Julian Dorey Podcast - #50 - Riley Horvath: THE FUTURE OF TESLA & ELECTRIC CARS; AR / VR & 3D TECH; AI & DATA

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Riley Horvath is the Co-Founder & CSO of Soar, a spatial technology company that specializes in AR/VR and compression innovation. The company’s mission is to make volumetric technology (like holograms) a central part of our everyday lives. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 9:59 - The timeline of Soar’s progression from the beginning; Covid speeding up adoption across the world 23:59 - “Compression is the road––holograms are the cars”; Making the last 2 percent that changes the world; How to use your iPhone for volumetric experiences; Steve Jobs and the simplicity of use; The future of shopping in a 3D world 34:47 - Soar is ready to live stream a concert or boxing fight right now; How Soar has attracted world-class engineering talent from Day One as a startup; Rapidly scaling a tech company *without* losing the culture that put it in that position   45:58 - What got Riley into tech and startups; Riley’s Sunday Ritual that we should all try; Riley’s hobbies, including rebuilding cars and planes 55:55 - The electric car market and how soon it’s going to take out all gas cars; Solar panels, solar energy, and their current potential / hurdles; Converting gas cars to electric cars; the status of Charging Stations in America 1:11:53 - Why Riley’s not surprised at the tech jump society took during the Pandemic; Niantic’s Pokemon Go Concept integrating into the real world; Human interaction and tech; Why holograms can save the world 1:17:48 - How Soar can bring back the dead; Using the technology to pass on messages from beyond the grave; Riley explains haptics; the TikTok filters that “bring back” the dead 1:29:24 - Screen time and the Pandemic; Tesla’s data collection and Elon Musk’s 3D Map of the world (Starlink); The self-driving cars question 1:39:09 - The media and negative headlines; Neuralink and Fact-checkers 1:45:14 - The tech platforms and groupthink; The need for startup founders who believe in the vision over who offers the most money; How tech companies start as rebels and become the establishment; Big companies, startups, and culture / resources 2:01:36 - Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger (the Instagram founders) and the upsides and  downsides of their 2012 sale to Facebook 2:07:42 - Social Media and the 3D World; Lil Miquela and Gen Z’s opinion of what’s real and what’s not 2:13:22 - The NFT Market; The NFT deals Soar has been working on, including with Roast Master, Jeff Ross; The get-rich-quick schemers who hurt the NFT market and its credibility 2:33:27 - The Data Question and what Soar’s technology requires from its users; Superintelligence (Bostrom), Kurzweil, and the Artificial Intelligence Question (AI) 2:43:38 - The tech and startup communities' move to Miami; The problem with San Francisco; “Suits are dead” ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If their head's on straight, they'll look at that and won't just look at the dollar figure that they throw at you. Because to a Facebook, unlimited money. It doesn't matter. If they want something, they're going to buy it. So you need the power in the founder to say, no, fuck you. I don't like what you're about. I don't like what you're going to do with my technology. Because for humankind as a whole, I don't see how you're going to benefit or how you're going to benefit humanity with it. So I think the power needs to come in the entrepreneur and the founder not to

get greedy and to say, no, I don't care if you offered me an extra hundred million dollars over my competitor. I like your competitor's intentions with what you're going to do. I see a better fit for my tech inside of this company from like an efficacy standpoint. What's cooking everybody. Before I get into the conversation we had today, I do want to point out something that if you are watching on YouTube right now, you may have noticed on the front snippet of the episode there. And that is the bunker is officially complete. Now, I don't have a camera pointing to it right now, but you'll see it again in a few minutes. I'm talking about the back end, the background behind the guest.

So I had created a soundproof kind of homemade setup to be able to get that crisp sound we have in here But in order to officially complete the bunker we had to go fully professional And I want to give a huge shout out to my mom who had the design idea To put some red curtains back there and if I may say they look fire and this place officially not not that it wasn't complete before but it the bunker feels lit now, so very very excited about that and I mentioned it because we didn't talk about it in the conversation today because my guest and i were actually in meetings together all day and kind of rolled right in and did the podcast and forgot about it so i'm recording next week's episode in the next

day or two so i'm sure we'll talk about it there but very very cool to see it done and again shout out to mom anyway today's conversation might remind you of one that I had in January. It was number 30 with Anthony Fenu. And if you remember or you didn't see that episode, Anthony was or is the co-founder of a company called Soar, which is – let's just call it what it is. They are a software company that produces live streamed holograms and it's absolutely fucking insane so i have been lucky enough to develop a great relationship with anthony and his two co-founders since then and you'll actually hear today i'm not going to get into the details in the intro because it'll take too long but me along with chas servino from number

40 and giovanni gussin from number 34 who is also now full-time at SOAR. All of us and the SOAR guys have been working on some things the last four months or so, so that's been very cool. And I've kind of had through that a front-row seat to the tech itself, and it's absurd. So I am joined in the bunker today by none other than one of the other co-founders, Mr. Riley Horvath. The great thing about the three guys at SOAR, and that is Anthony, Riley, and Baker, is that they are all different. They all play off each other so well. They bring different things to the table, different styles, but they have the same vision, which is critical. So we had a lot of great conversations today, broadly around like vision and how tech can be

used once it's actually put out to the world and some of the worries these guys have about that and also got into like some wild shit like riley previously worked in solar paneling so that that was his startup before he ever got to soar which i think started four or five years ago and so he knows a lot about that he knows a lot about tesla's and the electric car market and had some interesting thoughts on how we're converting to that market From gas cars and how fast that's gonna happen and that was pretty crazy to me, but I Can't remember some of the other stuff AI we talked about AI and had some conversations around that that I don't think we're related to Soar but we should do that in the future because there is some relatability there and it was it was just a fun conversation. So Stay tuned for a little there was a point in

there where we did talk a little bit about some of the work we've been doing and gave some context there so you'll notice that later in the episode and you know i'll answer questions around that as they come in if people have them but been really cool working with these guys very excited to have them in the studio and very excited to do this as they're scaling up. I can't talk about where they are in the funding process. That's not public. All I'll say is that you will probably hypothetically hear something somewhat soon about that. But the company is growing massively in size, and the reality that their tech is going to be changing how we do things in society has set in. And it's just

very cool to get them on that upswing to see what they were thinking at this time. This is the type of content that we'll look back on years from now and be like, damn, you know, what were their thoughts then? What changed? What didn't? That's just, I love that. I love that about this job. I love that about the people I bring in here and catching that moment in time. And we're going to do it again with Baker. They're Justin Baker, their third co-founder in a month or two. And these guys will continue to come in here. They're great guests, incredibly interesting, and they're on the cutting edge. So I hope you enjoy. Now, you've heard me talk about my friends at Eight Sleep. If you haven't heard me talk about my friends at Eight Sleep, they are the first sponsor of this podcast, which thank you again for that. Amazing. But Eight Sleep is the mattress company. They are not a mattress company. They are the mattress company because they are the first legitimate mattress company that actually integrates tech into the one thing that we absolutely all have in common besides like eating and shitting, which is sleeping. So if you currently have a mattress that you like, right? Like you love the feel of it and you don't want

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my job this is everything so it's going to keep getting better. And thank you to everyone who's bought in early on. I will never forget that. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Dreadfire. where's the news you're giving opinions and calling them facts everyone understands this but few seem to do it if you don't like the status quo start asking questions i actually this doers right here i bought when you were going to be coming in what two months ago and then we and then we had to wait to do it so i'm like you know what me and bitcoin jesus killed that much of it i would have been so upset if it wasn't cracked open yeah well this was like one

night that was and we killed another bottle outside that that was an interesting night but i saved the rest of it you know because it was bought with the intention of you being in here so we drank something else in between but very cool glad you finally did it man oh yeah man happy to be here good good let's let's get this bad boy open are you uh i didn't even get to ask you you're scotch guy whiskey what's your thought uh i honestly don't have much of a preference i like that i always tell people if it's got liquor in it, if it's got alcohol in it, I'll drink it. Yeah, if it's wet, I'm good to go. That's good.

That's good. So what's been going on, dude? Obviously, I had Anthony on here, so people are familiar with the company if they heard that episode. Yeah, yeah. Circle back. Great opportunity to take a little snippet from the previous episode. Yeah. Yeah, no.

Things have been a little bit crazy. Just trying to manage the scale of everything we're doing here. It's crazy. It's been like one hell of a journey. And to get to the stage that we're at now, I mean, we never had a thought that it wouldn't happen. But being here and kind of seeing it come to fruition after all these years of dreaming of these days, it feels pretty good. I have to say. Can you just remind some people who didn't hear that episode what your company SOAR is?

And to be clear, you're a co-founder with Anthony and Justin Baker, but just what you guys do and what you can say about where you're at. Sure. Yeah. So we're a volumetric media company. Essentially, it's real-time streaming of 3D assets. Those 3D assets are typically humans. So I like to talk about it as like telepresence.

So you and I could be having this conversation and you would be like holographically popped up in my living room. And so kind of like think of a Snapchat filter where you could pop up and there's like a dancing hot dog on your table, little gimmicky things. So now they're no longer created. Now they're just kind of real assets no more animation that goes involved and now you can just kind of click a button and stream these assets in real time and it's actual people so like you and i and it could be live correct yeah and you guys are the only people that have the compression algorithm capable of doing that in high quality in the world uh yeah yeah we actually are um still not yeah not many uh people have the opportunity to say that but uh but yeah

cheers man cheers right on that let's get this party started oh yeah so i know obviously like now ever since anthony was in here we've all gotten to know each other and we talk about a lot of different things like off camera, but I know there are some things obviously that are not for public consumption yet. So we'll be careful with that today. And if I start to talk about something where it's like, can't go there, just tell me no problem. But on a broad level, take me through, cause we didn't really do this. I want to talk to Anthony exactly the timeline of it it take me through when you guys started soar you started without that tech like you started without that compression algorithm that you know in english allows you to create the holograms that you guys now create so essentially my understanding is that you guys were like okay we know we want to get into vr slash ar

but the tech isn't there to live stream anything so we need to build whatever that underlying tech is so the compression to be able to do that and then you guys did but that wasn't like yesterday no no this has been a bit of a journey it's probably been going on four and a half years now um so i guess we could take a take a step back go back to the the beginning um initially when we first started me and Anthony have been friends our entire lives. Both dropped out of college together. We were on the same page and was like, okay, let's both feed in. Let's go for it.

And initially, we started in sports. We saw a huge gap between technology and sports. So we started creating AR experiences inside of sports organizations. So like all the major, started on the team level actually, and then went to the league level because like the sales process was a bit easier. When you say AR assets, I'll stop you sometimes today just to be clear on stuff. So obviously augmented reality, but you gave the hot dog example a couple seconds ago from Snapchat.

So when you're saying like you were looking at making AR assets with sports teams, like what's an example? Okay, so this is a good way to look at it we created like the world's like we shouldn't say the world's first but one of the first facial tracking algorithms for face like face paint and face filters so like what you see today on snapchat and facebook the technology that they have all adopted we built that before it was really mainstream and we had no idea what to do with it. We were like, it's really cool stuff. And obviously there's value there, but in the world, maybe not yet. So we were trying to piece together. And I remember we were selling this to the teams

and they're like, this is crazy. I have no idea what to do with it. You want me to my fans to put these filters on their faces? And we're like, yeah, it's going to help with engagement. And they're like, I don't know. Is there any data behind it? Trust us, trust us us and then you fast forward like four years and you can't go on a social platform without seeing something like that um so that's where we started um now how do you just create something like that though we had back then we had uh an engineer his name's nick he's still with us today he's been there since the beginning but um i don't know we were just a couple crazy guys with a vision was like yeah let's like build some cool shit i don't know what you say and uh i guess that's what we did and so you you were able to build that like what year are we talking with that like 2017 maybe yeah it was mid 2017 yeah got it but you were still building

because that that was a simpler technology. You could do that with far less bandwidth than what you're doing now. So you were still building this compression. What was that process like? Who were you bringing in? Were you guys just building it yourselves? It's crazy to me. I'll say this before you answer.

That like, as I say, three assholes in Jersey figured this out. But you guys did and it's you know i would love to hear the story behind it yeah honestly i'll never forget the day where the idea came to fruition um we were in like this pivotal moment um where the face filter thing it was like okay it was kind of gimmicky wasn't gaining like a ton of traction and we knew where we wanted to go and how big we wanted this to go um our whole dream was always like build a unicorn. We want a billion dollar business. And we said, we're not going to get there with this, just this. So how do we make it bigger? So we're working with like at the time. Wow. Yeah. So we were working with a couple of influencers at the time and thinking, wow,

really cool. A full blown AR social platform would be really, really cool. Super immersive. You could scroll through and like all of the assets that you see or the pictures that you see would like be placed in AR. And then from there, it was like, okay, is this possible? And we went back and forth for a bit. And me and Ant were sitting in one of our rooms and we said, okay, why don't we just like go back, talk to the engineers and see what's going on. So we brought it downstairs. They were all working in the basement of our house at the time and then uh

so we went down and they're like absolutely not you guys are fucking crazy like this isn't possible in the world and we're like okay yeah we'll circle back and every like couple weeks be like guys this would be really cool like what do you think can we make this happen can you walk through that one more time because you were saying like you wanted to take pictures and put them behind somebody, like something – like we kind of have that today now, but we didn't then? Yeah, so go ahead and look at this. So take Instagram, for example,

and make the entire platform where you're scrolling through different objects that you can take out of just a screen and kind of place them in your environment so it feels more 3D, more engaging, more immersive. Obviously, that's where the advertisement is going. So the way we look at it is the advertising world and 2D ads are just diminishing rapidly. When that happens, it's going to be very hard to monetize on certain platforms, so you need to pick that engagement up how do you do that that was like the key behind it i said okay make it add another dimension to it and every time somebody looks at something make them say

holy shit what is that and make them keep on re-watching and re-watching right yeah that was the thought there now i always think of this of this in terms of before Pokemon Go and after Pokemon Go. Because that was the first time where, I mean, yeah, we had the Snapchat filters and everything. But that was the first time where you picked up a phone and you held it around like a flashlight almost in your environment. And then on the phone, something appeared in the image in front of you, but it wasn't actually physically there. So you guys are, I mean, to go back to what we were saying at the beginning, you're building that, but you're building it with people. And I guess like to what you were just talking about, like brand activations. Exactly.

Yeah. So if you use that in just a bit, if you use the logic of Pokemon Go at its core, what is it? A scavenger hunt that people can walk around and interact with other people? Yeah. Why was it so catchy? Because it was something new. It was very immersive. These objects were being placed in your real environment.

But at its core, it's just a 2D, like a regular scavenger hunt. If it was just a scavenger hunt with no AR, nobody would have used it. But they created one of the most popular gaming platforms of all time yeah i still remember our intern back where i worked couldn't find him one day for like four hours or something like that we went outside he was like fucking holding the phone all around we're like are you kidding me people were so it was like the new shiny object and it was like pokemon but adults were enthralled with it because they could they could exist in this world and i think the most surprising thing to me is that clearly behind the scenes the tech has come such a far away but people haven't necessarily

gotten there yet even with covid you know it's like we got used to the whole remote thing with Zoom, but it's still like real. There isn't this movement yet, but it's like right there of people who are like, yo, we're just going to make everything 3D now and like where we're going to put ourselves in places. Yeah, I mean, COVID, the way we look at it is it didn't change our lives too much because like we had this work-life balance. We've been doing this for a very long time. We've been working from home and just kind of doing that for a while so it didn't change too much on that aspect but what it did do is speed up the process of adoption for like emerging technologies so now i would love to see the data on american screen time how it inflated over the past 12 months i would love to see that data. But with that, they're getting bored with just regular 2D things that you've seen for the past 10 years. You needed something

different. And now everybody's itching for it and they're eager for it. And especially when you look at entertainment, right? So there's no more, nothing in person anymore. So you need like another level of intimacy. So that's kind of where we saw this going, but it just happened a bit faster, which is good for us, obviously. But yeah, so that process was interesting, adapting to the speed and the pickup that we had the scale at. So yeah. Well, I think people got used to it.

It's not so much that it wasn't there. They just got used to the fact that Zoom, for example, best one, that lag time, there's still like a little bit of it but you talked on zoom or something like that three years ago even you know there's like a pause like you know there's there's that thing where it's like it's not personal and then suddenly people realize the tech had been there for maybe a year or so i remember using zoom like a year before that like wow this fast as shit all it took is like some shock wave for adoption to be forced to happen you know but what you're doing that wasn't a part of being forced you know it's not like suddenly they're like you know what we need holograms everywhere but it's like we're almost at that bootloader

to it you know yeah no you're absolutely right and it's interesting because i remember before it was a standard where like you would have a phone call to make it make the introduction and say okay how fast can you get to la how fast can you get to miami and we were on a plane like i don't know 20 days out of the year and it was exhausting and you think like oh wow it sounds great like a lot of fun it's not you brush your teeth in the airport you're getting dressed in airport bathrooms and stuff just going to like meet somebody new um where now i guess the world becomes much more ergonomic where everybody's okay with okay let's just hop on zoom and nobody wants to leave their house i'd rather take this call in my pajamas yeah and like for big executives in the world i think it's great for everybody to adopt that

i really do do you think it's going to go back a little bit yeah i hope it does yeah and and it will naturally um everybody's eager for it but um yeah but back to like uh where we started and that kind of thing so yeah they come but we lost that the compression like when did that hit yeah um so i guess it became like okay this needs to be bigger than sports obviously needs to be bigger than like face filters we knew that but also the industry that we're trying to tackle needs to um be larger so we said all right we have sports it's pretty much locked down we know everybody we've worked with almost all of them um we're not really tapped out yet um how do we get this bigger so okay take a step back why don't we just take over all of entertainment um and then from there you go from entertainment to advertising

industry to every major brand, and your market cap gets much, much, much larger. So we took a step back and stopped on servicing as many clients just strictly in sports, dumped into an R&D phase. All right, let's take a step back. Let's see if we can actually build this thing, because if we can, it's going to change the world forever. So that's exactly what we did. And a couple of short months later, it was like, okay, we have a really rough proof of concept here. It works and it's possible, but we're going to need this, this, and this, a lot more resources and just a hell of a lot more bandwidth just to make these things come true. Your holograms are like, I think of them as the high-end Mercedes-Benz, right?

And it needs a road. You can't serve it – you can't have the car to drive and rip it up to 160 miles an hour if you don't have a road. And I look at the compression as kind of the road. as someone who doesn't hasn't been in there iterating it like you guys have is a lot of it like the greatest new innovations a lot of them come from maybe having 98 of it done open source right like not patented just kind of there for people to hack on or whatever and then someone builds that last two percent at least to where the now 100% is. It always changes, right? And then suddenly, boom, the doors open. And so when I look at you guys, it's not like when you were starting off with the sports teams, you were building these kind of one-off stuff on the faces

and things like that that you could do where you kind of capture something creatively quickly in a picture or a quick video. It wasn't, hey, we're going to live stream the fucking team playing and it's going to be on your coffee table in a few years you had to get the tech to get there and so you guys got to the compression what like had to break through 2018 maybe late 2018 yeah i would say so it wasn't perfect back then but there's still a lot of work to do but it was that's when it became possible and like we saw and said oh wow all the we've done, it actually makes sense and it exists and it's actually something that's doable.

Yeah. So I think like going back to like paving that road, you got to look at the major organizations, like look at Snapchat and Facebook and what they're building. I like to say we're a bit of quite a few visionaries. So we look at things five, 10 years ahead and see what happens. So like when the face filter thing came about, it was like, this will be a thing naturally. The world's going to think we're nuts for it right now, but just watch. And then take a step forward

and look at where we are today. The same thing's happening right now, but the process has sped up a little bit. So right now you have Snapchat building with all their lens partners. So you're getting all the major agencies involved that pretty much run all of media. They're creating a lot of the immersive experiences. Like the ad agencies.

Exactly. So they're building on top of Snapchat and that platform. So as you see them innovating and seeing them adopting immersive technologies little by little because they know what's happening as well, but they can't – the world isn't ready for it yet and they're very consumer-facing. So you can't publish everything that's up their sleeves right away. But if you look at what they've done in the past couple of years, you can see the direct path of where the world is about to go. Does anyone click – you mentioned this a little bit ago at some point in some context but does anyone even click like banner ads anymore do you no that's that's what i'm asking and like do you i know my my dad doesn't either yeah do you put any on your podcast zero there

you go i wouldn't if they asked me to it's like so i still see this though like i look for it when i go to a web page i'm like all right where are they you know i'm never going to click them but i'm actually like thinking where are they and i see like you go to espn.com or something or cnbc there's fucking one up there there's three on the side and i'm like who is paying for this i would love to know and why i agree i agree so what you guys are looking at doing is if you can create these experiences and i may go crazy here and if i go too crazy you've reeled me back in but you could create a world where through someone's phone they could walk into the mall almost and like oh that's not a banner ad from macy's or whatever department store that's like yeah i'm gonna walk in there and and see what

they're selling you're virtually inside of macy's and like that dress that you want to buy, you can actually buy it when you integrate it with like e-com sites and you pretty much turn your whole house into a shopping mall. So based on, we can go down that path. Let's do it. I'm here. Yeah. So some of the things we're working on now, obviously we're deeply tied into the music

space. So we're working on some really cool projects where you can bring essentially a Coachella and you can have your house be the venue now. So you can have Post Malone placed in your living room. You can have Cardi B in your bedroom and all these brand activations throughout. And you can literally turn your own home into attending a Coachella festival. Okay. Because I've known that now and it still blows my mind you know when like ant was talking about being able to have the tech that could pull off

you know like a logan paul and floyd mayweather type fight right now that's just like crazy to me and i've seen it so it's like double crazy but in order to do something like the full scale what you just talked about like post malone in your living room that end needs hardware on the back end too obviously or not obviously to view or to capture to know to view it no not you can do it from your like your mobile phone you can walk around your house and like that's what i mean okay let me state that more clearly when you're saying you could put post malone in the living room in front of you you're required to use your phone to see him there correct hold your phone up that's what i'm talking about because obviously that's pretty crazy tech but it's like it's you guys you guys are live streaming and capturing real things at a way higher level than Pokemon Go did with a similar concept a few years ago because you have the bandwidth to do it.

The second level to it is where someone can turn something on like a TV and they don't have to pick up their phone. They can text on their phone and it's right there. You guys do the software. So you do – you create the ability to capture that content and then produce it. Whereas something like that, it's not like you could just integrate your software into my TV right now. And suddenly like Post Malone is going to be right here. You have to have, someone's got to build out hardware for that. Are you guys thinking at all about getting involved with that? Or are you looking for other people to do that? And then you'll just be ready.

I think that comes down to like strategically picking your hardware partners properly um there's entire businesses that are built solely around hardware and we're not one of them we're built on the software side um so we kind of leave that to the experts we're not naive to say we're the best at that so we'll kind of stay out of that world eventually it'll make sense you can acquire a hardware company that's working on some cool stuff i was gonna say i didn't even think you guys were doing much around you know what i mean yeah but like based on that logic um so we talked about everybody's screen time increasing right yeah with that is everybody's rapid decline of attention spans so if you have to if there's one extra step even if it's a very simplistic step to that adds a little bit of a layer of complexity, it's gone, they're not even going to click through it, you're not even going to get

through the process. So that was our whole thing was like, we need to make this as streamlined as possible. And that was a difficult part, because you have this unbelievable technology that nobody's even seen before. And how do you make it as simplistic as possible where your everyday TikToker can use it. It's simple enough on something like a Snapchat and TikTok because it's a filter. Correct. Right? And you scroll over.

Oh, that one puts this on my face. And that goes back to what you were doing at first. But I think it blows my mind that you can even think about making, and you have to, you're right, but you can even think about making something like we're going to capture all, you're going to capture all of yourself and put yourself in your friend's phone and make that simple. And the reason I say that is because no one's ever done it before. And the only, I mean, if I thought about it, I could think of other ones, but the one that comes to mind heavily where I feel like we made that leap was a lot easier though. And that would be like what Steve Jobs did with, I'd say, the iPod first where he was like, I want people to be able to get to their artist in two clicks or whatever. And he wanted that and he didn't even want labeling on some of it. He wanted as few buttons as possible. That's still like a device that someone can learn how to use.

What you're talking about exists in the not physical world. So how do you, like, I guess the question is, how do you get something simple when you have to get it adopted first and like teach it to everybody? I think that comes naturally, just like the evolution of technology, right? So think about it this way. In the 90s, early 2000s, internet was a big thing, and people decided, okay, why don't we just digitize information? And that became the internet.

It was the biggest thing ever. And then there came, and that was obviously run by Google, and then comes Facebook and said, okay, why don't we start digitizing people's relationships? And that's when you see Instagram come about. And they start digitizing entire relationships and like human interaction. Now we're in like this third wave of this, I call it the evolution, where you're digitizing the entire world, right? So like, now I can scan that, that bottle, and now it's a 3d asset. And it happens in real time and very easy to do. So that part gets a little bit crazy because essentially once you're collecting all this 3D data, you can have a one-to-one representation of the entire world.

So if you think like 10 years from now, if you think about evolution, the entire world will be digitized and you'll be able to explore it at will from like a virtual setting. How far does that go, though? And to be a little more specific. You know, like I try, I when I'm thinking of it in my head, I'm just morphing everything I know, like that exists publicly in technology with the 3d space. So like, I think like 3d printing, as an example, which is entirely different than what you do. But maybe use a straight example to point out what I'm getting at. If I'm, to go back to the Macy's example, walking into the store through my AR experience, let's say I'm just doing it through my phone. It's not like some hardware that's actually set it up for me. And I am now shopping

in the store and I see a suit that I like. Are we going to be able to like try on that suit digitally and then even be able to do something like customize it for yourself on there and then have it 3D printed somewhere and fucking mailed to you? At some point, yes. So think about it. You can put this face filter on your face because it tracks every little data point in your face and like the movement of your cheeks and when you blink your eyes and things like that right so you can place something on your face the same exact technology that would track it to your body so you could put a suit on your body you could tailor it do all that kind of thing and have like a virtual try on um so yeah it's not too far-fetched 10 years at this rate i wouldn't even say that

now how close do you think you guys are to live stream i mean i guess your tech is there but based on partners that you're actively building or working with on like a smaller capacity how close do you think you guys are to live streaming a concert or actually doing like the fight you know obviously not doing this one that's coming up here in a week or a couple days whatever it is but you know like how close do you think you are to getting the yes of like oh yeah you know what we'll do that oh yeah we have some pretty cool concert experience coming up this year. Oh, wow. Yeah, so a couple of the festivals that are coming up, the Imagine Festival is coming up in a few months, some like that.

And as well, so for the UFC and some of the boxing, obviously boxing has been huge lately, and it kind of fits our technology perfectly because the capture space is relatively small. So you can have a holographic boxing match pop up and have so right now we're in their training camps um so learning how to do like a back kick um you can now have like six degrees of freedom and move around that entire ufc player um or like say the weigh-in if you want to do the weigh-in before and then when you tie that into like sports betting

and things like that and the people that are betting can actually see the actual size of the person that's about to be fighting in their living room it adds like a whole nother level of immersion and it kind of blows people away so it can be as i'm just thinking like the size of a phone because right now it's holding up the phone like the size of a phone holding it up in front of me i can kind of like know based on the space around it oh francis naganu's six foot four and built like a goddamn brick shithouse you can place them in real size and if you stand next to him you're gonna be towering so you have to but you right now without the whole hardware you have to do it like this like hold the phone and

for people listening and not watching i'm like right acting like i'm standing next to him and holding the phone up. Yeah, and it's just like scale them smaller and larger with your fingers. Basically, you could make them the size of a skyscraper or like the size of a cup on a coffee table. Now, I was in your studio today and you guys weren't working. But you just had, you know, you had the camera set up and everything and the computer happened to be on. So like it was somewhat capturing what we were doing. So it was not even the full scale.

But I was pretty amazed at how it was maybe a quarter second behind my movements. I would throw fake punches or whatever, and a quarter second, Almost a snap of a finger right behind it. When you're actually live doing it though. And having your engineers work on it. In real time I guess. Some of that latency that I see on there. You're pretty confident that's not going to be there. And you're able to capture most of that.

Full 3D. So that if someone's watching two guys fight each other. maybe not UFC because they get on the ground and there's some complexity there, but like boxing, they're going to pretty much see the full thing that they would see on TV, but it's 3D. So it'll be true real time. Sometimes there's some legality

behind broadcast because if somebody drops an F-bomb on live TV, you can cut it out really quick. There has to be a little bit of a lag, But on the technical side, no. We will be true real time. Do they even cut that out anymore? I hope not. What are we doing?

Come on. Yeah. But yeah, and when you said nobody was working today in the studio when you were in there, it's actually kind of funny because being that everybody's remote now, we have teams working all over the world and they use a team viewer to work on our studio from like, I don't know, Canada, Australia, Europe, doesn't really matter. So they were working at the time and sometimes I'll walk in, it'll be like two o'clock in the morning. I'll walk downstairs and grab a glass of water and I'll look in there and everything's on and running, but nobody's in there. So everybody's like

working. It's 24 seven. We have like like these machines going so they can turn on your machine from where they are yeah we just keep it running and they're able to like access the code base um remotely which is nice that's crazy yeah how do you find these guys like how did you build because i don't care what you say like i we talk about the there's i know there's certain parts that was like confidential but obviously like there was a there was a company before this that you guys had a – we'll call it an exit from and leave it at that. So you guys had a history, but you were still like 19 years old, 20 years old, something like that when you're building this. How do you get people – forget where they are. Clearly very talented people who were able to build this. How do you attract them to your project when frankly you guys are just some dudes

who landed on something really cool in a dorm room and moved out of that and into something new? It wasn't more than that. So it's easy to do if you say, hey, we're going to pay you X dollars to do it. What's really truly impressive, when they want to do it for free. And that's kind of where we find the bread and butter.

You know you're onto something that's truly going to change the world and you have the right people that are passionate about it that's how you know you want to hire them because i see what's happening i'm an expert in the space and i need to be a part of this because like i want my name on this in the next 30 40 years when this was created it's like saying i was a part of youtube in i don't know 2008. yeah yeah well what about you know like patent trolling and stuff because while you're building it's not like you have patents on stuff so you're sharing at least some of the information with these guys i guess like what stopped them you know you landed on the wrong guy and him going and doing it himself so you'd never have one guy working on everything.

It's just, so that comes from like the genius side of it. My CTO is a guru. He's truly unbelievable. Baker? Yeah, Baker. He can strategically map out who needs to work on what to achieve this result with nobody knowing what anybody else is working on. So that's how you kind of keep it secret and keep it really, really special.

So the patent process is one thing, which obviously everything's filed and we're okay. Yeah, now you're good. But during the build process, you just kind of have to keep everybody one degree removed from what you're truly going for. But it was enough for people who were thinking about coming in to grasp where it was going and be like, oh, this is legit.

Because if they're not seeing the whole thing, who's to say you're not a used car salesman coming out like, oh, we got the magic stuff. Yeah. Yeah. You just have to sell them on the dream, I guess. And like I said, they're experts in the space so they can see. And they'll be passionate enough about one single aspect of your entire pipeline where that's enough for them. A lot of times they don't even mind knowing or caring about the whole big picture in the beginning. You just kind of focus on one thing that they truly love to work on.

And then eventually you bring it all together and then they step back and say, wow, this is what we contributed to. And then obviously like now, you know, you guys are what, like four years in, something like that? Yeah. Four and a half years in. So now you, you know, you can hire people and pay them and, you know, these guys are part of the team. But that's pretty cool that I didn't know that. You were basically recruiting people to be like, yo, you want to work on something fucking crazy on the side? And they're wherever they are sitting in whatever country. They're like, yes, I do.

Yeah. And then it's really cool. And it's like, okay, this is no longer a side project. I want to leave my job at one of the most powerful companies in the world and come work for a startup. Holy shit. Cool, man. Glad to have you. Yeah. And what about like this scaling though? Because, you know, you see a lot of companies that have a great idea and then you see fewer companies who morph a great idea with actually creating the great thing, right? That's the hardest part. You have to have that. If you don't have something to sell, hard to build a company, but you guys covered that so now it's like i guess maybe the last six months year the thought more has been okay how do we how do we expand from here where it's kind of like boots on the ground all hands on deck you know we're kind of feeling it out to like whoa you know i know you can't talk about where you're at in funding but like we're going out we're getting some serious funding this thing's

going in the next level and you can see at the end of Horizon something like an IPO. You clearly got to add a lot of people. You got to really scale up pretty quickly. What's the approach there? happen and before we saw that shift we you could you could reach out to any VC any investor in the world and say hey this is my really cool idea this is what I want to do and if you're not quite there they'll tell you even though if you think you are you're probably you nine times out of ten you're not so you see like just dramatic shift in okay hey I would like to have you involved this is what we need this is what we want and they'll straight up tell you hey you're not quite there keep Keep us posted. And when you're ready, reach out.

And that sucks because you go through that for a while. And you put every waking hour and all of your energy in the one thing. And for somebody to say, you're not where you think you are, that kind of, it's tough to swallow. But you just kind of, you strap up and bear down again. And one day, you're going to reach out to somebody else and they're going to say, holy shit, guys, you have something. And that is when you see that drastic, drastic pivot. Do you worry about, though?

Because you guys all live together. You're in there every day. You're touching everything that happens at the company. Maybe some of the engineers are working overnight on some stuff and things like that where you're not physically there. But you know every single thing that's going on. And I guess when you're at like 20 people or something like that, you can do that. When you go from 20 to 100, it's really hard to do that. Does that – I guess like keeping that culture that's built it to here, is that a concern that like, okay, well, now we're at that point where we're going to be hiring a lot of people not just on the engineering side

but actually like on the go-to-market side and things like that and now we're going to be bringing in a lot of people and maybe we don't even know and we got to take a leap of faith to say like you know what we're going to delegate this and delegate that and trust it's going to get done and get done the way we would do it yeah it's terrifying for all of us because this has been our baby and been under our full control for a very long time. And you need to scale, obviously. But doing that,

you need to scale with the right people. Luckily, I don't know why or what it is about us, but we've attracted some of the perfect people and they just fit the puzzle very well. So we'll see how we can do that as we scale so you're talking about like hiring 100 people there's gonna be like a high churn

rate there you just need to make sure that you're not hiring the wrong people and if you do it naturally it will happen identify it quickly and get rid of them and bring somebody else in that is a better fit um so that's kind of an art around that yeah um we're very good with with people and like i take a psychological approach to a lot of things and i um that's kind of like my thing so i'm i'm very excited to just be able to bring on that many people um and kind of see how they fit in this crazy crazy ecosystem that we've built yeah what what like got you towards this? Because like you got into this young and like there aren't – I mean I can always speak for myself, but I can speak for a lot of other people even that ended up in tech. Like it's not like when you're 15, you're always thinking like, you know what? I'm going to go change the world building some crazy algorithm or some crazy whatever there are people who think like that but a lot of people it takes longer to get there and like you just kind of made the the jump young was that something that was always in the back of your head or you just kind

of like you know you and anthony were close growing up and everything and you're like oh this seems cool like let me check it out and then you fell in love like what's what's the process there um so truly i was never like was never unbelievably passionate about tech. I never really saw myself as like, that's what I wanted to do. That's the career path I wanted to go down. But I was very passionate about working for myself and building things that are out of this world and very new and innovative. So my first business when I dropped out of college was in the renewable energy space. That was a lot of fun for a very long time.

And it was like a very rapidly emerging market in New Jersey, at least. So took advantage of that and really jumped in, learned a ton, met a lot of great people and truly had a great time building that. And what were you building? So installation and sales of residential and commercial solar systems. And then scalded state to state. Scalded a pretty good team, actually. Some of the companies that spun out of my original business, they're still around and absolutely crushing it, which is really cool to see. And then from there, it was like, okay, what's next? This is one thing, but what's really out there?

What's the big one? I guess the the dreams and the ambition got a little bit larger and the next natural um stage was what's the one of the most emerging markets out there it's obviously tech um so and then me and we've been close just kind of like hustling all kinds of different ideas since man we're probably like nine ten years old or so and uh he was just like he's always like the natural guy to go with there's like always a feeling there um yeah yeah yeah because he's like the way he explained it to me is like he kind of fell into it a little bit you know like he wasn't thinking oh i'm gonna go to tech and then he was always thinking about it from whatever he'd be doing whether it be i think he said he had a job like freshman year of college where he was like selling at a department store or something. And he would always be thinking about like, what's an easier way to do this?

This is like stupid. And so then it kind of translated because tech is all about like saving time and making convenience and something like wild that, you know, you put in a human's life. And it just kind of translated straight to tech. So it sounds like it was probably, if I'm hearing this correctly, pretty similar for you in that you did want to work for yourself and like build something. But then you're also like,

okay, what can I do to make something easier? Exactly. And then it comes down to like, who do you want to build it with? Because your team is truly everything. Without the proper team, we would have been dead three years ago, four years ago.

We would have hardly got this thing off the ground. But there's like a sense of resilience because like it's not always great. There's a lot of like hard times to go through it. And having the people that are willing to like, okay, no matter what, there's not even a thought. We're going to get through this and we're going to get to our end goal. We'll see what hoops we have to jump through without. But like without like that support system and like that team behind you,

it's going to be tough to do. You also got and i don't know if lucky is the word but you're doing this with a childhood friend and then baker i think was a childhood friend of anthony's right but you didn't is that right you didn't know big okay so like he's got both of his childhood friends in there and everything like people are always saying like it's scary when you go into business with like friends and then especially you create something where you all move in together and you're building the company but you guys seem to have like such a yin yang and young or whatever you know on the three of you did you did you know that kind of when you went in or is that something

that after a while you're like oh shit that kind of worked by accident yeah it's like we're such a cliche yeah the odds are against you in that in that sense but uh i think the key is just balance you know like we are truly like working day to day every single day um gotcha start over no no you're good you're good just pulling in the mic um yeah like truly balance is the key in this um typically we work until i know two o'clock in the mic on you um yeah like truly balance is the key in this um typically we work until i don't know two o'clock in the morning most nights whenever we're feeling it you shoot each other texts like hey are you tired yet no can't too many things on my mind okay let's run through this let's like do something um and also so for me it's like sundays i take kind of for myself and i didn't for a very long time.

And you just started to get burned out and you get too close to things. You don't have like much perspective on the outside world. And then you got to think about like, what am I actually building for? And you don't, you're not connected with the outside. So what I started doing, it was a little while ago. So I try to do, I learned, I did this thing where I try to learn something new every single Sunday. And since I started doing that, everything has become a bit easier. So it's kind of like a mile wide inch deep mindset. So learn a little bit about a lot of things and become much more well rounded. What kinds of things? So when I first started, it was just like, reading a different book, right? And then you start getting bored.

You start pounding through books. It's like, okay, I'm learning a lot there. That's great. And then so I've been like a car guy my whole life, right? So I would work on either a different car or a different piece of a vehicle every Sunday for a little while. And I rebuilt me and a couple of my friends have like rebuilt a number of really cool vehicles. Wow. Yeah.

And then I learned how to play the guitar um baker actually taught me it was like every well that became more than every sunday um just start learning new things and then recently started working on planes with one of my friends maurice you're working on planes yeah just like we're not very really good at it yet but we do a ton of diligence and like we're mechanically inclined so like we know how to work you're talking about that like you got a fucking plane parked outside what do you mean you're working on like where do you go work on planes like the airport just like an old one yeah yeah just like old you're like just take it up and fly it too no no i can't fly eventually that's the goal i like my dream i want to have like a seaplane and live down in the florida keys

and like work out of miami i'll just take the seaplane up and down. Forget the traffic. So you got into planes. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Was that like a natural progression from cars? You're just like you saw under the hood, you understood stuff. You're like, oh, I wonder how to fly. They're unbelievably similar and mechanically a bit more simplistic.

But I know that sounds kind of crazy if you don't understand like the aerodynamic behind it but they're kind of like simple uh simple objects how so it seems like because you know to like the layman looking at it layman whatever you say like it seems like there's a million moving things that if one of them goes wrong we're all fucked there's much less resistance and like what do you really have to worry about up there? With cars, if you have a car from the 80s, it's like, holy shit, you have a classic, right? Most planes are from the 50s and 60s and still flying,

and that's a very common thing. Really? Yeah, for sure. I didn't know that. Even though the big Boeing planes that you fly on every day, they're all from the 80s, 90s, and they seem like they're brand new. I would believe the 90s yeah depending what airline 80s yeah well spirits from 40s I mean you got like duct tape on on the goddamn wings but that is when you actually think about that though like

I totally believe the 90s but now you concept it in your head and you're like oh my God it's 2021. long time ago can you imagine driving a car that you've driven for like like every day for like the last 23 years that's not like a rebuilt classic that's like you know this this is like a crime driving this thing around it's actually kind of funny i have i guess one of my cars is 21 years old the other one is 30 years old holy shit driving every day my dad drives the one of them every single day of his life as a daily. How many miles are on those things? I mean, they've been rebuilt a couple times. Okay.

But yeah. Okay. See, that makes sense. Yeah. And you see the guys, like, especially with the classic cars, but you see, like, the 67 Mustang or, you know, 65 Mustang. Some of those, like, they're more common ones that you may see because guys rebuild the engine totally those things were the outside was built so beautifully like and i know very little about like how to actually build the engine of a car but my understanding from people i knew who did it is that it was relatively easy on cars like that if you knew what you were doing and actually learned

it to be able to replace that engine and create something new in there and then keep the entire outside intact yeah it's as long as you have a decent donor to start with the process a little bit easier um and the only thing it's difficult in the tri-state area because there's like a lot of rust you have rough winters um the road salt kind of decays them but if you can get like a decent donor vehicle from a warmer state they'll last forever as long as like they're taken care of to some degree that's crazy to me yeah it's like i i think about like i'll see a car i mean my last car r.i.p died on garden state parkway up in north jersey caught on fire no way yeah yeah you were one of those guys oh yeah no way it was interesting everyone looks at you funny and they're like are you okay my car is like

fucking on fire i think i don't know i'm like i you know what i guess it was like 13 years old that's that's just what happens so like the idea of you know i guess that one had like 200 some thousand miles it had a lot of miles on it but i just figured it gets like 12 13 years old it's like it's like a ticking time bomb like it's just a proper cremation it's okay yeah so why don't more people be like yeah we just replace the engine and cost you two grand rather than buy a fucking new car for maybe not two grand but three four grand something like that rather than buy a new car for thirty five thousand dollars you're absolutely right now the emerging ev market the electric vehicles that's going to be a whole new thing. What do you think of that?

Where are we in your mind? And how real is it that we're not going to have gas cars on the road in 10 years? Oh, yeah, 100%. I strongly agree. So much so that my next venture, when I just kind of like passion project, kind of want to hang out and do things i really love um i'm probably going to start a shop that converts gas cars to electric mainly because that's going to be the way of the future it's going to be very rare to see gas vehicles um especially if like think about resources in general well i come from the renewable energy um business so i look at solar and say okay that's the way of the future as long as you can find a way to manufacture um the panels in an efficient manner and like a green manner um can we take a sidebar on that real fast yeah i want to ask about that sure because i treat me like i know nothing because

i know next to nothing on solar i know very basics one of the things i've heard there is that with solar energy a one of the misconceptions is that you need the sun actually shining on it at all times but certainly helps but it's also the amount of power and i'm probably using the wrong term that it provides that is not able to effectively power something like a car to guarantee that you're going to get 300 miles to an engine or you know 300 miles to one drive without filling it versus what gas or even electric now will do is that accurate or like is it improving where we stand there so it's definitely improving right now so you see like the the tesla shingles they came out a long time ago great concept but it only powers like 30 of

your home um so you can't use them in jersey because utility bills are too high in winter time you have to run your ac that kind of thing but like the actual panels if you fill your roof like it'll run your entire house so the the barrier right now is it's still tied to the grid so you can't really go fully off grid you still have to be tied to like on a psng or um lannix city electric whatever utility is once you once i majority of the population has like the battery installed in their home they're completely like self-sufficient and you have an electric car electric house everything is solar powered um that's when i think it's going to like really make that transition does that completely save cost too because you like install the solar panel and then what what the hell else

do you even pay for it's pretty much the upfront call well it depends if you're leasing it or you're owning it yourself it doesn't really make i wouldn't lease it but if if if it was up to me i would own my own and it's just that initial investment of insulation and the panels um and then from there you just have like free electricity you have a little bit of maintenance but they're built pretty well it's not much so like let's say solid house 3 000 square feet something like that regular kind of roof what what expense am i looking at right now ballpark if i wanted to solar panel the whole roof um i'm kind of putting you on the spot there sorry but yeah i mean it's been a while. I don't know what like current market rate for panels is, but probably somewhere around $30,000-ish.

Okay. $30,000 to $50,000 depending on like your utility – like your electricity consumption. That's about – I would have guessed about like $40,000, $50,000. Yeah. Okay. So it's not like you're buying a second home there, but it's a big investment, and the tradeoff is that if it's – and they're not right now yet, but if it becomes sufficient enough in capture to power your entire home, that's like saying, okay, well, I'm never going to have – first of all, I build an asset on the house that I get to work into the price, secondly i'm never going to pay electricity bill now right and how like how close are we i don't even know if you said this i was trying to pay attention a little bit but how close are we to those panels being able to do that on a house that puts them on the entire roof and like cover all of your electric yeah

oh you're we're there but you're still tied to the grid so they don't allow you to take 100 electricity the big man i was gonna say that seems like a fucking scam there you go so they make you i mean they would go out of business very quickly if that was the case what about the amish is it amish or amish i say say both ways. They're doing just fine. But they don't have to get the electricity. No. So pretty much, if you put solar panels on your home, the government knows about it. And if you're not paying an electricity bill, they're coming for you. I don't know if they would really come for you.

I think one of the cool things is you can sell the electricity that you produce. There's a whole market for it. So it's called like a SREC, Solar Renewable Energy Credit. And like you can sell it state to state. So if there's another state that's in need, the price of SRECs goes up in your current demographic or geographic location. And you can sell it to other states just like you're selling a Bitcoin or any stock or anything like that. There's like a whole market for it. Okay.

I'm a little lost. What am I selling? So you produce – If I'm New Jersey. You produce energy, right? Yeah. You collect that energy. With solar panels.

Yeah. There's a need for energy in another state, right? Supply, demand. Here you go. Here's some of the electricity that I produced from New Jersey. It comes into a credit. Think of it as a coin. That I didn't use.

Yeah, you didn't use it. And a utility company in Arizona, if they're in need, okay, the rate's a little bit higher, demand's higher, I'll pay a premium for it, and they'll buy the energy from you. But then the energy has to be transported there. Through the grid. That's why you're still grid-tied. So it's the whole, yeah, it goes into the lines. so essentially it's like a game of musical chairs a little bit you're just moving energy around state to state so once all the states buy in there's no end once you get to

like 40 states lights out no pun intended yeah yeah for sure well i guess the the rate of the each s record coin would drop what what about like at night though and stuff does i mentioned this a little bit but that's where i get a little hazy i've heard that like even though the sun is down there's some sort of like uv energy or whatever that'll still power it is it gonna is it not powerful enough to like guarantee my tv is gonna stay on so that's why you're still grid tied too, because like, okay, if it's nighttime, I produce enough during the day, it goes somewhere and it's being stored or distributed elsewhere. But you can still, at nighttime,

you can still get your power from the grid or if you have the batteries installed all day, you're collecting the solar rays and it goes into the battery and it stores it in that battery in your basement. And then at nighttime, the power you consumed um or produced all day goes into your battery and then you can just run your house on it pretty much it's like it's like saving up something yeah like a piggy bank almost it's a big piggy bank every every day of electricity and then you go into the piggy bank at night depending on how much you use yeah it's cool wow so we we sidebarred that off cars though because you were talking about 10 inside of 10 years from now or something

like that yeah we're gonna have all electric cars on the road one of the things that blew my mind there is you're talking about doing a business at some point like it's a passion project where you take gas cars and make them electric cars do you like i guess it is possible you just rip out the entire engine and just stick a stick a voltage whatever in there it's actually like relatively simple as long as you can like understand the electronic part of it but it's just a couple batteries you rip your engine out and you don't need all the coolant you don't need all the crazy lines you don't need the transmission it just goes battery on each axle and

let it rip um so these cars are but and now i'm getting naive about my car knowledge yeah these gas cars are set up such that you're just able to hook in electricity to where you know certain belts and tubes used to be yeah i mean you'd still need like your your ac air conditioning so you would just like tie that you You would probably leave that. But everything else you could pretty much get rid of and go electric motor, which is kind of cool. There's some guys that do it now. I've seen some people do like old Plymouths from like the 60s, 70s, rip out everything and throw like a Tesla motor in it. And it's like pretty fucking cool if you ask me.

Well, that's the other thing. You can just buy Tesla parts like that. I didn't even know that. And think about it in like five ten years but tesla's relatively new you don't find many of them with over 200 000 miles on them right so like does that even matter no no but eventually there's gonna be parts and like donor vehicles laying all over the place you can go to a scrap yard and be like hey i need a tesla here you go we got 300 of them you grab the parts you need are there any because I know a fair amount about Tesla, obviously, because they were the big guys leading the space behind Elon and everything.

But any of these other companies like Ford, I know they've really fucked around with electric vehicles. And then I think Mercedes has started to do some work there. And I think a lot of them have at least gone to start that or create it. Are they anywhere near where Tesla is? So Tesla has the advantage right now on the autonomous driving and a lot of the software-driven things. But mechanically, I mean, there's not really anything super special there.

If I'm being honest, I probably wouldn't buy a Tesla. I don't know if I ever will. I will because I'm a fan of Elon, but I think they're going to depreciate rapidly. Not Tesla as a company, but the vehicles that they produced already that are already being used day to day. They're very cool now. They're very different and unique now. But once every other company is getting involved and there's going to be millions of them on the road, they're very different and unique now but once every other company is getting involved and there's going to be millions of them on the road they're not going to stick out as much as they do currently do you think part of that is the fact that they're relatively minus the computer program they're relatively simple inside whereas let me give like the explanation of what i mean

you know somebody buys a mercedes let's use a more mainstream one rather than like a Rolls Royce or something ridiculous. Someone buys a Mercedes over a Honda because in the Honda, you know, maybe it's not nice leather seats made of whatever fucking animal is the best one. I don't know. And it's not, you know, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that a Mercedes does. And then the engine itself isn't as great. with a Tesla first of all it seems like the engine is engine the the fucking box is very replicable I don't know if that's a word but we'll go with it and then you have the car itself minus the computer right there the computer is also replicable and then the rest of it is not like special in your mind agreed yes um so i mean think about it now you have audi mercedes uh bmw they run the luxury market right yeah and then you have honda and toyota

all most of them are owned by the same company but they just have different tiers um i don't know if tesla has the ability to kind of like i guess guess, own every single one of those classes. So like if you look at Audi right now, they're creating electric vehicles. They perform one-to-one with Tesla for the most part, but they're beautiful. Like that has creature comforts, has everything you need in a car and everything and more that I would ever ask for. So I think like those kind of adaptations and innovations from the existing motor companies, I think they're going to take over. Also like Rivian.

I think Rivian is one of the – I actually don't know that. Rivian? Rivian, yeah. So they've been around. Yeah, look them up. They're super cool. I actually saw some of their vehicles at CES last year in Vegas,

which was really cool to see. So they landed a deal with Amazon to – Amazon is going to take the chassis of all Rivian cars and trucks and put them in all their delivery vehicles um so they'll be one in the corner of the screen for people watching but yeah keep going um yeah that's probably I've been on they've been on my radar for a while now they're probably gonna hopefully they IPO later this year um not sure if it got pushed back or not i'm not super sure but uh yeah see like i'm looking at their trucks right here and they're they're yeah they're they're

cool they're sleek they look a little different but it looks like your new era tech take on like a ford f-150 or something exactly whereas like and i don't know if that's exactly like how that compares when you look at like the cyber truck which looks like it's out of fucking you know i robot you know it's like so i don't know if people are gonna look for what was with like a nice twinge on it or whatever which i guess they kind of do with the cars right now but i'm talking about when this market takes over versus you know something that looks familiar and it's just like souped up it's gonna be interesting yeah the way i look at is like all these companies have been competing for years right they're going to continue to they're just going to change like the drivetrain

and they're still going to compete the ones that are running markets right now so like the higher end luxury vehicles they're probably going to continue to run those markets when electric comes around because it's going to be very similar technology well the other thing we're we're missing here is that this is like slang a lot but it's very true like people use it in passing and just say this and don't think about it but it's really hard to run a car company oh man i wouldn't do it your margins are fucking terrible you know it's like when you think about even like a dealership model and the number of hoops they gotta go through and you know it's not like buying a goddamn even like a phone you know it's like someone's making a big investment coming in there relative

to them whatever they're shopping for like you know a guy might sell 130 000 mercedes and make you know profit of like three grand maybe for sure you know and then they're also a lot of them are set up such that they don't profit at all in fact they lose money on the sale and they're betting on the lifetime like service so that motherfucker better never move from here or better live close and then you think about like how fast tesla scaled and everything it's kind of wild and it's why they it's scary that you know it's elon running it but he's even said this before he's like don't start a car company like they haven't made money because the expense of what they're doing also involves creating

adoption you know they got to set up all these charging stations everywhere which like where even are they with that um i mean so you can travel like cross-country and not have a problem with charging your tesla you could do it it's on every interstate in most towns um i think there's a huge market there for me so naturally natural progression as you see electric vehicles being adopted gas stations are going to start closing they need to be installed or rebuilt and get rid of the gas pumps and put electric chargers in i think it'd be really cool to have like a whole uh a solar array on top of your gas station like on a bunch of land and put chargers in and you essentially become the gas stations of the world i think that's that would

be really cool to get involved with um I see like a huge opportunity there. And that would be a different monetization too, because you would be like, let's say you're the, well, we can't call them a gas station. You're the electric station there. You paid to put all those panels in and you're going to do way more than one home because you've got a lot of traffic coming through there. So maybe you're paying, let's fast forward 10 years you're paying a million dollars or you're paying like five bitcoins for it or something right you know so you invest one-time costs in that but in order to use it people get a utility and they get like a flat rate so instead of like three dollars a gallon or two dollars a gallon whatever now it's like oh you want to use the tesla station it's like paying

two bucks for you know yes like like buying chips or something literally you know is that is that the model they're looking at yeah i i don't know firsthand but i would imagine that's what they're going for um yeah it's just like when i talk with people like you it's it's crazy how close we are to a lot of this stuff yeah it's not far-fetched. You know? No. And, like, even if you had talked... Like, what would you say to yourself from... If you could talk to yourself from December 2019 and tell your past self in December 2019 where we are now,

even with COVID, which is a shocker, right? We didn't... No one saw that coming but even even tell him that which he'd be shocked at would you have thought we're like this far where people are adopting the remote like this and then also looking at oh yeah like saying something offhand like yeah you know i think we're all we could be all electric in 10 years like is that the speed you were looking at then or did covid just move everything up 5 10 15 years um i don't want to like sound like that ass up i kind of like i saw this um mainly because i've been like in that space for a while now naturally um i would say covid accelerated it maybe a year or two um at most i don't think

it's like super drastic um Got people much more comfortable. And the adoption sped up, I'd say, a couple years. But in general, like we're pretty on par here. I mean, if you look at it, like these companies have been building this for years and years and years. They saw it coming. You know, it just like going to market a little bit faster than everybody anticipated. And it kind of, it sped up some things again that slowed down

because the key to any of this is people got to be ready to like look for it you know you can go create the greatest innovation but like if people are like what the fuck is that you know then gets put on ice and that's kind of i mean to loop it back around that's kind of what happened a little bit a little bit with your space not what you guys built because that wasn't built yet. But when you look at, back to the Pokemon Go example, I remember there were some, I think I said this to Anthony when he was in here, there were a couple of companies I was aware of. One of them, I didn't know the people there, but my boss at the time did and was very close with them. They were already looking at doing that virtual world with advertising, right were already looking at doing that virtual

world with advertising, right? So whether it be the billboards you pass and, you know, there'd be some kind of like virtual experience there, which would require a passenger, because hopefully people aren't holding their fucking phone up while they're driving. That could be a crazy one. But more importantly, that whole mall concept, like they were, they were looking at, okay, how do we, you know, they, they didn't get to the tech you did, but they were they were looking at okay how do we you know they didn't get to the tech you did but they were thinking about that and they were like oh someone's getting to this inside of like a year and i guess technically you guys kind of did because that was probably like 2017 but it's not like like their thinking was oh this will happen right when we get to it it'll

happen but it's a lot it's one thing to have like a Pokemon Go game. You know, you can turn that off. But it's like, oh, I'm going to do all my shopping now in a virtual mall. You know, that's some movie shit. I would like to see or talk to the guys at Niantic that built Pokemon Go and ask if they actually anticipated that kind of adoption from it? Or was this something that, oh, I think this would be really cool to do. Let's try it. Or if it was like, this is going to be the biggest thing that the world's ever seen. I would love to know if like they anticipated that and saw it or they kind of, wow, what just happened? You know? Is that that company Niantic?

I don't know much. I've heard the name. I don't know much about them. Is that like the main thing they've done or have they done other things too that I would know of? They've acquired a lot of companies in the space. You'll hear a lot more about them, I would imagine, in the next couple of years unless they want to stay really stealthy. But the everyday consumer probably wouldn't know who they are. Look it up after this. You'll find some stuff. Yeah, they're like on the of like all this kind of technology yeah i mean it's just like it's a lot to handle

like thinking about it's it's kind of it stresses me out because now like i see it like what you guys are doing and like it's cool you know me and jazz are in there fucking like playing around with ourselves and then i leave the house and i'm thinking about it I'm like holy fuck man like am I gonna be doing this or are you gonna be floating you know like and this is a podcast like who gives a shit like in real life though you know it's tough because like I struggled with this for quite some time and I looked at it was like what we're building is either yes it's really cool but what's it really doing to the world you know like what's the actual impact that's going to happen with this so i i like to use uh like kevin sistrom as a uh example instagram founder of instagram did he really when he was building instagram do you

really think it would have affected the world in everybody's day-to-day life at the scale that it did probably not you can run like entire businesses. People quit their jobs and are like full-time on Instagram, either if it's like integrating e-commerce or just being influencers. Do you really think his plan was to change the world to that degree? I'm going to say no. And I think about the same thing. And one scares the hell out of me. What we're building, once it gets into the hands of everybody in the world, it's out of your control at that point, right?

It's either going to be, some is going to be really good. Some of it might be bad. I don't know if it's going to be malicious, but it's going to change social interaction as a whole. But on the flip side of that, I see it diminishing rapidly already. Like go on a plane,

go into a gym, and see if there's one person having, like, a conversation, or if in between reps they're looking at their phone and just buried in their phone. They're just diminishing social interaction as a whole. Where if you can bring, like, a sense of intimacy back, which is, like, that was our whole goal in this. We need to bring intimacy into the digital world.

Then I think it's kind of saving it in a way too, which is an interesting way to think about it. That is a very interesting way to think about it. I sit up at night thinking about this. I'm just a guy who happens to have a little bit of a front row seat, a little more than other people right now, and I think about it. Some of the conversations we've had off camera

is like, when you guys first came up with this, the three of you, I remember asking you guys this back in like maybe January when I was over your place for the first time. Like, do you guys think about the downside of this? And you all looked at each other and like deadpan every day. And I think the way you explained it after that was after a while, you have to used to that. And you have to know someone's going to build this, right? And there's a level to which it's going to get to a point no matter who you are, good, bad and different, it's going to be out of your hands happens and when you start to create – or have the ability to create things that suddenly, I guess, blur the lines between the real world and what's not. And to put an exact example on that, like one I think about – two I think about a lot, and they're different. So first one, you guys are going to be able to bring back air quotes there very famous people who have been dead maybe for a while who are important to

a lot of people right because they laughed at them or or love their content or love whatever they're singing whatever it was you're going to be able to give that quote-unquote six degrees of freedom to put like a Whitney Houston in the middle of someone's house using video of her from her whole life, practically. Because she was all on video. She was from the newer era in that way. We captured all that. And literally recreate, in fact, even the vocals,

recreate all that, which that part's easy but then have it so it's like oh my god whitney houston's fucking singing to me now the second example and this is the one that really gives me pause is like imagine your father and you lost your nine-year-old son to cancer and that was 15 years ago but there's a video of you and and your son having a catch when he was six and i think about four or five years from now i'll even give you a buffer and say like yo when you guys are really like you can get down to every little birth defect you you can put that father on demand that video of him having to catch with his son and he he could play it on demand in front of him in his living room that is i don't care what you say that is different than just watching a 2d video because when it's 3d right there and he can get up and walk and when

we have the hardware to do it he's not just using a phone he can get up and walk around him that could fuck with your head yeah that's something i think about a whole lot and it just comes down to like the efficacy of everything um and like it's in whose hands now because it's out of yours and what are they doing with it so it's funny you bring that up and it's one thing that i think could be really really special but a bit uh a bit scary it's almost like a like a post-mortem effect um we talked to a couple of people at hospitals when we were kind of exploring different use cases for the tech, right? And one thing that we came across was think about like terminally ill patients, right? Or if it's like a mother,

and she knows she's going to die after she has her kid right away, you can capture and have her like give like a speech or say, hey, you're going through puberty. Now this is your first boyfriend, this is what you need to do. And like things like that. And it's like this. You don't want to mess with that stuff. But then like naturally, somebody's going to do that. So like, something that I wanted to do is like, so my grandmother's getting old, right? I thought it would be very i haven't done it yet but i would i would like to um i'm just a little scared of it um i want to capture her have her say something to like my grandkids because she's probably not going to meet them um and in 20 years from now play that and like there's like a full 3d representation of my grandmother but something

that we've also just uh explored was like say you had a tiny desk of you've seen the tiny desk of mac miller right yeah oh my god bringing mac miller back to life and having that tiny desk kind of thing that's the first example dude come on yeah like whitney houston mac miller like all these people and like recreate and recreating the famous moments too yeah you know like people lost their fucking mind when pock came out of coachella in 2012 and it was an illusion yeah and i there i put up a video because i talked about that with anthony i put up a quick tick tock a couple months ago on that and there were there was one or two people i think there's one there's at least one maybe two who were there and they

said when you were there you could tell like none like it looked when we saw it on camera afterwards it looked like a little bit real but you were there you're like tell. Like, it looked, when we saw it on camera afterwards, it looked like a little bit real, but you were there, and you're like, oh, that's just like a, you know, it's just like a flash screen. But what you're talking about is, like, depth and seeing that. And it's... So, to stop you there, like, think about, like, haptics. I keep telling you this, but sorry.

Oh, sorry. I'm a nudge. No, you're good. I got to watch the volume here, because I want to make sure you're coming in and booming for people. Think about like when you integrate haptics with this kind of technology. So like I can build a haptic t-shirt or haptic gloves. What do you mean haptic?

So I guess to explain it like little vibrations that you can build into clothing to make it feel. So like if we shook hands right now, I would feel with a virtual object that i interacted with it and touched it and it would feel real so you can integrate things this again this is in the future but it's there's a direct path it's happening it's going to happen wait wait not us but other company guys okay yeah okay but still even if it's not you like you're working on the visual end you're telling me that like i'm actually going to physically feel like i shook one someone's hand yeah you could so you can get like a like a haptic t-shirt and if we if i hugged like this virtual object this digital object it would feel like i'm actually hugging like a real thing have you ever used like an oculus or like a

vr actually no i have not blue i we just got one i used it to be honest for the first time a couple weeks ago absolutely blew my mind it was nuts so what did you do in there like where were you i was on the home screen to be honest and that alone just kind of like peaked all my curiosity what do you mean home screen there's like this home screen where like it kind of like maps your whole house um and you can get lost in like this weird digital world and i got terrified of it like really really did so it creates experiences in your house though yeah you can't aren't there place objects into your own home so you think about like what we just spoke about and integrating haptic with it you can like live in this virtual environment and kind of feel

okay with it and stay there for a good bit of time it's kind of strange to think about but it's like the matrix yeah like in real like and they're lying in the box or whatever the fuck it was but life imitates art you know like like you know you saw the beginning of covid but not for nothing i had some huge i am legend vibes in there like there's some weird shit that happens which by the way i always say this if some like blonde lady comes on tv in the next couple years and says she cured cancer humanity needs to go kill her before anything happens i'm sorry lady but like i've seen that movie it happened in i am legend i'm not we're not doing zombies i watched that movie like two weeks ago oh my god yeah no no first of all dog dies in the movie that's a hard no-go that's that's a hard no-go spoiler alert sorry and then you know i'm not

serious but still like don't come out with a cure to cancer if you're blonde just saying nothing against you just saying side note but you're talking about this these speeches or like having a dying mom talk to her kids on their wedding day or something, which is crazy to think about. But the emotion of it, take you know it could be a picture from 30 years ago and it's maybe your great-grandmother and great-grandfather and it will very slightly in a way that makes them look like a zombie move their face like if you're listening and not watching i'm barely moving my face like a little bit left and right and when people watch this when like the kid shows their shows their dead grandparents to their parents and their face is literally just moving like that in a picture they cry and it's

real like they cry they lose their minds the other one is and this is a tiktok filter of some sort someone holds their hand over their face and at the end of holding their hand it's like a 10 second countdown or something when they remove it their, based on a picture that they uploaded, now looks like a dead relative or a dead friend or something like that. And you see people react to this. They're not kidding. They're fucking streaming down their face because it's so emotional to see that reality staring back at you.

That is so simple and bullshit compared to what you're talking about you see it happening already yes and so now i'm thinking about that's basically like i don't even have a good example to think off the top of my head but that is basically like the first piece of plywood on a house you're gonna build yeah they're crying at the plywood imagine when they're looking at the fucking house go back to the evolution. Yeah, man. See what's about to happen. I Don't know how that doesn't like I mean, I know you guys still think about like you said every day But I don't know how that doesn't like blow your fucking mind every day Yeah, and then parts of you are like

Do I want to be around to see that happen or like are we ready to let somebody else handle it that's scary though too yeah for sure that's why I want to like stay in control because you can control what everybody's doing with it if it's yours you know

it's like an obligation yeah you never want to play God and some people do that. And that's – Some people love that. Some people love that. It's a power thing. Terrifying.

But there is like that positive competition in your head like, hey, I know that my vision for this is like the morally potentially among the best, right? And I don't know that the next person will be so like in your head you are judging your own morals in that way that's not something that a lot of us can relate to because we don't you know people don't fucking create a compression algorithm like that and create 3d objects you know and there's other examples of similar types of tech or ideas in tech but like to the average person like me you know i don't know how i'd handle that at the age of 40 with a full family let alone fucking 24 25 years old what are you 25 26 just turned 25 okay 25 years old been thinking about this for the last three years at least yeah it's heavy it's heavy as shit man

you just you seem like kind of i don't know you and i all three you seem this way you seem i don't know if the term is at peace with it but just like it is what it is we've come to terms with it you know yeah people listening right now are like fuck man holy shit by the way are we not going to discuss the haircut because you pulled up to my house today and i got like heavy johnny depp yeah man it came i'll put it i haven't put it on camera yet i got a hat head but it came off like a month and a half ago yeah so yeah like blow is one of my favorite movies and you pulled up with the glasses on today i was like holy shit it's johnny you know what that's that's the uh that's the versace shades hell yeah i gotta i

gotta give a shout out to the versace they really do their thing brand deal dude brand deal all day i will i i will pay you i will pay you to sponsor this anyway not really but you know i i realized that actually when i was putting those on it's funny you say that i'm like shit you have them up here you gotta put them on i know they're downstairs but they were sitting on here for a couple podcasts because i was actually outside before but i've worn them like six times in the last year i used to wear those fuckers every single day of my life you know it's like because that's the other thing we're we're talking about all this tech and all this innovation we've mentioned covet but you know it changed reality on everything you know like day to day like i never thought about how often i go outside you know and now i think about that like i haven't been outside

today i'm gonna go for an hour walk. And you're okay with it. That's the weird thing. That's the scary part. I think, you know what though? And you definitely can speak to this because you've been building something for years. But I'm building something right now, right? In grind mode. Exactly.

So it's like I consider myself really lucky to have that because then I don't have time for like the distractions as much for shit that's going on. Whereas like let's take a lot of my friends who have great jobs and like work at big companies and stuff. They haven't worked nearly as much over the last year and a half naturally, right? There's a lot of time on their hands and then they can't go fill that time i don't know how i'd handle that look at their screen time would love to see it would love to see it yeah i mean like screen time i think is like it's like an expectation that you're going to be on there for like seven eight hours now probably yeah for sure it's nuts i mean i i've always had my thing i don't know i'm ocd i have the no lock screen so i can never check my screen time because i will sit my phone like on a charger

open maybe not use it i'm i'm good i train myself to not use it for six eight hours at a time last summer so now i can leave it next to me and i know i'm pretty much not going to use it but like it's technically on the whole time so i don't even know how much i use it but you made the point a few minutes ago like you go everywhere and like people are fucking in it and so maybe maybe a good part of your technology is that i think you actually said this i don't know if i remember correctly but you guys can kind of force people to have to interface a little bit because they're using the tech, but they're seeing the other person. And then eventually they're not using the tech.

The other person's right there. It knocks down one of those barriers. So the analogy I like to use is I actually spoke with my cousin. We were getting sushi the other day, she meant, we were talking about Teslas and like everybody texting and driving. It's terrifying. And like everybody's crashing and that kind of thing. And she said, the problem is not the phones

and the phone usage of the humans. The problem is with the vehicles not driving themselves. That's kind of like a interesting take. It's like they, people are never going to stop using their phones they're too addicted they're not going to like to put them down when they're driving have i was texting and driving on my way here i'm guilty of it we all are it all do cops even pull people over anymore for that shit they're doing it too you ever like see one on the side of the road it's like you're on your phone bro they're not on a phone they're on a

laptop you ever see the cops like driving like this and their fucking fingers are going like this into a laptop it's like and we're getting pulled over for texting and driving yeah she's right that's not the problem problem is the cars people aren't going to change people are who they are cars need to change to adapt to the new lifestyle of people yeah it's funny you bring that up because i had one of my videos that people were arguing over on tiktok was from an earlier podcast it was on the self-driving cars and i was using it as a hypothetical i was trying to compare oh let's uh sorry let's get a little refill here you got the ice bucket yeah but um i was using a hypothetical to try to compare like the value, not the value, the equality of deaths, right? So I was saying like if we had 50% self-driving cars on the road right now and 50% human-driven cars and there were 10 – obviously there's way more than this.

But there were 10 human deaths on a given night versus one self-driving death. The news story is the self-driving death and they're gonna demonize it and they're not looking at it apples to apples The thing is though you bring this makes me think about it because you bring that up The technology for self-driving cars is to my understanding. It's there Yeah, they just need to get I think it is literally like trillions of miles of data to let the government start looking at it because it's a cover your ass it's regulation and so

have you been privy to any of that tech minus what we see in like Teslas that are available right now so one thing I think is pretty interesting like the data that Tes's collect, right? So they're driving every day and if it's autonomous, if they're capturing all the road data, so it knows where every single vehicle is, it knows where it is in the lines.

And if you think about that from a global scale, it can essentially create like a 3D map of the world. So if you look at the AI and machine in machine learning that's uh built into it eventually we won't really need to ever even have steering wheels because they're going to learn they're going to communicate with each other every tesla on the road is going to start to map this world more and more every day to learn more and more every day as people buy more and more teslas or autonomous vehicles um it'll fuel the uh the the the algorithm just to uh just to map that world a little bit more efficiently so eventually there's not even going to be like a steering wheel in the car one of the arguments i hadn't really thought about

with this and should have anticipated but there were a lot of people who and i get it they were making the argument going i mean it would be a couple different levels, and I'll kind of combine them. They would say, first of all, self-driving car is made for that not to happen. So when it happens, you question, can it all happen at once? And then another level people took to it,

which I think, just from a layman's view, is quite possible, is that, what if they all get hacked it's very real concern like very very real see and that gives me a lot of pause yeah and i and that was just a total miss on me but you know like a one of the pipeline just got hacked i mean obviously the they're not as uh call it technically safe as Tesla would be, naturally. But if something like that can get hacked, something like the grid gets hacked, something like Tesla's autonomous vehicles get hacked, it's a real concern. Like something even above like blockchain ability that allows for absolute record keeping and no opportunity for like a zero day or something. I'm getting a little technical, but to like do some things to create holes in software for bad actors to come in and take control.

I think if we're using Tesla as an example, so they're building Starlink, the satellite network. I think if everything's tied to that and they have ultimate control over that, I think that'll help tremendously. And how does that work? What's called Starlink? Yeah, so I'm no expert by any means.

I'll just share what I know about it. Putting up hundreds of satellites all around the world in orbit and providing a satellite network so for uh think of it as wi-fi for everybody in the world um using tesla satellites so instead of like using comcast or verizon you could have access to starlink so say like you live on top of a mountain or something like that right right? You can tap into the Starlink service and now you now have service. Now, can they monetize the fuck out of that?

Of course. Yeah, of course. So why are we so worried about them as a car company? Their margins don't matter. Oh, yeah. Tesla's much larger. Tesla's only one thing that Elon does. And that's the other thing elon not

tesla yeah yeah but tech like in the in the scorekeeping game of life tesla's separate from space they're different entities right so they still have to perform on their own that way yes they're all attached to elon but like if that's owned by tesla that they're gonna have a monopoly on the data repository it sounds like. Right. I'm not sure if – I don't think Tesla owns it. It's probably an entity in and of itself. Interesting.

But he has access. He can use it for all of his other entities obviously. He created it. Oh, I see what you're saying. So it's – yeah, of course. Yeah. It's one of his and so yeah he has control over it and he can control the monetization flow like you know we're gonna charge one penny to tesla for that he's wild man unbelievable human being you've been a fan for a

long time since sunrun i didn't i wasn't when the paypal days i probably wasn't really uh I didn't... I wasn't... When the PayPal days, I probably wasn't really... I didn't know him. I wasn't really in that world. So I can't speak to that. But like once when I was in Renewable and he was running... Or sorry, SolarCity. That was unbelievable to watch come to fruition. I don't understand why he gets a lot of hate.

I don't know. Why does anybody get hate, honestly? Great question yeah it's just like a need and if it comes from the media media the media tends to be quite malicious you can control the narrative a little bit no they would never come on no they would never do that i just don't like i get get it with the gossip and the politics and stuff. Things like that, okay. I think it's fucking horrible what they're doing. But I understand why their angle is to attack, attack, attack and do everything. Fine.

But when we're talking about things to better humanity, I don't understand. I guess it sells, but I don't understand the mindset behind that the efficacy in a lot of like big media it's just diminished rapidly and almost like hardly exist anymore is that solvable people need to stop consuming it and enjoying it the way they do the only reason they publish so much because they make money off of it the only reason they make money off it because a lot of people view it and the only people a lot of the only reason a lot of people view it is because like they're addicted to that kind of like negativity i guess um yeah it's just two

different types of people i guess but people people don't get off their phones if they know it's not good for them sure it's the same psychology like do you think that's gonna stop i mean i don't think that's gonna stop i think people can't get enough of it even if they hate it they still have to read it the headline you're absolutely right and even like i'm not a negative person by any means but like i still see the shit i have to read the headline maybe i won't click on the article but like it's still gonna affect me in some way you know even subconsciously if you don't even think it does it does truly the subconscious is that's the most underappreciated part to me because like you even think about i was talking

with someone about this like the push button. Think about even the news app on Apple. I figured out, now I'm experimenting with it. I'm going to keep doing this for a couple months, and then I'll give some results. But I realized, and it probably was like five, I don't know, maybe not five, but two or three straight years of this. I realize that literally the only two places that they send me notifications from are CNN and Fox News. And so one will come in right before the other when I give a news story. And I actually pay attention to see how I'm going to be – like if I were just getting the CNN or I'm just getting the Fox, what I was going to think about this. It is psychologically damaging. You're absolutely right.

But they're monetizing from it. So they're not going to stop. So like human psychology needs to change and eventually they'll stop monetizing from it because it'll be negligible um but until that happens us as humans need to change the way we consume content and consume media and then from there we'll be able to like i don't change the narrative a little bit there but like it's not up to them it's up to us yeah see i'm a cynic on that a little bit like i don't think we can change and maybe that's like not having hope in people but for certain things like i know myself included maybe you included like most of us we're gonna go to the law of averages and the law of averages says we like negative shit we don't

like it but we're addicted to it we're not going to change and so the way i think about it a little bit is that there has to be some sort of tech that's going to change us. And I may be getting way out of bounds here on what I know and what the ramifications of it are. But I do think about, in particularly, the one thing Elon talks about publicly a lot that he's working on is like Neuralink and whatever. And I think about that from like a fact-checking basis. Because do you ever look at this where it says like according to fact checkers right it's like

well who the fuck are these people right like what do they think like are they right wingers are they left wingers like what's their bias we all have bias I don't blame them how do we have a world where information is just distilled perfectly to you like this like a robot

which is a slipper slip like this is what happened here was the beginning here was the middle here was the end is that gonna be when we can like read each other's minds a little bit with neural link i feel like a lot of it comes down to what's true and what's not and what's manipulated along the process um so if you keep it factual it's not it's not misintrude misinstrued by the media because like ultimately there's a higher power there i'm not saying like nothing religious i'm saying like consumption wise there's a higher power that causes you to think the way you think it just mainly built upon whatever you consume a lot of people say like what you consume is who you are and until like that

object that you're consuming that changes so I guess essentially what from what we were talking about from people people need to change, there's something that needs to change to the people. And typically that is the consumption method. And that ultimately comes down to the media. So I guess you're right. People won't change without something else causing them to change. Well, and I think the important other thing that I should have mentioned as well, that's a question now until we have like that causation because it's not like Neuralink's here right now. It's going to be a little while.

What about like our attention? As masses, we put our attention on certain spaces, right? So where's the average attention now including for older people in many cases? It's on the main social platforms you know so if you are looking at people of their platform of choice but chances are they kind of integrate across a lot of them you're getting your information from instagram twitter facebook or tiktok most of them are owned by one larger party yes and it's they're all a part of the same and now i'm getting towards some of the circles you run in which you know it is what it is but you can have a lot of people who are trying to do

great things but they're all a part of the same community you've had that quote-unquote silicon valley community right and it's not a fault in the sense that this is just the way it works when you're all a part of a big group you tend to take the thinking of the whole group right and so you see biases on these platforms where you know i i think we're far past the point where it's like this political left right thing i think it's like there's a certain opinion you can have on anything. And like, it has to kind of match what they want. And if it doesn't, you don't go. And I don't know that it's like they, and maybe they did,

but I try to see the good in it. I don't know that they sat in a back room and cooked it up and said, we're going to fuck all these people over. I think it just kind of, it's like, it's like a sand peeling away at time like it kind of rusts off or whatever the term is like it blows off and then suddenly boom you know you have this barren desert instead of this canyon or something like that you know i don't even know if that's a question but do you think much about the fact that that attention even if there's like a new platform that comes into the fold like tick tock did recently like that attention is what has to change because that's like the public square

versus tech is going to change us soon enough or people are just going to have to change like you were saying which i obviously don't know that's going to happen it's loaded i'm sorry yeah no and in the middle of that what i thought of is a lot of people ask us, like, what's your end goal, right? And it's either your IPO and you become that big company or you join a big company to build inside of. And I think you really need to look at what are the intentions of the big companies that give you offers, right? And I think it comes down to the upcoming generation of entrepreneurs and tech companies. If their head's on straight, they'll look at that and won't just look at the dollar figure that they throw at you. Because to like a Facebook, unlimited money, it doesn't matter. If they want something, they're going to buy it. So you need the power in the founder to say,

no, fuck you. I don't like what you're about. I don't like what you're going to do with my technology because like for humankind as a whole, I don't see how you're going to benefit or how you're going to benefit humanity with it. So I think the power needs to come in the entrepreneur and the founder not to get greedy and to say, no, I don't care if you offered me an extra hundred million dollars over my competitor. I like my competitor, your competitors intentions with what you're going to do. I see a better fit for my tech inside of this company from like an efficacy standpoint. You took that top down approach. Wow. Yeah. Okay. That's, that's interesting. I haven't talked about this. So instead of looking – I was coming at it from the masses and you took it right to the source, right? So off something like that so you think the impetus is on creating more openness in the people who are

creating these things to lead the way versus what you were talking about a few minutes ago which is like the mass has got to change you think the masses can change when the people at the top change and you think it's possible the people at the top can change yes to a degree but okay i think the damage is done for the big corporations right they are who they are they're not they're too large they can't be agile they can't adapt to new things where the upcoming companies that they're naturally going to acquire the way i look at it is like they don't large corporations like facebook twitter you name like they don't large corporations like facebook twitter you name it they don't necessarily build as much innovation as they did when they started now they buy innovation so they acquire innovative people innovative companies and that's how like

they drive their innovation so you can call it building it if you want but essentially it's just buying it um so i think if the intentions in the people building the innovation are, if their heads on straight, I think that's what can ultimately save it. I'm going to put my cynic hat on again. Hit me. The older I get, the more I realize how much money is the most important thing in the world. And I do believe that every person has a number and when you're talking about companies that have the gdp of a fucking decent sized country and have massive

economies of scale to a level that only once has ever been touched i would say which was standard oil which got broken up you know and standard oil didn't have the upside that these places do it gets real it's almost like the the cork is unscrewed or the corks out of the bottle you know you can't put it all the way back in in this case i don't know like you you seem to think that there are people who have that higher calling of like, fuck you and your money. My thought on the other end is you might be right, but the people who are still doing the fucking are the people who they say no to, who then can say, okay, I'm going to go buy these guys or I'm going to go fuck you up now. Good luck. I'm going to throw a thousand lawyers at you to sue you into submission over nothing and i'm just gonna i'm gonna outlast you because money i can burn it in the air it doesn't matter to me it comes down to greed ultimately it's like yes you have your number but if you achieve that number and then somebody comes in and decides to double it but you don't like their intent intentions you need

to stay true to what your number originally was and what your ultimate goal was from the beginning because once you get like further down this path the numbers get larger but you need to stay true to like your roots and realize okay this is when i started this this is what i wanted to do and i didn't want to go past a certain point even if there was like a larger corporation that tripled my offer and my number is now pennies I think that plays like a big role into it greed is one of the most important factors when making these kinds of decisions I would imagine there was a bartender I knew back in the day who I used to play at these card games

up at a place and it'd be like big poker games and the the bartender there had been there for like 20 years. He was just one of those guys who knew everyone, knew whatever. And he used to joke, but I don't know. It might have been like halfway serious that he had this agreement with a buddy of his.

He was like, he would say it to me dead seriously i still think he was joking but the concept i forget what it was but if he ever did something like if like if he became something put three in the back of his head and he left money in a safety deposit box that you know the guy gets paid for throwing hit on him and i always thought about that because when you look at these tech companies they all started in a garage or in a van or in the back of a dorm room or an apartment or like a fucking side street or a coffee shop they started oftentimes with i mean you look at them a lot of these founders didn't come from money you know they weren't rich they weren't like daddy's trust fund baby they were just like like, yeah, I got this fucking wild idea. Let's see what, you know, they're sitting there fucking ripping a bong and making the next online group chat, you know, and I don't know. I don't know that there's a number right And without knowing it, they all cross over.

And some of them cross over for the worse worse. And some of them just cross over to where they lose their roots of being innovative, right? But the ones that cross over for the worse worse where they get so caught up in the game and lose sight of the fact that they're fucking killing humanity in some way. It can happen to everyone. And so I even think about the startups now that you're talking about. And I'm like, even you guys. Do you have a point where it's like, you know, you fucking grind for 10 more years and you're making billions of dollars as a company and the preeminent provider of 3D tech in the world that like you forget. Yeah, we were just, we were fucking around at the beginning of this.

You know, it's like, it's not you so much as it's like human nature yeah i think the the key is like don't lose your grit because ultimately that's like what it was founded on and that's like why you became successful is because you had that quality where you mentioned like trust fund babies trust fund babies don't have the grit it takes to start a startup and that's why they don't you typically do it that's why you see a lot of like i'm from nothing and i'm gonna build something kind of people because it's like it's a quality that you that you have and you need it life experiences teach you those kind of kinds of qualities um and i think uh and there's a funny story um i'll leave names out of it, but it was something that I've recently heard and experienced. It was like one large corporation.

I'll start here. There was an individual, had a ton of grit, small guy, didn't have much, built something very, very groundbreaking and transformative in the world, was ready to exit. Somebody gave him an offer. Offer was too low. I said, no way. I think the offer was something around maybe like $40 million or something like that.

And he was like, nah, I wouldn't take that, but I would take like $150. And went back to the company. Company said, cool, sounds good. We'll give you $150. Boom, acquired, just like that. Because money isn't an object. It doesn't matter. It's not even real to them. company said cool sounds good we'll give you 150 boom acquired just like that because like money isn't an object it doesn't matter it's not even real to them so they'll buy whatever if they want it they will have it so you got to stay true to who you want to give it to i'm gonna butcher this

quote i think but it just reminds me i think it was eric schmidt it was because it was youtube but i'm gonna butcher the quote but i'm gonna get the idea right after he bought youtube in like 2006 right after they had been born and like you know obviously great investment someone i think they paid like a billion dollars for it or two billion dollars something like that which a lot of money to us but in the context free compared to what they got out of it someone asked them they said what do you think about the price do you think it was a fair price he said what i can't answer that and they're like why not and he goes because we either just overpaid the fuck out of this thing and it's going to be nothing or they're the dumbest people of all time and just sold us the greatest thing ever for no money they're like service a billion dollars

and he's like yeah what happens when i'm doing a hundred billion dollars a year? Like, you know, it's it's all It's like fairy dust to them. No, you know if they once you have that economy of scale, it's like Alright, you know, let's see what they'll take You know and it's like they feel it out and I hear those stories It's not the first time I've heard that where somebody's got like a number and then they're like, oh, let me throw out Let me see if they'll take this and they're like, yeah, sounds good throw out. Let me see if they'll take this. And they're like, yeah, sounds good. Cash or check. It's a holy shit, it worked. Yeah. And then you're like, what would they have paid for it? Like, for real, it's scary, man.

But on the flip side, like, you have to look at what these large corporations have the ability to turn small startups into. It's like you have this tiny little piece of technology. They're the kings of monetization if they have something cool and they have their eye on it either one they'll buy it so their competitors don't have like an upper hand or they'll buy it because like i see directly how this can fit into our current ecosystem and how i can make billions and billions of dollars from it you obviously don't have the ability to do that. It could take you a lifetime and you'll never be able to bring it to the scale that we

can, but we'll give you X and we'll do this for you. Well, I still think that if people, like if you're running one of these companies and you go to get bought because of the resources that that company has and that's why you agree to it. The thing is you do still most of the time – I'm sure there's some examples where this doesn't happen. You don't get to build the culture you wanted to build. So even though – like let's use Google for example and let's use you guys as an example. Let's say tomorrow Google comes in and says all right we're going to buy soar use a round number let's say billion dollars you guys are like all right fuck yeah we're in they want to buy you guys so they want the three of you coming in

and doing your thing but now they're going to integrate you inside of their company and everything and they're going to bring their people in or whatever even though in the short term that can allow you guys those kinds of resources and economies of scale can allow you guys to make a lot more progress right now i still think about the long term and like what does it cap on the ceiling like do you do you guys think about that or are you more just like all right we hope to not be in a position where we have to say yes to something because we're going to get raided with the tech or something like that? So there's a couple different ways you can protect that.

It's either one scale or two IP and patents. But it's like it happens all the time, and you see it where they give you like a golden handcuff. Hey, we'll give you $500 million, but you need to come work for us for four years. I need you and what you've been building and your team to build this inside of, call it Google just for the sake of the example, where it's not yours anymore, but you're still the one running it. I don't know if I would want that situation because it's no longer mine, no matter what anybody wants to say.

But I think it says a lot about what you've built and who you are. Because there's one thing, it's either you don't get the golden handcuff, give you a quarter of a billion dollars, and I just want your technology. To me, that slap in the face says, you got lucky, you don't have shit,

you don't have what it takes to run this. We do. So give us the tech. Good work so far, but you can't bring this to multi-billion dollars. The golden handcuff thing where say, hey, come inside, build this with us for four years. That's them investing into one, the technology, but also the founders. It's like you as human beings have something and I need you to bring this to a hundred billion dollar product

but now we're going to package up how you bring that because guess what you don't have full say over the resources we make you use and that's the question because like you guys right now like i i have a view into your culture your culture is so great because you've you've added these engineers over time right they're like on the ground floor and they're in there. They're fucking building this with you and everything. And now like you get bought by a Google tomorrow. Now they're throwing you a lot of talent. Don't get me wrong. Like there's no idiots working at Google.

But there's a certain way they do things. You know, there's not like this. All right, let's talk about this. It's the freedom. Right. You're gone. Now you're an employee. After you spent five, ten years, however however long it was building this on your own and

you were your own boss and you were the man behind it it was all your of this your decisions and whatever you say goes now it's up to google now you're just another employee you're just a number because like to them you're nothing but to everybody else in your life personally you're the king of the world i think about sistrom and Krieger a lot with this, who you brought up earlier. That was a great one to bring up. Because I don't think there's been like a tell-all book or anything on this.

I would love to read that though. They sold Instagram for I think a billion dollars in 2012. I believe so. Right, like 2012-ish. And they stayed at the company until August 2018. And during that time, Instagram went from, let's be honest, I believe so. hugely benefited from facebook buying them and that's the beauty of the trade the downside of the trade is it's very clear that zuckerberg resented them because they destroyed his his fucking blue f right they destroyed its reputation all the cool kids went to instagram and even though it scaled very well i remember going on Instagram for real for like the first time on my phone. I wasn't even on it until – I didn't get an Instagram until – I got it in 2017 and never used it.

But I got it like September 2018. And I had been on it for a while though doing marketing for people. And I remember using this app in like 2016. Like god damn. It's so simple. It's so perfect like a little old lady could fucking scroll double tap and then they added the stories in like 2017 I think scroll to top tap whatever and that beauty of just like anyone can figure this out they scaled

that so well and then added to like the picture ability and like some of the quality and added it in a little bit of video they didn't over complicate it so even when you heard that there was all kinds of shit behind the scenes going on where there was a lot of button heads and facebook was sending in people krieger and sistron they still had a separate office and they could still kind of build out their team right and they kept it as small as zuckerberg allowed them for you know to a certain extent i know there was still infiltration and all that. But when they left, I don't know how you feel about Instagram now, but I fucking hate that app.

They have cluttered the fuck out of it. There is text everywhere. The menu is a disaster. The bottom menu I don't even use. I don't even know what's on there. Don't give a fuck what's on there. And it's this, I mean, people already tried too hard on Instagram, myself included for a while there.

It's like it already had that culture, and now they've taken this app that used to be, we talked about like the two-click method earlier, used to be like two clicks and figure it out to like, where the fuck is anything? Yeah, I think that's like the Facebook way. So it's funny you mentioned that so my father who you're getting warmed up over there oh man he despises like facebook and like

big technology smartest guy that i know but and like he worked he worked in tech uh i guess in the late 90s when it was like just emerging. And he sees it now. And he was just so against it. I was like, Dad, you got to get on Facebook. He was trying to do these things. I was like, it solves all your problems. Just try. Don't engage too much.

Don't give him access to anything because he's like real conservative on his data. But he was trying to use it. Let's talk about that. Bookmark that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. And he was saying, I haven't used a platform like this in my life. And I don't know how to navigate this. So I don't think they're trying to acquire new users. They're just trying

to add resources to their existing because if it's a new user, and he's like, like, that's not the target demographic for them. He they could give a shit if he uses it. And anybody older, because like, they can't navigate it. They don't know how it's just not gonna happen it's too cluttered there's too much going on and like from imagine if you went on facebook today or instagram today and you've never used it before you would have no idea how to navigate it no no tutorial no nothing's like here you go here's our stuff um but yeah it was having that conversation with him i was walking him through it and he was just clueless and he's a tech background guy yeah Yeah, he gets how everything works, that kind of thing, but just the user experience is just lost. I don't know.

You're saying they're not going for new users. That's a death knell to me because that's what blows my mind. It blows my mind about what they've done to Instagram because they – and it's an ego thing. It has to be. It has to be because they saw what they've done to Instagram because – and it's an ego thing. It has to be. It has to be. Because they saw what they did to Facebook. They saw when you drive the key demographic, and I'm going to mix a couple demographics here and say like when you drive the 14 to 26-year-olds off a platform, you're done, right? You may last a while.

There's a lot of people, know gen xers boomers all over facebook still they're still churning out some money there but like that's that's gonna fade right and now the the cracks in the foundation of the same things that i saw with facebook are happening with instagram and like you see how much tick tock just jumped in here and took an entire new medium what happens when an app that isn't identical to instagram but does something else new but adds in enough of like that pictorial asset of instagram comes in and makes it two clicks to figure it out i feel like these 13 year olds who are digital and and are trained their minds are trained to find the simple things

and find the cool new thing they they're going to find it. Yeah, but then Facebook's going to buy them. Just like how Facebook bought Instagram. So Facebook's bigger than just the consumer-facing platforms. Think about their ad network that they integrate throughout all of their platforms. They're just going to keep on buying whatever's hot and whatever's new. It's just like the Reels thing. They didn't have to buy anything because they can compete directly just by like altering a few things and adding a feature but eventually they'll like acquire a new platform just like they acquired went from facebook to instagram and now instagram's like

the big honcho and then the next one is whatever it's going to be but they'll still integrate like that ad platform across and they're going to monetize across all of them and ultimately it's just gonna they'll collect more and more and more data and they'll just integrate that ad platform across, and they're going to monetize across all of them. And ultimately, it's just going to – they'll collect more and more and more data, and they'll just get more and more powerful. Have you guys looked at – I don't want to ask this without you having to say anything if you are talking to people. But Facebook is the ultimate 2D banner ad type social, right? Even if it's not a banner. It's within your feed it says promoted it's six out like a sore thumb have you thought about like social media not just

facebook like in general in a 3d world yeah what does that look like to the best of your knowledge right now it's going to save the advertising industry because right now it's like rapidly diminishing 2d ads nobody watches them like we said before like i don't know why anybody pays for it but if ultimately it could be the same content and like a 3d nature add another dimension to it and people will engage that'll happen naturally just because like it's new it's cool but if you think about it in like another 10 years it's gonna have to change again so naturally like the natural progression it goes from like 2d ads, archaic, dying, needs to change to 3D, immersive, and that'll live for like another 10 years. And then from there, what's next? I have no idea.

But like this is obviously the next step. I can't concept that in my head. I can't. I've thought about that and I'm like, okay, social media, 3D. I mean, first of all, we got to see the world where the hardware can handle it, right? Because what you're talking about, you can do that. But, I mean, we first got to get people used to the whole phone thing that we've already hit on a million times. But then the idea of like, okay, 10 years from now, people are going to have some sort of hardware probably built into their phone or maybe built in their fucking body by then.

There you go. I don't know. That's a whole other thing. to their phone or maybe built in their fucking body by then there you go i don't know that's that's a whole nother thing you know where they're gonna set their glasses something where they're gonna engage with people like this you know and like and like reach out and and the haptic stuff you talk about is gonna be a part of social media right so now it's like we bring it full circle where we took people away from being social together by going online to fucking comment on their latest picture that's the same one as the last fucking 10 that they took in

the last two weeks to now okay we still have people apart but now there's this emotional connection whatever because we're creating them actually in person again and making them feel like they're making eye contact and actually like having that bond yeah so i think like the next natural progression is going to be digital worlds and socially digital worlds where you don't have to leave your house to interact anymore. Right now, you could be in person with your best friends, and you're not engaged physically with the people you're surrounded by. You're consumed by whatever platform you're using at the moment.

Eventually, I think that barrier is going to disappear. There's no longer like, hey, let's go out for cocktails. It's going to be like, okay, I'm going to sit in sit in my house have cocktails with my digital friends that's like the next thing wait with my digital friends probably i would imagine are they real yeah okay but not like physically not physically yeah but they're they're real people for sure have you seen this little Michaela on Instagram give me some context it's probably I'm gonna pull her up okay you may have seen her before little Michaela was a creation I forget the name of the company yeah so I thought she's not real she's like a digital asset she looks like a Pixar like a on steroids Pixar right you see her I'll put her it's like a deep fake kind of thing

yeah I'll put her in the I think it's this, the bottom of the screen for people to see if they're watching. But they created this character, right? And you can tell she's not real, right? Can you though? Compared to like most other influencers on social media? No, there's not like a huge difference. Because everybody there is pretty much fake also. You are making my point

for me yeah fair i can tell i test that like that's beyond just like some crazy visco filtering you're not allowed to say anymore sorry i didn't mean it like that but anyway we're a little deep on alcohol here whatever so this right here for like one of my very early podcasts, I was looking at the context of influencers. And I came across an article, and then I looked at some others, but there was just one that struck me heavy where they were talking about the integration of virtual and physical worlds. And how the line is blurring between the two not just with people but with what's real and what's not real so there was a kid who was quoted who was heart you know front end gen z-er he was like 18 years old last year so born in 2002 something like that and the quotes he was given like scared the fuck out of me because he was talking about Lil Miquela

and he was talking about her saying that, her, she. She doesn't think this. She feels this way. She represents this kind of thing. She's down to do blank. She's into these kinds of things. And then they're like, you're talking about her like she's a fucking person. And the kid goes, well, the only thing I've known growing up is people who are online anyway.

So they're digital. It's no different. She's no different. In fact, she's more real than they are. I mean, you can go down a rabbit hole with this, talk about like sex dolls and shit and all this crazy stuff. You know, like the whole virtual whatever. like we don't need to go crazy but this looks a lot like what we have conditioned the youngest generations to consider oh yeah it's just a part that's she's a person yeah she can feel things like me you're just looking at me like yeah no that's what it is yeah that's like the world

we're living in today though whether you like it it or not. I feel like we're aging rapidly. Trying to keep up. I'm going to come back to the data point at some point. Let's not forget that because I want to ask about that. But this is a good time to ask about like how like NFTs are a bootloader into this. Because everyone and their mother was screaming the word NFT in February and March. You were looking at that months before. I know Giovanni was too.

I actually was, not because I found it, but I had Cole Cannelli in here, and he stayed after and talked to me a lot. He knows all about that shit. And so I started looking heavy. And then three months later, everyone's like, oh, NFTs are a big thing. So there's a lot of crap there we know that and like the market now has settled down because the initial hoopla is like was like fucking stupid and people were selling shit assets for millions of dollars but the thing that is now starting to become a part of the equation

with nfts is like these virtual worlds like buying a digital horse i see there was one i don't even know if it was an nft but they were buying like a digital house and whatever like are people going to look at that in your opinion the way that we look at real horses and real houses absolutely yeah so interesting you bring this up so i was talking to blau uh well justin everybody knows him as blau um a few months back and he was talking about building this like the entire virtual world it's like a one-to-one representation of the digital world is that the producer wow yeah yeah dj oh yeah yeah yeah um he um essentially you're able to like buy digital real estate the same as it would be in real life but you can

access it through like either like a vr ar environment some kind of like immersion or put it into a video game um so him and a couple of the other djs seem like they're building like this whole digital world where there's like live events happening in these spaces where different technologies are adapted to bring like a real life um events and concerts like fall cap they'll use that and like i can go to bb and t venue in this digital world on friday at 8 p.m and there's going to be a concert happening and then i leave and drive home so it's like this full one-to-one real life video game think of it like um i don't know like grand theft auto but like your real life and like you have control over what happens in that one.

And your friends go there. Yeah, your friends go there and say, hey, meet me at this venue at X time in this digital world, whether it's VR or whatever it may be. Loaded question, but how do you create value on that? And I'll qualify that by saying like with land,'s limited there's a world right so we're talking about going multi-planetary but again we know like mars for example we know the size of that there is a limited supply there's not this unlimited infinite supply of land whereas in a virtual world you can just create shit wherever so how do you even value something if like someone buys a mansion in this town in the virtual world all right i'm gonna create my own town and buy a mansion like what's the value i guess you can like authenticate it somehow via blockchain say

this is my house nobody else can rep replicate my house similar to like nobody can build the same house i'm in right now and this real estate is more valuable than three towns over because it's closer to x just like how like you start to diminish in value when you um go farther away from a city similar to that um yeah i'm not really sure to that degree yeah because like when you build a house right now you have to pay to build the physical house you have to pay for the land and like the land is in a certain spot but hypothetically and i'm talking out of my ass here but in virtual world you'd be like yo if you have the resources to do it at home like people build regular tech at home like all right i'm gonna build this new town right there code it in there but most people can't

just like how most people today can't buy the lumber they can't put the nails in the framing they can't put the shingles on the roof they they can't build a home. Similar to like, you, I, probably your neighbors down the street, they can't build a digital home. They don't know how, they don't have the resources for it. Interesting. That's a good point. So it's like another skill. It's like being a carpenter in that digital world. I'm like a developer in this digital space because like I'm just an engineer and I know how to build 3D representations of homes. That's like the modern day um like civil engineer carpenter what about to go back really broad on the nfts because you and i obviously have talked about this a lot over the last several months off

camera but it seems to me that guys like you who are in spaces around it and are aware of the space and then i'd like to say someone like me who's now been around that you know we see it as that mad craze that it was where there's just people throwing shit at the wall suddenly everything's valuable and all the shit is gonna fade out of the market and be worth nothing and people may get punished for whatever they put their brand behind but you know that five ten percent that's like legit it's first ending right and it's like kind of the beginning here do you think though that based on the fact that most of the nfts we're seeing are built in 2d or you know tech that's not shocking right right? Do you think that you guys, I'll use Top Shot as an example, are going to take like the NBA Top Shot moments

that people are buying on video and now move it to like 3D with NFTs? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, NFT market's kind of crazy right now. So we've been in the space for a while. There's a reason we haven't published anything. I think we needed the market to settle down and become much more realistic before anybody does anything so we have a pipeline of a couple projects coming up um so one with jeff ross it'll be like a virtual um

comedy tour we're able to like oh we're announcing this let's do it we're streaming we're doing it here let's go we'll be like streaming it to the homes of the viewers where they could pop up Jeff Ross like in their own home. And you can give like a comedy roast. Jeff Ross is the roast master. Oh, man. People that don't know. The king. Come on.

He is the homie is what he is. That guy is cool as shit. But yes. Yeah. So things like that. And I think now in the next couple of months upcoming, there's like that market settled down a little bit. And now you can like reasonably price things. And there's not going to be like this crazy escalation of price from the initial drops.

And now it'll help out on like the secondary sales and things like that. And there's like actual value instead of all the crazy inflation. So now I think a lot of like the artists, they're not going to get um killed on that secondary sale because i think like the whole the whole goal for it is to get rid of the middleman no more like little commissions and percentages taken out like from the labels and things like that so now it can all truly go back to the artist and the producer of these drops so like to use the jeff ross example he's working direct with the people creating the assets and that's it. That's just the two of them sharing on it, which in our case, we're looking at making

like an AR asset with him and stuff. So we can produce that. Yeah. Where like before, I think a lot of people were just trying to capitalize on the hype. And if there's one person that knew a little bit more than the person with the, with the following, if they knew a little bit more, it's like, okay, give me 60% of the drop and I'll make it come to fruition. When realistically it was super easy to do from the begin with, to begin, to begin with, you, you didn't need somebody else to do this for you. You could do it yourself with a click of a button. And the whole goal of it was to get rid of that. And in the beginning that was coming right back. So I think this correction is very healthy for the entire market and the vision for the whole industry as a whole.

Dude, I love it because when we were talking with some of these guys, like floating the ideas of like, oh, would we do this or fuck with that? I talked with Anthony about it because, you know you know full disclosure like we had chas in there and me in there like working on building some relationships with some guys like this is back mid-march and he was really worried about like yo this market's gonna reset and i i said something to him like dude that can't happen soon enough because it will take the desperation. There was so much desperation in the room right there. Like, guys, do it tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

And it's like, yo, if you want to build something good, you really got to – the creative has got to be great. And you have to figure out what am I going to make that people are going to value intrinsically five years from now, ten years from now? And so I don't even think, I know I didn't, I don't know that Anthony or you expected that it was going to reset as soon as it did, but I shit you not like that was like maybe like March 15th, March 16th. You can go look at the numbers. The market started like calming down like that day. And so all these conversations we were in, whether it was Jeff or someone else, it was like it got really – it got a lot softer and like, okay, we can breathe. We can think about this because you're dealing with like Jeff Ross.

You're dealing with John or someone like that. I don't know if we want to talk about that right now. But you're dealing with guys like that who are – they have a lot of attention and they have a lot of ideas around it. And so like the hypothetical example of a basketball player or a fighter, right? You can market an NFT a lot better around, you know, like the NBA finals or a major fight coming up versus just like fucking dropping it right now, especially right now. Whereas, you know, if you wait two, three, four months and bide your time and build out creative and then work the marketing around it, this market's going to be mature enough that the buyers are going to be there for the shit that they're like oh that makes sense like even people's painting which everyone painting his digital creation that everyone looked at that thing was fucking incredible yeah like someone

who someone bought that for 69 million that's a great investment 10 years from now it's gonna be worth a lot more because this guy for people who don't know people created i think it was 13 straight years every single day of digital unbelievable like abstract paintings and then paintings like digital art and then put them in a collage all in one piece and sold that one piece online and like some people are like oh god somebody bought a digital piece for 69 million would you buy the mona lisa back at the beginning of the day of the days for 69 million yes you would you know there's value in the early days they probably wouldn't have bought it they wouldn't have seen the value good point but the people there's always a few people that do yeah that's all it takes we have we have people coming to us all the time saying

hey i have this this NFT project. It's going to be great. I'm going to make like $10 million from this. Or 10's a lot, but like maybe like three to four when like the market was hot. And we would look at them and be like, yeah, you're a huge name, but just not realistic. It's not going to happen.

And your intentions are not in the right place. We're in this for like the long haul. We see where the industry is going and like we can truly fuel a lot of the creation of this. So we would turn down people left and right just saying, hey, your intentions are not in the right place. It's not aligned with us. But yeah, I mean from there – and I love to see that the market finally took that little correction because now everybody's intentions are back on track. Now this industry can actually become what it was built to be there was a company back in i think it was literally january 2018 should have seen this

one heavy but that was when crypto was first booming the first boom of it and some company out on out on long island new york who made long island iced teas i shit you not like in a can bottle or something something it was a penny stock like they i don't even know if they sold any right but they were a public company one day they made an announcement and said we are no longer called long island iced tea we were called long island blockchain and i should have known right there that's tough that's awesome because you know you saw it in like the end of fe February, all these companies started sprouting up that are like not tech companies at all. They're like, you know, someone in their fucking mom's basement.

Like, yo, we were called blank and now we're called blank plus NFT. Yo, come do it with us. And so all these guys, even like big names, you know, it's all like we're trying to catch up to it. We're trying to catch up to it. They're coming to you like, well, these guys are telling me we can do five million for this and it's like you don't want to be the bearer of bad news and it might cause them to run away but you're going to be right in the long term where you're like bro that that's not going to happen like you're not making a people here like that's you know what i mean and it's any psychology stays the same in markets over time yeah no you're absolutely right we saw it all

like day after day after day in the of it, you were there with us. It was like every single day there was somebody new, and it was like, I get it. You're a big basketball player. You're a big artist. Yeah, I understand that, and your likeness is through the roof. That's great, but everybody's trying to do this, and you need to settle down. And you saw some of them that we mentioned that to. They dropped one in a different route, and it flopped.

Hey, we told you yeah you have to be careful of these things there was one guy i talked to who i never even we never even brought it your way because right away we had i liked how this guy thought we had an understanding about it and he was like yo i'm really i know there's some good nfts but like this is a trap and i'm like you're speaking my language cool because like it's cool to get a guy like that and look at the other side like the volumetric side because you know no one else can do that but he was saying that he felt forced to have to go do something and then they later had

to do it and you see it come out and you're like he's right yeah but it was a situation where they got like kind of they couldn't say no i'll put it that way but it was cool to see that someone on the inside who was literally building one was like this is not gonna work they they understood whereas everyone else is coming to you and they're like you know 10 million 5 billion like oh yeah no problem like there's a limited amount of money out there when the first ones were going turkish soccer player or whatever it's like no one had nfts out of course people it's the first one people are throwing money at it there's an mlb player who no one's ever heard of he never played he's a fucking artist now more power to him he dropped one for like 1.4 million in like two seconds because he was like the third guy to do it you know like you get that's the early anyone

who's the earliest to the game they're gonna going to get that. But you have to have that understanding. And I know that there was I'm not I'm definitely not gonna say who it was. But there was one of the people we were going back and forth with during like the heat of that was where i was like oh okay this might reset a little sooner than i thought because they were like we have no incentive to have to do this we will do this whenever we want because that was when it was like oh you have to do it now you have to do it now and they're like no and then i look back on that i'm like you know there's always the signs there that like when you feel like it's going to happen because someone really smart says yeah it's going to happen right now it probably is there's something so special about the community that was built early on and i think clubhouse fueled a lot of that um even like the early days of clubhouse like in like september when it was in still in beta and they created

these uh the nft groups i there was just something about that that was so special and you knew that these, the passion that came from a lot of the individuals inside of it, you knew that there was something going to come from this, mainly because of the passion from all of these influential people that were involved. I would love to get their take on what happened to the entire market as a whole, and like, how, if they're still bullish on the whole idea of it. I would imagine most of them were in there from the um from the beginning for very good reasons and they saw longevity but that big influx in i don't call it february and march i would love to see their take on that raiders on the ship yeah that's that's all and and there's always good the people who are in it for the long haul and see the value provided there's value to be there and i there is they're gonna win you know and it

gets frustrating in the short term because you see people like hijack a movement and that's exactly what happened and the big thing that i think sucks is like some artists got hijacked and fucked you know and now it seems like the knowledge of the space is much better such that artists now understand Like oh wait, I have a lot of leverage here and they and they should you know They're they're making they're bringing this stuff to life and not to call out names here But I saw a couple early on that came out from big-name people right in coordination with whatever artist and it's like You know What even is that? Like, it's a fucking stick figure.

Like, you know what I mean? Like, that's not going to age well. It's because they said, I need this to be published within two weeks. Well, you're going to know that it was only built in two weeks. It's obvious. Yeah. And that's the, that you have to, the people in business that i've seen in my career who i'm like i take the most notes from who i'm most impressed with and most like yo how can i be like that guy or that girl like like what do they have figured out

it's the ability to be here 30 000 feet in the air knock knock it low, knock it high, ask the simple questions, and actually read the answers back and not the answers you want to hear. You're not influenced by anybody. No obstruction. You can look at everything from a macro approach. Yeah.

Well, it'll be interesting to see how that pans out. I know there's... I think we have three done. Yeah, we have some really cool ones coming up if i could say so myself yeah jeff obviously is like heavy in the pipeline oh and he's a blast to work with too he like makes the whole process so enjoyable people overuse the term down to earth but i can't emphasize that enough like he's just he's exactly what you see when he's doing a roast like that's that's him yeah and and then he's also very curious about the creative of it which is great

because you get a lot of these guys like all right yeah make me one yeah I love it because he doesn't want to rush he's like I want this to be perfect and I want to have a lot of control over it and I feel like every time uh we're on the phone with them and Giovanni can speak to this I would imagine much more than we can but uh it's like a comedy roast in itself every single time we're on the phone with them and giovanni can speak to this i would imagine much more than we can but uh it's like a comedy roast in itself every single time we're on a call i'm just belly laughing i'm like how does one individual have that power over the other human beings to just like belly laugh the way we do you know you know what's cool though he sees a way bigger picture of this too because you know he's a comedian yeah and they got unless your name was

andrew schultz tim dillon whitney cummings a few others maybe like bird and and bill bill burr and burke kreischer and someone missing or joe rogan who obviously has like the biggest podcast in the world you got crushed when covet hit yeah because you comedians live to play right like to play live that's how they make their money. That's what they sell on. And like to Jeff's credit, he's like, yeah, the world kind of stopped. And like I wasn't as ready as I wanted to be for the last one. That's never going to happen again. So you guys can build me in 3D.

You can put me on a stage. I can be in Vegas playing a show and I can be sold out in Wyoming at the same time. And so the guys who – it's very cool to me. The guys who have a bigger picture of like what's possible here, they look at a company like yours and they go, okay, the NFTs are cool. Like let's do that. Let's do it right. We'll focus on that. But yeah, what's the long-term play here?

Yeah. You know? Yeah. I mean it's true true they're true visionaries i mean they didn't get in a position that they are in today without being a visionary and like you have those types of people have an eye for new innovative ideas that are they know is going to be the future because like they've been in it they've seen the whole evolution of what they've been through especially if they've been in it. They've seen the whole evolution of what they've been through, especially if they've been in it for a long time. Like Jeff, he's an older guy. He's been through it, and he's seen like different eras of like called media production.

And he sees what's next, and naturally this is like the next progression. Yeah. Now, I want to come back to that data point though because I don't want to forget about that. It just reminded me saying that. What you guys do, and I'm really speaking out of my league right now saying this, like my understanding of how it all ties in, I can guess. But it requires a fuck ton of data. You're talking about reproducing people, right? So my question here is that you guys have a very intense awareness of that and an awareness of where the market is. I mean you see where – how much people flipped out at Facebook with the accept agreement, fucking taking everything.

But how do you operate in that world where it's like, hey, we do need a lot from you, the user, in that way. In that way, you are a part of the product. But we're not going to infringe on that and we're not going to sell you down the river here to this company and monetize that way. In that way, you are a part of the product, but we're not going to infringe on that and we're not going to sell you down the river here to this company and monetize that data. Yeah, so I guess that's kind of two parts. There's two sides to that. So it's one on the capture side,

two on the consumption side. So on the capture side, yes, to create these kinds of assets, you need to capture every data point known to a human body. So we have that, and it's like a full 3D representation of all the data that builds a human being. So we have that. And then on the other side is similar to how Snapchat collects all of this data, which most people have no clue.

But to place these assets in an environment you need to scan your entire room so essentially at its core it will fuel the adoption of like building this uh 3d representation of like the world but you collect the data of like inside of everyone's home so if say you wanted to place one of like say if you want to place jeff ross inside of your um your room here and you wanted to see this comedy experience, to do that you have to scan your entire environment so you can know that I want to place Jeff on this coffee table. So with that, the data you were able to collect is

I know what bottles on the table, I know the size of the table, I know what kind of rugs you have, I know the color of the paint on your wall, I know the depth of everything in this entire environment. Think about that at scale. Millions and millions of users. I have every home in America. Think about Snapchat. Everybody you know uses Snapchat,

and they're using these filters where they're scanning their environment. They're collecting all the data of the world, essentially. So you need to be very careful where all of that data goes and what you're doing with it There's a lot of directions. I can take that I'm trying to think where I want to go first Is this it's a tough problem, but it's like it's like anything in life If you want it you have to pay for it, right?

There's there's a price to pay for anything if you guys are gonna create this stuff You can't just like snap your finger out of thin air be able to get it but people let's play devil's advocate and i'm sure you guys had to do this all the time when you're talking with vcs or whoever you know okay i'm the regular person and i find out who you are sore and i find out you're this company is bringing me this thing why am i going to trust you guys with that data? And I'll even answer the question for a second and play cynic and say, we've already trusted every fucking company. Is that what you're relying on? Most people don't care. Yeah.

It's like, oh, you got this to me. You got this to my phone. I trust that you probably went through the hoops. Most of them probably did not. The regulation needs to – I mean, they're working on it. And there's a lot in legislation that's geared toward fixing like the data collection rules. But it's not quite there yet. And mainly because I believe legislation is like five years behind.

They're still using the logic based off of like when Instagram was like midway through their creation. It's like it's not the same anymore. The type of data you're collecting is completely different. And now like they need to be thinking like a tech company. We're like Silicon Valley. The whole idea behind is like rapid scale, rapid creation, rapid innovation. And I can grow faster than anything else. I don't know of any other industry or government

or anything like that that scales like that. And nine times out of ten, a tech company will scale faster than any government. That's kind of easy to do. Right? Yeah. And that's the problem when they're the ones making the rules and making the laws around it because, I mean i mean hey you're not going to keep up so i think there

needs to be like some kind of merge there and like i'm no expert in that space such as kind of like what i see but i i see changes that need to be made okay the second layer to this that i didn't go to first i'm glad i didn't because that gives some context right there that's important. Because, yeah, the regulatory environment is going to have to catch up with some things, and that's just kind of built into the expectation. Like, okay, we're going to get ahead of the government, so they're going to have to catch up. And like you hope you don't – like I'm not talking about you guys as a company. I'm saying like everyone. You hope that not enough damage in like international waters is done on the way.

Okay. People talk about – you used the Snapchat example, correct? hope that not enough damage in like international waters is done on on the way okay people talk about you use the snapchat example correct obviously you know people are videoing around even instagram you know capturing stories and stuff god knows what the hell zuckerberg put into that you know you also look at tiktok though which is an interesting case because it's not an american-owned company its own it is owned by do you who i probably pronounced that wrong i'm sorry but it's owned by a chinese company and so a lot of people including myself have had a lot of questions around data transfer that can happen there because it's people videoing they're capturing the whole area and putting that data

on there some smarter people than me have explained to me and made me feel more comfortable about it in the sense that they're like the amount of, I don't even know if the word is data, but like the power you need to be able to transfer that data from the United States, because we're worried about our users here, to China to get the mainland China into the government

is beyond what we know we can do with tech in some cases so that makes that part feel better but they're still capturing something and you have to worry about like machine learning to me i think about that did you ever read super intelligence by bostrom i have not you gotta read that yeah fucking wild don't smoke before you read it don't do that gotcha just fucking read it sober and like you you got to read it in pieces like it took me a month i read 20 pages at a time and i'd like get up and take a lap and think about life and like be like wow i might you know be here when humanity ends side point but he taught he points through all these he paints all these pictures of

potential uses of like ai and it's all derived on learning like getting data points from right now and so you're talking about snapchat you're talking about tiktok whatever we're talking about they're getting all these data points and then you build an ai that eventually matches human intelligence and then surpasses it dude what do you even do when that happens now i mean i have this picture here because that's the next frontier like we had the nuke and now it's like can machines pass people and then not be told what to do anymore and fuck us all over there's there's a lot that goes into that conversation yeah um yeah i mean i think again comes back to efficacy and like what we allow the machines to do um because like ultimately we're building them right they learn on their own but there's also like a limit on what

we allow them to learn um but if there's like a malicious approach to creating um that machine learning that's when i think uh there could be like very big problems like everybody's scared of like nukes and things like that not so much i'm more scared of what somebody creates and that learns on its own without us you know what i mean there was i don't know how true this is but there was like a an ai that facebook of course facebook built it like two years ago three years ago something like that and the ai they built two of them and they invented their own language together and they started fucking talking to each other in a language no one understood and they were like and they just pulled the fucking plug button off them. I worry about where, you know, and I know movies like romanticize it, or not romanticize it.

They fictionalize it, and it's not realistic, or at least right now realistic, but you look like X-Mac, you know, where you can't just unplug it. You know, and like decide to do something. How do you not get to that point? It's tough because like you have the smartest people in the world creating things that are built to be smarter than the person that's creating it so smartest people in the world building those kinds of things what are the limits there you know i don't know if there are any i mean i'm fucked up from reading super intelligence but depends on the intent of the creation and that gets into like the moral question because there are a lot of people who just say yeah you know there's enough

good people out there it doesn't matter it only takes one bad there are bad really smart yeah there are bad people in this world there always will be and if you get the wrong people and unfortunately it doesn't even take like a bad. It takes a blind person. Someone who's really smart and is just so fucking focused on it. You know? I worry about that. Even thinking about Kurzweil sometimes. He's drinking almond milk and eating dry spinach and nothing else because he's trying to be here to live forever

and fucking building all the Google algorithms that when you type out your email and it tries to autocorrect and it looks incredibly accurate, that's Ray Kurzweil building that. And I think about he's not a bad guy. I love listening to him talk. He's clearly all about it. But is he so like, oh, we got to build this. We're going to live forever.

That like one day he's like, oh, fuck. Oh, we're all going to die now. Like you don't know, man. You never know. You don't. Well, one last thing before you get out of here that i gotta ask you about is this whole movement now that is maturing like it was new for a while and so like we had to see where it was gonna fall and now we're starting to see the chips settle and that is the covid move of tech heavily not just remote which happened naturally but to miami where suddenly francis suarez sends out a tweet on december 4th and this no pun intended this nuclear bomb goes off and

suddenly boom people are leaving san francisco they're even leaving new york where there was some tech infrastructure and going down to the lovely south beach do you think that that is because people are down there like it it has happened do you think that is a permanent thing or that is something that will eventually reset and people will be like yo i like this but you know i'm gonna go back to where i was yeah Something I've thought a lot about and I'm sure you've been to Miami. You're familiar with like what it's like down there. Okay. Gotcha.

How about Miami? So I- It's my favorite place on planet Earth. Why do you literally think they're going to run out of space? Why do you think that? Have you- Before the boom, you go to Miami and like there's- The traffic is ridiculous.

There's people everywhere. There's already not that much space. Yeah, there's high rises with 60 floors and you could pack them in. That's no problem. But the issue is pushing out inland. One interesting fact that I learned recently from last time I was down there, I actually heard this. If you venture closely outside of Brickell, there's like the call it the slums, a lot of like breaking down buildings,

and it's not like a great area to be don't get lost out there. And it's difficult to clean that up. And you would think with all the money and all the power and all the resources coming down there, why can't you clean that up? So back in the heyday of Miami, the, I guess you call it the cartel owned all the real estate, right? So they bought up all the real estate and eventually they cleaned all that up. But the way they did that is they incarcerated them. So they're all in prison. They're all still there. But the problem with that is they still own all of the real estate. So they're in prison and they're holding it there but the problem with that is they still own all of the real estate so they're in prison and they're holding it near and dear and they won't sell it so the city can't

buy back the real estate just outside like surrounding miami so it's just decaying and falling apart so there's like a couple mile radius with just nothing and just kind of slums mainly because they can't get the real estate back from the incarcerated cartel members or the families you're saying that like on the edges of miami yeah where it starts okay that's interesting i haven't heard that yeah because look at that number behind you i pulled it up the miami area that's what's stunning the area is over 55 square miles yeah right and when you look at miami there are a lot, even the infrastructure you're talking about, and I agree with you, there's a lot that's built, but there's also a lot that have been

waiting to be built or finished. They've been sitting there with cranes, 30 of the 45 floors done. And so there is a lot of space to still build up. And I think, obviously, that's an overdrive right now. I mean, you got to put in an offer on an apartment in Miami. It's gone before you send the text. I've been trying to move to Miami for quite some time now for a couple months. And I have a couple of realtors working on it and they'll send us a listing. It'd be perfect. Exactly what we're looking for. I'm like, yeah, that's great.

Please send me next steps. 15, 20 hour later, they'll say, oh, sorry, that one has been sold. I'm like, what the fuck? Are you kidding? It's so difficult. Unless you're down there, it's a bit difficult to move unless you're like paying like a full term in cash but that's a whole nother story i gotta look into that though because what you just said was a total curveball i know nothing about that like the and it doesn't surprise me like old cartel money

and shit just like holding on i mean god's not making any more land so hold on to it yeah but that is the thing when you look at it versus like an austin and austin's done a great job and to be clear austin was happening before covet it was it was already a secondary landmark right and i had a client who went down there early and was like yo like he works in tech like happening there but austin is like an inland hilly mountainous you know woods and on outside town. It's this laid back kind of whatever. And I've never been there, but I know that from people that have been there a ton, live there, whatever. It's not like this metropolitan, boom, let's get shit moving and building. but like miami to go back to that point they still do have room to build where they are and if they can figure out and i again i gotta look into that that's a curveball but if they can figure out some of that no man's land around there i gotta look up new york but that is a fuck ton of square mileage right there that's got to be way bigger than new york and like it's

miami and adventures out there's like the rail is blowing up carl gables and like outside like the u they're really starting to develop um and what's great is like the people that have been there forever the real estate's going through the roof so that's another thing that's great to see the one thing so i'm a big fan of the florida keys i spent some time that we actually built a lot of our company from like this cool little shack on the water and the keys um and uh it's a super special place and like very homey and i just hope it doesn't get filled with um the big tech that comes down and kind of inflates the cost of everything down there because like it truly is a very special place and like a lot of them are not

going to be open to that call them outsiders coming in buying up all the real estate so i'm very curious to see what uh what happens down there as well some of that's not their choice unfortunately which is interesting but they can you know build the culture such to get the fuck out of here you're not welcome we'll see how that works but you to me san francisco and we have to still see a play out it's early here you know you never know some people could go back but look i see a lot of people burning the boats. They fucking sold their shit out there. They are here. They're not here. They're in Miami, right? Like they're gone. It's going to be very interesting if that continues to age that way, the case study of San Francisco,

because the living expenses that they allowed to get out of control there and the tax dollars that they allowed to happen that are a fuck ton that then people got nothing for they it's almost like covid or no covid a lot of these big cities were almost saying to people fuck you please leave and the only difference miami did is suarez said yo like what can i do for you come on in like all right how can i keep my taxes low for you? I don't care what political side you're on. Like, if you can do that and demonstrate you have a well-functioning city, anyone's going to be like, yeah, that sounds pretty good. Yeah. You know?

Yeah, it's interesting. Like, I've spent a lot of time in San Francisco over the past couple years, and every time I go, I'm never excited to be there. Like, yeah, there's a ton of innovation. There's a ton of innovation there's a ton of tech but I think it was it's it's dying and it's oversaturated well was oversaturated and I don't know I don't know if it's just like me personally if it's like a lifestyle thing but I never was a big fan of San Francisco although it's beautiful and there's a lot of opportunity just was never like my place but going to Miami i don't again i don't know if it's a lifestyle thing or like you can't go wrong might be a looks thing too yeah it might be a little looks thing

yeah i remember they they had a early on in clubhouse they had um london what's her name london i forget her last name but she's the mayor of san francisco oh okay in a clubhouse with suarez wow from miami oh i wish i heard that most awkward thing of all time and like she was scrapping and and scratching to try to not fall apart but like all these people are fucking leaving her city and she's like we've done such a good job you know typical politician patting themselves on the back we we responded to covid so great everything we did was awesome and the host who was mark andreason's wife or ben horowitz's wife she kept on calling up entrepreneurs to the stage who had moved to miami and she was awkwardly trying to be like yeah so when are you coming back and they'd be like you know so um the the thing is like when it comes to yeah i'm not coming back like then they leave the stage and and it's just like silence and suarez is sitting on mute the whole time like

i don't even know what to say right now it's a shame because like it was an incredible city and like the rush and like what they've done there is unbelievable. It's going down in the history books, but there's a time for everything. Well, the other last question there is the – and we hit on this earlier with something, but I've never spent time there, so I don't know. And I've certainly never spent time in the tech circles there, so I really don't know. But there is the proverbial one-thought mindset that goes on there. And it's not – people make it political, especially like the right wing will politicize that. I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about like, yo, this is how shit is done, right? It's one way. This is how you fund a company. This is how you build a company. These are the types of things you build. If you stray from that, fuck you, right? Which kind of goes against the entire founder's idea of like what are we doing to change something right it's almost like counterintuitive i think that a lot of people who left there certainly motivated by covid and what

was going on and how much better miami looked in that way i think i find when i see these people talking on twitter and talking on interviews and stuff they're like very refreshed by the fact that people there's not like one way of thinking in Miami. You know, there's not this like, here's how shit's done. It's kind of like, all right, yeah. You know, it's like, it's like, it's like the wild west again. There's some diversity. Yes. You go to San Francisco. So like we, we, we saw this from early on. It's like, you go to San Francisco and you sit down at a coffee shop. Every single person is either one pitching pitching a VC, two, trying to hire an engineer, or just having a conversation about like the startup

that they're thinking about going to. We're here in Jersey building this startup and we're like, there's a handful of us and there's nobody to talk to, nobody to communicate to, nobody to express your problems to. And you just kind of like figure it out on your own. Like, I think I'm doing the right thing, but out there, like you're just another number.

Like there's no diversity whatsoever. And that's why I think Miami is very cool because there's a lot of tech going there. So you still get that community, but that's not the only community there. There's a lot more going on than just solely tech. Huge. And you see Suarez also capitalize

on attracting like Wall Street and stuff. I mean, he's focused. Like, I'm so impressed with that guy he's focused on that he's like i don't give a shit who you're voting for just like i'm trying to build my city here and i think he also got like 90 of the last vote so he's not worried about anything and it's like okay like let's let's make a let's bring all the talent in let's just not make it one industry or whatever let's get tech is the best we want to focus on that but let's get wall street here let's get you know obviously like real estate tycoons are going to need to come

down there or fucking fix that problem you know like he's focused on all these communities it's it's really amazing yeah i mean like real estate's been there if you bring tech there naturally wall street needs to go and follow yeah i mean that's just kind of like the way of the world in this generation um they never did that that much in san francisco i know they're out there but like they didn't you know what i mean it's not as they still were they were new york companies yeah yeah and like the new yorkers were converted to the san francisco way everybody kind of calms down they wear button-ups and all birds instead of the nice tailored suits which is nice it's quite refreshing refreshing. Suits might be dead, man. You never know.

Hope so, man. I hope. It's like that was so archaic. I had that moment after college, maybe two years in, where I was like, yo, I went from wearing a backwards hat and sweatpants every day to wearing a fucking tailored suit. And now look at you now. Look at me now.

There you go. I'm back on my roots, baby. That's why Miami's cool. I remember i was down there two weeks ago and uh we saw a couple like overheard a conversation from a couple wall street guys and they were wearing like just polos shorts and flip flops were like when would you ever see this in new york and they were happy as hell you know what i mean yeah it was great to see it's a vibe well listen man i'm glad we finally got to do this yeah and we'll do it i i know like anthony's gonna come in here again probably like mid end of summer that's when

we're kind of talking about i know you guys got some stuff going on so i want to work it around that and then we'll get you in spread you out a little bit get you in as as well because i think what's really cool about this podcast is we can also you know been able to build relationships on my end where it's like we can see the progress of things as they go along you know like you guys are so much it's like a whole different world from when anthony was here and now i'm like i'm mad i know some of the stuff going on i'm like holy shit like this might be wild in fucking august so the listeners get to come along for that ride and and the i i gotta say i think it comes across in these two sit-downs i've had but the culture of what you guys are building is really fucking cool man not just what you're building the culture of

it like you guys and i'll have bait i'll get baker to come on here too he's been dying to to be honest i was talking to him today he was like oh my can i come with you it's like do the next one do the next one dude i need to have him on yeah he's an outlier yeah i like him no i appreciate those words i mean we've been working really hard for a lot of years on kind of building this kind of culture and uh i'm glad we get to we quite often we don't get to showcase what we're working on um obviously we're a bit limited on what we can say on here but uh you kind of have a an art on how we can uh bring it out of each other. So I truly do appreciate that opportunity. Yeah, and you're okay on here.

I mean, it's cool that people get it. Like if there's something that we get to where you're like, I don't even think we had to do that. No, definitely not. I was better this time than last time. Anthony was a couple times like looking at me from across. Don't go there. I'm like, okay.

But now I felt more comfortable with it. So we'll do this again, and then I'll get baker in here in like probably a month or so if he's game to do it oh he's eager amazing because i thought it was the opposite so i'm excited because he's like he's the cto he's in there fucking doing it every day i'll nerd out i'll try to keep up people are going to be excited about that one so riley cool thank you brother yeah and uh we'll do this again maybe like six months something like that sounds good man cheers all right cheers to you thanks excited about that one so riley cool thank you brother yeah and uh we'll do this again maybe like six months something like that sounds good man cheers all right cheers to you thanks for coming in dude everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace