This Week in Startups - TWiST News: Subscription Economics, Density's Waffle, and The Cost of AV Fleets | E2027

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Fundrise. Fundrise provides access to diversified portfolios of private real estate to all investors with their industry leading, easy to use platform. Sign up today at https://www.fundrise.com/twist Brave. Brave is an internet privacy company on a mission to protect your personal info online. Download Brave today at https://brave.com/twist to browse faster, search privately and so much more. All in a single click. OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. TWiST listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twist * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (2:06) FTC's new subscription rules and impact (6:58) Fundrise - Sign up today at https://www.fundrise.com/twist (8:16) Density's mission and "Waffle" product announcement (16:02) Real-time wayfinding and utilization tracking (22:45) Brave - Download today at https://brave.com/twist to browse faster, search privately and so much more (23:59) Data's impact on city planning and operations (27:12) Sensor costs and impact on adoption (32:24) Unit economics and adoption curves (39:13) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠ (40:22) Robotaxi fleet modeling project (48:33) Google and Kairos nuclear power deal (50:00) Amazon's nuclear energy agreements (55:09) Solar and fracking trends * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * TWiST AV Models: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1txb73-0MvKq_FAcGWMsUcctwgEVHYkgQ38kgEnOuHMs/edit?gid=1464971737#gid=1464971737 * Mentioned on the show: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1txb73-0MvKq_FAcGWMsUcctwgEVHYkgQ38kgEnOuHMs/edit?gid=1464971737#gid=1464971737 https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/google-kairos-power-nuclear-energy-agreement https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-nuclear-small-modular-reactor-net-carbon-zero https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czkkgnp1d2xo https://archive.is/ZOO42#selection-1051.130-1059.17 https://www.semafor.com/article/10/03/2024/solar-boom-in-china-turns-electricity-prices-negative * Check out these startups: https://www.trlyr.com https://www.terra.one https://www.tozero.solutions https://www.altris.se https://bedrock.inc https://www.unbound-potential.com https://www.3dc.co.jp/en https://www.flowaluminum.com https://www.hydrostor.ca https://www.thaleron.com https://sizableenergy.com https://www.kitekraft.de https://www.byterat.io https://www.ionworks.com * Follow Andrew: X: https://x.com/andrewfarah LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewfarah⁠ Check out: https://density.io * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (6:58) Fundrise - Sign up today at https://www.fundrise.com/twist (22:45) Brave - Download today at https://brave.com/twist to browse faster, search privately and so much more (39:13) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠ * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

This Week in Startups is a show about startups and technology and that journey of trying to find product market fit and solve really challenging problems in the world. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Fundrise. Fundrise provides access to diversified portfolios of private real estate to all investors with their industry leading, easy-to-use platform. Sign up today at funrise.com slash twist. Brave. Brave is an internet privacy company on a

mission to protect your personal info online. Download Brave today at brave.com slash twist to browse faster, search privately, and so much more, all in a single click. And Open Phone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. I have a co-host here. His name is Alex Wilhelm, and he has an incredible 15-20-year resume of working at places you've heard of like TechCrunch, Crunch Base, and cautious optimism is his newsletter that you can subscribe to you for about a hundred a year. How are you doing today, Alex? I'm doing fantastic. I, if you have young children, you'll know the feeling when you wake up

and you're like, wait, I'm not exhausted. And I must have slept well last night. So I am flying to and we have a really great show. I'm actually really excited about this. Jason, I'm going to tell people what's coming up. So, first of all, new subscription rules. Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in Twist History, we are going to have Jason Calcanus say nice things about Lena Khan. So if you want to say History Made, stay tuned.

Then we have the CEO of Density on. They have a new thing called a waffle, but no, you can't eat it. Just wait lots of cool stuff to come there. We have a first look at our AV fleet financial model. nuclear power rising and the startups looking to make solar possible. Jason, we are loaded today. But first up, Lena Con, the FTC has some new rules out, and this caught your eye.

Yeah, you know, we've been very critical about Lena Con. I did a meme today from one of my, I have an army of meme builders for me now. So if you pull up my Twitter, you'll see this meme. So it's the Vanos meme. Did LenaCon get us? Click to cancel? Yes. What did it cost?

No exit market for, four years. So this is, somebody clip this and said it to Lena Con. Thank you, Lena Con, for your service. We do like the ability to cancel our gym membership. But please, please, Lena Con, if you get another four years before you go to Andreessen Horowitz or Y Combinator as a partner and secure the bag, please, Lena Con. Let us sell companies for under $100 million without any approval process. Please, just singles. We wouldn't even ask for a double. A double would be $500 million. Okay, I'm going to ask for the double. Anything under a billion, just let us sell it. Under a billy makes no difference. Let us sell. You just win from a hundred million to a billion in like two sentences.

A billy. I don't disagree. I actually think a billion would be a perfectly fine threshold. Yeah, have at it. Here's the thing, though. We are talking about this new FTC rulemaking in terms of Jason and Alex want to cancel the Wall Street Journal sometimes and their gym. Here's the thing, though. What about businesses that sell the consumers that currently make, let's say, a good chunk of their revenue, Jason, by folks for getting their paying $5. a month. So there's a pro-business, pro-consumer kind of tension here. And I'm curious how you think it's going to net out for businesses. So I think one of the great things about subscription businesses is that it creates a North Star. When somebody unsubscribes, they get that box.

Why are you unsubscribing? And you get information back. I don't live in your city. And I move to, you know, New England somewhere. I'm in Boston. I'm in Cape Cod, wherever you are, I'm in Brooklyn, well, that's giving you a signal if 100 people move to Brooklyn. That's where you should open your next location. It's short-term gain as an entrepreneur to not let people unsubscribe and you don't want people locked into a product that doesn't work for them. And there is a counter to this, which is you can come up with different subscription terms. I have no problem paying a year in advance and the person saying, you can't cancel, you're buying it for the year, like my ski pass. When I just bought my epic passes, and last year I bought an icon pass because

I thought I was going to go ICON, and my schedule changed, and I couldn't go on the ICON trip, and I had bought a $1,100 icon pass, I skied zero days on it. But on my epic pass, I had ski 25 or 30 days, so I felt fine. You know, I put the two passes together, divided the number of 2,000 by whatever number of days, and it was half the price of if I had bought lift tickets per day. So if you want that reservation at a nice hotel, there's a cancellation period, right? If you're booking a hotel during the Super Bowl, you can't cancel it. It's the Super Bowl or you can't cancel a week out.

So there's reasonable things to be had here. And if you're a SaaS company and it requires onboarding, you could say you can cancel any quarter, you know, or with 90 days notice in your two, just make it up front, right? Is I guess the goal. And this creates a weird tension where you have a group of people inside companies, Alex, is such a great question, trying to do what are called dark patterns. and dark patterns, no bueno. Because now you've got really smart people trying to figure out how to trick people. That's not how business should work. You don't want people tricked into using your service.

It's like you don't want people tricked into being in a relationship with you. This goes for, you know, the ultimate dark pattern in the United States is employment and health care. If you are working at a company and you've got kids and you've got health care and they've got a good family plan, you stay at that company because of the health care. And people will stay at IBM. or Google or Microsoft because of the healthcare. And if the health care was portable or was provided by the government or independent of employment or you picked it and your company gave you a contribution to it, which is how I think it should work, man, things would be so much better. So much better.

You came here first, everybody. Welcome to This Week in startups where we're in favor of Lena Con and Universal Health Care is on the table. All right. I'm okay with it. I think we should have a basic healthcare system just for the basics that everybody gets. and then you should pay for on top of that. And you should always be a fee. So if you go in, you should always pay 25% or 20% of the cost so that you know the price.

Yeah. That's, I think, would be reasonable. Just for things like basic checkups, that would save us so much money later on. But I do want to give a plug for myself, which is that while we're talking about smaller deals, acquisitions and startup N&A, I do have the CEO and co-founder of cash flow coming on Twist this Friday. They just sold the HubSpot, early stage company. I'm going to figure out how the hell they got that done. And if there was any regulatory pressures, Jason.

So more coming on this topic. All right, venture capital is one of the most lucrative asset classes in the world. Don't I know it? I do it for a living. Why is venture capital so great? Well, just look at today's public tech companies. Almost all of them raised venture capital when they were a private company. And that's great for venture capitalists like myself and for my LPs.

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Now you can get in early at fundrise.com slash twist. That's fundrise.com slash twist. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the Innovation Funds Perspectus at Fundrise.com slash innovation. This is a paid advertisement. Okay, awesome. Well, we have a great guest today, and he's got a new product, and I think it's time to transition to that. Yeah, Alex? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So I used to run a conference called Launch Festival, and before that it was called TechCrunch 50. And I might bring lunch festival back. We stopped it during COVID, but at this event, 50 people launched a new product. One of those new products was a people counter. And it was at Phil's coffee in San Francisco, and it had a laser at the door. And when you broke the laser, it counted the number of people. coming in or out. And it had to kind of figure that out. And then there was also one that used Wi-Fi, which was a little creepy because you could identify people and you would know that the same person came in connected to the Wi-Fi because even if you don't log into a Wi-Fi,

your phone might connect to it. That founder is Andrew Fara and I am on the board of his company, density. And I was, I believe, the first investor in the company. Welcome to the program. Andrew has a big product announcement today. Hey, happy to be here. Andrew, meet Alex. I don't know if you two have met before. No, actually, I think this is the first time. Although, since we've met, we've talked about skiing half the time. So now later on, we need to talk about snowboarding. Okay.

There we go. Same though. Andrew, we have been on this journey with density. And the domain name is density. Dot, Iho, I believe, still. And you can go see this incredible software. And tell everybody what the mission of density is today. And then let's go right into the announcement.

We won't prolong this. Yeah. I'd really like to know how the world is used. And I think there are a lot of other people that would too. There's about three trillion square feet of physical space in the world, residential and commercial. And we don't know how any of it's used. Something like 99% of it is unmeasured.

So today we work with predominantly like large workplaces, large corporate offices. And we deploy radar sensors, kind of like wireless access points. So like above, you know, on the ceilings. And then we get a heat map of use inside buildings. And so we spent a lot of time about about 10 years trying to count people in physical space. And that's sort of our core customer is large corporate offices.

And then we just announced something yesterday called Waffle that has been, you know, sort of like part, I described it as part love letter to our customers and part return. to our roots because it's something that we wished we could have bought when we started the company. And we just couldn't, we like couldn't find it in the world. So we built. The technology wasn't there. And for people who don't know, the way density works today is you have to put a sensor in each of the conference rooms. I'm in a conference room here at Capital Factory in Austin, who is nice enough to house us while I look for our permanent office here. Shout out to my friend Josh. And if you're a startup, Capital Factory is a great place to hang out.

I'm in a conference room with a producer. This conference room has seating for 10. And for a work, a co-working space or incubator like Capital Factory, it would be great for them to know the utilization of different rooms. What people do is they use conference rooms for 10, typically as phone booths. And so, you know, with density,

if you were Amazon or Google or Microsoft or LinkedIn, and you have all this office space, wouldn't it be nice to know the utilization level? and of the conference rooms. Maybe you find out, hey, we've got too many conference rooms and not enough phone boots. Let's convert these two offices into eight phone boots. And that would be a better use of space. So space planning for organizations, space is typically the second or third line item.

Is that right, Andrew? Yeah. Second effort payroll. In fact, over the last year, something like 53% of all meeting room use was by a single person, regardless of size. In tracks. Yeah. So those have a limitation. When you put the sensor arrays that density currently uses,

it requires power over Ethernet, I believe, and you have to put these door sensors in. And I don't know the approximate cost, but maybe you could give people an idea of what that costs and maybe you could show that graph. I'll call it $1,000 all in installation, hardware, software, and something like between 50 and 65% of that cost is installation. Got it.

So it is hard and it costs money. But once you have it up and running, now you have perfect visibility into your campus. And if you had a lot of space, if you could cut 10% of the space or 1% of the space, I would assume, sublet 1% consolidate, not add space. It would pay for itself. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, to give you a sense of scale, like, you know, we work with many of Fortune 500, Fortune 100. they'll have 65 million square feet of office space.

Wow. Not warehousing, not like other sort of medical or infrastructure. We're just talking offices. And when you're in the tens of millions of square feet of space, even north of a million square feet, you just lose visibility. So you just like can't, you can't know. You can't put eyes on all the space. The pandemic put a very like sharp point on how limited our visibility was in buildings because everybody went home. Andrew, so when I'm thinking about this, though, will I put the new product, the waffle,

into each one of the rooms at my Fortune 500 company office footprint? Or do you think that the new product is more aimed at companies that have, I don't know, a couple hundred employees? I'm trying to sort it out and kind of put it into a market category, if that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, we were solving a problem that we faced, you know, every day doing deployments, which is like, it sucks to spend $700 on installation and $300 on the technology. Like, that sucks.

Yeah. So if you could, the question was two years ago, like, can you delete the installation cost? So we deleted the installation cost. You now self-install a unit on a wall. So you went into founder mode. Let's call it what it is. I was there. I saw it is, you know, it's been a rough couple of years.

Beef and rice and going to the gym and then working on density. It's essentially all that I've been doing. Founder mode. Congratulations. Okay, let's show the product. And I love this chart talking about, you know, what you did in terms of, terms of, you know, what Elon does in founder mode or Brian Chesney from Airbnb. So here's Waffle, gorgeous. It sits on a table. I guess it gets attached to the wall. It looks like a hockey puck

or a waffle. And I suppose you could put this into an Airbnb as well to know if they're partying, huh? I mean, sure. I mean, I think the thing that's exciting about self-instillation is that it immediately addresses the biggest pain point our primary customers have, which is cost. But it also opens up the world to lots of creative uses for count inside space. Got it. Yeah. So I'm excited to make this extensible to developers especially and also folks that are just interested in like, if this, then that style things.

Because I think the uses are, there's a very long tail. Oh, that's a lot of fun. So if you did if this than that, you could say if there's more than five people in the room, turn the walls purple. And then if there's less than three people turn them blue. And then you could have the DJ know how many people, music, Oh, that's actually really fun. I was thinking totally boring.

I will say it is capped count. So wall-mounted self-installed units have an occlusion problem because they can't see the entire space. And so at launch, the product will do what we call capped count, which is 0, 1, 2, and 3 plus. And then over time, we'll sort of iterate on the algorithm and kind of update it. But it gets to most of the use case of is a room in use.

and how. And here's really where this gets super powerful. People don't get to see this all that often, but here is an example of a building, and here is floor number five, office 403. And what you'll see is you can see that basically a heat map at different times. And when you're just looking at the floor plan,

even if it was desks or office space, conference rooms, you just see the density of the space. And this gives a facilities person, or somebody who's doing return to office and wants to know if there's assets and seats if it's working or not, right? Because now you have Amazon saying, hey, everybody's got to be in the office.

Andrew Jossi said, Apple's doing three days a week. People are starting to come back to the office and realizing the value of it, including myself. And so here we go. You're getting to see the rooms light up. So when you work with... Can I mention with this? Can I mention with this?

This is live wayfinding. This is for occupants. This is for employees. Got it. screen over by the elevators where it says you are here. And there's real data. And the way it works is we have a grid

that shows the major highways of the floor plan. So this is ways for your office. It's ways for buildings. Ways for buildings. And so the sort of aquamarine color is in real time available. And the red is

currently occupied in real time. And real time is defined as essentially sub-7. It's Sub 700 milliseconds. So if you walk into a room, it will instantly turn right. So this is fantastic because one of the big complaints people have with office suiting as a concept or conference rooms is, oh my God, I got there. Somebody was in the room who didn't have the room.

And not only were they in the room, they were in the room with a bunch of Chinese food and eight people. And then I have the room reserved. And I got to tell them to clean up all the Mugulai pan and the General Soz chicken, the sauces everywhere. It's a disaster. I mean, we've all had this experience. I mean, we should have called the product Mugugai Pahn.

I think that's just rattling off dishes here I like. But, yeah, it's such an incredible product. And so this, you had a chart. I thought that would be very interesting to show. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. This took four months to deploy. Oh, as you're looking at right now, took four months to deploy. All the devices, all the planning, all the POE, all the Ethernet cables, like all the ladders

that you had to climb up on after hours because you can't do work when people are in office. This took four months to deploy. With waffle, you could do this in an afternoon. Yeah. Wow. You could do it literally in like two hours. This is how many sensors do you think we, how many waffles will we need, Andrew, to make this work today? One per room. One per room. So there's one, two, three, four, has it something. I don't know, 15 rooms here. So call it 15, 6.20? 20. 20? Is that a reasonable estimate? Yeah. Okay. So price, you know, somewhere around there. Yeah, 150 bucks a piece, eight bucks a month. Seems pretty cheap. I mean, when we think about the cost of office space,

eight bucks per month per sensor, which I think is what you're charging for waffle, doesn't seem like a lot, frankly. I always wonder if you're undercharging. He's undercharging. That's my advice as a venture capitalist. Jason wants you to add a zero to that if you don't mind. No, I mean, one of the great things, Andrew,

I'll let you answer the question is when you underpriced something, people will use it more, and they'll deploy it and get value from it and you can scale, yeah? You remove an objection, because I could see people saying, oh, $1,000 a room to install these, $40,000 per floor, 10 floors, $400,000. That could be a blocker for somebody who's got a company that's really penny-pinching or consolidating at that time, even though they would save it in the next year with what they would learn, right?

I mean, this utilization, the sensing of buildings, like buildings becoming aware of humans, I think is going to follow a similar adoption curve as Wi-Fi. Buildings 30 years ago did not have wireless connectivity They were all hardlined And if you look at the history of like Aloha Net And like all of these Is a very rich history to Wi-Fi

It wasn't until 2011 When we hit like 450 megs down per second That it became It was like This is as good as hardline I should just have that This is silly And I'm now talking to you on a laptop

As a result of that infrastructure being deployed. But it took literally 25 years. So I think sensing is kind of similar. We're not replacing an existing system. It's net new infrastructure for buildings. And so if you can keep the, if you get that cost curve, if you're on the bottom end of that cost curve, you can rapidly accelerate the adoption of new infrastructure, which then opens up new possibilities like dynamic HVAC or real-time availability of spaces or notified. I mean, when a place is quiet, or is that cafe currently super busy right now? Or we should, like, totally change the structure of our buildings because we've got 53% of

meeting rooms being used by a single person. All of those are outflows of making the infrastructure low cost and scalable. There's also an environmental impact here because you guys talk about on your website knowing what's been used and therefore avoiding cleaning, clean spaces. And so I can also see saving water, chemicals, paper, et cetera, in larger offices with lots Grimmons and votes. Yeah, so about $6 a square foot. So assume like $30 a square foot is the average cost for a lease in the U.S. Premium class A is about $60, $65 a square foot. Your facilities cost is about $6 of that $65. And so you can optimize that six with cleaning. Where the real

returns are on energy or on, I'm sorry, on sort of sustainability is that 39% of all global carbon emissions come from buildings. Half are from energy, operational carbon. Half are from building materials in the construction of buildings. And we add to the net new buildings every year, I'm sorry, every day, 13,000 net new buildings, every day. And that is going up. So if we just didn't turn on air conditioning and heat on floors that were unoccupied or areas that were unoccupied, we could do a massive amount of not only saving the environment, which is awesome and virtuous, we could also take load off the grid, which we're having grid problems. And then on top of that, the person who runs the office and the facilities would save money. It's like a win,

win, win, win. All right, everybody, you know my favorite browser that I use on my mobile phone and my desktop every day, all day, is brave. Why do I use it? Well, It's privacy first. And I don't want people knowing what I'm searching for. I don't want to be tracked. I don't like ads. Really, it's for two reasons. One, I think it's creepy.

But two, it slows me down. Loading web pages with pop-ups and ads, it's just insufferable. And Brave also has a built-in search engine, and it's awesome. Brave Search is powered by one of just three global scale web indexes. And unlike other independent search engines, it isn't a skin over big tech technology, right? It's their own search. And they have seven. million daily users, 35 million queries, and it's the fastest growing independent search engine since

Bing. And you don't need the Brave browser to use Brave search. You can just go to search. com using any browser. I mean, I of course think you should use Brave for so many reasons. It's also got a VPN built in, which is really cool, especially when you're out of cafe. So search all day long every day at search. Brave.com. And if you want to try Brave search today, go to brave.com slash twist. You get better results, protect your privacy, and get the answers you need faster. Go to brave.com slash twist so they know that we sent you and download the browser. It's awesome. What happens if New York City knew how it was used? Like that, that is kind of the core question. If you could snap your fingers and on, like on Monday, New York City knew how it was used,

had perfect data on use. Would anything change? Everything would. Oh, yeah. Like, everything would. Like, everything would change. Like, how would change the subway pattern? You would change how cars move. You would change the cost of rent. You would change where you would build buildings. You would change how many Starbucks baristas were at one cafe versus another. Just, I mean, and all of this is done with privacy.

So I think maybe you could speak to privacy here, Andrew, and why that's important? Because this was something you and I had a bunch of debates about early on. And I was like, why don't we just use a camera for this? Yeah. So the answer to that question, yeah. Yeah. So this is, it's really small. This is the board.

And it's about 75 millimeters by about 20 millimeters. It'll be sort of like the final device. And you can see the renders and the final product shots on the website. If you want New York City or any city to know how it's used, you have to solve the distribution problem. How do you get an intelligent device into every relevant room in the world? One of the interesting barriers to that is if you're deployed. surveillance tech. People get really uncomfortable

using spaces in certain ways when they're observed. And the second that they feel like they're not being observed, and you see this play out in Airbnb, right? Airbnb has a global policy of no cameras allowed in any of their spaces if you are a host.

The reason they do that isn't because cameras aren't useful or because hosts don't want them, they do want them. It's because guests really don't, it doesn't drive distribution of use on the guest side. And so if you can achieve the vast majority of what you need to achieve in use with an anonymous at source system, I think that's good for business.

Yeah, I was in an Airbnb recently, and they had cameras on the outside of it, and they had it in the backyard where we were hanging out, and there was a hot tub and a dinner place, and I'm like, that camera's on, and it's obviously could be recording every conversation I'm having is recorded at this Airbnb in the backyard. And I was like, how do I unplug it? And they had obviously strung the cable up to make it so you couldn't easily unplug it. And I was like, well, this has got to go in the rating system here. This is not cool.

I mean, obviously, cover cameras. But yeah, putting the, it is very nice to know for a hotel if a guest is in the room so you can clean it. That's right. And this would be such a game changer. When you stay at an Amman Hotel, they have a door monitor, sensor. system. So they do know a door opens and closes. If a door opens and closes, they will send the cleaning crew there to go clean it, but they don't know if you're actually in there or not. They just have a guess. Here, you would know. There's two or three people in the room, whatever. And I

had an Airbnb for a while and we had a no party rule. And somebody threw a party, I found out about it because I had a driveway cam. And in the morning, I woke up. And like from 3 a.m. till 7 a.m. cars and ubers were dropping off and I had like 30 notifications when I would normally have none during that time period. So it was very weird. Do you have the chart of the cost? There was a really cool chart you had with the cost. And I think for entrepreneurs, this is super important.

You've been working on this company for a decade. And it's just another one of these, as we call it in the business, overnight success is 10 years in the making, a decade in the making. So maybe you could show that. So here we go, cost per sensor over time. And you had the depth sensor, cameras or optical sensors, radar, the battery, everything. Yeah, so you can see the, and, you know, a more detailed breakdown would include what portion or percentage goes to installation, what portion is sort of core hardware software. But ultimately, the total cost of ownership has a huge impact on adoption.

And what's interesting is like all, and you actually see this similar chart. you know with SpaceX, they'll show a similar chart on like cost per kilogram to get to orbit or, you know, essentially a weight measurement of how much does it cost to get a certain amount of weight to orbit. And all of the interesting stuff, I know if you can see my cursor, but all of the interesting stuff happens sort of in the bottom right. And so if you look at Waffle relative to these costs, it just has like a really big impact on what types of new places you could deploy in the world. Yeah, I mean, if you're a cafe and you don't want, you know, a cafe owner doesn't want to

spend this kind of money or a hotel, you know, doesn't want to spend the money. This is a way to actually do that. Wow, continued success here. This is amazing. Andrew, if you look back on your journey here as an entrepreneur, what, what have you learned, you know, if you were to mentor folks who are starting a hardware startup specifically because hardware is hard and your hardware in SaaS. And SaaS is on the easier side of businesses.

That's why a lot of people like to do them because you know exactly who you're going after. You get all that benefit. And you have like a very narrow, specific problem you get to solve. And it doesn't have the, I don't know, randomness or lightning in a bottle of consumer. But, man, adding hardware, hardware is hard. So as a hardware founder, what have you learned and what advice can you give other entrepreneurs lesson? Well, in a world where, you know, you can ask cursor to help build a piece of software and replicate, you know, split-wise in about an hour and a half. I think physical systems, you know, going after hard problems and building physical systems

is a hard problem, it will be defensible, much more defensible than I think sort of just like pure software layer. That said, but you have to really want to do the thing. We're wandering into a world where the infrastructure is so much better than it was when I started. There's so many new things that you can build with on really good rails. And the companies that are going to win, I think, are the ones that are willing to be playful. And you see this in Tesla. You know, you see this in Anderil. Enderil is a defense contractor, and they're still playful.

And I think the folks that are willing to sort of like, you know, not take themselves too seriously, but also build, you know, exceptional stuff are probably going to win. Also, go to the office if you're a startup. Like, don't do it distributed. And that's not, that's not because. That's like for me. Unpack that for me. Unpack that. Well, trust is built in person.

It's lost virtually. And I have this theory. I was talking to someone just yesterday about this. They brought up a really interesting point. And it never really occurred to me. But you can't read body language as well distributed. You can read some, but it's actually deeply muted. It's like wearing socks on your feet or gloves on your hands.

But as soon as you get in person, all of a sudden, like, The conversation is funnier. You want to know about their lives. Like, it's sort of rounded out. And I'm reasonably convinced that it actually has to do. It's just like physical body language. It's like somatic. It's like somewhere deep in our human existence connecting in person resonates.

Here's an image from the visual capitalist who does really nice graphics of the cost of spaceflight. And as you can see here, the costs per kilogram of. like the space shuttle, Delta heavy, and then here comes Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and then here's the Starship estimate. And what this chart shows is a slow curve coming down, and then it falls off a cliff, very beautifully. So the slope just angles straight down. This is the reverse of the hockey stick, or it's an upside down hockey stick, cost plummeting. And when cost plummet, adoption goes up. If you were to build a six-lane freeway and you previously had a two-lane avenue,

what you'd find is people would induce traffic. People would get on that highway and explore new places. And that's what the highway system did in America. It just inspired people to go for rides because you could go 60 miles an hour and go somewhere 120 or 300 miles away from your house quite easily and comfortably. if you're a founder like nail your unit economics and then do that because what happened in the run-up you know in sort of the Zerp era is this would happen right but but it was with negative unit economics and so after you grew like it did drive demand um but but the faster you grew the faster you

died if you nail your unit economics and and you then you go crush your costs so that you can bring to market, like, essentially a democratized version of a technology. You do all sorts of amazing things. You unlock all sorts of amazing things. We're going to go to Mars because of this. Uber X comes to mind, you know, with Uber and that whole race with Lyft. The Lincoln Town cars were fabulously profitable at the beginning of the economics were beautiful. All that ZERP era money went into building Uber and Lyft into tens of thousands of cities globally. And then they had to work backwards to change the union economics. This is what Brian Chesky had to do. He had to reorganize Airbnb over since COVID to now to being a money losing machine to a money printing

machine. Uber went from a money losing machine to a money printing machine. Tesla went from a money losing machine to a money printing machine. It's also known as the J-curve where you invest, invest, invest, but unit economics is at the core of it. You have to understand, you know, how much you're charging for these things and how much they cost to deliver because selling $100, bills for 50 bucks is quite popular. Alex. It's quite popular. It's super popular, but I feel like Jason, you're dancing around the obvious question for our fine friend here, which is, what are the gross margins then on the new waffle?

Well, that's a good question. I mean, they're definitely positive. Good start. They're definitely positive. We are not wrapping dollars around hardware or software. Software as sort of typical, like, you know, 80%, 80 plus percent. software gross margins. And then hardware,

you know, first run stuff always costs a bit more. But even our first run stuff will be profitable. Will consumers be able to buy these? Is this like a consumer could just come to the website or high 10 of them? Yes, it's also the first time we're publishing price and allowing people to self-serve. Like if we're going to allow you to self-install, you should be able to self-serve.

So in January, we will open up the ability to just kind of purchase a unit. Oh, wow. Can you pre-order now? Is that on the website or no? You have to reach out to us. Then you've got to talk to me. Okay. Andrew at density.com. Then you can buy because we have a lot of demand from core customers. And so we're trying to make sure to meter where those initial volumes go to the right customers. We want to make sure that a customer like is fabulous, successful. How many units are in the first run?

So typical like EVT, DVT, PVT, PVT, which is just like engineering, design, and then production validation. testing. Yeah. Usually going from like 25 to, to 100 units in your EVT builds to, to call it a couple hundred in your DVT build. And then once you break a thousand units, you're, that's usually you're in your production validation testing and then you're in sort of continuous manufacturing. So you can sort of imagine thousands of units becoming sort of initially available.

And then you go into continuous manufacturing, which, which is supply demand forecasting. You wander into a different, different about a different math. So when we're in, you know, the start of Q3 of next year, this has been out for, you know, six, eight months.

How many units do you think you're going to sell of the waffle per month or per quarter? I don't know. You should talk to me then. I mean, I'm just curious to see how fast this can grow because there's a lot of space in the world.

There's just so much space in the world. And I think, you know, I want to hear the end of your question, But I would just say what will be interesting is the mix of core enterprise workplace customers and sort of like expansion within existing customer sets and how this drives net new adoption, even within core ICP, like ideal customer profile. And then there's the other category. And I'm most excited about, well, I'm actually thrilled about all three because like we want

to serve core customers. We want to drive top of funnel pipeline. but we're also really excited about the experimentation people will do. Yeah. I also just was that you ruined coffee badging for all the people out there who like to go and swipe the badge and go home and work. So that means that you are now the biggest narc in corporate America, Andrew. I think, well, okay, hold on.

So I don't know who you are. No, this is actually fair criticism, but probably not of us. We don't know who you are. And we also don't know how long you personally have been in a space. all we know is how the space was used and how many people were maybe assigned, like what teams were assigned to that space. So you keep coffee badging all you want and you can take up with HR and density will have zero to say about it.

Unless you're a senior executive and have your own office, then we could safely assume if you're in the CEO's ass in seat. It was a funny moment. We were in a board meeting years ago and I was like, why don't we put a sensor in the seats and you would actually literally know asses and seats. And Andrew was like, no, Jake, that's a little much. What if you had too much coffee? We're trying to figure out how cheap could it be.

And I was like a weight sensor in a seat would be really interesting. Now, but that could be an interesting product for a bus or a subway is to actually know the utilization of the seats, right? Because you could actually then know in a cafe or a park, hey, we need more seating. It's, you know, we have enough seats. We don't have enough seats. People counting is amazing. The leader in this space is density.io.

I am super excited to be a board member and a friend of Andrews for the past decade. It's one of the great joys of my life to watch an entrepreneur, absolutely crush it and hit these. As Ruloff would call them, crucible moments and a crucible moment, this was for the organization. Can we get the waffle out? And here we are. We did it. And by we, I mean you and the incredible team. So I just want to say thank you to the density team.

It's just an honor to watch how hard everybody worked, Andrew. And I know that you had to make a lot of very difficult decisions. There were layoffs, restructuring, get back to office. You know, it's hard. Startups are hard and hardware startups are hard. And just you have my complete respect for the hard work on this journey. There's still so much to do. That's the right answer.

Yeah, excited touch base with you all again soon. All right. We'll talk soon. All right. Are you still using multiple devices and apps to run your business? Well, you need open phone. Open phone has rethought what the modern business phone should be. And what's so magical about open phone is that it works through one single elegant app right on your existing phone. And you can use it on your desktop. Now, listen, open phone is so good. I have my entire team on it.

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will port them over at no extra cost. So head over to openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get 20% off. What do we got next here, Alex? I know we got a lot more on the docket. Yeah, I'm going to give you a taste, Jason, of our upcoming Robotaxy fleet modeling

spread. Kabir and I are working on this. It is not quite done, but I can show you a couple of things. If you watch the show on Monday, Jason walked us through a chat, GPT-40 Canvas demonstration, Make it two sizes bigger, if you don't mind. Maybe one or two sizes bigger. I do not mind.

Okay, perfect. Okay. So what we have done is we've taken your work and we have broken it down into individual questions that can be answered. So, for example, Jason, if we wanted to say that the max number of trips per day that a robot taxi could do is 20 and let's say takes about 90 days off for service, six hours a day, that's about 91 days a year. Call it 90.

Just to be simple. That leaves 275 days. theoretical trips, and then we can calculate pretty easily how many AVs we would need to replace all U.S. trips, just lift and Uber, public transit, et cetera. Now, we also worked in the costs per unit, and then not changing overall demand. We have estimates now for what about costs to replace

all cars, just lifts and Ubers or parts of public transit. And then also, you ask for an inclusive of 20% search. So let's say people don't go out more because there's more options. Those are the numbers there. and we can also tinker with this line. So if we want to change all the numbers, make it look easier, we can just make this 30,

and then everything changes. Okay, great. So we'll put the Robotaxy Fleet modeling into the show notes, so you'll be able to see it very easily. And here we go, folks. The total trips annually are in the United States 400 billion according to.

This is the National Highway Travel Household, National Household Travel Survey, 2022, which is the most recent. Yeah, an Uber and Lyft trips in the United States, $4 billion, public transit, $20 billion. I think that number's very low, but we'll see if it is or not. And then trips per day, if you were driving an actual Uber, you could probably do about 20 trips a day in a car because you have to charge the car. You have to clean the car. So if we take six hours out, there's 18 hours left. And if each ride took 45. minutes is my estimate, 20, 30 minutes per ride, and then maybe 10 to 20 minutes to get to the next

destination. Remember, you have to get to your next ride. Now, in Manhattan, that might be much smaller where, you know, you're only taking, you know, short rides and your next pickup will be very close. If you're in the suburbs, you know, if you're out in the hill country, in wine country, you know, it might take half an hour to get to your next ride or 45 minutes to get to your next ride and your ride might be 45 minutes. So we just came up with this 20 trips. It obviously would very, very dependent on suburb, country, or city, or infill, you know, different areas. And the number of days, the AVs on the road. So that's an interesting way to do it. You're taking out six hours a day. And you probably take out maybe five days a year, I would say,

to change the brakes, the tires, inspect the car. But anyway, 90 days, 95 days miss per year is based upon the six hours of daily maintenance. And what I wanted to point out was when I did the back of the envelope math, what I saw was this would take a long time. And this doesn't take into account two factors that we want to add here, which is regulatory, consumer adoption. And the third piece, of course, is actually building the car. So when we look at this, we've estimated that Waymo cars on the low end would cost $5.5 trillion.

That's 80,000 per car or 75,000 per car. And then way more on the higher end, I think, is 120,000 is what I was told. So maybe we put 120,000 in there, if you don't mind, in Cell B. 25, that's about 120,000 is what I was told. Those cars cost right now. So to replace the entire fleet at the Tesla, BYD and by due prices, which is 30,000 per vehicle, you're talking about $2.2 trillion just for the United States. 2.2 trillion is a lot of money, Alex, just to give you an idea. Probably Tesla has $30 billion in the bank and Apple maybe has $200 billion. It's a big number. Now, which means it's a big opportunity, obviously. And so $2 to $9 trillion is the cost estimate, depending on who's doing this.

So this is the Tesla advantage is that Tesla and Bidu and BID, those three companies build stuff very cheap. Then you have Waymo prices very high, and somewhere in the middle is, I guess, what the average will be. And then if we scroll down here, the, so we have regulatory risk or regulatory cost and capture. Then you're going to have consumer adoption. Maybe 50% of people will want to give up their cars. Is it 80% of people? Is it 20% of people? That's unknown. And then there's how quickly can cars be built. So did we, in this model yet, talk about the, time it would take to make this many cars. No, I had to jump into the recording, but I will have a much better model.

By the time you hear this, for the listening to the podcast, the model will be improved, the link will be public. Very simply, you know, Tesla, since they have the biggest ambition here, made 1.8 million cars, I believe last year. Let's assume they put half their factory space towards this. They make a million of these robotaxis a year. Let's say they can increase production by 20% a year. that means every three years they would double production.

So, you know, to get to 50 million cars, 70 million cars, we can actually estimate that that's going to take Tesla. If they did a million in the, let's say they did 500,000 in the first year. That would be very aggressive, right? 10,000 a week. Yeah. I don't know if they could do 10,000 a week for a new car line. But let's say they could.

500,000 in the first year. Let's say they double it to a million. And then from that point forward, they grow up 20%. So 2026, 2027, they put 500,000 on the road. 2027, they put, no, no. I think he said they're going to start coming out in 2026,

which means like full production year will be 2027. Okay. Let's say, let's say 27, 500,000, 2028, a million. And then we just go 25% more a year, which would be like a very aggressive production ramp. At what year could they replace, you know, half the cars in the night?

Could they take up the, entire US, and then we could do the world, right? And you can kind of see that this is going to be, and then all car manufacturers do about 70 million cars or sold a year, I think I read. So you can start to really think about if all car manufacturers had this technology and put it to work, we could actually do all the cars in the United States. If everybody from around the world stop providing cars to everybody else and just send them to the United States and they had the ability to put self-driving in it and regulatory happened, you know, it's going to take years, is I think what everybody will come to.

The thing that I learned, though, putting this together, and we'll clean it up. So if you're watching this live, you've seen me taking notes, is because it's all working. But the thing is, efficiency is such a safer. Because every time you increase the trips per day, Jason, the number of cars you need, the costs, the maintenance expenses, it really comes down. And so the biggest lesson for me is, if you can do more trips per car per day in a robo taxi fleet, your economics are going to be just so much better. That opens up opportunities for, you know, cleaning, maintenance, and so forth, being done kind of at the microscale. inside of cities, tune-ups,

fixes, that sort of thing, anything to keep the expensive assets that depreciate on the road during their prime is going to be absolutely clutch.

But it's a lot of dollars. I'm very excited about this, and I really do think, like you said, it's going to be a J-curbs, and then we're going to have a very change to world quickly. It didn't take that long

to get rid of horses once we had carbs. Yeah, and the rollout probably, that would actually be a really interesting thing to compare this to is how many years did it take for horses and buzzes,

to transfer to cars. I don't actually have that information. Chat Cheapeteer could probably give it to us in 30 seconds. So anyway, let's keep moving here. We're made this model. There were some other stories in the news that we can get to. We're about 50 minutes into this live show. So what do we got left in the docket? Well, let's touch quickly on nuclear because there's quite a lot going on here. And then I think we'll end up teasing our solar startups and batteries for the next episode. But Jason and you flagged that Google has now put together a deal with Kairos for nuclear power. This is a deal they're calling the World's First Corporate Agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors or SMRs. Guys, that's an acronym you're going to want to know because everyone is talking about small modular reactors.

Jason, I love this. Yeah. Chiros, K-A-I-R-O-S, Kairos is how it's pronounced. Am I correct? Yep. Yep. Yeah, so Google is purchasing these. And I guess when will they have the first one live?

but, you know, we also saw Microsoft turn on three-mile island. Now you have Google. I don't know who else in the Mag 7 or, you know, in Big Tech has committed to nuclear in the U.S. Amazon. Big news this week. They have three deals coming up. They have a deal with energy northeast for four advanced SMRs in Washington State. They are also doing a deal with Dominion Energy to build an SMR in Virginia where a lot of U.S.

data centers are located, and they're putting money into X Energy, which is a nuclear power startup we've talked about here on the show. So really, Jason, I think if you are a hyperscaler on the cloud, you are going to be involved in nuclear power either paying for it, investing in it or purchasing from it just for the rest of time. This is the new reality. Yeah, this is fantastic. And these small modular reactors are different than the giant ones you see that look like the ones from the Simpsons, you know, the giant towers that Wolverine and Deadpool fought on top of, like, those are different than SMRs. These small module reactors are smaller, as is in the name. They're don't take up the vertical space. They're not eyesores, and they're incredibly safe because

they don't melt down. And you can look up all that technology. I think one of the interesting things here is we went from after Fukushima, which was less than 10 years ago, I believe, and that terrible tragedy, which was completely avoidable because they put an old silent nuclear reactor below sea level. They were told not to do it. Like literally, they were told this is too dangerous to do. They did it anyway. And then that led to the Germans, uh, you know, and Europe to being anti-nuclear and this incredible turning off of nuclear power plants in Germany. Now here in the United States, we had Three Mile Island. Obviously, there was a tragedy in Russia as well.

And so all of a sudden, we are now in a position where everybody believes we're going to be able to have nuclear power everywhere in the United States. What happened, Alex? What explains this? Because I don't hear anybody saying, stop this. I don't hear one politician. I don't hear Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, you know, somebody in the pocket of oil, somebody who's a green person. I don't hear anybody saying no, or we have to stop this. I don't hear the press.

I don't hear any groups of greenies saying this is terrible environmentalists. Why the vibe switch? What happened, Alex? Well, the environmentalists who are anti-nuclear energy, which in my view aren't environmentalists because they're insane, are still making some noise. but I do think it's been dampened because the reality has changed. For a long time, energy consumption rose with GDP. There was a pretty good correlation between it. However, in the last decade or two, in much of the developed world, there was a divergence.

Energy consumption was roughly flat, well, GDP kept growing. Totally fine. But power growth demands have now very much changed. We're talking about putting nuclear energy in Washington State all the way to Virginia because that's how many data centers, which I think of as digital brains, were building. They're going to get bigger. If you recall from the liquidity summit, Gavin said that in our lifetime, the biggest buildings in the world will be data centers. And that just goes to show how much more power we need.

So everyone's looking around going, look, we can't just go build 30 coal-fired power plants to solve this. We have to do something else. And we are going to talk about solar and batteries later on. But if you want good baseload power, once you get past these startup costs, nuclear is really, really efficient and hyper-clean. So I just think it makes sense. What's incredible here, and I think people should take away from this discussion about nuclear is where there's a will, there's a way. And then things can change. And a little bit of scary global chaos can actually motivate people. What's happened is over time, people saw what happened to Germany in relation to their dependence on a dictatorship, Russia. And they're seeing China do their belt and road strategy and spread influence through nuclear power. They're building three, 400 reactors, not just in their country, but in other countries. that they want to have dependent on China. And I think all politicians now are aware of this.

And when you compare what happened with the moral panic around nuclear and the technology getting safer because entrepreneurs invested in, including Bill Gates, investing a lot of money in this one, it was incredibly unpopular and losing a lot of money. He's losing billions of dollars trying to pursue this vision. Entrepreneurs, global events, and then AI comes in. And you actually have a customer who is willing to pay like Google, like Microsoft, like Amazon, in advance, some large amounts of money. All of that has conspired now.

And this is going to change humanity. Putting aside AI and data centers, we have a perfect storm occurring right now. The giant companies are customers to the smaller modular nuclear reactor companies. and that will give them a lifeline. They don't need people to throw money and hope that someday these things happen. Politicians have flipped their position on this and the United States will become the leader in nuclear again.

This could be transformative for humanity because we already have hit two other important points. One is the natural gas and fracking in this country has made us a net exporter. And solar has plummeted and almost. Monday show we're going to do a similar modeling and this is what we're I'm trying to do here with Alex and the team is the level up the show here so you as a listener this week and startups get a lot of data so you can be the smartest person in the room when talking about these issues whether it's

going into self-driving and how long it's going to take and how much money it's going to take I want you to be the smartest person in the room because I try to be the most informed person I can be to make decisions and that's what this combination of you know new we'll call it twist 2.0, a twist in the second decade, and that's why I brought in Alex, you know, to be really smart about this stuff and work with my analysts. I'm trying to understand the world quicker and deeper. And on Monday, we're going to go into solar because there's a trend happening in solar now that will dovetail with fracking and the United States becoming an exporter, Alex, and these small modular nuclear reactors getting customers and government stepping out of the way. And when we look

at what happened in Australia. What's the term for when you have too much energy being created in a day? There's a technical term for it. Minimum system load event. So explain what happened in Australia. We'll just tease it for Monday because we're going to do another model for Monday around solar and some of the startups. And maybe we'll just make that, let's make that a tab in this Google sheet. So the first tab will be the model of that we did for self-driving. The second tab will be for solar and we'll just talk about what would happen if we get to 50% solar or something. So answering your question, though, so what's happening in Australia is that rooftop solar and also solar arrays have become so popular that there's times in which there's too much power generation.

And so they have to actually dampen certain sources that are non-baseload that are variable, like solar, just to keep the grid healthy. You can't overproduce without the ability to store it. And so this simply down a complete rabbit hole of looking at different European countries, solar installs, changes in solar power. And then I went through a list of startups. I went through probably 20, 25 this morning, all in the power storage space.

And there are companies just literally around the world who are doing awesome stuff, everything from flying wind turbines to using offshore water storage for power. It's awesome. So come Monday, because I'm going to have some really cool stuff to shit. Yeah, we're going to really pull this thread

of what's happening in energy and then what impact that could have on society in India. I've been reading some stories and we'll dovetail with India here. And you as a listener can be a producer here as well. He's Alex at launch.co. Are you Alex W?W.W. at launch.com and I will read any email anyone send me as long as it's not good. So, yeah, you just educate us as to, you know, what you think we should have in these models. And, you know, in India, what's happening is these solar cells have become so cheap.

that people in India now are buying solar cells batteries, reclaiming batteries, and building their own energy for their homes, and they're doing it themselves. And then I said, I want to put a solar farm on the ranch, and I got a bunch of inbound. So I'm trying to figure out if you have unlimited space, right,

let's just say you have like an acre you could put towards this. Yeah. What would I do with an acre on my ranch in solar? because I probably would never be able to use that much stored in batteries. And then I was talking to Friedberg and there are power walls and things that people put into their garages when they're space constrained. When you're not space constrained, I think the power walls and other offerings are designed to have a small footprint and a lot of density. But when you don't need that and you have a shipping container, say, and you can just fill it with batteries, you can have a much cheaper solution. is what I'm told.

And so I'm trying to pull the string and just learn about it myself. Redundancy in the world is a theme. People want to live off-grid because they don't want to be dependent on the government, on a foreign country. And I think COVID kind of added to people's awareness of resiliency in their homes, in their countries. And that's kind of part of this theme, I think, Alex. anti, is that an anti-globalization theme or is that something that sits next to it and doesn't

actually counteract? Because if you're thinking about the guy who's going to put a, a shipping container full of batteries on their property, less grid dependent, right, off the grid, but then again, that technology is dependent on, you know, a global supply chain and so I'm always torn between personal lack of dependence and then also in a way that against how much it takes for the world to get that person there. but at the same time, I want my own battery shipping container. Now that you've mentioned that, that sounds great. I'll take two.

I mean, there's going to be all kinds of versions of this. People already, like I told people about the router I have from Unify, I think it's a company. Anyway, the router I have, I have Spectrum and Starlink into it. And they have a third option where you can buy an AT&T SIM card and put it in there. And what happened was Spectrum went out as it's prone to do. It goes out seemingly every couple of weeks. and I got an alert, Alex, that Spectrum was down. And my wife was like, oh, my God, spectrum's down.

We have no Internet, but the Internet's working. And I looked at the router, and Spectrum was indeed down for two hours. It felled over to Starlink. Nobody in the house noticed that we were on Starlink. And I was like, well, here we go. Redundancy and resiliency. To your question, is it about globalization or is it about feeling safe? I think it's a little bit of both.

If you were dependent on Russia or China for oil, or PPE or medicine, you know, that would be a globalization issue. And if we, if you think about it just in terms of weather events, think about how many people are losing their power and internet and then having food security issues at different times. And then you think about cost and inflation coming into this. If you had solar, you are independent of, you know, grid issues. and weather issues. In Texas here, we have a lot of them.

In Florida, you have a ton of them. And if you had chickens, you know, it's on silly and stupid as one example, but there's a lot of people who are putting chicken coops in. So this is called homesteading as a trend. And having an unlimited supply of protein through eggs at a very cheap price, it's kind of dovetails with fire,

you know that financial independence kind of movement. Take the retirement out of it, the FI and Fire. The financial independence, and resiliency of chickens is amazing because eggs are perfect food and everybody likes them and I just had a beautiful omelift this morning. And you don't have to be in Austin to do chickens.

My big sister, my oldest sister, lives in Sunnyvale in the Bay Area. Yeah. And she has chicken. She has an enormous yard or lot, lots there. Yeah. A while back. And she has chickens.

And I thought that was just the most wild thing. I'm like, Emily, you live in Silicon Valley. And you've got chickens. All over the peninsula, people are doing this. I had a lot of neighbors. and the neighbors would bring us eggs because they couldn't go through them. They had 10 chickens and they were getting 20 eggs a day. And so they were literally going to their neighbors with 20, 30 eggs in a basket saying,

here's some eggs. So you start thinking about this on a cooperative basis. You know, it's really, yeah, Peter's like, Jason is obsessed with fire. I am obsessed with fire, not because I want to retire, but because I think a counterbalance, I really care about humanity's happiness. And I think we should, you know, if I was running government, I would have happiness of the populace as one of our most important goals. And when I do run for president or governor, happiness is going to be my platform.

How happy can people be? Well, part of being happy, Alex, is not being scared, right? And not being fearful. And what do people fear running out of food, running out of money, health care, safety issues? There's a whole cohort of things. And if you can take away those issues and people feel like, hey, I'm independent in some way. I have agency. This is something that's missing from America and a large portion of Americans for whatever

reason do not feel independent and resilient and they don't feel they have agency. I think part of it's real. And I think part of it is a little bit of learned helplessness and that people can actually figure out how to become independent by learning certain techniques. And so I think it's like an interesting thing for us to talk about here on the program because entrepreneurship is the pinnacle of independence, resiliency and agency, right? Being an actual, and you are doing this with cautious optimism.com. Sign up for Alex's newsletter. It's only 100 a year.

I have so many things to say off of what you just said, but we have to go away. So everyone, stick with us. Twist is going to be around three to four times a week. Wednesday, live show, 12 p.m. my time in Texas, which is, 10 a.m. your time in Pacific time and is 1 p.m. Alex's time on the East Coast. 10, 12, 1. You get us twice a week. We're locking into Monday, Wednesday. Eventually, it might be Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That's my goal. Yum. Yum. I'm here for it. Live guest. Tell us who you want to be a guest. And wrap us out. Here, take us out, Alex. All right. This has been another episode of

Twist. He is Jason over on X. I am Alex over on X. We have several fine newsletters. We have the Twist 500 newsletter, which you should read. And friends, we're back soon. I'll see you on Friday. Bye.