TWiST News: F1 on Apple Vision Pro, Self-Driving, and Stablecoins | E2029

29:32You will get an additional$20 with your first deposit of$100. That's Kalshi.com slash 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? So 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 at a glance. Like my favorite that I had worked on was Black Panther, this vibranium sand that you see throughout the whole film.

30:23It's like a physical interface rather than a hologram or the sort of traditional like glowing bullshit, 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 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.

31:10Amazing. 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 got to understand what's happening here is they're tracking their eyes because that gets the right person. And she's just like, you dumbass. I get it. It's obvious. Like, why are you like? happening everybody understands this and i was just like there you go that's that's that's brilliant well and if you think about invisibility as a concept you know wonder woman's invisible jet i know your team marvel but any of these concepts if you actually know who the audience is and you have a screen uh you could make something essentially disappear in the world and so here There is that hallway scene where they set it up and they are tracking this guy's eyes.

31:56That'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. What a great pull. Just like and it's all and it's all show don't tell. Right. Like they're not they're not hitting the brakes on the movie to have a TED talk about how this technology concept is is functioning. No voiceover. 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.

32:36I mean, you just see someone glancing at a tablet and you see with every voice interaction, these new branches that, you know, start creating alternate, you know, potential. And you're talking about the HBO series of Westworld. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Done by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, who I've met and I've told the story before. Or 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.

33:18And just think about how much this, Alex, what we just saw with that poll, how much of that predated by five, 10 years, what we saw happen with chat GPT. Oh, one. So this is one of the really interesting things I love about science fiction and the work you're doing, John, and writers do. Alex is all of this inspiration is like a flywheel. The, you know, you, you build something, put technology out into the world, like vision pro or Oculus, you know, or chat GPT. and it just inspires creatives to take it to the next level and then bring it back. And if you look at her, another great seminal film, the earpiece in her predated, I believe, AirPods, possibly, but maybe not.

34:04And this whole concept of 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. So, and those two I love just because they communicate so much understanding. I love the vibe of, and because you just mentioned it, I'm going to drop a 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 like trending straight towards that.

34:46But 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 only what the future felt like during that three to six year period. And there's just this much broader concept of making sure that when you're working in these spaces, you don't get caught up in this notion of like, I almost I almost hate the word futuristic. Like it just sort of is like to make things in the style of the future.

35:27And like, yeah, the future is not a style. It's not a vibe. 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 uh and then you could have something like fifth element which i always found really interesting another future vision you know my poll was i don't know if you remember the character who kept saying super green he was like the talk show host yes yeah and he has a a staff, which is his microphone. And it really does, uh, uh, predict podcasting and, um, what do we call, uh, influencer culture.

36:12And 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 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. Yeah, I was going to 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 got to 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 film series that Amazon picked up, they had this great method of showing orbits and intersections in space using, I think like a hologram.

36:58and it's so awesome. And now I can't stop thinking about how we can make a game that actually uses that style of interface inside of the Vision Pro and then I could finally have the space sim I've always wanted. The future is going to be awesome. I'm stoked. Guys, the future 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.

37:36So we're super stoked here at Black Box. If people want to hire you to do something or collaborate with you, how can they get in touch? Yeah, just reach out to us. It's blackboxinfinite.com. We're easy to find. And we, you know, our typical way of approaching projects is installing ourselves within certain brands or certain teams as like a secret special ops innovation team. And we really quickly iterate through concepts and ideas and figure out how we can get to prototypes and start building pathways and strategies forward 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.

38:22All right. Well, thanks for coming on the show and we'll talk to you soon. All right. Well done, John. Alex, how mind blowing was that? I mean, it's so awesome. It reminds me of the first time I wore Microsoft HoloLens back when they were still like pre-production. And I got to play a Minecraft version that interacted with the real world. So you could like push blocks around on a table, but they were digital. And I just was like, oh, this is different, exciting, and awesome. And I love DataViz. I love real-time DataViz. And I love racing. It's perfect for me. I love it. When I saw it, I was like, this would be great for Alex to start the week.

38:57In 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. 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 and hill country uh often in austin and the technology is now such that you don't have to worry about sunglasses or you know doing the nagging feature on your thing so we're getting close i think everybody agrees on that um and so i 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.

40:15There's a lot of religion around Tesla and 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 literally a guy who is obsessed with trying to get the technology taken off the road. I don't know if you've been following that guy who does TV commercials about it. I think he's got a horse there is. And I thought we'd just go through the safety here because when you have detractors, Alex, they make you better, right? They will look at everything you're doing and become hypervigilant because they hate you or they love you.

40:54They'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 really hates Tesla and thinks FSD shouldn't be on the road. That's, I think, ridiculous. I use it every day it it makes you a safer driver 100 and i and i include like the blue um i have something in my suburban that does lane uh awareness and adaptive 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 i'm gonna have to confess to something very very honest here i don't drive any oh 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 her driving because we live where she's from and she's a great driver and she does not really like lane assist technology, but she's a very vigilant person, so it doesn't bother me.

41:44But 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 US, whatever you think. Millions of Teslas, 40 deaths over five years, eight a year, it 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.

42:24So a trend that points in one direction. But the question then becomes, inside of that kind of modern world, how do driver assistance systems do and how do Tesla's FSD do? So, pull some more data, did a lot of digging around. Tesla says that inside of its driver base, people who use autopilot, and actually, Jason, for folks out there, can you define autopilot versus FSD and where they kind of end? Okay, sure. Autopilot is, I believe, 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 two in, and then FSD is a brand.

43:06Autopilot 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 know, the map or my phone in its cradle, it will start beeping and disengage.

43:47And 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 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? 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.

44:33And then they make a video of this and they put it on the internet. Oh, interesting. Or, you know, and they'll do crazy stuff on public roads. I do believe that there are 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 then...

45:10That makes me sweat through my palms. And I struggle. I don't have that much of a death wish. So that doesn't really appeal to me. But what's interesting is you're making a point that as we give people better technology to help them drive, how do we balance keeping their focus as technology improves? But even today, even with that concern in mind, the data to me is pretty clear. So I pulled Tesla's Q3 advanced driver assistance kind of like update. And what they said was in the third quarter, they had one crash for every 7.1 million miles driven using autopilot. So not the full self-driving, just autopilot.

45:45And 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. All right. So this is a website called tesladeaths.com. It's a little bit charged, obviously, but people are keeping track of this in a very detailed and granular way, which in some ways is fantastic, but there's a little bias here because they're kind of like, I noticed they frame this as like FSD caused deaths, which is FSD is turned on when somebody dies in a car.

46:37The car could have been T-boned by another car and that has nothing to do with the FSD, right? Because it takes two to tango in many of these cases. So there were over 400 deaths of 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 there are times, Alex, when we're like regulatory capture and it's real and they're slowing things down and progress.

47:12And then there's, okay, obsessing over, I don't know, operating room cleanliness or Tesla deaths or any kind of deaths 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. So let's go over this data and see if we can figure out the truth here. 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 FSD turned on. So it's not that many. Now, we don't probably have every single data point that's ever 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 u.s much better okay so there you have it folks uh fun with numbers and i think we got to have john come back and uh create some interfaces for fsd and for driving in general that would make people safer i one of the things i notice is we should have a heads-up display when I have my Corvette C6, it would project my speed and my RPMs onto the dashboard.

48:45This was an incredible feature because you didn't have to take your eyes off the road to know your speed or what you were revving or what gear you were in if you're using the Tiptronics. A lot of fun to have that. And you can move it up and down to your eyeline. What if that showed you each of the cars in front of you and told you the distance of that car and the speed of that car? I don't know why nobody builds this, but I want a heads up display that tells me I'm 18 feet behind that car and how much stopping it would take, what my speed is, what their speed is, and then the distance it would take to stop.

49:15And 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. 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. I just want to have my eyes loosely forward as I think about the novel I'm listening to, you know? I think you're one of the folks who would prefer that.

49:46And then there's another group of people who still like to drive. So like John should get on this and like make the two different versions of the HUD and the display. Because I do think like knowing that there's a car behind you and that it's approaching you quickly, like that's all done by, it could be done by the technology. 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 on your left or right or if it's safe to change lanes or not, right? Yeah. Imagine if you had the AI telling you, there's a truck that's closing in on you, J-Cal.

50:25I look in the review mirror every X number of seconds slash minutes. But what if it told you, like you're in the left-hand lane, there's a Ferrari approaching at 110 miles an hour behind you. It's going to be on your tail in 13 seconds. You might want to change lanes. Like that's the kind of like intelligence. I want my car to be interacting with, right? 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.

51:01And 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 weigh, you know, four or 5 ,000 pounds and they go down that. Like to me, I think the self-driving screen is correct and we should probably not let people drive cars when they're so young uh i think both of these things are exactly correct we hold new technology to a standard that we don't um hold accepted societal traditions too and it is nuts that we give 15 16 17 year olds these cars but we don't trust them to you know when they're 17 or 18 to drink a beer no um but we do trust them to take a 5 ,000 pound, 6 ,000 pound vehicle and do whatever they want from it, it should be required that anytime a child is in a car, that that car has got an attachment that throttles the speed, reports the speed.

52:14Anybody under 18, it should track everything you do in the car. I know this sounds crazy and I'm privacy experts, but when my daughters start driving and I have in my Tesla the ability to watch their ride, to know their speed. And it would be great if I could geofence. I should be able to geofence my car and say, this car cannot go out of 50 miles from my house unless this code is put in. And that code would be something my wife and I knew, but nobody else knew. So if you steal my car or my daughter or anybody's child decides, hey, I'm going to go rogue. I'm going to go somewhere I'm not supposed to go, which we did when we were kids.

52:51We 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. They would not have allowed us to do that. And we just decided, well, if we drive really fast on the highway, we can get there and back without them knowing. The solution is crime, naturally. Yeah. Precisely. So anyway, this is 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 then alcohol. Oh, it's craziness to me. But here's the thing.

53:24The difference between you and I, 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? I feel like - Yeah, I'll tell you. Get that phone out. Well, you know what? It's interesting. We did have conversations about this with our kids early on, and he did mention to me that we could put a speed regulator on it, and they have a speed regulator on it. The speed regulator on your Tesla wasn't exactly for your kids. You know what that was for?

53:53To make sure that you don't get speeding tickets. Oh, interesting. Because any person who drives a Tesla, I think, has had the experience. Or if you drive a Mercedes or a BMW or an Audi, the cars are so smooth that you don't actually feel the speed. Now, if you're in a Corvette or some car that RPMs, you're going to feel it because the engine revs up. You don't actually feel the speed in a Tesla. You could be going 85 and think you're going 50. You could be going in a Mercedes 95 and think you're going 65. It just, you don't feel it. And I think that's like one of the things to keep in mind. But yeah, geofencing would be a great feature.

54:30And then tracking each ride. And there are third-party services that do this already. So that's why I think the OD, what is it? ODBP port that there's a port on every car that lets you do telemetry and other things. Oh, I know what you're talking about. Yes. Yeah. That should be like a really, uh, you know, a standard, uh, item, uh, for folks, uh, to use. Well, we're going to stick with the geofencing concept and we're going to stick with Robo Taxis and talk just for a second, everybody about the upcoming pony.ai IPO. We've talked a lot on twist lately about distribution. OBD OBD. Thank you, John.

55:03Oh, 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 guests, he just like hangs out in the green room. The guests is in the green room. John, you heard our conversation about self-driving tech. What should happen? Go ahead. Your brain's been going over time. 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 uh moving at speeds the human body was never meant to travel at uh filled with the people you care most about in the world and topped off with gallons of liquid explosives or lithium ion and you know one way to describe it you user experience becomes a very like mission critical sort of factor in that in that context.

56:27And I think it's abysmal that we don't have the, and it's interesting, we just wrapped a project with a new automotive brand where 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 what it is when you're using any of this stuff in a vehicle.

57:08It's that simple. Yeah. I mean, the safety could be improved just by making the pilot more aware of what they're doing. People don't understand exactly how speed 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 increase 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. Like these cars are all equipped with tech that could also be channeled towards improving the skills of drivers.

57:56We assembled a roundtable 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 L.A. and, you know, 30 something hours. Yeah. He is he's obsessed, you know, for a guy that broke every vehicle vehicular, you know, law you could imagine. He is obsessed with safety and with driver training above all else. And all of this tech could be coaching people to just be better drivers. 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.

58:43My 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. And one of the things it told you was how close you 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, or you went, it vibrates when you get out of the lane, which is what it does now. Man, that kind of like coaching would be great.

59:24And 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 know - And you could do all that. It's just calculating the fluctuations in the pupillation of your pupil, Um, there's, uh, so I've been doing a ton of work on generating the sounds that EVs make, which is this whole crazy concept of, you know, we've finally got a vehicle that can be completely silent and now we're figuring out ways to have it make noise just for, just for fun. But there's, uh, this is, this is my pitch.

1:00:03This is a freebie I'll put out there to anyone who wants to, to make it sound is the ultimate tool for communicating like subliminally and you could even just have like a white noise that like shifts slightly in tone or harmonizes depending on whether or not you are centered in your lane or driving more efficiently or more effectively what a killer ideas in a way because you don't because you don't want warning beeps you don't want it the the doing the fighter jet you know like steer left no steer right you know you don't all up all up you you want something that you're not even actively paying attention to but it's it's guiding you and it's coaching you through that that's a terrible idea it's a perfect way for 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 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 ding dong ding dong it's a it's a uh 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 offline 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 i think also look out look out like if it's if you're if it crashes imminent if it blared an alarm that would be good too i don't know 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 I love it.

1:01:59Acoustic vehicle alerting system, AVAS. Wow. Acquired accessory for electric vehicles in many countries. AVAS system generates sound for nearly silent electric vehicles to improve the safety of vulnerable road users. VRUs, such as pedestrian cyclists and children. Amazing. Also like deer. This is another thing. I didn't know how much roadkill there was until I started living in Austin. I see a dead deer every day. There is a dead deer on the side of the road. There are deer everywhere because we have no natural predators for deers in texas for anymore or very few and so they're everywhere and uh they're constantly getting hit on the road and man just being able to see them because when i drive at night they're kind of hidden in the sides of the roads that they're they're stealthy by design by evolution if this thing could actually look for deers and just highlight deers my lord that would be incredible uh as a as a heads-up display item all right listen john you're amazing the heck out here.

1:02:58Go back to work. I love the fact that he hung around and he was giving us these great ideas. All right, Alex, we got time for one more story, but one more. All right, so I'm going to do - We'll do ladies' choice here. What do you want to - 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 a lot of fun.

1:03:32Just 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? I had not heard of Bridge, but I understand that they are, are they somehow involved in stable coins? That's my understanding. Yeah. So they do two things as far as I can tell. One is they help companies accept stable coins. So around the world, if you want to be able to kind of ingest them as currency, you can do that through them. And they also, according to their website, will help you spin up your own stable coins. Now joining Stripe.

1:04:08I don't think it's too hard to see the overlaps here, but my read of this was Stripe thinks that stable coins will enable lots of global e-commerce. And so they want to be right there. So they bought Bridge. I kind of love it, frankly. Here we go. it's a interesting maneuver because stable coins 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, etc., there's some amount of load involved in that.

1:04:53And I think, aren't we supposed to be paying like 10 bps, not two bps when we do transactions? So shouldn't this lower it? I mean, when you do an event, when I do my events and we sell tickets all in Summit, this week in startups, events, founder, university, whatever, I'm always amazed by, you know, if you sell a million dollars in tickets that you're giving$30 ,000 to MasterCard. Or if you sell 10 million tickets, is you're giving$300 ,000 or$250 ,000 in merchant fees. 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?

1:05:47you know maybe maybe not or v because that's all going to visa mastercard anyway so yeah i think that's what this is about well don't forget we had the ceo of circle the company behind the usdc uh stable coin germian a layer on the show very recently you had him out on back in the day and so stable coins you and i have discussed are kind of this awesome use case for crypto 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.

1:06:28But the way that I think about it is this. Stripe's worth 80, let's just say for the sake of conference nature. For one 80th of Stripe's market cap equivalent. Yeah. 1 % change. Yeah, it feels expensive, yet also cheap, in my view. When you do these kind of deals, you're just going to look at what is the acquirer's theory here? If the acquirer's value increases greater than 1.x%, 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.

1:07:09And so in your mind, you're like, okay, they just made$15 billion buying this company. And there is some truth to that. If you look at a really expensive purchase, WhatsApp was$19 billion, right? And that was a significant portion of Facebook's market cap at the time. But they took out a potential competitor. And 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. Yeah. But I think that at the time was more like a 10 % of Facebook's market. Yes. It was a large percentage of their market cap.

1:07:46It might've been 15%. I think they might've been worth a hundred billion and change. These things are, you know, um, 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 Lena 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 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.

1:08:21They 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. There you go. DPI is back on the menu. you we've got an exciting uh week for you we're going to be taping live tomorrow and on wednesday tomorrow at uh 10 a.m pacific 1 p.m eastern 12 p.m my time here in texas and i think on wednesday we're going to go a little bit earlier 9 30 a.m pacific 11 30 a.m my time because i gotta catch a flight but tomorrow uh we're going to have um one of the executives from heritage i've been talking about the heritage foundation and we've been talking about election interference uh election integrity.

1:09:04We 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 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? We'll do a little bit of that around election integrity. They created at heritage.com. I think that's their domain name, an election integrity database. And now this is a partisan organization, but we'll get their side of the story. They are very concerned about election integrity, and they made a database of 1 ,600 cases from the 80s till now.

1:09:48And I did some back of the envelope math 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 a really great way for us to evolve the show here this week in startups is to tackle the biggest societal issues, self-driving, election integrity, energy, solar, nuclear, and then just really get into the numbers, since you're great with numbers, and say, what is the truth? And that means having some of these biased people or partisan people on the pod, right? Then we get their perspective, and then we can put it against the numbers and see.

1:10:26I'm curious to see what Hans has to say. I've gone through the Heritage database. And in fact, we cited some Heritage data next to some Brennan Center data when we did the last Wednesday show. So we are not opposed to going across the ideological spectrum to find what people had to say, and then we'll poke at it. 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.

1:10:58Yeah, a lot more coming. And we will be starting our cold open. 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 uh for people who sign uh the pack uh his political action committees uh his super packs uh constitution sign up we're going to give away a million dollars a day here on this week in startups to somebody who tunes in live so just tune in live give us a thumbs up on youtube and win a million monopoly dollars just to be clear million monopoly dollars to be clear yes you cannot afford a million dollars a day uh sadly yet give us six months and then yeah yeah you never know no we will uh we'll see you in the chat room we're not giving away a million dollars a day and we'll see you all next time on this bye