're literally optimizing 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 yeah we're all getting the ludovico treatment yeah oh is that what they called it ludovico yeah in the movie that's the ludovico treatment uh where they they they but they also they're key they're playing his favorite uh they're playing beethoven his favorite music so they're associating the sickness that he the revulsion that he feels from the violence with listening to beethoven which ruins his life because that's his favorite music wow it's like would be like making me watch like that stuff while listening to dire stripes would absolutely really exactly associating mark knoffler with feeling nauseated all the time god please no super interesting that was also a device in the fifth element when the fifth element played by uh mila jovovich i believe when she is um that's what she's learning about our world 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 right holocaust and then everything in between civil rights that classic sci-fi trope of the outsider watches like instantly catches up on our world through the tv or through the internet yeah yeah pretty pretty good trope i like that i like the truck 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 we want to talk about well we just had this uh this tweet from uh our uber ceo oh yes dara kajrushahi so new first for uber last friday one million concurrent trips that's more than the entire population of san francisco all at once using Uber, getting rides in Uber.

43:28More 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. well you know when they say trips i think they include food in it okay so this is both people getting food delivered and people riding in that's my guess i could be wrong but i think the routing of food is the same as the routing of people as far as they're concerned because most drivers structure is the same yeah yeah i mean this is um a massive achieve achievement uh to be able to do that at once i think he is also maybe he's always been let the results you know speak for themselves and the results at uber since they got to profitability raised the prices and you know basically uh scaled to such enormous and obviously i'm long i'm still long the stock um although i'm diversified so it's not like an acute thing for me or a religious thing you know he's just letting the fact that they became a money printing machine and their plan on buying back their stock on a business basis speak volumes but now it's self-driving and waymo and tesla cyber cab and byd and you know uh self-driving uh little robots that deliver your food uh in in cities i think he's maybe wants to share more of what's special about uber just in terms of marketing or you know corporate communications maybe and i haven't spoken to him about or anything but i do think he's maybe just trying to explain to people how big uber is so they appreciate this you know uh because again he's quiet about it he's just like look at the numbers the results of the results everybody relies on this there's hundreds of millions of customers and a million at the same time you know if there was a 150 million customers it's almost one percent of them using it at the same time which is kind of interesting just in and of itself i wonder what the denominator there is for a million concurrent rides yeah but it also proves is if there's a million concurrent rides going around in the world right now that means you need a million cars at any given point in time to just do those rides a million cars a lot of cars folks to be on the road at one at any one moment yeah because 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 it's fascinating to me like los angeles i feel like uber as a transportation option has really fallen off there's there's fewer drivers rides are a little more expensive it's it's uber eats is the breakout everybody's constantly using uber eats here you got such great food there i mean when i go when i was staying in manhattan beach over the summer i mean i there was a gwyneth paltrow's goop kitchen was really good you know if you want to eat healthy there i mean it's just it's also all the fantasy sugar fish sushi was on it just a lot of great places 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 city city i had hi-ho burger that was great i love the burger it's really good in santa but like i'm curious like i'm sure ever this is another complexity to the uber business i'm sure every market is different like the yes the how many people are taking rides versus how many people are ordering sandwiches it's got to be you know incredibly diverse the writing is on the wall though you know i think we will be sitting here in another decade and it's going to be instead of one percent of rides in the united states are ride sharing or you know whatever two percent of them it's going to wind up being like 10 or 20 percent i think car ownership we need to get these cars off the road however we do it i i'm i'm fine with ride sharing as an option whatever we do ride sharing is going to be incredible because the you'll be able to recapture that time and so and then you take out parking and storing your car i mean those are major costs in cities and so all that's the worst thing we ever did in cities was fill them fill them with cars it now we're stuck with it but it's it's a nightmare it would be so great to get all these cars off the road however in manhattan they it was always amazed now i guess bloomberg did this towards the tail end of his uh tenure there but in manhattan they you know you get you're coming down broadway and you get to like herald square or whatever you're usually you leave you leave times square 42nd herald square is 34th it's just broadway's closed it's all people and they've shut down the roads and they have tables and outdoor cafes and pop-up booths and coffee it's nice and you're like oh this is beautiful it's like the santa marica promenade well then you think about all these like great world cities how did they become great world cities it's like public squares and plazas and destinations where people can go walk around and not necessarily like every street is bordered by this expressway that you have to like run across yeah it's gonna be fantastic i'm really excited to see more i am concerned now though i have to say about millions of people losing their gig jobs we have all this controversy lawn about oh my god you know people are being abused by you know the ride sharing companies the delivery companies doordash or whatever amazon they're not paying people enough while people flock to that as an option for extra employment or you know part-time employment whatever very few were actually full-time statistically you know the prices keep going up is you know they have to compete against working at starbucks so the salary has to beat or be as good as a starbucks or an apple store job uh in my mind now those jobs are going to go away we're sitting here 10 years the idea that you're delivering food is going to go away 10 years it's probably going to go away the you know having a human driver and then a truck driver i mean this is you're talking about millions of jobs in the u.s like millions and millions and people pay their rent people pay their credit card bills people pay for their kids school by doing an extra door dash shift or on the margins or being an amazon picking up an amazon shift like we talked about earlier in the show i'm a little worried about what happens to when we eliminate those jobs i don't think there's like a quick plug-in there's so many things we sort of could do but americans just have this huge resistance to anything that could even be remotely mistaken for like welfare or, you know, like socialism or like, all you have to do is say, well, that's socialism and everybody gets upset about it.

50:06But 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, Once you combine AI, robotics, self-driving cars, all these things, you're eliminating millions of jobs at a go. You can't just teach them all how to code. There aren't jobs available. You already eliminated the retail sector, so they can't go work at a store. When I was a kid, that was the go-to. If you lost your job, well, you go work at the Gap.

50:49You 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 tie you over. Right. And 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. Yeah. 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? 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 on site 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.

51:50You're going to love this interview with QB Technologies. Enjoy. And thanks for Juan for coming on the program. He is x.com slash L-O-N-S. See you next time. Bye-bye. All right. So next up from the Twist 500, we have QB Technologies and we have yet another Alex, in this case, Alex Gumpel. He's the co-founder and COO, Jason. This company founded in 2021, based in New York City with manufacturing operations over in Eastern Europe in a city called Minsk that I have actually yet to visit, but is on my list. Only raised$6.4 million in known capital. They're building mobile micro factories. I think this company is awesome.

52:27Ah, there he is, Alex himself. How are you doing? 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 abatement going on in there and you can be warm and you have all these incredible tools that you can bring that you 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 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 yeah first of all thank you for having me big big fan uh of both of yours um i'd say we're the antithesis to anyone trying to industrialize construction which is where you're placing the category.

53:34Our 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-entry boxes, 3D printing, etc., meaning the more you deviate away from what a traditional home is, the more you run into regulation risk and incumbent adoption risk. So we said, you know what, we're going to build homes on site traditionally.

54:07We're not going to shove electric, plumbing, and whatnot behind panels. We're literally going to build a home the same way that Lenar builds a home, except we're going to do it with better process information. We're going to do it with a better supply chain procurement management system. And the third pillar is really around cost. No existing group in the space, and probably by your investment you've seen, has done this in a cost-effective way that combats where existing costs are. So the sales cycle becomes, hey, I'm more expensive, but I'm better. And there's better quality assurance. We took a different approach.

54:38You guys spoke about Tesla a lot. We don't like that analogy. This whole thing of roadster to Model 3 isn't going to work in this space. This is a highly conservative space. If you're not cheaper than existing home builders today, you're almost irrelevant. You'll never go that curve from roadster to Model 3 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$100 a foot. National average is around$152. But in short, we're a full stack technology company. We build hardware and software. It's all for the purpose of improving building processes and new home construction.

55:13In a TLDR, we design, develop, and deploy mobile microfactories, exactly what you see behind me. It's a containerized solution to a factory. So that factory is like a pop-up building that's got one of those inflatable roofs, I think, or a botress roof. You might see a tennis court, yeah? The opposite of a tennis court. Because if you've played inside a tennis court, it's super loud. It's pressurized. So as soon as the doors open, it deflates. We actually use a repurposed air hanger technology. The pressure's in these little tubes. So you can keep the doors wide open. But yes, it's a containerized solution.

55:48so we build about 50 of the hardware in-house and we deploy that hardware into containers so then we can send call it 60 to 100 containers later anywhere in the world a factory that gets erected in eight weeks eight weeks okay that was my first question was how long does it take once you pick a site to unload all the shipping containers and then get it set up how many houses do you think one of these mobile micro factories needs to construct uh to be viable economically because there's cost with bringing the equipment, getting it set up, training, and so forth? Yeah, we no longer think. This is past theoretical.

56:20We've deployed one of these already. So it's past kind of this technical risk stage. So we're at about 400 ,000 engineering hours, TRL of eight, which means we're far enough where we're ready to commercialize this, and we are commercializing this. But each one is about$10 million 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.