This Week in Startups - How generative AI is enabling hologram assistants with Looking Glass CEO Shawn Frayne | E1753

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

This Week in Startups is presented by: House of Macadamias is the next big health trend! Get 20% off your first purchase and a free bottle of cold-pressed macadamia oil at houseofmacadamias.com/twist by using code twist20! Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world, and Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist Meowtel. Traveling soon? Book a local and insured sitter on Meowtel, the #1 cat sitting app. Save $25 on your first booking with code TWIST25 at https://meowtel.com! * Today’s show: Looking Glass Co-Founder and CEO Shawn Frayne joins Jason to demo their new hologram assistant (1:03) before breaking down the unique use cases for Looking Glass’s technology and Shawn’s perspective on the pace of AI (10:24). Follow Shawn: https://twitter.com/shawninvents Check Out Looking Glass: https://lookingglassfactory.com/ * Time stamps: (0:00) Shawn joins Jason (1:03) Shawn demos Looking Glass’ hologram assistant + Looking Glass’ business model (8:53) House of Macadamias - Get 20% off and a free bottle of cold-pressed macadamia oil at https://houseofmacadamias.com/twist by using code TWIST20 (10:24) AI’s impact on product design and how users interact with Looking Glass’ platform (17:57) Investing in hardware startups (20:43) Crowdbotics - Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at http://crowdbotics.com/twist (22:10) Looking Glass’ customer base (31:23) Meowtel - Get $25 off your first booking with code TWIST25 at https://meowtel.com (32:42) Shawn’s perspective on AI (37:18) Shawn and Jason’s first picks for holographic assistants * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo & Apply for Funding Buy ANGEL Great recent interviews: Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

Tell me something funny about Jason. Oh, Jason Calacanis? Love his monotone voice. It's like ASMR, but instead of calming me down, it puts me to sleep. But hey, at least he's got tech smarts. Am I right? This week in startups is brought to you by House of Macadamias is the next big health trend.

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Traveling soon? Book a local and insured sitter on Meowtel, the number one cat sitting app. Save $25 on your first booking with code Twist 25. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I'm joined by Sean Frane, the CEO and co-founder of Looking Glass. He was previously on episode 902 back in February of 2019. We wanted to have my back on because they are cooking something very interesting at Looking Glass.

Sean, welcome back. What have you been up to? Thanks. Thanks, Jason. Good to be back. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me what are you working on? We're combining the realism of polygrams with the realism of conversational AI. So pretty hot stuff

Okay Well I mean the best thing to do here Is to show Don't tell So maybe you could do a quick demo If you're not watching the video You can go to YouTube.com slash this weekend Or if you're on Spotify

You can click the video player And if you're on Apple podcast You have to search for this week And start up's video There's two feeds video and audio But we'll sports cast it And we'll talk about what we're seeing On the screen while we do this

Always fun with holograms to Sportscast. Yeah, so the name of this platform is called Light Forms, and it combines holograms with ChatGPT. I'll pull up one of the many light forms here. Okay, so what we're looking at here is a camera pointed at a frame. It looks like a picture frame with some light around the edges, almost like a neon light around the edges. That is our looking glass portrait to display.

and I'm going to bring a little Shiba Inu into the looking glass. Okay, everybody's favorite dog after Bulldogs. So there's your puppy, and we're seeing like a cartoon character that is, has a lot of depth, looks like a actual avatar in the real world. Hey, can you hear me? Hey, girl, what's up? Ready to kick some metaphorical butt today. Hey, uh, little Enu, do you know who Jason Kalakanis is?

Hey, hon. Of course I know who Jason Kalakhanis is. Do you want me to give you a lowdown, or are you just trying to flex your startup knowledge? Tell me something funny about Jason. Oh, Jason Kalakhanis? Love his monotone voice. It's like ASMR, but instead of calming me down, it puts me to sleep. But hey, at least he's got tech smarts, am I right?

One more question. What was Jason's best investment as a VC? Oh, m. Let me check my crystal ball real quick. Kidding, girl. Everyone knows that Jason's best investment was Uber. Obvi. All right.

So, you had this conversation with this picture frame, with this animated avatar character of a dog. And every time she was thinking, you asked her a question, a couple little thinking, like a thinking bubble, kind of showed you three bars and the three bars like you might have on your cell phone to show you reception were moving, I guess, to indicate that she was doing a search on the internet. And then we also heard that instead of just reading it in a monotone

in a boring way like chat Shepit Wood, she had a little bit of style, a little bit of hipness. So a bit of personality. So you've trained her to have personality while she did those queries. She's a bit sassy. Bit sassy. Yeah, that's what she does. And combines with a holographic output of the character.

And so really what we're focused on with this Lightforms platform that works in looking glass holographic displays is pulling those conversations with AI into the real world. This is such a great idea. I feel like we had this discussion already. We did. We did. I took your idea. Well, I mean, it's a pretty obvious idea that I think you had already, so it's very generous of you to give me credit. But last time you're on, it was a couple of hundred episodes ago.

Here's what I said. Oh, my God. I just figured out your entire company. I love talking to smart people. It's so inspiring. If this was Alexa, and you have all these deep fakes, deep fakes, you call them? I think so. Real fakes, deep fakes.

You have all this deep fake technology. this looks like my Amazon show which has a little screen on it if Bezos if you he got his hands on this and Alexa was looking at you talking when you said Alexa call me an Uber

right imagine that have you thought about that taking one of taking Siri or Alexa and then bringing them to life that was pretty funny that was a little bit about 30 pounds heavy there so shocking be able to see me, that was fat J-Cal, as opposed to Schfeld the J-Cal now. But aside from that shocking moment

of how fat I was, what are you, were you actually, was that the path you were thinking about already? I'm assuming you were. There was a, there's a short list of four or five killer apps that we were all, we've been working on for the last eight years of our company's life. And so conversational holographic AI character was one of them. The problem with Alexa, and we tried this with IBM Watson, all the stuff for four or five years,

has always been, didn't feel real enough. You know, the holograms felt real, but the conversations didn't feel real. But now with ChatGPT and, you know, some additions of personality combined with the holographic output, it feels as real as a real character, you know, there in front of you in the real world or a real person or what have you.

And so what is the business model today? Because obviously you have this looking glass. You created the hardware and the, I guess, the software platform to create these 3D, you know, holograms. And I don't think they're that expensive. So what is the hardware cost? And then what do you think the business model will be? Are you going to be a service provider in a platform,

or are you going to try to actually make an Alexa competitor, or do licensing deals with Marvel or Disney? What's your, the business model? And how much did you get those, the looking glass blocks down to? I guess you call them blocks instead of frames. It's cool a name. Yeah.

And these newer systems that we use, they're actually, they're hollow, so they're very light. And the screen element itself is very thin versus the ones that, I brought to your studio a few years ago. They had big old blocks on them, so we're kind of beyond that point. And so the business model is to sell hardware, like the looking glass displays, and to sell time. So time that you're chatting with these conversational AI holograms. And we're focused, obviously, giving folks a taste in their home.

So people can buy a looking glass portrait for 400 bucks right on our website, looking glass factory.com they can give light forms the platform a try and there's some sample characters in there that people can have conversations with and see what it's like to

chat with different characters with different personalities, different holograms with different personalities and then for enterprises we charge for time and so the more you chat with the light forms the

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she said earlier. You did a Kickstarter once or twice, raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars from that, and then you did seed rounds and series A, and you've been just grinding and grinding as this product, which is a hardware product, to have the hologram, looking glass. That takes time. But then, uh, suddenly you have AI catch up in that time period, which makes it super interesting because you must have seen there is a TikTok influencer charging a dollar a minute to talk with her. Right. Yeah. And so it doesn't take a genius to figure out that, hey, you could have a Marvel character, uh, an influencer and you could start a virtual relationship with one

of them, or now people are starting to speculate, well, you could take grandma or grandpa and, you know, have whatever, if you did 10 interviews with them and you had 10 hours of conversations about their life, you could create an AI where you could at times, instead of looking at just a picture of grandma, you could ask grandma, you know, hey, what was it like in the roaring 20s? And she might give you an answer. Absolutely. And, you know, our piece of it is making sure those characters have real personality, so it doesn't feel like the chatbots set. No one likes when you're waiting for, you know, airport customer service feels more like a person, a conversation with a person, and the embodiments holographically. And, you know, people have imagined this

future where conversational AI is embodied, but a lot of those imaginings have historically in sci-fi been in robots. But the problem with robots is they're made of metal and plastic and you can't change them. They're sort of, you know, stamped at the factory and then that's what they are. Kind of like a Blackberry keyboard. But for this moment of the embodiments of conversational AI, holograms provide a much more flexible iPhone-esque type of platform. And are people third parties using the platform yet? What's the most interesting thing?

you know, folks have used the product for it. So this is at the very early days. So we just started teasing this out and are really just announcing the platform now when this podcast comes out. We do have folks, even from the early teasing that we put out there with one of the early light form characters, contacted us. They want to make their mascot into a living, breed. breathing, well, almost breathing, but a living, a hologram in retail environments, in location-based entertainments, for events and stadiums, all these types of things folks are reaching out and saying,

wow, we have a mascot or we have a person that we want to turn into a hologram you can chat with. Can we do something with looking glass? So that would be fascinating if some sports team had a mascot, you could have the mascot greeting people at the store, at the store, at the stadium, you know, if you go to Disneyland or some amusement park, you could have all the Avengers and you could walk through the hall of Avengers and you could actually talk to them and ask them questions. They might know who you are through some QR code or your phone app, and you could actually have a conversation with Ironman Tony Stark.

The possibilities here endless. And those frames now, they get quite large, right? So the $500 one is what we would consider like a desktop photo of your family, like I don't know it's out of 10 by 5. It's around like an iPad size. Yeah. Got it. But you can do bigger ones now.

I remember you had talked one in our previous conversation about doing larger ones of these, right? Yeah. So we have a 32 inch and a 65 inch looking glass despite their, yeah, they're big. That's like TV size. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a perfect size for some of these advertising, retail installation type of

environments. And that's why we made it. This would be amazing. I mean, if you went to Yankee Stadium or. or, you know, Madison Square Garden. You could have all the past Hall of Fame players, if the players would allow this, and let them have, you know, a very narrow set of conversations.

But hey, tell me about this game. Tell me what it was like to play here. And you could have, you know, pretty dynamic conversations. Of course, you got to make sure the conversations don't go off the rails and then say things are not supposed to or, you know, get involved in discussions and, you know,

zones that would not be appropriate for the venue or the context. But that's something that software can do pretty quickly, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think the time is ending for folks being satisfied, going to a movie, and having a Marvel character, you know, a flat Marvel character, physically flat, having a one-way sort of conversation, just talking at the audience. In five years, I think everybody, for every film, they're going to demand having a two-way conversation with a hologram of those characters. And same thing goes for any of these other

environments like someone at a stadium that you want to have a conversation with. And you, when you talk about movies and filmed entertainment, a passive experience, which is kind of what we want. We want to sit back and just be taken away and then just kind of lose ourselves in a film, at least I do. I don't want to talk to the film. I want to have the experience of what the director intended, but afterwards I might want to talk to the characters, or that could be fun for my kids, I think. So how do you see that playing out? Somebody goes and sees, you know, whatever the popular movie is, minions. So if kids are going to see the minions movies, you could have these things in the lobby and you could talk to the minions and kids might have as much

fun doing that as they did seeing the movie. Yeah. So not replacing movies. That type of experience, in my view is something that is very special and that shouldn't be made interactive in the theater itself. But then when you're in the lobby of the theater of the cinema or when you go home, being able to continue the relationship, the conversation with those characters is going to be big. And they're going to be able to do things in your life. It won't only be about necessarily what that movie was about, although certainly that'll be part of the conversation. They might be able to remind you in a way that is in character what you have coming up tomorrow. Hey, like Billy, don't forget to study for that test you have coming up tomorrow. And that could be a hologram of a

minion in the, you know, home of the very near future. Yeah, there's something that Disney did with fighting Nemo around this. I don't know if that was that your technology or that somebody else where you could interact with him. So if, if I'm a, well, of the turtle. Yeah. Turtle talk. Yeah. That's an amazing installation.

As far as I know, there was someone actually puppeteering that in the background. So that wasn't, to my knowledge, that wasn't AI driven. That makes total sense. So they are doing CGI live and there's a puppeteer who then is interacting with the audience. In your case, here now with technology, this is going to be much easier to do. That's right. Yeah, wow, crazy. So I guess the idea now is

How does your business When you have a deep tech business like this And you got to spend tens of millions of dollars Five, six, seven, eight years How does the investment community view your startup? It's got hardware. A lot of VCs don't want to do hardware.

It's got deep tech. It's going to take a while to perfect. You got a limited audience Because people haven't figured out the killer app yet. Explain your journey, what you've learned as a founder. because I get this over and over again. Founders telling me, you know, we have to build this like really hardcore technology.

It's going to take years and I can't get venture funding. How did you do it? And then how do you, you know, kind of get this over the finish line? Because they're looking for scaled revenue. How do you get to $100 million in revenue? Yeah. Based on it. And it seems like you're still in the,

I want to say experimental phase, but you're still in the looking for, I think you would agree, the killer app. Well, we think this is the killer app. But we have been searching for a while. So that part I 100% agree with. And, you know, we're not at hundreds of millions of revenue yet, but we are doing good business with different enterprise customers and individuals who are looking to get an early taste. The journey has really been one of following a few North Star.

that we haven't diverged from. So we think people like to do things in groups. So we make group viewable holographic displays. We want to make technology easier and easier and easier for folks to use. So you don't have to be a super nerd, speaking as a super nerd. You don't have to be a super nerd. As a qualified super nerd. To use this stuff.

Yeah. And then making them more and more useful in people's lives. And so we've stayed true to that. and it shaped the technology path. And we've been very lucky to be able to get investment from investors like Foundry Group. Bradfeld is on our board. Folks at Lux Capital, Jeff Claviette, Uncork. I mean, you know all these guys.

And they saw the same future and see the same future that we see that feels so inevitable. Because we've been seeing it in movies our whole lives. Yes. In fact, the Blade Runner, that just came out. had 3D billboards. Absolutely. And this character who was projected from like some sort of projector that the main character had fallen in love with.

It was kind of like a romantic avatar and he had this relationship with. All right. We all know the one thing that separates great startups from the good ones is product velocity. What does it mean? Product velocity. Fancy term, right? You got your product and your velocity. Speed.

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That's C-R-O-W-D, B-O-T-I-C-S dot com slash twist for a free build plan. And so, yeah, that's out there. You mentioned enterprise clients in there. Enterprise clients, they don't scale exactly, but they're a great way, especially with an experimental technology, to get in hundreds of thousands,

low millions of dollars, to do projects. It's a little bit of service work. it's a lot of custom stuff, but it proves out the case. Have the enterprise customer started coming in yet? Oh yeah, for sure. Are there public examples of that yet or not yet ready to be announced?

There's a few examples I can talk about. So, Bulgari is using our technology. In that case, to visualize products, watches. Pixar just showed a couple of the characters from their new movie,

Elemental, in two 32-inch looking glasses in the Steve Jobs Auditorium at Pixar headquarters as part of their press event because they wanted to pull those characters from the two-dimensional world into the real world for press to see. And so there's a lot of examples like that that are kind of the early examples of top-tier brands, recognizing the value in the technology. And so the course that we're charting is the course that anyone who builds these new computer interfaces has charted in the past, go to the deeper pocketed enterprise customers that really want to be first in the world, and then that will help to fuel the cost reduction so that everybody will be able to use this technology

not too far down the road. Yeah, somebody tweeted out, actually, the Pixar stuff from Elemental, and I guess this is, we'll pull it up on the screen here. Now, this is hard to, because this is a hologram and there's some reflections, cameras don't do a good job of showing the fidelity. because you get the office space and the reflection, but you wouldn't be seeing that if you were in real life, I guess. But you do get to see, even with that, you know, an iPhone camera,

I assume you really do get to see how the depth of that character looks totally different than a flat screen TV. Totally. It's transformatively, qualitatively different. And that person that shared that was Peter, who's actually the director of the film. And so it's been nice to work with folks that share this vision of the future. Yeah, and now you start to think about generative AI tools, and this could become part of, you know, the hardware stack

for a Pixar artist or a game developer. We recently had a game developer on the show who was using generative AI to make the items in a game. Yeah. And so you could say, I don't know if you saw that episode, but you could say, oh, make me a zombie character. You already have a palette of what the design theme of it is, you know, let's say it was anime

or a certain type of anime. You say, and the company is called Scenario, by the way. And so with Scenario's tool, you could say, oh, give me, I did one more, give me a teenage zombie and a football jersey, like a football player zombie. And it came up with like five options. And they said, okay, let's take this one and make, this is the one we like, let's make ten options of that.

And you can imagine doing that on the looking glass and being able to seat in 3D and really get a feel for it. So has that concept come to pass yet where artists are saying, you know, I want to see this. People who make commercial artists doing video games, doing whatever comic books, etc. Looking at them and saying, hey, this is a place for me to kind of experience my characters before I let them loose and actually be doing like Dolly and Mid Journey Live. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of folks are making Mid Journey holograms, pulling those into their looking glass. and, you know, the future of this is that you'll be able to have holographic media that you generate off of a prompt that you type in or maybe that you speak to a light form and they generate it.

But also you could manifest any character you could imagine that you're working on as well in a looking glass. So making it easier and easier and easier to make 3D content then immediately feeds additional. content into the looking glass ecosystem. Yeah, so if I'm understanding correctly, we've got this looking glass, it's on a desk, or it's in my home, or it's, you know, in an art gallery or something, and I talk to it, where I talk to an app that's connected to it, perhaps, I give it a prompt, and I get to see it actually come up in real time. Yeah.

It's kind of trippy when you think about it. It's crazy. It's like summoning something from. your imagination just by speaking it out. It's, uh, it's, it's magical. It's really interesting too for movie theaters. You think about just the humble movie poster and how there was an art form of movie posters or concert halls would have, you know, there's Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan.

You can go by the beautiful, uh, posters that people were making and there'd be one of one, you know, like make it for each tour, each stop along the tour. They would make a different piece of artwork. You could actually start to do stuff like this. movie posters in a lobby, so you're going to go see Blade Runner, but you see the characters or the next, as I said, Marvel film or whatever,

Indiana Jones, and you get to see Indiana Jones in this sort of 3D thing. This would be a great draw to put outside a movie theater. Yeah, interactive movie posters. Wow. Yeah.

Fantastic. And so people can buy these now. And who's buying these looking glass things now? Is it just dorks and nerds? who's buying all these things, yeah. I mean, as always, definitely some amazing dorks and nerds, like yours truly. Any surprising people that you saw, like, while this order came in and like, wow, this is interesting.

Like, I mean, I'd have to say who the person is, but you could say the sort of genre of person. I mean, every company that you could imagine that is interested in new ways to communicate, new ways to entertain, new ways to bring characters that they've invested a lot of money into, into a new environment where they can remonitize in a different platform. So a bunch of folks have our looking glass displays, the small ones, the big ones, full kitten kubutal. And now with the release of the light forms holographic AI platform, folks are starting to use the beta.

And we'll see some insulated. come out in public environments that I think folks will find pretty interesting. So AI is going to help people make the characters, which that makes the looking glass that much more valuable. So the software level, you're building these toolkits will make it easier for people to actually get stuff onto the looking glass. Absolutely. So all of the, the whole can caboodle of visual generative AI and the conversational AI that platforms like chat GPT have brought out there, all of those feed in, unbelievable amounts of, additional content into our holographic hardware.

Yeah. Wild. And how many people have the company now? About 40. Yeah. Seems like the right size team while you're figuring it out. And if you can get these commercial projects, that'll pay for it. Are any amusement parks using this yet?

Have you cracked that nut yet? Because that does seem to be, you know, like could be a wild or like these, what are they call them, like museum, these Instagramable experiences like, Museum of Ice Cream. There seems to be like location-based entertainment, I think, is the category. Well, that's what we used to call it. Are location-based entertainment and amusement parks and experiential stuff? Has that started to drop yet?

Are there any examples that you can share, or are they still under wraps and being worked on? Yeah, there's a few examples under wraps, but a lot more of that's going to come out now that there's both this content that people can use, but also something you can speak to. And that has really been the missing element for a much wider adoption, sort of ubiquitous adoption. Yeah. Yeah, just having them, it's kind of like an enhanced painting. Yeah.

It's an enhanced graphic, but it's not an experience exactly until you can talk to them. And talking to them, man, that's going to just be crazy. I mean, imagine if you had some comedian. Totally. You have Will Farrell or Dave Chappelle or something. you mean, you literally could take Ricky Jervais to take something like that and you could have them roasting people

you know, on a comedy club you could have them interacting and I mean, people would not if you had Will Farrill, you know, goofing on the person and it had the ability to, with a camera, assess the person, they're short, they're tall, they're ugly looking,

whatever it is, they got a shirt, they could make fun of their shirt, they could make fun of their hair, you could get roasted, you could make jokes, I mean, it could be pretty compelling. You can start to sort of, yeah, see where this is going. Listen, you know, I'm a bulldog guy. I've had bulldogs my whole life.

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thing up to hell. And then you see AI come in and the pace is best described as what daily weekly, I think we'd probably both agree on. So maybe talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, it's what we've been waiting for. And I know a lot of lot of folks feel the same way. And it feels like what the early internet days felt like. I wasn't running a startup then, but always hoped to be able to live through that moment. And now that's what all of this generative AI is doing. And the pace is outrageous.

Fortunately, we're already done with all of the hardware development and all of the software development that we did on platforms like, you know, IBM Watson and Alexa in the past, combined with our holographic software, sort of lets us move very, very fast on the light form software platform. So we're keeping pace. We're the first folks out there with this holographic embodiment of AI. And we intend to run as fast as the wave is that's coming at us. Yeah. The interesting thing is like you look at Watson and you look at Alexa, they were moving, you know, like at a quarterly pace,

maybe you would get some sort of updates, you know, maybe every six months, you'd see some improvement. You know, just as a technologist for 30 years, like this, the only other time I can remember things moving this quickly

were two moments. One was the internet itself, right? Like HTML moving very quickly to add features in every, I'd say every month, monthly the HTML spec would add something, you know, fonts, blinking tags, backgrounds, whatever. And then when mobile came out, you got this sense that, you know, every six months Apple would release something, every three to six months,

or Android. That just made your app a little bit better. Oh, we have, now we have an SDK for this. So now we have GPS enabled. Now we have messaging enabled. Now we have, you know, whatever feature it is, some graphics update. And you can just do a little bit more, a little bit more. The pace of this is just to me mind-boggling.

And I think there's a big lesson for founders in your company specifically, which is if your company doesn't die, right? Which hardware companies die in an alarming rate. The fact that you made it to year eight as a hardware company and had some number of users using it, you can stay in the game until some inflection point or enabling technology creates this amazing use case. And I'm really happy for you because I know how hard you worked on

this. And, you know, we look back on Siri, Alexa, like, these things seem dumb now. And then we look at Chad GPD and you're like, and I don't know if you've been playing with Bard, have you been playing with Bard? A little bit, yeah. Yeah, you're like, whoa, now it's a two horse race. And then, I don't know if you've been on hugging face, like looking at some of the other models and you're like, well, wait a second. Some of these models are, you know, super promising and verticalized. and it feels like the race is on. And we're going to have, like the web, 20 different models.

And, you know, there were 20 different servers or server farms, etc. To do that. And it's like, just think about Siri. Like, what was it? They bought that company for 200 million in 2010. Apple bought the Siri. I think it was an Israeli company.

And, uh, they're not. now 14 years, 13, 14 years into it, it's still terrible. The most it can do is like play a song or call somebody on the phone. It gets that wrong half the time, maybe a third of the time. And now here we go, you're asking Jason Concount is his best investment. And it's like, oh, come on. And it's putting sass in it. Where do you think this will be next year?

You know, like you did that demo of like kind of talking to her about me. Okay. Let's say you get your dream character. Let's say we get, I don't know, if you had a dream character, what's a dream character for you? What would be like a holy grail of a character to make interactive? Fictional or not fictional, I mean. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the characters from that, that's a great one. Let's go with that.

Well, no, but what's your character? Jesus is mine, but what's your, sorry, I interrupted you. On the other end of the spectrum, I was going to say, like a Lego character. you know, to be able to like summon all of this amazing 3D stuff within a world that, you know, my kids, no. Oh, so Roblox. Yeah. Or Minecraft or Lego being able to build in 3D, pull up different pieces, build a world.

Oh my God, that is such a compelling vision. Like Roblox is getting super popular. and if you could have an integration with them, that would be next level. Totally. I think my Jesus one would be second only to Roblox of Minecraft. But if you'd think about a religious person,

I know this sounds crazy, and I don't want this to be insulting to folks, but there are people who have, you know, big faith and it's a big part of their lives, and, you know, there's probably a billion Christians on the planet, who, if they could literally have the son of God, get a 3D model, and I'm not saying this to mock,

but we grew up praying, and if you could say a prayer, with Jesus, these like, I don't know if you've looked at the top 100 podcast recently, but, you know, like, we're like, oh, wow, I wonder if all in will hit the top 10. And it's like, you know, if it wasn't for Jesus and serial killers, we'd be the number one podcast.

But there's nine podcasts ahead of us every week. And it's like three or four of them are a dude reading the Bible. And the other six are people describing serial killers. And once in a while, Bill Simmons, I think Bill Simmons basically can, Bill Simmons is good enough during the NBA season to beat Jesus. I'm not saying Bill Simmons is Jesus. I'm saying he competes with Jesus. But that would be amazing if the Catholic Church was, and you could literally talk to Jesus. Are you Catholic?

Would you grow up Christian? No, no, no. So there's a thing, like you do penance, like you can go to confession and say, I did these bad things. and you got to say 10 Hell Mary, she got to say five all fathers, and you ask to be forgiven. And, you know, a lot of people will have a crucifix in their living room, they'll have a picture of Jesus,

or Mother Mary, whatever. This would be like a really serious thing that people could do where you could actually talk to Jesus or say a prayer with Jesus. That would be a best-selling thing. You have to get one of these megachurches to partner with you. Yeah, I think anytime folks want to feel a connection, you know, the real is,

is important. The realism is important. It can't feel like pre-baked script. It can't feel like, you know, you're talking to your phone. It's got to feel real. And in any of those situations, I think the opportunity is pretty big and very multi-fold. All right, listen, if you make a Jesus looking less, says this was my idea. I want 50 basis points as an advisor, 50 bibs. Okay? When I come back, when I come back in three or four years. With Jesus. Hopefully, I say, hopefully I say we took this idea. Yeah.

No, but I mean, what? Can I get my beak? Can I get 25 bips? A little quarter point, half point? I don't think it's too much. I mean, if it becomes a best seller. I don't want it if it doesn't become a best sell. I'll make a version of Jason Calcanus that speaks with the voice of Jesus.

Yes. Angel of Jesus. Yeah. I just think. That I can guarantee. If you made a Jesus looking glass, I think you sell a million. I think you sell a million of them. There are.

it would be the ultimate Christmas present and the ultimate Easter present to be able to talk with Jesus or just because people want to pray every day so to just do a prayer class it could be with a famous priest it could be a famous rabbi a famous you know any religious leader

wow man it's really inspiring when you think about actually manifesting these characters in the real world I will say just don't promise me you're not going to like open up some portal to like an evil place and start manifesting like Ghostbusters

some evil characters. We'll try. We'll try not to. All right, Sean. I will see you in another two or three years when hologram Jesus

and leg hose. I mean, if Roblox and Minecraft are listening, like one of you's got to get in here and get the exclusive on this for the next five years, like do an exclusive deal with looking glass and rocket.

If people want to learn more, if they want to buy a looking glass, if they want to start programming, where do they go? They don't even need to program. They can use this stuff with no programming experience, but they go to lookingglass factory.com. Lookingglass factory.com. We just type looking glass factory into the Google, uh, or chap, JBT continued success, my friend. And, uh, congratulations on staying alive and finding this

inflection point is a very important lesson for startup founders. You got to stay in the game and think good things happen. Prices get lower. I'm assuming the prices got lower and the margins went up on the hardware. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Man, say that's it, man. You gotta just keep grinding. Don't give up. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye-bye.